Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: Design in Focus Who Will Replace You?
Uploaded: 2019-03-21
Duration: 12 min 41 s
Description: As designers, we’ve blazed a bumpy, meandering path to the executive table at some of the world’s top companies. Yet, few of us have built a bench of leaders to take our work into the next decade and beyond.

Hi everyone, thanks for having me, I'm Kate Aronowitz and I'm a design at GV. GV is the capital of Alphabet and the design team at GV works with the CEOs and the founders in our portfolio companies to help them realize the power of design and making better business decisions. We also work with their design teams to help them grow and also have more impact. We also build design community and support amongst the top design executives and tech, we regularly get them together and discuss what's working out and share our successes but we also talk a lot about where design Still has a long way to go. Just over the past year, I've worked with more than 40 companies from names that you would know like, Slack or Uber all the way to health care start ups that are just getting up and going. And I'd say m main takeaway from being at GV for about a year and a half and working with all these companies is that you can go into a company You can teach design thinking, you can put people through workshops, you can have sprints, you can teach empathy to engineers, but if there isn't a leader that's left behind, that's taking responsibility for design, a true design leader, that work very quickly goes to the wayside. And that's why I'm excited to come and talk to you about I think the big challenge we're facing as design leaders. So, over the past few decades, as a group design leaders have reached new levels of success, and is thanks to many people in this room that the top companies in the world are finally getting design. We're using design thinking to solve really big problems Or designing and putting products in the world are both more thoughtful and they're more delightful. And we're also leading the way into meaningful conversations around ethics and the environment. And as leaders we can actually finally see a present and a future where designers on equal footing as a discipline with math, engineering and science We can also see a future when design executives were finally paid the same as our peers in business and product and engineering, we can also see a future when design organizations or centers of pride and excellence and doing good at businesses from their very inceptions. But the success, it didn't happen overnight most of us in this room have been hard at work and design for 20, 25, 30 years or more. And with that in mind with how long it's taken us to get here in the success that we've had i'd like you to all pause and think for a moment and i'd like you to think about what's next What's next for you? How long will you stay in your current position? When you leave, what's next? Will you take another position similar to the one that you have now? Will you simply join another company? Do you have it in you to scale a team from very small to very large again? To have the energy to educate yet another CEO on the power of design. And when you leave your current position, do you have someone to take your place. So over the past year, a dozens of coaching section, lots of dinners and other conversations that I've lead, I've being asking other design leaders the exact same questions I've just asked you. And I'm hearing the same answers over and over again. I'm hearing that there has never been a better time to be in design, and we are super proud of our accomplishments. But I'm also hearing, I'm tired. [ LAUGH ] I don't know how much longer I can stay in this position I don't know if I have another leadership position in me and I don't have someone to take my place. Hope I'm seeing some nodding heads I think you're probably feeling the same. We have worked so long and so hard to get design exceeded the table that we have now moved from a problem of Demand to one of supply. The demand for design executives is simply outpacing the number of people that are both interested and qualified in taking these positions. And this is both at startups that I'm coaching, but also at really terrific, great companies who are having a hard time finding new design executives. So I'm worried, I actually think that this really does put our legacy at risk. Think about your own personal legacy. Let's say you left your position tomorrow you were ready to move on, because these positions are rewarding but they take a toll. What would happen if you were position when they can for six Or 12 months. Just go over to LinkedIn and do a search for design director and you'll see that there's 66, 000 listings. 66, 000 open positions for design directors, VP's of design, other leadership positions in our industry and that's just LinkedIn. Think about all the positions There are not listed there. So, let's talk about it who will take our place? And I'm here to tell you robots are coming not yet. So, if you think about maybe who might take your place, your natural instinct might be well, just go find someone else that took might pass, someone that has a similar background It's me. Well, good luck. It's a fool's errand. And I'll tell you why. Not only are we sure on people that took the same path as us. It would really be a mistake for the next generation to just look like clones of the current. If you think about the past that we took to get to our leadership positions, I didn't go to school for user experience. I was designing vitamins labels when I graduated from college. I found the user experience by mistake and as physician at linkden and Facebook and eBay I usually had to write my own job description. They knew they needed design but they didn't know what to do with me. My friend Michael Golf he runs the global at Uber. He was in licensed architect before getting into tech. My friend and fellow design partner at GV Vanessa Cho designed book jackets long before running design teams at GoPro, Walmart and Google. We've blazed a path for design, but our path was not exactly straight, it was pretty varied. And the next generation is pretty different than us. Most of them did go to school for the design that they're practicing now. Most of them did join companies with the design teams and great career paths. They also have some really terrific qualities that we didn't grow up having Accessible design is kind of second nature to them a little bit more than it was for us. Designing for a global audience is kind of just what they do. And many of these upcoming leaders, they don't draw these hard lines between hardware software that maybe many of us did. The next generation is also gonna have to dive even deeper from the conversations that we're having this week. They have to go deeper in the AI, and the ethics, government relations, inclusion. So, I think it's really exciting to get new perspective into this conversation. So, when you're thinking about diversity as I hope you all are because we know more diverse teams, Build better products and better companies. I want you to think outside of gender or ethnicity. I want you to think about getting outside of your industry, getting outside of your region. I know that in Silicon Valley we have to do a better job at this cuz I want us to get excited to pass the baton to the next generation that probably didn't take the same path we did [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Another thing I think about when I think about bringing up another generation of leaders is how to mentor them. And mentorship often takes on this kind of grand very formal definition of deep relationship, deep responsibility for someone else's career and I'm not knocking that kind of mentorship But when I ask a lot of design leaders, what ws the mentorship that made a difference in your career? It wasn't the grand gestures that made the difference. It was the designer who told me that she often had a manager that gave her projects she didn't even know she was capable of doing. Or another senior leader that said that he had a great boss that always just gave his ideas an extra plug in a meeting. Mentorship is in the small things that we do every single day. It's when you get back to work next week, you've got a presentation to give considering giving part or all of it to someone else. Invited junior person to a meeting that they wouldn't normally be invited to. With real power at your companies, you have real responsibility to be providing opportunity to the people both around and below you. I challenge you to commit just a few small acts of mentorship a week, and I bet you could probably do one a day, if you really put your mind to it. And bonus points to providing mentorship to people that wouldn't normally get access to you. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The next thing I'd like to ask you to do, it's gonna sound a little counterintuitive and scary given the supply problem that we have But it's something that i'm both practicing and advocating for very hard back at home. I'm gonna assume that you are all here today because you have hired very well you have teams back home taking care of what your team is in charge of. I'm gonna assume that you have also hired some really terrific senior people. Let me break it to you. You also probably have a senior person or two that's ready to leave your company. Think about the times in your career when your life when your best next move is to lead your company. I know it was for me. So what happen these days when a senior person really want to leave. I know I used to do this, I used to do this, I would bury my head like there was nothing that's happening. Eventually then send a good bye email, you had a party and you say good bye. But it doesn't have to be that way. I'd like to propose that with a simple mindset shift we could be helping each other build our benches. We could help each other introduce these great people to their next boss and get their new position. Just last year I was working with a terrific program manager On a design team. And she really had hit the bounce of what her position could offer, she was far more talented that what the company could offer her. And so instead of kinda ignoring that, I introduced her to her next boss. When she got her offer, I even took her into her and I helped her negotiate her stock package to make sure it was as good as it should have been Now, that program manager from the year ago is now leading and running a design ops organization at a terrific company. I bet you can each think of someone that you know or somebody in your company that's ready for new opportunity. Instead of ignoring that I'd love you to take that person's name. Share it, share with the people around you. Consider it a thank you to that person for all the work that they've done for you. And also consider it something good that you're doing for the industry and for all of us in this room. By helping other people move around more freely, I think that we can put them in the right position where they can someday ascend to these more senior Positions and they can step up. Managing from a place of fear, which I've done when I've run really big teams before, fear that people are going to leave you, is not true leadership and not serving the greater good of design. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And then the last thing I'd just like to ask us all to do is just to do a better job working together. We come to conferences like this, we have great conversations, terrific dinners, we'll all write a lot of articles, we'll tweet. I've build some new relationships this week that are terrific, but let's face it we get back to the daily grind of our jobs, our businesses are competing with one another We hold talent we don't expose vulnerabilities to one another. On a day to day basis we don't actually work together. I think bringing the next generation up is something that we really could work together on and I think it's something that we have to. If we don't collectively own responsibility for putting the next generation in place [ UNKNOWN ] I do worry that all these work we've done to get designed and sit at the table, it will be all for none and we will slide backwards of an industry. I believe that it's gonna take us all working harder together to make sure that the next generation design leaders is they even stronger and better than we were and are And I believe that it's gonna take us all working harder together to make sure that the future remains bright for design, thank you. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: Design in Focus Who Will Replace You?

Design

As designers, we’ve blazed a bumpy, meandering path to the executive table at some of the world’s top companies. Yet, few of us have built a bench of leaders to take our work into the next decade and beyond. 