Ethan Marcotte on the Tech Industry, Unions, and AI

In a time of massive layoffs across the tech industry, and with the inevitable advancement of AI, is it time for tech workers to organize — as in, unionize? I know, I know. You thought unions were for 1950’s factory workers. Not so. Ethan Marcotte, author of You Deserve a Tech Union (and coiner of the term “responsive web design”) thinks it’s high time for tech workers to protect themselves by coming together and deciding what’s most important to them as a collective.

Certainly tech workers don’t face the same kind of potential life-threatening working conditions of industrial America, but they still deserve a seat at the table when important decisions about their work are being discussed. With issues related to equality, transparency, workplace harassment, and how AI is shifting roles and affecting how work gets done, there’s a lot to talk about.

Ethan will bring his perspective on tech workers and how they’re being impacted by AI to the upcoming Designing with AI virtual conference in June.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• What’s attractive about unionizing for tech workers of the 2020s
• What tech workers would change if they could
• About tech walkouts and unions that have already happened
• Helpful resources for starting conversations with coworkers
• The potential relationship among AI, reskilling, and worker unions

Quick Reference Guide:
0:20 – Introduction of Ethan
3:35 – How Ethan became interested in the idea of tech unions
6:04 – “Weren’t unions for the manufacturing industry in the 1950s?”
9:32 – The things tech workers would change if they could
11:14 – Conversations among employees – are they safe? Are they protected?
13:28 – On organizing for the greater good of humanity
17:11 – Plug for Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions by Harry Max
19:06 – How we should feel about AI
22:36 – AI, reskilling, and when workers don’t want to leave mundane tasks behind
31:08 – Employees “voting with their feet” is costly for organizations
33:24 – How future workers may organize as it relates to AI
36:30 – Ethan’s gift for listeners

Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations (Videoconference)

In the May Community call, we talk about all things conference presentation proposals! The Civic Design Call for Presentation (CFP) will be open for submissions until June 1 to present at the conference on November 16th – 18th, 2022.

Design is the Differentiator: Bringing New Design Innovations to a Very Antiquated and Very Large Industry

Technology and design are at the heart of the innovations Compass delivers to thousands of real estate agents. Compass Founder and CEO Robert Reffkin and Sr VP of Design & UXR Greg Petroff chat about the industry and the opportunity for design to make a difference.

• Learn how technology and design make Compass stand out and deliver digital innovations in a massive industry.
• Hear about the Compass culture of learning and collaboration that is at the core of high-performing design teams.
• See how design scales its efforts with the help of product and engineering partners and a powerful set of entrepreneurial principles.

Through the Looking Glass—The Outsider’s Perspective on the Enterprise with Dan Willis

Dan Willis is Director of Customer Experience at the General Services Administration’s Centers of Excellence, and the mastermind behind past Enterprise Experience conferences’ wildly-popular “Storytelling Sessions.” At this year’s Enterprise Experience conference, Dan will be leading Theme 3: “Through the Looking Glass – The Outsider’s Perspective on the Enterprise” on Wednesday, September 3. Considering Dan’s extensive government experience means he’s all too familiar with large, slow moving and bureaucratic enterprises. In this wide-ranging episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Dan shares anecdotes from his career and offers some sneak peeks into the six sessions he’ll be leading on day three of Enterprise Experience 2020.

Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation

As a startup in hyper growth mode, the design teams at Signifyd immediately faced the unique challenges in meeting the demands of a fast-paced, agile environment which rarely looked the same everyday.

With growth, the pace of change continued, leading challenge of managing an organization in a constant state of transformation. How do you build and nourish teams to be both agile and hardy, having both flexible branches and strongly planted roots?

Sharing stories from across two design teams–the largely centralized Brand and Marketing team, and the mostly embedded Product team–Kincade and Ortiz-Reyes will illustrate how in just three years, those teams have transformed models through cross-pollination and shared best practices. Brand and Marketing’s centralized model has become more embedded, and Product’s embedded model now largely resembles a centralized model. The result? Signifyd’s design teams are among the most highly ranked in terms of employee satisfaction.

Join this session and gain valuable firsthand insights that will empower you to:

• Prepare your organization for transformation
• Implement and manage a participatory visualization of the org
• Understand and apply the psychology of change management

Theme 4: Enterprise Organizational Journey

We’ll blend panel-style discussion, improvisation, business wargaming, and more to explore the dynamics of cross-functional enterprise implementation teams. Our panel of experts—each representing a different facet of the software development lifecycle, including UX, Product, Development, Operations and Sales & Marketing—will be put into situations not of their own choosing that they must resolve in a series of meetings played out before the audience. Each member has their organization’s goals in mind, and their company’s goals in mind, but they don’t always know everybody else’s goals or concerns. Just like back at the office!

Participating in this session:

– Nafisa Bhojawala, UX Team Lead for Compute, Google Cloud Platform
– Kintan Brahmbhatt, Head of Product Management, Amazon Music
– David Gatto, Strategic Account Executive, Smartsheet
– Dave Sifry, CTO, MyVillage
– Wendy Spies, Director of Business Development for Data and AI

How Lessons Learned from Our Youngest Users Can Help Us Evolve our Practices

Every researcher wants to get the most out of a testing session but that’s easier said than done. It requires expert navigation of the nuances of different personalities, distinct power dynamics, and the varied abilities of each participant.

Dovetail’s Head of Design and Research, Lucy Denton sits down with Mila Kuznetsova, Senior Director of User Research and Product at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to get a better insight into her experiments with methodologies and techniques as she’s navigated testing with a distinct participant group—children. In this session, we’ll hear from Mila about staying nimble, adjusting her approach to cater to the individual, and how we could bring the same level of understanding and grace to testing with adults. This session isn’t to be missed!

Sheryl Cababa on Systems Thinking for Designers

Sheryl is the author of the soon-to-be-released Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers.

With a background in journalism and political science, and having worked at or with Adaptive Path, Substantial, Frog, Ikea, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation, Sheryl has an interest in the big picture of systems thinking and how it applies to designers.

Working on projects of enormous scale that could directly or indirectly affect thousands or millions of people can put researchers and designers in a state of paralysis as they realize the potential consequences of their work. Systems thinking can help move us out of that state of paralysis and into one of thought, collaboration, and action.

Sheryl explains how systems thinking fills the gaps that design thinking alone can leave behind.
• Expand your scope from the user to anyone who could be affected by the product.
• Don’t just ask how the product will be used. Asked why the product is needed at all.
• Expand your thinking. Think broadly about who the stakeholders are and the various contexts that could be impacted by your design.
• Imagine different solutions that you might not be able to execute, solutions that might require a policy change or a different business model.

An approach like the above will feel slower – at least initially. If you have impatient supervisors and engineers, gain alignment with them by getting them involved in the process.
• Help them understand the status quo and envision the future.
• Have them go through the exercise of creating visual maps with you.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• The relationship between design and systems thinking
• How design thinking falls short
• How systems thinking fills in the gaps by expanding your thinking and looking outside your scope of expertise
• Why systems thinking feels slower but is more collaborative and more efficient in the long run
• How to gain alignment with your decision-makers

Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction
[01:44] Ways to overcome decision paralysis
[04:55] Navigating the complexities of the world through systems thinking
[06:45] The problem with formalized systems thinking
[08:24] Design thinking vs. systems thinking
[13:22] The kinds of interventions that drive successful innovation
[15:42] How long-term thinking helps overcome compliance issues
[17:38] The difference between Cloud Space and Clock Space
[22:10] How designers can tell their superiors to slow down
[25:22] An easy way to gain alignment with your decision-makers
[30:38] Sheryl’s gift to the audience
[32:05] Parting thoughts

Insights and Interventions with Jill Fruchter

Jill has been listening to customers and clients for over 20 years. She has worked for organizations like Etsy and Blue Apron, and has since started Field Notes Consulting, a research and strategic planning practice serving both public and private sectors. She is method-agnostic, harnesses full-stack research, and interrogates all data to get to the real data or the root cause.

While hard data and numbers are important, data alone does not equal insight. Making sense of the data often requires listening to customers, human-scale frameworks of things like journeys and experience mapping, and, of course, minimizing researchers’ biases. It’s often the outside-in perspective that brings it all together to give us insight that will highlight consequences and implications.

Jill is a champion of what she calls “interventions” and doing interventions across silos. She shares an example from her time at Blue Apron that beautifully illustrates how one research silo can lose direction without insight from other silos.

Some interventions Jill recommends include:
• Remember that everyone in the organization is on the same team and after the same goal
• Encourage observation
• Bring cross-functional teams together
• Fit KPIs and OKRs in the story of the user

Jill will be leading a session, “Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher’s Role is to Stay Curious,” and a workshop, “Holistic Insights: Collapsing Functional Silos for Maximum Impact” at the Advancing Research Conference March 27-29, 2023.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• How Jill defines insight and why it won’t be uncovered from hard data alone
• How “interventions” across silos can help everyone in the organization win
• A taste of what Jill will cover in her talk and workshop at Advancing Research 2023

Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction of Jill
[01:50] Jill’s role at Advancing Research Conference March 27-29th, 2023
[02:27] Jill’s love-hate relationship with data
[07:25] How we get insights from data
[09:36] Lessons from Blue Apron
[14:13] How to perform or support interventions
[21:54] On interventions outside your area of expertise and considering the interconnectivity of the entire organization
[30:43] Looking back on information and library science school
[34:52] Jill’s book recommendation
[36:49] Jill’s session and workshop at the upcoming Advancing Research Conference in March

Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake

For many in Design and UX, news that your company or organization is adopting the Scaled Agile Framework can feel like the beginning of the end for fully integrating design and design teams in the software development lifecycle. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I will talk about how Design and Business Agility built a deep and cross-functional partnership at USAA to bake a human-centered approach into the Scaled Agile layer cake resulting in: SAFe Coaches who advocate for design, a Lean Business Case that uncouples business and user outcomes, and a shared definition of value that aligns whole teams on the best outcomes.