Design Meets Business

Conor and I talk about how designers can prove their value in larger companies, why working in silos is a thing of the past, and how to transition from a design leader to a business leader.

Connect with Conor

LinkedIn, Twitter

Selected links from the episode

BT's Medium Design blog

Shook's model

Marty Cagan, Inspired

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden, Sense and Respond

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organization.

On the last episode of season one, we're talking to Conor Ward, Director of Design at BT Consumer. We talk about how designers can prove their value in larger companies, why working in silos is a thing of the past, and how to transition from a design leader to a business leader.

Conor, thank you so much for joining Design Meets Business. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. You are one of the design leaders that I was lucky enough to work with, and I'm really looking forward to bring some of your knowledge to the masses if you will. So you used to be the Global Digital Experience Director at Centrica, and for the people who don't know what that is, it's the owner of British Gas. And as I said, I used to be part of your team. And I remember we have chats about “playing the game,” which basically is the whole idea of designers understanding how to manage their stakeholders in larger organisations.

So, before we go into all that, if you’d just like to dive a bit deeper into who you are, so people know who's talking to them. You grew up in Northern Ireland, if I'm not mistaken, how you came up to London, and maybe a couple of words about the saxiest man alive. That's a story that I love.

Conor: Okay, how do I do it in about four seconds so that I don't bore anybody. It's great to chat. It's been a while. It's good to catch up. So I guess my career has been in three really quick phases.

So first phase was music, and I did a lot of improvisational music as a kind of a career for a while, a step away from design for a while. And that basically taught me how to get good at generating ideas and then throwing them away. So, the old kind of diverge-converg model got fully ingrained in my brain being an improvisational musician. So it was great.

Second part of my career was getting back into design again after university and did a lot of agency work. So did huge amounts of kind of different brands and enjoying the breadth of different types of skillsets. I had to figure out what does design mean and all the different areas, which was great to kind of broadened my thinking about what I think design is as a role.

And then the third part of my career is enterprise size things. So that's where I moved into kind of heavy design leadership and learned a lot about that since then, and some in some very large companies, British gas and now I’m the Director of Design at BT.

Christian: Fantastic. Looking over your profile and doing a bit of research before this, I've noticed a lot of things that I didn't know about you. So first, I didn't know you had a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. You've been a software tester for a while. You're a certified scrum master. How have these aided you in your career as a designer or as -- and then later on, of course, as a design leader, but take it a step by step.

Conor: Yes, and certified product owner, a number of other things. I think it's trying to figure out what other feathers can I add to my bow? I think for me, the most interesting part of this digital industry is to try and broaden beyond a particular silo that you might be put in. So if you're a UX designer, how do you broaden yourself to consider all the other different disciplines. If you're a broadly skilled designer or a design leader, how do you broaden your knowledge, skills, influence, and expertise around lots of other different areas? How do you understand technology and your technology colleagues better? How do you understand product and that kind of product management approach, and how does product ownership work? What does the business need, etc? I just kind of value that enough. I think that knowledge helps you become a better designer.

Christian: Let's keep talking about that. Why does that, all that knowledge and understanding what everyone around you works on, and all the disciplines you're kind of cross collaborating with, why is that important to designers?

Conor: Well, I think it's the old Venn diagram, isn’t it? We talk about that quite a lot here at BT with me and my other director colleagues. There's hundreds of different, funny Venn diagrams of what design is, what a product is, etc etc. But the one I think that works for me in my head most days, the three circles or the three-legged stool, where one of the circles is the user, one of the circles is the technology that you have to work with, and one of the circles in the business and the reason why anybody is getting paid to work on this in the first place. And I think the centre of that, sometimes I think people get confused that the centre of that is a discipline like design, or the centre of that is UX.

For me, the renter of that is the product. It's the thing that you're creating; it's the experience. And the more that you can broaden your knowledge across those three different areas, the more you can contribute to the -- you can empathise with your colleagues. You can contribute your thoughts and be part of the overall holistic process of creating a great product.s you do that, the more you're just going to, I guess, get in people's way and annoy them a little bit and try and be a bit of a purist where you're fighting for your own discipline, you know?

Christian: Yes. And I guess a lot of designers struggle with that in larger enterprises, especially where design maybe is not that valued as in a small startup is actually is fighting a lot against people who, at the end of the day, have the same goals as them. Which the goal is, “Let's create a great product,” but they go by achieving these goals in a different way.

So let's segue a bit into talking about design in larger enterprises, where you have most of your recent experience of about the last four or five, six years. In your experience, what have you seen as patterns of what design as a practice struggled within some of these bigger companies?

Conor: Yes, so our design team at BT is 190 designers at the moment. It's very large, and that's because our definition of design is very broad and wide-ranging. So our definition of design that we created when I joined the team – I created with the rest of the team two years ago was human insight-based creativity. So that covers kind of four areas of our team that we set up at the time.

So, first area is product design, and that we have kind of 80 or so product designers. And that's a mix of people that have typically they would be called UX designers or UI designers, etc. And we have a single role that’s called a product designer that looks after how does a user interact with our products. The secondary of our team is content design. That looks after all of the creation of the content, the reason why it exists in the first place, all of the kinds of content editing, updating, producing it, and all of the SEO and how it’s found in the first place.

And the third design team is called inclusive design, and that covers our user research team that covers our service design team, and it also covers our accessibility specialist roles. So just looking at how do we make sure that we're being as user-entered as possible? On the fourth role is a DesignOps team. So that covers the design systems squad. We have DesignOps roles. We have ContentOps role. We have a ResearchOps role. And for me, this is the engine room of our design team because they're trying to essentially make designing easier for the rest of the design team.

So that’s kind of a really nice summary for me of what the design team is, but the really interesting thing about the way we're set up at BT is the rest of the organization. So, for example, I'm the first design director at BT, which is a really exciting role for me to take on, but my peers are product directors, engineering director, kit building planning director, etc. So it’s kind of like, instead of those being perhaps in other organisations pulled into, engineering would report into IT, product would report into the business, etc. It's kind of more like we're all the business, and we're all trying to do something together. We all report into the MD of Digital, and he reports into the CEO.

So you start getting these things that are promised in Silicon Valley companies where design is one step away from the CEO. It's being represented on the intent is that it's

Jane and I talk about her opinions of what's the most crucial aspect of being a design leader, quantifying the value of our design work, and what we can do to support designers who are just starting out.

Connect with Jane

LinkedIn

Selected links from the episode

Jane's Medium articles

The Intrapreneurs Club

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host, Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organization.

Today, we're talking to Jane Austin, Director of Design at Babylon Health. Jane shares with us her opinions of what's the most crucial aspect of being a design leader, quantifying the value of our design work, and what we can do to support designers who are just starting out.

Jane, I really appreciate you being in the podcast. Thank you so much for joining. You've been with Babylon Health for a couple of years now, and I'm sure you've got a lot to share about building teams and design leadership and all that. So we are going to be talking about all those cool topics today, but first, why don't you give us a quick background of yourself and how you ended up being in the role you are today?

Jane: I'm not quite sure how far you want me to go back. I'll try and I'll go back quite far because it's interesting. And I'll try and counter along quickly to get to the present day. I've got a degree, a master's degree actually, in philosophy, which meant I was completely unemployable. And I went traveling via around Easter Europe and Portugal, Europe, various other places, teaching English as a foreign language. So all these poor people they're actually learning Scottish, not learning English. And then I came back to London and I got a job teaching refugees English. And this shows how long ago it was. It was for a government college and they invested all this money in an ICT suite for the poor refugees to learn English. But these CD ROMs were so badly designed and everybody was getting really frustrating and upset. I got onto a free course to program director at the college. We did the CD ROMs and discovered that actually there was a thing called usability and that this was a huge problem.

I had no idea that this was even a thing and that we used the CD ROMs as a – like a portfolio to go onto a second master's which was called Hypermedia. I really am showing my age. And then from there, I got a job now and a really nice studio to be creative agency in Shoreditch, which went spectacularly bankrupt.

Set up my own agency. I phoned their clients and asked them if they had anybody looking after them. So it was like D&AD and Channel Four and the Design museum, so some amazing clients. And we didn't make a penny. Not a penny. We just like -- I was too embarrassed to ask for money. I didn't understand how business worked. It was an absolute disaster.

So from there I got a job in another agency and then I went and played safe. Because that's when I discovered actually what product design was, it was owning the product and iterating on it. It wasn't just kind of doing usability at the end of the process. So starting with product people from the beginning to craft something that people actually wanted. So that was at a trading company, online trading platform, which was insanely complex. I left there because I was second guessing myself. It was actually more like gambling than trading.

And went to the Government Digital Service, which was just amazing. I learned so much in GDS. I worked with some of the best people in the world. Then went to the Telegraph. We rebuilt everything at the Telegraph, and then they decided that we had built all the things, so they didn't need a product team. They just needed to market the things. So we all got made redundant and then I went to MOO, wonderful company making business cards.

And then I followed my boss Chad and moved to Babylon Health where I am now. We’re an AI-powered healthcare, not really a startup anymore, it’s a scale-up, and their mission is to provide affordable and accessible healthcare to the world.

Christian: Yes. Thanks. Thanks for that, Jane really quick, really, to the point. I love that. You said one thing that was really interesting, which is you've learned a lot at GDS. And a lot of the designers that I've spoken to around London and who have worked for the Government keep mentioning the same thing. Like, “Oh, I've learned so much working for the Government.” Which is probably another thing you would say in a lot of, let's say, more forward-thinking industries. So what were some of the things that you've learned at GDS?

Jane: At GDS I learned the power about having a mission and having these really clear sighted people at the top of driving that mission. I learned the power of doing research early and often. Research was a tool for everybody to understand the customer. So they had mandated contact hours. Everybody had to see the people using their product. They supported people, so people outside of GDS, to come along on the journey. We're having an incredible impact on people's lives.

So the people who redesigned the new passport service, it’s amazing. I actually saw them starting work on that -- starting work with really understanding people's needs and why they had to do this online service. And then building out from needs and making sure everything was clear and simple… doing the hard work to make it simple. They had values that were up everywhere. So you can't – you’re able to make really clear decisions.

And then the way they did agile, it wasn't just like… what’s it called, fragile, or like waterfall with some standups. It was proper agile where people were collaborating really well. The teams were really well structured. We had lots of retros and the people themselves. So I worked with Lisa who's amazing. And just, they had the space as well to really do considered very good work. I think the problem being in a startup or somewhere commercial, often, everything is an MVP, and that's really frustrating. But at GDS, they finished what we started and they released products which were a complete step change, most substitute of the products, but absolute complete step change in what had been done before, and setting standards that the rest of Government followed. It was just a joy to work there.

Christian: Was there any difference, or now looking back, you've worked for the Government, you've worked for a lot of private companies, any difference in working or in how design is being applied at the Government versus how it is applied in private companies?

Jane: It's an interesting question. I think at the Government, really, a lot of the battle had been already won. I can’t remember the lady's name from last minute… Oh gosh, that's terrible, I'll come back to that. She'd written a report into why Government had to be more digital. So the battle of this had already been won.

And then secondly, they said the people who set up GDS had a system and a process, and that battle had already been won. And they understood the importance of research and design. But very often in private organisations, they don't understand Design. They think Design makes things look pretty. I remember once getting interviewed for a job and the product manager said to me, “Oh, yes. I love design. It's where the magic happens.” And I felt, wow, this is a place I don't want to work. He thinks Design is like a creative genius in a cupboard doing magic, when actually it's a rigorous process.

So I think that what I learned at GDS, Design is a rigorous process that you follow that's based on customer needs, and it results in something really good rather than you're turning out and colouring in some stakeholders’ ideas, which is often what happens in the private sector. So for design to work well, you need stakeholders to understand the impact and you need to be able to do regular research and to iterate. And rather than HIPPOS, highest paid person in the organisation coming in dictating what you should do, at GDS it was the opposite. You started with customers or citizens and worked up from there.

So I think the differences where the power is, and what battles had already been won, and having the space for design to actually prove itself, rather than just coming at the end and colouring in. That's not everywhere, but a lot of companies are still like that remarkably.

Christian: So you said one thing that I'd like to unpack a little bit, which was one of the things that's required is for stakeholders to understand the impact. And I'm sometimes wondering whether that's something that we, as designers on the ground can do more towards. So to me, it always comes back to transparency.

It's sometimes very difficult for stakeholders in the business to understand what you're doing when you're working in silos or you go away and you work and then a month later you come back for a grand reveal or something like that. So do you think being more transparent at work would help more stakeholders understand what it is we're doing?

Jane: Absolutely. There's so much you can do to work with stakeholders. From the start, actually turning your UX and your design processes on the stakeholders. So not just having empathy for your end users, but having empathy for you

Rochelle and I talk about why being a designer is a huge responsibility, why it's important to understand what matters to people outside of the design team, and how to be more transparent about our work.

Connect with Rochelle

Website, LinkedIn, Twitter

Full transcipt

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today I'm talking to Rochelle Dancel, an experienced designer, producer, and creative director, currently working for global design studio, Idean. Rochelle and I talk about the responsibility of being a designer, why it's important to understand what matters to people outside of the design team, and how to be more transparent about our work.

Rochelle, thanks a lot for joining the podcast. It's really a pleasure to have you here. I'm looking forward to talk about design and design leadership with you today. I believe you're the right person to talk about these things with not only from the perspective of the agency world, but also from the perspective of larger organisations, since you've got a wealth of experience in both. But first, let's talk a bit about how much of a fascinating person I think you are outside of design. So tell us a bit about your background, how you got to work with so many incredible brands over the past 15 years, and about your other career as a producer in the film industry?

Rochelle: Yes, so I think – wow, intro. I think I would probably describe my career as a series of very, very happy accidents. So I started at university in events. I worked for ticketing company, and then when I left, I had my own company off the back of that. So actually I -- on a podcast about design and business, I think a lot of us have sort of naturally built in business backgrounds when you look at things retrospectively, because we've had other lives. And I think that has definitely sort of fed up and into the things that we've ended up did up doing subsequently.

But yes, I mean I started in events and met a lot of film people. I have a background in theatre, which is what I went to university for. And so my career in production, I guess the things I do on the side, all of the films and whatnot and then the web series that I've made subsequently or I've become known for. Those were sort of passions that I followed that we thought, “Okay, we just need to take those sort of to the next level.”

And then off the back of that, I've had a kind of massive learning curve having to learn how to make my own websites for the shows that I've been making. Because at the time, we didn't know anyone that was a developer and we didn't -- it wasn't a skill set, and so we had to do things like YouTube - How to make a website, and YouTube all those sorts of things, and so, software was not what it is now. We didn't have availability of free kind of software or freemium versions of things that we could try. So a lot of it was kind of putting -- I mean, it literally was bootstrapping in many cases.

And then off the back of that, the kind of like main, I'd say kind of turning point, was when I made a website for one of my shows, my very first show which is ended up getting picked up by MTV. So there was all of a sudden, quite a lot of traffic to the site. It became a bit of a showpiece and a talking point. I mean, it was terrible website. It was built in tables, and I had to learn how to do a dropdown menu in Flash.

Off the back of that, I could say that I could code. And when I was then applying for other jobs, I ended up at the mayor's office in a charity that was looking after the London domestic violence strategy at the time. And I came on, and I think it was like an administrator or something like that, because I could do things like code newsletters and all of that kind of thing. Then you become the person who's good with computers, and you become the person that's good with websites.

And then off the back of that, I got to work on some really cool projects that probably someone at my level would not have done just because it was perceived, I had this particular skillset. And then that blossomed into a really cool online project which was around supporting domestic violence workers who work with children. And it was the very first online space. And so that sort of as a project around sort of designing the pathways into that, around how security protocols work with that. Like all of those sorts of things, I'm sort of suddenly having to think about. So, that was -- Yes, so, I mean, that was -- Again, I call it a happy accident.

Off the back of that, learn lots sort of nonprofit meet-ups or meets-ups with other charities. Was talking to them about capacity building and then ended up in an agency that worked exclusively with nonprofit organisations, charities things, like that.

So, yes. I call all of these sorts of things, a happy accident. I ended up at PayPoint in the sort of e-commerce part of the business. Again, because I was just like, “Oh, I need like a temp job to fill up some time. “I can code. They were like, “Well, we need someone to do sort of like newsletters, and we got some microsites, we've got some things like that.” So then, you know, I’m suddenly kind of accidentally in this environment and then meeting their head of product and meeting developers and then getting a much bigger insight into workflow and how the little bit of what I'm doing fits in with a much, much bigger organisation. And then the other way around having to explain how my little piece of the puzzle fits into the much wider view of the organisation.

So I don't think I've ever done anything deliberately. I don't think I've ever gone. I want to -- if you'd have said to me then, I want to be a service designer, even though that's exactly what I was doing, I don't think that I would have had that sort of like cognisance or even known how to foresee how to build a career path into the awesome things I'm doing now. I've been very, very lucky and incredibly grateful to work on all of the things I've managed to work on. And as much as possible, I mean, my big ethos in life is that I follow people. I don't really follow brands and products and things like that.

I think after I got past the first year of -- because agency world is very small. And agency world it is incredibly nepotistic still. Nepotism is still a massive thing. It is all about the network, and I was very lucky in that I met a great recruiter who we clicked right away, got on with really well. And when I was thinking, “You know what? Let's go freelance.” So let's basically just see whether or not this is something that I want to do.

The very first agency I got to work with was Sapient. And in London, if you work for Sapient, everyone knows who they are. I mean, everyone's got their own opinion about every agency, organisation, you name it. But the minute that was on my CV, it was a massive kind of door opener. Once I had that first project, is a name that a lot of people in the industry recognised, obviously. It was just a lot easier to get recommendations or to have people immediately go, “Okay, she's worked there. Fine. They've had her, she didn't blow anything up, we can have her on our project.” And I've met lots and lots of people. I've been very grateful and very lucky that they've recommended me to other people and so on and so forth.

So I tend to follow people rather than the brands now. A lot of times, recruiters that don't know me will come to me and say, “We've got this brand. It is going to look amazing. It's a great project. You go to travel to this place.” And I'm like, “Yes, no, it’s fine”. But recruiters that I work with, they know who I want to work with, or what type of person they want to work with, or what kind of organisation I want to work with. And so they're very much, “You should join this project because I think you and this person would really get along.” And I take recommendations from people that I know about people that they know very, very like to heart, especially if they're people that know me.

And I just think that -- especially if you're on a project for -- maybe be six weeks, 12 weeks, whatever, six months down the line it's that sort of classic airport test, in that, you have to be with people that you wouldn't mind spending 12 hours on an overlay unexpectedly with. Yes, it's – again I've been very fortunate and very lucky, and I'm really hoping that this kind of just continues for the rest of my career.

Christian: Yes. There's a similar story I keep hearing from everyone who's on the show. There are small particulars that are different, but the pattern is the same. Most people I've spoken to until now started out by doing something totally different than design. Maybe they started coding. Maybe they started with a totally different career, and they ended up in design by chance.

But another thing that I'm noticing is how most of these people have started design by already having a lot of skills that help them in their design career. So as you said, if you've worked in other areas of the business before and you become a designer, then you're going to have those skills to aid you as a designer. And I'm wondering, it sounds like it's such a high barrier of starting in design today. There's so much required of you even when you're just a junior because there are all these prodigies coming in k

Olivier and I talk about the difference between designing consumer products vs. enterprise software, and how advocating for Design in organisations is supposed to be a long game.

Connect with Olivier

LinkedIn

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organization.

Today, we're talking to Olivier Cottin. Olivier's a former agency owner and designer with a wealth of experience and together we tackle topics such as designing in B2B versus designing in B2C, and how advocating for designing in organisations is supposed to be a long game.

Olivier, thanks a lot for joining Design Meets Business. Really a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I can't wait to talk about a lot of interesting design topics today. Just to give everyone a background. You and I, we used to work together at British Gas. And although we were in different product teams, we did have a lot of interesting chats over lunch about how and why design struggles to thrive in larger organisations.

So today, we'll focus a lot on that, but let's begin by giving everyone a bit about your background. What's your story? What brought you where you are today?

Olivier: Sure. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you, Christian, to have me in your podcast. I’ve been listening to the first episodes, and I really liked the direction it's going. I think it's a very interesting thing you're trying to do, creating a safe space for designers to talk about these questions. So thank you for that. A bit on my background. So, my background is noisy.

Christian: Okay. Very noisy… noisy is good.

Olivier: It’s noisy. I wasn't really planning to be a designer. It has been an accident. So what I mean is that this is -- when I went to uni, I was studying accounting. So very different from design, because I always wanted to run my own company. That was the main thing I had in mind. And I felt that if I knew how to manage the books, that will help me to get there. But I got bored. it's too linear, it’s one way of thinking, and not really who I am.

So By the age of 18, I discovered the Photoshop by accident. I started to play around with, and then I found that it was actually a job. So then I decided to go back to uni, and I studied was is called Media and Communication. So very early days of this. It was back in France, and at the time it was doing a part time education.

So I was working in music, and interesting thing of this was back in 2007. It was when the music industry was in the biggest crisis they ever had because digital just had started, with the illegal downloading and piracy. I worked for a company called Because Music. I was working with the creative director of this record label. And I’d seen how the digital has really impacted and all business model.

So it was an interesting thing for me, and I think this is why it kind of shaped my career. I've always been in companies that always trying to find their fit, trying to change business model or adapting, all that kind of stuff.

So after my degree, I started to run my own business. I was 21. I created like a small agency, but it wasn't a small agency for small companies, but with the knowledge of big companies. So the idea was all the expensive knowledge you can get from WPP, I wanted to bring this into small businesses because I realised a lot of them had potential but didn't have access to the knowledge and the people.

So that’s what I started to do. I mainly shift to B2B and then B2C. It went really well that we grow the business all the way to maybe -- I think it was £1 million revenues, in a couple of years, but the downside of it is I was very inexperienced, and I made a lot of mistakes, and the cashflow just didn't follow.

So company collapsed. I run this business with my best friend at the time. I want to think that I've learned is business and friendship is not meant to be mixed. Because unfortunately, our friendship has fallen out. So that's the biggest lesson I've learned is do not do any business with family and friends.

And then that led me to go to London. I'm half French, half Mauritian. So I always been a close contact with the UK because my family -- of course, my family is in the UK and I spoke English very early days. So I always wanted to go to London. I didn't know how and when. The Olympics started in 2012. I came for one weekend and never went back.

That's my story. I didn't know anyone in the UX industry. So I applied for, I think, a hundred jobs. I had a lot of rejection and then the first company that risked to hire me because, at the time, my English wasn't so good. I could do the job, but I wasn't really fluent. And I realised that UX is all about communication. So I started to work for the House of Fraser.

Christian: Pretty big brand to take a chance on you, not just the company in a corner of Colchester.

Olivier: Very big, very big, established. But the interesting thing is my boss was willing to take a risk because he really liked my approach of how I see UX -- and he said to me that's – you know that they give you like a design task. And he say to me, “That's the best staff I've seen. So I had to hire my team.”

So that's what I studied, but I want to come back to how I get to working in the UK. So when I moved to the UK, I haven't had a job. I just called a couple of savings, and my family said, “You need to find a job.” Not because I had to work, but they wanted me to get used to the British system and how things work.

So for me, having such experience was very difficult to go back to a very low paid job, but I did it. So I worked for Cineworld. I did that for about nine months, and it has helped me to understand pure user experience and service, because this company is really around customer service. So I did many small jobs. So I was a cashier. I was also the cleaning team, also helped the supervisors with cashing and I things.

So I've learned quite a lot, but the main thing is I've learned about how customer experience impact the staff. So what I mean that this is the way round. So we care about the customer experience that's feasible, but we don't see how the employee experiences has real impact on customer experience. That is an interesting thing for me. I've realised that I was also part of the problem because not being well paid, long hours, you get tired of hearing the same thing and same thing, so you start to become a bit like a machine. And that's why I think I've started to develop this sense of empathy because, at the time, people were paid 15, 20 pounds for a seat. And I was thinking, it's a lot of money to go to cinema, and you don't deserve to have such a bad experience because I'm not in good mood or I'm tired.

Christian: This reminds me of when I was younger, I used to work in the service industry as a bartender. You learn so much about a service-driven business when you work behind a bar or at a cashier or at Cineworld, as you said. It really gives you a lot for later on.

Olivier: I think you learn a lot when you work in entertainment and leisure industry, because when people are coming to relax, some people have to work, and it's a very different dynamic. If people want to understand where I came from, I'm earning in one day what I used to earn in one month. It's a big difference, and to me, it's just -- when people say, “Things are difficult.” Yes, they are, but there's a way -- always a way. And I think I want to tell to people, if they have a dream or they want to chase something, they have to try. You can't live in regrets. And I think for me, the best thing I have done is trying.

Christian: So how did you get from Cineworld to starting your own VC fund? Let's talk about that because it sounds like such a big difference.

Olivier: Sounds like a crazy project. So through my career I started with House of Fraser, then I went to work with Selfridges, and then I did a couple of consulting. Then I worked and joined a company called POQ. So it was a – it’s still running by the way. It's very successful, but they have the biggest retailers in the UK on their platform. So it's a native retail platform where retailers can launch within three months. What I've learned about startup is at this company, because they were in a process of raising the second and third round. And when I joined, it was slightly before series A.

So I've seen the change where they had the first injection of cash, and they're trying to raise -- get more customers and improve the product. But once series A has kicked in, dynamic has really changed. The company, in terms of size, has grown massively. It was a very engineering-led company. So quite a challenging for me because they brought me in to bring design, but I was the only one designer. And that was a very, very, very special experience.

What was very interesting is, they knew user experience has value, but how do you make it work in a very engineer-led company in terms of culture and how they think? I think that's one of the greatest challenges that I had in my career.

Christian: So how did that work? Is that something you helped with, or did they bring someone external to help or…?

Olivier: No. So, I started. What I realise it's getting closer to the engineer's team. S

On today's show Tommy and I discuss what separates successful designers from the less successful ones, the two viable career choices for creatives, and what he's looking for in a portfolio when he's hiring.

Connect with Tommy

Website, LinkedIn, Medium, Cuckoo

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use Design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today we're talking to Tommy Toner, former Design Director at Nissan, and currently co-founder of UK’s emerging broadband startup Cuckoo. We're talking about what separates successful designers from the less successful ones, the two viable career choices for creatives, and what he's looking for in a portfolio when he's hiring.

Tommy, thank you so much for joining Design Meets Business. Really, really a pleasure to have you here. I've been looking forward to having a chat with you for a while, so it's awesome to finally have you here. Just to give everyone else a background, everyone else who hasn't heard about you yet. Can’t be too many of them, but there might be a few.

So you've got a very diverse background spanning a lot of freelance roles and the now Head of UX and Brand at an upcoming player on the broadband market. We're going to talk a bit about that. So we’re going to talk about all your career and maybe your time at Nissan and leading design there, and what you've learned from that.

But before we go into all that good stuff, let's start talking a bit about your background, how you started out as a front-end developer actually, and what made you drop that for a career in Design?

Tommy: Hi, Christian. Firstly, thank you so much for having me on board. I've been -- it's been exciting to join you for this chat today under super relevant topics. Hopefully, we'll have a good chat today. Yes. So before I go into sort of my more recent professional history, I thought it'd be interesting to mention how it all began. So this is actually a secret that I've not told many people that you might find interesting.

So I don't know if you're familiar, but there used to be a game called Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun, which was a PC game. So I'm not a gamer by any means. However, this one game captured my imagination. And I was very involved in the community with a clan and sort of play playing online with friends of age about 14 at this period.

So I got into chatting on the forum, of which I was then inspired to start creating some visual assets for my team or my clans, kind of signatures on the forum. And that was actually how I first learned and taught myself Photoshop -- Adobe Photoshop properly CS1 or whatever it was back then. So from then, that was kind of sparked my sort of love of design. I wasn't actually an art student at the period, so it was all quite new to me, sort of in those early days of sort of the interactive web. It was an exciting time and is where visual design first started playing sort of a big role.

So, yes. Then I went on to study at the University of Leeds; a degree called New Media. Now, the reason why I wanted to bring that up is because I think people might find it interesting. It was before really user experience was an established academic course, which is much more common now. You can study human-centered design much in a variety of universities across the world, and it's a much more kind of, I guess, more established and respected profession now.

But when I was doing it, this course was called New Media, which my parents, I think, had – weren’t too keen on and found quite amusing. My dad actually, I think, called it a Mickey Mouse subject, which was basically, it was a hybrid of design meets kind of communication. That was kind of where I learned my trade, and that was a bit of code flown in, and it was actually called F usion, which unfortunately is no use whatsoever anymore.

So that was kind of where I then, as you say, my first role outside of university was a front-end developer, an agency which I loved. I mean, I found it incredibly frustrating at times because it wasn't really -- I didn't study Computer Science. I wasn't necessarily a coder by trade, but I kind of threw myself into it, and in the end, it paid dividends later on. Like, even to this day, when I'm creating user interfaces, that first role as a front-end developer was super important.

After that front-end developer role, I was looking to -- I wanted to go back to my sort of creative roots. It was what I've really enjoyed, but I didn't really know where to start or where to look. I popped up a portfolio, and then I ended up getting a role at Sky, BSkyB, which in the UK is a huge corporation, but they have a number of different sub-brands from broadband to sports and television etc.

I started as an acquisition designer, so designing ad banners. I don't know if you're familiar with ActionScript 3. And then, after that, I kind of moved into a more product design role, which was my first exposure to user experience and user interface design as a sort of trade. It was something I was fascinated in because I was able to maintain being a creative visual designer, but I was able to fix and solve complex problems which is what I think we hopefully will talk -- is kind of where I get a lot of my inspiration from. I enjoy problem-solving. And I think that's where design is super valuable for business. It's ultimately fixing complex problems through design.

After Sky, which was up in Leeds in Northern England, I kind of made my move to the big city of London. Very naive, not knowing I made the move to go -- decision to go freelance. And I'd never done that before, like in a professional capacity. Obviously, I'd helped out friends and family businesses and sort of smaller companies. So I spent about six years in the London design and advertising agency space, where I was lucky enough to work on some awesome international brands from websites to apps to sort of mixed reality experiences.

And then, more recently, I joined Nissan, the automotive brand where I started off as a designer. And I was sort of the second UX designer actually in the global sort of experience team as it were. There wasn't really an established user experience practice in Nissan at a global level at that stage. So it was kind of up to us to kind of define what are the processes, how can we add value to the customer experience across all of these different journeys at Nissan. And then, as time went on, we grew the team quite rapidly, and our influence across Nissan in terms of what value we could add was growing.M y role got elevated to Design Director, where I was also the User Experience Manager, managing a team of UX designers, UI designers.

And then that kind of brings me up to current day, which is my briefs -- my most recent venture that I want to talk about today is Cuckoo. And for those that don't know Cuckoo Broadband, it's a UK-based Internet service provider. And we've just launched a couple of months ago. The broadband industry in the UK is somewhat broken in the sense that you look at things like Trustpilot or NPS scores in the UK broadband companies, and they're outrageously low. It's quite shocking, actually.

So, in the same way, Monzo and Revolut came in and disrupted the finance sector or Bulb Energy or Octopus, if you're based in the UK, came and disrupted the energy sector, the idea of Cuckoo Broadband came about that we could apply these similar principles — customer first sort of approach to a design-led approach to our product — and there was scope to disrupt this market.

Christian: All right. Thanks. That's a very comprehensive background about yourself. That's all good, no more questions for there. One thing that I've noticed is that you've worked across different types of companies in different types of sectors and at different types of levels. So I'm wondering, in your experience, how is design treated and approached and applied in agencies versus how is it applied and approached when you're in-house?

Tommy: Yes. Great question. I'll start with the agency world. And again, this is going to depend on whether you're hired as a freelancer or whether you're hired as a permanent member of an agency team.

When you're a freelancer, you're more of a hired gun, and you might not be exposed to the sort of more strategic side of a project, whereas when you’re in-house in an agency, you're going to be very much part of the team trying to solve and meet a client's needs. So how it would typically work is, a client or brands would come with a problem that they can't solve in-house. And that might be because they don't have the in-house expertise, like to give you an example, it might be that a lot of in-house brands might not have a motion designer, a motion department. So in order to -- if they're putting off, maybe it's a campaign for growth, or it might be some kind of interactive experience that they want to launch on their site, that typically might not be something an in-house team could pull off. So that's where the specialism comes in.

So what you'll find with the sort of agency world is you have some incredibly talented people all brought together to solve one problem or a series of problems. And the differences, I think, with in-house, is the ability to not just have your eye on the project at hand, but also to have tha

Cassius and I talk about why it's important to learn how to learn, the challenges of moving into leadership, and why asking questions is key to solving problems.

Connect with Cassius

Website, LinkedIn

Selected links from the episode

Mark Channon - The Memory Workbook

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today we're talking to Cassius Kiani, a fascinating product designer, entrepreneur, and former lecturer at the Imperial College of London and MIT. In the next hour you'll hear us talk about why it's important to learn how to learn, the challenges of moving into leadership, and why asking questions is key to solving problems.

Cassius, thanks a lot for joining Design Meets Business. Your background in design is very diverse. You've got to work with a wealth of companies that everyone has heard about, whether that's Bumble or GoDaddy, or Facebook, and you also got to lead products in the fields that are a bit more ambiguous, let's say, like blockchain and emerging technologies. So we'll talk about what all of those different experiences taught you as a designer. But before that, let's go a bit into your background and how you started out in Design, and if you remember, what's the moment that made you want to become a designer?

Cassius: Yes, so that's a rather interesting question. So I've always been interested in technology in general. And I spent a great deal of my time as a teenager and young adult exploring, experimenting with social media. And that could be things such as just creating MySpace themes and hacking around the bits and pieces.

And I wouldn't necessarily call that design, but it was at say my first soiree into using design tools. And then, from there, I suppose my path is unconventional because I didn't realise that there was product functions within businesses until I ended up working in a start-up. And I originally worked at a start-up within marketing specifically.

And from there, I then saw different aspects of the product function and realised that some of these skills that I'd spent my time learning as a teenager and hacking around with were actually useful. And from there, I started to essentially do the same thing that I think a lot of people do when they realise that something is interesting, and they start to talk to more people about it, learn more, find out more about it.

Then I met some very talented individuals who, let's say, acted as my mentors. And then from there managed to scale that into a profession and through the consistent practice of doing good work, managed to, let’s say, move forward from there. So it's not a very romantic story as much as it's quite a pragmatic, practical one.

Christian: So, what were some of these skills that you’re mentioning? Because I can relate a bit to that. I started by coding for fun when I was very young, and then suddenly that turned into design. So was coding one of them, or what were some of these other skills?

Cassius: Yes, so I definitely think that programming is something you have exposure to at a younger age than you would, say, design, simply because the idea of making websites and apps comes up a lot. People don't tend to understand that the difference between design and development is the same as architecture and construction. There's a fine line. And so I explored programming; I did a lot with WordPress and hacking around with bits and pieces.

However, I definitely would have considered myself much more of -- I think they call them growth hackers in the space; someone who could take different aspects of marketing and a couple that with development. Now, I wouldn't necessarily say my development skills were rather strong, but they were good enough.

So I suppose that the skills I realised I could apply into design were things such as critical thinking and what people obviously define now as user experience — the idea of how can you help people accomplish their goals or solve their problems through a product specifically. Because you realise quite quickly that -- at least I realised that those two things are separate in terms of what people think about as development in a standard sense. So I realised that actually, I enjoyed that side of things much more. And then I've managed to find labels from that.

I mean, when I first started doing this, this would have been around 10 years ago. So the industry itself was, especially if you're a young person you grew up in the UK, was something which was a little bit more mysterious. User experience existed. Yes, UI/UX was talked about, so was product. However, it was by no means an absolute standard function within businesses, unless you were venture-backed or you're a booming internet business at the time.

Christian: You're right. I remember 10 years ago; it was not even product designer. You are a web designer, right? The industry is evolving just as a role if you want, is evolving. Again, with the industry evolving, I guess we as designers need to evolve as well. So throughout your last 10 years, let's use that as an example, what were some of the things where you can look back and say, “That's what's allowed me to get to the point where right now I can build teams, and I worked at all these successful companies?” What's the thing that made you successful in your career that you've managed to develop throughout time?

Cassius: Absolutely. So this is right. This is a rather interesting topic for me, because I have quite a strong opinion on this. So I believe that the majority of leaders in the world are great synthesisers, which means they're able to find threads between people, business, and technology, and they're able to pull on them. And typically, to do that, you have to be what some people would call a polymath.

So you have to be someone who is capable of learning, and exploring a number of different areas and understanding how those areas start to fit together and from there, be able to synthesise thoughts based on what you've learned. And so for me, I'd say that my unfair advantages is I spent a great deal of time learning how to learn. I surrounded myself with experts within the field. And from there at the same, what I did a lot of was attempt to find my own thoughts and opinions on things, because it's rather easy to read a textbook. It's rather easy to listen to what someone says and to say, “Okay, that makes sense.”

However, that isn't necessarily synthesis. I wanted to understand a little bit more about perhaps why things were the way they are and how I could then apply that into, like I said, these three different fields of people, business, and technology. And so synthesis, I'd say, has been the thing that has been my unfair advantage. And I'd say that any leader in the field or any leader within almost any company is rather good at synthesis.

Christian: I love this topic of learning how to learn because I think there’s, especially in education today, there's an emphasis on learning. Here's the curriculum. Here are the things you need to learn, and by the end of school, you need to pass a test to show that you've learned those things, but we're not really talking in education, whether that's design education or any other type of education, we’re not really talking about what you mentioned earlier, which is learning how to learn.

Did that come natural to you, or have you picked it up from somewhere? How did you find this concept, or how did you start thinking even about learning how to learn?

Cassius: For me, what happened was I stumbled across an interesting set of people known as mnemonists — so people who could memorise obscenely long pieces of information. So let's say 150 words in five minutes or a thousand digits in a short space of time.

And for me, I found that quite fascinating, because I wouldn't necessarily say I have a good memory by any stretch. And so I was curious to learn more about what these people could do and how they learned to put together these structures in their minds, which allowed them to then absorb copious amounts of information and to do something with them.

And so I actually spent a great deal of time being taught by a previous Grandmaster of memory, who I sought out and asked for some support. And he showed me all of the techniques, tricks, and tips. And from there, I started to ask myself questions around what makes these things work? Why do they work? How does the mind work in relation to these techniques? Why are they so effective and so sticky?

And you quickly realise that actually, this whole process of learning consists of three big blocks, where you have encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. And the memory side of things is the retrieval side, and encoding and consolidation is stuff that we interact with a lot on a daily basis through education and everything else.

The only downside is that most of that is heavily focused on rote learning and the idea of being able to absorb facts by simply repeating them and expressing them over and over again, rather than understanding them. And from there, I started to dive into the topic and learn more

I talk to Rick about his hustle of becoming a designer, how to deal with tricky client situations, and what are the steps to becoming a successful freelancer.

Connect with Rick

Website, LinkedIn, Medium

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business – a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host, Christian Vasile, and on this podcast I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today we're talking to Rick Veronese. Rick is an Italian designer based in the UK, from where he runs a small design shop focusing on FinTech and PropTech companies. In this episode he is sharing with us the hustle of becoming a designer, what's important when going freelancing, and how he deals with clients in difficult situations.

Rick, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. It's really a pleasure to have you here. You're working today as a freelancer, just like I am, and you're trying to nail down that FinTech niche. So we'll be talking about that a bit later because I think that's really interesting, but first, before we go into all that design talk, tell me a bit about yourself, how did you end up in the UK, right, because you're from Italy, and if you remember, I love asking this question, what's the moment that made you want to become a designer?

Rick: Right. Okay. So there's a bit to unpack, because obviously when you move countries, as you know, there's a lot of things that you need to learn. And the naive me about maybe six or seven years ago thought that starting a new career in design and moving to a new country at the same time would be a great idea; without knowing the language or anything, so I moved here in the UK. I'm in Bristol currently, from Italy, about six years ago. And I got into design by chance, to be honest with you. It's not a romantic story or anything. I started Googling jobs that I could do online. You know one of those top 10 lists blog posts.

Christian: Yes

Rick: Yes. That's exactly how it happened. And I thought -- well, I think I consider myself a creative person, so I'm going to give it a go, and that's it. That's how I fell in love with it, to be honest. I spent nights on trying to learn graphic design at the beginning and then web design and coding and things like that. And that's when I decided to get serious with it. But at the time I couldn't find a job in Italy. I wasn't trusting that I would find a job.

So I moved to the UK with my then-girlfriend and now wife. That's basically how I started my career – by making websites online, so just as a web designer, and after a couple of years I wasn't happy with that anymore. I decided to specialise and become a UX designer, because that was the boom like a few years ago. That’s when everyone was becoming a UX designer. People that have been -- that were doing it for years were like, “Oh, now you're waking up?”

Christian: Yes, welcome to the party.

Rick: Exactly, exactly. That's how I started, and I found a full-time job as a designer, which was quite a big step for me because having taught myself design from my bedroom back in Italy, going to work in a different country, in a language that wasn’t mine. So it wasn't that comfortable in expressing concepts and things like that. That was a big step.

So when that started, everything changed in terms of how my career evolved. The plan was always to get into the industry, if you will, work for companies for a few years, and then eventually set out on my own and just do my own thing. And that's pretty much what brings us here today.

I've been at it at full time for some time. I realised I wasn't really jiving with company politics and things like that. I decided to scale down in a way. I used to work for a big company in the UK. I decided to scale down and work for startups closely with the CEO and the CTO and the founding team. And from that, that was just what jump-started my freelance career a few months ago.

Christian: Nice. That's a a good, good background story. I love the fact that you just looked at the list and just picked one thing from the list and that’s how you started.

Rick: It's random, right?

Christian: So random, but I guess it turned out for the best, didn’t it? Let's stay on that topic a bit, because I wanted to talk to you about education – design education. Some people have a degree in Design, and they've used that as a catalyst for their careers.

Some other people have a degree in Design, and they haven't really used that at all; like me, for example. I used to do work before getting my degree. So the degree was more of a checklist exercise for me. And there are -- there's the third type of people like you, who don't have a degree, yet somehow are still successful in the industry.

So there must be a lot of steps in between deciding to become a designer and where you are today in terms of learning. So let's talk a bit about how you got here from a learning perspective. What -- where did you learn? Was it all online? Did you do any courses or anything; reading articles and Medium? Or how did you do this? How did you get here?

Rick: Yes, that's a great question. I think for you, for example, that you have a degree, the path is completely different in a way, because that's what you're studying and what you're going to do. And sometimes not even that, sometimes I reckon people finish Design school and decide that maybe it's not for them. They’re going to do it something different.

Christian: Totally. Yes.

Rick: But for me, yes, it was a lot what you said, to be honest. A lot of online courses. So I would work a few months to try to get a client and then whatever money I would get from that would use it to buy a new course, some books about design or anything that would interest me basically and I saw would upgrade me as a designer and as a professional in general, I would invest in. So I think that makes a difference. So it has to be self-initiated in a way. You need to be really aware that you need to work harder than maybe the people that had degrees. And you need to have that kind of discipline -- to just have work ethic to be able to bridge that gap.

Christian: Your story is all about hustling, I guess. And I love that, because a lot of people starting in Design don't necessarily, or didn't necessarily have to hustle the way you did. So I guess what's happening when you start the way you did is that you are so committed to it, because you need the next client to buy the next course, and then you buy the next course, and you upgrade your skills, and then you move on, you need the next client again. So it's a big commitment to say, “Well, I'm going to spend so much money on a course." That probably forces you to -- or motivates you to stick to that path. Right?

Rick: Exactly. And the way you said it is right, but I also think that you say you invest in a course. I actually see as an investment in myself. So it's a change of perspective. If I'm investing in myself, I'm going to spend whatever money. I don't care. If it results in me improved by whatever, it's going to be a good investment. It doesn't matter how much it is or how I'm going to get the money. I mean in legal ways, obviously.

Christian: Sure. Yes, but it's worth it. It's worth investing in yourself like that. I love it. The reason I wanted to talk about this is because I think Design is becoming more and more of a cool job to have.

So a lot of people grow up thinking they want to do something creative, but don't believe in the classical path of going to school. And then they have a lot of questions of how do I go from where I am right now become a designer that's worth hiring or to be able to provide some value to my clients.

Hopefully, your story will be a bit of an inspiration, because that is how you start. You do one course, you get better. You do another one, you get better. You maybe get a client where you get to apply some of this knowledge, you get better. At every single step, you get better. It's like karate kid polishing the windows, just doing the work.

Rick: That’s such a great example.

Christian: I love that. I love that. So you've been in-house for a little bit. You said earlier you got tired of it. And then you moved into freelancing. What made you go into freelancing other than the fact that maybe you were not really feeling it that much in-house?

Rick: That was always the plan. So the plan was to be a freelance web designer. I was liking the idea of being successful, but I wasn't at the time, I was just trying to make ends meet, and I was working in retail. So it's not like I went full-on with web design and was so talented that I would get clients every week.

So it was a bit -- it was a struggle, don't get me wrong. I think I needed to go through it to understand what I needed to do. So struggle is great, but I think that the way it happened is I worked full time, so I really like the vibe, the environment. Actually, I was working in a great company. I liked the people it was working with. I like the projects and things like that. Everything was new, and everything was exciting. Then eventually we got bought out, and I don't want to get too much into the details, but there's a shift in cultur

Rafa and I talk about the blind spots of design education, what's the first thing he does when he takes on a new client, and how design is thought of in different organisations and sectors.

Connect with Rafa
LinkedIn, Website

Selected links from the episode
Your Digital Rights

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today, we're talking to Rafa Prada, a London based product designer, and college lecturer. We're discussing the blind spots of design education, what's the first thing he does when he takes on a new client, and how design is thought of in different organisations and sectors.

Rafa, thank you so much for joining the Design Meets Business podcast. Just to let everyone know, you and I used to work together at British Gas more than a year ago, although we were in a different team. So while we didn't get to work with each other directly, the fact that you were one of the most talented people in there was never a secret. It was very much out there. So we'll get into what's your secret sauce today. And before that, like in any other episode, I want to give everyone an understanding of what's your story and where you're coming from, and what made would you want to become a designer? All that good stuff.

Rafa: Yes, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, man. Thanks for inviting me here. It's been a pleasure. Well, and again, the thing you say, we have a really good team at British Gas, and I think that we can talk a lot about all the stuff that happens there, but the way to get to that point, I'm coming from a small city in Spain. A lot of people know about it. It's called Seville, Sevilla, and I studied fine arts, and that was kind of a way to get into proper stages of curiosity. I do believe that the same is all about being curious and try to understand well, and then try and bring a solution into the table very well.

So then naturally kind of very slowly, kind of moved towards the place that I am now. I run my own company, and I'm doing consultancy for big firms, but they try always to get into the more collaboratively spaces if that's the case. So I guess that talking about those collaborations and that collaborative space. It’s quite -- it's way a good thing to do in there.

Christian: So looking a bit over your background, you've said yourself, you have a background in arts, but someone told me you also have a background in coding and that is a very interesting combination. Usually, you're very creative, or you're very logical. You have a bit of both. Tell us a bit about that. How did you get into coding when your background was in arts?

Rafa: So, yes, that’s something that I question myself as well sometimes. Like is the something. I can think of the same way, like, “How does that even happen?” And the only kind of answer I could get to that is that basically when you’re an artist -- when you train as an artist, and you create things, you create objects, you have your paintings, you create drawings, you create sculptures, then you have this feeling of ending. You're going to have to complete something and then set it int he wild. Then when you started to do things more related to design, which are more -- I would say that when you're talking about design, it's like way more inclusive. When you're an artist, you produce something; you give it to someone that will buy it or not buy. When you do the same, you design for people or for businesses. So you design for a reason.

So it gets to a point where being a designer, we will always create bridges. So I will do design, but then maybe someone is going to print. I would do a design that someone is going to then make into a website. And that was a bit of a thing that I was missing. I need to understand how things are made in order to make them properly. And that's how I slowly kind of got into code and made sure I understand why -- and this is talking about -- we're talking like six or ten years ago. We were still having conversation about responsive design. “Oh my God, why is these things from 50 pixels to 1%? What is this?” Those are the kind of the learning points, I guess, that gets you into coding. And I've been kind of growing from that.

Christian: So where was the point where you said, “Okay, enough is enough. Now let's focus more on design and bridging that gap between businesses and customers and being that pivot point in the middle that acts to, I guess, please everyone's needs.

Rafa: Yes. So, I have a personal kind of opinion, that critical thinking is very important. And critical thinking is not really something that people get trained of or maybe kind of being taught in schools or any of that stuff. So there's something that's inside of you. You’re either a critical thinker, or you grow into critically look into those things. With this, I mean that at some point you work and you do design based on -- someone will tell you to do thing or a creative director will tell you what to do. You kind of -- you need more answers. You need to make sure in order to make something that is useful for the user, you need to understand what's happening. You need to understand what’s happening.

That's how you use kind of slowly say, “Look, listen, there is no way that a successful piece, it could be called a product., it could be called a service, there’s no way that this will be successful if someone gathers the information, passed it to someone, then that information goes to me, then on that information I make mock-up and pass it to the developer, and then we go on. That needs to be much more fluid. It needs to be much more connected because otherwise, there obviously the Chinese. How they call it in English? The Chinese phone?

Christian: The Chinese whispers.

Rafa: The Chinese whispers. And then you always lose information on the line, and people make decisions down the line, which might not be a decision based on what's the necessary thing for the end product basically.

Christian: So how do you bridge that gap? You join a company, and maybe they don't have these processes in place. Maybe they do a lot of Chinese whispers. Maybe you're the first designer. Where do you start from?

Rafa: It's interesting because I recently joined another company. Well, one of my clients, and there's pretty much that, what's happened. We’re talking about a situation where you get onboarded into a company in the middle of a pandemic. I know that you, Christian, you talk a lot about distributed teams and remote work, so it's very similar. It's just that now it feels more real for some people. For people feel like, “Oh, I cannot go to the office, so we need to introduce this person.”

So when I get to places like the one that you describe, I'll -- things that I do is just basically talk to everyone. I spend the first month just talking to everyone. Everyone needs to know there’s someone new here and make very clear that what I'm doing here is help everyone. That we’re in this together and try to bridge that somehow. You go, and then you say, “Well, I'm going to talk to my direct team.” But this team needs to talk to the stakeholders. And the stakeholders have their own teams, and the bubble kind of grows, grows, grows.

So you can spend basically the whole first month trying to make sure that people understand what you do. Why are you there? What is your purpose? What is your role? And then you understand theirs as well, because that’s very important. Sometimes you get to places where I want to do -- as a designer, I need to create this particular thing, which could be a piece of content, or it could be a particular feature. And I've got my specific needs, which is basically make sure that it's very user-focused, it’s very user-centric, or is kind of good for the business. It's important for the business. But then you talk to a project manager, and then you realise that maybe they have another set of needs.

They may have a bonus, and that bonus is based on a particular outcome. So how could we bridge this? This is important for that person. Like how can we make it that it’s good to work for everyone, really. And this, trying to kind of uncover all those needs, those kinds of unique needs. I feel that a lot of times it takes long. So it's normally not something that you could flip in a week or two, because you need to get trust. You need to gain trust with everyone, and that's really tough.

Christian: Building trust takes a lot of time; you're right. And it takes even more time when you're trying to build it as this outsider that comes into a company. Nobody knows you; nobody knows who you are, and you're trying to build trust. So what are some tips there? How do you approach those conversations? Whether it's a developer, whether it’s a project manager, whether it's someone that’s underneath or above you, how do you approach those conversations on your day four or day 21?

Rafa: I mean, if it was in a kind of a physical space, I just kind of go and talk to the people. I just don't -- I'm shameless on that end. So just go and talk to people really. But honestly, what I normally do is this being very humble. So it s

Jiri is a Design Manager at Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint.com. In today's episode he talks about doing research when there's not enough time, traps designers fall into when they test prototypes, and about the progression from coming out of school to becoming an entrepreneur-designer.

Connect with Jiri

LinkedIn, Twitter

Selected links from the episode
Eric Ries, The Lean Start-up
Art Lebedev AI-designer
Design at Intuit

Full transcript
Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business – a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host, Christian Vasile, and on this podcast I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today I'm talking to Jiri Jerabek. Jiri is a Design Manager at Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint.com. And in today's episode he talks about doing research when there's not enough time, traps designers fall into when they test prototypes, and about the progression from coming out of school to becoming an entrepreneur-designer.

Jiri, thanks for joining the podcast, I really, really appreciate it. The first season of Design Meets Business is exciting to put together, and I'm glad you wanted to be part of it. So you are an all-around designer who started your career a bit similar to how I did, and that is by coding and playing with Flash and all that good stuff… all the good times.

And so before we go into what you do today, your thinking around design and all that, tell me a bit about your background, where you're coming from, and how did you decide to drop coding for a career in Design.

Jiri: Yeah. Oh, and you know what? I loved it so much. I thought with the late 90s and early noughties, what we witnessed was a democratisation of the Internet. We witnessed a time when getting online and coding was one of the easiest things someone in their late teens or early 20s could learn, just like that. There were so many of these resources popping up and I just loved it; this democratisation of something awesome like this. And yeah, so I went on, I did coding. I also did design. This job title almost disappeared these days. I was web designer. And you don't get too many web designers these days.

Christian: You don't hear about that anymore. Everyone is UX and Product...

Jiri: Exactly. I never managed to become a web master. I always wanted to be a web master. That sounds so cool. I never was a web master.

Christian: Well, I think your current job is cooler than being a web master. To each their own…

Jiri: Probably, yes, there you go. So as I evolved in working with clients, most of my early career was spent on the agency side. And I was working for some pretty awesome clients in some pretty awesome agencies, but what I started realising was a lot of the digital products or websites we produced at the time, they were based on what you would call requirements from the client. And ultimately, we were meant to serve an audience, a customer, but we were not really looking at what did the customer need or how to design the product in a way that really satisfies those needs of the customer.

And so I started learning about that. And I learned about UX. I learned about interaction design, and I fell in love, because I realised there's so much knowledge accumulated in that area that could help me with getting on with the job. And so this is when I started switching. I basically switched in my heart first, then my career switch followed a little bit later.

Christian: How did you find that transition from a job that is very logical – the one of coding and I remember Flash and all those good times – to something that at least when you started as a designer, wasn't as logical as your job is now? This was more about feelings and how things look and how they feel. It wasn't as much about business goals in the beginning. So how was that transition going from one role to the other one?

Jiri: I found it actually really easy, maybe I'm a little bit weird. I always found the interaction design and UX side to be fairly logical too – to understand what the customer wants to achieve, what is the goal, why they're coming to this place. How then apply well-documented patterns, validate usability, understand how the customer might be challenged in their path to put items in the shopping basket and check out. To me it made perfect sense. My brain didn't suffer as much.

And I also, at the time when I was still coding, that was the time of CSS hacks, mind you. It was a time when I was trying to get the code working and looking similarly in IE6 and Opera. And code was just like a little, little thing somewhere on the horizon, slowly appearing, I suppose. So it was quite messy at the time as well. I didn't see it as a huge massive change.

Christian: Yeah. Design is messy, isn't it? if the process is clean, then it's something wrong there. I mean, I guess the more complex the project is, the more messy you expect the process to be from taking a product from a concept to finals. And I guess that's one of the things that I'd like to move into talking about, because when you look from the outside, you see just what's above the iceberg. You see the visual design, you see the copy and you think that's what design is, but we both know that the hard work actually goes on behind.

You've worked a lot in agencies and I know that when you work in agencies, it's more often than not all about delivering fast so you can move on to the next client. How did you balance that need of taking your time to do things properly and working on that discovery and understanding customers with the need of the clients to get something delivered in a week or two or three? In the agency world you don't really have a lot of time.

Jiri: Yeah, I'll give you one example that is so funny. If I look back at it, it always makes me smile. So I was working for this agency that doesn't exist anymore. It was a fairly sizeable, London- based agency called Fortune Cookie. But we were serving some pretty awesome clients and the team was a dream team. I joined there as a junior UX designer. And I felt really privileged to be joining such a fantastic team, with such a fantastic boss at the time. I loved it.

And I was really looking up to all my Senior UX designer colleagues. And I was so hungry to learn from them. And one of the clients that we were designing for was National Rail Inquiries, which in the UK it is a system to gather your travel information from before Citymapper came and when Trainline was really crappy. You would always look to National Rail Inquiries, and a lot of people do still today. And so one of the products that we were working on was the mobile app.

When I joined the team working on the app, it was already released. The team was working on it for a while. I joined them later and I was tasked with designing alerts – what happens when something bad goes on the train line and there's a delay or there's a disruption, and how do we let the customer know. And I started designing that. And there was, as you say, there was very little time for some involvement of customers, as it typically is in the agency land or at least used to be at the time. And so I got really creative. I was taking a train every morning.

Christian: You did your own research… you researched yourself

Jiri: Yes, and you must know, and probably everyone who listens to his must know, that talking to someone on the public transport in the UK is a no-no. Even just looking at someone is a no-no. Even just looking at someone is a no-no.

Christian: Yeah.

Jiri: You're risking being killed.

Christian: Yes.

Jiri: But I was like "Hey stranger, I've got this prototype here. It is meant to make your journey to work easier." That was amazing, because once the people understood, “Hey, this will make my life easier”, they’d be like, “Okay, I'm going to give you some feedback”.

So I did this a couple of times and basically I bypassed the constraint of not having the time to do it during my normal working hours. And I suppose it's a little bit unfair to do that, but I was so hungry, I was so passionate about bringing that user-centric perspective into the project that I just did it anyway. I did it all on public transport. I'm cursed for life probably.

Christian: Well, it's a good curse, I think. What's happening when you bring all this research home, and then you've done maybe a diary study, maybe some eye tracking, maybe some guerrilla testing on the train in the morning. You've got all this research and then you need to create a product based off of that. How do you transition from having all this information to actually putting something on a piece of paper or in Photoshop back then, or Sketch, or whatever way you're doing it?

Jiri: There are many different ways a designer can go about doing that. I really fell in love with the way how this is done at Intuit right now. We distil a crystal-clear customer problem. Customer problem is your sort of a needle-sharp definition of what the customer wants to achiev

Austin is a designer at Google and previously the first UX Designer at HubSpot. We talk about the importance of economics as a designer, why the change to distributed teams is inevitable, and why understanding the value systems of a company you're interviewing for is important before saying ‘yes’ to an offer.

Connect with Austin

Website, LinkedIn, Twitter

The UX & Growth Podcast

Austin's newsletter

Selected links from the episode

Austin's UX Design Process

Lean UX, by Jeff Gothelf

The podcast episode with Dan Patiñ0

Indonesia's top healthcare app

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast, I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

On the first episode of the show, we're talking to Austin Knight. Austin is a designer at Google and previously the first UX Designer at HubSpot. We talk about the importance of economics as a designer, why the change to distributed teams is inevitable, and why understanding the value systems of a company you're interviewing for is important before saying ‘yes’ to an offer.

Austin, thank you so much for joining the Design Meets Business podcast. Really excited to talk to you today about some of the things you've been working on and maybe how the future is going to look like for our industry. Your team at Google is influencing the future of Chrome, which everyone knows is the most popular browser out there. And you're focusing on how to get to that next billion users in the emerging markets. So, I'd like to talk about how you manage such a mammoth of a task today, but also about your experience of HubSpot where I know you were one of the first UX Designers and how you helped the company grow so massively.

So before we go into that, it would be nice to start with a bit of a background so people get acquainted with you. What's your story? What led you to the path or on the path you are on today?

Austin: Yes. Excellent. So I'm really thrilled to be here, Christian. Thank you so much for having me on. It's fantastic to be talking to you about these topics that are actually really important to me at the intersection of design and business. But yes, just to give folks a quick background on myself, I am a Product Designer at Google based in the San Francisco Bay area.

Prior to that, I helped lead and established UX at HubSpot, and I actually worked remote for quite a sizeable chunk of that time. I was primarily based out of Rio de Janeiro, but then I was traveling around the world. I do some mentoring at Columbia and Stanford, advise start-ups at Sequoia Capital, do some speaking when we're not dealing with a global pandemic, co-host a podcast called the UX & Growth Podcast and then another one called the Decrypting Crypto Podcast. Both are kind of about design and tech and stuff like that. So really passionate about this space.

I am fully self-taught, so I kind of came into this purely based out of that passion. I come from a place in the middle of the United States called Kentucky. It's not exactly the tech centre of our country, and Design wasn't really seen as a career. So it was more something that like failed artists did to pay the bills. So it was really cool over time for me, as I pursued this passion to realise that actually it was a career and it was something that real value could be derived from. So eventually, yes, made my way here to Google designing with immense responsibility for Chrome – over 3.5 billion users that we are serving now. It is incredible to operate at that scale.

And yes, as you mentioned, starting out at HubSpot as an early designer; learned a lot about what it means to establish a design practice and what was already a very, very well-functioning organisation actually, they really knew what they were doing, but getting design off the ground when the company was already several years into its incredible growth trajectory was quite an experience. So happy to talk about that too.

Christian: Awesome. Thank you for the background. I cannot even imagine how complicated it must be to have to design for billions of users, and that's billions with a B. There must be so much going on behind there. And we're going to talk about that in a second, but first I want to talk about something else that I've read about you; might be true, might not be true. If it's on the Internet, it's true. Isn't that what they say? Tell me about unsolicited redesigns and getting jobs out of that. Is there any truth to that?

Austin: Yes, there is some truth to this. So a big theme in my career is actually sort of self-initiative, which I think an unsolicited redesign is sort of one manifestation of that. I started my career really by launching a non-profit organisation, purely again as a passion project. It was fighting human trafficking. And did a fundraiser with a local business in Kentucky, and we raised way more money than we expected to. And as a way of thanking them, I wanted to kind of go through their digital presence, especially their website, to perform an audit and give that to them as an additional thing in return for the incredible work that they did for our fundraiser.

And then I presented this audit to them, and they basically said, “Look, this is awesome. We don't have the expertise in-house to do this. How much do we have to pay you to just do this for us?” So that ended up being basically my first job. And it was really just a fantastic opportunity to kind of explore all of the different areas of design that I felt I could be interested in and start to hone my craft and take things in the direction that I wanted to, because I have a lot of autonomy in that role.

And then that eventually led to -- this was around like 2013. There’s a huge allure, as there still is, to the idea of joining a start-up at the time. So there's a start-up out of Cincinnati, Ohio, that really caught my attention. I did an unsolicited redesign of the site, built a style guide, spoke to the CEO, and got a job because of that effectively.

And then interestingly, that also was a big theme in my going to HubSpot. I was on Reddit doing anonymous design feedback on like r/designcritique or something like that. And one person whose design I critiqued happened to be a fairly prominent engineer at HubSpot, and he knew that they were looking to establish their UX practice. And so this opened that conversation to complete strangers behind random usernames. Ultimately, we became very close co-workers, and we actually started the UX & Growth Podcast together. That's Matt Rowe – was the guy that did that with me, and he's still at HubSpot doing incredible things.

So it's really cool to see how when you have a passion, and you are pursuing it organically, it will lead to opportunities both intentionally, of course, and unintentionally as some of these were.

Christian: That's a great story. The reason I wanted to talk about it is because I see a lot of designers nowadays, especially towards the beginning of their careers, really struggling with getting work. And especially in this time when nobody's really hiring, or very few companies are, it must be even more difficult than usual. And this story reminds me of the fact that whichever situation you find yourself in, there is always a way around it. Not a lot of people do unsolicited redesigns, and I guess not a lot of people will continue just because of this podcast. But I just want to put the story out there because it's a bit inspiring of how you can start in a different way than most other people do.

So you’re self-taught. You didn't have a college degree or whatever, you didn't have that catalyst to start your career based off, but you found other ways of doing it. So I just want to raise that flag and say, there's always a way to get in front of companies, and there must be, not Google, not HubSpot, not Facebook, not Apple. Probably that doesn't work there, but if you are at the beginning of your career, I can imagine that starting in a smaller company, it's probably even better than starting in a large company that might be a bit overwhelming. And maybe a way of starting in a smaller company is doing some sort of an unsolicited redesign or trying to just provide any value maybe without expectation, and someone might say, “You know what? We actually need that.”

So that's why I wanted to talk about this. I love that story and the Reddit story of how you got into HubSpot; that's even better. So let's talk about HubSpot. You are the first UX Designer there working on the website, working on hubspot.com, and when was that? 2015 or when was that?

Austin: Yes, yes, right around there.

Christian: ‘15, right around there. So they were already growing massively, but with you being the first UX Designer, I can imagine that the role you came into was maybe a bit different than, or defin