Design To Be Conversation

After 65 episodes, today’s show is the last episode of our podcast, Design To Be Conversation. There are big shifts happening behind the scenes with Design To Be and closing the chapter on our podcast will allow us to take the proper next steps to what’s ahead. Thank you all for listening. Now, for our final episode! Jehad Affoneh is a design and product leader who's led design, product, and engineering teams most recently at VMware and Splunk. He is currently Chief Design Officer at Toast, leading the product, customer, and end-to-end experience that empowers tens of thousands of restaurants to delight their guests, do what they love, and thrive. He lives with his wife in Redwood City, California. We chat about why designers struggle to build end-to-end experiences, why many organizations ship their org structure, the ways to avoid this, and ways you can think this through.

Andy Vitale is a design executive, educator, speaker, and co-host of the Surfacing Podcast. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Design at Rocket Companies, where he leads a team focused on transforming the lending and finance industry, through a human-centered approach, to provide the best experience for millions of people. Throughout his career, he has built, scaled, and led teams that elevate the role of Design as an organizational competence and a competitive advantage. We dive into how his career evolved over time, how you create a space to scale a team and grow their capabilities, how he values teaching online, mentoring often, and how interns have been valuable to the Rocket design team.

Amy Thibodeau is the Chief Design Officer at Gusto, where she empowers designers, researchers, and content strategists who are working on products that connect companies with their employees in a more meaningful way. Previously, Amy was a senior director of UX at Shopify where she led a cross-functional team of over 130 people working on core business products. During her time at Shopify, she also led the launch of the Polaris design system, built the Platform UX team and founded the Design Ops practice. In earlier iterations of her life, she was one of the first members of Facebook’s now gigantic content strategy team, renovated an old house in the south of France, worked in art museums, and traveled around the world for a year. Amy lives in Canada with her husband Dan and small but mighty dogs, Gus and Ella. We dive into the difference between the tension between speed and quality, the importance of creating shared language and goals, as well as the conditions for quality and velocity, and much much more.

Renato Valdés Olmos is an executive, angel investor, and advisor with over two decades of experience serving millions of customers worldwide. He's built products, brands, and organizations in various industries, including artificial intelligence, transportation, healthcare, and productivity tools. Most recently, he served as VP of Product at Pitch, and Head of Design at Grammarly and is currently focusing on being a Dad and investor. We dive into the most important lessons he’s learned throughout his career, how his career has evolved from a designer to an executive, to being involved in the investment space, and even the most transformational experience of his life.

Bob Baxley is a design executive, advisor, mentor, and advocate who has built, managed and led UX teams at some of Silicon Valley’s most respected companies. With a career spanning three decades, Bob's work at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and elsewhere has touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. Currently, Bob serves as the Senior Vice-President of Design at ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence, and data analytics platform. Committed to recruiting and inspiring the next generation of designers Bob also mentors individuals and advises organizations working to improve the profession and practice of digital product design. We dive into his motivation to continue designing, how he’s adapted throughout his career, what’s going on with the design industry, and why he’s inspired for what’s next.

Over the last 25 years, Parameswaran Venkataraman has been in design and innovation leadership roles across companies like IDEO, Tata Digital, Fractal.ai, Dr. Reddy’s and Sapient. Over the last decade, he has been instrumental in setting up and establishing strategic design capabilities & culture in several organizations. Some of the work Param has led at Studio 5B at Dr. Reddy's is now a featured case study in IDEO U’s course on Designing for Change Param is passionate about mindfulness and the ‘art of stillness’. At the end of each year, he publishes a toolkit for applying Mindfulness and Design Thinking principles for personal reflections on the year that went past, and to create a vision for the year ahead. We dive into how the more you progress in your career, the more inward you need to look, how coaching and therapy have helped him as a designer, how to think about career milestones, and much much more. ,

Jesse James Garrett has been one of the most prominent voices in digital product design for more than 20 years. His career highlights include co-founding the groundbreaking UX consultancy, Adaptive Path; writing the foundational book The Elements of User Experience, whose iconic five-plane model has become a staple of the field; and defining Ajax, the dynamic interaction model that transformed web technology and design in the Web 2.0 era. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages and he is a frequent keynote speaker on making designers and organizations more human-centered in their work. We dive into leadership through relationships, how most struggles of unhealthy design teams can be traced back to unhealthy relationship dynamics, paired with leading with authenticity, and how too many designers feel they have to shed some part of who they are in order to fit the mold of leadership. But leadership has no mold and comes in every shape imaginable.

Tim Allen is the Global Head of Design at Instacart. He leads the global product design, research, content and operations, centered on food access and inclusivity. His focus on fueling human potential is key to building products and cultures that inspire people to do their best work. As an additional outlet for his passion for design thinking, Tim was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business for 2017. Tim speaks and instructs at schools and events around the country. Prior to Instacart, Tim led Airbnb's global Product Design team, Microsoft's Experiences & Devices design practice and Amazon's Product Design Studio as Executive Creative Director leading the experience design for Echo, FireTV, and Kindle products. Tim also shaped the vision for one of the largest Experience Design teams in the United States at R/GA, whose Nike+ work established the future of connected experiences for brands. Through innovative work with Adobe, Red Hat, and IBM, Tim holds seven patents related to software design, ranging from chat interface modeling to mobile device synchronization. We dive into how throughout his career, Tim continued to make the ceiling his floor. We chat about what that means, how his upbringing impacted him as a designer, and how the skills that got you to where you are today won’t necessarily get you to what’s next.

Noah Levin is a Senior Product Design Director at Figma. His job includes a variety of things, like attracting and retaining talented designers, setting and sharing context, providing actionable feedback, and helping facilitate a healthy environment for design in the company. Before Figma, he led design teams at ClassPass and Google, taught designers to code as an advisor at Framer, and built a cuff-mounted digital assistant for astronauts at NASA. He studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and is originally from Pittsburgh. We dive into how he and the team at Figma continue to innovate stale practices, how he goes about learning from others, who he actively learns from, and much more.

Sameera Kapila is a designer, educator, manager, and writer who works as a senior product designer at Netlify. Born in India, raised on the Dutch island of Curaçao, and living in Austin, TX, Sameera has held roles in agencies, educational institutions, and consultancies ranging from individual contributor to executive leadership, student to educator, and everything in between. She writes and speaks about web and product design, diversity, inclusion and equity, tech education, and design research and process. She’s written regularly forThe Pastry Box Project and net Magazine and spoken at events such as Creative Mornings, SXSW’s HBCU track, Design/Content, and Clarity. We dive into how she develops new skills through learning by doing and chat about inclusive design communities, how to foster them, and much more. We even get a little preview into her new book that just came out, Inclusive Design Communities. You can check it out on abookapart.com.

In today’s episode, I chat with Sarah Doody. Sarah is the Founder & CEO of Career Strategy Lab, a UX career accelerator that helps UX and product professionals navigate their job search and get hired without applying to hundreds of jobs. Professionals that have worked with Sarah have landed jobs at Amazon, Blue Origin, Home Depot, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and more and on average, they increase their salaries by 40%. She is also a User Experience designer, researcher, and educator. Having worked in the UX industry for more than 18 years, she began her career by working at large corporations and startups before launching her own product design consultancy business in 2012. For more information on Sarah please visit www.careerstrategylab.com or www.sarahdoody.com. She can also be found on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. We dive into what are the timeless skills that you need to excel in your career, how to go about creating a product roadmap for your career, and much much more.

In today's episode, I speak with Dan Szuc and Josephine Wong. Dan is a co-founder and principal at Apogee and co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as the co-founder of UX Hong Kong. He has been involved in the UX field and based in Hong Kong for over 20 years. Dan has lectured about user-centered design globally. He has co-authored three books including Global UX with Whitney Quesenbery, The Usability Kit with Gerry Gaffney and Make Meaningful Work with Josephine Wong. Josephine is a co-founder and principal at Apogee and co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as the co-founder of UX Hong Kong. Jo grew up in multicultural Hong Kong, with a Chinese-Burmese father and Chinese-Indonesian mother. She collaborates with global teams conducting research in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Jo is passionate about the environment, political and economic systems, and how we can live healthier and happier lives while not adversely impacting less fortunate people. In this episode, Dan and Jo take us through the experience of using an observational and sense-making tool they’ve developed called Practice Spotting. It can be used to uncover implicit learning opportunities and deepen explicit practices in support of the character, leadership, and culture you want at work. This is our last episode before we take a few months’ break. Thank you to everyone who’s been listening! Practice Spotting examples and downloads

In today’s episode, I speak with Evan Dody. Evan is the Head of Design + Creative at Angi (including HomeAdvisor and Handy). He leads Product Design, Brand Creative, UX Research, UX Writing, and DesignOps across the multi-sided home services marketplace. He and his team help homeowners across the country create and care for homes they love, while simultaneously helping local businesses thrive. Prior to Angi, Evan led design teams at Mailchimp and Huge in Brooklyn. He's designed customer-centric services for some of the world's most recognizable brands—McDonald's, American Express, and United Airlines to name a few. He's passionate about creating easy digital products that help people enjoy their in-person lives more and helping the small business economy thrive. We dive into what it means to lead with optimism, including redefining optimism as an active tool for change, uncovering the why behind the work you’re doing, and the vital role that identity and representation play in believing a positive outcome is possible.

In today's episode, I speak with Fonz Morris. Fonz is an entrepreneur and self-taught designer, born in Brooklyn and now based in San Jose. He has worked in tech and design on both coasts of the United States, in Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and California. His belief in the importance of self-driven education continued through his travels through Europe, Central and South America, and South East Asia. Since 2020, Fonz has been the Lead Product Designer at Netflix. Prior to joining Netflix, he led a design team at Coursera. We dive into what it means to be true to yourself, the value of a supportive community, and how to build confidence in your decisions when taking risks. Find Fonz on Twitter at @youngfonz.

In today’s episode, I speak with Andy Budd. Andy is a design leader, conference speaker, start-up advisor & coach. He co-founded Clearleft, the first dedicated UX consultancy in the UK, along with the Leading Design and UX London conferences. He’s a member of the Adobe Design Circle, and has appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists of influential leaders in tech. He’s currently helping start-up founders make the most of Design in his role as an Expert in Residence at Seedcamp, Europe's most successful early stage venture fund. We dive into what you give up and what you gain in the shift from a designer role to a design leader role – and how to navigate common pitfalls. This episode is full of honest and actionable insights to guide you in choosing a path that’s most meaningful to you. The book Andy references is Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager. Find Andy on Twitter at @andybudd.

This is our 50th episode of Design To Be Conversation. Thank you all so much for your support – and an extra special thanks to those of you who have been listening since the beginning! Today we’re celebrating by doing something a little bit different. In this episode, our guest host Jayneil Dalal interviews me about my experience with a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Jayneil Dalal is a product designer born in Gujarat, India and polished in Dallas, Texas. He hosts the design MBA podcast where he interviews rockstar designers. And I’m Rachel Weissman, the Founder & CEO of Design To Be and the host of the Design To Be Conversation podcast. I’m also an emotional intelligence coach, keynote speaker, and meditation & yoga teacher currently based in Venice, California. We dive into what happens when disconnecting from technology entirely, the difference between experiencing and intellectualizing, and listening to your body to get clarity on your career. Find Rachel on Twitter at @racheldweissman and Jayneil on Twitter at @jayneildalal.

In today’s episode, I speak with Malthe Sigurdsson. Malthe has 25 years of experience as a designer and design leader building, scaling, and managing design organizations that deliver beautiful and effective work across multiple disciplines and product categories. He is currently the Chief Design Officer at Handshake, where he is leading product and brand design across the company. At Handshake his goal is to help level up the end-to-end consumer and enterprise experiences and is instrumental in helping Handshake grow a world-class design team. Before Handshake, Malthe was Head of Design at Stripe, leading design for 6 years. Prior to Stripe he was SVP of Product and Design at Rdio and Creative Director at Skype. We dive into what ownership, influence, and impact can look like for designers working with diverse stakeholders. We discuss 6 key steps for exerting influence with outsized impact – including identifying and communicating your convictions, and enabling others to be successful alongside you.

In today’s episode, I speak with Ximena Vengoechea. Ximena is a user researcher, writer, and illustrator whose work on personal and professional development has been published in Inc., The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Huffington Post. She is the author of the new book, Listen Like You Mean it: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection (Portfolio/Penguin Random House). She is a contributor at Fast Company and The Muse, and writes Letters from Ximena, a newsletter on tech, culture, career, and creativity. She is best known for her project The Life Audit. An experienced manager, mentor, and researcher in the tech industry, she previously worked at Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. She is currently working on her second book, a guide to reclaiming rest. We dive into how to cultivate a listening mindset through humility, curiosity, and empathy; how to identify your own default listening mode; and ways to uncover hidden needs in a conversation.

In today’s episode, I speak with Susan Weinschenk. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is the Chief Behavioral Scientist and CEO at The Team W, Inc, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Susan consults with Fortune 1000 companies, start-ups, governments, and nonprofits, and is the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. We dive into the brain science of creativity and how to come up with better ideas and solutions by working with the 3 networks in your brain that foster creativity: executive attention, imagination, and salience. We discuss how to set specific intentions, why it’s essential to turn off your concentrated brain, and the science behind the “Aha!” moment.

In today’s episode, I speak with Indi Young. Indi is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people, without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. Indi has written two books: Practical Empathy and Mental Models. She builds knowledge and community via a series of live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency. You can follow her on Twitter @indiyoung and access many resources on her website indiyoung.com as well as at medium.com/inclusive-software. We dive into what it means to listen deeply when doing research, how to collect knowledge about a purpose rather than a solution, and how to create a safe space so the person you’re listening to can access their interior cognition. You’ll come away with some fascinating examples and actionable techniques for deep listening.