Meet Stephen Gates, Head Design Evangelist at InVision
August 19, 2020We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s Enterprise Experience conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get at the heart of why they’re passionate about enterprise design and design operations, what it’s like to work with them, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring Enterprise Experience 2020?
Stephen: As a partner in digital transformation to 100 of the Fortune 100 companies, InVision has a front row seat to the evolution of digital product design and development taking place in innovative organizations around the world. Enterprise Experience brings together the leaders responsible for transformational product design. InVision is uniquely positioned to align with enterprise companies to help them achieve design-driven collaboration to build the world’s best digital products at scale.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?
Stephen: Here at InVision we like to say that every company in the world has become—or is in the process of becoming—a digital product company. Every brand and company needs to be focused on design, and its power to fuel growth. That’s because everything comes down to a customer’s experience with the screen. If that experience isn’t easy and convenient, consumers will use a different product.
Two years ago, InVision conducted a research project that asked more than 2,000 enterprise designers across the globe about the relationship between design practices and business performance. We found that those dominating their industries are the ones treating the screen like the most important place on Earth. In fact, companies with high design maturity see cost savings, revenue gains, and brand and market position improvements as a result of their design efforts. That’s the disruptive power of design at enterprise scale.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Stephen: Design is baked into our DNA here at InVision. In fact, “design-driven” is even one of our company principles. We create together, share diverse perspectives, welcome feedback, and iterate to deliver best in class experiences—all while being a fully distributed company.
Our Design and DesignOps teams are in the unique position of building products used by innovative digital product teams at some of the largest, most influential companies in the world.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Stephen: As companies look to evolve from ‘small d’ to ‘big d’ design organizations, InVision empowers them to drive innovation and maturity within their teams. As many people already know, InVision allows teams to ideate, prototype and test new ideas in a secure environment; create repeatable and streamlined processes in design, product and engineering; and move more efficiently from inspiration to production. We’re honored to be the choice of so many incredible brands.
Through all our conversations with the biggest and most complex organizations out there, we understand that even a decade in, digital product design is extremely messy. It’s hard! That’s why we support our partners with industry-leading content that helps collaborators in every corner of the business. In the past year alone, we’ve published dozens of InVision books, hundreds of blog posts, and posted the fourth season of our Webby-nominated podcast, surpassing more than a million listens. It’s all intended to give product teams the tools they need to compete at the top of their game.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Stephen: The way people have been working since the pandemic struck is the way we’ve been working since we were founded. InVision is a fully distributed company with 700 employees in 28 countries. In the past few months, brands have come to us to find out how to do a remote design sprint, how to solve creative problems when everyone is alone at their computer, and how to build a strong culture without a central HQ, to name just a few. The fact that we’ve built our company in a fully distributed way translates to us being extremely intentional about who we are and what we’re creating, and that includes a culture centered on customer empathy, design thinking, and intelligent urgency. We hope others consider going fully distributed as part of their exploration into new working styles, which will free up more time to focus on digital transformation.
Additionally, we’ve recently launched updates to InVision Freehand, our virtual whiteboard, and we’ve seen incredible momentum there—triple digital growth since March. Very soon we’ll share the latest around Design Systems Manager, which is industry-leading and a critical part of our platform going forward. Many new faces at InVision are making a big impact and we’re excited about what’s to come.
Thanks to everyone who is part of our community, whether you’re on a product design team at a Fortune 100 company (all of whom use InVision), you’re participating in some of our early beta tests, or you’re simply a fan of our content. We appreciate you every day.
