 Let's talk about leadership. We don't have a plan for this. Should we start with some audience participation? Maybe make a new plan. Okay. Why don't we take a moment, each of us introduce ourselves and give our experience with leadership. And then we'll, this is going to give you time to think through some questions where notice how we're making things up on the fly. This is what designers do. And I nominate you to go first. Hi, everyone. Oh, look. Our moderator is here. This is the leadership panel. Before we get into it, why don't, should we introduce ourselves? Okay. All right. Let's start from far and come in from my perspective, please. No problem. Hello, everyone. Matt Hopgut. I'm at PublicitySapien. I've been designing in digital since about 1996 and have had a variety of different roles across UX, UI, information architecture, experience architecture, interaction design, you name it. As an industry, we love to change our titles and have been running creative teams for over 25 years. So I'm so happy to be here. Hi, everyone. I'm Katrina Alcorn. I'm the general manager of design at IBM where we have a amazing practice of about 3,000 designers making software and hardware and various services for our consulting clients. And I lead that practice there and I'm excited to talk about leadership today. Hi, everyone. I'm Vittal. I started my career around 1998, not too far from you. I started my career as an interior designer and then I was a graphic designer, then I got into UX. I've been working on design software, like on Photoshop when Photoshop did not have a number like Photoshop 1, 2, 3, I've been working on Photoshop since then. I am the design director of JP Morgan and Chase. I manage the India team and we have close to 1,000 designers in Chase and I'm very excited about today's discussion. My name is Troy Asmoon. I am the SGP of Platform Product Experiences at ServiceNow. I founded ServiceNow's design organization. I started out my career as a test automation engineer and a web developer and then I was a product guy, then I was design guy, then I was a product guy again and I'm the moderator on today's panel. All right. So hopefully you've got the 10 questions, the prearranged questions that I provided. He's lying. He did not send us questions. We're going to keep it pretty loose in a fun way because I think definitely part of leadership is rolling with the punches. So in that theme, I'll just ask a few questions and I want to make sure we get a chance for the audience to ask too because that's often where the best pieces come from. So one question I have for each of you. What would you tell yourself 20 years ago, let's say, because I think we could all do that, 20 years ago, that would be helpful to know that far back about leadership now that you are where you at, very successful in your careers? I would basically tell myself to take more risks and I think risk is not something you start taking from day one. I think over a period of time, you start getting a better picture of what will happen when you take risk. You also see people fail. You understand that's okay. So it took me a lot of time to understand that it's okay to take risk. It's okay to fail. It's okay to try new things. So I would go back and take as much risk as possible. And that is the one thing that I'll tell myself. I'll go. I would tell myself 20 years ago that it's going to be fine. And it's okay to make mistakes. I think my 20 year ago me felt that I had to do everything perfectly. And it was an awful lot of stress to live under. And the reality is to do anything interesting, you're going to have to push yourself into uncomfortable situations and you'll make mistakes. And you'll learn from those mistakes and that's how you grow. So getting comfortable with not doing it right the first time is, I think, part of growing. I think I probably spent the first five or even 10 years of my career thinking that being an incredible designer, not that I was, but trying to strive to be an incredible designer was the aspiration and that was the thing that would propel you to huge impact internally and with clients. And I think that as I reflect on those years and I think about what value creation looks like now, it's being able to translate that design into customer and business value and that means that you've got to lean into understanding products and services, building up domain expertise, being able to talk to the other people in the room in their language. And I think often, certainly I was like this as a designer, I kind of thought nobody understands design, they don't value me. And of course, if you'd have asked me the question 10 years ago, what the person on the other side of the table did, I'd say, I don't care. And I think that you have to recognize that all of this is a team sport and you have to understand what the product guy does and what the business guy does and what the engineer does. And when you do that and you can connect to their world and use their language and talking those terms, then it stops being dogs and cats and starts being sort of a collective culture. And I think that's when you begin to really crave value. And I think for me that was when I started to see design have impact. And so I think I'd probably tell myself, just stop obsessing about the actual design and start thinking about the impact. What's the hardest part of being a leader? I think that if I was going to give an answer, it would almost be, what do I think a good leader looks like? And I think that one of the characteristics that I think that you should look for in a leader and if they demonstrate this, you should stay with that leader is some sense of humility. You know, you want that person at some point to say, I don't know, I'm not sure, but let's solve this together. And I think that the hardest part of leadership is sometimes continually falling into this sort of myth that you have to have the answer all of the time, that you have to be seen to be leading, that you have to be seen to be sort of invulnerable and resilient. And I think that creates sort of brittle environments, both for the leader and for their teams. And so the hardest part for me is just continually reminding myself to say, you know what, you don't understand everything. And I think certainly when I think about the context of our industry at the moment and the changes it has been going through over the last few years and what's likely to impact it over the next two or three, this idea that you could have anyone that might know the answer and be clear-eyed about what that future design role or that team looks like is nonsensical. So look for the humanity in your leaders and I think trying to continue to go back to that humanity is the hardest thing and not sort of pretend you know everything all of the time. Did you guys want to go for it? Actually, I had a different answer, but when I heard yours I'm like, that is the right answer, which is very true. I think the toughest part is knowing when you don't have the answer and trying to solve it together. And as leaders, people expect that you know the answer, especially people who work with you. Like you said, have the humility, be honest, say that let's solve this together. And also tell them it's okay to fail, right? I think that is something that I agree on. That's interesting. I'll say that I think the hardest part about being a design leader is I'm continually surprised by how a few people in the world understand design. And there's the surface details of design, which I think is what the majority of people think design is and that you know that's just the surface. Getting people to understand that design is more than fonts and colors, that it's actually the product itself, it's the experience itself, it's how stuff works, it's your business model. I think Justin McGuire said that design is the skin on your business model, it's the whole thing. And there's this film coming out right now actually about the founder of our design program at IBM. We have this amazing history where design has kind of gone in and out of the company. And in the 50s, we had Elliot Noyes, who's this iconic architect and industrial designer who started the design program. And I've become friends with his son, there's this film coming out and I was invited to go look at the archives and I've been reading all his stuff and I'm like, holy cow, Elliot Noyes was saying in the 1950s the stuff that I'm still saying. Trying to get people to understand how to scratch the surface and how to incorporate design practices into a company. So I continue to be amazed by the things that I think many of us think are common sense are not common sense. So yeah, you mentioned specific to being a design leader. That's actually one of the questions I have here. So as a design leader, what do you think's like one of the toughest hurdles that you have to overcome compared to let's say a product leader or an engineering leader? Like what's a distinct problem that the folks in this room as they go on their design journey and they go into leadership roles, you want them to be aware of? I'll just add on, because I think I mostly answered that question, but there's a way that we have to, it's so funny, because our goal is not to make design great. Our goal is to make the company great. Our goal is to make things people love to use and hopefully make the world a better place. But design, I think in most companies, honestly, and I think IBM is farther along than most companies, but even so, I think design tends to be the more marginalized function. Product managers don't ever have to explain what they do for a living, as far as I know. Engineers definitely don't have to explain what they do for a living, but over and over and over, I see designers have to explain what they do for a living, and I don't know what it's gonna take to turn the corner on that, because it's a waste of everyone's time. We have work to get done. So yeah, that's just the design part of this. Do you guys have anything to add with that, with regards to being a design leader in particular, that's just a tough road? Hello. So one thing that I noticed is, as designers, we are very good at conceptualizing ideas, and what I find, which is a tough situation to solve, is when the design team does not understand the technology and they're way ahead in designing something, which probably will get implemented over 10 years, 20 years. So I used to be the guy, I used to be, I love designing, like futuristic design, put everything together, mash it up, make it really awesome, and then I would hear the developers say, oh, he's designed this, we're gonna take, we're gonna do this in five different patches. We're not gonna get this out of the door. So one of the things which I have learned is to ask my team to work with the tech team, to understand what they are going to consume from us, and how they plan and envision to execute it. Also, one thing that I've also learned is, there's so much, like now we're all talking about AIA, it's the buzzword, but before AI, when HTML5 was there, HTML5 had so many capabilities. So designers need to understand what those capabilities are to kind of envision the experience for that as well. So my two cents on this topic is the collaboration between the design team, the data team, the tech team, and the product team, if they are, or the business team is very important. Understanding each other and what they expect from each other is super important. I think the only thing I would add would be, and this goes for all, everyone in the room, is resilience, which is we're gonna have to build lots of resilience if we don't have it, and we're gonna need lots of resilience for all of the reasons that we've just discussed, which is this sense of kind of some marginalization. And the reality is that sometimes I think we can as a community feel a little persecuted, but there's a reality in that as well. And the reality is that when it comes to unlocking the funding, whether it's in your own company or it's whether in client companies or partner companies, there's only three stories. There's a greed story, and that's what the management consultants go in. They say, you spend this money and we'll make you money. Everybody loves a greed story. That's the first story that gets funded, money for money. Then there's a tech story, which is a fear story. That's a great story as well, which is if you don't spend this money, everything is going to stop and your business is going to fail. Our story is a hope story, which is if we do this, your customer experience is going to improve, your brand advocacy is going to improve, your reputation and memory in market is going to improve, and we're going to accelerate the value creation in market. It's a hope story, but it's not as powerful as greed and it's not as compelling as fear. And so we have to find ways to think about the value that we create in those commercial terms as leaders and create that compelling bridge. Otherwise, we'll just be third on that pecking order every single funding round and then become the discretionary thing that feels like it's really used a little thing. But we can do better than that and I think if we can connect that design value to commercial value, then we'll unlock and we'll move up that pecking order a bit more. But in order to do that, and we've been doing this for a long time now, and it's the same thing, quarter in, quarter out, year in, year out, it's resilience. And so as you guys are at the beginning of your career, you'll need to beat up the resilience against your, with your colleagues. And as you get more senior, you'll need to build the resilience with the leadership teams. Nice. Okay, so I have a few more, but I wanna open it up and make sure that the audience has a chance to ask questions that they've got on their mind about leadership and design and leadership in general. Yes. Can we get a mic over here? Hi, thanks. My name is Dasagya. I wanted to get some inputs from you on leadership without a title. And I think a lot of people in the room are individual contributors, but are still getting chances to maybe lead and influence. And there is other set, which is a manager or somebody who's ahead of design who has a very clear set of responsibilities to do. Do you have some tips and thoughts on how you've seen individual contributors lead? Because I see a lot of us looking for more of that advice. I think the question was leadership without authority, there's an echo, so it's a little hard to hear up here. It's, you know, how do you lead when you're not having the leading title, manager, director, whatever the case may be? That's a good question, thank you. We will do our best right now to try and get that one figured out. I can start. So I've had roles where I was leading through influence and I've had roles where I lead through authority. I'll tell you, I prefer the authority. It's faster. But that said, there's an interesting study that McKinsey did that we're now, this is part of a leadership training actually that we're doing with our product managers at IBM. And we list out the different tactics that you can use to influence other people. And at the very top of the list, there's nine influencing tactics. At the very top of the list is inspiration by inspiring people. And then you kind of go down the list and like halfway there is like using rational data. And then you go all the way down to the bottom of the list and it's like pressure, like fear, you know? And we ask people, you know, which thing do you use? And most people usually say rational data and that could be an IBM thing but it's probably a tech industry thing, might be a human thing. And then we ask people, what do you think is most effective? And people usually say pressure tactics, scaring people, you're gonna lose your job, I'm watching you, you know? And what the studies show is both are wrong, that the most effective technique to influence, whether you have the official authority or you're influencing sideways, is inspiring people. It's that very soft skill of inspiring. Now the reality is when we influence people, we usually use a combination of things. But I think it's important to remember the inspiration part of it. There's another, there's a talk one of the McKinsey folks gave recently about what was it? It was this idea of enrolling people. So rather than, you know, mandating or drafting that, you know, now you're on this project and this is what you're gonna do, there's this concept of like, I'm enrolling you and you've got a certain level of decision-making power in that. We'd much rather have people having that intrinsic motivation because that's where good work comes from. If you're just doing something out of fear, you may do it, but you're bad-mouthing the guy who told you to do it and you're not really bringing your best effort. So there's something about that inspiration that I think holds no matter whether an independent contributor or you're the big boss or something in between. I'll take a swing at it as well. I think that leadership and management are two different things. Leadership is getting people inspired and managing is telling people what to do. And that's probably the least desirable method, though sometimes it is needed. But you can make a big impact, just as big of an impact, when you're leading through inspirational technique. If you saw the presentation I'd done earlier today, there was an individual contributor that inspired me. And then I used a combination of inspiration and everything else required to make it happen. So I think that the main question will come at some point in your career. You'll have to make a decision. If you can get there fast enough without having to manage a team of people or not. And if the answer becomes no, it will take too long, then you probably wanna switch over from IC to manager. But if you're patient or if it doesn't require that many people, maybe don't bother with it. It's definitely a big responsibility. Everybody's watching you. I have a short one for this. I think being curious, right? I think that really helps especially. If you're curious and if you build that into talking to others, understanding things, also when you create something, being curious of how this will be used, the curiosity will definitely take you a long way in this journey. We don't have to answer all of them. So if you don't wanna answer, then we can keep going. Okay, any other questions? Next question, yes, you with the strong arm that went up. Thank you. As a design leader, I face a challenge of recognizing, curating, and mentoring talent. I'm a fairly new person in this sort of role where I'm trying to recognize and hire talent to build our team. But I'm finding various challenges in this new space where UIUX is a very popular career path. So there is a lot of talent, but recognizing good talent that you can take along and build a great team is something that I wanna know how you guys did. And if you guys have any tips for new age people out here. So the question is essentially, how do you hire for good talent in a field like this that's really hot? Is that right? Yes, that's right. Okay, how do we do that? I think context is important. So in my role, I'm looking for people that can work in that design consulting space. And so as well as looking for design skills, of course, as a core attribute. One of the main things I'm looking for is warmth and charisma. I'm looking for likability immediately in that meeting and in that moment that the interview is happening because so much of the value that you create in the consulting space is being able to connect with your clients and connect with your team and build that rapport. And so the soft skills are terrifically important and are certainly things that I look for when I'm thinking about talent. And we have a, like any organization, we've got a litany of hiring wonderful designers who are awful human beings and it doesn't work. It doesn't work. You could be the most talented design thinker in the world, but my goodness, if you're hard to work with and largely everybody loathes you, it's just not gonna fly. And so I think it is that balance between design skills and soft skills which is really important and then the point that I would then close on because it's the kind of the third sort of the triumvirate as it were is the curiosity which is ultimately finding people that are asking as many questions as you're asking and are pushing you for the things and you're feeling a bit on the back foot in the interview because they're giving you a hard time and you're thinking, I really like this person but my God, they're making me feel a bit uncomfortable. I'm thinking, hang on, I think we've got some talent here. So that's kind of how, that's my litmus test. I've become a big believer in growth mindset but I didn't start out that way when I was hiring designers and I think I have a good eye for talent but I have made mistakes and the biggest mistake I've made is it's kind of along the lines of what you're talking about. It's hiring people who are not open to growing and they're not open to feedback and that often goes with that alienating behavior. You can't work past that. You can work through almost anything if someone is willing to stretch themselves and willing to take feedback and willing to be in dialogue with you and give feedback but that's my number one rule and besides that, I'm a big believer in all forms of diversity, racial diversity, gender diversity, cognitive diversity. It's not that I want people who all think the same way except for that one thing. Diversity is really important. Cognitive diversity in particular what we're doing, I always say diversity is between the ears and our business. You want to get different people with different perspectives. For the designers we have here in India, the founding members of the team, they all interviewed with me and they would tell you it was a strange interview where they were asked questions that didn't have clear answers. It wasn't about the answer. It was about them having a point of view and being able to articulate their position and push back because I mean, believe me, like it only gets tougher as you move up and having to defend a position and push back. So we want to make sure that the people that we bring in are comfortable with that because it's part of the job of thinking about the end user to do that. So I'm a big believer of, you can always train someone on skills but the attitude should definitely be right, especially when they're gonna be working with different teams and also your own team. I'm very careful about if someone is coming into the team, are they gonna uplift the team? Are they gonna be part of the team? That's very important. So while we're looking for skills, ability to tell us how they think and what they can do, I always see is this person gonna be the person who's gonna help the team be excited about coming to office? Or is it gonna drain the entire team's energy? So that is something that it's always worked out for me. I've hired in a lot of companies but what I've realized is once you make an entire team like an ecosystem of happy people, then you get great results. They are always there to help each other. If someone doesn't know something, they'll be like, at least I got your back. This is how we can do it together. So that is something that I always, I look for when I usually recruit. That's a really good point, team composition. The person you'd hire second or third may be entirely different in their qualifications than the person you'd hire seventh or eighth, depending on how the team is forming. That's absolutely true. See, these are way better questions than the ones I had and that we're getting. Another question, please. Yeah, hi. I have a question for Matthew. I love your analogy of design being hope. I wanted to know, do you have an example of design being greed? We're missing you because of the echo. Say it again. This is a question for Matthew. Matthew, you gave an analogy of design being hope, right? Design is something which gives hope. Are you able to yell at me? It's tough that we don't have good audio up here for this. Can you just come up here? Hi, can you hear me now? I think you'll have to come up closer and just yell at us. Come on. Come all the way down. I'm sorry. We're right at the center of this reverberation, so we're trying to live free. We work with CEOs. We're used to being yelled at. You can yell at me now. Really difficult to hear. I'm so sorry. You can yell at me now. Everyone else could hear but us. So the question, very, very clever question, which could trap me, was I talked about design being a hope story. And the question is, can design ever be a greed story? And of course the answer is yes. You know, of course, of course. And I think what's kind of interesting is that someone far cleverer than I told me years ago was there's only two strategies in life. There's exploring new value and exploiting the value that you've got. And design plays a really important role in both of those things. But you have to figure out which one you're doing. And I think that if you're exploring value and looking for innovation and breakthrough, that can be that story of hope. But if you're exploiting, which is a lot of the work that we also do as designers, which is looking either at the front stage or the back stage and looking at process, looking for failure, variance, waste, duplication, looking to take friction out or add friction in, often there are cost and efficiency stories, which I think you could broadly package under greed. But in a good way. You know, in a sort of greed is good type of philosophy. But hopefully that was fudging that answer enormously. But hopefully it got within the ballpark of something acceptable. All right, great question. Who else? Yes? Hi. So my question is, so usually in the design industry in general, designers are asked to take ownership of their projects. But I think the owners of that doesn't go just to the designer, but how the design leader inspires them to do that. So is there any way you would do that or your thoughts on maybe your team members taking ownership for their work? Hold on one second. Is there any way we can get the volume up on this wedge up here for the question there? On the center wedge. Come on up and talk to us in the meantime. Yeah, that's better. Is it about ownership or credit getting ownership? So feeling responsible. OK, so the question is things that we do to make sure our team feels responsible. So one of the things I've learned over time, I'm still an only child. So this took a while, is to give it away. So I can come up with a good idea with pretty good regularity. But I'm not able to come up with a great idea on my own. So learning to just let go when it's in a good space and bring other people in that can take it to the next level. Now they have ownership. And I'm glad they do because now it's really something. I liked it before, but now that I've involved these other five or six people, I'm loving this. And maybe I should have done that earlier. So I think that's one of the techniques that I am more and more comfortable with as I become more experienced, knowing all the benefits that come along with giving it away. So one thing which I've learned from some of the leaders that I worked with is that when a new person is trying to own something, they're always worried about failing. So if you tell them that the failure is mine, so you don't have to worry about it, you can try. And all you need to focus on is trying and getting your idea out there, that really helps. So if there is a feedback session, then I'm the first person to go get the feedback and only share the ones where they can action out on the team, but not the heat. One thing they really are worried about is it depends on which state the designer is in, at the beginning of their career. And you definitely want to protect them so that they can try to take more some risk. But as they grow, I think they need to understand ownership as all aspects, including good feedback, bad feedback. So it depends on which state. For people who are going to start their career, I think that is the reason why they will have a project leader or a team leader to kind of make sure that they will let their team work. But if things don't work out, then the leader who's going to take the kind of responsibility for that. And the other thing is there's always a line between ownership and accountability. Accountability is not something that you should always have. And ownership, like he said, is shared. It's just not your thing. It's going to be just because we create the flashy part of it, it doesn't mean that we own it. The people who code it behind it, they own it equally. So like he said, ownership is something that I think is shared. But accountability, we are accountable for what you do. That is something that's very individual. Next question. Yes. Hi, so I wanted to ask, as you take care of and design such big systems, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the work that you're doing. And when you're into it, you might lose a fresh perspective or a different way to look at things. So do you have any process of taking a step back from what you're doing or how do you navigate through that issue? Well, first thing I would say, so there's taking a step back, like you have a story about going surfing and unplugging and everyone needs to do those things, but also design reviews are so critical. And being able to get input on your work at various stages, not trying to wait until you've polished it and made it perfect. And I've worked with the design teams where that was a struggle, like they had to learn that it was okay to show unfinished work, at least within the family of the design team. And this is where psychological safety comes in. There's a lot of performance anxiety that I think designers have, architects have it too. And some people in design school get beaten up through the critique process. So they have to unlearn that on the job. But I think it's really important that there's sort of like some norms established around how you give and receive feedback. When I centralized the design teams at my last job at Autodesk, the first thing I did is I ran an offsite with all the designers and it was a really big group, but we figured out how to organize it so that everyone brought work in progress. And then we taught them a method for giving and receiving feedback for running a design crit. And then they practiced it with each other and it was great because they got a chance to see each other's work. But also it created new norms. And then once those norms become normal, you don't have to think about it so much. It becomes easier. Get a third perspective. I think when we're too close to the top, you can't see the peak. And when you're too attached to the design, you, no matter when you look at it, like designers work on designs, let us say from morning eight PM till evening six, seven, eight, nine, 10. So your involvement with the design is very, very heavy. What you would need to do is understand that you designed it, but someone else is gonna use it and get someone to use it. And the minute they tell you that it's not working, it's gonna take some time for you to accept it, but the minute you accept it, you're gonna be a better designer. Yeah, I think that's the critical thing is value is value listened until you proved it. And you can only prove it with your customers. And so you gotta get to that as fast as you can to give you the perspective, but also to give you the language, the framework, the ammunition to go back and challenge and expand and adapt. And one of the things that I couldn't agree more about the importance of critique. Critique isn't just about getting the work better before it goes out the door. Critique is the fundamental learning and development tool to create better designers, because that's where you understand different perspectives across your peers and they elevate your work for you. And so you've gotta look at that sort of critique thread that's running through things. And then the third thing that I would add is what I would call white space, which is you've got to have some time in the week, maybe not every day, where the team does nothing. It genuinely does nothing and it will drive your PMs nuts. They'll look at it and they'll go, what are you doing in that time? And you'll go, we're just chatting, we're talking, we're reflecting, we're getting the opportunity to make that leap, to think about the thing where we're intuiting the idea and we're pushing it beyond the analytical stuff that we've been doing in our time where we haven't had time because we've been so heads down, that white space heads up with the team is the thing that's gonna give you better work, is the thing where the work drives memory and reputation. And you've gotta fight really hard to crack those moments of white space in that plan. And if your project plan and your team just keeps you busy, like 30, 40, 50 hours a week and there's no white space, I can tell you now, the work is not gonna be as good as it could be. So get the white space, do the critique, and engage in some of these other activities and you'll see the work naturally lift. And don't just get feedback only from designers. That is also very harmful. We are very inclusive when we start where, especially when it's doing like a design sprint or design thinking, we get people from different streams, like people from tech, people from analytics, every possible stream we get them. But when you're getting design critique, we predominantly go to another designer, a bunch of designers and they'll give you that perspective. So just take your design to the person who's just, we've done this, right? People are just walking across and they come here. What do you think about this? And you will get really good feedback. So can I just add another piece? Because don't get us talking about critique. Literally, we won't shut up. Don't be too nice. Please, for the love of all things, good. Don't be too nice. Don't be rude. But be critical in a way that's constructive. I spent about a year, 18 months working at the BBC in the UK. And for those of you that don't know the BBC, or you all know the BBC, that's a ridiculous comment. But anyway, it's terrifically middle class and it's terrifically nice. And everybody there is lovely. Like it's like the loveliest place you could ever work. But we would run these design critiques within the BBC and no one ever said anything bad. Like the work would go up and it would be palpably poor. And everyone would sit around and go, yeah, you did a great job. And I'd be literally having this out-of-body experience going, this is terrible work. And everyone's just full fear of social consequence, just back slapping and being a bit sort of self-congratulatory. And so there has to be some tension. You have to fight for things and add some element of critique into the critique. Otherwise it is a little bit performative and then the work won't improve. So don't be afraid to give people honest opinions and the work again will get better. Great, yes. Hello. Hello. So the four of you are from four different global companies. And my question is, you as design leaders, what do you do to help your team stay in a good mental health state? And this is barring all the organizational level initiatives that are taken. I would like to know from each one of you what is your personal take on this? I act very human. I have a very carefully choreographed series of things to make me appear human at the beginning of meetings. Just kidding. I'm just my own person. I'm a normal human being and there's certain things I like, certain things I don't. And I don't hide who I really am. And it helps with everybody. We can be more comfortable. I've also over the years developed a wide array of terrible dad jokes that help deescalate situations. So I think it's a bit of an art because you're pushing to get things better. But if you're working that hard, like we were just talking about, if you're working that freaking hard, there's gotta be an outlet. There's gotta be an escape valve. And so the escape valve needs to be, it's okay if your cat jumps on the desk or if you hug your dog in the middle of the meeting. And it's okay if someone's talking about dropdown and someone falls under their chair and you go, oh look, dropdown. So stuff like that I think is really important to help everybody feel like they don't, on top of producing good work, they don't have to hide who they are. So before the pandemic, when people used to go to office five days a week, we used to do something called ice cream Fridays where we just get into the room, buy a lot of ice cream, a lot of chips and eat it for one hour, right? And when we're doing that, there's such good conversations on the team. We never discussed a project. We never forced anyone to discuss work. Just sit down, talk about movies, not politics because it's very tricky in the land that we're in, but discuss things, right? And I've always found this conversation and there is no hierarchy there. Everybody can pull everybody's leg, right? There's a lot of jokes, there's a lot of fun. And one thing which I strive to bring is to the team is I want people to come to work and just have fun while working, right? It does not have to be serious. You don't have to be serious every single minute of the day. And we know that people are accountable. They're gonna get the work done. So there is no, like just have fun, talk about things. Like now people work remotely, they work hybrid. Some of this, you know, the social time is definitely reduced. So we need to be a little more creative about it. But one thing that we did was ice cream Fridays. I loved it, right? Lot of good ice cream. We had a great budget, lot of chips. And every week it would be a new person who would go and choose it, otherwise you would get the same flavor, yeah. So when I joined IBM, there was already a really strong design culture in place. And it did not happen by accident. It was very intentional. So we've, you know, continued to do that. And it's a mix of things. We have various recognition programs for designers. But we also have a recognition program. It's called With Love From Design. It's by designers for their cross-functional partners. So we, you know, like the love comes from design, but it goes beyond design. We definitely, the fun part, we take fun very seriously at IBM. Halloween is like, you know, an all week event at our flagship studios in Austin. A lot of our design studios around the world participate. And it goes beyond just like individual costumes. Teams do team costumes, and then they compete with other teams. So there's just a lot of focus on these things. And then the other piece I would say is it is important to have an intention around inclusion for different types of folks. So like an example of a fun thing that was done by the design teams recently, they did a fashion shoot. And I think it was like three by fours. It was 12 different designers, all different ethnicities, all different body types, you know, wearing their wildest clothes. And then we created this, or the team created this poster that we sent around the company. And so I think these little things matter because going back to what you were saying, when you create an environment where different types of people can be themselves, you can kind of put your baggage aside and be yourself as you get the work done versus kind of like holding back. It's hard, it's really, really hard. Because the thing that drives all of that is connection and trying to create community. You can't fake it, it has to be authentic. And the only way you can do that is bringing people together. And then in the end that just happens, it's gonna happen at different sort of levels of altitude in an organization. It needs to happen within the teams, it needs to happen within the countries, it can happen within regions, and it can happen at a global level. But you've got to sort of commit to recognizing the importance of that community to create that broader safer environment that is inclusive, that makes people remember the value of the community. Because sometimes I think there can be dissonance and you can get lost in your own work. And sometimes that work might not be the most exciting. And you get a bit, your head drops a little bit. And so I love your share from design with love. We do, there's a program in London where we do share the love, which is a similar thing. And I think that's the important thing, which is just keep reminding or be reminded by your colleagues about the impact of design and the strength of the community. But it is hard, and it needs a lot of work. Continue your work. Thank you. I have a follow-up question on this. While you've given us a lot of solutions about how it was pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, now that all the teams, all the design teams have come online, and a lot of us are collaborating across the globe, how have you still managed to keep it afloat, keep the kind of team bonding afloat, especially with the design teams? Because from what I understand, a lot of the designers, they belong to their own shells and they would rather collaborate with their own. And just that little bit of collaboration or the networking that has to happen within the organization, how have you managed to keep that afloat? So I'll bring up one very specific thing we did. And this started just before my time at IBM. And I think this started right as the pandemic was hitting. I'm looking for my IBM colleagues, they can correct me. But we had this groundswell of interest from our design community globally to run an internal design conference. And so we started doing that. It was virtual in the pandemic, incredible way to connect people to, it sort of operated on many levels. There was the sharing work part, which designers, it's a really big company, it's 3,000 designers, people are really curious about what other designers are doing and they don't often get the chance to see the work. So they got to see each other's work. They also got a chance to present to each other, which is really important. I believe being a great designer means you need to be a great storyteller, be able to present the work. So it's a great, great opportunity to do that. So a lot of learning and sharing. And then there were various fun activities. It wasn't all just work stuff, but we've continued to do that every year and now we're in this weird hybrid thing, which is actually more challenging than being everyone remote because you have to figure out how does that work when there's people on the screen and people in the room, and then we're global. So there's the time zone issue. So the teams have been really creative in how they've worked it out. So for example, I was in our Bangalore office this week. I, Ruchi, who's somewhere in the audience and I gave the intro to our external keynote speaker, we gave it on Indian time in the room with all our designers there, but then we played a prerecording of the keynote, which was broadcast from the Bay Area. So there's a lot of that like ping-ponging between recorded and live, so people got a mix. But yeah, we'll keep experimenting. So something that started during the pandemic, which still holds good, especially at Chase, is we do something called humans of Chase, right? And there's anybody who comes new to the organization, they actually talk about their journey, right? And this also gives you through what they've gone through in life, where they've been, what are the experience. So this is something that I found very meaningful and everybody starts connecting with the person, not just a title or not just the kind of role that they do. So that was one. The other thing that we definitely do, I think when she was talking about time zone, I got reminded about this. Being very mindful about the time zone is something that I've seen and that has to start from the leaders, right? So when we had like a catch up with the India team, my boss, he actually got to office at 5.30 or six o'clock in the morning, right? And I actually told him that in my 24 years or 20 plus years of working, I've never seen that happen. So it starts from the top to be inclusive and inclusive, not just of ethnicities, but also include people into what you do. So including the India team, moving things for them. If there's something big happening there, like can we do a version of this? Especially if there's a large global team and they're all having these moments where they're teaching each other or sharing something, sharing recordings or doing an instance only for the India team or any team which is not on the same time zone, I think that is something that is really good. And so we have a once a year, everybody from design gets together. We have one of those on West Coast, California and then another in India. And that really helps. Most of the time is not structured. It's a lot of white space or pseudo white space where it's not mission critical because we can do the work remotely but getting to know each other. It's a lot harder thing to do when you're not in person. And I think that's probably the new reality with the hybrid work environment is getting everybody together intentionally a few times a year, just so you can build those bridges that help smooth the collaboration process when you're working together. Hello. Yeah. How do you push for change when the stakeholders that you're working with don't necessarily agree with it. Essentially like how do you convince them to like towards what you want to build. Thank you. The love language of business is revenue. At least at our company. So I talk a lot with the designers about we need to learn to speak the love language of the business. We can talk about craft and all those stuff, all those things amongst ourselves. But revenue, adoption is another big one. Profit is another big one. We try to connect what we're doing to those things. Value and impact are like, I think I learned this not when it started out but somewhere down the line I realized that the minute you talk about what value you can create either for the business or for the customer or the impact for the customer or for the business, people definitely listen to you. And every time you pitch an idea or every time you have something that you want to talk about do talk about how it is valuable to someone or how it's going to be impactful for someone. That's what I would do. Just to build, if you don't know what you're measuring or you have no metrics to measure that talk about the value of the work that you're doing then you're never gonna convince anyone of anything because you have no baselines and you have no argument. And it doesn't matter whether that can be operational or effectiveness measures in that process, time to decision, time to cash, time to activation, time to first use, whatever. What are you solving for? Or it could be more sort of brand or reputational measures. But the measures have to be agreed collectively at that team and product level and then you can then frame any of your ideas or your provocations against the moving of the needle on the metric and then suggest an experiment to then demonstrate the value shift. But if there's no measurement in place, if you're working on projects and programs and it obviously happens a lot still which is, you know, they're fluffy and it's like, hey, we're just making it look better or we're just generally improving the customer experience then you're kind of sunk, you know, because then it becomes too subjective and then it's like, you know, he said, she said, I think it's better, I don't think it's better. What metric is it moving? We don't have any, you know, you're just gonna go around in circles. So, you know, as a design community, we need to get much better at that, the language of business and connecting the work we do to those value metrics and encouraging more junior designers, younger and younger, so there's a four year old walking across the front of the stage and I might recruit him. Got a natty t-shirt. All right, we have time for I think one or two more. So let's make sure these are really tough ones. I wanna see Matthew break out into a cold sweat. Hello, can you hear me? Hello. Hi, so I wanted to ask you like, all of you guys have been, you know, through different journeys in UX and now you're in design leadership roles. So how do you manage imposter syndrome? Like, you know, how do you deal with it? Like, you've been at different stages of your career, like, you know, at some point, you manifest like, oh, what am I doing here? Is this right? So how do you deal with that in your head? I missed the key word. How do you deal with? Oh, imposter syndrome. I missed. Any of you guys have imposter syndrome? Is that just for the ladies? No. Tell us where you're vulnerable. Come on, bring it out. Honestly, I oscillate between God complex and imposter syndrome, like a hummingbird in almost every meeting. There's this internal monologue going, oh, for God's sake, just say something. This meeting's going nowhere and, oh my, you shouldn't say anything. I know, literally, literally every fraction of a second and that's been every year for about 27 years. I think embrace the uncertainty and embrace the fact that you don't know things and, you know, take the chance in those meetings and say what you think, you know. But yeah, no, no, huge imposter syndrome always. Hi, I'm Kaushikin here. So we've mostly always heard about the concept of T-shaped thinking and being a T-shaped learner. I want to know your thoughts on, especially for young leaders or leaders, young people aspiring for leadership roles. There's often a trade-off where we hear that you should be going into a certain amount of specialization, which makes a lot of sense. But also with the constantly evolving landscape of design and of UX, there's a lot of, unless you don't experiment or go into sort of different roles, different domains from VR and all of these things, there's also that fear of missing out. But at the same time, companies often also look for a very specialized experience pathway. So what do you suggest and what are your thoughts on the same? I would suggest that you find an area that interests you that's financially viable. That's the intersection you're looking for. For some people that means being a master of none, right, jack of all trades. And there's other people that have been very successful, specialized on only design systems or only visual design or accessibility. I think it's important as you go through your leadership journey to not, do not try and emulate someone else's leadership journey. You're gonna write your own story. There may be parts you pull from those other books in the world, the other people. But it's gotta be about your life and how you did it so that it's the best it could be. I think I would completely add to that, especially in my life, and things are gonna change all the time, right? But you are the person you are. You like doing what you like doing. Filling in that out is not gonna be something that you'll do right when you start. But over a period of time, you realize that there's a pattern with you. You really like doing something. So dipping into that and using that as your core skill, at the same time, making sure that you're aware of everything that is changing, right? Like AI or, you know, Pigma from XD. So that's my advice. I really like Troy's advice about listening to yourself and figuring out what it is you love to do. I think we over-index on what other people think. And only you know what you need to do, you know? And I also think that if we over-index on what that other people think, we're likely to pursue a path that's not authentic to what, you know, to our values, to what we like doing. And I think you do your best work when you go for your strengths. It doesn't mean we shouldn't work on our weaknesses, do that, but go for your strength. Thank you. One last question. Yeah, so I have a question like as design leaders, how you guys see innovation? Cause as leaders, you have to take care of your existing product, you know, solving all those user needs. But at the same time, you have to look or you have to do something that can take your product one step ahead of the competition. So how you guys, you know, think about innovation? Yeah, experimentation is the best way to do it, right? So we have so many tools to kind of test different variants of what you do. You can always benchmark your existing product or existing product idea against the innovative idea with a set of audience and see how they react. I think that's, I would think that would be a very good way to do it. I think that not everybody has an appetite for innovation. Sorry to say. You'll have business partners that just wanna iteratively move slowly right and up. And then there'll be people that, you know, damn the torpedoes, burn it all down. If you're more of the latter than I'd say, never waste a good crisis. There's a good crisis just around the corner. Whether it's AI or remote work or design systems, we've seen a bunch in the design world. And that's when people have their focus on those crises. That's where you can come in with innovation that's in that locus and say, hey, this is how we can make the most out of the situation. We can pivot with X now that gen AI is here, you know? And so that's at least been my technique oftentimes because the goal is to get those, people don't have to agree with you on where it's all gonna go later. If they can agree on the first couple of steps, at least to start, and then you slowly tell the rest of the story as you take them on the journey. But it's really, really tough to tell somebody who's, let's say, very risk adverse. Hey, let's risk it all. Let's go bet everything. You know, so you have to be very mindful of those people and get in their heads what's important to them. And when there's a crisis, everybody's ears are to the ground trying to figure out what does it mean. So you want to develop a sixth sense for that and attenuating your innovation, passion to that. I find just the word innovation quite triggering now. It almost makes me slightly twitch in ways that are deeply uncomfortable. You know, only a few years ago, this idea of kind of organizations having innovation teams that were separate from lines of business and products and services and they would have a head of innovation over there. It always felt like it was an organization creating a petting zoo for the C-suite. Do you know what I mean? It's just like, hey, go and look at the weird giraffe and then we'll get back to real work. And I think it's created this kind of, this difficulty for me at least around innovation because it feels like innovation feels like it's just too, I don't know, out there too esoteric, too risky and people go, oh, no, we don't want to innovate. We've got actual jobs to be doing here. We've got customers that need to be served and you think, well, you can innovate at any level everywhere and innovation doesn't happen over there in the petting zoo. It can happen in the business process redesign or in the policy change or in the module of the app. And so, and I think it comes back to, and there's a thread of this, all of our answers, which is connecting the value of design back to customer and commercial value in ways that are measurable. And that's where I think you find the space to make the argument for innovation because you can again point to the value that it's gonna create, either internally or externally. But my view is that every one of us are both an innovator and a optimizer. A bit like oscillating between God complex and imposter syndrome, really. But yeah, so, yeah, innovation, a bit triggering. The only thing I would add to that is a continuous cycle of UX research. That's where the little innovations come from, but sometimes that's where the big breakthroughs come from and they're not necessarily things that we hear directly articulated from people, but that's where so much of our inspiration should be coming from. Thank you.