 Design has the power to create tremendous value. I probably don't have to convince you of that. And for anyone who's still in doubt, just take a look at Apple's stock price in the recent years. But design will fail miserably when it has to behave responsibly and in a predictable time boxed fashion. And that's the trend we've been seeing over the last years. So, this episode is a call to action. To stand up for the aspirational nature of design. To not settle for mediocrity. And to create solutions that touch people on an emotional level again. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is James. And this is the service design show, episode 190. Hi, my name is Marc van Tijn and welcome back to a brand new episode of the service design show. The show where we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you. Design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and of course our planet. Our guest in this episode is James Helms. James is a true design veteran. He spent the last nine years of his career at Inuit, most recently taking up the role of VP of design and product. I think it's fair to say that over the last decade, design has made its way into most companies. And that's a success we absolutely should celebrate. But underneath the surface, there is a downside to the rise of design. A lot of companies have been integrating design without actually taking the time to understand how it really works and which conditions are needed in order to get the highest return on investment. Keeping the status quo in place is what most companies tend to focus on. They have a deep desire for predictability and efficiency. Now, in order to survive in this environment, design needed to act responsibly and get in line with how businesses run. So many service design professionals have been flexing in order to make design work in this environment. Now, if we take a step back and reflect on what has happened, I think it's fair to say that design has been pushed into a corner where its capabilities have been crippled and its impact has been marginalized. And now we're hearing voices saying that design is just a hoax and not able to deliver on its promise. A harsh story for every design professional who's putting the heart and soul into their work and taking pride in what they do. According to James, it's about time we get ourselves out of this messy situation. Now, that's not going to be easy and will require some hard decisions. But the alternative is that we settle for mediocrity and insignificance. So I'd say it's what I shot. In this conversation today, James is going to help us get started on this journey by sharing how we can get executive level sponsorship to provide the necessary air cover. Why we need to keep sharing aspirational stories about how design can impact the lives of the people around us and when it's time to persevere and when it's time to actually start looking for a company that does provide the conditions for you to succeed. That about wraps it up for my introduction. Now, it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with James Helms. A very warm welcome to the service design show, James. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. You have some interesting perspectives on the state of design. As always, we're going to dive into that in a few minutes, but first we do a round of introductions for the people who haven't looked you up on LinkedIn or search you on Google. I ask chat GPT who you are. Could you give us a brief background of what you've done and what you do today? Yeah. The quick cliff notes of my career is that I actually started as an advertising art director in the very traditional space about 25 years ago when the space was ostensibly a traditional space. As the work got more and more digital, so did my roles. And so I moved first into website design and that kind of user experiences that were based around web. And then eventually moved into mobile experience design. Worked at Bottle Rocket for several years, which is a third party app developer in Dallas that was on the forefront of delivering third party apps for the Apple platform. And then spent the last 10 years leading design and product for into it first in their strategic partnership group, which focused on accounting software for pros. And for the last three years working for their platform team focused on identity, data exchange, and the design system, all shared capabilities that are used by the whole platform. And what I'm doing now is I'm actually talking to you from Portugal, which is my part-time residence, doing some freelance work, doing a lot of traveling and just kind of figuring out what I'm going to do next, quite honestly. How is that to be in that uncharted territory that you always put your clients into and now you're in it yourself? Yeah, the shoe is on the other foot, as they say. It's been okay. I mean, the good news is that I am blessed with plenty of runway to figure out what it is I want to do. I'm doing, I'm taking my own advice, which is I'm experimenting with a lot of different kinds of things. I'm meeting a lot of different kinds of people, including you, Mark. And I'm really leaving myself open to surprises and delightful coincidences to see if there's something out there that really just sort of strikes my heart with, this is what I want to do now. Serendipitous encounters, right? Aligning the university. Cool. Let's see where you end up in a year time, maybe still on a beach in Lisbon or close by. James, one of the questions that is a tradition on the show is for me to ask you if you recall the moment that you learned about service design. It's actually a fun story because I was researching design skills for the future. That was kind of a focus for the design organization and into it. And I was tasked with doing some research in terms of what were the emerging design competencies that we should be paying closer attention to investing in. And it first started that I actually even heard it mentioned from a couple of professors at Savannah College of Art and Design that they were training students for service design jobs. And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. I want to find out what that is. And so I reached out to my friend now, Mauricio, who is running the service design program at SCAD. And I said, it would be great if you could tell me a little bit more about what service design is and how you prepare students for careers. And he said, I can do better than that. Come to our service design open house and I'll introduce you to alumni and students and you can introduce yourself to them. So that was really my first entree into the space. And then I would say, really the person that sort of opened my eyes to all that it could be was one of the first service designers I hired. Her name is Liz Ball. She's an amazing design partner and probably one of my better hires. And she taught me a lot about service design and how to think about it, especially as it related to the work that we had in front of us in the shared capability space. Yeah, Mauricio has influenced a lot of people in good and in bad ways. We love you. Yeah, so thanks for that, James. But you're not off the hook yet because we're going to dig a bit deeper into who you are as a person next to a professional through a rapid fire lightning question round. I've got five questions for you. Your goal is to finish a sentence that I'm going to prompt you with, just the first thing that comes to your mind. You haven't prepared and that's exactly the goal. So are you ready? I think so. Okay. Please finish this sentence. The thing that always brings a smile to my face is... Anything that can surprise me or pique my curiosity. Okay, next one. If I had unlimited resources, I would... Travel the world, eating things. Okay. The most important quality in a friend is... Creativity. I've got the next one for you. The best day is when... The weather cooperates. My schedule cooperates. And I get to spend it with the people I love doing the things that we like to do together. And usually involves a cocktail, a sunset, and a good night's sleep. You're setting a high bar here, but it is the best day. So fair enough. Okay. The fifth and final one. And this is a bomber. The world needs more curiosity. All right. Well done, James. You've sort of succeeded for this question around. And now it's time to dig into the topic of today. I'm going to drop a bombshell because that makes it usually quite interesting. Is it correct to state that you feel design in its current state is shamed and crippled? Yes. That is true. Tell us more. How did you get to this conclusion? This is honestly, it's a piece of my personal experience combined with a lot of things that I've read from a lot of other designers. So I know that I'm not alone. But there's a lot of pressure, especially in the last, I would say, 15 years or so for designers themselves have put a lot of pressure on themselves to get a seat at the table, so to speak, which is to be involved in how a business is run, how a business holds itself accountable to its customers, how a business chooses to invest in all kinds of things. But among them, design talent, design innovation, product and technology, strategies, all these things. So there's a lot of pressure for designers to get a seat at that table. There's been a lot of arguments about whether or not having had a seat at that table, they've taken up that responsibility and really taken the seat and done something with it. We also watched an era of chief design officers, I think most notably Joni Ive, as this incredibly influential and powerful right-hand and patriot of a business savant in Steve Jobs, who transformed the vision for that company and really set a huge example for other design leaders to look at and say, oh, wow, there is so much room for design to have larger impact in a business. And consequently, I think, or I should say consequently, that's kind of collapsed on itself. And I've seen a lot of chief design officers ousted, a lot of design roles, design leadership roles removed, designers laid off in droves in ways that really sort of make me question, was design truly delivering the value that it promised to these companies? Or, and this is what I worry, was design so focused on justifying itself through metrics and participating as business people that they missed the opportunity to do what designers do best, which is to connect with our customers emotionally and inspire companies to see well beyond what's possible today and think about a future in a vision that is exciting and that happens in five-year stretches, not quarters. Now, I'm going to assume that a lot of us who are listening have mixed emotions about this. One might say, and I'm going to just name a few things, not to say things that I would potentially agree with, but just to throw it out there, one could say design needs to justify its impact on business. That's just reality. And if you want to be part of the big boys game, you need to understand numbers, you need to show your impact. Ignoring that means that you're an artist. You're just doing the work for the sake of art rather than for impact. What's your take on that? I agree that I think that design in a bucket or in a pocket or left to its own devices or in some ivory tower somewhere is not effective because that's not partnership and that's not accountability. I'm not suggesting that design shouldn't be accountable. I'm suggesting that design has tied itself in knots trying to point to its own value at the expense of being valuable. Can you give us a story or an example that illustrates where this has happened? Well, I think one of the easiest ones to point to is, honestly, design takes all shapes and sizes, and I want to be careful to frame this in my particular experience, which has been for the last couple of years in the tech industry. In that context, there's a design process which is, as most designers are aware, non-linear. You follow the customer, you follow customer needs, you spend time immersing in who you're designing for, you spend time reveling in the surprises of things that you didn't expect to happen, and you iterate in cycles, many of them failures, looking for ways to connect value proposition, product experience, and create a real light bulb or lightning bolt moment that connects a customer with a brand, with a company, with a business. Practically speaking, the design process is laid next to something called the agile process, and the agile process is a religiously heartfelt way of doing things in the technology industry, which is we work in two-week cycles, we focus on shipping value in every cycle, we are very rigorous in making sure that we are resourced and using those resources effectively at all times, and the design process and the agile process don't work together without some serious compromises. I'll tell you that those compromises nearly always happen in the design process, not the agile process, and I think the designers have said, sure, we can make that work. Yeah, we can make that work. We can make agile work, and you know what? We can make your quarterly planning work, and we can make many of these other things that the business needs to do for the sake of the business. We can make those work, and all of those things end up taking a bite out of design's ability to have impact, to innovate in meaningful ways for customers, and it's because design has flexed in ways that other processes have not been asked to flex. Nobody's asked agile to flex for design process. Nobody has asked the planning process to flex for the fact that the designers are still out there in the woods trying to figure out what the value proposition is. By virtue of the fact that design tends to be the least structured looking of all of the things that are out there, they say, hey, why don't you get in line with this other thing? It's working for everybody else. I'm sure that everybody who works in a large organization feels this pressure of predictability and efficiency and optimization. So if you're in a context that optimizes and is optimized to sort of focus on those areas, you have to get in line, otherwise you don't get the opportunity to play. That's at least what I'm going to assume. So is there a choice? Do we have to play along, or should we just put a stake in the ground and say, no, this is not how design works? I think we have to play along in, like I said, I don't think that design can do anything on its own. I think that design in companies that respect the fact that design takes a while or design is as much about learning what not to do as what we're going to do next. While that may not feel satisfying at the end of a shipping cycle, that is actually how innovation works. Innovation is about quickly finding out what we shouldn't build as well as quickly building and efficiently building what we should. And I think that what happens is when you exert agile pressure on a design system, you force designers to validate versus approach with curiosity and a sense of skepticism. You teach them that successes are expected and check the box and move on. You don't go back and inspect them for what did we do right here to make sure that we repeat that next time. You just kind of have faith that all of the assumptions you made were the correct ones, which is why it worked and we can double down on that. And honestly, people that know how innovation works know that that doesn't work. People that know how innovation works understand that there are micro failures that are worth figuring out and avoiding and there are micro successes that are worth finding, distilling and capitalizing only on the micro success. But to go back to your question, should design fall in line? I think actually all functions should flex with some degree of understanding of what actual success looks like in terms of delivering value for customers. And delivering the approved number of story points is different than delivering what the customer actually wants, needs, and is paying for. We're really curious to hear if you have seen examples where design stood up to its core values and was able to be, I don't know for a better word, accepted, respected within the organization rather than the organization asking design to fit into the more predictable processes that are in line. So what do you feel are some success stories? There's plenty of success stories. The fact is that all great products began with great design stories, like the story of Airbnb and what was originally an experiment in can I rent this inflatable mattress in my apartment is a leap of faith concept that then extends to a several billion dollar business. What design is capable of surrounds us in experiences that we've come to take for granted every day? Uber's another one where the idea that you would climb into some stranger's car and pay them to drive you across town. That sounds insane in 2005 and now I can't live without it. So it's not that there are random stories. The story is around us all the time. I think that the problem is design is seen as a thing that is useful early. Design is a thing that's seen as when you're a very early startup stage company or when you're not even really thinking about it like design yet, when you're still just sort of testing the waters of what's possible and trying to scramble and put something together, you're operating within these principles in a way that's very non-linear and very much about finding the value and making sure that that value is delivered to customers. The problem comes when corporations, which in turn are publicly traded and have a responsibility to stockholders and have quarterly sort of expectations that they are setting for the street and things like that, they need predictability. They need to de-risk. They need some sense of we're on progress. And what I think is that in many cases, these things stifle a design organization's ability to innovate and quite honestly, that's what those stockholders are actually paying for and it's what the customers are paying for. But there's a cart before the horse thing that ends up happening, which is like predictability is more important than actually delivering massive value. You know, predictably delivering some value is better than potentially delivering massive value. And we see examples of that everywhere as well. In fact, with rare exception where you see companies that have such a belief in design that they have whole aspects of their company that are only focused in this innovation space and they are given the free reign to go spend time and treasure and effort exploring, failing, prototyping in, you know, many times in the dark. Surely Apple spent years and years and years figuring out this virtual headset thing that's out now in a quiet place where they were not beholden to stockholders and all that other kind of stuff. And they had the ability to work based on what matters and what's the hunch and how do we refine this idea. Contrast that to the Google Glass, which was released basically as a prototype that you could pay for and got there much quicker but without fully understanding what it meant to delight customers with this thing, what the use cases were, any of that kind of stuff, and brought with it a variety of ethical quandaries, social and stigma things that came up with it. An interesting idea, not perfectly executed by any means but a bold swing but a whole different approach from a design perspective in my opinion. Okay, let's go back to one of the things you mentioned about publicly traded companies and the pressure of delivering quarterly results. I was going to say most organizations are publicly traded, but that's not true. Most organizations aren't, but the big ones of course are. And most organizations aren't set up to innovate. They are set up to maintain the status quo and do it in the most efficient, cost-effective way. Does design from your perspective actually have a role there and does it stand a chance when it's outnumbered by people who have a completely different mindset? Well, I think I want to take issue with the first half. I don't know that all designs, that all corporations are set up to maintain the status quo. And I worked for a company that leaned very heavily into artificial intelligence when they understood that it was going to be a huge disruptor. Not just as they wielded against their competition but even internally. They knew that it was going to break some stuff and they wrapped their arms around it anyway. And I think there's a lot of technical innovation that's happening that's quite inspiring in the way companies in the last couple of years like the ability of Amazon and Google to turn the cloud into a product. These are fantastic innovations that are led almost exclusively, technically first. And then you sort of go and figure out what's the market and what's the value and how do you price that and how do you sell that. So just saying, I don't think corporations are necessarily set up to run the status quo. I do think corporations, for good reasons, are trying to do right by their many hundreds of thousands of employees, their customers, and their stockholders and other stakeholders. And unfortunately, I think that that has led to what kinds of things can we do to appropriately manage expenses. Then how do we turn that into an effective planning system? How do we turn that into an effective resource management framework? How do we turn that into guidance for how to make sure teams are using their resources reliably, predictably, efficiently? And that's what happens. What happens is that things that are done in the spirit of being responsible from a business perspective, by the time you get to an individual team member, their hands are completely tied. The work is, in many cases, planned months or even a year in advance. And that doesn't give you a lot of room to be wrong or to suddenly say, I mean, and again, I'm not saying that companies can't pivot. I'm saying that individual designers have a lot of trouble adding value beyond story points when they are treated as a resource that's expected to deliver a certain incremental amount of value and they play down, so to speak. There was a time when there was a lot of companies and into it was among them that spent a lot of time spending that encouraged employees to have 10% of their time spent on innovation and blue sky stuff. And at some point, I think we decided that was waste. I think at some point we decided there's like, they're really not doing anything with that time because we're not seeing a whole lot of innovation coming out of that. And so what we're going to do instead is we're going to have them, first it was we're just going to have them go back and polish up things that we haven't had a chance to polish up on. And then that just turned into we're just going to get a couple more points out of every cycle. So I feel like there are good reasons why system after system after system are arranged the way they are. And what I see is that it's difficult for the design process to coexist inside these bulky multi-layered and oftentimes somewhat bureaucratic systems. And many of the people that have built those systems look at them and say they're too heavy, they're too rigorous, we're asking people to assume things and size things with no idea what they're talking about yet. They know, but it's a practical way to do it. The problem is, and then this is the other side of this, and many people that are in the marketing space will understand the concept of the use it or lose it budget. You get to the fourth quarter of your business cycle and you've got some money left over. And if you don't spend it, they're going to cut your budget for next year. Oh, you didn't use all your money. You clearly don't need it all. So we're going to take it away from you. We're going to give you less next year. Wouldn't you think that that would create all kinds of terrible behavior wasted money on half thought out stuff and little pet projects and all kinds of things that again, that doesn't sound like accountability at all. That just sounds like spend the money so we get more money. I mean, that sounds utterly unstrategic. Now, the same thing happens in resourcing where you resource a team with a bunch of engineers to go build a product and the design team goes off and comes up with, they spend some time doing some research and they come back and they say, you know what, the early results on this prototype are that it is the wrong thing to build. So we're going to go do some more research. And a product manager who's got 10 engineers under their resource to them and their value is as a deployer of resources is twiddling their thumbs and trying to figure out how to keep those engineers busy. This 10 people, all of whom are making surely $100,000 and we're going to keep them busy for two weeks. That's what Hagell does. That concerns me as a person that wants to be responsible with resources. It's like, make sure you know what you're going to build before you have resources stacked up to build it. But that's the way resourcing works. You get resources for months or quarters or years and every day they're not busy. It's a day that your money is blowing out the window. And so there's a lot of pressure on designers to validate something that we can go build right now. Give me a shovel-ready story of something that we can make this week. How do we, or what kind of conversation do we need to have with our leaders on whichever level in the organization it is to create that space to, like you said, be more messy, more mystical, be more inconvenient? It seems like quite an uphill battle. I think it is. And I think that part of it is that I think designers themselves are half bought in on the fact that they need to justify their value, that they need to spend cycles, teaching, engineers, product managers, leaders, pretty much everyone around them, why design matters. And a lot of times the response they get is, quit telling me why design matters and go matter. There's a bit of gaslighting that goes into that because designers were trying to do the work that mattered and they were being shut down as that's the wrong work. We don't need inspiration. We need shovel-ready stories. We don't need five-year narratives and journeys. We need value to customer in two weeks. And I think that some of it is that they're outnumbered. For every designer on a team, you've got one to two product managers and sometimes 10 to 20 engineers at the expense. And it is the job of designers to educate and to build partnerships and to advocate for customers and advocate for, and I'm not kidding when I say this, but to advocate for magic, not just functional specs, but emotional resonance and a sense of wonder and curiosity and fantasticness that comes from experiences that feel elegant and sort of like, how did they know that in a way that, as everybody likes to say in air quotes, isn't creepy, but feels like you know me and feels like you expected this and keep me from feeling terrified about the use of my data and all that kind of stuff. I mean, there's all these other things that are out there that are all swirling around the human experience and the overwhelming emotion that people feel when they're confronted with technology is a sense of bewilderment or fear or frustration or agony that things don't work the way they're supposed to that they have to do them twice or three times or five times. And these are products that we all respect and are proud of and sell for 10 and 20 and $30 a month. And the amount of pain we inflict on our customers, and I'm not just talking about the companies that I've worked for. I mean, Apple is killing me with iCloud subscriptions. I don't understand how they work. I don't understand why I pay for a different one every month. And all I know is that I can't not subscribe to them because something won't get backed up. And I don't know what it is. But iCloud's supposed to be magic. And I'm like, but it's also terrifying. No, James, you said a part of the problem is that designers have subscribed to the idea that they need to justify their value prove their value. And at the same time, you're saying that we should explain the story. Well, I think that I think that part of it is, and this is one of the reasons why I brought this word up earlier, I think I think there's a lot of there's a lack of curiosity from functions outside of design as to how could this be more magical? How could this be more emotionally resonant with customers? That's not a question that engineers will ask. That's not a question that most business leaders will ask. And so designers say things like, shouldn't it be more magical? And then they say, well, how? And they say, that's a great question. I would love to do some research to let you know what magical feels like for this customer. And then everybody else says, that sounds like a waste of time. So the expectation needs to come from leadership, the expectation needs to come at the mission and the vision level of a company, of a corporation. And by the way, the people that are running corporations, CEOs and C staff and corporations have very, very, very big important things that they need to go solve. And I'm aware of that. I know that employee health and retention are important issues and that customer growth is an important issue. And that managing expenses and managing expectations for the street are very important. And staying close to customers for those leaders for whom they prioritize that they know that that's a huge piece of time they should spend. And looking at what other companies are doing and making sure that we are staying abreast of trends and benchmarking appropriately and all those things. So the idea of expecting more magic from your projects or from your products sounds like one more thing and maybe that's somebody else's job. And I assure you that until that expectation comes down from the top of the corporation, and I'm not sure it will, then I think that the role of designers as innovators and as conjurers of magic and emotional connection is going to be stifled. And what does that mean for the design community? I think it means that you have to either build the bridges, look for the people that will give you the cover you need to go do the work that needs to get done. And I would say that there are visionary product leaders, there are visionary design leaders, there are visionary technical leaders and marketing and sales leaders who know that our products are not living up to the expectations or wowing our customers. And they don't know what the levers are. They want that but they don't know how to get it. And so instead of shouting into the wind at every single person about how important design is and how important it is that we do the right amount of research and how important it is that we do less better, you just have to find who these people are that believe already and help them, have them help you make the case so that they can help find the funds and all those kind of stuff. But I just see a lot of design leaders that are thinking, oh, if I was just a better business, if I just had a better head for the business and the metrics, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm just saying I don't think that's the path to getting the magic in the door. I think that you're being drawn off sides by, oh, I need to conform myself to these, to weigh these other business leaders' talk and look and work or we're not going to get any design impact. And it's like, well, we'll see. But real design impact and real design magic when customers see it is quite potent. And so one of the things that I've coached teams forever to do is get your experiences in front of your customers and get it on tape and share their delight and absolutely their disappointment and their frustration in video and make those leaders watch uncomfortably as these customers struggle with our problems and struggle with our experiences or light up in the moments where we've done something right and they're like, what did they just do? What happened there? And it's like, right, shouldn't we be focused on that? Well, this is a very important part of our conversation, which is quickly overlooked, I feel by many. And that is that anecdotal evidence and stories are often disregarded as evidence, as proof. And we try to fit into the existing metrics that are in place. And often they are expressed in big numbers, in quarters. And like you said, there's probably nothing wrong with that. And it's smart to have to understand the vocabulary that the rest of the business uses. But when we ignore and neglect our metrics, and those are the smiles, the frustrations, the emotions, as you said it, if we forget to put those forward, then we're probably, we're positioned for failure because we're not showing where the true power of our skills lies. I'll do you one better. When you consider how important data has become to your average company, and there are companies like Google and Facebook and Netflix that have really defined themselves based on how well they know their customer, from the number of discrete data points they have about that customer. There's probably an overwhelming sense of, I know this customer better than they know themselves. And that may be true from a behavioral sense, from a, and then if you were to confront that customer with that data and say, this is who you are, and a piece of them might go, oh, that's really interesting. And then they might even go so far as to justify what they're seeing in that data. But the fact of the matter is that people are emotional, and they make decisions for reasons that are really, really hard to connect to rational stuff. And if you start with the customer and you start with what are you trying to do, why are you trying to do it, why is that important to you, how did that become an important part of your life, you learn all kinds of shit that doesn't show up in that data. And then you would have a lot of trouble being able to go, oh yeah, I can see that right here in this click or in this behavioral moment. You can't tell that. And the fact is, that's who we're designing for, where we're designing for these emotionally driven, incredibly sort of like fickle decision makers that are surrounded by a combination of magical experiences that they can't tell you why they love them, but they love them. And other experiences that they wish were as magical and are therefore frustrated and peeved and feel like hurt that you're not thinking of their expectations in this particular moment. And so yeah, I think that quantitative metrics, lagging quantitative metrics, quarterly and yearly quantitative metrics drive these ships in ways that the qualitative metrics or the qualitative and anecdotal story would be such a better sense of, this is where we should focus and this is our opportunity to triple down on a thing that matters. And I do think that the problem is you look at those big numbers and you look at an incremental lift of 0.3 or whatever it is and you're like, hey, that's pretty good. And it's like, oh my God, you're selling yourself so short. We could literally double this business if we would just pay attention to what these people are saying. But instead, we're going to like, we're going to futz with the conversion of one particular button click by making it a different size. You think we're solving a problem with that? We are not. But it feels more secure, right? It feels more in control. And you can point to it, right? It's a metric. You can point to it. And so like I said, you've got this trap where everybody's now focused on the metrics on these quantitative measurements of what success is. And I say a lot of that's bullshit. And it's a red herring for the actual value you could be adding for customers. And isn't that sort of lacking or the thing that we can maybe blame ourselves as a design community that we have done a really poor job at communicating? I wouldn't say that maybe the ambition or a vision or the problem that we can solve. Yeah, Mark, you know what? It's probably my fault. As somebody that was a VP, and I don't mean entirely. I mean, but for example, somebody who was a VP in a company who tried to pride themselves on creating air cover for creative teams to go do the right work and putting service designers and other designers in place to make the most of what I felt like was the opportunity. But I don't think I did a great job of creating the environment where those designers could in fact uncover and capitalize on that 2x value that would have then turned around and mattered to customers and the business. In hindsight, with the knowledge that you have right now, what do you feel would have been it? Was there a better strategy? Yes. Do I know what it is? No. I mean, I spent some time. I think I needed to spend more time, especially in my last role with my cross functional partners. But like I said, I think the curiosity is this big important piece of the equation. And when people aren't asking, how do we make sure design is having the most impact it can? And what can we do to help? I actually was asked that question quite a bit in other roles. And so when nobody asks and you feel like all you can do is tell and show, it's a lot of pushing and it's a lot of searching for who's interested in helping. And that's time consuming and a lot of relationship building. And yeah, I'm sure it's a measure of what I would have done differently, for sure. Is that a red flag or a good indicator of success when I'm imagining that you and your role as VP shouldn't probably next to looking for the people who are curious about design also probably should have asked who people, why do you feel design is here? And if they have no clue, then it's like, okay, red flag, we need to jump ship because if the people who are sponsoring it, somebody's always, there is a PNL somewhere, if they can't tell you why you're here, then you're running off a cliff. Yeah, that's a good question. And Mark, it brings me back to another thing that we talked about earlier, which is, what am I going to do now or next? And I think that one of the things that I'm trying to figure out now is, where can design be impactful that's not in a corporate setting? Because one of the things that I'm particularly, one of my sort of provocative questions is, can design really be its best self when you have revenue and When it's crippled and shamed, James, that's the way you described it. When it's crippled and shamed, you describe it. Yeah, I guess that's the point is, but part of that is because there are so many layered processes and expectations that sort of leave very little room for design to explore. And again, I don't know that that's true everywhere and I don't know if that's true. But I'll tell you that having interviewed now at quite a few different corporate design organizations, I would love to be surprised by the one where I'm like, ooh, they actually sound like they're coming at this totally different and in a way where design is actually set up for success. And by and large, nope. By and large, they are all kind of doing it the same way. So maybe another note, it's not a definite conclusion, but the state of design is that within corporate environments, its impact is often marginalized and it's up to us to change that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I think it's up to the leaders in those companies to do a combination of things, one of which is create the air cover for those design organizations to do the right work. Don't get cowed into trying to fit a design process into an agile process. It just doesn't work. I mean, and plenty of people, I'm not the first person to point this out and I will not be the last person to point this out. Quite honestly, there's an awful lot of people out there that don't think agile is a very good process at all. They don't think that engineers think it's a good process. They don't think it's a good value delivery process. They think it's an efficient thing, but it's efficient almost for the sake of being efficient without a real sense of accountability that it's delivering the right value to customer and the right velocity, that it's making the most of the rich opportunity that things like research, experimentation, failure, and even cross-team collaboration. Agile doesn't make a lot of that stuff easy. In many cases, it makes it almost impossible. When you start asking for things like collaborating, they're like, well, I'm going to have to fit that into next sprint. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? I want to ask you some questions. Yeah, I really don't have time until two weeks from now. I mean, that's insane. That's a big issue with why corporations can't get out of their own way. Again, which is why when you go back to the roots, when you get back to smaller startups, when you go back to little projects like the ones that I was working on in Bottle Rocket, and you're surrounded by people that are good at their job that are focused on a singular mission and that are tasked with building the most important thing possible as fast as possible and quality is a key consideration, you can work really fast. You know what? You can deliver the same thing that somebody in this other big company is delivering, if not better, and probably 50 versions of it, some of which were better, some of which were way better, some of which were terrible, but that's okay because you can work quickly and effortlessly and it's a big deal. And then the realities of working in these big organizations are that there's all this extra apparatus around you have to use our data model and you have to use our design system and all these other kind of things that quite honestly are like, I'm a believer in design systems. I think that once you know what it is you're supposed to be building, a design system can really free up designers to do creative work. And the second you start looking at a design system as, oh, we no longer need visual designers on the team, you've completely missed the point of a design system, which is don't second guess decisions you've already made, go design the stuff that we haven't figured out yet. And reassure your customers as they move across an ecosystem that they're working on the same with the same data and the same products and the same security and all that kind of stuff. There's all kinds of great benefits to a design system, but it's not so that you don't have to have designers anymore. Well, we can have an entire conversation about AI in this context, but yeah, let's let's leave that for a different episode. So James, we've discussed many things, agile design systems, the future of design. Now, if any of us is listening to this and we find ourselves in this corner, or we have been cornered into this position where we feel our value as design professionals, isn't respected, isn't seen as very marginal. Like, if you could give us one piece of advice, what would that be? I think there's two. You're cheating. I think there's one simple one, which is leave. And find a better place. Go find a place that does do that. Fair enough. It's a brave thing. It's not always the... And I don't mean like just quit. I mean, prepare and exit. And maybe as part of that, let your manager know and maybe let your GM know that this is what you see, that this is the work that you want to be doing and can't do here, that this is the impact that you expect design to have and can't have within the constraints and the corners that it's been painted into. But there are companies that are doing this well, and there are even companies where there are even corporations where some elements of the corporation are doing it well. I mentioned the fact that I still believe that there is an innovative heart at places like certainly like Apple, but also places like Airbnb and Netflix and even Google and Facebook and all of those places. I think that there's lots of really, really interesting work that needs to get done in those places. And I can't speak for all those places as far as the mechanics go. So if anybody wants to say, hey, by the way, that's not the way design works at one of these other corporations. I mean, I'm going by what people have told me and all that kind of stuff. So I've heard enough of this information to feel like this all sounds like it's very similar. But if you're going to stay, work with, find the right people. Stop shouting into the wind and find the right people that have the right mindset and the ability to help make the change happen. So you're looking for executive sponsorship and you're looking for cross-functional sponsorship. I don't think designers get out of this box on their own. I think designers will have to find and coax the curiosity out of non-designers. And I think that that's the lesson. The lesson is how do you find and coax the curiosity out of the non-designer because us trying and showing and telling and building and doing all these things to try to paint the picture of how design can be more impactful doesn't work if people aren't curious and doesn't work if people don't care and doesn't work if, quite honestly, I'd love to hear about that, but I'll have to schedule it into my next sprint. That's how you know you've lost when people can't even make time to have a conversation about, hey, this train is broken. Hey, I'm too busy fixing the train to talk about the fact the train's broken. Both suggestions that you give require a certain level of courage and confidence and bravery, either to sort of say goodbye and this is not the right time, not the right place, or to speak up and be confident about the value that you can create when the conditions are right. So yeah, maybe maybe we do need a little bit more bravery. Yeah, I mean, humility, curiosity, and bravery, the three tent poles of a great creative, know that you can't do it alone and know that you don't know nearly enough, ask and involve everyone, and yeah, stick your neck out. Try stuff that sounds stupid but just might work. Yeah, there's nothing to lose anyway, the ship is going down. Exactly. I mean, you know, or maybe you learn something in the process, maybe you uncover something by being curious, maybe you uncover something that you didn't really consider or didn't really think about, that's now part of how you make decisions. I don't think this is hopeless. But I stick by my contention that there is a lot of, what were the two words that we used? Shamed and crippled. Shamed and crippled. There's some shame and crippled going on, for sure. We can fix this, we must fix this, or wait till those organizations go extinct and create a viable alternative alongside of them, right? That's plan B, or maybe that's plan A, actually, I don't know. James, you're on a journey to see what's next. Is there a way we can follow along and maybe learn more about what you're doing? I'm a pretty regular writer on medium. I have a medium link that I'm sure that you can share with everyone else, but I'm pretty easy to find there. So I've been writing observations on my journey as a leader and especially things that other designers can do. And I think a lot of them would probably dovetail well with what I've said today. And then purely on the other side of the spectrum, I think I said at the beginning that if I had all the money in the world, all I would do is basically travel the world eating. So you can find me on Instagram at Susie loves Sonoma. I would expect that that would be a call to action invite me to your next conference. That's another way. You can absolutely do that as well, invite me to your next conference. Then the only other thing that I've got that's pretty cool is that I started working with this creative collaborative called Neil. So that's a really great place. One of the things that's been striking for me is the talent that has joined that platform is universally experienced in a way that you would never see in a freelance network. It's just utterly jaw-dropping. I am the least qualified person on there by a mile. And the people that I've met are truly inspiring. And what I'll say is they're focused on the big stuff. They're focused on climate, social justice. They're focused on sustainable cities and housing and how we're going to make the best of the mess that we're in right now. And I feel like that's the call to action if you don't know if corporate's not working for you. Man, there are important things that need help out there in the climate and sustainable future realms that need design and designers desperately. We'll make sure to include all the relevant links in the show notes and don't beat yourself up too much. You at least made it onto the service design show. So that's not a bad day. James, we could talk for probably a few more hours. This is a classic thing everybody says on a podcast, but it's true. But I'm going to thank you for your time and for sharing your story here and for doing this wake-up call for the design community. I'm going to interpret this as to be more brave. That's my conclusion. I'll wrap up for this conversation. So yeah, thanks again for making the time in coming on. Awesome. Thanks, Mark. James really got me thinking about how we can be more ambitious and inspirational again as a design community. Yes, there is a risk that will not fit in with business as usual on the short term. But should we settle for mediocrity? I know my answer to this one. I'm really curious. What's your biggest takeaway from this conversation with James? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there. And if you made it all the way here and enjoyed this jet, please do me a quick favor. Click the like button. Not to feed a huge of algorithm. I really don't care about that. But to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. My name is Mark Fontaine. I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Please keep making a positive impact and I'll get you very soon in the next video.