 In this episode, you'll learn how to help design and designers inside an organization to succeed. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Michelle, and this is the Service Design Show, Episode 151. Hi, my name is Marc Fontijn, and welcome back to the Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are those hidden and invisible things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business, and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Michelle Walter, who's now the head of design operations at ANZ Bank. With Michelle, I talk about why so many organizations still make the mistake of hiring designers and then forgetting to set the right conditions for these designers to deliver the best work. Michelle and her design upstream are tasked with making sure this doesn't happen at ANZ. They help the organization to hire the right designers for the right job and then make sure that these designers are set up for success from the very get-go. As you'll hear in this conversation, creating these internal conditions has been a long journey that required a lot of patience and perseverance. Over the years, two key elements emerged that Michelle contributes to the success they are finding right now. A vibrant internal design community and a highly curated professional development program. If you stick around till the end of this conversation, you'll learn what it took to get this design community off the ground and really make a drive and all the secrets behind this development program. If you enjoy exploring topics like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure to click that subscribe button because we bring a new video every week or so. That about wraps it up for the intro. Now it's time to sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation with Michelle Walter. Welcome to the show, Michelle. Marc, thanks for having me. Yeah, really excited to have you on the show. All the way from Australia, we're a little bit more about where in Australia specifically, but we're on the opposite sides of the world and time zone, so I'm happy that we were able to make this work. Michelle, the first thing I always start with is a brief introduction because I would love to know a little bit more about who you are and I can imagine the people who are listening to this episode as well. So who are you and what do you do these days? Oh, thank you. So I am Michelle Walter. As Marc mentioned, I'm from Australia, so quite far away from where you are, Marc. I live in Melbourne, I was born here, and I guess I have two kids. I have a new puppy, as most people did as part of the pandemic, bought a dog, which is kind of like my third child, but she's great. And being in Melbourne, I love coffee and food. And now that we're all out of our lockdowns, I'm enjoying the freedoms that we have in this great city of ours at work. So I work for ANZ Bank, so we are one of the largest financial institutions in Australia. They say that we're one of the big four, so there's three others that kind of compete in our space. And I head up design operations there. I've been there for seven years. I came in as a contractor. I thought I'd be there for six months, and I thought, this is great. I can kind of try before I buy. I'd never worked inside a large corporate before, but all these years later, I'm still there. So I lead design operations, as I mentioned, and I support, we have 210 designers that work right across our business. So I've quite a large community, probably one of the largest in Australia. When I started, we were 11 designers. So what's been really interesting about joining a bank is seeing, I guess, the progression and the maturity grow in terms of design, our capability, and certainly our community grow over those years. So there's never a dull moment, I have to say, when it comes to embedding design. So this is going to be a great episode, and it's really surprising to me that I've been trying to get somebody from the design ops community on the show for quite a while, and that somehow it's been very challenging. I don't know why, because the design ops community seems to be thriving as well. So I'm happy that you're sort of the first one to create bridges between the service design show community and design ops, I think there's a lot of overlap and we definitely should be having more conversations together. I was gonna say, that's really interesting because I would say the design ops community is absolutely growing, and it's probably been around as kind of a discipline for probably about five to seven years. But I think what's really interesting about what we do in design ops is if I go back kind of before it was kind of named as a discipline, there were lots of people and designers in particular, studio managers, producers who were playing a similar kind of role, where we're really there to support and enable design to thrive within companies. We build programs and frameworks to really drive efficiencies, and we really look at engagement. So I guess with those factors, they've really been around for a while, but now it's nice. We can label ourselves as design operations and we're really starting to build a global community around that. Yeah, and it's great because now you can sort of connect with each other, expand the field, expand the practice. And like I said, I think there's so much overlap and synergy between service design and design ops, but I'm sure we'll get into that a bit later. Michel, we also have a rapid fire question round for which you haven't prepared, I hope. You get 60 seconds to answer these questions. So are you ready? Go for it. All right, what was your first job? My first job was working at a bakery. Got it. What's always in your fridge? Sliced cheese. All right. If you could recommend one book, which book would it be? The Art of Gathering by Priya Pakkar. It is a must-read. Got it, next to me. If you could work from one place in the world, anywhere, which place would you pick? My home office in Melbourne. Yeah, okay, sounds good. And the final question is, I'm curious if you recall the first time you heard about service design? Yeah, when I joined A&Z. And what was the story? Yeah, I didn't know much about service design. My background was more in digital design and graphic design. And then I remember when we were starting to really build the team and build the different capabilities within the team. And I first joined A&Z. I got a job description that said service designer. And I was like, what is that? And what was really interesting is that I learned pretty quickly that, you know, it's been around for a while. And a lot of the opportunities or problems that service designers solve are really similar to what we do in operations. Thinking about all the different experiences and all the different opportunities and touch points along the way. And yeah, it really resonated. And I was like, oh, I knew about this for a while. But again, it hadn't sort of been labeled in my own world. So it was nice to learn about that from very early on when we started recruiting designers within A&Z. Cool. So in preparation for our talk, you mentioned, and I'm going to get my notes here. Let's talk about growing, nurturing and inspiring designers within a large, complex organization like a bank. Correct? Correct. I love that. Just a small topic. Yeah, just a small topic. And there is so much to unpack here because I think one of the big challenges is, isn't per se getting designers into an organization is actually keeping them inside the organization which doesn't have a strong design heritage. So you apparently have some ideas on how to do that. And I'd love to learn more. But let's rewind the tape a little bit and go back to how did you get started with this? What is your story? What is your journey? Right. So if I cast my mind back, it was probably about four years ago. And I'd started in, I had a new boss and pretty much a new structure for design operations and thinking about how we were going to continue to scale designer A and Z. Sort of newish remit, new manager. And I guess one of the things that we wanted to do really early on was understand what challenges there were for our designers and really how we turned those challenges into opportunities. So it was all great designers. We ran a series of interviews. We sent out a survey and we really started with discovery. And one of the really early insights that we gathered was there was really murky and really unclear career progression, career pathways for our designers. And they really didn't know how A and Z were going to support them on kind of their growth and development. So it was almost like this golden nugget that was given to us. And it was really clear and quite a few of our designers were really passionate about working for an organisation that truly supported them and nurtured them and helped them grow. So we took this, I guess, what seemed like a relatively small idea. We developed a How Might We statement about really focusing on supporting our designers on their career aspirations. And we spun up a project. We were good citizens. We wrote a brief. We thought about our stakeholders. And really from the get-go, we found the right sponsor. And luckily, it was our chief design officer. And he was 100% on board with the program. And I guess the brief that we were looking to develop. So we worked really closely. We formed a small team. And we really learned by doing, I have to say. We ran workshops. We bought our design leadership together. And one of the things that came out of that was there was a real gap or a black hole around skills. So whilst, I guess, the North Star was thinking about supporting our designers' career aspiration, there was kind of the short to medium term opportunity, which was really around defining skills. Our designers didn't know what skills they needed. So whether they were, I guess, the more softer skills or the more technical skills, they would help them progress in their career. So we really love this idea around skills. And we basically thought, well, what are the ways that designers can learn about these skills? And we came up with this idea of a workbook. I love using props. So this is the finished product. So we published a book, which is all around skills that our designers need. And what that looks like across all the different levels. So this is one about inclusive design. So we describe the skill, why it's important to design, and then some of the activities and expectations that we would expect of our designers for each of those skills. So we set an ambitious goal to publish a book. And about eight months later, we did that, which is pretty incredible. I've never published a book before. So it is for our internal audiences. And we really treated it as a prototype. So even though it's a beautifully published book, we very much still, again, still are to this day operating in that beta mindset. Really is a way to test and learn whether this idea of skills and designers are understanding what skills they have now and what skills they need and how A&Z can support them to, I guess, grow mastery in those skills. But the three things that we really lay the foundation of this kind of small project that turned into quite a large run that we've really been focusing on for the last sort of three to four years. All right, let's wrap up the episode. No, just kidding. There was an interesting journey. And there's, again, so much that we can dive into. So this gives a pretty good high-level idea of what you've been doing recently. But I still want to go one step back. And that's the moment that somebody within the organization came up with the idea that, hey, we might need to ask our designers what they need. Like, can you take us back to that moment? Because in a lot of organizations, this doesn't happen. Like, where did this initial question come from? That's a really great question. So I feel like the question came from just not knowing, having a real sense of what our designers needed, to be honest. It came from curiosity. It came from an environment where a lot of our designers were new. A lot of them had transitioned from other organizations that were looking at engagement and retention and learning programs much more maturely than we were. And we really had nothing. We had a lot of, I guess, more generic frameworks that ANZ have developed, which absolutely served a purpose for the broader community. But there was nothing really that spoke to designers in a language that they understood that was easily accessible and also designed for accessibility in mind as well. So I guess it was just a bit of a blank canvas. So it was definitely a need with a gap in what we were seeing in terms of what we could offer our designers. I guess the other point is it became a really important part of our recruitment strategy. We were scaling design really quickly. We needed designers on the ground. And whilst we spoke about all the great benefits of working for an organization such as ours, we really needed the hook and what was going to make us different to the startup down the road or the financial institution across the road. And the market's still really tough today. So I guess we were also looking at just a bit of a hook to help differentiate us when we were positioning us as a bank to say why ANZ not someone else. Yeah, so that's sort of the thing I was curious about because identifying the gap, that's one thing. But if there is no pain or there are no consequences, then there is little motivation to actually act upon this. But what I'm getting from your story, when you want to scale design, you need to have a place that's attractive and that designers actually want to work with. And you need, like you said, some kind of edge over your competitors who are also hiring designers. And that's what I'm getting from your story, one of the things that drove this initiative. Absolutely. And one of the things that still holds true today is when we screen candidates, when we talk to them, when we have interviews, referencing the program is a really important part of selling design. We run lots of events. We focus a lot on community building. We focus a lot on tooling to help with efficiencies with our designers. But at the end of the day, I think one thing that I've learned is that our designers want to feel like the organization generally cares about them. And I guess for us, it was a really effective way to say we care right from when we're interviewing designers as that key differentiator, but really delivering on that promise via this program and other initiatives that we do around growth and development. How would you describe the situation before the program? And I'm especially curious to what was the expectation of the organization when hiring designers? Because apparently, there were designers prior to this, and they were sort of put into this huge, complex machine. What was the expectation back then when hiring designers? That's a really great question. So pre the program and I guess pre my time in design operations, because one of the things that we do is support the recruitment and onboarding of designers. It was a bit of a wild west, I have to say. We understood that the business wanted to hire designers, but it was kind of every man for themselves. And we had a lot of hiring managers that didn't necessarily come from design who wanted the help from the organization, but we just didn't have the expertise. We didn't even really have an interview guide that really spoke to simple things like a portfolio presentation. Designers should present their portfolio or case studies. So it was really sort of everyone to themselves. And I guess the opportunity that we saw in that was to streamline the process, build a proper interview guide. But really the outcome was quality. So we had quality designers that were fit for purpose. So again, to answer your question, going back, we had designers placed in the wrong team. We had designers placed in teams that had hiring managers that for no fault of their own thought that they understood what they were hiring for and then landed with someone completely different. So obviously education was a really big part of what we focused on when we were looking at, I guess, a new way of recruiting designers. And it's speaking in a language that not only we understood but non-designers as well. There is, it makes a lot of business sense to actually do this and streamline this process, make it more efficient, optimize it, make sure that the right match is there. But I think the most important part is probably that you're sort of making sure that there is less human suffering because when you get hired on the wrong team or for the wrong position, like designers burn out and they leave, they get frustrated. So I think that's the biggest win already, what I'm hearing from your story. Yeah, absolutely. And we take a lot of time when we're looking through CVs, when we're writing job descriptions, interview process, particularly if it's for a more senior role, our chief designer for self-participates in interviews. So we have gone from a space where, yeah, it was a bit of an unknown territory and you would go on our intranet and hope that you would find some kind of interview guide or some kind of framework that you could leverage. And we've moved to a place where we have one source of truth, so everything is on our design playbook. Here we have our chief design officer involved and who runs a pretty rigorous interview with a more leadership or senior positions and we have a whole onboarding program as well off the back of that. So an incredible amount of efficiencies, but to be honest, it took years to sort of get it right and we're still learning the market is incredibly challenging at the moment and the way designers even wanna be interviewed is different. I mean, you look at a screen, it might be more panel style interviews. So how do you make it inspiring and engaging for them when they're potentially, and you're potentially looking at a screen all day? So yeah, lots of opportunities, particularly around the recruitment space for us, but you're absolutely right. And we had this very much early on, hiring the wrong person or for the wrong role caused a lot of reputational damage as well and you go back to square one. So you have them join, you've invested weeks of time and then they land and either they're not happy or the hiring manager, there's a misalignment there and then they leave and then you gotta go back again, which is pretty tiring. So we just try as best we can to set A in setup and the designer up for success and that takes time, but we're happy to invest in that prior to them joining. Well, like not investing that time, the alternative is what you just described even worse. So it's, right? I'm curious to hear about your practical, what is it, the things that you have found that work for you and you've mentioned the program already a few times sounds like something very mystical, but I know it's very tangible. So maybe we can dive into, and I know that you have two stories into the things that you're doing today to grow, nurture and inspire the designers within A&Z. So I'll probably talk about the second one first. So again, thinking about the opportunities as we were scaling design, building a community was really important. So we are an organization of 45,000 people. So 210 designers is relatively small. So feeling a sense of connection and belonging, particularly for a creative community was a huge opportunity for design ups and it's still something that we continue to work on even to this day. So how do we foster that? Particularly with so many of us being online and we do have, I guess we are a global community. So we have teams in New Zealand and also in India. So focusing on that sense of feeling connected yeah, is really important. So a couple of things that we tried really early on was this notion of events and experiences. So we essentially have three signature events that we run throughout the year to really foster that sense of community. They all are now done online, which is great because it means that anyone can dial in at any time. I have to say that booking a meeting room and catering and all those kinds of things always took extra work but yeah, I think being online has definitely has its advantages. So we run events and the three events we run really focus on three sort of different aspects of building community. The first one is how we call it our design monthly meetup and that is essentially an event that we run on the last Thursday of each month where we scour LinkedIn and our networks to try and find inspiring speakers. We have a range of topics. It could be about design. It could be about innovation, accessibility, leadership. We really make the topics quite broad but it's a really great way to bring our community together for an hour where they'll come to learn, walk away with something and as I mentioned, feel inspired. So that's kind of our first event that we run. We also run a town hall which is our, I guess in all hands and that's a really great way to not only get organizational updates but also a bit of a showcase as well to see what other teams are doing whilst we have a lot of designers in our community getting visibility on what everyone's working on can be incredibly challenging, I have to say and there can be a lot of duplication of work that other teams could potentially leverage. So a really great way to kind of foster the work, create more conversation around the work. So that's a really great event and we run those every quarter. And we've also just started an event series called Navigating A&Z. So that is part of our learning program and Navigating A&Z is an awesome new series. Also run each month that helps our designers connect with other teams across the organization. Really the enablement team, so teams from finance, personalization, marketing, group strategy to foster more connections with those teams and really understanding as a designer how you can work more effectively with those teams because design shouldn't work in a silo but I guess what we're trying to do with that series is just really uncover who are the teams or who are the true enablers of design and how can we work with them better? So they're kind of the three events and experiences that we run for all of our events. I say they like a stage show. We plan them, we script them, we do a lot of preparation, we prototype them, we even have a dress rehearsal just to make sure that everything kind of works well on the day. Yeah. So I fully buy into the idea of communities and I think it's super important and super valuable. I think that's the way sort of any professional who's beyond the junior stage grows and learns. Now the thing that you described and you also mentioned it, it's a lot of work. It doesn't happen organically and I think that's one of the things that I've been seeing with communities that people sort of, it's very reliant on volunteers but it sounds like you have a very structured and professional dedicated team doing this, right? Yeah, that's a great observation Mark. It's been years in the works. So I have to say that when we thought about this idea of events and experiences, they started really small. There was no script, things were going wrong all the time and we just kind of wing it, which I think is fine to a point but when you're talking to a much larger audience, you want to keep it interesting. It potentially becomes more complex. We try and plan things three months ahead so people know that it's coming up and they can allow time in their diary to turn up. Yeah, it does require more preparation but I have to say that yes, DesignOps runs a lot of those initiatives. It really ties closely to our engagement. We have really incredible engagement scores and I'd love to attribute our events and experiences that drive those positive scores but we're still learning. Some of our events don't work so well. Sometimes we get a lot of acceptances and then on the day people get clashes or different priorities or yeah. But look, I think that if we can get 100 to 200 people on a call, that's a pretty good success metric for us but probably the biggest win is referrals. So if our designers share the events with other people in their team and they're gaining interest, that's a really great success measure for us. A really great story that just happened today that I would love to share. Our Navigating A&Z series as we've just started so connecting designers with other teams across our organization. We've seen a really great opportunity to work with our friends in HR or talent and culture as we call it who's running a similar speaker series. So trying to not duplicate, it looks like we're gonna come together and collaborate on more of a enterprise-wide series that really started from design and started from, I guess, a small idea that we thought could really have a lot of leverage and benefit other teams, not just designers. So that's a really great win for us because we don't always want to operate just with designers. I mean, that's great. And obviously our primary focus is our community but if we can build a broader community outside of design, that's also a win too. Awesome that it's still growing and that you are getting support for this. I'm curious if you can recall like was it an organic growth all the way starting from something small done based probably on a voluntary basis or was there like a pivotal moment that you thought, well, okay, sort of, this is becoming so big, now we need to get dedicated people, we need to get a sponsor or how did this evolution go? It really started as small. It really started as a small, a lot of our ideas in design operations, I have to say, start as this kind of little flicker that burns and curiosity. Why don't we try this or what about that? And then it turns into something a bit ago, like why don't we publish a book or why don't we build a website that looks at mapping skills? So for the events, it was really similar. But I guess one of the things that we always focused on it really early on was engagement and thinking about retention and inspiration. They're kind of the three words that we've always thought about over the years but it definitely started off really small. And I guess the interest just grew. And one of the things as well is if you put the time in people's diary and it's the same time around about each month, the same cadence, the same formula, it just kind of sticks. People know that it's coming up, they get excited about it. I mean, we used to change the day. This is kind of a really good example. So early on we had it on a Thursday, then we changed it to Friday afternoon and then it was on a Monday. And one of the pieces of feedback was, it was nice having it on a Thursday. I knew that Thursday at one o'clock was gonna be our design monthly meetup. And so we kind of took that. It was like, oh, okay, well, we don't really need to shuffle the time and we'll just make it work. So those kind of micro ideas, but turning to like the big ideas really helped sort of set the rhythm and it helped with planning. It helped with all the prep. It helped with lining up our speakers. But from a designer's perspective, they always knew it was there and it was just that consistency. And I think in a world where so many of their calendars are double booked with meetings and stand-ups and design reviews, it was really nice to have something just consistent that they just didn't need to think about. And this is a great example. And I'm sort of in a similar situation running a community for in-house service designers where a lot of the things that make these events work and these communities work, they seem so natural like having a fixed time. But they are done by design. They are very deliberate. And I think you sort of have to have someone or a team thinking about this, designing this experience because it doesn't happen naturally. It's designed. Like it's again, it's a deliberate act, yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting about designing the experiences. I mean, that's absolutely one of our principles. And that's why we spend so much time in the prepping and planning is that we try and think about all the interactions and building the momentum for those events and experiences. It's really interesting. One of the questions that I was asked just recently, I was in an internal workshop and there were different people from across the organization looking at their own capability programs. So looking at skills and mastery. And one of the questions that was asked to the group from someone quite senior was, talk us through some of the successes around your program or the different programs that you offer to your different communities. And one of the things that I reflected on was exactly what you said. We design the experiences. So when we think about learning and development, when we think about growth opportunities, everything is by design. We think about the needs of our designers. We think about the needs of the business and we bring those two together to really think about what is those experiences? What are those interactions? What are our success measures? And what are we gonna do next? So that's something really important, particularly for design ops and what we do and what my team does. And yeah, I think that's being really intentional about where you're at and the problem and then thinking about how you're gonna deliver it and yeah, celebrating those wins, losses and learnings I guess is really important as well when we think about that interending experience. Yeah, yeah, absolutely agree. And like you said, it can start out small organically and just winging it, but really quickly you sort of see that this needs love, time, attention to take it to the next level. So, okay, community. Awesome to hear that it's a vibrant community and that they are engaged and that it's still growing. I would love to also hear a little bit about your second adventure. So the second one was really around our learning program. So one of the things that I guess I wanted to share a little bit about that experience just to build on what we were talking about earlier. So the program has been running for just over three years now and one of the things that we did early on was build the toolkit. So I said, okay, here's the thing that we need to build to really give designers that understanding of skills and we built some tools and frameworks around that. And again, thinking about the experience or running any great design project, we gathered lots of feedback along the way and one of the things that our designers shared with us actually really early on was kind of thanks for telling me or showing me what skills I need but how is A&Z gonna help me grow in those skills and really improve my mastery? Like what does that look like? So again, another kind of golden nugget and we took that as an opportunity to build our skills learning program. And yep, that's been running for about three years. It started off as a pilot. I'd love to say it was a small pilot but it wasn't such a small pilot in the end but it was this kind of simple idea where we did a whole bunch of research around what are sort of the facilitated workshops, what are the expert coaches out there, what's some online learning that we could offer to our designers, curate it and bring it all together as part of this skills learning program. And one of the problems that we were solving back then was our designers didn't know where to go. So we said, right, well, if you wanna upskill in storytelling, there's lots of courses on LinkedIn or go to this conference or find a mentor but they just sort of hit a wall. So a great example, when you type in adaptive leadership on LinkedIn Learning, which I think is a really great platform, I think you get 16,000 modules that you can look at. So really overwhelming for our designers and then they become disengaged. It's too hard. So fast forward, we built this program to make it really easy for our designers to sign up. So we offer a whole lot of curated learning experiences, we call them, and they're facilitated by external coaches and educators from right across the world. So Mark, you might be interested in facilitation. Well, you'd go to our website, which is an internally hosted website and we'd offer two to three courses and some complimentary coaching that can help you upskill in facilitation. So it's a year long program, it's a lot of work. We have an incredible volunteer group or working group as we call them, they help pull together the program. Again, and we run it every year. So that's kind of a nice compliment. So I guess when we think about growth and development at ANZ, we have the what, which is the workbook and some frameworks that we've put in place, but the learning program that we've put forward is really the how. It's really how we're gonna support you to grow those skills and how you can progress further in your career by learning new skills or yeah, just developing more in the skills that you're choosing to focus on. Super interesting. And I can totally imagine overwhelm and then people getting disengaged. What would you, I feel that you experienced this program as a big success. What do you think is the thing that attributes most to its success in the form that it is right now? I love this question. So a couple of things. It sounds really easy to say, but in organizations I know it's quite hard to do. Find your sponsor really early on. They're gonna be the person or might be a few sponsors that are really going to contribute to the program, help advocate for the program and help fund the program in a lot of ways. One of the things that we did really well was take the time to find who the right sponsor was. In this case, it wasn't someone from our human resources or our talent and culture department. It was actually our chief design officer who's still our sponsor today. Can you share a bit more about that? Because like you said, saying find the sponsor, find the right sponsor, it's easy to say it's hard to do. Like, how did your journey go? What did you do? How did you find the sponsor? So the first step was we went to our HR department and said, we're thinking about this idea. We want to leverage a lot of the work that A&Z has done around growth and development, but we want to make it more relevant and I guess more bespoke for our designers and they basically said, great idea. You just basically need to go and do it yourself. But very respectfully, they said, you know, we solve these kinds of problems or look at opportunities more enterprise-wide and there really wasn't the appetite to look at something specifically for design. We were and still are quite a small community, relatively speaking. But I think what A&Z do well is they rely on, I guess, community leads, like myself, to build these kinds of programs and there's benefits to that is I understand the community more, I understand what they need more and, you know, can really build something that would resonate with them. So something a bit more creative and something a little bit more engaging. What they offer, again, is really to stretch across many roles and across the organization. So there really wasn't that appetite back then to build something specifically for us. So I went to the chief design officer and I said, look, I was pretty honest. And I said, we have this idea. We just want to run a tested learn. We want to build a prototype pretty quickly and but we need a sponsor. Would you sponsor it? And at the time, we didn't really talk money, I think was also really important. We just wanted to build the thing, test it and see if it kind of stuck before we committed to, before I was asking him for any kind of financial assistant and whether he was kind of ready to commit. So it was a bit of a slow burn. And I have to say that getting him involved really early on meant that he felt like he was part of the process. He felt like he could contribute. And a lot of the prototypes that we developed were black and white. I remember standing at the photocopier, remember those things, printing off prototypes and I had this beautiful black string that I strung together are these books. So really early on, really low fidelity and it was just a really great way to engage him. It spoke to him in a language that he understood. So that was really important. Nothing too fancy, really simple kind of communication with him and I would have to say just a chipping away at it, just a really slow burn at the start. And then the money conversation and I guess the workbook, publishing the book came a little while later. So finding somebody at the leadership level to advocate for you, obviously that's helpful and you were lucky enough to have access to somebody at that level. One question about this is if you look back on this, what do you think made him or her resonate with this? Why did they engage? To be honest, I don't think and he can correct me, I don't think he had seen a program or it's certainly a project plan or an aspiration of this kind of size and scale and dedication before. He's worked for other organizations. He's come from IDO. I mean, they do a great job at growth and development but I guess inside an organization such as ANZ or more on the client side, he hadn't really seen this kind of work before or this sort of thinking and I guess he really believed in the opportunity. He was new to role and very open minded about what was possible but a shared passion as well is probably my third point. Really passionate about not only embedding design which is such a big term and loaded at times but really building this sense of community and he would say building a world-class community inside an organization. So huge aspiration. So I guess it was a little bit easier for what I was trying to sell in terms of this idea of this learning program but he knew that we need to do something different to reach that aspiration of being world-class and building that community within our organization. So that's not to say that he was 100% of us as a believer from the first go but he certainly saw an opportunity to build something different, to build something that would speak to designers and he definitely resonated with this test and learn approach that we were taking to seeing if this thing would even work. Yeah and what I'm hearing or getting in between the lines is it's connected with his agenda. You're helping him to achieve the objectives that he probably was set out to achieve and that makes it so much easier like compared to your conversation with HR like they had or have a different agenda and then it's really hard to get sponsorship. You have to find the person who you can help achieve the thing that they want. Yeah absolutely and I think you raise a really good point so it's really understanding what that business need is or what that strategic objective is. I'm really grateful that part of our design strategy, part of our vision is to build that world-class design community and the chief design officer is a pretty smart guy and he knows that that doesn't come without work and that preparation and that dedication and really having design ops to enable building that community I think is one step closer to achieving that I might be biased but I think it's true. Anything else with regarding to success and the factors that have contributed to success? I think one of the things that we do really well is we get feedback throughout our learning program. We have a pretty rigorous feedback process. We do a really lovely activity where we interview and film a lot of our designers and our stakeholders prior to the program starting and then 12 months later we capture some testimonials so it's really fulfilling to see where people started on their learning journey and where that kind of end up in 12 months and even for us success could also mean I've improved a little bit but I see more opportunities for myself so even if the program doesn't 100% hit the mark at least it's given them a little bit of a springboard to think about their growth and career a little bit more. So yeah, that's a really great thing that we do as part of the program and it's evolved. As I mentioned we started as a pilot. We had a very small amount of money. We leveraged a lot of our partners as well. So a lot of our software partners ran workshops. We used a lot of LinkedIn learning at the time and so three years later our budget has almost tripled and the program has evolved. So I think this year we're gonna run, I think it's 114 events. Last year we ran 80, almost 90 events and the first year we ran about 50 events. So when we say events, there's sort of workshop sessions where you can kind of sign up for, so yeah, it's grown but one of the things also that has been incredibly successful is we've made it really easy for our designers. We've made it really easy. We put a program together, it's like running a festival. We put a program together all the times. We put educated information and we basically say go to this website and register here. We've made it really easy. Yeah, and making it really easy is really hard. That's the thing. That's right. It's a lot of work to make this easy. Yeah, it's a lot of work. So yeah, we formed a working group. So there's myself and five others. An incredible, passionate group of designers that have come from the community. So one of the things that, I guess, an ambition of mine last year was thinking about how to grow the program and how to add more workshops and content and I could have done it with our smaller team but there was a lot of volunteers who wanted to help build the program and really believed in it and what we've done in 12 weeks could have easily taken 12 months. So I'm really grateful to them and I think they've learned a little bit along the way as well. So it's been great. So just to put this into perspective, like you've been at it for at least three years, maybe even six, depending on how you count, you're dedicating yourself with a team of six people to this. Like it doesn't, this doesn't just fall out of thin air. Again, I think I'm trying to stress here that it requires time, attention, dedication, intention. So a few questions that are still left on my mind about this. Know what you know now. If you could start all over, let's say you move to the Netherlands to a different financial institution and they ask you to set up this thing. What would you do differently if you could start over? I would do what I'm doing now, which is I would stay much more focused on the things that matter. And I would focus, try as best I could to focus on three things that are really gonna create impact. If I go back six years, you know, there was a task at hand. I needed to operationalize the team. I needed to, you know, think about how we work. I needed to think about tooling and processes and really getting the engine running. But that took years to be able to, I guess, focus on kind of three key things. So if I had my time over, I would, I guess, set up the practice and take what I've learned and set it up much faster, operationalize, get that engine running, keep the lights on much quicker. And be a bit more brave, I think, since a lot of time, yeah, just trying to perfect those processes, whereas, yeah, I probably should have been a bit braver back then. But yeah, just being a lot more focused. So thinking about, yeah, what I mentioned before about what do the designers need, what do the business need and how can design ops support that to deliver value. Having that clarity has taken me years, I would say. So yeah, if I had my time over, I would think about what's the most efficient way to operationalize this community so that I can really focus on what designers, the business need and I guess the design ops function to really create value. Is it possible to be more efficient at the start or do you actually need the time to explore? Yeah, I think there's always ways. I think leveraging the community more, working with other teams outside of design. So it's talked about so much, but really breaking down those silos. So really understanding how your risk function works, really understanding how finance works, you can run so much more efficiently. I think I took a lot of things for granted or didn't really understand coming into an organization such as A&Z, the importance of those partners or those enablers that sit outside of design. So I think that, yeah, to be more efficient, you need to take the time absolutely to really understand your world and the context that you're in to ensure that design can be successful and the work that you're doing, yeah, it does have that impact. Yeah, to be efficient. All right, now what's next? What's coming up? Anya, what's on your bucket list? Okay, so what is coming up? So we have just launched the learning program, which is great. So in a couple of months, we will start planning next year's learning program. We are looking at a mentor program, which is really exciting. A&Z have tried to have a mentor program, but we really see an opportunity, particularly in this remote context, to create connection. Our designers have told us that they love, yeah, whether it's mentoring or more peer-to-peer learning experiences. So thinking about pairing experts with designers. And the final thing is we're gonna hopefully publish a version two of our workbook. Yeah. This little beast. So we're looking to do that next. And will that workbook be available publicly? The vision was to always make it open source. So I'm going to say yes. Look, the workbooks had a lot of interest over the years, which is really amazing. And yeah, it's fantastic to see how it's evolved and the feedback that we're getting. And also the skills that are changing since we first launched the program. So a really great example is one of our designers a couple of months ago said to me, oh, I've just joined A&Z and I got a copy of the workbook because we give it to them as part of their onboarding. And they said, it's interesting. It talks about facilitation, but it doesn't talk about remote facilitation. Have you thought about adding that as a skill? Like absolutely. So obviously the book was published before the pandemic. So it's really interesting to think about what are those skills that are really gonna sort of future-proof our designers, whichever way they work. So whether they are fully remote or hybrid or we all kind of return to face-to-face interaction. So there's a whole lot of skills that will be added to the book. So currently the book is 126 pages. I mean, visiting it's gonna be a little bit thicker by the time we get to version two. Cool. We'll definitely share that one when it's ready or when it's online. Maybe we can make it version 3.0 into a collaborative thing from the entire community. Michelle, sort of wrapping up, what do you hope is the one thing people will take away from our chat? I really hope that this has inspired everyone on the call to get under the hood a little bit around how design works and I guess functions within a large organization. And I also hope that you walk away with more of an understanding of design operations, I guess what we do and how we deliver value to not just our design community, not just our chief design officer, but I guess A and Z more broadly when we're thinking about really, embedding design within organizations. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. There are still so much on my notes here that I would love to go over, but maybe we'll do a sequel episode someday. Sounds fun. Michelle, thanks for coming on and sharing this with the service design show community. I hope that we'll be able to create many more bridges between design ops and our little community over here. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That's very wonderful. I really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Michelle and got something useful out of it. If you did, leave a short comment down below with your biggest takeaway. Thanks so much for watching to the service design show and I look forward to see you in the next video.