Hey 👋 

What a week to be in the UK. I’m writing this from a glorious Essex! ☀️

We’re shaking things up. We’ll now be releasing 2 newsletters per week:

(That’s the aim anyway - currently being up a bank of newsletters)

• 1 “Community Insights” edition

• 1 Q&A/Insight article.

“Community Insights” will be a curated list of great insights from smart people off the back of my social media questions, as well as any links to new podcasts I create, books, articles etc.

In this mail:

• Leading design teams with no design background

• Companies hiring designers with the EXACT experience

• A SaaS company with NO PMs

• You’re invited to the Verified Community

Is having someone run design from a non-design background that bad?

Alex Morris: Depends if it's a purely people management role or requires someone who needs to have an opinion about what good design is. If it's the latter then no, it can't work

David Hamill: I can well believe it. As an observer to this, I see a conflation between craft competence and leadership skills that is less likely to happen when the leader isn't expected to have competence in the craft.

Designers don't get promoted to leadership positions for being good designers, they are promoted for having leadership skills. But when they get promoted, the assumption is that they are experts in the craft. But there are often people in the org below them who are better at it. When the leader is not a designer, this doesn't happen. The leader lets people who are good at their job, just get on and do it while clearing the obstacles that are stopping that.

Design teams often crave an exec-level designer to represent them at the top level. Until they get one. Their imagination of how their life would be if that were to happen is often quite different from the reality when it does.

Jason Clauss: In most branches of the United States Armed Forces, there is an extremely senior noncom role called Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman. Their role is to advocate for enlisted personnel at the highest level of military command. This should be a template for companies.

Every company should have a single top designer whose skills and interests lie more with design than management. They should have the same pay the CDO or VPD (whichever is the highest rank in design). They should be present at company leadership meetings but their focus should be on shaping the product design goals and policies while CDO focuses more on building the organization and procuring the resources needed to further those goals.

While some (rare) companies have inched in this direction with principal, distinguished, and fellow levels, this takes it to its fullest extent by creating a single role and putting it at bylaw-enforced parity with the highest execs.

Osandi Sekou Robinson: How can you have human-centred value, when the leadership hasn't invested in a single track of learning what it fundamentally is?

It's like having someone who wants to open and operate an authentic Thai restaurant, yet has never set foot in the country to understand how the food SHOULD taste and the context it is most experienced in.

Rogier van der Heide: Indeed Tom, designers say "people do not get us". They do not just say it: they use the statement to explain or even justify lack of success, lack of recognition, lack of budget, anything. But in the first place, all of that is due to design leaders themselves. 

Not long after I joined Philips, I set up an internal campaign led by two of my venerable design directors, Guillaume and Brad. The campaign was called "Design is not Optional" and it basically encouraged execs and senior directors to visit the design studio and discover the value of design. Everyone in my organization took part: welcoming management, showing them around, and asking them questions to understand their real pain points. 

It was the start of a journey that quadrupled the spending on design by the business. It helped of course that I moved design from a separate building into the headquarters's ground floor, separated from the lift lobby only by a transparent glass wall. It also helped that our two sofa corners - with espresso makers - were bookable as meeting rooms in Outlook, for everyone who wanted a "cool meeting place" to impress a customer, or to get inspiration.

Think bold, think in experiences, think from the other's viewpoint, and get everyone involved.

Why do companies love to hire people with the EXACT experience?

Helen Arvanitopoulos: Doing the same thing, with the same mindset, without any other experiences. Thank God I had someone with a brain that literally said, I hired you because you're an expert in what I'm looking for, not because you know "e-commerce". The transformations we've done.

Jesse Lewis: Tom, I agree that 'companies love to hire people with the EXACT experience they desire.' I think that often is a symptom of short-term need or demand and failure to recognise the longer view and strategic advantage that they can bring to the broader leadership and business.

You are not hiring based on experience alone. You are hiring for the positive influence that an individual can bring an alternative point of view or just because they will ask, 'why?' of all levels. 

The opportunity for you, design and the business, is to support them in their growth, to gain relevant experience in their new role, and expertise to develop a myriad of new skills in the time they spend with you.

Scott Parker: Amazing things happen when you hire from outside the industry. A new, sometimes naive perspective can take your products and services to places you never expected.

Igor Koshelev: In our rapidly evolving tech landscape, isn't adaptability and the ability to learn quickly more valuable than years of experience in a specific domain? How many times have we seen industry veterans struggle with new paradigms while newcomers thrive?

James Parillo: One of the core problems is that HR gatekeepers continually fail to understand that design is about creative problem-solving, not checklists of keyword skills. We are not data entry clerks, we are tasked with engaging critical thinking to solve problems.

Graham Reed: It's a lack of intent to progress their staff. They want people to come in and give give give, not train and mould. This is a big red flag IMO, and companies that say this claim to support their staff, develop their staff, invest in their staff, and plainly lying.

Jason Mills: If you keep hiring people from your competitors, you're only going to keep doing the same things as your competitors.

A diverse workforce brings new perspectives to drive innovation, new experiences and new products.

Lindsay Browning: The hiring managers who are open-minded to talent with skill and who are adaptable, curious and motivated will build a high-performing team with a diverse mix of perspectives and experience. Hiring is a skill that takes time to master and feel comfortable with, especially when hiring non-traditional profiles.

A SaaS company with NO PM’s

Dan Gough: 100%. Designers need to understand the commercial impact of design & know what will make the biggest difference for users and how to communicate that within their own team and with stakeholders. Product managers are often a wonderful bridge but designers need to be an active and powerful voice in that conversation - at all levels!

Thomas Wilson: Also, Tom Scott I'd like to acknowledge this post. When you fight for righteousness and what is best for customers and employees doing this work, it really warms my heart and it sends a message to researchers, strategists, service designers, UX designers who are being affected by unnecessary layoffs, in the millions now.

What is happening is wrong. There's no grey area here. It's wrong and the data shows it but no one reading this needs data. You know the systems and services you touch and EXPERIENCE YOURSELF on a daily basis, are not getting better overall. You know that if you work in these environments you are being asked to do things you know are wrong. They are not good for customers nor are they healthy for the psychological safety and growth of employees.

All it takes is for a few GOOD people with a platform and a voice to stand up and show courage. History will show where we stand right now. This is a pivotal moment in human evolution and we are being systematically denied the opportunity to make a preferred future. Instead, most are just kowtowing and capitulating for the sake of a check.

This doesn't happen in any other creative or innovative endeavour. It ONLY happens in technology and software DESIGN.

TJ Harrop: Love this Tom! A lot of people scoff at the broadly skilled product person, but I think that's exactly what a product designer is - someone who can design a product which makes sense technically has a strong market fit, won't go bankrupt (even if it isn't direct-to-consumer) and balances desirability, needs, wants, and the unsexy pragmatics of operating a product in the real world.

Milos Soskic: I think the product managers v no product managers line of thinking is a false dichotomy. You can probably find a successful org with no designers if you look hard enough.

What matters is having an org where the chosen functions work well together.

Kerry George: Without knowing anything about the stage of the business or product it is hard to comment properly but this is interesting and makes total sense for this to be wrapped up in design at a certain stage that a business/product is in but long term, is this where design should be spending their time? I wonder if the founder/HiPPO is an undercover product manager providing some product strategy and priority to design?

I have worked with and still work with some fab designers who could easily do product and come at product with all bases checked off. To me, they have the potential to be great product managers long term.

Ahmet Emre Acar: I think product needs to be owned by someone - either a designer, a developer or a subject matter expert who knows the customer and market extremely well.

A "generic" product manager is what corporates and mid-sized companies do. Product management activities are important, but I believe you don't need the PM m role in itself.

It goes against what I taught and practised with AWS customers, but they had different setups and grown structures.

I would advise a startup against a formal PM role. It should be someone who is hands-on in some aspect of the product, whether it is the design, the development, or the marketing of it.

I would also try and avoid getting to the scale that forces you to introduce one. there ought to be a better way of forming companies. I think DAOs might be one approach worth following

The Verified Community 🚀

I post a lot on social media about the business of design, careers, and portfolios, integrating design with the lens of sharing insights from the amazing ICs and executives I speak to.

But, LinkedIn is not set up for conversation. I like to think of LinkedIn as the “stage” and now we need to go backstage, build deeper relationships, and put together brains to create change in this crazy industry of ours.

My focus of the community is working together to integrate design. This could look like interviews, building data-backed reports to share with non-design executives, meaningful threads, interviews with non-design leaders etc.

We need to make noise, but, back it up with action.

I take my role in executive search seriously, we can’t make any change without the right people at the right time in the right place in the organisation.

I’m concerned with how neglected design is at the top of most companies.

So, you are invited to our new community. In this, we plan to:

• Host exclusive Q&As with design and NON-design leaders.

• Connect with like-minded peers over Slack.

• Have better dialogue on challenges we are facing in the industry.

• Access to our curated resource hub for design, careers + life stuff.

• Working on rolling out discounts and deals with certain companies.

• And of course, 2x newsletters per week.

• Invite to our invite-only talent network.

As we grow Verified, we will be developing new services for example we’re tinkering with a “personal agent” service for leaders right now, for people in our communities.

Who this Slack channel is NOT for:

• People who don’t want to contribute or seek out information.

• People want to sell services. Leave that for LinkedIn.

• Very early-stage designers, we’re keeping this at senior for now.

What the Slack channel will look like and process to join:

• You’ll join 10-12 channels. Focused conversation.

• One of the team will send you a welcome message with instructions and prompts on how to introduce yourself, where to find what etc.

If you’re interested in going “backstage” to have more meaningful dialogues please fill in this form - https://forms.gle/vfertSabAMcyPvMQ6

We’re going to wait until we have 200+ people interested so we can have healthy discussions and a healthy volume to get started.

Hopefully, see you there 🙏 

Peace + love,

Tom

Hello 👋 

This week we have Gregor Matheson talking about all things portfolios from a hiring manager perspective, and my quick insights into topics such as “design need a seat" and how to get buy-in based on insights of speaking to people who have done just this.

In this mail:

• Q&A: with Gregor Matheson on portfolios

• 6 conversations: with non-design executives in 2023

• An event: You’re invited to Verified’s first virtual event

Gregor Matheson is a strategic creative leader who believes in thoughtful and holistic design, executed with consideration and craft.

He is currently Head of Design at Osome, who help free entrepreneurs from financial admin, paperwork and back-office distractions through a unique SaaS + human-in-the-loop approach, he’s on the pursuit to creating a world-class design organisation that is adored by customers, revered by the industry, envied by competitors - and feels they are uniquely positioned to do so at Osome.

If not working or with his loved ones you’ll likely find him in the gym doing CrossFit, Olympic Lifting, Swimming, MMA and everything in between.

Right, let’s get stuck in…

Gregor Matheson

1 - Hello Gregor! What has been your journey in design?

What has been your journey in design?

My grandad was the one who introduced design to me at a very young age after spotting a competition to ‘design’ a Kellogg’s cereal box while babysitting me. For the record, this was a long time ago.

It was a pretty innocent ‘keep him distracted’ babysitting activity, but I had no idea people could earn a living doing something that was so much fun.

Unbeknownst to him, it would lead me into a career in design eventually as it gave me a bit of a laser-focus in school on what I wanted to do (despite it not coming naturally to me or being a popular career path at the time) and led me to study Graphic Design at Robert Gordon University, in Aberdeen.

Following university, I spent the first 10 years of my career in agencies of all different shapes and sizes, working across a bunch of different specialisms, sectors and audiences, before making the decision to join iZettle (now Zettle by PayPal), which was my first in-house role.

Did you choose to get into management?

When I was progressing in my career as a designer, there was no such thing as an IC path - you either progressed into management/leadership or you didn’t progress, it was as simple as that.

That said, even today, I still believe your impact as a high-level IC does have a ceiling in comparison to the leadership/management track, but it really comes down to your goals and ambitions.

Do you enjoy it?

I love it. I’m hugely passionate about personal development and through my own personal journey, I’ve discovered that not only do I get huge amounts of reward from developing others, but I’m probably a stronger manager/leader than I was as a hands-on designer

But this is an important question you’ve asked because… if you want to be a great manager or leader, then you have to be passionate about people, know how to get the best out of them and actually want to do the job. Sadly, organisations have the proclivity to put people in leadership positions because of time served, not because they want to be there and are the best person for the job.

2 - Do you think Designers + Leaders should have portfolios? Why?

Absolutely, and I don’t understand where the ‘trend’ of not having one has emerged.

Portfolios are only redundant if you believe a portfolio needs to be solely hands-on output.

Perhaps a controversial opinion, but if you are a designer and/or leader and you are unable to present the impact and value you deliver as a compelling story, then you are probably not a great designer and/or leader.

In my opinion, the notion of not having a portfolio because ‘people are too senior’, ‘their not hands-on anymore’, or my personal favourite, their ‘too busy delivering impact’ is simply a bullshit excuse.

It comes down to effort VS reward, and in my experience, most people in design leadership positions just don’t want to make the time it takes to actually create a portfolio.

It is a lot of hard work and it is really time-consuming to sit down and articulate your value and impact into a story and present it as a portfolio, but it will make you better.

To quote James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) “mastery requires practice, but if you only practice when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never achieve the remarkable.” 

3 - What would you say to those people who say portfolios can contribute to bias?

Your recruitment process can and should be designed to be equitable, inclusive and minimise bias - regardless of your organisation’s size, industry, maturity or resources.

The only bias I think portfolios could contribute to is: the likelihood of being considered when comparing someone with a portfolio VS someone who doesn’t have a portfolio - but that will vary on the hiring manager’s personal philosophy.

4 - What do you look for in design IC portfolios?

Broadly speaking, with any portfolio, I am just looking to have my intrigue sparked, that’s it.

The best portfolios are those where I leave wanting to meet the person and ask them more questions about them and their work.

More specifically, I believe the core skills of all designers/design leaders can fall into 1 of the 6 C’s: Centricity, Capability, Creativity, Character, Communication and Change Agent - and while I never expect to have see all of these skills demonstrated in a portfolio, it should at least send some positive signals

5 - What do you think a Leader should include in their portfolio?

Your philosophy/values

If you listen to or read any book from the best leaders across the world, you will find they all have a philosophy on their domain of expertise - you should too.

I think most leaders will have a philosophy or values, but I don’t think enough leaders sit down to reflect and then actually articulate them.

Your taste

I read an article recently about Rick Rubin that summed this up eloquently for me. Rick has no technical and/or musical ability, but when asked what he gets paid, he responded: “the confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists”.

As a design leader, you should confidently demonstrate your taste, whatever it may be. It might not match my taste (which is a bonus as it helps improve diversity of thought) and/or it might not be what we are looking for at that time, but it should be clearly expressed in your folio.

Your impact

Perhaps an obvious one, but demonstrate that you make a difference to an organisation. And remember, it doesn’t always need to be objective business metrics (although they do help). For example, I saw a folio recently that had excerpts from their most recent 360 feedback, as well as internal engagement survey results. Not sure how GDPR-compliant it was, but I liked it.

6 - What is the best portfolio you’ve seen?

While I have come across some seriously impressive and visually/technically stunning examples, I don’t really remember the portfolios, but the people (if I end up meeting them). Like I mentioned, your portfolio is there to spark intrigue - your character is what gets you the job.

What I am looking for in terms of specific content varies on the role I am recruiting for, but the portfolios that make me ‘lean in’ are those which strike the right balance between:

Storytelling

Some people hear the word ‘storytelling’ and think ‘War & Peace’ - please don’t. I can safely say I don’t think I’ve read a single case study cover-to-cover. Keep it punchy, keep it concise.

I always suggest people should treat their portfolio like an actual presentation. For example, you wouldn’t spend 5 or 6 slides in a presentation on process, so there’s no reason to do it in your portfolio.

Consideration & Craft

Whether it is personally important to you or not, I (and a lot of other hiring managers I know) see portfolios as a manifestation of your standards and taste.

I don’t really care how you create your portfolio (bespoke website, templated website, Figma, PDF, Keynote etc.), but your portfolio should exhibit the level of quality, consideration and craft you seek in your actual work as an employee.

If your portfolio is messy and riddled with errors/broken links, then it will make me question your attention to detail. Put your best foot forward and give it the same level of objective scrutiny you would do anything else.

Digestibility

Over the years, I’ve experienced some impenetrable portfolios due a lack of care, structure, or sometimes, the opposite… It’s over-engineered and confusing as hell.

Most hiring managers are short on time when it comes to reviewing portfolios. They are not there to hang around and figure out how to navigate your portfolio, so make it easy and digestible.

This is what gets your foot in the door, so don’t start that relationship by obfuscating your portfolio unnecessarily.

If I had to articulate a portfolio recipe that won’t steer you wrong, I would suggest:

• Keep it to 3-5 strong case studies maximum

• That all follow a punchy, concise structure:

  • Overview - a single-sentence overview of the project

  • Context - to the problem you are solving

  • Solution - how you solved the problem and steps taken

  • Impact - what happened as a result of this work

  • Role - what part did you play (if you are a manager/leader)

• Supported by an engaging About page that demonstrates your philosophy/values/personality

All of which is presented beautifully.

Open Roles

We don’t have any open roles in the design organisation at Osome right now, but I can say that we will be looking for a UX Researcher and a Design System Lead in the not-too-distant future, so feel free to reach out.

6 ideas to get “buy-in” for design

I speak to 3+ non-design executives a week about design.

(Often, CDO's "Digital" working in large 10,000+ people companies) Very few CDOs (Digital) come from design, common backgrounds are business SMEs (especially in large companies), product, eng.

6 similar conversations I've had in 2023:

• They see design as a crucial part of their team.

• 90% tell me Product has more power than Design.

• CEOs do not mention design, it's about shipping products.

• Focusing on business metrics. Design happens to be part of that.

• They believe the wider executive team do not understand design fully.

• The other 10% say Product/Eng is a serious bottleneck for design work.
  
  Ideas on getting-buy in:
  

• Pick a product or service leadership cares about.

• Fix the design of the product or service

• Show the biz impact, distribute results to stakeholders.

• Work to show the impact it could have across the wider business.

• Generate a team to consistently show value.

• Ask to make design part of the business strategy and proper budgets.
  

  P.S. Make your own table, and stop asking for a seat.

Can we stop saying “seat at the table?”

"Design needs a seat at the table"

(Often, people get there and don't know what to do)

Good start: Translate design success → to how business views success.

Stop saying "design". Speak the business language.

Start talking about what CEOs, CPOs, CIOs care for.

Take initiative. Infuse design into business strategy.

Fact: execs don't like spending money. Show them design needs investment.

CEOs want customers, satisfaction, increase in shareholder value.
CIOs care about streamlining processes, saving 5%.
CFOs care about profit, revenue, and savings.

Design can support all of this. Some people just don't know yet.

Fact: Non-designers don't understand design like designers.

Form an internal community. Build internal excitement.

Focus. Create 1-2 cases where design is driving ROI.

Focus on value. Business value > pixel pushing.

Make your work "talk" → Make your stakeholders "listen"

In Other News

• We’re going to host our first virtual community event. We have 1000+ of you who read this per week, time to start putting faces to names!

On 5th October, I’ll host a Q&A with a special guest on any questions you have from:

• Personal Brand

• Positioning yourself in the market

• Portfolios, resumes, cover letters

• How to write effective JDs.

• And more.

More information to come on this in next week’s newsletter edition.

• We’ll also be hosting an invite-only event with David Martin Founder + President of Fantasy one of the world’s most esteemed design studios. We’re planning an event where David and myself will review portfolios live.

See you next week 👋 

Tom

Good morning. A warm welcome to the 60 of you who climbed aboard this Verified community this week. It’s growing quickly now 🚀 

Today’s newsletter:

• Q&A with Mitchell on being the first Designer at a company now valued at $1.2bn

• Why being a Design Manager is so tough

• Things we need more of in the design world

Being the first Designer at a company now valued at $1.2bn valuation

Mitchell Clements is a Senior Product Design Manager at SimpleNexus, where he has helped the company grow from a 17-person basement startup to a $1.2 billion tech company by demonstrating the business value of design. During his career, he has worked in many roles including developer, product manager, and designer. He also volunteers his time in the design community as the vice-chair of the Product Hive mentorship program.

Mitchell Clements

1 - What was the state of the product when you joined SimpleNexus?

When I joined SimpleNexus six years ago as the 17th employee, we were a small, scrappy, self-funded startup operating from a basement. Our product was rudimentary, consisting of a digital business card and a basic mortgage calculator for lenders to share with homebuyers.

We were a fast-growing startup, though we lacked a clear product vision and strategy. This quickly resulted in a haphazard product experience with significant friction for customers and users.

My goal when I joined was to make a meaningful impact. I wanted to shape the company's future trajectory and be part of a passionate, hardworking team.

2 - Did they understand the true value design could bring?

I don’t believe so. Most people view product design as a role that focuses on aesthetics and usability. It took a lot of effort to break that stereotype and show the business value that design teams can deliver when they are empowered to do so.

3 - How has the product evolved?

The transformation has been extraordinary. From serving 10,000 users initially, we now touch 10 million users, representing 1 in 4 loans within the U.S. mortgage industry.

Furthermore, in January of 2022, we were acquired at a $1.2 billion valuation. What made our product worth that amount? In the definitive agreement statement from the acquiring company, they stated that we had, “streamlined the many stages of the homeownership process into a single, seamless journey…” They also mentioned how our “innovative solution and deep subject matter expertise in consumer front-end technology” would extend their capabilities. That is the impact design can have on the business value of a product.

Today, we now span 1,700 employees.

(I answer the “how” in question 7)

4 - How do you set up design for success?

We have experienced significant growth since our basement startup days. Presently, our design team comprises a director, four managers, and approximately 20 designers. Additionally, we have designated DesignOps roles overseeing our design system and user research operations.

We have adopted a hybrid approach that combines centralised and decentralised structures. Each designer belongs to two teams: a centralised design team and a cross-functional experience team, working closely with product managers and developers.

This setup enables designers to immerse themselves in product domains, shaping strategies and directions while fostering strong collaboration. Furthermore, we maintain cohesion as a unified design team through regular design critiques, trainings, mentorship, career development, workshops, whiteboard sessions, and offsite retreats.

5 - How has design helped shape the product and business strategy?

Early on, I took charge of our product vision and strategy for our homebuyer experience. This required gaining a deep understanding of the pain points our customers and users were going through. Once we understood their pain points and the market opportunities, we started showing the rest of the company what our homebuyer experience could be like in the 3-5 years if we positioned streamlined experiences and customer journeys as a core value proposition of our product offering. When leaders saw the vision of what we could become vs. what we are today, it generated a lot of excitement and transformed our product and business strategy.

This was a new paradigm for the company. Our mindset before had been about asking customers what they wanted, and then building features. But with our product vision and strategy in place, we were instead anticipating what our customers needed before they told us. This allowed us to innovate and stay ahead of the competition, and deliver streamlined experiences for our customers and users.

6 - From the people who were at the company when you joined, has their opinion on design and the value it can bring change?

When I first joined, the perception of design was primarily limited to aesthetics and usability. However, over time, several leaders have come to recognize design as a strategic partner capable of driving the product vision, solving meaningful problems, and delivering streamlined, customer-centric experiences that add substantial value to the business.

7 - What would your advice be for a company pre-revenue, looking for product-market fit, on the importance of hiring a designer?

The number one mistake I see in product organisations (both startups and enterprises) is they ask customers what they want, build it, and then the customers end up not paying or using the product/feature.

Experienced Designers know how to solve this. They use generative and evaluative research techniques to help you identify meaningful customer problems, identify innovative solutions to those problems, and then validate those solutions before building the real thing – achieving product market fit in the fastest and least expensive method possible.

If you're still trying to achieve product-market fit, then you should invest in a high-performing designer who has experience with research, and business strategy, and can help guide you to building impactful solutions.

It can be tempting to hire a junior designer to make your product look pretty, but they likely won't have experience achieving product-market fit or navigating business strategy. In addition, they will lack needed mentorship from a design leader. If you feel like you can't afford a senior designer, then I would recommend hiring a part-time contractor or agency. Let them show you the business value they can bring to your company.

8 - Bonus question! What are your top 5 favourite interview questions to seek out top performers?

1. What's your design story? How did you get to where you are today?

   Seeking to understand their unique perspective, motivation, and passion.

2. What are your next career goals?

   Identifying alignment between the candidate's aspirations and our business and design team's objectives.

3. What's the most interesting insight you've gained about your users recently? How did you learn that?

   Assessing their commitment to deeply understanding their users and their ability to derive valuable insights.

4. Based on your understanding of this role, what would be your 90-day plan for tackling these challenges?

   Evaluating their ability to strategise and align with our expectations for the role.

5. What questions do you have for me?

   Top performers are always assessing the company's vision, understanding of the organisation's maturity, and potential for growth and change.

Things we need more of in Design

I’ve observed a lot of people in 2023, and I think it’s time we as a design community stop talking and start taking action. Together. To do that we need to be speaking to NON-design executives.

→ IC career rubrics
→ Founding designers
→ Business literacy + IQ
→ Designers into → Product
→ Big focus on visual/UI craft
→ Great mentoring + coaching
→ Less of “seat at the table” talk
→ Better utilisation of design leaders
→ Proper "senior" UX(R) practitioners
→ Talk with non-designers about design
→ Update outdated ways of hiring designers
→ People focusing on the "work" less managing
→ Content Design has equal pay to Product Design

As much as designers do not get the room and protection they need to contribute to customer value, we must also stop playing victims of execs. IMO it increases the distance between design and business execs.

We need fewer design communities talking between ourselves, and more of a focus outwards on speaking to non-design about design.

Why being a Design Manager is so tough

Design managers are underrated IMO.

It's a tough role to hold in design.

You're not leading the whole team

• You're not executing the "work"

• You're in back-to-back meetings

• You need a mature org to understand the value you bring.

Benefits of design managers:

• They translate the vision of a CDO/VP to the wider team.

• They unblock situations, so ICs can get on with work.

• They can attract and develop high-performing ICs.

• They influence the day-to-day work of the team

Design managers burn out because they're forced into "player-coach" roles and expected to lead the work, lead teams, org design etc.

If your design managers are burnt out, it will affect how engaged your team is, which affects output, which affects the quality of the product, which affects the bottom line. Voila.

They're crucial for the health of your design organisation.

If someone forwarded this email to you, you need to subscribe 😉 

Unsubscribe if you think this newsletter is not to your taste. Your inbox is too busy for that.

Until next time!

Tom

Hello 👋 

This week we have Andrea Pilutti talking about his experience from IC to Head of Design. To finish off with I will brain-dump some thoughts on how to create job descriptions for designers.

In this mail:

• Interview with Andrea Pilutti on becoming a Head of Design

• How to write a JD for Designers

Becoming a Head of Design

Andrea has 20 years of design experience under his belt working for a variety of agencies, as an entrepreneur, in-house and in the last 8 years leading design teams. He’s worked in Italy, France, Switzerland and now Spain currently as Head of Digital Experience at Nespresso, leading a cross-functional team of 40 across Product Design, Design Systems, Research, Marketing Design and Front-end Dev.

Right, let’s get stuck in…

Andrea, hello! What has been your journey in design?

I started working in design in 2002 – when websites were built with <table></table> and web 2.0 seemed like the next big thing. I entered the design industry through the visual angle, working in a small and very dynamic agency in Torino, Italy. However, I quickly realised that visuals had to be complemented by functionality in order to be valuable to both people and businesses. That conscious consideration paired with my natural curiosity led me to deepen my knowledge of both technology and user experience. I started studying and reading about front-end technologies, usability, psychology, and business.

I could put all of that into practice when I was running my own design studio business for 7 years. Back then I didn’t know, but it was a perfect playground for growth. When you are the one putting your face on it with clients you have no right to disappoint. And you develop a “service mindset” very useful in corporate environments as well.

All of those experiences have ultimately been very useful for landing and succeeding in my current role as Head of Digital Experience.

Did you choose to get into management?

However, I got into management by accident. I was not asking for it nor expecting it to happen, while I was enjoying the ride as a designer/individual contributor.

My first experience as a manager was while I was running my own business. I was lucky enough to get a lot of projects coming from people I had previously worked with. Building trust by being reliable and delivering on the promise helped me get a stable stream of incoming business. When the volume became unsustainable to manage by myself, I had to look for support. First, I looked into freelance options, then I insourced a permanent position. In retrospect, I can see how a terrible manager I was (Fabrizio G. if you read these lines, I am sure you’ll smile)... I was so used to doing everything myself that having to delegate all the details of the execution was not natural at all for me. I suppose it was a necessary struggle to go through to improve and grow.

Fast forward four years, 2015, I moved to Switzerland, where I had the opportunity to join Nespresso as the sole designer. It was a step back in terms of role – considering my entrepreneurial experience, not the size of the business – but to jump further. Luckily, I hadn’t been alone for long. With the support of my great managers, we started insourcing the UX/UI design not only for marketing campaigns but also for the evolution of our website and mobile app, our core digital products selling for billions every year. One week I was improving our checkout, the next one designing the Black Friday campaign, and the following week we started discussing our Design System. Just six months after I joined, the volume of work was so big that we had to start scaling the team.

Do you enjoy it?

Since then, I have progressively and happily moved into design leadership roles, and I couldn't have done it without the trust, support, and guidance of all the great managers (A special mention to Jerôme N., Mathieu C., Cyril L., and Nicole C.) I encountered on the way. I consider myself lucky to have met all these inspiring senior leaders, and each of them taught me something valuable and influenced the way I manage teams today, placing humans at the core of the interaction. I will always remember the very first management advice I received from Mathieu C. on my second day with him: "Andrea, you need to hire people (in your team) that can take your place…".

Managing managers

On the path to becoming a head of design, there’s a milestone that could be tricky to pass, and I personally struggled with it at first. Moving from directly managed teams to managing managers. You get one step further from where the work is done, hence you have to rely on a line of direct reports who are great at communicating. It’s your responsibility to filter and distil that information to frame your decisions and actions. In the same way, you need them to cascade messages and orient the teams in the desired direction. Needless to say, you need to establish a trusting relationship with them, as they need to be able to represent your broader team in any circumstances.

What is the key difference between IC + Management apart from the obvious?

The transition from an individual contributor to a design management position requires a complementary set of skills that not all designers possess or cultivate in the first years of their careers. Many senior product designers demonstrate strong leadership skills, even without occupying formal management positions.

Other designers naturally turn to them for guidance and support, and their names come up frequently in conversations. They are proactive in seeking to understand the problem, the business, and its context; they have a bias for action, often finding unconventional solutions and challenging the status quo. They get things done and help others, quickly becoming a reference for the organisation.

While a focus on crafting skills can help you advance in your individual contributor role, helping the organisation and others succeed is key to succeeding in a design management position.

What are the key behaviours required to embark on a design leadership journey?

• Have a long-term vision and a purpose
  Depending on the stage of the company, the vision can be cascaded from the top management. However, it is important to establish a clear vision and purpose for the design function. Ultimately, our goal is to design solutions that generate outcomes and bring value to the organisation. Clarifying this will unite the team towards a common destination.

• Delegate and empower
  Delegating tasks and empowering team members are key success factors for a design manager. Establishing a culture of trust, fostering ownership, and psychological safety to encourage diverse perspectives is paramount to achieving collective success.

• Communicate and collaborate
  Communication and collaboration are fundamental for a Product Designer, but they are even more crucial for a design leader. Nothing impactful in an organisation can be achieved by a single individual or team working in isolation. Learn to facilitate conversations to guide towards effective solutions.
  

• Pitch and sell
  Learn to speak the same language as the business to raise design credibility throughout the organisation. It's easier to do so with data and facts at hand. Conduct research and use all available data sources, both qualitative and quantitative, to build a case to defend the idea you believe in.

• Mentor & coach
  Your primary goal is to make your team successful. To do so, you need to mentor and coach your team members. Providing guidance, feedback, and support will help them develop their skills and grow in their careers. Their success is your team’s success.
  

• Decision-making and risk assessment
  As a design manager, you are often responsible for making critical decisions that will impact projects and team direction. Assessing risks, and making well-informed choices are part of your day-to-day life.
  

• Evaluate performance
  Evaluating the team's performance and providing support with constructive feedback is essential for continuous team development. It is important to understand how to measure success and address areas for improvement. Praise in public, correct in private.
  

• Manage conflict
  99% of the tensions you will be facing, will likely come from personal situations. Conflict resolution is an unavoidable aspect of leading a team. Learning how to handle disagreements and foster a positive team culture is crucial for maintaining a productive and harmonious working environment.
  

• Manage resources and budget
  As a design manager, you'll need to manage resources effectively, including budgets, project timelines, and team capacity. Balancing multiple moving parts while sticking to aligned priorities becomes a core aspect of your role.
  
  Also, remember the quote from my former manager “You need to hire people (in your team) that can take your place…”? Well, you will learn how to hire and you will make mistakes. A tip? Hire for the attitude. A great designer (hard-skill wise) who doesn’t know how to collaborate is less valuable than a slightly less good designer with a collaborative attitude. A great designer is one who can deliver thanks to the great bonds they can create with stakeholders and cross-functional peers.

• Evangelize Design

  Design managers must act as advocates for design within the organisation, promoting its value and impact on business outcomes. You'll need to articulate the ROI of design investments and gain buy-in from stakeholders.

  However… don't be overwhelmed by the journey – it's not a straight line! We all make mistakes, and that's how we learn and grow over time.

It's been an honour to share my experience, and I can't wait to hear from the community! If you're a young design leader stepping into a managerial role, feel free to reach out – I'd be happy to offer support.

Before we wrap up, I want to recommend an awesome read: "The Making of a Manager" by Julie Zhuo. This book is packed with inspiring stories and valuable insights that will surely resonate with you.

How to write JDs aimed at Designers

To attract the best designers, write to them directly.

A lot of the JD’s I look at are vague and full of corporate jargon. The best designers do not care about this stuff, they want specifics, they want to know what are they going to be working on and detailed expectations.

I don’t need someone to tell me a Product Designer role will include prototyping for example.

Things to include when writing to designers:

• Why is the role live?

• How big is the team?

• What can they be fired for?

• Who’s going to be their boss?

• Where does design report into?

• How efficiently do they operate?

• What’s their expected deliverables?

• What does the first 100 days look like?

• How mature is the design organisation?

• How does design work with engineering?

• Who’s the highest exec sponsor for design?

Write to one person, that person being your perfect candidate. Filter out the noise. Attract the few. The right few.

If someone forwarded this email to you, you need to subscribe 😉 

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Until next time!

Tom

Hey 👋 

This week we have a Q&A with Juan Ramirez from Netflix, my thoughts on the design job market and 7 great recruiters you should connect with if you’re a design leader.

In this mail:

• Q&A with Juan Ramirez on how to be a better designer

• Review of the Design job market in 2023

• 7 top recruiters to connect with in 2023

Good to Great 

Juan J. Ramirez is a seasoned designer that specializes in Developer Tools. Currently a Product Design Lead at Netflix, formerly at Meta, Gitlab, and AWS. He also runs his own personal studio, Rasterwise, through which he has developed products such as getscreenshotapi.com (a profitable API as a Service) and selfgazer.com (an experimental AI tarot app).

Today we look into how to level up as a designer. It’s even more important that we are levelling up as a community, proving the “ROI” and aligning our work success to how the business views success.

Juan Ramirez

1 - How do you define a good and great designer?

I would say that good digital product designers are the ones that care about their craft and focus on adding value to the spaces in which they operate.

In the current state of the digital product design industry, I believe there are already a set of canonical skills that most companies are looking for, such as the ability to think critically about problems, communicate and articulate ideas, produce compelling product visions, work well with developers, understand underlying business dynamics, having a strategic mindset, being adaptable, producing good visual designs, being a fast tactical worker, etc.

What defines a great designer is a little bit more nuanced and layered. I believe great designers are those who have the hard and soft skills to perform as a designer but also are radically authentic and genuinely interested in embracing their creativity and offering it to the world.

2 - What are the attributes of the top 1% of designers?

think is mostly about authenticity. What makes you who you are, and how do you align that with what the world needs?

I also believe that genuine curiosity is the defining attribute of the top 1% of designers.

When you become really curious about how the world works and you start seeing its vast interconnectedness, you start realizing that there’s an opportunity to shape reality and improve the world at any scale. From how you organize your desk to the strategic implications of a corporate design job, I think there’s always an opportunity to ask yourself why things work the way they do and creatively find ways to improve them.

I see design as a useful medium to imagine new and improved realities, so in that sense, I’m convinced that what defines the top 1% of designers isn’t the width or depth of their skills but how intentional they are about using those skills to make a difference.

3 - What are the top three skills for new designers to perfect?

1. Strategic Thinking: Do you understand the long-tail implications of your designs? Are you capable of creating artefacts that go beyond the surface and shine a light on hidden and underlying challenges?
   

2. Technical Acumen: Do you understand how digital products are built and distributed? Do you understand the low-level technologies that allow a given digital product to deliver its value? Do you understand the constraints and limitations of your technology stack?
   

3. Visual Skills: Can you produce generally appealing designs that are aesthetically pleasing and that promote trust? Are you able to capture the cultural dynamics of a product and its audience and create visuals that trigger an emotional response?

4 - What tips would you give on strengthening communication and prioritization?

I would give the same tip for both communication and prioritization. Be effective and direct. Don’t cut corners but also don’t overcomplicate yourself.

Being a designer is a hard job because you’re continuously trying to define the value you create and how exactly you create it.

If your communication and your priorities are scattered, is pretty hard to deliver that value. My standard advice is to leverage your existing strengths and find ways to improve your communication and inform your priorities.

For example, in my case, I believe I’m a way stronger writer than a speaker, so I choose to leverage that skill set to level up my communication style and balance out those areas where I’m still developing.

The same applies to prioritization. It’s easier to do first the things that you’re strong at and save some brain cycles for those tasks where you need to push a little bit harder to produce the desired results.

5 - How can people level up as a designer?

This is a hard question because you can level up in many different ways, but I’ll tell you what has worked for me.

Most of my career growth has happened as an effect of changing jobs. I know changing jobs is emotionally tolling, so I understand why many people prefer to stay in one lane and drive on it as much as possible.

But for me changing jobs has been an opportunity to go and take on new challenges and reconfigure my skills as I grow professionally.

When you do it right, you cannot only take on new and more challenging responsibilities. You also upgrade your financial trajectory because there’s no faster way to grow your salary than taking on new opportunities.

Again, I know this is not for everyone, but I believe there’s an effective way to level-up as a designer by staying 1 to 2 years at a company, learning as much as you can, having as much impact as you can, and then going to a new culture to learn and teach new ideas.

The only problem with this approach is that it obviously has a limit, and at a certain point is wiser to stay put and modulate your growth trajectory so your career doesn’t become your life.

But the best way to up-level as a designer is to get out of your comfort zone and try new things.

6 - What kind of impact should new designers expect to make?

This is an interesting question. I think “impact” is a complex word because even the smallest acts can have a huge impact on something or someone.

I honestly think new designers should see the kickstart of their careers as an opportunity to define what kind of value they are trying to add and intuitively figure out what direction allows them to grow and have the biggest impact.

So I would say that new designers should only have one priority, and that’s learning as much as they can and being as helpful as they can.

If you operate on that policy, you will have multiple opportunities to have an impact and add value to the products and initiatives you’re working on.

Design Job Market in 2023:

“The design job market is volatile”

2023 in a nutshell:

- Companies focused on surviving.
- Centralised to Decentralised teams.
- It’s the year for agencies to clean up.
- Less budget, fewer people, more work.
- Leaders are being hired with no OKRs…
- Lots of companies building hubs in India.
- Lots of soul-searching for design leaders.
- The death of IA continues in a lot of roles.
- Inflated titles being handed out like candy.
- Content Design has been affected by cuts.
- Salaries being reduced in the perm market.
- Designers been asked to do more with less.
- Majority of leaders I speak to are not happy.
- Taking roles 1 or 2 levels below true skill set.
- In-house design leadership seen as a luxury.
- Lots of player-coach roles, less people focus.
- Lots of hands-off design people managers cut.
- In June there was a pick up of Director/VP roles.
- We still cannot agree if we need portfolios or not.
- C-Suite changes, design not positioned correctly.

In a lot of discussions with designers and leaders, a lot of them want to “remove” Design from their title because they feel it’s a hindrance when looking for a job or with clients to gain buy-in.

7 Design Recruiters To Connect With In 2023:

Note: For Head of Design + above.

We all need to spread the love.

• Me. Sorry, had to get that in there.

• Wert&Co - Famous Design Exec Search firm based in the US.

• ByG - Legendary Design Recruiter Garrett Fowler.

• Michelle Stuhl - Experienced Creative Exec Search.

• Rob Magowan - Focused Design Leadership Recruiter.

• Lena Kul - Leading Design Hiring at Miro. Awesome Recruiter. 

• Jared Tredly - All over the US hiring scene.

If someone forwarded this email to you, you need to subscribe 😉 

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Until next time!

Tom

Good Morning! ☀️

This week we have all things business literacy and the importance for designers to embrace business to enhance their careers.

Read time: 6 minutes ☕️

In this mail:

1. Business + Design: Q&A with Alen Faljic

2. The state of IA in 2023: Sparked from a LinkedIn post

3. My #1 design team in Europe: Wise

Unlocking Career Potential: The Importance of Business Knowledge For Designers

In my discussions with non-design leaders, the main topic is often how they want to work with designers, but feel designers struggle to quantify their value as they don’t understand how their work links in with business, and ultimately bottom line.

I couldn’t think of anyone better than Alen Faljic to discuss this important topic. He’s the founder and CEO of d.MBA, an online business program for design leaders. He is an ex-IDEO business designer, one of the most prominent business designers internationally, and a guest lecturer at RCA Royal College of Art in London.

Alen Faljic

1 - Hello Alen! 👋 Please could you share more about your journey in design so far?

I had a rather non-traditional path into the design world. I studied business in a business school because I wanted to create cool products and ventures. My thought process was that a business school is the best place for that.

While I was there, I realized a business school teaches you how to create a good business model but not how to create great products and services. So, I had the feeling I needed to learn design too.

I got an internship at IDEO as a business designer. And that’s where I started to learn design. And while I was at IDEO, my colleagues, who were mostly designers, started to approach me with business questions. “Hey, Alen, who are the biggest competitors of this company? What is their business model?

I slowly started to realize how big of a problem the lack of business literacy is within the design community. I saw how it held us back on client projects. We would create these awesome user scenarios and opportunity areas but we wouldn’t explain the size of the opportunity or the business model behind it.

So, I just felt like something needed to be done about this. And that’s how the d.MBA was born.

2 - Designers want a seat at the table, but why should non-designers listen?

Design-driven companies like Apple, Tesla, Airbnb, and Google have shown that design can help drive business results. Research even shows that design-driven companies outperform S&P by more than 200%. From what I can see, most good companies have already realized that design matters and that it leads to concrete business results.

I think the real question is why would a designer need a seat at the table. Isn’t it enough if they do their design behind their desk?

Well, design is not just making things look shiny. It’s an approach to solving problems. As someone who has finished business school, I can tell you that this approach is completely different from the approach of non-designers.

For example, designers are much more comfortable with ideas that seem unrealistic at first. Those ideas that non-designers would immediately label as “would never work”. Designers see that these ideas aren’t perfect either but they are comfortable with ambiguity because they understand that to create something new, novel, and differentiated, we need to start at the edges. And thinking through the “crazy” ideas is one way to do it.

And then there is also the designer’s superpower: prototyping. This is a really special skill that can take boardroom discussion to the next level. Imagine having someone in the room that can quickly sketch the idea so you can chat more concretely. “What if we entered X market next” can go from a hypothetical exercise to a concrete exercise with a quick mockup of our storefront in another country.

I’ve seen examples where that one mock-up was enough for business managers to talk completely differently about the idea. Why? Because it brings out minor but important details. For example, should we open a mono-brand store? Be present in stores of others? Does our branding need to change for it to work in X country?

3 - If business and designers are such a match made in heaven, why do we keep hearing how designers struggle in companies?

Great question! Yes, I do believe business and design are indeed a match made in heaven. I actually like to say that “Business - Design = Utility”, “Design - Business = Art”, and “Design + Business = Magic”.

Unfortunately, there is a whole generation of designers who was let down by its education. The problem is that most design schools have very little or no business education. So, designers join companies with great knowledge of how to design services and products, but they don’t have the framework and language to see or explain how their work fits into a bigger picture.

When you work as a designer in a company, you are expected to drive business results. But the interpretation of designers is that if I do good design, this will naturally lead to good business. That’s the unspoken expectation that designers acquire in design schools. But we know this is not true. Beautiful design is not necessarily good design for users. Nor business.

I think it mostly boils down to the lack of business literacy.

4 - So, what’s the solution?

I think both sides have some work to do. Let’s start with designers first.

As I already pointed out, the design community needs to realize it has a problem that it needs to fix. The lack of business literacy is really hurting us. We are in the “design revolution” era, where companies invest heavily in design and naturally, designers will get more and more responsibility. But if we don’t do a good job of explaining what we do and tying it into a broader business context of our organization, we’ll end up as pixel-pushers instead of boundary-pushers.

And the path there is much easier than most think. We don’t need to become great in maths or spreadsheets. We just need to practice the very thing that makes us designers – empathy. We need to practice it towards the business side as well.

Just get curious about things like: how my company makes money, what is the best-selling product and why, what is our business strategy, who are we competing against, and how we measure success. These simple questions can be answered easily if you start picking the brains of your business colleagues.

On the other hand, the business community needs to give us time and space to develop. Design is a relatively new discipline. We need to learn how to be CDOs. How to lead teams. How design needs to operate in different company sizes. How it needs to operate in different industries. The Business community had hundreds of years to come up with best practices, language, and culture. It’s going to take some time for designers to get there. It requires some experimentation (luckily, we are good at that) and grit (we got that too) to get there.

To follow Alen’s work I’d advise checking out his epic newsletter, where they take business news and explain their relevancy for the design community. And the second is the d.MBA program. If you are interested, you can sign up for the waiting list here.

What Makes A Good Design Team?

I was thinking this week, about what makes a great design team and who are my favourites outside of the obvious ones such as Airbnb, Apple etc.

One team I love is Wise, based in London.

Why?

• They have a strong design leader.

• They have sponsorship at the right level and retain that sponsorship.

• So, they have an influence on the business and product strategy.

• They hire slowly, with intention, meaning high retention.

• Established design disciplines, with strong leadership in each.

• They focus on candidate attraction by showing the work.

• They get prospective candidates excited.

• Unlike most, they have great visual talent.

• They just shipped an epic re-brand.

The biggest reason they stand out for me is they have sponsorship at the top level of the company, and retain that, which is evident by having budgets to hire world-class talent, partner with best-in-class agencies and produce epic work.

Who’s your favourite design team?

Special mentions for:

• Typeform

• Volvo

• Klarna

They are producing high-quality design craft.

Also, special mention for those leaders who are leading design in companies who are going through modernisation and fighting the good fight.

The State of IA in 2023

When I joined the design recruiting world in 2015, the most common brief was “Information Architect”. Moving forward to 2023, I rarely see IA even mentioned on JDs now.

What has happened to IA? It seems like Content Design, SEO and some UX people are picking this up, but focused IA practitioners are sparse.

This topic caused a great conversation on LinkedIn yesterday, with the majority also seeing a lack of IA roles and buy-in to do proper IA in organisations.

It’s definitely a topic I want to explore in more depth.

What do you think? Is IA in the wilderness?

That’s all for now.

How was this week’s newsletter?

Unsubscribe if this newsletter doesn’t hit your needs, inboxes are busy enough.

Until next week! 👋 

Tom

GM Verified crew 👋 

Happy Friday!

Here’s what I am serving up today:

• The Human Cost of Bad Design - with Thomas Wilson

Reading time: 10 minutes. Grab a coffee!

Thomas goes into great detail on the problem of “product-first” mindsets and the human cost of bad design.

Let’s go! 🚀 

Thomas Wilson

The Human Cost of Bad Design

Product First is broken. Sustainable value comes from the pursuit of a strong Customer and Employee First culture.

Current State

We need not look any further than the daily headlines for the evidence of poor design driven by technical hegemony, greed and apathetic irresponsibility to understand what that begets us as a species. A new level of anti-human, disrespect and harm is abound and we are not only engaging, but as researchers, designers and leaders, we’re actively involved in its creation and prolonged stranglehold of the victims of its existence. US.

From Teslas blowing up and killing people on the road and their special ops legal team who threaten the victims to the rockets of SpaceX blowing up on launch. To the shit-show that is Twitter and what the Twitter Files uncovered about our own covert government ops using backdoors to shadow ban voices of descent.

From the massive hiring of tons of ESG and DEI related positions to their total elimination within ~5 years. How about the recent debacles of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines and their garbage tech and legacy systems that have upended lives and caused undo stress. All while leadership was taking bonuses? They didn’t upgrade systems or planes and treated customers poorly whilst being totally above reproach. Or perhaps, the $893mil UI mistake of CitiGroup almost 2 years ago.

What about Amazon pulling back on Alexa after losing 22bil in one year alone on it? Oddly, the same year they eliminated 10,000 jobs. The Metaverse is an epic fail and cost more than ~36bil and several rounds subsequent of layoffs of more than ~22k jobs as of a few months ago, who knows what the actual headcount is now. All retail stores are learning that customers loathe the 'self-serve' check-out and it doesn't work. In fact everyone including Walmart - the world’s largest retailer is reporting record shrink and theft. And they know it’s largely because of self-check-out. Two entire generations of cell users opting for dumb phones in place of high-priced gadgets with poor experiences. Gen-Z with their flip phones and Mature Market with Jitterbug and the like. Healthcare is learning that patients and members aren't using apps for healthcare and banks and investment groups are learning humans don't like using apps for fintech, unless it's Gen-Z and Millennials trading pennies and then, even that fails (Gamestop short-scandal, Robinhood and more.)

The data at large or complex orgs with robust eco systems, usually shows something like 10-15% of your users are super users. Meaning, they want to play with your apps and technology, self-serve and hack their way through your systems of clunk. Of course those numbers rise when talking about specific products.

How about the toxic chemical train derailment that has ruined and may have even worse lasting health effects on 5,000 residents of a small town in Ohio? More recently, the Titan Submersible, Ocean Gate disaster took 5 lives, including the greedy moron who ignored tons of warnings about the shoddy design of the sub? Historically speaking, know what happened with Chornobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Plant, Apollo 13, Challenger Mission, Deep Water Horizon et all. I could rattle off 20 more. All had poor design flaws that had significant warnings in most cases. BAD DESIGN.

In some of those cases voices were ignored, stifled, fired and disregarded in favour of profit and ‘progress’, ‘immoveable’ deadlines or launch dates siting concerns of development or hold costs, downtime and most were just facilitated by good ol’ fashioned greed.

Know what that says to me, reader? The wrong people are leading this work. It also says that when leaders have no idea what problem to solve or how to read markets, they take risks that aren’t smart, don’t pay off, often dangerous, and unethical and then they make their employees pay for it, by bloodletting their ‘human capital’ (a term I loathe) to balance their broken balance sheets.

The Root Cause of Return-To-Work

The return to work is rooted in the notion that many people were hired in leadership positions for the wrong reason over the course of ~5+ years and they could not perform or execute and that caused a drop in productivity. It also forced a LOT of seniors, managers, pros and director levels out of the workplace and into permanent unemployment, or solopreneurship or leaving their respective industries for good. McKinsey did an excellent article on it. Lots of articles have been written on the subject. These same companies were not and still are not prepared to service Work-From-Home from a people, process and technology standpoint and fell flat there as well.

Given all of those things in a perfect storm of CV19 for 3 years, what you are witnessing is the dramatic plunge of Commercial Real Estate values. All of those companies owned or leased large buildings and spaces that are now empty. Because that is a major issue within the economy -everyone is pushing you back into the office. Those are the real reasons and there are tons of nuances and specifics around each of those massive issues. When CV19 started and it decimated small business owners initially and put restaurants, coffee shops, bars and barbers and tattoo parlours out of business in urban areas, it was a real estate-feeding frenzy to buy up all that property and the rich got richer. But the minute CV19 went on for 2 then 3+ years, and those large real estate investment firms realized people weren’t coming back to the offices they held the notes on, now it was time for the war on the consumer/employee to get those butts back in seats and get the rent machine back up and running.

The Paradox of Product First vs Human-Centered Design

This brings us to what is happening in most large organisations internally right now. With the decimation of Design leadership and design hierarchy within the organization, there is a toxic wave of control, rooted in fear and disrespect of researchers, designers and customers. This can be seen in; the push for generalized skills and org flatness. And the push for Product First cultures. Why? Because somebody at your org read ‘Continuous Discovery’ and the ‘Lean Startup’ and thinks PMs and programmers should be doing qualitative research, everything should be done in a sprint, everything should ship as an MVP initially, and the only type of designer you need is part of a three-legged stool. What kind of designer is that you ask? An IC production worker who manages assets, screens inventories, d-systems and makes Figma prototypes. Reducing design to UI incrementalism and iteration while increasing complexity with unnecessary feature bloat. Overdoing apps and sites for the sake of doing ‘something.’

The design leaders who are still inside of these orgs are living in chaos and abject fear and embracing some serious Stockholm Syndrome. They’re order-takers and serve the dullest, reactionary minds in business history.

Product managers are often rewarded based on the size of their teams and their position in the hierarchy, rather than the efficiency and effectiveness of their output. All while using metrics like NPS that have been disavowed by its own creator. Many companies have circled the drain and filed bankruptcy from following NPS as a lagging indicator of faux customer love. Businesses do this to pretend like they're having value or impact, rejecting any form of legitimate metrics. And denying craft, practice or specialization in favour of generalists who will simply make trash on command in a CX/UX Theater near you. NPS in conjunction with CSAT and CES can provide a more holistic picture of your CX.

Full disclosure: I don’t refer to people who write code for software as ‘engineers.’ That’s kind of disrespectful to Mechanical, Electrical, Structural and Chemical Engineers. Someone who types well and learns different languages like eh, Spanish or C++, is a developer or programmer.

PMs and developers are often incentivized to pile on new features, even when they’re not necessary. Players wanna play, and programmers wanna program. Most times, in circles. I get it. This leads to code bloat and overly complex software that’s virtually impossible to maintain and even harder to use. Product managers are often rewarded for adding new features, rather than improving stability and usability. This can lead to software that is feature-rich but unstable and difficult to use. If it’s fresh UI on bad data stacks, even worse. We’re building things for no reason and creating tech that solves no real human problems. In fact, it’s creating them.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that many developers are emotionally attached to their code build and therefore reluctant to admit when their solutions are unnecessary or overly complex. I can assure you I’ve never met a programmer, CIO or CTO in 27 years who understood the notion of Pragnanz or Gestalt. They embrace the sunk cost fallacy and Dunning-Krueger Effect ad nauseam. This leads to inefficiency in product environments. So, when features and complexity rise, the experience deteriorates. It’s a pretty complex concept. Pun intended. Motion doesn't equate to action and just because you want to keep your developers busy building stuff doesn't mean you should. We all should be learning more than we launch. That’s called discovery and it’s done by trained UXRs and Service Designers who are passionate about Customer Experience.

Creating an environment that is conducive to innovation and efficiency isn’t that hard. Productivity and innovation cannot exist in mass entropy. You can't ensure customers get great experiences with poorly conceived products and services, through top-down, reactive strategy.

It all begins with consensus, focus, support, the love of problem identification/definition, solving and reduction of pain and waste. Product teams claim to profess to be innovative and agile, yet facilitate rigid behaviours and embody identities more akin to ideologues and zealots than free-thinking innovators. That same destructive rigidity filters into the products, services and poor delivery of value to customers. That culture and thinking creates an environment that lacks psychological safety and intellectual honesty and it also encourages people to cope, not thrive within organizations.

My feeling is the key to all of these changes are hiring more experienced UX Researchers, Service Designers and Strategists, Design Ops and structured design leadership hierarchy. And the critical understanding of the division of labor through defined roles and specialization. The maturity to embrace ‘Bottom Up’ structures as opposed to Top-Down. We need these processes and practitioners and we need to commit organizationally, to regular short run qualitative and continuous discovery of our customer’s specific use cases, experiencing our products and services. Because the only way to imagine a more preferred future state is to really define what the current state looks like for every customer, across every journey through every single touchpoint within our products, services and eco-systems. Especially the outliers and edge cases.

Revaluate who you are and what you stand for as a company. Part of design is understanding your North Star values and business strategy with foresight and purpose. We need to really make it clear what our strategy as; Plans, Position, Perspective and Patterns of Action are as organizations.

Who Comes First with Regard to Value Creation:

Customers- We need to commit to continuous generative discovery and put them top of mind by speaking to them and co-designing with them regularly.

Employees - We need to show that and indicate we hold a safe space to learn and fail and innovate. Encourage and support psychological safety and intellectual honesty. High-performing teams understand and instil both as well as define the work that is best suited to our backgrounds and mental models. Know the difference between innovators and adaptors. Please embrace neurodiversity. It’s estimated that ~25+% of your workforce is neurodiverse.

Shareholders- If you treat your employees and customers with respect, shareholders will garner a tidy profit. There are so many examples of doing the right thing and how design led businesses are more profitable.

Product First mentalities work if all you are is a singular product like Slack, Uber, Spotify, etc. That also works if you’re in startup mode. Then everything you do is solely about requirements gathering and feature farm incrementalism and product compulsion. Most Fortune 5 to 500s and SMBs are so much more than a single product.

We’re in a service economy. Everything is a service. Even software. Hence the acronym SaaS. Software as a service. Not the other way around. There is no acronym for everything in the business as a piece of software. That’s why Product First is a bad idea in MOST cases.

Product First is an epic fail. The fail rates do not lie. It’s more like a toxic religion of technicals comprised of short-sighted fools, tech tyrants and product oligarchs seeking control and wanting to be something they’re not than it’s a smart culture or process that facilitates successful outcomes. Every business cannot function like a startup or a singular-minded product. In reality, a very tiny percentage can or should. Every product launch or initial alpha/beta cannot be an MVP. In fact, there are many cases where that will be absolutely disastrous. Very little can be done in a one-week sprint and in an enterprise-level environment, good luck getting traction or consensus on more than a button placement in five days. There are a hundred reasons why you would not allow PMs or developers to speak to customers directly in large service organizations. Allowing them to listen in on interviews or watch videos and read transcripts after the fact, is perfectly fine. But PMs and developers doing discovery interviews is a terrible idea. Having them be involved in product-specific usability interviews, evaluative testing and experiments, just fine.

UX Research, CX and Service Design Works and is Hugely Profitable

When you're a large enterprise with many products and services, of many LOBs and BUs and various touch points, lots of journeys for many types of customers, in a massive eco-system, you must be Customer First. You must commit to regular discovery and Customer First driven innovation must get its own budget or you will eventually go out of business. You're just living on borrowed time and waiting to be bumped by a challenger brand that is willing to do that important work, rooted in respect and love of customer needs.

Research by IBM and NASA revealed that every $1 invested in UX could result in a return up to $250. McKinsey studied 2 million pieces of financial data and 100,000 design actions over five years. Conclusion: Design-led companies had 32% more revenue and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared with other companies.

Uber disrupted the Taxi Service industry. AirBnB disrupted the hotel/hospitality industry. CostPlus Drugs just disrupted the PBM and pharma distribution/payer industry. If you want to know how they and hundreds of other businesses did this in just the last 10-15 years, I can assure you that a study of their strategy and approach was 100% Service Design and Value Chain strategy. The product was a manifestation of that smart rethinking of an old idea, and a broken or costly service model, with pain and friction to the customer.

Summary and Solution:

Embrace CX, EX, UX and Service Design now. Everything is a Design problem. The majority of what you see in any business is a Service Design problem. The only thing that isn’t a design problem in business is Design itself. That is usually a cultural problem. Product First is a huge strategy, organizational, service and internal cultural problem.

If you're unwilling to be Customer First, design-led and disrupt your own business or industry, someone else will do it for you. And tons of research indicates a recession is the absolute BEST time to innovate new areas of service.

If you don’t love your customers and employees enough to innovate, you don’t deserve either, or to stay in business.

At this very moment, we’re being pushed into the singularity and unbridled greed, explosion of AI/ML tech growth, the rise of broken methodologies, disrespect of specialization and culture by techno-tyrants seeking power and hegemony to the point of serious consequence and harm. We are losing the numinosity and wonder of what it means to be uniquely human.

The least humane and least creative people in your company are most likely in control of human outcomes. God forbid you’re in an environment like any of the previously mentioned or healthcare, wherein poor products and services can inflict serious harm and even death.

When we put people first, the profit will come. It’s likely to flow freely when customers see that your organization’s vision and values are righteous and you’re concerned with serving their needs.

Empathy is rooted in respect and love. Greed and poor design is rooted in scarcity, fear and apathy. Poor design isn't just inconvenient, it’s creating a world none of us wants to be in, many can’t thrive in, and unnecessarily facilitates stress then death.

Let’s create a world that’s inclusive, human-centred and driven by love. The love of simplicity and the people we serve. Let’s do that by putting humans (Customers and Employees) FIRST.

A quick note from me:

• I made a quick typo in yesterday’s newsletter, apologies. We’ve all done it! Thanks for your kindness in understanding.

• On Sunday we will have Alen Faljic talking about all things business literacy and the importance of understanding business for designers in their careers.

Until then! 👋 

Tom

GM Verified!

In this mail:

1. The Role of a Founding Designer: with Ivy Mukherjee

2. Insight into what’s happening in design leadership

Ready? Get a coffee, Matcha, Green Tea and enjoy. ☕️

“Tom, my co-founders and I are struggling to hire a designer for our early-stage start-up”

This is one of the most common messages I receive on a weekly basis. Founders often don’t know where to look, what they need, or the nuances of design, which is understandable.

I believe in 2023, more designers are looking for meaningful challenges, there is no job security anymore as we’ve seen with layoffs, so working for a start-up is enticing.

I sat down with Ivy Mukherjee, a world-class designer focused on growth, 0-1 and has worked with some of the greatest design teams as well as now in the start-up world on her thoughts about the role of a founding designer, how to hire the best designers for your roles and the realities of being a solo designer.

Ready? Let’s go. Get a coffee, breathe and enjoy. ☕️

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role

Ivy Mukherjee

1 - What are the challenges of being a founding designer?

Startups are designed to be hard and literally no day will feel the same. The highs are very high and lows can even break you at times. With that said, they are also very rewarding and that’s one of the primary reasons people start or join a startup.

There can be multiple different challenges in a startup and this is my ongoing list, which goes beyond the hard skills of a designer:

• Keep your mental and physical health in check: first things first - in order to do good work, collaborate well, explore fast and iterate enough you need to make sure your body is in sync with yourself. Get enough sleep, meditate, run, strength train or anything that works. But make sure you are taking care of yourself. Startups can be intimidating, so be selfish and take time out for yourself in order to make sure your tomorrow looks better. Do this for yourself.

• Too many challenges to be solved at the same time: There is always something on fire and needs your attention, but ruthless prioritization is the name of the game. Remember, every decision will have its consequences. Are you comfortable with X over Y? If so, how comfortable are you? What are the business stakes? What happens if you can’t prioritize Y for the next few weeks? People will look up to you and your hypothesis, insights as well. So, being comfortable with which project to take over others is very important.

• Forget your picture perfect double diamond process: I can’t stress on this enough. I might get into trouble here with fellow designers here, but let me say - there is no picture perfect process to designing good products and no one framework works for all or in every company or in every situation. Be adaptable, be bold in your approach and be more than okay to change your process with the need of the hour. But that also doesn’t mean you have to bend over backwards to fulfil every task from everyone.

• You will do a lot more than what your job entails/lines are blurred in between different roles: There will be a lot of problems which are not well defined or nobody is there to define it for you. A big part of you growing as a founding designer is to define problems, why the problem is a problem and what are the different ways of solving it without having a full fledged team. And trust me it can be a lot of fun. An opportunity is as big or as small as you want it to be. Ask yourself if you are okay with it.

• With great power comes great responsibility: Everyone wants more power and control, but very few can deal with the responsibility that comes with it. Ask yourself if you are okay with being questioned on your decisions, if you are okay with being uncomfortable for days and being okay with personal hockey stick growth. Imagine yourself in those situations and see how okay you are with it.

• You don’t have the luxury of time: You don’t have all the days and weeks to work on optimising. There will be, but it might not be now. My manager keeps saying this fascinating sentence: “ always think of how much we can do in a week’s time and let’s push through that” and it has stuck with me. I found it really valuable in how to think of time, prioritizations and what can be done.

• Thinking slow, fast and beyond: Now this is a tough nut to crack and you will only get better with time and experience. Solving for MVP, yet solving for the future so the system doesn’t break. Always imagine what your north star vision is and work backwards with different shipping cycles. You will also realize how far you and the product have come.

• Imposter syndrome: I work with a bunch of magnificent colleagues who are incredible at what they do and beyond so. You are bound to feel like an imposter. But growth happens when you surround yourself with people who are extremely talented and passionate about what they do.

2 - What is the driving factor for you to join early-stage startups?

Let me start by saying, don’t join a startup for a flashy designation like “founding designer” or “head of design”. There is a good chance of you being disappointed if that’s the sole driving factor.

I wanted to solve for -

• Evergreen problem space(s): Startups working on problems which are heavily rooted into our day to day life and ecosystem. Also, they are generally hard to uproot with some external changes.

• Problems which I am inherently passionate about: This boils down to being self aware - which kind of problems excites you the most, where you can see yourself thriving, where you are even 1% better than other folks, where your 1st principle thinking kicks in. You ideally don’t want to challenge yourself in every aspect while joining a start-up.

• Nimble team with incredible people: 10yrs in the industry and I have realized people can make or break your experience in a company. So, I personally take bets on people. You will be working with them 8hrs a day, 5 days a week in the years to come. You better enjoy working with them and vice versa. I also wanted to move fast and iterate at a much faster pace, hence the decision to move to early-stage.

• My growth as a designer and beyond that: I recently turned 30 and the idea of starting something of my own is becoming more real to me. I wanted to somewhat simulate what it is like to be in a start-up and grow with the product(s), people and company. I wanted to grow as a designer and beyond that - this is more of a self discovery journey too.

3 - How can companies set up founding designers to succeed?

• Don’t expect designers to come in and tell you the importance of design on a daily basis: Designers can relate hard with this one! One of my foremost criteria to join any company was to make sure the leadership values design and understand the importance of it and I am so delighted to see it in my current company (touchwood). You don’t hire engineers or sales folks and keep on asking them what is the value of a good engineering system or good sales pipeline right? Please stop asking designers on a daily basis, how this will move the needle. Good design brings trust and trust brings and retains customers. If you have doubts about it, please do the research yourself.

  Also designers, please find out leadership/companies who value design. You will be tired of having an upward battle every day.

• Culture/values of the company: This is a 2-way street - what do you value and believe in. And see if the culture is mostly matching to yours. Also, how the company historically has stood up with their values and culture. Ask questions with examples.

• Define which kind of designer you are looking for: Different companies in different spaces will have various needs. Ideally, you want a unicorn, but they aren’t real, right? 😄 So, defining which kind of designer you will need at least for the next 1-2 years will be very helpful for you and also for the prospective candidates.

• What does success look like: You need to understand what the expectations are from you. What does mutual success look like in the 1st month, first 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and beyond this will be an evolving process? So, keep having these conversations on a daily basis.

• Decision documentation: Written documentation culture is a no-brainer. As a company, you are taking hundreds and thousands of decisions on a daily/weekly basis. So, making sure it's documented somewhere is very important to gather all the historical context. Even for designers this is true once you join any company - make sure you document your decisions with reasoning and also communicate them in your team(s).

4 - What should the first 100 days look like for a founding designer?

• getting to know the product inside out: The best way to start working on a product is to use it daily and also document the good things and not-so-great things. This can be a great primer for your chats with different people and questions to them.

• build relationships with your inner team and outer team: Do a lot of calls with your immediate team and get to know the outer team who also influences decisions and what should be built. This has compounding effects in the long run - truly understand their problems and see if and when you can solve some of them.

• reading through decisions: Read through the history of the company, their customers, what they have been up to and why. Do your own mind-mapping exercises to make sense of how things are and ask a bunch of questions. Remember, you are very new, so you have the card to ask any and every question.

• read about the business model: Understand what they are trying to solve, how they make money and what the future looks like. As you grow in your career this becomes more and more important. Challenge yourself to understand the business model and if you can’t understand certain parts - ask questions.

• understand what the company and leadership values are: A big part of you being a good designer is to understand what the leadership values are and how you can deliver them. This is a combination of 1:1s, all hands, self-awareness and how they react to different situations. This is not a one-time problem-solving - it's a lifelong process.

• Attend sales/customer calls: Always be listening and taking notes. Be as close to the customers as you can be. Make the GTM team your best friend. You want to show your work to customers, get feedback, make iterations and keep listening to how they are using your product, what they are working towards and how you can positively surprise them. This will solidify your decisions and help you make better and more relevant products.

• building a working design system: You want to make your life and the fabulous engineering teams’ work as easy as possible. Please make sure to build a robust design system which works for 70% -80% of the product lines but also remember to not waste your time building deliberate and rigid design systems as the system is supposed to evolve and grow.

5 - Where can designers find founding design roles?

• Follow prominent Venture Capital fund’s portfolio companies’ talent portals and get accustomed to their recruiters. I have met some fantastic recruiters over the years and got connected to great founders as well.

• Specific recruitment agencies working exclusively for founding designers or early-stage roles

• Twitter, Otta.com, read.cv can be really helpful too

6 - What kind of designer do you need to be to join as a founding designer?

TL;DR - my personal suggestion will be to work for at least a few years in order to be a “good” founding designer at a fast-growing early-stage company, or else it can be very overwhelming at times.

• Self-aware to take the hit: highs can be really high and lows can be really low. So be mentally prepared for it.

• Be a Ferrari, but don’t forget to refuel: You don’t need to speed up to full throttle every day, but knowing when to be a Ferrari and when to refuel yourself is going to be crucial. You have to set clear expectations and be true to yourself.

• Be ridiculously good with your craft: Your strategy and research will be meaningless if you are not good at your craft. At the end of the day, you will be judged based on the output you create. Be confident about your craft. No sugar coating here. You are a designer after all and craft is a big part of it.

• Be entrepreneurial: Best founding designers will know when and how much to cut corners. What can be achieved in a minimal team or time set-up. Or even when to go all out as well when that is going to be the most pivotal point of the company.

• Have a good grasp of how products and people work: Understanding products, markets and people in both macro and micro levels will be super beneficial. For example - which products in which markets might work and how people in those markets behave as well.

Insights into the Design Leadership Job Market

I’ve said before companies are in survival mode. They care about the next 3 months, not how design can infuse business strategies for years to come. They know they need design, but some are struggling to get the best talent due to budgets etc.

A quick snapshot of what I am seeing, mainly in large orgs:

- New CEO comes in.
- Design gets diluted at the top.
- Move from a centralised function to decentralised.
- Lose the design leader or they leave.
- Design sits in product teams.
- Designers want to leave, poor retention etc.

C-Suite changes are affecting design more than ever. Mainly, because they don’t see how design can infuse the business strategy 3-10 years out and need to cut costs now.

Often, a high-end consultancy will come in at CEO/Board level for strategic input and 3 months later they have their designers in the team. This is happening a lot.

I predict for the next 12-18 months consultancies will be used more, and cut costs until in-house leadership has a resurgence again.

That’s a wrap, thank you for reading.

Quick note:

• If you’re looking for a new design role please consider signing up for our invite-only talent network. This is where we talk to designers about live roles, as well as more community features coming soon - https://itsverified.typeform.com/apply

• If you’re looking to make hires, want insights into the market, figure out what the best designers and leaders are looking for, we’ve come out of the “beta” phase now, and are ready to go all in, so please do get in touch.

You can also reply to this email if you have any questions, thoughts, concerns, or challenges with finding a new role or figuring out your next career move. Me and the team are here to help.

Over the next 7 days I will be bringing 2 interviews:

• The Human Cost of Broken Design with Thomas Wilson

• Unlocking Career Potential: The Importance of Business Knowledge for Designers with Alen Faljic.

Until then! ❤️

Tom

GM Verified!

Here's what I am serving up today:

1. How designers can stand out - an interview with Lena Kul.

2. LinkedIn comment of the week - Centralised/Decentralised teams

3. Quote - From Aaron Walter

Recruitment has never been more important. If we’re going to ensure design gets integrated effectively, we need to ensure we’re hiring the right people at the right time.

Today I am speaking with Lena Kul who is an experienced design recruiting leader, based in Berlin. She’s scaled two major design teams in the EU markets at N26 and currently Miro.

Lena has worked through 2 hyper growths and got to hire for every creative role on the market from mid-level to executive levels. She’s very active in helping the design community prepare for the interviews through her continuous posts and 1:1 coaching sessions.

How Designers can stand out in the hiring process

Lena Kul

1. How do you review IC Product Designers’ applications? What makes you think “Yes, I need to speak to this person”

First I check a CV, then I check my portfolio. Unless you are a software engineer and applying for a senior product design role, I will always check both.

What truly excites me about someone's docs they sent are:

• They are clean and easy to read. If either seems to be hard to build for a designer, I would question their design skills on the spot.

• I like when designers add personality to their application documents. Maybe there is a certain colour pallet for your or anything else on your CV that speaks more about you and your personal brand. In my portfolio, when I see a creative design (even if irrelevant to a role you apply for) I want to know who stands behind those great designs.

• Make sure I can access it.

2. How should a Designer prepare for a recruiter screening call?

Tom: This is a very misunderstood step. Lots don’t think to take it seriously and expect to walk past the round. Internal partners have a lot of choices in this market and carry weight in the process, so designers need to take it seriously. What do you think?

I could not agree more. I do not know how many times I have read the feedback after rejecting candidates that they "just spoke to a recruiter and got rejected for nothing". Quite often when I go into the call, the candidates simply are not prepared to share their experiences, answer with just a few words, and ask when they could speak to someone from the team. Once it got so bad, that I even made a post on this, knowing that many candidates check my LinkedIn profile before our call.

The best way that anyone can prep before meeting with a recruiter is to think about major projects and achievements, what you expect from the next step, and why you are looking around. As simple as that. Many recruiters suggest using the STAR method to answer questions. As long as I think it is a good one, I would also say: just share what you think would be important for you to find out if you were to hire someone and be yourself!

3. What are the top questions do you think designers should be asking?

Tom: Quality questions make people take you seriously, right?

I like when candidates ask questions that are important to them, rather than asking questions just to seem interested.

Often, I get meaningful questions about the design team and its place in the organisation. I’m being asked about the environment and why I’ve stayed with the company for a while.

I love when designers are curious about ways of working and collaborating with other XFN disciplines, this is a green flag because they seek similar work environments to what we have.

Of course, it’s always good when someone asks questions and explains why it’s important to them rather than just shooting in the air.

4. How can designers approach negotiating salary?

Tom: This question is even more important for candidates not going through an external recruiter, as they need to handle this conversation themselves.

Stop going into the interviews and saying "I do not know the salary bands for your company".

Designers are capable of coming up with products and features that change the world, yet some fail to research salary bands.

There is not much information online but remember, your community is the best info pool you can find.

Ask friends for the bands if they work for similar businesses in similar locations, reach out to communities, and ask for the right recruiters to talk to. There are plenty of people who treat this information as a publicly available one.

If we want to have fair salaries and close the painful yet present topics like the gender pay gap, we all should start asking and sharing.

But as important as it is to know what you want, it is also important to know what the company offers. I always find that the candidates move themselves into a stronger negotiation position when they say that they have a range in mind, but would like to hear me first.

5. Bonus question for people hiring designers. How should companies structure their interview process to ensure they can hire top designers ensuring quality?

A good process is a short and clear one.

Sometimes it seems you can not skip that particular interviewer, but once they are out sick or on PTO you see that the show must and can go on. So IMO good recruitment processes should fit into 2 weeks time frame or 3 restaurant sittings of 2 hours each.

At Miro, we try to limit the process to 35 days timeframe (Time To Hire). It's proven that the faster you are, the more chances for success you have.

Of course, in reality, things are not so easy. We all have lives going on, emergencies, holidays and etc.

But for as long as every call brings a new perspective to the company why this candidate is a yes/no based on competencies assigned to the calls and to a candidate why this company is yes/ no based on people they meet and questions they receive/ask, we are good to go.

If we are speaking about specific examples, I believe a healthy process can access hard and soft skills as well as candidates' potential.

If a company is hiring e2e product designers (like Miro does), the competencies could be UX design, UI design, UXR, product thinking, and planning skills. We are also looking for critical thinking - can you prioritize and be strategic with your designs?

On the soft skills side, we need to make sure that a candidate has leadership skills, hence can unblock themselves or push back if needed. We want to see how collaborative a candidate is, are they resilient to change?

In terms of potential, it's not so easy to make it tangible. I would recommend candidates be ready to explain why they may have not done something that is expected of them in this specific company and how they would approach it if they were to start.

Thank you, Lena!

Here’s a link to Miro’s design roles - https://miro.com/careers/open-positions/

LinkedIn comment of the week:

It has to be from Doug Powell, former VP of Design at Expedia and IBM discussing why the recent rise in design teams moving from centralised to decentralised.

Incredible insight here:

Doug Powell’s LinkedIn Comment

Quote:

This quote from Aarron Walter got me thinking. It’s obvious how Design, Product and Engineering are all part of the puzzle, but it’s eye-opening a few companies don’t see this.

That’s a wrap, thank you for reading.

Quick note - If you’re looking for a new design role please consider signing up for our invite-only talent network. This is where we talk to designers about live roles, as well as more community features coming soon - https://itsverified.typeform.com/apply

You can also reply to this email if you have any questions, thoughts, concerns, or challenges with finding a new role or figuring out your next career move. I am here to help.

See you next Sunday 👋 

Tom

GM Verified! From a cloudy, confused UK.

Here's what I am serving up today:

1. Design Leader’s First 100 Days - an interview with Andy Polaine.

2. LinkedIn comment of the week - Design leaders + portfolios?

3. Design job insights - It’s improving.

Right, let’s dig in:

You’ve been promoted to a design leadership role, congratulations, now what?

I speak to those who move from Senior IC into leadership and realise the difference when adapting, and how leadership can be lonely. I talk about the first 100 days in a role because, in my experience, it’s the leading indicator that a leader will work out long-term.

I sat down with Andy Polaine a design leadership coach, educator, writer and co-author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, now a standard text for Service Design.

He can be found at polaine.com, writes a newsletter called Doctor's Note and hosts the Power of Ten podcast. He is currently in the early stages of writing a new book about the psychological experience of moving into design leadership.

The first 100 days as a Design Leader

Andy Polaine

1 - How do you see the state of design leadership today?

Design is in a curious place at the moment. After a couple of decades of pushing upwards to be more strategic and connected and having some success at higher levels of organisations, design functions have been split up again in many orgs.

Design leaders were previously able to build up a coherent practice in the organisation, combining design research, service design, strategic design, UX and visual design and more. These often worked as a kind of internal agency, constellating and re-constellating teams as projects flowed through. The advantage of this approach is an increased maturity and culture of quality that can be built up over time, plus much more sharing of ways of working and systems that maintain consistency across all touchpoints. There’s a reason our book’s tagline was “from insight to implementation.” That red thread and traceability are essential to maintain, even while teams work on different parts of a product or service (and most of them are services).

For design leaders, their job was to manage that culture, quality and growth, collaborate and make the case for design’s impact at higher levels in the org. The rapid rise of product management has added another layer of stakeholders to interact with and the product leaders have a loud voice at present. When it goes well, it can be an excellent collaboration between business needs, design and engineering. But in many orgs it has re-industrialised design, by which I mean feature factories. The white-collar management in the glass box do all the thinking and the blue-collar workers merely execute on the assembly line. Design teams split across feature or moment-in-the-journey teams are disconnected and usually a minority voice in that team, most often run by a product manager. This is a challenge for design leaders, who are trying to maintain quality and coherency across the discipline, but are having to wrangle with the silos once again.

I would argue that product is far less mature than design as a discipline—it’s simply not been around as long—but design has, as ever, done a terrible job of communicating the impact of design to the org and has suffered as a result. The Achilles Heel of design leaders is that they talk about design too much. It does feel like design leaders have to repeat the past 20 years all over again.

2 - What are the main concerns/challenges new design leaders face? How do they overcome these from your experience working with hundreds of new leaders?

The biggest one is confidence. It can be very discombobulating to unravel an identity woven from many years of experience of being someone who makes things. There’s much more to say about this, but the short version is that this identity is often forged quite young – at college or even at school where many designers leaned into their “talent for creativity or drawing” having been told they weren’t very “academic.” Fast forward 20 years and the same dynamic is often at play at work. Design leaders are frequently the only designer at their level in a much larger org.

As designers start to let go of some of their “on the tools” craft skills and take on more business, people management and leadership responsibilities they can go through what I call the Design Leadership Dip, where their confidence is rattled in both craft and leadership. Imposter syndrome can quickly set in.

Unless you are lucky enough to have had a role model or mentor, you’re faced with making things up as you go along and this can feel terrifying, since you’re always waiting for the moment you’re going to be found out. But the dirty secret is everyone else is making it up as they go along—that comes with the job of being out front leading. It takes some time to remember that you are one of, if not the, most experienced design person in the org and that’s why you’re in the leadership role.

Design leaders need two different vocabularies. One is talking design to designers, the other talking impact to the org’s stakeholders. If you’ve spent 10-20 years talking about human-centred design, design process, and design minutiae, it can be a difficult habit to break. It can come as quite a shock to realise senior leadership doesn’t really care about design at all. They have different metrics they are focused on and design leaders need to learn to link those to whatever they’re also trying to achieve for the org.

That does not mean jettisoning everything design and becoming a numbers person. You will lose the special lens you bring to conversations with senior leadership. If you do that, what’s the difference between you and any other MBA apart from your slide decks looking way better? But design leaders do need to re-think the storytelling of how they talk about design.

3 - What advice would you give non-design executives who hire design leaders on when is the right time to bring in a design leader?

Tom: I believe one of the main reasons why design leaders are leaving rapidly is due to being brought into the organisation at the wrong time and not having meaningful OKRs that link back to what the C-Suite cares about. What do you think?

As early as possible. I know it’s a common question, but it’s also odd when you think about it. We don’t often hear senior execs ask when the best time to bring in management or engineering is. This is a sign that design still hasn’t done the best job of explaining to business folks how it can best be leveraged and the impact it can make. But it’s also a sign that organisations are not doing the necessary structural work.

The reason for bringing in a design leader from the start is that it helps infuse the organisational DNA with different ways of working and collaboration between and across functions from the start. Primarily, though, organisations need to avoid racking up design and experience debt in just the same way they need to manage organisational and engineering debt. Without this, it makes them extremely vulnerable to disruption from a competitor. Tech is often easy to copy. Experience is much harder to copy.

So, yes, setting up those metrics that are directly aligned with what the organisation is trying to achieve is essential. For that to happen, the C-Suite needs to have an ambition, purpose and strategic vision that can filter down and draw up. This is surprisingly rare.

4 - How do you navigate your first 100 days in a new design leadership role?

Do your discovery. Find out what other stakeholders in other functions do, and what their needs, fears and anxieties are. Do lots of listening and then work out what needs to be done, for sure, but think more in terms of how design can help those stakeholders and the business with those problems. That way you’re operating on a pull rather than push basis.

Before hiring for a bunch of roles that you think make sense in terms of a design org chart, think instead about what the design jobs to be done are. Cluster those jobs and think about what kinds of people might be able to do them. People have many more skills than their job title and it opens up the opportunity to hire some different flavours of creative folks. If you’re just starting, you can also think about who you might hire who can cover multiple jobs to be done.

Hopefully, readers can see the relationship between those two approaches – it’s very much a human-centred design approach to the problem space.

5 - What is the difference between a good leader and a GREAT design leader? How can someone become a great design leader?

Well, first I’d question the premise of this question a little. Much as with parenting, you’re doing well if you’re doing good enough. Banal as it sounds, I’d say a great leader helps people thrive and is equal parts inspiring and encouraging so their teams aim high, but not at the expense of burning out. It’s so easy to get swept up in the management race to chase made-up numbers and growth for growth’s sake. Leaders who say things on their LinkedIn profiles like “I drive results” usually slave-drive their teams.

The thing that makes someone great as a leader is authenticity. They don’t try and be what they’re not. They don’t try and pretend they know all the answers. They usually have a real connection to people. “Authentic leadership” has become a bit of a trite term, but underlying it is a really hard question that takes a lifetime to answer: “Authentic to what?” In a leadership role, all the personal complexes and issues you have are magnified, so you need to do your inner work, understand where you come from, what you are about, your values, your complexes and issues in order to become friends with yourself, warts and all. Once you have nothing to prove, you have less reason to act in ways that are not in line with your sense of self. If you don’t know the interactions and issues that turn you into a monster, you’ll be a terrible boss. We’ve all been on the other end of one of those.

LinkedIn comment of the week:

I had a fascinating debate on LinkedIn earlier this week about if design leaders should have portfolios. I’d say it was 50/50 who agreed and disagreed.

Gregor disagreed. I understand his point, 100%.

Alex made a great point. A lot of design executives work in the boardroom, unlocking design, hiring, and working with their teams.

This is going to be a whole topic in itself, but I believe there are different things I’d expect to see at different levels. We also need to reframe what “portfolio” means.

But in short, all design leaders are very capable of putting together a deck on how they work, results etc. But my point is often design leaders (when not in this market) are headhunted and a lot of design leadership jobs are done over several rounds, informal coffees. Hiring a design executive is a big call for both company and the leader, it’s more than just showing a shiny portfolio, it’s more nuanced.

Also, every CEO is going to want different things and personalisation is always vital.

My advice would be:

• Have a personal deck/resume with key results such as if you hit your mandates, OKRs were successful, how you increased design maturity, how you lead teams, and reporting lines, how you increased revenue with proof of linked OKRs but also how you were the champion of bringing creativity into the boardroom.

• That deck/document needs to be presented in a way that a non-design exec understands. They do not care about fancy Miro boards, they just care about the outcome of design and its impact on customer experience and revenue.

Do you have any thoughts on this? Would LOVE to hear them via email, comment or on the post. 🙏 

Design job insights:

The market is picking up on all fronts. The start of 2023 felt rough. For me, it was slower than in the early days of the pandemic.

Speaking to many people in hiring positions, budgets are coming back, people are getting interviews, and there’s been a visible increase in design jobs on LinkedIn. Things are improving from the start of the year.

What I have seen this week or been chatting about:

There are a lot of “Head of Design” or “Director of Product Design” roles reporting to a CPO/Head of Product. They seem to be more execution focused with the majority of specs not talking about design sponsorship or how design can influence strategic initiatives.

The people with the most opportunities seem to be Principal/Staff level ICs who are being approached for either IC roles in companies to lead projects or Series A-B companies to be the first head of design and play a player-coach role.

A lot of companies struggle to attract the right calibre of design leaders because they are not talking to them in the JD.

If you’re hiring a designer or leader right now, I’d advise including things like this in your JD:

• Design OKRs that link to business impact.

• CEO/C-Suite note on why they are hiring this person

• Companies’ current state of design maturity, and vision for 1-3 years.

• Is there CEO sponsorship? Without this, an exec level is doomed to fail.

• What do the first 100 days look like? What results do you want to see?

• Does design play a meaningful part in strategic discussions?

This will help design leaders reading to understand how they can support the challenges and if they are going to be positioned correctly in the company for success. If you have no idea, but you know you need design, be honest. That will be a great challenge for the right person.

That’s all for this week. Thank you to Andy for sharing his time and insights.

Quick note - If you’re looking for a new design role please consider signing up for our invite-only talent network. This is where we talk to designers about live roles - https://itsverified.typeform.com/apply

The goal of Verified is simple. Not only help companies find their next design leadership team, but help designers navigate their careers through curated job reach outs, peer-to-peer networking, hot-seat masterminds, non-design skills to help your design career, and exclusive communities for you to have a safe space to navigate your careers.

Verified is 8 weeks old. Right now, we’re focused on bringing immediate revenue, and for every revenue goal we hit to increase our team and runway, we will be adding new services including exclusive communities, personal agent service to leaders and detailed reports. Thanks for being here in the early days!

See you next week

GM, Verified Crew. Happy Sunday. I hope the sun is shining where you are ☀️

Here's what I am serving up today:

• Q&A with Heleen Engelen on “Does design need to report to a CEO?”

• My thoughts on the famous quote “We need a seat at the table”

• LinkedIn comment of the week on securing internal sponsorship

I’m excited to bring you a Q&A with Heleen, who’s been part of the world-famous design team at Philips for 27 years as a design business partner in Domestic Appliances, Consumer Luminaires, and Diagnostic Imaging.

As Head of Design for Philips Precision Diagnosis, she’s been driving the design strategy for a cluster of businesses. In her role as Head of Design Delivery, she was responsible for the full Philips Experience Design community of creatives (500 FTE, across 12 locations) driving the digital transformation towards one culture, one agile way of working, establishing Digital design competencies UX/UI, Service Design and Usability.

Currently, Heleen is in transition from Philips to Maxima Medical Centre, taking up the role of strategic adviser of the Board of directors. Bringing Design into the non-profit sector, moving even closer to patients and medical staff, and continuing to drive the digital transformation in health care.

Here’s what stood out to me most from this interview with Heleen:

• We need to re-imagine design leadership in 2023.

• It’s on designers to bring key insights to the non-design executives.

• Designers need to understand and have empathy for how non-designers communicate.

• There’s no right person or department for design to report to, it depends.

1 - Do we need to re-imagine design leadership in 2023?

Yes for sure we do. As change is the only constant, the predictability of the past is gone, and complexity is the new norm. Initially driven by the digital transformation and changing geopolitical dynamics, intensified by Covid, the war in the Ukraine, logistical challenges and now the threat of the economic slowdown.

Senior leaders including Design leadership need to rethink how to thrive in this rapidly changing world. To make a systemic impact, we might need to consider focusing on different organisations.

To drive digital transformations we need to rethink how to add value in agile organisational models. Organisations with less hierarchy and fully empowered multi-disciplinary teams, working as close as possible with customers, patients and medical staff.

2 - There’s a constant obsession for designers to want a “seat at the table”, why?

Our design profession is relatively young compared to R&D and marketing and it is still not always common that Design is included at the table.

Designers have unique capabilities to encounter problems holistically. As part of our design thinking methodology, we empathise deeply with the needs of people and are capable of making them tangible. Via visualisations (customer journeys, service blueprints, PRFAQ’s and UX prototypes) Design uncovers the real challenges across complex systems.

It is our responsibility to bring these insights to the attention of decision-makers. To convince them to act (and allocate appropriate budget/resources/capabilities). But obviously, we are not always heard. Whether this is at the table of an exco, or whether this is inside a scrum team.

3 - What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a design leader report directly to the CEO, compared to other reporting structures within an organisation?

This depends on the overall organisational set-up, the operating model of the company, the role and visionary capabilities of the CEO, the way portfolio decisions are made, the way how budgets are being divided and multidisciplinary competencies are developed to remain best-in-class.

The advantage of design reporting directly to the CEO allows direct challenging/influencing of the CEO, which might result in less competition with other innovation capabilities like R&D and marketing. But there is no guarantee.

4 - How do reporting structures impact the effectiveness of design leadership?

I see a change from traditional organisations to agile organisational models.

This results in delayering of unnecessary management levels, ensuring strategic decisions are made where the work is being done. As close as possible to the needs of the customers.

The agile organisational leader sets the vision but empowers the team to define HOW to get there. The leader brings a multi-disciplinary team (including designers) together, and sets a culture of customer first, learning by doing. He/she supports thereafter by removing roadblocks and on-the-job coaching.

In this setup, there is a need for hands-on Designers in scrum teams. Next to guild leads that ensure the design competencies stay top of the bill. No need for complex reporting structures, Design business partners, and different hierarchical levels of seniority.

5 - What are the key factors or considerations that determine whether a design leader should report directly to the CEO or have a different reporting structure? Are there specific organisational characteristics or contexts where an alternative reporting structure might be more suitable or effective?

Various different factors, a lot of it depends on the organisation of course.

• The overall organisational set-up> is design a function or one of the capabilities inside a team

• The operating model of the company

• The role and visionary capabilities of the CEO.

• The way portfolio decisions are made and budgets are divided

• The way how competencies are developed to remain best in class. (including Design)

6 - How can design leaders be more effective in their organisation to have a more tangible commercial impact?

• Have passion and endless energy to make an impact for your end-user (customer/patient/medical staff)

• Have deep knowledge of the needs of your customer (have access to your customer)

• Have the ability to communicate the needs of your customer (verbal/visual) in an understandable way, so all colleagues inside/outside the Design community are inspired to follow your recommendation.

• Understand and have empathy for how non-designers communicate (business/R&D/marketing vocabulary)

• Enable a co-creation process (via inclusive tools/PRFAQ’s) to come to a common understanding inside your multi-disciplinary team on the needs of the customer, the challenge of your business and how you as a team are going to move forward (define a Northstar). Act as glue inside your team, to keep them all focussed until the product is delivered to the customer

Build rapid prototypes of potential solutions, to invite end-users to provide feedback, learn and improve continuously

My thoughts on the famous quote “Design needs a seat at the table” 🤯

I’ve been speaking to 5-10 Chief Design Officers for the last 3 months for my new video series coming out in September. It’s been fascinating to get insights into how they think, how they operate internally and work with their business peers.

I believe if we are constantly moaning that design does not get a seat at the table it only enlarges the distance between design and business execs. We need to establish a personal relationship that is built on trust, mutual respect and inspiration of each other’s craft, acceptance of critique (no ego allowed!), and a single voice to everyone else.

I spoke to 2 CEO’s about their approach to releasing new products in May. They did not mention design once. It was all about shipping on time, delightful experiences, conversion etc.

Most business executives rarely talk about design, it’s part of the wider delivery system. They care about generating profit for their shareholders, customer experience, retention of customers etc. They rarely talk about design, it’s just a tool in the arsenal.

Good design leaders go beyond getting design notices, they ensure it becomes the driving force of the business.

What is apparent with 99% of leaders I speak to:

• We need to design for business opportunities.

• We need to understand what C-Suite care about and ensure we’re linking in our OKRs and constantly proving value.

• Be accountable for design outcomes that enable business goals (I got this from watching a talk from the VP at Netflix. Hit home!) Right now the stakes are high in this economy.

• Not every company needs a Chief Design Officer. For some companies having this level of leader makes no sense, rather it’s important to have a senior enough sponsor to enable.

• Not every CDO needs to report to a CEO. I know of very few CDOs who actually report to the CEO. For example, if you work in a bank, why would you report to the CEO who is an accountant by trade? Rather than having someone like a CMO, Chief Digital Officer makes sense depending on the organisation. Be careful what you wish for.

Comment of the week 🚀 

It comes from Marcus from the post discussing how to find and retain key sponsorship for design within an organisation. Such good insight from someone who has been there and done it.

QUICK NOTE: This newsletter today was a new format where I will interview design and non-design leaders on various topics all geared around integrating and positioning design to achieve maximum success. Feedback is welcome. I’ll also be looking into re-branding this newsletter (colours, logo) in the next 1-2 months, so if anyone has any good ideas I’d love to hear them.

For people who have subscribed to this, I genuinely appreciate you. I hope you’ll see it grow and have the impact I desire which is to help designers and leaders position design in their organisation for maximum effectiveness.

On a side note, I’ve noticed this morning a lot of email responses from the welcome email have come into my spam folder. I’ll be sure to get back to each one of you. I’m trying to sort this with Beehiiv, who I use for this newsletter.

Chat next week,

Tom

Good morning. 👋 Tom here from Verified. This is the first newsletter I’ve written in years, so I hope you see the changes as we keep releasing more. Let’s dive in.

Here's what I am serving up today:

• 7 reasons why companies struggle to hire top designers

• What to include in a compelling job advert for designers

• 10 ways to speed up the process of hiring ICs.

🤯 7 reasons companies struggle to hire top designers:

1) Your career ladders are rigid.

2) You’re looking in the wrong places.

3) You're not showing people the work.

4) You’re relying on generalist talent teams.

5) You're not building a consistent inbound network.

6) You’re not appealing (yet) to work for as a brand.

7) You're slowing down by insisting on a polished portfolio.

It should not take 4 weeks to close a Senior IC role with one candidate end-to-end from 1st interview to offer.

🚀 Write compelling job ads PLEASE

A lot of companies don’t attract top designers.

Because they’re not enticing them or offering anything special.

90% of JD’s on LinkedIn:

• We are hiring

• Join the rocket ship

• Click here to see our jobs

• We’ve reached unicorn status

• We need someone to do the UX

• Oh, someone that does everything

Instead, tell designers:

• What is the actual salary

• Leadership develops teams

• The senior sponsor in the org

• How you build an inclusive team

• Where design report to in the org

• GSD mindset without excess meetings

Understand what designers want and talk to them. They need to see if they will get meaningful career growth, if their work will get shipped, if the company cares about design or is open to deeper understanding, if their OKRs have a meaningful commercial impact on the business.

An underrated thing to talk about in an advert is your product and development team. sHow strong is your engineering team? The amount of times I’ve seen engineering slow or change design work is staggering.

⏰ 7 ways to speed up the process of hiring ICs

At Verified, we work to a 2-week sourcing cycle from briefing to offer stage. We understand the importance of time delays in securing and closing the top IC designers. They will have offers elsewhere, you gotta move!

Our process roughly looks like this:

Day 1 - Briefing

Day 2-3 - Initial sourcing via our talent network. We have an invite-only network, with our own career grading framework.

Day 4 - Calibration with the client. We provide 5 sample profiles, we discuss each one, resulting in us focusing on 1-2 sample profiles with the aim on securing the candidates (and similar profiles) into the process.

Day 5/6 - Continuous sourcing ensuring we are securing the profiles we’ve aligned on in the calibration phase.

Day 7 - Interview slots for 3-5 designers.

Day 8/9 - Interview slots for 2nd interview.

Day 10 - Any final chats with 1-2 designers with C-Suite/CEO.

We’re adding to our talent network 24/7. If we get to the end of the process and no candidates are chosen (touch wood, it’s not happened in over 2 years) we conduct the same process.

Ok, let’s dig into 7 ways to speed up interview processes:

1) Stop asking for a polished portfolio from Senior ICs and above.

I want to see raw files, scrappy work, not always a polished portfolio which someone else could have put together for you. Often templated portfolio doesn’t show me enough.

2) Making sure everyone is aligned internally on the role.

Before a role briefing, you need to ensure the budget is signed off, the key stakeholders for the role are all aligned, and you’re not going to get to the end and someone will say “I think we need someone a bit more UX” 😂 

3) No more than 2 stages for IC roles, 3-4 for leadership.

I’ve yet to see a legitimate argument for an IC role being more than 2 with a 3rd for CEO/Founder “culture” chats. Please email me if you have one. Interviewing is a skill, you should be able to get enough information from an IC interview in 2 to determine if they are a good fit.

For leadership, I believe 4 max of “proper” interviews. Coffee and intro chats do not count. But with leadership, often these coffee chats are vital to determine connection as you work so closely with your peers.

4) Have a strong EVP to attract talent who WANT to work for you.

Industries in which people have strong ethical views i.e Gambling may struggle to attract the right calibre of talent needed. Now, I genuinely believe these companies need design more than ever and need to change, which they are doing. But, with experience, I’ve witnessed them paying over the odds just to get 7/10 designers in the door to get projects off the ground.

Talk about what people can do there, career path, CEO messages on change, how you will raise design maturity, how the CDO is integrating design effectively etc.

5) Build talent pools. Designers love being part of communities.

Every day is an opportunity to engage with “passive” talent.

6) Interview with intent, not "to look around the market"

This will come through everyone being aligned, the budget signed off, a clear 100-day plan once hired, sourcing strategy, JD approved, a headhunter in place, and interview slots booked out.

Do not waste designers’ time, they are off the market quickly.

7) Hire on potential, not where they've been = great untapped talent.

Interviewing is a skill. This should be obvious. We don’t need to be always doing “vanity” searches chasing after sexy logos like Instagram, Spotify, and Google. Sometimes the best designers are working for small agencies, pumping out incredible design work.

LinkedIn comment of the week

It comes from Stephen Schroth EVP, Enterprise Design Officer at KeyBank in Ohio. He was commenting on a post of mine talking about designers’ incessant need to want a “seat at the table” and how we need to adapt how we talk to non-design executives about design.

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter today was written using my thoughts and insights over 10+ years of hiring designers. You’re welcome to disagree, I’d love constructive feedback. This is the first newsletter I’ve released with lots more planned with leaders (design + non-design exec). This was more of a tester for me to get used to writing long-form again. I hope you see the changes and improvements in the following articles. 🙌