 In this video, you're going to learn how to get into the positions where you have the authority to influence business decisions as a designer and which pitfalls you should avoid once you're there. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Todd Wilkins and this is the service design show episode 136. Hi, I'm Mark Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the hidden things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you make great services happen that have a positive impact on people and business. Our guest in this episode is Todd Wilkins, a design leader with an impressive career at companies like IBM Adaptive Path and the Mayo Clinic. The reason I'm so excited to have Todd on the show today is that he took a leap and stepped into a non-traditional design role that of being a product manager and leader moving a bit away from the craft of design. That role came with a lot of power to influence business decisions, but also with its own set of responsibilities. You'll hear from Todd's personal experience why it's sometimes challenging to stay true to your design identity and leverage the superpowers of design while being amongst other business leaders. I hope that after this episode you'll walk away with a better understanding if the move into a leadership role is something that could also be the next step in your career. If you're enjoying conversations like this and find topics like this interesting, make sure you subscribe to the channel because we bring a new video like this every week or so. So now without any further ado, it's time to jump into the conversation with Todd Wilkins. Welcome to the show, Todd. Thanks. Well, I'm happy that you're here. We're going to chat about a really interesting topic that hasn't been covered on the show a lot. You have a really interesting career. I was looking through your LinkedIn profile. We'll talk about that in a second. And I think you have a unique perspective that not a lot of designers have and definitely can learn something about that. But before we dive into all that, for the people who haven't looked you up on LinkedIn yet and haven't learned about your background, could you give us a brief introduction into who you are and what you do these days? Sure. So I am actually currently on sabbatical. So I don't I don't do much of anything right now. But most of what I've been doing with my career is for the last let's call five or six years I've been a product management leader or a business leader. Prior to that I was a designer for quite a long time. I guess I could could go back to the beginning, which is I got a computer science degree, but realize we didn't talk about users or people very much got really interested in learning about people that drew me to interaction design. I did that for a while in various capacities in the late 90s, went to graduate school in sociology and information science, and then came back to industry spent about five and a half years working at a company called adaptive path. I worked there as a sort of senior consultant for a year and then I opened up the second studio for adaptive path and ended up joining the leadership. So, and then I kind of went in house and worked at the Mayo Clinic I worked at IBM worked at Atlassian. The thread to pull together here is that I really was a designer and a human focused kind of researcher for most of my career. But I kept working with business and I kept working with product management and eventually I sort of I made the jump to being a business leader and a product management leader, just bringing my kind of design and research background with me. And that's already a hint upon what we're going to discuss in a second. But before we do that, I have a 30 second question round no a 60 second question round rapid fire question round five questions thought you haven't prepared for the goals to get to know you even even better. Just answers quickly as possible. Whatever. What's the first thing that comes to your mind so. Okay. Question number one is what's always in your fridge. It's always in my fridge. Half and half, and some kind of Indian food. Oh, right. Which books are you reading if any at this moment. I am always reading some sort of spiritual or prayer book. And I'm currently reading a fictional book called the sparrow about interesting about some priest who goes to a foreign planet in a different solar system. Awesome. We'll add a link to that in the show notes. Which superpower would you like to have. I think I would like to be able to fly. What did you want to become when you were a kid. When I was a kid, I wanted to become. I think I wanted to be in the military at one point. And then I wanted to be a professor. Interesting. Still possible. Both things, I guess. And finally, although we're going to talk about business leadership and product management, I'm still curious to recall the first moment you got in touch with service design. Oh, yeah. So I was working at adaptive path. This is probably 2006. And I can't remember. I read something about it or heard something about it on a maybe at a conference. And then I got very interested in the whole concept of service design. And ever since then it's sort of been a foundational part of how I do everything I do, even though I don't always use the phrase service design. Yeah, fair enough. Service design goes by many names these days. Yeah. Let's transition into the topic of today. You already hinted upon your background as a product manager, your background being in business leadership and design leadership. How would you sort of introduce this topic where maybe we can start with the end? What do you hope to bring across in the conversation today? Yeah, I think that it's a very common thing for people from a design background to end up working with a lot of people in organizations because it takes a cross disciplinary team. And for designers to end up feeling frustrated sometimes trying to get their point across or get someone to buy into the perspective of their human centered or design perspective. And I've heard many people say, well, if I was in charge of this company or if I was in charge of this business or if I could make all the decisions, this is what we would do. And it would be great. And I think that what I would hope people would get out of this is one case study of what happened when someone tried to do that. I basically said, okay, if I think I can do this better than the business leaders and the product leaders, I'm going to try to take that job and see how I do trying to bring my design perspective. And so I hope people can walk away with an understanding of what's really involved if you try to do that, both the great things and the challenges. Yeah. Yeah. And then this is awesome because I totally see that frustration and that desire to have the influence to have the authority to have the power to have the budget to have the mandate. All those things to influence change because that's eventually what we want. We want to make a positive impact. But sometimes we feel our hands are tied and you actually made the leap into, we finally said the other side. There isn't an other side, but sort of metaphorically the other side. Now, you already mentioned something about your career and how you transition into this, but maybe we can rewind and go back to like what were some important moments in your career that you now looking back on it. That transformed you to move towards this direction. Yeah. So I think the first thing that really moved me in this direction was working at Adaptive Path, which is a design research consultancy. I was sort of senior consultant there. And about a year and a half into my time there, my family wanted to move to a different city and Adaptive Path had one studio in San Francisco. And so I really didn't want to leave Adaptive Path. But I, and so I had a conversation with the leadership and essentially I said, would you let me move to another city and try to open another studio. And they looked at me like that was a little crazy, but they said they think about it. And so I went away and decided I would write a business plan, try to essentially justify my salary and a plan to create an actual other team. And I did that. It was a terrible business plan in many ways because it was my first stab at it. But it made me learn how Adaptive Path's business worked really detailed. I went and interviewed everybody there in the business. And then I convinced them to let me give it a try. And I think that that was my first moment of saying, oh, like I did my designerly stuff. But for the business, I went and did user research. I put together a model for understanding how the business worked. I made a case for a decision for a course of action. I prototyped it. That's what my business case was. I prototyped what I was going to do for the next 12 months. I told them here's what I'm going to do and why and how and why. And then they said, sure, we'll give you a shot. And so I moved with my family to Austin, Texas, and started trying to open, get a new studio up and running. And so that was my first moment of realizing I could do something that wasn't just design, but using a lot of my designerly kind of skills. But then I found myself running part of the P&L for the business. I had to hire people. I had to do the facilities. I had to handle all the stuff. And I ended up joining the leadership of the company as a whole because I ran a meaningful part of the business at that point. And this makes me think of the event diagram we always see in design. Feasible, viable, and help me out. Feasible, viable, and what is the other one? Useable. Exactly. And being on the other side, having to run a business, having to think about the financials is something that's, it is in our Venn diagram, but we very rarely actually have to do it, right? And you force yourself into a position where that was really an important part. Exactly. Now, it was easy for me in some sense. I didn't start my own business. I was beginning, like I had all the support of a business that existed was successful, their brand, their way of working. So it was probably the best possible scenario for me to try to take this step. And I will be forever thankful to the people that I worked with for giving me the chance and the support. But it was a mind-changing moment for me. And then the next five years, four or five years when I was running that studio was a real learning opportunity for me. I like to say, I never went and got a formal MBA, but I kind of, I learned a lot of basics about other things you do in an MBA because I had to do them. And I was just learning from my peers or the people that I worked for back at the home office. Now, there might be some people listening and thinking like, like, why? What's the opportunity here? Why would I, quote unquote, I'm just a designer. Let me do my job and stick with that. What do you see as the opportunity here of stepping into the other side where at least learning more about the other side? Yeah, so I'll reiterate that my main motivation was actually very personal. It was something I was passionate about because it was important to my family. And so I will say anybody who wants to make this jump, don't just do it because you want a different kind of job title or you want more power or more influence. It has to be something that's driving you that's really personal. And in that case, the first thing that made me think of it was something my family needed. But what I think your question was sort of, what do you get out of it? Like, why would you do this, right? Yeah. And I think that for me, it forced me to empathize in a way. It forced me to empathize with a lot of other parts of businesses that I conceptually be like, oh, I understand all those people's concerns and what they're doing. But when you really do it, I had to put on the shoes of someone who's entrepreneurial and I had to mess up a lot and then succeed a lot. And it's a very powerful experience and you learn a ton just about how to be a professional. But it broadened my perspective outside of just design. And of course, that's a great thing. If we take this one step further, like, of course, we need to become better professionals, more well rounded, more mature. But again, what's the opportunity? What's the potential benefit of somebody who's now a service designer stepping into a more product leadership or design leadership or business leadership role? Yeah, sure. So I think for me, the thing that was the most the biggest benefit, I think it would be for most people was I got to start doing things the way I really thought they should be done, right? I got to test my own beliefs and my own perspective. I put them on the line, right? And it was wonderful because our second studio ran differently than the original studio. We did things differently and not completely, but a bit. And we began, if you talk to anyone there, we had a different character. Even after the first year, more of the large ambiguous research projects were coming through our studio than the old than the other one. We started doing actually about the end of the five years. Some of our some of the biggest and longest lasting clients for Adaptive Path as a whole had been based out of the Austin studio, the smaller Austin studio than the San Francisco one. And I think it was because of the nature of the projects we tended to get. We were a little bit more researchy. We were more service design actually in some ways than Adaptive Path back in San Francisco. They had strong service designers there. But if you took the whole 30 people, there were five or six really strong service designers and some people who could do service design and then people who just did more classic product design. Whereas I think in Austin, we were much more research and service design and so that character was great. So we got to test and learn a lot of stuff because I wanted to push my practice and the idea and the practice of the company forward in a way that was harder for me to do in the other situation. Yeah. So this is all about which the thing which we started with, if you really feel that you can make a difference and you're currently being limited by external factors like people around you who don't see it. They don't want to give you the support or the trust. Like this is the opportunity to take charge. Yeah. Right? That's absolutely true. Yeah. After I did that, this is actually the advice I started giving to every young designer that I met for the last 10 years is when I talk to them and they start to say things like I'm frustrated with my part manager or I'm frustrated with the way the business is making decisions. The first thing I say is, well, you know, you could do that job. You're smart and you're talented. You could become a product manager. You could become a business leader for a small part of this business. You could take that job and what's funny is the look on people's faces when I say that. They're like, no, I couldn't. I was like, no, look, and I can point to an example. Every organization has examples of people who made that switch. So I can say it's concrete. You can do this. And then half the people will say, well, yeah, but I don't, I mean, I don't want to actually have that responsibility and do those things. And I'm like, well, that's great. But then you have to acknowledge that someone else is doing that and you have to give them some respect and understanding. And then half of them are like, wait, maybe I can. And then I've seen some of the best product managers I know are people who used to be designers and decided to make this jump. It's not for everybody. But it is an important. So I tell everybody to think about this in their career. So can you elaborate a bit about what do we actually mean with the jump? Like, how does your role transform? How does your life transform? Do you still feel a designer like take us through that transformation? Well, I mean, it'll be a little different depending on how people do it. So I could tell you my story and give you what it was like for me, but mine may be a little unusual. So I spoke a little bit about that change when I was helping run a datapath. When I was running that studio for datapath. That change was very gradual because when I started off, there was just me and I had to slowly grow a team. And so it's hard to state the change. I just all of a sudden found myself acting differently, right? But then I went back into more very design focused roles for a while until I landed at Atlassian. I was VP of design for communications and mobile for a while there, which means I was ran designed for a product called HipChat, which competed with Slack, as well as a bunch of the mobile work that they were doing across Atlassian for a while. In that case, Atlassian was just building up a product management practice. They had been an engineering organization and then they built a strong design organization and they're building product management. But because they had a few great product managers, but not that many. The designers were often kind of stepping in to give leadership and roadmap planning for the products. And I started to do a bit of that. And I even talked to one of the founders of Atlassian and told him that my goal was that in the next four or five years, I'd like to take on the product leadership for some area at Atlassian. And they were very supportive of that. And then interestingly, six months later, I got offered the chance to become the GM of a different software product called WooCommerce. And that was a very unusual situation to come up. But I saw the opportunity. I was like, I can step into doing this thing I've been talking about wanting to do and I'm going to do it four years sooner than I was ready for. And I would say, so that was a great opportunity. But so then the experience of that, because that was my first really stepping out of design and looking at the whole business. The experience of that for me was, frankly, I realized I knew a lot about design and design teams, but I didn't know a whole lot about the other things. And so I leaned very heavily into doing what I would call design research about how to run the rest of the business, which involved a ton of user research and interviews with people all across. I did 90 interviews in my first 60 days at WooCommerce and automatic with people in my organization to try to understand how their jobs worked and how the business worked. So that I could try to be competent at it. Yeah. So it doesn't sound like if you're still using your design approach, design methodology, if that isn't the thing that is changing, what is changing? What I think part of it is what I'm applying it to is changing. I'm not just solving interface or experience problems. I'm solving lots of other kinds of problems creatively. Design is really just about creative problem solving in a lot of ways. And so I was doing that. And then I think the other thing that did change is I worked very hard not to privilege the design perspective as the only one, which meant that I spent a lot of time trying to understand ways of thinking about businesses and teams that weren't particularly designing, because I felt it was I needed to round out my ways of thinking to be a competent leader. And so what changed for me there is I actually stopped paying attention to the design team a little bit. I felt like they were strong and they had a good lead and I basically said, I'm not going to get in the design details at all. And I'm going to kind of align my thinking and my identity more with the product and the engineering and the marketing and the finance, because I felt like I would have had a tendency. I felt tempted to focus too much on the design part and not these other parts. And so that was something I consciously tried to change for myself. And that did change my way of approaching the world. I think even right now I'm a little bit less, I don't think of myself as much as a designer as my identity, but I do really privilege design as a way of approaching the world and thinking about things. Yeah. So getting in this position allows you to enable design to do its thing. That's right. It does. I think that it does. I think this is going to get into some of the things we might talk about in a bit, but I think that one of the downsides of this, I don't think it could have been avoided, is that I wasn't as helpful to the design teams as I could have been, because I purposely stepped away from them. And so to the degree that we had a good leader and a good team, the design went fine. And to the degree I was in a situation where I didn't have a very strong team yet, or I didn't have a strong leader on a team, it didn't go very well, or it didn't go as well as it could have. And I think that was directly related to the fact that I was a lot more hands off for the design teams than I would have been years before. And I'd love to know a bit more about that, but one thing that's still on my mind is I'm trying to understand if you move into a product manager or leadership role, you get responsibilities for performance. I guess you might have profit and loss performance, like employee happiness performance kind of things, road map strategies. Those are because you mentioned you were applying design onto other challenges and this became your realm, like having to deliver business outcomes. Yes. I basically spend most of my time on trying to ensure business outcomes, which for software and service products or offerings is usually customer and user growth and revenue growth. Like really those are the only two things that matter. Everything else just supports those things. So I become very focused on how do I help our business grow both in terms of its customers and in terms of its revenue. And I apply anything I can to solving that problem. And then I build organizations. I build teams. I think about the structure of teams and I spend a lot of time figuring out how to get people working well together and how to scale the teams up much bigger. I've worked in a lot of companies that were growing and so a lot of hiring and changing of the way teams work, that's where most of my time is spent. And what I really like about this is that in a lot of design teams that I've seen is that the thinking and responsibility stops at the level of the end user, the customer. Like we want to create a great experience. We want to remove the pain points, you know. And often what's lacking is a connection to the business goals. And I don't know where that happens. And that creates a lot of friction internally because the designers are the users advocate but there are other people inside the organization who have different incentives and metrics. And your incentives as a designer by helping customers is actually to help the organization as well just that the conversation often isn't taking place or there isn't a lot of awareness. And by stepping into that role you can actually bridge that finally. I think that's very true. Sometimes people like to say there's a tension between what the business wants and what the users need, what each one needs. And that can be true. What I have come to believe and see mostly is that when that tension exists, when something the business is trying to do and something that the users want are really, really not aligned well, that's usually a fundamental problem with the business. That's usually a fundamental problem with the way the organization is set up because a well-designed business meets user needs really well and it's very aligned with meeting those user needs. And so what I found is really good about the role that I've been in and actually it's my job to help notice when that's the case and then figure out how to solve it. Sometimes it's just that you're framing the business need differently than it needs to be framed or there's three or four, there's one business need and there's three or four ways of meeting it and one of them is in direct contradiction or directly intention with user needs but the other two or three aren't. So you just don't do the one that's intention. You pick the other three, right? That's the creative problem-solving part. So I'd say but often the design teams aren't privy to the larger goal or they aren't thinking about the larger goal. What they're really doing is just saying, well they told me that we have to grow revenue 20% this next month and I know users want to stop paying very much for this thing and would like this feature to be free and then they end up butting heads with their product manager or with their executive rather than saying, wait a second we can actually work around this. Now I know tons of designers who don't approach it that way who step right in and say, I want to understand the business, hey executive, hey product manager, let's creatively solve this problem together. So I'm not trying to caricature designers as not caring but I think that you're right. Many organizations draw boundaries on what designers are allowed to think about and then the designers sometimes just accept it. Yeah. Now having somebody like you leading a design team, a product management team, a product team sounds great to me because you know what designers are going through but you still feel that at some points you sort of in a hindsight would have done things differently, right? Could you share one or two stories where you think well those are lessons learned that might be valuable to share with future product leaders, business leaders who have a design background. Yeah, sure. So I think there's a theme and I could pick a lot of concrete ways that this manifested which is in an effort to become better as an all around product or business leader I purposely decided to distance myself a bit from the design organization and the designers and I think that I gained a lot from doing that but it's the pendulum. I swung the pendulum too far and I think that the mistakes I made were things like I stopped going to and looking at what the actual interfaces and experience were like that the designs were doing. I just said, okay, yeah, it's fine and I would only look at it at the end which is a terrible thing. No executive who's building software products or service products should only look at what's being created at the end. No one should do that and here I was someone who knew how that process should work really well and I was completely replicating that terrible that bad habit, right? And so I had a lot of those things a lot of things where I just I didn't do... I separated myself too much from the designers and what that meant was they ended up feeling not supported as well as they could have because I was a little absent. They came in with this like, Todd is the designer. Yeah, so we have somebody in the executive who knows us and then they would be like we never see Todd. He doesn't come talk to us, right? And so I had some morale issues because of that with people. In my last job, I needed to hire and build up a design team and a product management team. I put almost all my effort on building the product management team and the design team did not get as much support as I would have. It was much slower to grow and the leader who was there did not get as much support from me on just like on a weekly time basis as he should have. I realized from those that I'm sort of moving my approach back the pendulum back to the center now but I definitely made the mistake of that. The last thing I would say is I think I also did that because I was trying to help myself feel credible talking to and working with people who weren't designers. If I walked into the room and they're like oh, here's the designer who's now the GM or here's the designer who's now the Chief Product Officer the expectation would be I would be all design all the time. And I wanted to regain some credibility as a more general thinking leader and so I think I de-emphasized UX and design and I think it was a bad choice. So I can explain why I did it. Yeah, I'm curious about that. One thing about the first thing you mentioned that you didn't put enough love into the design team that's basically around FaceTime. You just weren't around, right? That's as practical as it gets being around having the conversations, right? I wasn't doing reviews. I wasn't giving feedback at various stages of the work. You made it very straightforward. I just wasn't there. Yeah, you weren't there. Exactly. And the other thing you mentioned about credibility I would love to dive into that topic because I think a lot of designers feel sort of in, we're generalizing here just for the sake of the conversation but maybe feel intimidated by non-designers, other stakeholders and often when they try to gain credibility they do that while losing their design identity which isn't what we're hoping for and it sounds like a similar path that you've gone through, right? I am guilty of that. So what's a better approach? Yeah, so the better approach that I actually have come across now through some other, you know usually I would mess something up and then I would try a different tactic and often it would be getting back to the things I knew worked which were usually designed. I always fix things. So the things that work are the only suggestion I would make is sometimes you don't want to use the word design but you do want to talk about I don't want to oversimplify design but the two main superpower designers have are kind of building user understanding and empathy which is usually some sort of research or modeling or journey mapping or what have you and then it's taking intangible things and making them tangible, right? You create prototypes or sketches or whatever at various levels of fidelity so that people can understand something that's really hard to understand and think about it. Those are the two superpowers. So what I found that I stopped doing is I stopped doing both those things. I stopped going and talking to users and I stopped sketching things out and I would just talk or I would just take someone else's perspective as the right one about users or the market. And so what I would say the way to avoid the problem I made is to hold true to those two things. You don't necessarily say, oh, I'm going to open up Figma every time I need to do something, right? But you could say, you have to remember that a conversation and decision-making process is always better when someone creates artifacts that make intangible things tangible and that's so designed so core to what everyone as a designer does that to concrete things, just never walk away from that because I've never seen that not work in a situation but I forgot about those things and then I always forgot about talking to users. I let myself go months and months and months without looking at what users were doing looking at their behaviors and not talking to them. And so I felt separated from the work and I couldn't make good decisions. So I think both of those things help keep you close to being a designer without making it seem like your whole identity is just design and your whole focus is just design but it's the two most important things design brings. And those are two very concrete things I would say, always do it. Get everybody right something down, show something, don't tell something, don't tell. Show it but don't tell it, don't tell it and then always has to come back to talking to users and looking at the data about the users quantitative and qualitative. So those two things should be hopefully quite easy to maintain if you keep them in mind. The thing that will be harder to get rid of is I would call it the imposter syndrome like suddenly being a leader and being amongst, let's generalize again like people in suits and how do you find your way, how did you find your way there? You're having conversations on a different level and you don't want to be seen as that designer where it might have a stigma of not being business focused so you try to blend in because there's an imposter syndrome going on like what do you do? So in that case it's gonna sound like I'm saying the same thing again because it's actually the true thing which is chances are if you're in a room of suits but to stereotype for a moment they're all talking about things that they know or think they know and trying to make some decisions and the chances are even if it's on Zoom the only thing that's happening is someone is talking and another person is talking every once in a while they'll walk up to a whiteboard and every once in a while someone will bring a document that's written all in prose and many and what you can do as a designer so you don't feel like an imposter but so you can actually show your value the two things that designers do really well ask a lot of questions ask a lot of questions about why is this work this way help me understand this do we have data about the users do we have data about the way the business works ask questions and then create something that communicates the things you're seeing try to articulate the conversation that's happening around you clearly in what I would usually call a visual way not just a prose and words way what happens there is you'll find that the very first conversation you have with the suits they'll all say this was such a great conversation I'm so glad that Maria was here I'm so glad that this other that this designy person was here and they won't say it because oh they're a designer we need someone who can sketch they're gonna say they ask all these questions and they showed us we made so much more progress than we usually do right and when I did my best when I did my best that was actually the role I usually played in most of these executive conversations early on yeah and what's great about this and what's really encouraging is I think what you sort of reminded me of is the only thing that changes with regards for instance to the questions you ask is the topic and the topic shifts from maybe being very user focused to more business goals oriented or planning or road maps but the rest of the things you know as a designer your design approach, design attitude tools that all stays the same it's just a topic to simplify it broadens yeah and it broadens like you have to start talking and thinking about sales a lot more and about the details of marketing more and then you also have to start thinking about operational and finance stuff you have to start thinking about what are the earnings or how we recognize revenue which are things you have to learn about but again you're right it's just a different topic you can still bring your same skills and perspective to that and it is the unique value no one else in that room is going to have and that's what's so encouraging about this and you mentioned it at the start when people approach you can I why don't you take on this role I think I hope that people who are listening right now see that this is right up for grabs and there's a lot of value to be added you just have to get comfortable and fluent with topics that you're maybe currently not are comfortable and fluent with right now what I will say is that there the one thing that is a little different about this move which is true for someone staying in the design career is you know there's the dual kind of two tracks in the design world like you kind of start moving into management or you stay an individual contributor and just kind of keep getting stronger and stronger to craft right and people have different predispositions towards those and that's totally fine moving into the kind of position that I'm in really is tends to work better for someone on the managing that tends to lean more towards wanting to rate to work with lots of people and are comfortable getting their hands a little bit more off the work they're not as in love with the craft that's the only thing that I would say to keep in mind for people when they're considering this although frankly some larger organizations actually have high level individual contributors that are product managers as well and that would be something that a sort of like a design principle for example a place could move over to being like a product strategy principle or a product management principle potentially if they wanted to and then they wouldn't manage a lot of people they would just be working on really big hairy problems that are more product strategy focused as opposed to purely experience or design focused if you look back on your journey so far what are maybe the most important trade-offs or compromises that you had to make to actually make this work the trade-offs for me were I don't so this is very personal I've always been a user research person I have a sociology background that's one of the things, design research is one of the things I love I love going out and doing interviews I love doing the data analysis I just don't get to do that because it's so time consuming and doing good design research just requires a lot of focus and so I have to have other people go do that work for me and then I can work with them on the analysis and I can work on the insights and the implications so a trade-off is, and the same thing would be true if you really like prototyping or you really like the details of visual and communication design you have to step away from those things and that could be a trade-off I think the other trade-off this is also a very personal thing too but I think it's worth considering I think something I realized is that I was excited about the opportunity to go and make this change and try to do something different and bring design to other things and I think I got very caught up in kind of like exceeding with finding career steps, finding new roles that seemed like a good step up and I could take on some more things and have some more impact it's very easy once you become an executive in a company to stop thinking about what makes you really happy and brings your passion to life not all executives have that problem but it is a common executive, VPs and above at various companies and I think that I let myself get caught up in that as opposed to remembering that the reason I always did any of this work is because I do my best work when I am full of curiosity and passion and so I'd say that's a trade-off it was a trade-off I made that I am now trying to reclaim one of the reasons I'm taking a sabbatical right now is because I want to find my next role and make sure it's something I feel is very inspiring to me because I got a little lost and so I think that's a thing for people to keep in mind is that remember that you should really think about what brought you to doing design and service design and what makes you happy there and don't sacrifice that just to go and try to have some more influence on something because it will not be a long-term path for success Thank you for sharing that because I think that's a very important reminder it's easy to get caught up in the operational and the management things of running a day-to-day operation within an organization so I'm curious now that you have said something like this how would you know that this is the right step for you you never know for sure but what would be some good indicators that people could see and think well okay this might be a good thing for me to pursue I think considering making a jump from design to something else I think that one thing to watch for is I would say finding yourself really enjoying things that are kind of adjacent to your design role it turns out that you actually really love working with the engineering team on planning out their sprints working on stories and this is in software in particular you really love doing that and you really love the way that that works together and that great things come out at the end you might actually make a great product manager with a designer's perspective because that's something that a good product manager really likes to do they like to help plan and work with the people who are implementing and executing not just come up with the plan which is what designers often do, the spec but actually work through it executives or other product managers driving decisions and really loving the decisions and often being the one who walks out of the room to create an artifact that captures the decision and then moves it forward you might make a great product manager because you clearly are already feeling drawn to and demonstrating value for this those two things are very I think are very good and then I think the last thing is you find yourself actually thinking a whole lot about how the business itself works if you play with business model canvases a lot if you like to think about that kind of thing and you find yourself inspiring changes in your business you might make a great product manager or product leader and then I would say so that's the thing about the one thing though that people do need to consider is a lot of the times people are good at these things but the challenge of being an executive or of being a product leader because product management usually has this is that they have to take on the responsibility for the success of the effort which means they have to also be responsible for making hard trade off decisions and so what I've usually found is that designers don't want to make this step because they don't really want to have to make that kind of decision or be responsible for everybody's kind of final result and they don't want to be responsible not because they're lazy it's a hard responsibility product managers are in the middle of everybody's crosshairs if something goes wrong it is always the product manager or product leader's fault this is something I didn't realize and have struggled a lot in last few years because when there's an executive meeting and something's not going well I am always the one who gets yelled at I'm always the one and at the start of this conversation where we said like you could be frustrated over the fact that things aren't going the way you want and you wish that you would be in the position where you could influence change you can but that has a price that has a price and the price is that you're responsible you're carrying that weight of being able having to deliver those results having to keep people happy aligning different agendas it doesn't come for free the influence and the power right and it will change you is the other thing I will say for better or for worse so since I had some time looking for another position I've actually been talking to people about purely design jobs there are some companies that have design problems and I have a strong design background and what I found is in almost every case as soon as I start talking about it this problem is really interesting but it's not enough it's not the right I can't get myself excited about just design anymore and when I say just design I mean it's less but I addictions the wrong word but I just become really used to the whole thing the whole thing that a product manager or a manager or a CEO does and so it's I noticed that it has changed me I'm trying to recover some of the things that I had from my design early self that I think are really important like I told you my pendulum swing but I don't know if I'll ever go to being a design leader and not trying to be a product leader also again because I feel like it's just really changed what I care about and think about if if somebody right now is listening to this and is getting inspired and sort of checking all the boxes I want to tackle the design challenge of the organization I have inspiring conversations with executives like what would you suggest is a good first step to actually making the transition so what I found is usually it's obviously talk to who your direct manager is because they're higher up in the food chain and they have some influence and some insight that you won't have so if you're in design you would talk to your design leader possibly if you're the most senior design leader in your organization might be a great person to have a conversation with about what you're interested in because they might have the influence the other thing would be to I talk a lot about software organizations but in a lot of software organizations you have teams that are a mix of design product and engineering and most designers have a product management peer of some sort that's working in a team with them I sometimes I suggest talking to your product management peer express your interest and say hey for the next three sprints can I lead the product work can I write up whatever artifacts that we use can I run the sprint placking meetings whatever your practices are ask them say I'm interested in learning this and then you can give me some feedback about it because what I found is it's always better to try something and show that you can do it rather than ask permission to do something that you've never shown that you can do so I always recommend that people start looking for ways to demonstrate to themselves that they can already do a thing prototype it exactly it's exactly a prototype but prototype yourself prototype your new role go do this thing for a little bit some organizations are very open to that to people trying new roles and some organizations are less so and so you have to find you have to kind of make your own prototype but that those are the things I would suggest for people who want to make the step for sure yeah I would also say just last like I'm actually personally if anybody ever wants to have a chat about their personal situation wants to suggest wants to talk through possibilities and brainstorm about this I'm very happy to talk to people about it because I my personal goal is to actually get a lot more product and business leaders with design backgrounds out in the world because I think it makes everything better so I am wholeheartedly committed to helping people explore these transitions if they're interested and I hope this conversation is contributing to that and creating awareness of it's opening up the opportunity or showing that there is different path and that the path is not as challenging as many people might think upfront yeah and we'll make sure to add all your contact details in the show now so if people want to reach out we'll do that for sure now sort of trying to close the circle what do you hope is the one thing people will remember from this conversation that our design skills and experiences are really valuable to organizations outside of their quote-unquote design teams and that it's worth it to take those things that you have those skills and experiences and do something that will seem a little scary and unusual to try to bring more impact into the world I really think those are the two things to remember is to have confidence in ourselves and the skills that we have and the perspective we bring and then to realize that it's worth taking the risk to bring them into unusual situations because I think those are the things that get in the way a lot that lack of confidence and the fear like we said the imposter syndrome but we will not solve it unless we bring more designers into the room because up till that point we'll always be the minority like I said the minority so the only way to bring design to make design a more credible background for leaders is to actually create more leaders that have a design background it's like catch 22 but I like how you said that it's worth it and yeah have the confidence to do it that's what I would take away for sure thank you for sharing this with the service design show community maybe not your average community where you usually appear in front of but I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will be inspired and will find this story very motivating so thanks again for taking a break from your sabbatical coming on to the show and sharing this with the community thanks Marc now this is really great I really appreciate it and I love the service design community like I said service design fundamentally changed my perspective for the world and so anything I can do to help keep moving it forward and contribute to the community is really important awesome that you made it all the way till the end I hope that you enjoyed the conversation and learned something valuable if you want to keep growing as a service design professional make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already that way you won't miss any future conversations with design leaders like Todd thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video