Leadership is just another design problem

Jesse James Garrett is a Design Leadership coach, author and speaker with over 25 years of experience in the UX industry. Jesse was part of the first wave of professional user experience designers and co-founder of one of the first user experience consultancies, Adaptive Path. In this episode, we talk with Jesse about what UX leadership needs in order to keep the industry thriving.

Transcript

ALFONSO DE LA NUEZ:

Welcome to UXpeditious! A show that brings you quick, insightful interviews with design, product, and UX leaders.

DANA BISHOP:

In each interview we dive into how UX research impacts user insights; shaping the design and business strategy of some of our favorite tech tools and products.

ALFONSO:

I’m Alfonso de la Nuez, Chief Visionary Officer and Co-Founder of UserZoom.

DANA:

And I’m Dana Bishop, VP of Strategic Research Partners at UserZoom.

ALFONSO:

And we are your hosts.

On today’s episode we’re talking with Jesse James Garrett. Jesse co-founded Adaptive Path - an innovative UX design consultancy. These days he’s a Design Leadership coach, author and speaker. People like Jesse are very important - just because we’re in leadership doesn’t mean we have all the answers.

DANA:

That’s right. Leaders are just like everyone else, they’re looking to grow and for ways to challenge our assumptions. Jesse helps design leadership lean into creativity and do so with an open heart.

ALFONSO:

Hey, Jesse, thanks so much for us. How are you doing today?

JESSE JAMES GARRETT:

I'm great. Thank you for having me.

ALFONSO:

Absolutely. It's an honor to have you. Why don't you start by introducing yourself, although I think most people know you already.

JESSE:

Well, it's interesting because a lot of people do know me, but people know me for a bunch of different reasons. So my name is Jesse James Garrett. I've been working at Digital Product Design for about 25 years now and I was a part of the group of folks who came into user experience design when user experience was really first emerging from this obscure rather academic interest into a full blown profession. And so I was part of that first wave of user experience designers as professionals out there in the world.

I was co-founder of one of the first user experience consultancies, a company called Adaptive Path. We did a lot of work over the years to educate and evangelize user experience design through our conferences, through our workshops, try to teach people about what we were learning along the way as we were putting together the methods to do our work.

Along those lines, I wrote a book called The Elements of User Experience which is intended to introduce people to the field. That book has now been in print for more than 20 years which is honestly astonishing to me. It had a tremendous staying power that I am just surprised by year after year. And yeah, those are the big highlights. These days, I am a leadership coach. I work directly with leaders of Digital Product Design teams to help them develop the skills to lead their teams more effectively and to build the relationships that those teams need in order to be successful.

ALFONSO:

Something I would say is absolutely a challenge and one of the things that we need to do the most, I guess, in terms of making progress in our field. I think that, as of today and given the impact that great UX and great design has financially speaking to any company out there, I think we need to definitely introduce UX to leadership and also develop leaders in our field, right?

JESSE:

Yeah. That has been really my focus for the last few years. As the entire field has grown, we've had this increasing demand for leadership as UX has gone from this specialty to a formalized role to now being the function of an entire department within these organizations. The leadership that's required to corral those resources and drive the alignment that's necessary to do that represents a whole new challenge for user experience designers.

There are no precedents, there are no models for them to follow. Nobody's done these jobs before and that to me is fascinating and rich with possibility.

ALFONSO:

So I always say great design is all about culture and leadership.I like this quote that you have on your website, "Leadership is just another design problem." So can you tell us a little bit more about that?

JESSE:

So many of these leaders today have found themselves in leadership positions without models, without mentors, without any kind of a script to follow. They are very much making it up as they go along. And for many of them, when they make that pivot from being an individual contributor to being a leader of a team, they feel like they need to leave a lot of their designer-ness behind and take on, put on the business suit and look at things from that perspective and operate from that perspective. And that's very necessary and important, but it doesn't mean you have to leave your design mind behind when you move into a leadership role.

And the way that I work with my clients, I encourage them to approach the challenges that they're facing in leadership as if they were design problems. "How are you defining the problem? How have you explored the boundaries of the problem? How have you prototyped possible solutions to the problem and really bringing those design skills into the arena of leading teams and aligning organizations?"

DANA:

Yeah, so I wanted to follow up on some of the philosophy that you shared on design and the keynote that you did a few years ago and two points that you brought up were interesting. Tell me about the benefit for leaders to have the capacity for discomfort.

JESSE:

The capacity for discomfort is essential for all leaders, but especially for design leaders, because design at its core is about grappling with the unknown. If you, as a design leader, are simply assembling best practices over and over again, you're probably not delivering the value the design could be delivering to your organization. So as a leader, you necessarily have to be willing to step into the uncertainty to be the one in the room, especially among the senior leadership team, to be the one in the room to question the organization's understanding of itself of where it's going and of its customers.

That capacity for discomfort is what the leader needs to model for the designers on their teams, for them to step into the uncertainty, for them to step into the discomfort so that they can take greater creative chances, so that they can do the creative exploration that leads to genuine innovation.

DANA:

Interesting.

And that's a great point because without that coming from your leader, you don't have that space and room to experiment and to push the boundaries which brings me to the other talking point which is failure. Where does that come into the design process?

JESSE:

Well, there's been a lot of talk about failure over the years in startup circles and in technology in general and the importance and the value of failure and people talk about failing their way to success in this business sometimes and I think that what that's about is treating every experience as a learning experience regardless of the outcome and having that mindset of continuing to learn and continuing to grow through your experiences and through the choices that you make.

And that means not being too attached to your failures, not letting them define you, but it also means not getting too attached to your successes either and not letting them define you.

DANA:

And I think, speaking from the UX researcher perspective, We collaborate with the design teams and that space is necessary in order to run research and evaluate the outcome of that research and then move forward, maybe not on the intended path, but to be open to what we learn in research.

JESSE:

Yeah, research is another area where just it's so essential to maintain that openness and to be willing to continue to question and to be okay with not really knowing what the answers are or sometimes not even knowing what the right questions are.

ALFONSO:

There's been this explosion of UX as an industry the question is, are we really doing UX, if we're not doing UX research?

JESSE:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's UX without research. I don't think it can be. UX, by its nature, makes design decisions from a place of user inside and user understanding. If you're not making decisions from that place, if you're making decisions based on business drivers, if you're making decisions based on technology drivers, that's not user experience design. That's just some other kind of product design. So to my mind, yeah, it absolutely has to be there. It's so exciting too to see the development of these tools and platforms to support research at scale.

Because I think that's been one of the big stumbling blocks in organizations, really activating on research as a capability, is that it's always felt so sort of bespoke and one off to do it every time. And as the field is scaling, the tools and platforms such as your own are maturing in a way that is supporting and even greater scaling and that's exciting to me.

DANA:

I'm curious, from your perspective, how does design leadership feel about that, about the democratization and the need for that, the necessity to be running, standing up rapid research programs and other things to really incorporate it in the design cycle?

JESSE:

Well, I know that there are some researchers who have a different point of view on this, but from my experience, the greatest value of research in the design process happens when the designers are active participants in shaping and conducting the research.

The research process is not about the report that you get at the end of it. The research process is about how the designer has been educated through the process. It's about how the designers' understanding has evolved through the engagement in research, not through reading a report that is thrown over the wall to them by some research experts. The expertise of researchers is not a thing that I dare question. It is important and necessary, but I think there's a great deal of value to be unlocked in that expertise, bringing design into the fold and being a part of that research process.

ALFONSO:

We've struggled quite a bit, especially in research, "Oh, where's the value? Oh, it slows us down." One of the things that I always think about is, and again, from the leadership perspective, is UXers, design leader leaders need to talk business and business people need to talk or understand design. We need to come together to a middle point, but if we don't talk business in design and UX, we are never really going to find the seat at the table that I think it deserves, right?

JESSE:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I completely agree with that. It is true that design leaders can step into the role feeling like now that they're there, their job is to force design on the rest of the organization now that they've reached that executive level.

And they're surprised to find that, in fact, the tables have turned and their role in a lot of ways is to help design function in a way that is more aligned with the needs of the organization rather than reorganizing the organization around the needs of design. That's a switch of mindset that can be challenging for people.

I think that a lot of leaders get caught in a bad place when they are operating on a whole bunch of assumptions about what the executives actually care about and haven't done the investigation.

ALFONSO:

Absolutely. It's been phenomenal. Definitely one of my favorite topics, so super fun to have you. It's an honor to have you, to see you, Jesse, for our podcast. So…

JESSE:

Thank you so much.

ALFONSO:

Thank you so much for joining us.

That was Jesse James Garrett, Design Leadership coach, author and speaker.

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DANA:

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