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Show Notes

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Summary: Peter and Jesse are joined by design and business consultant John Gleason. Coming up through P&G’s famous design initiative, we get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, we explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, and share what they should advocate in order to break the downward spiral.

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Transcript

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, is design dead? That’s the question strategy consultant John Gleason asked at a recent design conference panel. The ensuing discussion struck some familiar notes for digital product design leaders, but John Gleason doesn’t come from digital product design. Today, we’ll get his perspective on design beyond digital products, such as consumer packaged goods, the stuff you find on the shelves in grocery and drugstore. We’ll explore some significant parallels across industries and design domains with important lessons on the pitfalls that lead to diminishing influence for design leaders, what they should advocate for, and how to break the downward spiral.

Peter: Hi John. Thank you for joining us.

John: Delighted to be here, Peter. Thank you.

Peter: So you and I met on the internet, specifically LinkedIn, around a discussion that was happening based on an article written in Fast Company that was explaining what this journalist had witnessed at a panel of design leaders that you helped moderate. And the title of the article had the provocative statement: Is Design Dead? So that’s how I’d like to start this conversation with you. Maybe we’re starting at the end, and then this can be a very brief conversation…

John: What if I said the answer is yes, end of story?

Peter: Then, then, then we wrap up the podcast.

Jesse: Thanks everybody for listening. You can find us at findingourway.design.

Peter: But seriously, I do want to ask, it is meant to be a provocative, obviously there were discussions happening on that panel and in that room that led to this question. So when you’re faced with a question is design dead, how do you respond?

John: Well, we respond by creating a conference to talk about it. So my conference partners and I, David Butler, who was the first head of design at Coca-Cola and Fred Richards, who’s a long time ECD, CCO -type person in the brand design space at big agencies. The three of us came together just simply to talk about the industry itself.

And as we compared notes, I have started to see that design is in decline, particularly in the consumer facing space, probably starting eight or nine years ago, kind of as evidenced by shrinking budgets and shrinking organizations and diminishing the reporting structure of design into leadership in those companies.

And a lot of the people that I’ve talked to kind of chalk it up to, oh, well that’s the economy. Oh, we’re gonna cut budgets, it’s belt tightening, it’s these things. But I’ve had the chance to peek inside more than a hundred big corporations and a couple thousand design agencies. And so I see patterns that emerged.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And that led to the provocation of “Is design dead?” And I think we inherently knew that the answer was no, but I don’t think the rest of the room…so we had about a hundred people design leaders from various companies, mostly consumer facing corporations, but we had telecom, we had financial services, we had healthcare, we had core tech there in the room represented as well.

I don’t think most of the people in the room saw the patterns because they only see what’s happening in their company, or the one or two companies they may have been a part of. And so there was certainly evidence, as we started to unfold some of the things, people were, “Oh, just thought that was belt tightening. I just thought that was seasonal. I just thought that was post pandemic economy.” That started the conversation.

Jesse: So tell us a little bit about these design teams that you were studying and what was the change that you noticed over time? What was happening with these teams?

John: So a, few things that I’ve had the chance to see. I’ve tracked about 200, almost 250 companies since about 2016, 2017.

Jesse: Mm-hmm.

John: And it’s things like, what agencies do they work with? Have they built in-house teams? What’s the reporting structure of the organizations? And some of the patterns that I’ve seen, Jesse, are 39% of those companies, so 95 companies of the 243, have cut the top one or two levels of their design function…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … or they’ve downgraded the title to some lower title in the company, or they’ve downgraded the boss, the reporting title of the boss of those organizations. Conversely, only 6%, only 15 of those companies have done the opposite, have elevated design with a higher title or a higher reporting status in the company. 9% of them, 22 companies have eliminated more than half of their entire design function in a single year.

Jesse: Wow.

John: 84% of them, this one shouldn’t be a surprise to people. 84% of the design leaders or the heads of design reports to a specific function in the company…

Jesse: hmm

John: Marketing, innovation product. To me, the troubling part of that is 75% of them don’t report to the head of that function.

Jesse: hmm.

John: They report to somebody lower in that functional hierarchy, which again, to me, signals a deemphasis of design, as a more of a service organization than a beacon for the future. Almost half, 47% of these companies, the head of design is at a senior director or lower.

Jesse: Hmm.

John: They’re not even in the executive community inside of those companies, nor do they have a career opportunity to grow beyond that director, senior director, some are even senior manager.

Jesse: That’s as far as the design ladder reaches in those organizations.

John: Right, right. Yeah.

Jesse: So I find myself curious about the mandates of these teams and what these teams are being asked to deliver, and whether those mandates are shrinking as the teams scale down and move downstream as you’re describing in these very large organizations.

So what kind of design are we talking about here?

John: They certainly are diminishing in the scope of influence inside of those companies. So many of them, the design organization in a lot of consumer goods companies is really a packaging function.

And it ends up being a decoration function for packaging.

Jesse: Okay.

John: In some cases, they might be able to influence a better consumer experience, but, in many cases, especially in the, present economic circumstance, it’s cost cut, diminished, streamlined.

Jesse: Right. We’re basically talking about boxes and bottles on retail shelves.

John: Yeah. Yeah. And, there are some where design sits in an R and D or innovation organization…

Jesse: mm-hmm.

John: … where design influences, again, the structural component of packaging.

Occasionally they’ll influence the juice and the powders and the things that are inside the boxes and bottles. But mostly more powerful R and D organization says, Hey, design, we’ve got that. We’ll take care of that.

Jesse: Right.

John: And they tend to be looking at very narrow components inside the company. The other interesting thing, particularly as it relates to a more digital component, is many of these companies have assigned a chief digital officer in charge of the digital transformation and digital pathway for those big companies, building their own design teams, largely UX, UI and some development, although development tends to be outsourced and offs