Day 1-Keeping Design Weird

• I spent career in DesignOps, DEI, but took time to find that path
• I felt weird in all other places I journeyed
  • I graduated college with communications degree, worked as a project manager for telcom company, did internal comms, and magazine ad sales (which was icky)
• I went back to school and got interior design degree but found I didn’t operate well under creative pressure
  • This helped me find job with 3-D renderings and doing a program managemenet role, and a practice supporting the artists
  • Great role until I was laid off (and not the last)

• Bright green furniture
• Colleagues had interesting hobbies
• Cork board walls

• Everyone was weird and I continued to be amazed by teams we enabled
• The design thing I stumbled upon seemed like magic

• Why I do what I do
• We create constraints and enable of weird

• Power rooted in messiness, chaos, creativity

• We run the risk of starting to encourage design to behave in more mechanistic way and two week cycles
• Risk for DesignOps here in that DesignOps can be mechanistic
  • DesignOps is about enabling scale through playbooks and processes. If handled poorly, can make a situation worse

• Keep people at center, not business
• Solve for culture people rather than systems and processes
  • Do this in a way that enables people to realize own purpose and higher order meaning in work done
• Allow for ambiguity in corporate contexts, as key feature
  • Creativity requires uncertainty
• Recognize emotions as critical, and not to minimize and make things the same

• We articulated team purpose and values and have examples of this working well
• In 2016, Fjord, working to refresh it’s values, as it was being integrated with Accenture and most Fjordians didn’t like the process of integration
  • For Fjord to continue at new scale, needed new set of values for times that were coming

• These values were human-centered and easy for people to identify with (i.e. integrity and customer-focus are not what we personally identify with)
• There was a consistent global culture across multiple studios in many countries
• Created a guide for decision making and unifying ethos and processes from consulting
  • At the time this  was critical

• “Boldness through generosity”
• If not transparent, collaborative, and empathetic, if not there — hard to be bold

• We used the article to reinforce our values
  • We don’t expect Fjordians to share values on politics and policy, but we ask colleagues to be generous with colleagues and society

• Top-down
• Forced from top
• Conflicts with lived culture and experience of the work, and feels like it can apply to like any other company

• Bottom-up AND top-down
  • Fjord talked to every single studio and DesignOps to do that
  • We did UXR to figure out what team thinks values are and what the value should be
• Aligned values with goals of team and maturity of org
• The team purpose will emerge with values
• Implementation with leadership messaging and actions
  • All about leadership living those values
  • Goal to jive with lived culture and place where you work

• Way I approach this is how to bring weirdness into something that feels like stultifying bureaucracy
• Recognition that UXers develop in non-linear ways
  • Career trellises as opposed to ladders
  • We need to focus on cross-training as much as achieving next rung on the ladder
• We must make training multi-disciplinary and design and content and research for freedom and flexibility at the designer’s own discretion
  • Spirit for growth and development
  • We need to ask junior designers most member how can they grow, and what is expected for them for their career
    • Not performance and assessment
• Figure out how to create career architecture to give bureaucracy  that HR wants while providing sandbox for UXers

• Taxonomy to establish space where people can plan, broad enough and allows lateral growth and recognize it can’t be about craft or technical skills
• Things like strategic and professional skills

• Product designer can have many flavors of it
  • At core, for every product designer is interaction design and visual/UI design
  • Four skills have distinct paths to come in play
• These skills are Strategists, Design Systems, “UXer”, Architect, Research-Informed
  • All product designers in system but recognize that not all the same and different ways to work with them and ways to place them on

• This is opposed to most ladders, where you are locked onto a career path in a discipline

• Politics are necessary evil to advance your agenda, as you need to manage relationships and work to get agenda realized
  • It’s not being back-handed or unseemly, but recognizing how to work through something and not always being stickler for ideals
• Don’t wait for permission
  • If wait for permission won’t be granted it– just start doing the right thing
• Have stakeholders and sponsors to give you cover in case things go awry and encourage you to try things
• Use words like ‘experiment’ and ‘pilot’ or something you are trying
  • 10% start as opposed to all-in is what you need
  • Org will feel more comfortable with new ways that way
• Maintain your idealism with design, while executing with pragmatism to get to end goals

• Any % value is better than none. Any increase is great, and if you wait for maximum impact it won’t happen
  • Marginal gains lead to big wins
• Your expectations are too high, and you will be much happier with work if you grasp this
• Your work is not your identity
  • You might hear ‘no’ and it’s okay, not a reflection on you or your identity
• Time is on your side. There is lots of time in corporate environments. Maintain patience and perspective
  • Things move slower and maintain patience and perspective
• Get comfortable with living in middle of opposites. Live together with humanism and bureaucracy and help live in the middle of those

• Peter: I do this because we are at an interesting moment in time and companies are interested in ‘design’ or what they think is design
  • Companies see UX as factory for visual outputs for engineers
  • Still they are investing in design
• If you know what you are dong, you can deliver humanism in the work and rigid contexts to remind companies to put people at center of work done

1. I’m in favor of giving varied paths for designers grow, but I can run into challenges with consultancy and how to create more varied career paths within a consultancy?
   1. Peter: Designers shouldn’t work alone for this reason
   2. All designers are within teams and need to teamify design and different flavors of designers working for another

2. My HR team has poor understanding of DesignOps. Are there any resources for plugging the skill taxonomy practice?
   1. Peter: Can share material in master class and Jason Mazout and “Shaping Design” and skills mapping and charting. I will put the material into Slack
   2. There are resources from org-psych perspective, with O*NET online database to spit out core skills for the UX designer job
      1. Starting point you can start at

3. The career trellis a great metaphor, but how to articulate it to non-designer colleagues?
   1. Good question of the field  as we are expected to explain design all the time and processes and roles and talk through it– performance management and look at it word for word
   2. I’d leverage the analogy of not being one flavor of software engineer (there is back-end and front-end engineer and  that applies to design)
      1. Things to lean-in on and think of design as just one role and simple one at that and grasp breadth of opportunity there
      2. I have a whole rant on embedding designers, seriously avoid lone designers
         1. Multiple people produce complementarity when collaborating