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Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated, and then hand-edited. It may contain some errors.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: On today’s show, design leaders are feeling some major shifts in the landscape these days. In the wake of COVID and sweeping industry layoffs, leaders are facing difficult questions about the value of design, both from inside and outside the field, while new technologies and a chaotic job market make the future of the work harder to see than ever.

Peter and I take some time to explore what’s going on with design leadership here in the spring of 2024 today on Finding Our Way.

Hello, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Jesse. How are you? 

Jesse: Welcome to the show.

Peter: I’ve been here. 

So we’ve been having a lot of really rich conversations with a variety of different design leaders about their challenges. And those have been really great. But there is something larger going on out there in the world of design leadership. And I wonder if we can take some time today to try to put a name to it and kind of define the parameters of the elephant in the room here.

Peter: Name it to tame it.

What’s going on with leaders these days?

Jesse: Yeah. So what’s going on with design leaders these days? 

Peter: Oh, you know uh, the usual. What’s going on with design leaders? So many things. I found myself, in the last six months, part of a number of conversations around the state of the industry, where things are going, whether it’s on LinkedIn or these recorded conversations.

A lot of them have taken as a jumping off point. Robert Fabricant’s article on the big design shakeup that he wrote for Fast Company, reflecting on what he’s seeing as some step change that’s occurring, and the struggles that design leaders are having with figuring out, like, what to hold on to, to take them to what’s next.

And I think what’s going on with design leaders is there’s a recognition that what we’ve been doing for the past 20 to 25 years…

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Peter: You know, I’m thinking about around the time we started Adaptive Path, maybe a little bit before then, there was an evolution,, a curve, at times gentle, at times quite bumpy, but, you could draw a line between 1997 or 8 and 2022, in terms of what was going on with design and thus design leadership.

And it feels like something in the last two years has broken such that we can no longer rely on that trend just to continue to carry us forward. But it’s not clear what the new thing is to hold on to, and so design leaders are struggling with their relationship of, like, what’s next? What’s expected of me? How do I show up?

Because it’s not clear for many people, not even just in design. I, think we’re seeing this… I listened to a podcast interview that Lenny Ratchitsky did with Marty Cagan. And one of my takeaways from that is that product management is in a similar vein of disruption. 

Jesse: Oh, it’s just as bad on that side. Yeah, absolutely. 

Peter: I think we’re in this phase shift. And we’re in this middle of it, but you can’t really be in the middle of a phase shift, right? You’re either in one state or another, but we’re no longer in the prior state. We don’t know what the next state is. And I think a lot of the tsuris, a lot of the agita, the anxiety that we’re sensing out there is because we’re in this uncomfortable middle space.

The value proposition of design

Jesse: Hmm. You know, as I think about trying to describe the shift that’s happened in the last few years, and I think it goes back more than the last two, but definitely in the last five years, I feel like there has been a real shift in the way that business has framed the value proposition of design.

And for this generation of design leaders, they’re very attached to a particular value proposition of design that has to do with product discovery. It has to do with customer insight. It has to do with experiential exploration as a way of discovering new product opportunities in the market. The value proposition there has paid off in a very inconsistent fashion over the last 25 years.

And there are now quite a lot of, because of the growth of the field, because of the hockey stick curve that we’ve been on, there are now a lot of organizations that are finding plenty of value in the market without ever engaging with any of these practices, which then has their competitors looking at it and going, why are we investing in this stuff when we’re getting incrementally better results?

Peter: Yes, I think this, actually, also leads to one of those parallel conversations happening in product management, because if you read you know, Marty Cagan and you have this view of the world of product managers as, you know, empowered leaders who, given an outcome to realize, have the autonomy to figure out how to get there…right?

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

Mm hmm.

Peter: And that’s this kind of common conception from your product management thought leaders, your Marty Cagan’s, your Perri’s, of how product management works, but then, this came up on the Lenny Ratchitsky show, there’s this recognition, most product managers, like, well into the majority, 70%, 80 percent, maybe more, are operating in what would be called a feature factory environment, where they’re not empowered, where someone else has said, this is what you’re going to build, you can figure out how you want to build it. Sure. But this is what we’re doing. 

Those decisions have been made outside of that team. And, I forget who wrote it, but there was a product thought leader who was like, yeah, feature factory PMing is fine. That is right for some contexts, similar to this conversation, where mediocre-ish design is fine in some contexts, not necessarily every business will benefit from superlative design.

And that’s a tough pill to swallow, I think, for a lot of leaders.

Jesse:  Or at the very least the threshold of diminishing returns kicks in way sooner for some businesses…

Peter: right, right, right. 

Jesse: …than for others. 

Peter: Erika Hall talks a lot about exchange of value, right, between the business and customers, and the source of that value exchange might not be rooted in something that user experience design has a meaningful impact beyond a very basic, like, functionality threshold.

Jesse: Hmm. You know, when I think about when we started Adaptive Path and the value proposition that we were putting forward into the market, I’m reminded of the arguments that we had internally, the seven founders, about whether to call what we did design, even, because, you know, truth be told, our deliverables at that time didn’t look like design deliverables 

A wireframe was an exotic, strange thing. If anybody had in-house designers, they were working in Photoshop. We at Adaptive Path literally had no one with those skills. So we were trying to define user experience as something that was little bit different from, and a little bit distinct from a traditional design discipline. Over the years, , the value proposition that emerged there was that the same practices of customer insight the same practices of experiential exploration that are a normal part of a design process could also benefit business processes as well. And that’s where the whole design thinking methodology comes from, among other things.

That value proposition was a strong one during a time when there was a lot to be discovered, when there were not a lot of best practices to draw on, when nobody really knew what a lot of this stuff was going to look like, and we had to make it all up. 

That’s simply not where we are anymore. And those processes and practices, that value proposition, has a lot less potency in most product categories these days because the exploration and the discovery has been done. The best practices are there. There’s no need to reimagine the shopping cart. We’ve had 25 years 30 years of shopping carts.

Peter: Yeah. So let me start with where you are and then I want to pull it broader. We’ve had 30 years of shopping carts. That is not an interesting problem to solve. Much like onboarding a new customer is not an interesting problem to solve. They fill out their name and password. They put in some information, they give you some money, whatever.

But, we still treat onboarding flows as if they’re some source of innovation or some opportunity for innovation. And one of the things that you’re touching on that I think reflects the discombobulation that we’re feeling in design is, especially for those of us who’ve been doing it for 20-some years, is we haven’t taken into account that we came in where all of it was interesting. We published a report in 2002 on how to design a registrati