Design Leadership Unplugged ft. Buzz Pearce

so buzz welcome to the podcast thank you very much for having me thank you for joining me it feels like an age since we've been we've been speaking for for many years uh generally about design work and I've been speaking to you about job hunts in the past from a personal perspective and probably no doubt trying to pitch you in terms of getting people into your teams uh but now we are here to talk about you and the podcast and some of the topics we've got to talk about today specifically around design leadership the design industry which of course you've been in for well a few years I won't give away your age cause we've just discussed that um but can you give us a history in terms of your background how you got into design and then up to where you are today okay well let's let's give away the age so people got frame of reference I'll be 50 next year yup which is obviously causing some time to reflect yup so um I'll try and give you a few bits and pieces that people might not get if they stalked me on LinkedIn how about that how do I get into design well I had a great inspirational uh start point which was my father uh he's an architect okay and uh so I would always admire him on his draftsman table doing things by hand um and just seeing the kind of care and quality of craft and so that was very inspiring and of course uh also having a a mother who's very practical on craft like you know wonderful seamstress and so on so the act of making and building was there right from an early age which I suppose in some ways is quite typical of any designer you're taking things apart understanding them how they work what the materials can do and try and replicate it yourself so I suppose I had a a very um well blessed childhood really having a workshop at home and a nice big garden would build tree houses and yeah get very practical you were that child taking things apart were you yeah Lego yeah we didn't have a TV yeah it was just like no let's not have any of that and then of course computers became more accessible and I well remember getting a first family computer an Amstrad CPC 6 1 2 8 I can still remember that yeah and of course that was that opened up a different kind of world but I wouldn't say I was like a boffin or anything like that I just wanted to understand it as another medium and then we got an acorn Archimedes which was a a kind of the gooey point and click um kind of interface that you see on Apple Macs and so on but no one really heard of the ACORN computers but they were amazing um and right at that time early teenager getting into those so you know desktop publishing came out and you could hook up a printer and you could start doing your own stuff and output these things at professional grade so we got the we got the itch and a friend of mine at school got one as well and we started doing the first school newspaper nice so that was one of the things but right at that time schools were doing um work experiences and that was my first experience with an Apple Mac in a you know marketing company where I was scanning things in and getting them into layouts and so on so anyway so I thought I'd just dwell a little bit on just that that era yeah of what was kind of interesting me and I was very much into fine arts as well you know painting sculpting and just the act of making I still am like that yup um but then uh sort of being encouraged rather to actually go into the workplace very early on OK not not even do a levels OK um but I felt somehow that I needed to learn and be taught from the masters of the craft so going into university I had some amazing professors you know on typography and I went to bath and we weren't allowed to touch a computer for like a year and a half okay it was all hand drawn 8 point Helvetica type you know yup and so I I love that yeah um it slowed you down made you think and so on and then of course the internet came along and just blew everything out no one really knew what it was it was called new media so I started teaching myself and then long story short me and my mates at Uni entered various competitions and this one particular competition for the Royal Society of Arts was design the um user interface for inflight entertainment mm hmm and so we went down to Bristol Airport got a bunch of airplane seats cut holes in it put a you know put the computer in and shipped it all to London for the presentation long story short Simon Waterfall was one of the judges we won it he offered us a job yep and that was my great first job at deep end yeah um back in so 1998 9 99 sometime like that and then it's just been a rocket ship and people go oh how did you plot your career I didn't yeah I really didn't and you can probably tell I just like making stuff and doing things with other like minded people yeah and seeing where it sort of takes me but you you know um you're looking for sort of guidance where should I go what should I do your different life stages require different things so and then of course you can just look on LinkedIn where I've been um but yes I started off in the agency world yep um but then it was always a yearning to get closer to a brand to a product to a business and um after about eight years at poke um Skype came along yep and this was Skype when um it we just released video calling on a PC mm hmm when even on a Mac or any other thing so really early and yeah I came in as creative director with a team and I'd never managed people before and I was way out of my depth and I made basically every mistake in the book so it's been a real baptism of I was put into a job of incompetence yeah a maze that I didn't you know get booted out um so I wouldn't advise that yeah it's an interesting time though because that was probably a time whereby people were saying video calls and I was who's gonna want to have a call like through the internet like why would people want to do that yeah well there'd always been that kind of Jetsons like type of the future which is you know in films we're showing all the time so there was always that pent up this is what the future's gonna be but no one really experienced it people had tried but they were notoriously complex to to set up you had to open up firewall ports here there and apple had tried this and Microsoft had tried and everyone was like it's just so much of a faff and then Skype came along and it literally was plug in you don't have to do anything yep connect together and it worked it was like magic so of course saying that you worked at Skype people like wow you're you're some sort of celebrity yep so it was a it was probably one of my favourite places to work in my career and it was it was it was a rocket ship and we'd sort of inadvertently cracked the viral coefficient which is you know it for every one person they bring in another person it was almost like one it was amazing so you couldn't Skype alone so it was double digits and we remember just seeing like a million you know a week being added to the registration and you didn't it was sort of just took off yep I didn't really have to do anything it was just there but then it was OK we now we gotta connect up all the other end points you know on all the other types of devices and new devices were coming out smartphones were coming out front facing cameras and then of course the iPhone came out and it wasn't ready in version 1 as everyone remembers but version 2 the 3G one I remember very distinctly taking my first Skype call when I was in New York and the quality was insane like like they were standing right next to me and the amazing engineers there who developed the Codex that are still in use today yep um was incredible but then you rapidly discover that the battery life of the iPhone lasted about 20 minutes when you're running Skype so it's like OK that didn't scale so you you you know getting much closer to the technical side of things was probably what I Learned most from being being at Skype and then it's been sort of in house ever since then nice and going from something that is quite creative you sound like you're a hands on person right you like doing creating making into a leadership role yeah alright that's it's a big change right and people don't necessarily realize sometimes the transition that you need to make to go from a doer to a strategist or a people leader yeah I I always like getting in the kitchen you know but not like hey I need to be head chef or anything like that it's not it's not like that it's just more being around people hmm and and talking through things and developing that common language of taste and how you analyse things and if you need me to sweep the floor I'll do that still I still do that now even in this so called leadership position so I try and keep a little bit of the hands on but in a way more supportive role um so yeah just kind of the the making aspect is always there and I don't know whether you know as a true designer you ever really give that up yeah OK um but it's fair to say that you do get a bit rusty on certain tools and you know folks coming in they know all the shortcuts and they can produce things much quicker and I'm you know still detaching instances and you know doing all that kind of stuff that winds everyone up but you learn and I'm asking hey show me how you did that that's cool so I feel like there's a transition but the the most important thing is actually it's it's not a transition of the making so it's more of a transition in your mindset okay and in in simple terms I think of it like this and this is from my own experience but I do see it as a pattern you know in in your in your 20s and so on you're really kind of learning the tools learning the craft getting proficient and so a lot of it's about you and your and your skills and then how you operate within the team and then you're thinking about the business whereas you get into a leadership position it's completely inverted you're just constantly thinking about the business and then the team and then you yeah and it's that flip and it happens quite suddenly it's not it's not always a gentle transition at least it wasn't for me hmm so I try and help people understand as they're going through their career this is how you're gonna have to start thinking cause if you're not prepared then it can feel really sudden and you hear a lot of designers who make that say switch from IC to manager ugh I don't like this yeah you know cause they haven't been prepped for what it will feel like there's not like a management training school for designers that I see right it's most of the time you you just get put into it exactly and um and I did yeah and so you know I remember getting to Skype and I think I don't know I had half a dozen people reporting to me and that all felt good and my ego was crazy high and wow you know yeah this guy and and then it comes to performance reviews what's a performance review yeah honestly I I never done it never done it at at in agency it was like the performance review was happy Christmas good year is a couple of grand on your merry way it would you know it was it was like that yeah so how did you learn well you didn't have chat GPT to go and ask you to create a performance review certainly didn't I think very quickly it became apparent to my team very quickly that hey he's never done this before so I I try and be honest with people and go I've never done it before I'm really sorry you know but we'll go through this together because it's not actually that complicated and I think I'm fairly good at observing people and understanding what makes them tick and where they get their energy from and so on so I think I had that there and I also had opinions on what aesthetics what good looks like so I was able to kind of coach and that so you you kind of have a few of those things but it wasn't so structured so OK what are they gotta work on what's their growth plan and so on how are they done previously oh man I haven't taken any notes in one to one meetings or anything like this I've got all this memory that I have to now pour out and was it right and I think just by sharing observations getting them to reflect it became very apparent is that ah that's the key is it's not me that has to own their career they have to yep so it I tended to then start developing a kind of leading by asking questions which is effectively coaching yep right and people go what's the difference between a mentor and a coach they often get kind of blended together and my simple mind is that well a mentor comes from a place of experience and so therefore if we're having a conversation my mental mind would go OK based on what you've told me this is what I would do mm hmm but the coach would then flip that round and go OK based on this what would you do yup cause then the accountability lies with you and it's much more empowering because if you do the thing that I told you to do and it doesn't work then it's like oh now I'm accountable yeah OK not that I'm shying away from accountability cause I'm gonna say we'll probably get on to that but it's it's very important that you that word empower people yup to make those decisions in a safe space so that they don't deliberately fail yup you know because this whole notion of failing um I don't really like to be honest I have I don't like to fail yeah so I don't get out I don't go out to fail yeah I don't think many other people do go out to fail but it puts an interesting lens on it and I'm saying this because it's in the context of my own failure yeah um so you looking at it and you go OK how can I learn the fastest that's that's more and if I fail on the way then that's fine so yes I get the expression fail fast but it puts it in the negative yeah OK learn things more in the positive so how would you frame it then learn fast learn fast and so that's what I did or I tried to learn fast and we had great people in in the people department who were like OK we see you're struggling you know and we had really good coaching um that's great on being a good manager and I say I say I think honestly it's a constant voyage of learning being a manager because you're dealing with people and variables like you've never had before um if you think that you know designing a product has lots of variables yep that's nothing compared to dealing with people um and dealing with team yep yeah and you've have you had a mentors and coaches through throughout your career yourself and I've had the fortunate yeah I mean I've worked with amazing people and they've been very patient with me and sharing their wisdom um I've only ever had one professional coach yep and she was amazing and my that was first time I ever had that was as a sky scanner and that was as a result of talking to my mentor who was the CEO at the time and he said have you ever had a coach no what does a coach do you know it was sort of at that time where coaching was becoming a more of a commonplace thing yeah and it was very very helpful because she um called me out really yeah OK 'cause I was kinda looking for coaches like a advice like a mentor but no and that's where I learnt the difference between mentor and gonna ask you some tough questions you're gonna have to come up with the answers yeah and I remember when we were doing this sort of I I chatted to quite a few different coaches cause you wanted to get the right mix and the question that she asked me which I thought oh that's interesting she could sense that I was getting quite overwhelmed and so with everything that I was doing and so when was the last time you cried in front of someone ooh that's gonna be interesting hmm so and she's like well I'm gonna push you and you might end up breaking haha I was like okay that that that just kind of that's probably what I need and she just to take me to the to the edge yep okay now I know where where my limits are and so on and then we can start actually having a constructive dialogue on how to do that so yeah though you have these moments in time like I could take you to the place where she said it and you know and so on so and then we yeah we had I don't know six months of constant thing and she was she was great yeah and would you say for perhaps more junior people coming up in the the design market and design world yeah would you say a mentor is a better place to start or a coach because if they don't have the experience can they really have it coached out of them we're in a interesting time aren't we yeah where so much information and advice is readily available and even can be created in a moment but I still think there are some fundamentals that get very easily overlooked and I think you still need to have real deep human connection with your fellow human beings yeah um where you can share because I I would get concerned if you start defaulting to AI for advice and so on um it's very cold people are there and then they are because it's so convenient kinda scary but what you get is homogenization mm hmm people think the same so you have to you have to use it sparingly and I think of it as if a computer is like an electric bike for the mind mm hmm sorry a bike for the mind yup that Steve Jobs said yeah then a then a computer with AI is like an electric bike for the mind yeah you just get up and going so much quicker but then it plateaus rapidly I think and you're still on your own so you're still gonna use your mental faculties that are God given gift you know yeah a reason and so when you're when you're young when I was young you know you have a really good dollop of naivety yep which is helpful because you don't know what what risks you you sort of have an idea but you don't really know the magnitude of the risk and so it liberates you yeah the older you get the more perhaps risk averse so the reason why I'm saying this is I don't necessarily know what advice I would give from a mentorship point of view because we've never been in this space before with AI so it's OK but I I still think will come down to the fundamentals can you actually think can you dissect can you analyze cause that's the job right yep and if you're out sourcing that to to machine that's dangerous I think yeah um so with our kids at home you know if they're gonna start using AI for homework it's like OK then you're gonna start marking the AI yeah cause you just you just do it in a different way yeah and the same at work so I can get notion I can get all these different tools to spit me out a plan but then really interrogate that plan and modify it and so on but so many people just take that and then pass it on yeah you no and maybe I'm getting old maybe but I I want people to properly think yeah deeply still um so I'm yeah I'm I'm still keep banging that drum from a mentorship perspective nice um and then coaching I think anyone can do cause you just ask questions yeah there's a great book leading by asking questions yep which is very very helpful yeah nice and you've obviously worked in some great organizations experience some rapid growth as we've spoken about a moment ago what have you seen companies get wrong from a design perspective when they're going through that type of growth because I know we're not talking about necessary failure we're talking about learning so so yeah where where can companies learn from things that have happened that you've seen well designers we we have an ideal sense of how design should be run um and I think the first thing to do is as a designer you gotta know where other people are coming from and so one of the things I think is interesting right now based on I've pretty much only worked at founder LED start UPS is ask the question to the leadership when was their kind of conversion moment to design yup when did they realize oh that's the power of what design can do and that's a very telling question and answer hmm okay I now know where they're at right because it could be just very aesthetic it could be really deep and meaningful problem solving could be all sorts of different but you then start to gauge where they're at in in how they think about design how it should be organized and so on so that's that's one thing and then the other thing is where design sits in an organisation can be very critical mmm hmm um and often yeah we want design the top seat of the table but that's not always the best place to be honest I've Learned why because you have to put yourself in the CEO's shoes and certain CEOs will have a very strong kind of bias to a particular kind of um function right because that's their that's their happy place others will know what design can do but have no idea how to actually put it into practice so therefore that's why I'm there others will have a very strong idea how to practice it and therefore you have different kind of conversations um so it's a it's it's an interesting one because not all businesses are created equal the sectors have different biases and having worked across different sectors I think that's that's one of the eye opening things it's not there's not a single playbook so you gotta go in and seek to understand where they're coming from where the design is in their mindset why do you want me here you know that's a good question often it's I just want you to make things look good you know and you go okay well that's a start right yeah sometimes you just have to okay well that's what we can do and that rapidly translates into well we can make ideas tangible and that's them prototyping so I have a saying which is if a picture paints 1,000 words a prototype saves 1,000 meetings because you can actually get an experience it and of course now prototype is so fast yeah I mean that's it's insane we can talk about that in a bit later yeah um so you can get something very tangible very quickly and even sometimes that tangible thing can often be put into a test put into production so the whole thing is kind of collapsing but then you come back down to fundamentals again yeah what's the problem it's solving how well is it solving that problem you know it's not just organizing complexity it's removing it what's the outcome that you're looking for still comes down to those fundamental things as a design I say as a problem solving process that often design is the one championing in a business hmm along with and along with engineering and product so I think those three functions are the most kind of critical is probably data in that as well yep these days so the quad is a really good structure to put in place and have really good relationships with your peer group in that in that space no matter where they kind of sit in the organization so I really do try and seek to pull those four together and how do you do that well I start by asking questions yeah what are they goals what are their motives start to understand what do they think about design etcetera where have they been burned in the past cause often they've got some stories um either you know a design team or a design leader or something that's like alright well me up and so you gotta understand where the where the buttons are yeah OK and where where not on where to have a tough conversation but then you you rapidly gotta quickly come and go this is how I see it this is how I think we are in in the business right now and this is the first stage that I'll take you can't if you give them the whole playbook they won't wanna go right there straight away but you just can't um you can get there quite quickly yeah but you obviously got to think of the composition of the team think of the seniority of the team think of the skills you need to bring in what are they trying to achieve um so I have those conversations and then it's like okay if you're hiring X amount of engineers we're gonna have this kind of surface area okay cause often engineering go first yeah because they gotta do the most amount of hiring so you have that as a spider sense of okay this is the magnitude of what we gotta go build and then product and and design and data often kind of match a sort of a loose ratio and who's gonna go where um so I just have those open conversations and try and try and write the thinking down as much as possible share those documents for comment you know and have those artifacts um but it still comes down to actually talking to people yeah understanding where they're coming from as a leader they're they're expecting you to lead so you you have to be decisive but you look at the different composition of the leadership team your peer group and some will be extremely decisive and can actually make a decision very very quickly with very little data others will take a little bit longer I'm probably on this one of I'll take a bit longer cause I wanna understand it's not about perfection over you know doing it's more of this case I wanna have confidence in the decision that I'm that I'm making so yeah I can procrastinate and I know that's a weakness of mine is it backfired on you before oh yeah yeah I mean even now I'd say you know I'm working at a company called Tem Energy which is a wonderful company and um yeah I had a good chat with one of the founders and the CEO and I've been working there now for about in total 40 odd days yep and he's like OK right let's see some action then you know in terms of how you wanna structure the team and I'm going yep I know the reason why I'm procrastinating cause I don't know whether I'm gonna be in long term you know can I see them through cause you you don't wanna start making decisions then exit so procrastination I try and use as a strength but I know that um if you ask my wife yeah I can procrastinate but I think that's just I like to understand it comprehensively enough mm hmm not everything but enough to be confident in the decision so and then it comes back down to I suppose a bit of my style which is I'm I'm open about how I think and what you can expect from me cause I think that's probably one of the most important things you can try and do as a leader or as anyone really is what are you getting yeah just be honest I don't like doing that you know I wanna do this OK what gives me energy what doesn't OK great now I know how to shape it yeah OK you have to do a bit of that cause you have to do stuff you don't always like doing but how can you use your skills and apply them to the thing that you don't like doing to make it a bit more enjoyable so I tend to try and use my design skills to visualise the problem you know what I'm trying to solve yup cause I'm a visual thinker and I think that's partly why I procrastinate yeah is because if I haven't got a real strong mental model or visual model in my mind I I don't feel like I've fully grasped it if I can't draw it yep so that's why I'm constantly reaching for the paper to draw it and but that helps people right because we're all you know um we need all those different facets uh to help explain quite complex things sometimes it's not just the written yeah yeah and you talked about the quadrant of different disciplines so product design software engineering and data could be data sort of merge marketing could be ops you know all these different functions here I see a lot of the lines being blurred these days between these so like what's your opinion on merging these these quad this quadrant together almost which I see in some organizations where it all sits under one umbrella yeah um often it happens more organically um I think if you start forcing it then you tend to get a bit organ rejection the bottom line is that people are in certain functions because they have a preference for it and preference you know competence follows preference yep as a product manager you probably have a general preference for being super organized and wanna help people and orchestrate and so on but you also have a sense strong sense of I wanna make things that solve problems okay so there's an overlap there with design and engineering so you always had that overlap as what we call product people mm hmm yeah are you a product person yeah so you you still have those things in in a root but it is starting to overlap but some people just don't have that overlap they go no I actually I want to stay here how do you force people over that you know I think I think to think of it is you can nudge and encourage a classic one is like design owning more of the front end now hmm right because you kind of can yup but then you gotta be checks and balances it's like OK well you might be able to push something to production as on but can I verify that that's good quality cut no I can't so you still need the the deep expertise yup and experience but you probably need less of it in some ways cause you can have people that are just doing those things um on a daily basis but I think it's still people building collaborating together trusting each other it's the classic kind of five dysfunctions of a team do they trust each other and so on can you have those open conversations um so you try and encourage that um and we're literally kind of going through those sort of process enhancements now at at 10 yep we just crossed 100 people in the business yes and those are often the sort of the tipping points where it was working and all of a sudden it breaks yep and that's normal yep oh no now we gotta fix it again and so I I kinda like those kind of things I got a love hate relationship with it cause it's like ah we just fixed it now it now it's broken again broken again we gotta we gotta Rev it give you something to do yeah job security I suppose um but yeah having gone through those various stages you do see certain patterns and that's kind of quite natural human behaviour because one thing I kind of learnt I can't remember where I heard it from or maybe I dreamt it I wouldn't claim any originality here but relationships are so fundamental in business in any company the if this is me and here's my relationship to my peer group mm hmm that's four relationships right me to them mm hmm but a really tight team will understand their relationships to each other yep so how many is that yeah OK that's quite a lot of relationships yeah you add one more oh that's like almost an exponential yeah another one and then you know how many relationships can you hold in your head when you really do understand other people's relationships to each other and then you naturally just kind of have this point in time where you go OK I I can't keep track of everything yeah and that's the kind of core startup team right that of about say 30 odd where everyone knows each other quite intimately and that's you know several hundred relationships if you gotta think about it yep so of course some people love that and they love that intimacy and I totally get that I mean I still kind of crave that kind of intimacy as well but a business is gonna scale and some people then go I just they they try and keep hold of wanting to know everything all the time and know everyone all the time but you just can't yeah so you have to let go at some point and there's these kind of tipping points so so 65 and then again it's sort of a one 25 and then when you're after like 250 to 500 and it's a bit arbitrary but there are tipping points just slightly in there and then after 500 you're kind of in a replicable kind of playbook because you've got you've got the ways in which you structure and scale but you go that that's probably a bit of an old school way of looking at it right because you can do more with less in some ways with a I hate that expression actually do more with less but you can certainly get up and running quicker with AI and you can put workflows together yep but then it's those workflows that have to be managed and maintained and that still needs humans to do that so you can automate but you still gotta scale because processes get more convoluted and especially if you go into new markets there are different processes gonna create new workflows so you still gonna have to scale and you still got people that have to build it but I try and keep things very lean yeah okay um it's always much better to be in want of more yep than to have surplus yep um so yep is that what you've always done though with building your teams if you try to keep things relatively lean yeah and I kind of I kind of learnt a little bit the hard way at Skype which I went in and had almost everything fully staffed yeah and then and then without kind of realizing it you had a team of like you know 50 odd people and then they're like okay so what am I doing next week and I'm like oh man you know yeah and just hard to keep track of was that just so hard to keep track of yeah just so hard to keep track of and you know I signed a contract cause I was so concerned about missing deadlines and so on I suppose that's that's still a thing that I still have to learn which is I say yes yeah OK so learning to say no what it's not necessary to learn to say no on certain things yeah learn to say no that's that's a really bad idea don't do that that's rarer than than what I would say is not now we're focused on this OK yeah yeah which there's a slightly softer way cause it's probably a legitimate thing that we should be doing but yeah you can't do it all so like okay now it's about how to learn how to make the trade offs you're either gonna get this or this you know here's the resources let's yeah and you find yourself making those trade offs as a leader is your almost like your daily muscle that you're using not that this yeah and helping guide but you want them to self govern as well yeah here's the goal okay now you make the trade off yeah what would you get me slip into the coach okay based on that we'll do this good now you're owning it so yeah I I have been burned by over hiring um and I Learned the lesson the hard way so I keep it in scarcity um because you you're looking at a cost ahead right in a business yeah how much is those people actually earning for the business and yeah and but now you're seeing the cost ahead getting way more scrutinized yeah and so it's a good metric to keep track of like are they actually delivering you know on an aggregate you know um so yeah and how do you um talking of metrics how do you sort of then put together the metrics to to look at the value creation of design cause it's a big thing that people always look at and go sometimes the CEO goes I don't know what what's the value of UX design in my organization uh so is there a way that you have a secret sauce oh I wish yeah sorry it's it's a it's a fundamental thing that keeps coming up hmm um but it's so similar to how product management gets evaluated which is what is the thing that you're shipping yeah OK and what is the effect of it so there's no one single metric you're you're looking at a whole bunch of things um so the way I which I try and sort of stratify it up is there's the team operations right how efficient are you um are you delivering hitting deadlines so that's all kind of sanity kind of metrics to just make sure that you you're doing what you said you would do basically um and then it's like okay based on that how do we know what we're producing is actually making a difference so I tend to produce a kind of a lever map like if if we're going to introduce design standards what will that actually then do and what's the proxy metric that will then do to to hit revenue yep because it's not gonna be like design standards bomb revenue doesn't work like that there are there are proxies inside that so you're OK well engineering have standards code reviews why why do they have that well because there should be a direct correlation between quality of code and incidents yep or bugs yep same as design so you gonna well there's there's overlaps in in product there's overlaps in design there's overlaps in data well can we make informed decisions on poor data no we can't so so the way in which those four functions is like the glue and the grease you've got to kind of agree together what are the metrics the KPIs that are worth measuring that actually tell us something yep is going to happen or has happened that we like or dislike OK it's not that complicated when you explain it like that but it's it's a complicated process of unpicking what is worth measuring in a certain business yes um that's the thing I think people most people don't know what to measure yeah yeah and I I've I've struggled sometimes and get hmm well what what should I measure here the beauty of it is right now is you can go to GPT and go based on all these things give me some ideas and that's a good you know electric like a good start point you can go oh yeah I forgot about that one I could do it like that yeah but then you're on your own again you go okay now I let's bring that to the table and kind of look at it how we get the data that informs that I was chatting to a good friend of mine the other two days ago and he done an interesting thing his name uh no lions he's the chief design officer at um Natwest now yup and uh sorry no if this is but he was going hey I just took all of the Figma logs and saw what I could kind of maybe create from it and I think I might be onto something but I'm not sure and so we had a really good chat and oh that's an interesting thing OK let me have a I'll take my logs and see what I get from it is it is it worth the information cause you got data in abundance yeah and sometimes you just gonna shifting through and you might pick on a find a gem so I think quant data is helpful it tells you what is going on yep don't tell you why no that's when you need the Qual yeah it's a classic adage but the the older I get the more I believe in it you gotta have that as a the train won't run unless you have Quan and Qual yeah and I think in a in a game now where brands are and companies that want to have a bit more of a relationship with their customer you gotta understand what makes the customer tick and you don't really get that from Quant you get that from personal engagement um and understanding what they're trying to accomplish so I'm a big believer in a lot of things in business start from fundamental research yeah and why do you think then most organizations in in my opinion uh don't do that reason they're impatient and they also they're afraid of finding out something they don't wanna know OK cause the very nature of research is you don't know you don't know what you're gonna get back so the ego telling someone who's a business owner go telling them this is a shitty idea don't do it yeah but you have to understand why something is a bad idea yeah so you have to kind of go out and say see what happens then there is of course well you only ask five people and then you get into the kind of statistical yeah side of things so you have to kind of teach a little bit you're looking for patterns you're looking for these things um so I think there's yeah there's people that have a very strong hunch and you're constantly balancing these things because I mean I hate focus groups and all that stuff that it's more just quiet observation listening watching them perform tasks you know that tells you a lot alright you're not necessary by asking questions actually it's just by observing look at this task what you're trying to accomplish and some that you get these ah that's really interesting yeah um and give one example um Alexa wonderful product designer researcher at Tem Energy um tracks all the kind of insights and you go OK she's got I don't know how many hundred insights how many of those actually got into the product development life cycle and actually got done yeah great metric right because if you're doing research and none of that gets into like what in the world are we doing yeah you know so we go OK there's your score we gotta see these things happening coming through into the product you can't do it all yeah but that one's more critical than that one you know how do you then score it so yeah we're looking at the the rice score right now you know as using that I don't know intercom and others use those so you're looking at different models is this gonna be a better model than that one or do we have to invent our own very quickly it can get convoluted on how to assess the data because some of it's just arbitrary scoring internally just to give ourselves a bit of a steer it's a bit like that with engineering right very easy can can bamboozle an organisation and people go OK you know I'm not gonna talk about it because you're talking stuff I don't understand so they kind of get left alone yeah you know most of the time yeah yeah oh yeah four nines reliability oh yeah we're cool ha ha ha it's an arbitrary number yeah so why four nines why not three why not two what what I don't know what that you know yeah but it's a it doesn't mean but it's a number right yeah and they decide okay that's the thing that we're gonna do same with design yeah um but we should see if this got shipped what metric actually fundamentally was it adoption was it activation and you got all these different things um how much did it increase retention and so on so um they're just fundamental metrics you don't always know yeah sometimes you ship something it works sometimes you don't that's the beauty of it yeah um you're just mitigating risk as much as you possibly can yeah and looking at as many different types of data points and different types of metrics to help balance the scale yeah yeah exactly that's what makes it enjoyable when you're uncovering things all the time yeah and we spoke a little bit well touched upon tooling and you mentioned the fact that you can create a prototype in well minutes seconds depending on what tools you're using as someone who is quite old school in terms of your your background you talked about typography a bit of a dying art these days I feel for most people most people don't know much about typography in the design world how do you feel about all of the the design tools that are coming through that you can just do these things quickly is it something that you cherish and you love love using them or are they killing the industry I think it comes back to the point of like if you're divesting yourself of thinking and offloading that to a machine I'm very wary of that yep but rapid prototyping is about learning mmm hmm right the issue is there's tons of these different prototyping tools they do things in different ways you get up to speed to a certain point and then you get into a prompting black hole and then it just doesn't do what you you can't seem to it plateaus very quickly and then you can't seem to prompt your way out of it and you go I'm just gonna start again and then you're gonna look and go how long have I spent doing this I could have probably done it by now yeah and that's the pattern we see everywhere everyone's OK but then sometimes because it's probabilistic not deterministic you don't always know what you're gonna get so we're trying to create a probabilistic model be deterministic because as designers we're used to being very deterministic in shaping the thing so what in my ideal I would wanna have a a product that has the prompt and that's kinda like your art director your UI direct you know giving instructions to a designer yeah then have the canvas that you can actually use like Figma where you can feel it and stretch it and be direct manipulation as much as possible then you've got the fine tuning controls yep which you would traditionally have and then you've got the code okay and you need to have all of them and they all need to work across each other but at the moment it's just like it's still linear it doesn't flow back in to the design tool people go why is it have to do that well it does because as a designer I I need to feel it I need to be able to tweak it and test it with with my hands as much as I possibly not make that not tell it hmm it's just weird yeah I think so yeah maybe I'm a bit old school and then typography is is such a thing you got such fine tune controls now which is great in software development that I think as you progress in your career if you're really concerned about the quality of the thing that you put out you naturally get very interested in how the alphanumeric presentation is in the UI yeah um how things are spaced and how things are laid out the visual hierarchy is so critical for you to be able to understand things and so I find myself teaching that quite a bit um and sort of showing examples of why that's you know not that way this way oh yeah because you can just change things around so AI has a kind of a I got a love hate relationship with it yeah um but it's like whack a mole you just can't keep up yeah it's like one minute one tool can't do it the next minute another tool over here can do it and then that one then can do it you know which one am I gonna invest in sorry but there's just there's no there's no magic formula here it's like you gotta kind of just test them all and so I have like three or four same prompt yeah Bosch Bosch Bosch and you go how much are we spending on tools yeah you know how much is how much is costing to run those things from energy you go gets all very expensive suddenly you realize that actually replacing a person with all of these tools is it not as cheap as people make out yeah you go so you get this sort of delta happening where you go OK well one person using all these tools cause you don't know what you're gonna get um versus actually just hiring a person and then who's a really good person who can actually just get it done yeah way it up yeah so yeah um I mean I'm I'm pessimistic and I'm optimistic and it's a strange place right now but you probably hear this from absolutely everyone yeah um I think it's good to talk about it I think a lot of people are in this sort of in between stage at the moment they're not quite sure what to think and uh I think we're still early on into sort of you venturing into to these sort of things and in the mainstream yeah yeah certainly I mean it's I mean I've been using it at work since really GPT came out and that was the kind of the first kind of mainstream oh wow and then you start what you see is people when a new tech comes out you see the current patterns being applied to it so what I mean by that is people are so used to doing Google searches that effectively they were just using TPT to do searches so you go from the familiar to the new and then you start pushing and go what can what can this do and then of course with the internet is it everyone's then sharing what they can and can't do and there's so many charlatans out there in my opinion but yeah I did this and I did this and then you go yeah she show me how and then I don't know don't worry about that and you go you can't really do it can you yeah you try and do it um and then there are some people that genuinely have set up amazing work flows and that wow that's that's really impressive um I don't know how how they can scale I I don't know because I think workflows have to be constantly maintained yeah more complexity comes in so um yeah it's it's an interesting time in the family as well yeah going on a car journey and I'll end up speaking to GPT to um settle a debate or to find out if and so I I find myself going on a walk yep talking to GPT yeah as it's just sort of bouncing I just even GBT even Claude I just I'm using GBT at the moment probably because there's a strange personification that comes with AI and there's a relationship that starts building that scares me a little yeah yeah what's going on but you everyone prefers a different way of information being presented to them especially in the audio hmm so yeah having different tone timber speed people assimilate things in different ways so there's one particular voice that I that happens to just you know the other voices could explain it exactly the same way but it's just the the way in which it's dished up resonates to you yeah it helps me understand it more yeah and I think that's a really interesting space um and it's a bit like that when you're giving feedback to another designer you know I could give feedback exactly the same way as another person but the way in which you express it suddenly clicks yep and so yeah how how do you convey those through the the written means it we're so multi dimensional in terms of how information is delivered to us um a lot of the time we're doing loom video yeah because you need all those different aspects like there's the person's face you can hear their voice you can see what they're doing yeah and those become really powerful definitely but then you're gonna watch it yep so it's like double speed so it's fascinating time all the different mixed modalities that we're using um but I have a strong bias to being in an office with people yeah do you think it's just helpful sitting in front of someone seeing the whites of their eyes seeing that they're human yep that simple thing you you feed off the energy as well um it becomes less you know so much of the way in which we interact with is dictated to us by the limitations of the tech so you're on a Google Meet or a zoom it's like you have to raise your hand and then people yeah someone's saying something really interesting it's sort of it's a fair but it's also not not how it would naturally happen in the room yeah OK it's sort of reading people going OK they're probably back to speak or oh I'll just start and then you kind of use things it it flows more naturally I think than OK you go first then you then you and then by the time it gets to you if you're like third one with the hand up you're like well the moment's kind of passed and it's not important and that can be also a self governing thing so I just again that's maybe where yeah where I I prefer being with people and I'm learning constantly how to do it remote which is still come from Skype days yup um yeah so I look for the signals yeah a lot of the time and I misinterpret signals as well some people have very stern resting faces you think have I said something you know this is how they are yeah and you don't know sometimes because I just asked my wife she's got that face you are you angry she's like no it's just how I look you know and and we're cause we're constantly craving these signals right but when you're in person you get to know very quickly that's just that's how they their their face is you know when they're thinking or something so yeah I'm very conscious of that when I'm on a call that I don't want to give off the wrong signal so if I agree then I'll I'll I'll make it really obvious yeah um anyway these are just sort of the the human stuff yep that's important though it's so critical yeah and every industry has its trends and we've talked about uh I don't think AI is necessarily a trend but it's a hot topic but in the design world what are the trends that you see at the moment that you don't think are that relevant oh got me on that one there's a lot of kind of people looking into the crystal ball and predicting the future yeah um yeah it's fun to do how helpful is it I don't know um I tend to think of it as what's what's in the next sort of three to six months right in front of me that I gotta go deliver and get done that keeps the lights on for the business and so on so more pragmatic sometimes you just look up and go well look at the future I I would suppose yeah I mean having had a few conversations actually a lot of conversations about where where is this all going you can take a very dystopian view of it you can take a very optimistic view I always look at it like this whenever there's a new piece of tech that comes along there's always a trade off there's always something that you're gonna be giving up you go right back before you know the written word people were sharing history verbally yeah I'm constantly repeating it so their memory was probably astronomically phenomenally good writing it down was like if you write it down then my memory is gonna start fading yeah but the value of writing it down meant that there was a true artifact right a shared common understanding of something that actually happened okay that's a good trade off right you know you can go through all these things and you kind of go well look at the trade offs we're now making yep it's probably not answering your question directly but I do think that there's a there's a there's a moment go what are we trading off here guys yeah OK yeah cause I'm really worried that is everyone figured that out yet that's the thing no because convenience is such a strong yeah thing right it's like I say bags take that for example right yeah yeah Amazon comes along convenience like oh yeah that's you know Maslow's hierarchy of needs right at the top yep and it's like it's so convenient yeah but now you're missing out on certain experiences of discovery yeah um cause you just come to your door and so on what am I giving up maybe oh maybe that was worth it I don't know yeah um we'll find out won't we I don't I yeah but there's a difference between intelligence and wisdom you know I think let's let's try and be more wise and learn from the past here about what are we trading off so there we go and having worked with a number of different founders and working in founder LED organizations what would you suggest is the one question that founders should ask of their design leaders when coming into an organization I think it's very helpful for a founder to get a good sense of this person coming in on what they think and what they see without any kind of prior preconceptions on the business because what you get there is a very beginner mindset and you spot things that those who have been in the weeds very you know just don't see anymore so I I always try and keep the beginner mindset alive and go look at it as if I'm looking at it for the first time and you can spot so many different things so write them down and you can share that that to me would be my advice is get someone who's OK look at it see what you see what you can understand and then play it back yep that's a very helpful thing for a founder oh didn't see any of those things before OK cause they're so in in in the in the in the weeds so I found that's very very helpful and then go OK out of those things which one do you think of those things is really you know gonna burn the house down or really critical um and you start the conversation going that way nice keep it simple yeah sometimes the best way in life right keep it simple well that's the I remember hearing that phrase from my my grandfather you know Second World War always remember to kiss yeah yeah what are you saying we got a kiss keep it simple stupid yeah it's a great one fundamentals again and final question for you today buzz for any designers out there when they're when they're looking for work um as someone who's hired many designers in their time had teams of people what are the things that designers can do to to really elevate their skill set to get in front of like the right people or when they're in front of the right people to showcase the work that they've done um to land a job yeah it's a great question and it is it is tough I'm not gonna say oh it's easy and so on but what I do see is the same kind of case study over and over and over loads of post it notes loads of this and that yeah just like I can just go through it and go yep OK what is it really telling me um I read it I look at it and it's the same over and over what I trying to cut through and go what's the actual piece of invention here what did you actually solve tell it to me in a very straightforward simple way in an elegant way tell me what effect it had on the business and just leave it at that and then I tend to ask and go what are you what were you most excited about in delivering that what was the thing you're most proud of and then I can get really specific and then go I'm really proud of that little tiny interaction that just made it a bit more special or the way in which that was phrased that LED to that it meant that behind the office all of that was removed case studies are notorious but don't have tons of them I tend to think of as what's the latest one the most recent piece of work that you've done cause you I always look at it like that I'm only as good as the last piece of work I've done yep um and try and tailor it that's relevant for what you think is what the business needs I've done this before I remember I going for um folks invited me into this uh business to say hey do you wanna come and head up this design team and I said oh that's an interesting business oh can you when you come in take us through a case study and I was like oh man I can't put a case study in there and okay well I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of just manipulate this one a little bit make it kind of mobile first kind of stuff and and they kinda came in they took it and they were like oh yeah that's really impressive but was that relevant to us yeah I was like you're dead right it's not yeah it's 30% relevant yeah um but it gives you a glimpse on how I think but honestly I don't have time to prepare a big case study for you and I'm not gonna solve your business you know but I have prepared this for you and this is what I see about your business right now but I'm not gonna solve it for you I'm just gonna tell you these things and that was way more interesting and engaging so it comes back to the point around the founders of leadership should ask cause they'll do that with every other function yep why not design yeah absolutely you should be and I think as you say sometimes the biggest balance is the time like you shouldn't have to go away and spend like two days putting something together yeah yeah there are so many great tools out there though you know for putting together great portfolios and in many ways there's no excuse now you don't have to know how to code go on a framer you can do amazing stuff and it looks really good then the next thing is okay it looks good can you lay it out you know and actually have some level of craft so many designers and I just don't have that yeah so I okay I'm biased which is amazing though because that's the job right is to and I've always maintained this and we've had some fierce debates oh yeah you know designers shouldn't have to know how to you know do all the final pixel polish I'm like well then what are you doing to be calling yourself a designer but I tend to look at it as full stack right you gotta go through the classic kind of Jesse James Garrett kind of stack and go what's the strategy what's the scope what's the structure what's the skeleton what's the surface and you gotta be able to do the whole thing in my opinion'cause engineers do the whole yeah full stack but then you have preferences some will prefer the strategy but they can still do the whole stack some will prefer the front end final fix but they can still do the whole stack see you got the that's what I'm talking about the whole composition of the team you have preferences yeah and people I prefer over here OK then I'll compliment you with this and the variability of that is then they go well I don't like doing that anymore I'm gonna switch over here and so you got this constant mix and you want to help foster that as well so be really clear I think it's really helpful to have a read me file mm hmm this is what you get when you hire me um here's how I think here's my values write it down it's OK you know um because that's what interviewing is all about you're you're mitigating risk yeah that's what it is from both sides yeah yeah so I I I'd much rather have a much shorter interview process and get working together and use probation period for both sides try before you buy yeah so often it's like I gotta get through probation and then then I'm okay then I can sit back you know yeah and I don't think like that um so so that's that's worldly advice yep make it look good take your time don't have spelling mistakes all those kind of fundamentals make sure the visuals look really good and you can really see the detail um don't use crazy amounts of words explaining everything try and distill it down you should be able to do that with AI come on yep make look at it get it get DVD to analyze it whatever whichever tool you want break it down into exact language you can do those things and then what I'm gonna do is just kind of interrogate you on that work yeah and see how how much of it you did versus just be honest about it um so two fundamental things really if you're a person that can actually get things done great and then it's how you get those things done in a team if you've got if you can do those two things really well you'll be absolutely fine yeah so again fundamentals I love it yeah nice and simple buzz thank you so much for talking to me today it's been an absolute pleasure thank you Time's flying by it has didn't think I could talk that much there we go there we go we're good I hope it'll be helpful for for folks out there I think it will be