Connecting The Ops with Jon Fukuda
Ahead of the 2022 DesignOps Summit, Lou speaks with guest Jon Fukuda, a co-founder of Limina where for 18 years he has been delivering UX and technical design to his clients. His focus is on facilitating the implementation of scalable research and design operations. Lou and John discuss the concept of digital transformation and explore what it looks like to walk a client through the difficult terrain of operationalizing their design processes, how to have those difficult conversations surrounding company culture, taking the lead as a change agent, and more.
Jon is co-founder of Limina.co with 20+ years as a User Experience Specialist with a focus on UX Strategy, Design Thinking, and UI Design with experience leading human-centered requirements, strategy, interaction design, testing, and evaluation. Most recently, Jon has dedicated his efforts to Research & Design Operations facilitation for scalable/sustainable human-centered systems.
The following article is based on the episode. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
[Lou] Welcome to the Rosenfeld Review. My guest today is Jon Fukuda, co-founder of Limina, where for the past 18 years he has been delivering UX and technical design for his clients. He focuses on facilitating customers to help them implement scalable research and design operations. Jon is also one of the curators of this year’s DesignOps Summit, taking place on September 8th and 9th. Welcome to the Rosenfeld Review, Jon. It’s great to have you.
[Jon] Thank you. Good to be here.
[Lou] Jon, you talk a lot about this concept of digital transformation in the design ops world. Does that term mean something different now than it might have 10 or 20 years ago?
[Jon] Yeah. I see that the impact of digital on the way business happens today has kind of taken two tracks. You have the front runners who started operationalizing their digital transactional spaces early in the late 90s through websites and transactional internet spaces coming up all over the place. And then they settle into eCommerce or content management — essentially web fronts or storefront web portals to these businesses. But then another wave of disruption comes, and we have design-led organizations that have recognized opportunities to fully innovate and revamp the way that people engage with digital services to better enhance their lives. And that separation still remains today.
So, we have a very strong design-led set of organizations that are part of your speaking community at the DesignOps Summits. They share their stories on how they operationalize in design, and it’s almost like the future has been achieved for that group. Lagging behind them are many organizations that are still in the midst of adopting new systems and providing digital services to their customers in a way that better serves them.
Those are really the people that I think of their leadership coming more from the technology side of the business or from the business management side of things and less so from folks who are on the ground with real users, doing the research and understanding problems that exist. The former are the ones I want to invite into the fold. You need to learn what it means to become a human-centered business and how to drive your capacity to research and design at scale so that you can better move through that maturity arc of your digital transactions in your digital transformation.
[Lou] When you’re pitching these approaches, do you have to present differently to a company that is just beginning its digital transformation than you would to one that’s a bit further along? Or is it just simply using more accessible vocabulary?
[Jon] I would say a lot of the time, we get into discussions where we have to address issues of culture. So, if the value isn’t being recognized in terms of how we invest in research or a new design system, that comes from somewhere within the organization, right? So what’s the misalignment of what we put our value on as an organization and how can we understand the value of better designing for our customers’ needs? And a lot of times, at the surface, the value of a human-centered approach and how you can achieve that at scale makes sense.
But then, when it comes to implementation on the ground, how do you actually build your components in atomic ways? You’ll get pushback on the ground from either the engineers themselves or the product managers, so it ends up being a cultural battle. If you can build alliances and partnerships and tiger teams that can demonstrate the power and capacity of achieving research and design iterations at scale, those are the things that can be change agents within an organization.
[Lou] What should and shouldn’t be responsibilities among design ops people who are change engines? Is there a sort of map of responsibilities for change?
[Jon] You do have to pick where your strengths are and where your battles are going to have the most impact. And sometimes that’s in HR where you address how you bend the arc of what your hiring structure looks like and how you staff designers and researchers to teams and what that organizational model looks like. Other times, it’s in the budget arena where you address if you even have hiring capacity. Are you throwing enough at this problem in the way of investments? There’s a huge host of things that come along with fully operationalizing a research and design org such as tooling to the craft, the team makeup, any procedural changes, etc. You look at where you can have that first win to prove the value of that and then you take the next step. Ultimately, I think what design operators and operational managers are looking at is, where can I show that impact and where can I make those changes that are going to provide the most value to the organizations?
[Lou] I’m really interested in what works for you when you’re working in digital transformation when you have a client who may be new to the process. Even in terms of vocabulary for having conversations about these challenges, are there methods or techniques that help you make an impact with your clients?
[Jon] One thing I’m grateful for is to be practicing in this age where the tooling has really come a long way. So, if we talk to our customers about the value of research and insight repositories, or if we talk to them about how you can achieve deploying design at scale with the aid of good governance in the design system, we can actually show them those things almost in real time. We can pull up an example research repository, or we can pull up a design system, and it can click immediately, and they can immediately start thinking of how that applies to how they might be able to achieve research and design skills.
[Lou] So you’re showing rather than telling obviously, and that’s so nice to be able to do in ways that I’m sure wasn’t the case, not that long ago.
[Jon] Yeah. We still have our own gripes and grievances; I think there could be better integration between the tools that span across the entire life cycle from getting your research planning up to date to then conducting and getting it into the repo to your design plans. And how do you build the backlog and how does that fit seamlessly into a designer’s view? What are they looking at as they’re pulling up their wire frames and mockups? None of that integration’s really there yet. So, the plumbing for design operations is still an opportunity to be had.
[Lou] Well, that’s interesting. Now, in many situations, the platform becomes the Trojan horse for the movement. I’m wondering if you’re seeing the same thing with your clients in design systems.
[Jon] Yeah, absolutely. Especially with things that are harder to grapple with like compliance. But we can show them, “You have a couple things out of compliance and let’s just take that example into your design system and show you what color contrasting and font sizes can do for that.” Then you see how it would ripple through your components if you built them atomically and you run that demo really quickly. So those tools are really great.
[Lou] I have a question about implementation and tooling to get a foot in the door. You know what you want to have happen, but what happens after you show them the light of the design system or research repository? There’s an aha moment where they go, “Oh, culture has to change,” but does that happen right away? Or do they have to invest and maybe even fail in some of these tangible platforms?
[Jon] I think you can do your best with implementing systems and repositories. It’s almost like a “build it and they will come” ideal. The real challenges that exist in any organization are those cultural tropes that you brought up and that we build into our conversations that if we’re going to implement a design system, there’s a lot that comes with it. There’s a governance model. We have to come up with core tenants of how things get into a design system. How do they age out of a design system? How do you challenge the design decisions that have been codified in your system? All of that is very cultural for an organization.
Then you get into conversations about how we can work this in so that there’s a seamless integration of a design system. And what are the things that you do have grievances with, and how might we address those? What are you willing to give up along the way? And you think about how those are such human-centered problems that exist at any organization when it comes to adopting any piece of technology. So that question of change, design leadership as a change agent, or the change management role in the organization starts to happen.
[Lou] There’s a lot of opportunities for many players in these conversations to be uncomfortable and it’s hard to avoid as a consultant. How do you help people with that psychology, especially when it might be you and your own discomfort?
[Jon] I think it has to do with how you position yourself in an organization. The Limina stance on providing consulting services, especially in design ops, is that we’ll know we’ve succeeded when you no longer need to call us. Everything we’re doing with our customers is to empower them to achieve research and design at scale for themselves. So, if they’re getting pushback, we can’t take it personally because they’re fighting with themselves at that point.
We take a very supportive role. We’ve done our best to empower them to push things forward and to adopt better practices in research and design, and all the cultural aspects that come with that. Even including governance and for them to have hard conversations. If atomically constructed components is a two-way street between the engineering stack they have and how they’re able to deploy things atomically, and to the designers in the Figma — setting up the libraries atomically — then you need to set up the design system to accommodate that to Wall Street. And then to have a governance model that works at both ends of that. Along the way, what happens to teams that are going through their own maturity arcs, they’re all going through this process of becoming continuous learners, right? So they’re all going through their human-centered design maturity arc of their own. This is great to see when it’s happening well, and it’s hard to see when those challenges become uncomfortable maybe you have to give up concessions along the way.
[Lou] Before we wrap though, Jon, in Rosenfeld Review tradition, what’s your gift for our listeners?
I’ve been reading Jake Burkhart’s posts on Medium; there’s a URL integratingresearch.com which will take you to the medium post that he’s writing on research repository work that he did and continues to think about from his work at Amazon as a product manager of their insight repository. And I’ll just say, one thing that I love about Jake’s approach here is that he’s gone deep on what it means to be a knowledge manager of research insights. He then also takes a T-shaped approach in how to democratize and scale that value across an organization that has a lot of different product teams and can actually get much more from an insight repository than just a single project team.
[Lou] Jon Fukuda, great to have you. Thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom with us on the Rosenfeld Review.
Rosenfeld Media’s next conference is the DesignOps Summit, a virtual conference scheduled for September 8–9. Learn more at https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2022/
The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcast interviews with other interesting people. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.
ADHD—A DesignOps Superpower
The following article is based on a recent interview conducted by Lou Rosenfeld, Publisher of Rosenfeld Media from his podcast, The Rosenfeld Review. In this episode, Lou speaks with Jessica Norris, Design Enablement Coordinator. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
[Lou] My guest today is Jess Norris, Atlassian’s design enablement coordinator. Is that the same as design ops?
[Jessica] It’s part of design ops. At Atlassian, it’s one of our pillars regarding design ops. So enablement is really about programs focused on growth development and community. Something that we’re planning to look at first is onboarding. So how do we set up our new starters that are designers for success by aligning them with our best practices, the tool sets, and to what the expectation for what design quality really is?
[Lou] At the Design Ops Conference, you’re talking about ADHD and how it’s a design ops superpower. I’m really glad to hear this because I’m the dad of two kids who’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. There are a lot of different perceptions about what ADHD is in terms of, is it about hyperactivity? Is it about executive function? Is it about something else? Can you explain what ADHD is and then jump into how it impacts design and design ops?
[Jessica] Yes, definitely. So, going back to basics, ADHD is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are actually three different types of ADHD. The first type is primarily hyperactive and impulsive. That tends to be the stigma around ADHD, it causes hyperactivity. The second type is predominantly inattentive. So this is where I sit. And this kind of ADHD revolves around the trouble of regulating attention. So distractibility, or the difficulty of processing information quickly. And the third kind of ADHD is a hybrid of the two.
[Lou] Is there any correlation with gender? I certainly heard that boys tend to have ADHD of the hyperactive type, and girls are more likely to have the inattentive type.
[Jessica] I don’t know if there is a real correlation from a biological point of view, but ADHD goes severely underdiagnosed in women, and it’s because every single person with ADHD can present completely differently. Women also are very good at masking that they have ADHD. What I found is that in males, it can be more obvious, especially in children, if someone’s hyperactive. But for women, it can be seen as girls just being chatty, which is not as obvious. And apparently, the majority of studies on ADHD have been done on cisgender men. So that’s why a lot of what we know about ADHD is really skewed towards men as well.
[Lou] So, now that we have a general understanding of ADHD, let’s talk about your own experience. When you are hyper-focused, what do you tend to hyper-focus on?
[Jessica] I tend to focus on very detailed tasks. My background is in service design as well as product design. So working on journey maps, tasks that are really about problem solving and more detailed where it’s clear what you have to do. I just want to sit down and get it done already. That’s when I tend to be really focused.
[Lou] So let’s take service design. It sounds like you’re able to dig deeply into journeys, but do you have to step back to have the big picture of the journey, or a real broad understanding of the systems involved? Is that something you’re able to do despite the fact that it may not be at that level of detail? Or do you pair with someone who is able to sort of see that bigger picture, but may not be as strong at a detailed level?
[Jessica] I think everyone has their own strengths and so it’s very good to work in a type team because you really get to balance out those strengths and weaknesses. I do think that I can work at that high level picture. It’s just that I get more interested in the details. But I have a strong understanding of my ADHD. I’ve been lucky enough to go to therapy for it. So, I know how to pull myself out of hyper focus and how to have a really good baseline and regulate my attention more so I can be attentive to the stuff that is more high level that might not interest me as much. But it’s always good to be working within a team where you do have different needs and different strengths to balance each other out.
[Lou] On your journey to being diagnosed with ADHD, how did you find out you had ADHD and did it change the way you worked?
[Jessica] My journey to finding out that I had ADHD was quite long. I actually only found out that I had ADHD a year and a half ago. I had previous diagnoses of depression and anxiety and it’s so common in women to not get a diagnosis until adulthood. It definitely changed the way that I think about myself and helped me to really understand what my real strengths and weaknesses are. I know that there’s a lot of skepticism around ADHD. I had someone that I know say to me, “I don’t know why you’re talking about ADHD. It’s just putting a label on your problem.” And I think that’s partially true. But that label can really help you. If that helps you understand more about yourself and can help you really take control of your brain, why not? Why not add a label if it helps?
[Lou] Let’s talk about the design team setting and how you’ve been able to work with teammates in a way that plays well to your ADHD.
[Jessica] Yes, for my talk as well I was talking to lots of different people on my team and in my organization and the more that I opened up and spoke about my own experience with ADHD, the more I found that a lot of designers and a lot of people in design have ADHD or are neurodivergent in some way. So that could mean autistic or dyslexic as well. Some people can be a combination of all those things. For me, it was really clear to see design is an industry where people with ADHD can thrive. And that whole idea of neurodivergence actually means that we’re offering a unique perspective into design and into the world.
Every single person is different and has different needs. And I think that, whether you are neurodivergent or not, everyone brings a different perspective. I think one of the biggest things about the perspectives of people who are neurodivergent is there’s always going to be that empathy there, because anyone who’s ever been considered different from the norm, tends to really understand what it’s like to think and act differently. So they are able to really empathize with people who have diverse needs and diverse skills.
[Lou] So if empathy is one of the critical superpowers that ADHD people have, what else is a superpower when it comes to design ops? What perspective do you bring?
[Jessica] For me, I hyper focus under pressure. So, there’s a lot of times working in design ops where you need to quickly solve a problem and when you’re under that immense amount of pressure, people with ADHD tend to be able to go into hyper focus mode. I find that if someone sends me a message that says that something is urgent, I will drop everything, and put all my brain power into doing that urgent task.
[Lou] Let’s talk a bit about that one, because I can imagine that hyper focus is really valuable. But you could get 10 emails a day where the first word in the subject line is urgent. Does ADHD for you help you with prioritization so you can figure out which of those urgent tasks truly are the most urgent?
[Jessica] I think going to therapy as a result of ADHD has helped with prioritization. There, you are learning skills and strategies to really be better at work and in life.
[Lou] Anything else that you think ADHD people bring to design ops or could bring to it?
[Jessica] One of the biggest things that I’ve found with ADHD is it’s very commonly associated with a lack of dopamine, which is all about the pleasure and reward center of your brain. So, one really great way to get a hit of dopamine is to complete a task. So, if someone gives me a task, especially if it’s small and it’s something that I can do very quickly, chances are I’m going to do it straight away. I’m not going to wait around, because I really want that dopamine to hit. I want to feel a sense of accomplishment. I think that we’re very driven to actually complete something.
[Lou] So if someone is managing a designer or specifically a design ops person with ADHD, what should they know? What would you like them to keep in mind, with the caveat, that everyone is different with ADHD. And if they are a teammate of a designer with ADHD, would your advice be any different than for a manager?
[Jessica] Something that I’ve learned is that the things that help people with ADHD can actually help everyone in the team. I think that we always talk about the needs of the one and the needs of the many, but a lot of the time, if you address the needs of the one, it can address the needs of the many. One of the biggest things that has helped me is really giving timeframes to things to remove that ambiguity. If someone labels something as urgent, my brain goes into fight mode and wants to do it straight away. But if someone says to me, “this is due by the end of the day,” that’s a lot clearer for me and allows me to prioritize it within the scheme of everything else. We know that there’s always ambiguity in design ops, so you’re not going to have a specific detailed timeframe at all times but giving a rough guide can really help as opposed to just labeling something as ASAP.
[Lou] Thank you Jessica and good luck in that new job at Atlassian. We’ll see you in September. Thanks for listening to the Rosenfeld review, brought to you by Rosenfeld media.
Rosenfeld Media’s next conference is the DesignOps Summit, a virtual conference scheduled for September 8-9. Learn more at https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2022/
The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcast interviews with other interesting people. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.
Standardizing Design at Scale
The following article is based on a recent interview conducted by Lou Rosenfeld, Publisher of Rosenfeld Media from his podcast, The Rosenfeld Review. In this episode, Lou speaks with Candace Myers, Design Operations Leader at Netflix StudioXD. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
[Lou] Welcome to the Rosenfeld Review. I’m Lou Rosenfeld, and my guest today is Candace Myers, who will be speaking at the DesignOps Summit next month. Today we are going to be talking about design operations. Candace is a designops leader who started out her career as a lawyer in IP, intellectual property law. She’s been leading teams since 2013, first at Pinterest, and then at Meta. And is currently leading design operations for the Netflix Studios and enterprise tools teams.
[Candace] It’s technically the studio product innovation team, which is an end-to-end product team that serves the studio, but I am part of XD.
[Lou] What’s the remit for that team?
[Candace] It is all of the tools that are created that power all of the content that you see when you turn on Netflix everyday.
[Lou] Do you feel working in the streaming video world has been very different than working at Facebook or Pinterest?
[Candace] It is different in some ways because we are an enterprise tools team, whereas when I was at Pinterest, and then Facebook, we were a direct-to-consumer team. Working in an enterprise team obviously has different challenges. Your audience is very different. The velocity of the work is very different. Also, I think at times the quality of the work can manifest very differently since you don’t need to serve necessarily billions, but potentially thousands or even hundreds.
[Lou] How does that impact the actually operations of design? Does it make it any easier when you find you have more of a captive audience that is ultimately using the tools? Or does that actually remove pressure on the design organization, and maybe not always in a good way?
[Candace] In some ways it’s simpler because you know exactly who your audience is. They share an @netflix.com email with you; and they’re quite easy to pin down and to connect with and collaborate with. Collaborating with end users is really something we have going for us, a tailwind. Headwinds, though, are that we’re talking about domains that are deeply complex. Postproduction tooling, audio dubbing for internationalized content. There’s not a ton of designers in the world who know how to design these tools for the people who are actually executing or using the tool to do their jobs. That becomes difficult because we have slim pickings in terms of the types of designers you can work with. And obviously the domains go so deep that we do tend to get into these walled gardens of collaboration, and our design team as XD potentially gets a little remote from each other, since people are so deep in their domains.
[Lou] It sounds like you’re looking to unleash a lot of creativity in the service of standards. Those things seem to be at odds, right? A lot of design operations is about looking to bite off some of the less innovative, less creative work that is every everyday routine to free up the designers up and other members of the team to take on the stuff that may need more bespoke solving, a bit more creativity and true innovation. How do you square those two things?
[Candace] The ideas I’m tooling with here are less designer innovation, necessarily. Designers are going to innovate. The way designops works has never stopped designers necessarily from innovating. But I do think that we can bring a lot of insight into injecting innovation into our teams via the way we run our teams and the way we run and position our teams. When I think about what is hampering the average individual contributor on a team from having time to even think about what’s coming next or how they want to innovate on the product they are building, I think about the idea of operation overhead, or cognitive load that is dragging them down every day.
There’s a few levers I’ve identified where I feel like we can free up this idea of cognitive load. The first one is with automation, no code, connecting tools that we’re already using. It becomes a key impact opportunity of DesignOps to understand how to connect tools in a lightweight way that takes humans out of the equation, including designops themselves. That’s where I feel like this idea of no code, automatic data visualization of resourcing and project progress is going to unlock a lot of the operational overhead that our designers and our designops humans are burdened with every day.
The second one is this idea of what are all of these low stake decisions that our designers are making every day that they really don’t need to be making. Something that I think about a lot is the idea that Mark Zuckerberg wears the same gray shirt every day; and Steve Jobs wears the same black turtleneck every day because they recognize it’s not worth their time to decide what outfit they’re going to wear that day. What is worth their time is to think about the problems that they’re going to solve for the world and their companies. I want us to really think about what is the equivalent of the gray t-shirt for our design teams; the black turtleneck for our design teams; these really low stakes, high yield decisions that are going to free up cognitive load on our design IC’s, and really create innovation space by taking out all that operational gunk that everyone’s dealing with.
[Lou] I like how you frame it as reducing cognitive loading. You’re trying to make the design process more frictionless. Is that a fair restating?
[Candace] Yes, and I would say more frictionless in a very targeted way. No one on a design team who’s kicking off an initiative, a design initiative, let’s say, should ever start with a blank document, right? There are things like principles that we can put into place that takes out so much of the guesswork, the zero to one work out of our day-to-day work. And I feel like that’s how we’re going to free up time to innovate.
[Lou] Can you nail down this concept [of freeing up time to innovate] with a concrete example or two?
[Candace] This idea of freeing up space in order for designers to innovate, I think it is sort of a critical component. If we think about it as a funnel, we have opportunities at the very top of the funnel, and then opportunities toward the bottom of the funnel to sort of enable innovation. The top of the funnel, for me, is just really this idea of creating space. Some of the ways that we’ve created space is what I like to call at Netflix battling the enemy of the unknown. As I mentioned, I work on this team that we would think of as a series of six or seven walled gardens, and it’s very hard for anyone to see what’s happening on the other side of any given wall. Not for lack of interest, there’s just a wall. So what we’ve done is we’ve used automation and no code to start to connect our tools, most particularly Monday.com. We’ve used Zapier to connect some of the other tools that are being used across some other functions like user research and content designs, specifically, I believe, Airtable.
What we’ve done there is we have opened up this sort of dashboard that is line of sight. What happens in the human brain when you have an unknown is you fill it in with assumptions and experiences in the past. What my team has been battling for so long is PM, Edge, UIN, their leadership, product leadership are making all of these assumptions about what the team is doing, and the team has all this pressure on them.
They’re just making these assumptions because they don’t have line of sight into what’s actually going on. What we’ve done is we’ve connected all of the tools, like I said using no code because we’re not about to mandate a single tool, and we have connected them in a way where anyone with a @netflix.com email can see what is happening in any of the walled gardens at any given time. The other way we’ve leveraged automation is to drive it up into widgets and dashboards. Any design leader, any product leader can see all of the different statuses sliced in a very specific and beautiful way that we just didn’t used to be able to slice data unless you wanted to spend two days pulling reports and putting it together into its slide deck. In terms of bringing up space to equip people, to stop answering questions about what’s the status of this and really drive and harness the power of their own time, this idea of no code and automation has really, really unlocked us.
[Lou] One of the other things that came from our discussion earlier is having designops take a role in equipping designers to be innovative, to look at innovation skills as a form of tooling for them. Is that something you’re also looking into, or even working on at Netflix?
[Candace] It’s something I would love to do at Netflix. I do think in terms of the maturity of the studio organization, the organization itself isn’t quite ready for this level of engagement. But something that I did when I used to run DesignOps on the community’s product at Facebook was really focus on equipping people with the tools to innovate. The way I did that, or sort of the way I thought through it was to really understand what our levers for innovation are. You can give anyone Jake Knapp’s “Sprint” book, and send them on their way, but does that mean they’re actually innovating? I’m not so sure. The problem we were facing on the communities products group, which has a multitude of tools over it—events, groups, dating, campus—we’re talking about five or six really large products in the Facebook app.
What we ended up doing was program typing a brain trust of our best and brightest innovators across the entire organization. It was maybe five or six folks. We call them architects. We basically put an engagement model around these architects in different ways in terms of high touch, high leverage, low touch, etc.; and how they were going to engage with the rest of the team. The purpose of this brain trust was really to maintain the structural integrity of this product’s ecosystem and show and teach each other and more junior designers, people coming up, or people who are just less inclined to innovation, what it looks like to build a product with innovation in mind; and what it looks like to innovate. I pulled them together as a cohort, kind of like a tiger team, but forever. We put some boundaries around their time and some engagement models in place, ensuring that there was always time for them to whip something up for Mark; or that there was time for them to sit and consult with a junior IC who was maybe an intern last year, and just wanted to understand how something worked. It’s almost like a stewardship. It’s a little bit of an ongoing education.
But what it really does is give us true leverage. We have all these amazing people who are doing this incredible work. These are unicorns of the industry, and we have democratized their information. We’ve given the entire team access to them; and that was really such a linchpin on our team, as we were all asked to continue to develop the quality craft, and ultimately impact our products together in tandem.
[Lou] What I really resonate with is the education aspects there. I think that fits very much with the trend that I’m seeing about the educational role of designops professionals. There’s the kind of obvious stuff, like we need to get some training in our team on X, let’s go find someone. But then I think what you’re talking about is a lot more nuanced and a bit more integrated into what designops people are doing.
Your background is so interesting to me. Does your intellectual property law background connect to what you’re doing now? Has it helped you, or is it totally irrelevant?
[Candace] The work I was doing was intellectual property, soft intellectual property. So copyright, trademark work, business development work for creatives, all that type of stuff. I realized that what was always the best part of my day was just working with the creatives themselves. It wasn’t working with other lawyers. It certainly wasn’t researching case law or filing copyrights with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Those things are so boring. They’re so banal. It wasn’t writing nastygrams, and having adversarial conversations with people.
I like to meet with people and build and solve problems in a collaborative way. At the time that I started practicing law, it was right before design – products, and brand design had gone in-house in tech in San Francisco and Silicon Valley at large. There were all these little studios popping up, and they needed somebody who had some sort of business acumen and some sort of legal acumen. When I graduated from law school it wasn’t a great time, the economy was kind of terrible. I just put my shingle out there, as they say, and started making connections in the design community. And my husband is also a designer. That helps me get clients and understand the needs of designers.
From there, I started working with a lot of little design agencies who were doing all different types of work. After doing that for a couple of years I decided I would really like health insurance. That would be something that would be wonderful. I decided to pivot a little bit to be more of a studio manager, and step away from law. I knew law would always be there. I got hired at this little B2B or SaaS agency called Compare Networks. This must have been 2011. We used to make B2B iPad apps for the first iPad. Everything was brand new. Those things were like door stops. That’s really where I cut my chops in product design and agency life. They were amazing to take a chance on me.
[Lou] Do you ever find that since that time people look at you and ask, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you practicing law?” Or do they say, “Interesting. You must have some special insight into rules and how policy works, and how that might help us do what we need to do?”
[Candace] I’ll be brutally honest and tell you where being a former lawyer serves you the most. Performance review time is really a great time to understand how to write a highly effective, simple, short advocacy document for yourself, and for the people who report to you. And then when requesting headcount, all that legal writing and persuasive writing certainly never hurts. I think that people really understand the power of what it is to be integrated into the creative field without being a creative. So I don’t get a lot of questions about “why don’t you practice law?” anymore, but I get a lot of unsolicited requests for legal advice. That’s a fun party trick.
[Lou] I have one final question for you. In Rosenfeld Review tradition, I like to ask guests if they have a little gift of goodness, whether it’s a good piece of content, a book, an article, or a podcast, or person that you think our listeners should know about. What do you have for us?
[Candace] The podcast I appreciate the most, it comes out Mondays and Fridays, give or take, is called the Pivot Podcast. It’s with Kara Swisher, who is a legendary New York Times reporter, and Scott Galloway, who is a legendary jerk as a brand genius, as well as a fit financial and tech, and understanding the larger global piece of business. The reason I always tell my team or fellow DPM folks to listen to this is because it ties together exactly what we have to tie together every day in our jobs. It ties together human psychology and intent. It ties together the business climate. What are you working in? What needs to change? Why are you here? And it ties together this idea of brand being probably the most highly leverageable thing you can have in life. Whether it’s your own personal brand or you company’s brand. When I think about something that I use every day, it’s all three of those. And what’s the business use case for this work? What are the humans behind the work needs, and how am I going to position this work to be great?
[Lou] Well, Candace Myers. Thanks so much for joining us on the Rosenfeld Review. Candace Myers of Netflix Studios will be presenting at the DesignOp Summit, which takes place September 8th and 9th virtually, talking about the pretty broad topic of standardizing design and scale.
The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcast interviews with other interesting people. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.
Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers
The following article is based on a recent interview conducted by Lou Rosenfeld, Publisher of Rosenfeld Media from his podcast, The Rosenfeld Review. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This week, Lou sits down with the Head of Design for the Data Team at Amplitude, Courtney Maya George, to discuss her talk “Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers,” which she’ll be presenting at this year’s DesignOps Summit (September 8–9, virtual). What is a Design Leader’s role in providing stability for their team? How has that role changed over the course of the pandemic? Over the past few years, the security employees feel at their jobs has fluctuated drastically. Are there tools we are already using that can help our teams feel more confident in these uncertain times? Listen as Courtney and Lou touch on these topics, and more.
[Lou] Courtney Maya George is giving a talk at this year’s DesignOp Summit called “Scale Your Organization and Grow Your Designers.” I wanted to dig into this topic because I sense that you see the role of designops to some degree as a stabilizer. In the past few years, we saw rapid growth in design organizations. And now we’re moving into this time of more uncertainty. Can you speak on your role as a stabilizer throughout all this?
[Courtney] Yeah, I think it’s the role of any design leader is to provide that stability for the people on their team, whether that is building out structures and processes or giving them growth opportunities. I was reading a Gallup article where they talk about important things around trust, compassion, hope, and stability. I think that was really insightful for me on how everything we do as designops leaders needs to tackle those four things for the people on our team to feel like they have that stability and growth.
[Lou] So beyond company stability, there is also being there for people and making them feel secure, making them feel that they can trust the setting they’re working in. Those people skills are really important, but they’re also hard to scale. And if you’re a designops leader, you might have endless reserves of compassion, but you only have so many hours in a day. How do you scale that for a larger organization?
[Courtney] I think what we’ve seen in the last few years is that leading with the head is not enough. Leading with the heart can be hard to measure, but that authenticity that you can bring to the role, even if it is, “I only have so many hours in the day, and I will accomplish what I can,” just having those types of conversations go a long way.
Let’s say, for example, you’re bringing in JIRA to be able to track work. Before the pandemic, we would’ve talked a lot about how that helps your cross-functional partnerships and how that’s making your design team accountable and transparent into the work of designers. But what I realized in my role at Amplitude is that it’s also a tool to help decrease burnout. It gives you a tool to say, “these are all of the things that I’m working on as a designer, I need help taking some of these off my plate.” If you didn’t have that, there’s no evidence or measurable way to see that.
We all get sucked into the day-to-day meetings so that transparency allows you to zoom out for a minute and say, is this what I need to be doing? Am I only focusing on urgent items? Am I missing the important items, and does this align with our team charter or even my own personal career growth? It’s amazing how I’ve seen even simple structures put in place help designers on the team start thinking about that for themselves.
[Lou] When you use a tool like JIRA to help your team have insight into what they’re doing as designers, does that, in turn, create some sort of trust or connection that they didn’t have before, or do you have to kind of draw that out for them?
[Courtney] I think it’s a little bit of both. Some teams are more receptive than others. Some people are going to jump right in and say, “I know this is good for me. I may not know what the outcome is, but I’m kind of looking at it in full force.” And as they get that positive conditioning, working with their cross-functional partners, their managers are seeing the benefits. And then there are others where I think it needs to be proven out on what is the ROI of doing this. They will ask you to help convince them that this is actually going to help them. Luckily, I think that the first group of people who are willing to jump in and do it right away helps prove that out for the second group.
[Lou] Is it easier to build that sense of trust in the good times? Or do they not need you as much in the good times, so maybe you don’t have those opportunities?
[Courtney] I think it’s easier in the good times, providing you’re still at a company that is stable, or you feel like you have job security. I think there are more facets to have to feel that stability now, and I think instability is always bubbling under the surface or even is at the surface right now. Everything is kind of always at that breaking point where maybe in the good times for some people, certain things were maybe more stable than others. So, I think being cognizant of that as a leader and knowing your team really well, knowing what they’re going through, maybe beyond just the professional world, is extremely important because you might have to hit on how I can provide that stability in different ways for different people, depending on what they’re going through.
[Lou] Well, that again comes back to that whole point of scalability. So, you’re talking about getting to know people and how they’re different, but let’s say you’re in an organization with a hundred designers and researchers or more, how do you get to that point? Or is it a distributed model where you work with team leaders, and they’re working in turn with their people, and it becomes a big cascade of connections?
[Courtney] I think it is that second way where you need to be able to trust your leaders to be providing that for their smaller teams. But it’s on you if you’re a leader of many different teams in a large organization to know, what are the values? What are the principles that you are living by that you expect your organization to live by? How are you leading by example? If you are working 60 hours a week, you are already setting the tone for how your leadership style is perceived.
The higher up you get, the more conscious you have to be about how you’re leading by example.
[Lou] So one of the things that I keep coming back to is the illusion of certainty. It feels like you can’t really make plans now because who knows if you’re going to be able to get on a plane or if you’re going to be able to commit to that hire or whatever it might be. Everything seems so up in the air it’s disconcerting. And then I wonder, hasn’t it always been that way beneath the surface that things could always change? I just wonder if we’ve been fed a line that things were more certain than they really were. And I’m wondering if that’s the case that leaders need to start making to people.
[Courtney] I think that’s a really interesting point. I think I live my life like that because I know how uncertain life can be. And the importance of resiliency is critical to be successful or to be even happy just to live your life. I think when the pandemic happened, that illusion got dropped for people that maybe would’ve been able to have that illusion of certainty a little bit longer. My role in that as a design leader is to help build resiliency.
What does it mean to go through your professional life in these uncertain times? Is it ever actually certain?
You could always have a reorg. You could always potentially lose your job. There’s a lot of different uncertain things that could happen that maybe we choose not to see, or we don’t need to see, but it’s always there.
So in the good times, it might be easier to focus on the strengths that you have and framing it in different ways. But I think in the bad times, or especially during this pandemic, it’s more about the resiliency that you have to build.
[Lou] So how do you help them grow into their natural resiliency?
[Courtney] I think my leadership style has always been to push people slightly outside of their comfort zone. Because I think you then start to realize, “oh, I could actually do this. It’s scary. But if I know that I have the trust and the support of my manager, that if I fail, I’m not gonna lose my job.” I think that naturally starts to show them, “Hey, you can do this. You have that natural resiliency. I’m just gonna try to push it out of you a little bit more then maybe you feel comfortable with initially.”
[Lou] That makes perfect sense. Pushing them to be a little uncomfortable and giving them a little slack to, to screw up on occasion. Do you feel like there’s a connection between what we’re talking about here in terms of building resiliency and accepting our own imposter syndrome?
[Courtney] Yes. I think the imposter syndrome is very much a self-critic. I have it. You have it. Everyone has it. I think sometimes it’s really nice to have somebody else believe in you and to have somebody else say, “I’m gonna be that person.” That’s gonna give you the self-assurance for this moment. Being that person to say something that maybe just quiets their inner critic for a few minutes. Everyone sometimes needs that little external validation. And I think that actually goes a longer way than I realized when I was just starting out as a design leader. Especially during the pandemic times, I’m seeing how important and how those little things can really go a long way in helping somebody reach their potential and find that natural resiliency.
[Lou] I want to take a slight turn because you work at Amplitude and you’ve got data in your job title. It’s a data driven environment, but you’re also talking about psychology and we’re talking about things that aren’t always measurable. So how do you know when you’ve been successful in your role as a designops leader who is trying to help people in these ways that we’re talking about here?
[Courtney] Right now I focus mostly on qualitative feedback. We have a kudos channel at work, and we try to give props to people in our team. So, we do it a lot more anecdotally. I’m still trying to crack the code on how do you quantitatively measure something like this? I don’t think there is an easy way. There’s always a risk of, if you go too quantitative, have you lost the heart that this all started with? So, I think there is a blend that you have to find. There are things like engagement surveys so, there are definitely ways but I would love to chat more with other people who have tried different things, because I’m still in that experimenting phase to see how to really measure something like this.
[Lou] What’s a nice qualitative story you could tell about a moment you knew you were on the right track with your team?
[Courtney] I think it was when I had a designer tell me that they feel the support to be able to push back. And that setting boundaries is a skill that they’ve realized that they need to have, and that they feel much safer being able to do that when they have the support of me being able to come in and have their back and I will be there. Getting that nice feedback from that designer was showing me that I was on the right track.
[Lou] Thank you so much for joining us today in the Rosenfeld review and I’m really looking forward to your talk at the DesignOps Summit.
Rosenfeld Media’s next conference is the DesignOps Summit, a virtual conference coming up September 8–9. Learn more at https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designopssummit2022/
The Rosenfeld Review podcast is brought to you by Rosenfeld Media. Please subscribe and listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform. Tell a friend to have a listen and check out our website for over 100 podcast interviews with other interesting people. You’ll find them all at RosenfeldReview.com.
Meet Jason Kriese, VP, DesignOps at Salesforce
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked Jason some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about DesignOps, what it’s like to work at Salesforce, and what makes their products and services special to DesignOps professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Jason Kriese: Salesforce Design is growing as an organization and we know that design ops has contributed strongly to the success of our teams. We’re excited to give back to the broader design ops community by sharing our experiences and insights, and by enabling forums like the DesignOps Summit through our sponsorship and support. This community has always been focused on giving back, so we’re happy to contribute and be a part of it.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Jason Kriese: DesignOps is all about enabling design leaders and practitioners to deliver with quality, consistency, and efficiency. More importantly, however, DesignOps gives us the chance to develop programs and solutions that uphold our values and celebrate the diversity of our teams. I love that we can reliably incorporate values-first leadership into the way that we work together, from the highest level strategies to the smallest details of our execution. DesignOps is at the heart of the design communities that we foster.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people people at your company?
Jason Kriese: At Salesforce, we have hundreds of designers working across dozens of distinct lines of business. For design teams, and for the DesignOps folks who partner with them, this complex product landscape represents an exciting set of relationships to be discovered, navigated, and managed every day. And Salesforce as a company places a priority on relationships, including: relationships within the company, with our customers, and across the industry at large. Designers and DesignOps folks spend a great deal of time building meaningful relationships, so it results in a workplace that’s professionally challenging and personally rewarding.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Jason Kriese: Our Salesforce Design teams prioritize proper onboarding. We want you to take the time to establish a strong foundation as you enter the company so that you can build a long and successful career. In addition to robust enablement programs, employees find valuable support in the form of new hire buddies, mentoring programs, social events, and certification programs. And, with so many new designers joining outside of a physical office space, we’ve built it all to support success from anywhere through tools like Slack, Quip, Figma, and more. Of course, all of these programs require robust planning and coordination, so our design leadership is consistently championing our DesignOps function and growth. With DesignOps behind the scenes, we’re excited to welcome even more designers in the year ahead.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Jason Kriese: I joined Salesforce seven years ago and I still enjoy (almost!) every day. Of course, the most common question I get is, Why? How?! The answer is pretty easy, actually: The people. I thoroughly enjoy the people that I work with on a regular basis. Of course our DesignOps team is awesome, but I really enjoy my cross-discipline partners, too. Folks here are nearly always kind, helpful, and values-driven. In this type of environment, it’s easy to enjoy coming in to work and solving hard problems. Most of all, I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a part of our fantastic DesignOps team.
View Salesforce’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Meet Aurobinda Pradhan, Co-founder of Cubyts
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked Aurbinda some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about DesignOps, what it’s like to work at Cubyts, and what makes their products and services special to DesignOps professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Aurbinda Pradhan: Cubyts is a platform that helps design stakeholders solve the operational challenges of scaling design teams. And what better place than the DesignOps Summit 2022 to meet some of the biggest names in DesignOps today and understand their operational challenges?
We are very excited to present Cubyts to this esteemed group of people that are responsible for driving user experiences of some of the world’s most used digital interfaces today.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Aurobinda Pradhan: We are witnessing tremendous growth in the design space. Managing the chaos that comes with the rapid scaling requires some level of standardisation in processes and frameworks.
When the development industry was going through this phase, DevOps tools & framework helped to manage, orchestrate & scale product development & deployment. Similarly, DesignOps will be instrumental in streamlining design teams in their growth journey.
We believe that DesignOps is now integral to product development and will continue to impact the future of meaningful products.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Aurobinda Pradhan: Cubyts is a DesignOps platform to manage, codify & scale DesignOps. It helps design leaders and managers in
- Streamline design operations
- Efficiently allocate and manage design teams
- Create and reuse a repository of design artefact, processes & best practices across projects
- Track design metrics
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Aurobinda Pradhan: Cubyts’ founders have a combined experience of 75+ years in design and product management. While building Cubyts, we have interacted with 100+ design leaders and managers to understand their ops issues. Cubyts is the manifestation of our understanding in the form of a DesignOps platform.
We launched our private beta in May 2022 with 100+ Trial customers across 12 countries so far. We are going live by the end of August 2022.
View Cubyts’ sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Meet Marcelo Marfil, Chief Design Officer at Sketch
We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked Marcelo some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about DesignOps, what it’s like to work at Sketch, and what makes their products and services special to DesignOps professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Marcelo Marfil: We wanted to team up with DesignOps because we have common goals around inspiring and empowering designers. DesignOps provides a space where talented designers get together to discuss all things design with the goal of taking the industry forward. At Sketch, we take pride in doing the same — so we’re excited to partner with DesignOps on this.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about design operations?
Marcelo Marfil: I have always been enthusiastic about design and platform standards myself — and it’s something we embraced early on and care about so profoundly at Sketch.
Our product is available across various platforms. Making it scalable, providing a streamlined experience, and yet remaining consistent are only possible because we make design operations a core part of our values.
So much that, literally, we get to be both makers and customers in this business. It’s a fascinating win-win dynamic because everything our customers need, we also need for our team.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Marcelo Marfil: Our DesignOps department at Sketch is responsible for creating and updating the guidelines our designers and developers follow to maintain consistency across our design systems. They will work with the relevant teams to ensure that these guidelines are suitable and that the team understands them.
But that’s not a unilateral relationship. Even though DesignOps is responsible for the whole operational structure of our design systems, designers and developers contribute to it on many levels. — whether by pointing out ideas for improvements or working with the DSM to implement components related to specific projects product designers are working on.
We have processes to ease these flows and dedicated Slack channels where anyone in the company can ask questions, make suggestions, and communicate significant changes — so that everyone will be aware of anything that affects a project they’re working on.
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Marcelo Marfil: Our designers not only care for a good product — that’s standard here. We live for the craft and the details at Sketch. We have a responsibility to our community to shape the design standards and help represent the value of good design: simplicity and cohesion.
Our main goal as a company is to democratize design, and we can only do that if, first and foremost, we bring design tools to everybody. So they can share our vision and inspire even more people with their work and ideas.
We do it by collaborating, discussing, designing, prototyping, creating — igniting and accelerating the innovation process. We also imprint our values, but we always respecting the platforms our apps live on—and the guidelines and standards that come with them.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Marcelo Marfil: When one thinks of a design system, they might make a direct connection with building blocks or lego pieces that will ensure consistent and automated design processes. While this is true, we believe there should always be space for creative exploration and refinement. There’s a long process from thinking, gathering feedback, testing, and iterating before those blocks are ready to be integrated, hence our focus is on building bridges between all design stages — including not just designers but any person involved in the process of creating good products.
A design system is a shared effort, and cannot prosper if it just sits on a design file or a code repository. The key to success is adoption and contribution. Often, the language of all the people involved is quite different — engineers don’t need to learn how to use a design tool, and designers shouldn’t need to learn how to read a code repository. Our stance here is to offer the best tooling for each occasion while having a unique source of truth.
One can consume or contribute to a design system from the Mac app as a designer, or from the web app as a developer, copywriter or any other stakeholder. Everyone can be on the same page at their needed degree, and contribute together by just being members of the same Workspace. Thanks to the design tokens and our open file format we can also ensure interoperability with other tooling or repositories depending on the team’s needs — or configure their files so they can confidently distribute the libraries and assets to their selected audience.
By remaining open, not forcing workflows, and not caping creativity while offering reliable distribution systems with version control, we can stay true to our motto when it comes to design ops: provide designers and non-designers with a source of truth for all design elements they can use, maintain, share, and communicate reliably.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Marcelo Marfil: I got into product design almost by accident. I started as a graphic designer in 2004, and that’s what I thought I would do for the rest of my life.
But then, in 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone. I fell in love with it. I had no idea back then, but that would change my life forever.
My design agency job was still paying my bills, but I wanted so badly to feel part of this new and exciting ecosystem. I started to look around on the web and found this forum called MacThemes. It was full of people like me: excited about it too, designing custom OS themes, icon replacements, wallpapers, and so on.
As a hobby, I started creating my own stuff and sharing that with the world — and by “world,” back then, it was pretty much within MacThemes and Twitter. A small but vibrant community.
This hobby naturally became a profession at some point, and I quit my old job to join this mostly unexplored new world. When Apple unveiled the App Store in 2008, the same designers and indie developers transiting through that forum became entrepreneurs with their own ideas.
Since then, I got to work for numerous independent developers and organizations to bring products to millions across earth.
In 2016, I joined Sketch as one of the first designers after Emanuel Sá and Chris Downer, and had the chance to apply a lot of what I learned over those years. Fast-forward to 2022, I’m the Chief Design Officer of the company, leading our outstanding team of around 20 designers.
View Sketch’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
Meet the Curators: Farid Sabitov
Farid is a DesignOps Enthusiast with more than 10 years of experience in Tech and Experience Design. He works with enterprise Fortune 500 companies at EPAM. Farid is the Figma Community Advocate for DesignOps Chapter and Founder of xOpsToday.
Meet the Curators: Saara Kamppari-Miller
Saara Kamppari-Miller is championing the adoption of Inclusive Design and Research practices at Intel Corporation. As the Inclusive Design Ops lead within her team, Saara is leaning into the discomfort involved with moving from awareness to changing how we work. The goal is to make every Intel platform more accessible than the one before, by including people who we may have previously excluded in our processes.
Meet the Curators: Bria Alexander
Bria Alexander is a Design Program Manager, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) consultant, and an International Speaker, Facilitator, and Interviewer. She currently supports the Brand Experience teams with Adobe’s Design organization. With over 10 years of facilitation and hosting experience, Bria has served as emcee for Adobe’s Design Summit and for Rosenfeld Media’s Design at Scale, Advancing Research and Design Operations conferences throughout 2020 and 2021. Outside of her professional commitments Bria enjoys travel, live music, and a great bottle of wine. You can find Bria on LinkedIn or on Instagram @briaismynameoh.
Hear Bria interviewed on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast:
