Dave Malouf
Defending Design in Agile Environments
In this episode of Brave UX, Dave Malouf gets real about the role of DesignOps, how to protect design from errant efficiency seekers, and the challenge of designing in agile environments.
Highlights include:
- What is the value of design?
- Why are we confused about what design is?
- What can design leaders do to better articulate the value of design?
- How can designers play to their strengths and stay relevant?
- Is DesignOps about making design more efficient?
Who is Dave Malouf?
Dave is a veteran of digital design and a globally recognised design leader. He is also a pioneer of the field of Design Operations. In fact, he’s widely credited as the person who came up with the abbreviation DesignOps.
Across his 27 years in the field, Dave has held senior design leadership positions at well known enterprise companies such as Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, and Digital Ocean. He is currently the Director of Design Operations at Teladoc Health.
Dave was a Co-Founder and Board Member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He is also the author of the Guide to UX Leadership, and What is DesignOps, and the Co-Author of the DesignOps Handbook.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Dave Malouf. Dave is a veteran of digital design and a globally recognized design leader. He's also a pioneer of the field of design operations. In fact, he's widely credited as the person who came up with the abbreviation, design ops, no prizes for guessing what some of our conversation will be about today.
- Across his 27 years in the field, Dave has held senior design leadership positions at well-known enterprise companies such as Rackspace, HP, and Digital Ocean. Most recently, he was the senior director of strategy and Operations at Northwestern Mutual. Through his consulting practice, Dave helps to coach and train design leaders across the world on how to amplify the value of design. His clients have included JP Morgan Chase, VMware, Amdocs, IBM, and Orange as sought after speaker. Dave is regularly invited to deliver keynotes at global design events including the Design Leadership Summit, the Design Up Festival, the Design Summit and Joint Futures, the Holistic Design conference to name a few. Dave was a co-founder and board member of the Interaction Design Association, or IxDA, as you may know it. He's also the founder of and previous program co-lead for the Enterprise UX Conference and also previously the conference curator of Rosenfeld Media's Design Ops Summit. Co-author of the Design Ops handbook and author of the Guide to UX Leadership and What is Design Ops? A longtime blogger, Dave is clearly a generous contributor to our community. As someone who is deeply passionate about design and the people who practice it, it's my pleasure to be speaking with him today, Dave, shalom and welcome to the show.
- Dave Malouf:
- Shalom. Aleichem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wish that I had paid more attention at school when I was learning Hebrew Bec, because I have to say I've been caught a little short there, [laugh], just as how are you? Oh, well I'm good. I'm really good. Thank you for asking. It's really great to have you here, Dave. I've really enjoyed researching for today's conversation and as we've just been chatting about, we had a little bit of an off air conversation about how I went to a Jewish school and it's a bit of an interesting crossover there because I understand that you unlike me, who was raised a Roman Catholic and was sort of somehow led into the Jewish school, you are actually Jewish. And I was curious about that. What was it like for you growing up in the seventies and eighties in the USA as someone who was Jewish?
- Dave Malouf:
- An interesting question. One, you don't get asked very often in design podcasts, which I like. There isn't one Jewish America, there's this great book called Members of the Tribe that an Israeli journalist tours United States and tours all Jewish communities. And there isn't just one way of, there isn't just one way of being anything, but in the United States there's so many different communities. I think growing up in Long Island in the seventies and eighties, I grew up in what's known as a Matza Pizza town. So the town that I grew up in is called Massapequa. It's just a Native American tribal name, but Massapequa, Matza Pizza, it kind of fits. And the reason it was called Matza Pizza was it was half Jewish and half Italian. And it was just sort of normal to be Jewish where I grew up in a place in a time where 90% of my friends were from Hebrew school or from the neighborhood, and we were just all Jewish. And then when I think back at that time, it was, it's like an anomaly cuz I've lived in other places and I've been around the world and it's never been like that for me since. But there was this point where it was just kind of normal to be Jewish where I don't think that's the case anymore. And I live in a completely different part of Long Island now, and it's definitely not the case. So it's interesting. I would say it was normal is what I would say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And you were telling me before we hit record that you moved to California when you were 15. Yeah. What do you remember from that time? I mean, you go from growing up in what sounded like you a very Jewish community where 90% of the people around you were Jewish to moving to another coast in the USA to another state. What sort of stands out for you in terms of the contrast between where you were beforehand and Long Island and where you ended up and California?
- Dave Malouf:
- I think the most, there's so different in so many ways though the Southern California area that I moved to as a teenager versus where I grew up on Long Island, and I think it all comes down to one word, sarcasm. And New York was all about sarcasm. I had friends in California at the time that just didn't understand me. And it wasn't because of my harsh long Island accent that I have since gotten rid of. It was because I would speak in sarcasm or opposites. Everything is said sarcastically long Island in the New York area. And I just didn't have any sense of sarcasm. And I think that was just really hard for 14, 15 year old person to be thinking about. I think the other major difference for me was we talk about in the United States how the southern, southeastern United States is segregated and whatnot. But the honest truth is Long Island is one of the most segregated places in North America.
- And moving to where I moved to in a town called Thousand Oaks, it was so much more integrated and it wasn't even that integrated. It was a very wealthy area upper middle class area in some cases just outright wealthy area. And I had people of color in my life for the first time and that was another major difference. Whereas I would make this joke that living in Long Island in Massapequa, the few Greek people in my school were the people of color. And that's what it felt like. Whereas in Westlake Village, thousand Oaks, California, we had lots of Iranians, Chinese immigrants. I even had African American black people in my school, which I never would've had in Massapequa. It was unheard of. And they were in the next town over. That's how segregated Long Island is. It was clearly demarcated. Whereas in Lake Village, things were demarcated by class more than they were demarcated by color. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You've written about your class, I think you touched on in your last blog post, which was in April of last year, you mentioned that you grew up upper middle class and I was curious about that. What was it that your parents did?
- Dave Malouf:
- Well, my father isn't really where my father and my mother isn't really where I feel I got my class background from though. There's stuff there, but I grew up mostly on Long Island around with my stepfather and he was a part owner of a hardware store on Long Island. So this is before the big box hardware stores that came in the United States. We have Home Depot and Lowe's and stuff like that. But he owned this hardware store. It was the largest hardware store on Long Island and they did very, very well. But it was this interesting mix of working in working class people, but also comfort is what I would say. I grew up incredibly comfortable and incredibly blessed. I'm privileged because of that comfort in my life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand that comfort and that privilege took you to pre-med in college.
- Dave Malouf:
- Wow. You did your research.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I couldn't help myself. I couldn't help myself. Dave. And I was curious about pre-med because I mean, when you get to a stage like that in college and you're obviously intent on pursuing medicine at that point anyway in your life, what was it that inspired you to do?
- Dave Malouf:
- Oh man. It was total vanity, I would say. And I'm being a little flippant because I mean I'm 52 years old when I was 18, 16, 17 when I thought about it. But I will just say, I've never said this to anyone before, but one of the greatest influences of my life is the TV show mash.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right? And
- Dave Malouf:
- You're like, what? Who talks about MASH anymore? It ended in 1983, right. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It just came out here in New Zealand. So it's new, it's new for us.
- Dave Malouf:
- Oh, it's new, great. Enjoy! It's one of the best TV shows of all time. But the character of for Good and for Bad, Alan, all this character of Benjamin Franklin, Hawkeye Pierce is to me one of the greatest influences of my life. Forgive and for bad, yes, he was a misogynistic pig, but he was also this incredibly caring human being who just wanted to heal the world and just wanted to fix the shit of this war, the Korean War in that case. And so I didn't only want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a thoracic surgeon. I totally wanted to do that. So at the time, but I also was not prepared for what it meant, what it really meant to become a doctor. It was fanciful. And so when I got to Berkeley and went to school and just dove in with all the other pre-meds into first year chemistry, I did not know what I was getting myself into. And that's why I call it vanity today. It was thin, it was fanciful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And do you remember the moment? Do you remember the moment where you were like this is not for me.
- Dave Malouf:
- I've constantly told this story and I blame this one moment. And the moment was, there are two moments. There was the moment where I realized, oh shit. And then there was the moment when I made the decision, the moment when I said, oh shit was I saw someone put a salt tablet in someone else's chemistry experiment so that they would change the curve of the grading.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No way.
- Dave Malouf:
- It was just that competitive. It was that crazy. It was that nutso. And I was like, what the fuck? And I was like, is this, wait, what happened to the idealism? Right? What the hell? Right? Welcome
- Brendan Jarvis:
- To the world. What
- Dave Malouf:
- The world. So that was the moment where I was like, oh shit. And by the way, I'm assuming I'm allowed to curse this whole time, right? Cause
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh yeah, okay. This is an adult's only podcast.
- Dave Malouf:
- Just wanted to make sure. And then the real moment when I made the decision was when I decided to, the day before, second semester chemistry midterm, I decided it was more important for me to road trip overnight with wonderful woman to Los Angeles than it was for me to study and prepare for my chemistry midterm. That was the decision. I don't all fucks gone, I give up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And then the internet, how convenient [laugh]
- Dave Malouf:
- And then the internet, what, 10, 15 years later? Exactly.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Before we get to the internet and all things designed, there's just one other, I couldn't help but ask this question, which is I understand that you're also a tricky, and I'm currently making my way through the next generation. I think I'm on season four, episode seven, which is a great series by the way. I completely love it. And I've watched most of the others, which is your favorite Star Trek series.
- Dave Malouf:
- I mean, I don't know why I'm pausing. It's Next Generation, hands down. As you get closer to season seven, it just gets better and better and talk about another influence in my life is that the relationship of Captain Picard and data, it just grows and grows and grows and becomes the story in so many ways, especially when you start moving over to the movies too. And yeah, just actually even the Picard TV show, I don't know if you knew about that. It's all about data in reality. So that show is just great. I just love it. It's funny you mentioned that cause I'm wearing a Star Wars shirt, so it's kind of,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, no judgment. I love both of them. Hey, let's shift gears and talk about design. Now that I've got my curiosity about Star Trek out of the way, [laugh], something that's a big question that designers have been wrestling with for a while is what is the value of design? And you've said that the value of design is that it's an amplifier. And I'm curious and also curious on behalf of our listeners today, what did you mean by that?
- Dave Malouf:
- Sure. I think for some designers there's an inconvenient truth to the value of design, which is that design has no value by itself. Design is pre creation. It is not creation itself. It, it's the creation of intent, but it's not the execution of that intent necessarily. In fact, what's really interesting is that once you start moving into the creation, into the execution, you're entering into other fields like engineering. And when I was teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which we also called scad, the industrial design department was also with furniture design. And what was interesting is the industrial designers sometimes would say that the furniture design program is more art than it is design. And one of the things that really became clear to me around that was the way that they at the time and programs change all the time. So I don't wanna get caught by anyone saying it's not like that.
- One of the main differences was that industrial design prepares others to execute. And the furniture design program felt more like, I'm going to build a piece of furniture and that's it. It's just this piece. And they weren't really talking about mass production of vacuums and what it would mean to tool it. What would it mean for some factory to have to build it not to be handcrafted? And that's a great example of the difference in my mind between designing and building. And sometimes you need to design before you build, but you can design without building. You can just sketch it, you can just imagine it. You can just create a mockup. But that's not creating the code or creating the scaffolding or creating the tooling to make it happen. And it's just a long way of saying that. That's why for me, designing is about amplifying other things.
- And it could be applied to almost all parts of a business in terms of that amplification. It's like every part of the business is an electric guitar and then design comes in and is the amplifier of that guitar in a way. It's just a lot more sophisticated and a lot more complex in order to be that amplifier. And it's not always clear how it does it. The other thing that's really important is that too often people think of design as the outcome or the output. And in my mind, design is the verb and those verbs of what it takes to create those outcomes, those outputs, those same verbs that are used to create a mockup, could be used to create a business, could be used to create a financial product, a financial service could be used to create a new way of being, right? You can use those same verbs that you do for that and apply it there. And that's why I consider it an amplifier of all the parts of an organization.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is a really interesting conversation to have because I get the sense that amongst the design community, there's not a shared understanding of what design is. That sounds like from what you've just said, that you're talking about what I would consider to be big design or big D design. This is about mm-hmm the almost like the architecture of different systems and experiences, not the execution of how those things come to be. Why are we so confused as an industry or a group of practitioners about what actually is design?
- Dave Malouf:
- Well, cause I think some designers are also builders, right? And that's great. I think it's wonderful when designers can build and they own it and they feel like it is, but they aren't making the distinction for them. It's one thing, maybe it's pedantic or academic or whatever the word is. And I think that they're not making that segmentation, they're not splitting those hairs, if you will. And I think that for me, as someone who's never really been a builder, it's been important for me to make those distinctions. And that's why interaction design has always attracted me. Cuz it's always been really clear in the interaction design community, in the interaction design practice, that segmentation, it's like I can look at Jesse James Garrett's experience design chart, how it splits into and all of that makes sense to me. It's really bloody clear all these segments and stuff like that.
- And for others they were just going, no, no, this is all just one thing. What's the point of doing all that segmentation? I do all of this in my head and I think make it and it works for me and I'm able to create these great things. Why do I need someone to make all these different segmentations of what it is I do? So I can appreciate that. I do think that it becomes problematic when you want to teach it, when you want to not just do the whole thing, but you wanna be able to help people grow and be able to critique the different pieces so that you can make better interactions or better sets of behaviors of the system for the behaviors of people or better information architectures and content strategies and also visual design and graphic design and better systemic code to bring it all together. That might be one all big puzzle for somebody, but if I want to be able to segment it in order to critique it, in order to improve the different areas, almost like an equalizer on music, you need to be able to talk about it. You
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Need to be able to hundred percent
- Dave Malouf:
- Have those different pieces to communicate. But to talk about the why, just to jump in again, sorry. I do think that there's so many different perspectives on what design is because there's so many different paths to becoming a designer and I think that's what makes design great at the same time. Because if you are open to all of those different paths of possibility, it's just like any version of the mosaic, any version of diversity, being able to make something greater than it would be if you just focused on a single part.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. It strikes me that we need to be quite clear with people that aren't designers or even amongst ourselves though, that what level of design we're talking about or what type of design we're talking about in order to articulate with clarity what the value it is that we provide. And I watched your amplifying design value and you said that no value exists without delivery. So this sounds like the building side of what we were just talking about there in terms of delivering design. And I took that to mean doing things like creating a product that someone else actually wants to buy and putting that into the marketplace somehow could be one example there. We often separate discovery from delivery, at least when it comes to the creation of digital products. Is design a delivery activity or a discovery activity or both
- Dave Malouf:
- And more
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]? Tell me about that. I
- Dave Malouf:
- Mean, I think that delivery is a weird word because as I'm listening to it, [laugh] reflecting on it, I think all the pieces of anything are delivered in some way or another, otherwise no one can reflect back against it in some way, right? It's delivered. I think what I meant by delivery in what you were referring to was shipping [laugh], right? It needs to be shipped in order for value to be consumed. Any product needs to hit a shelf or needs to hit an IP address in order to be consumed. So there's that kind of delivery, but then there's the delivery discovery is delivered. You can call it research delivered in a report or insight delivered to a group. People through their experience of observation, it's delivered in that way. So that's another way of thinking of delivery. But what I meant when I said that it's both and more is that design by itself, even separating research out as a separate activity is a form of discovery through exploration.
- You can take observation as a form of research, but then the discovery is in the synthesis of that research through the explorations that's is designed and through those explorations you deliver a concept or deliver multiple concepts. So that's what I meant there in terms of it's both, it's sort of at the same time, I also think it's more in terms of there's not just doing discovery for the sake of being related directly to insight transformation, but there's also exploration of ideas. And this is where design and art maybe kind of start conflating a bit more. I've seen amazing designs that are design exploration concepts that really almost feel like art in terms of the level of expressionism, in terms of the level of what's, I'm not sure I'm losing my language here, but taking a core concept almost like a science fiction, how the racism of Star Trek are all supposed to be prototypical in some kind of way. That's not the way we are in reality, but they're meant to sort of be examples of that. And I've seen design sort of use that same way. What if X, oh, let's take that to an extreme and explore it. What if y take that to an extreme and explore it. And I've sort of seen that kind of artistic kind of approaches to design being almost like exploring our identities in that way, which is less about discovery and more about expression but to me it's still design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I'm trying to think of the last time that I saw something in design that really was pushing the boat out there. I feel, and this is kind of a bit of a tangent, but I feel like there's a lot of the same going on and I feel like the more mature the industry gets at, the more difficult it is to find those truly unique ways of expressing design in terms of the delivery of design out there. I wonder if that's got something to do, which would be good to come to this later on, which is, I know something else that you are, you're well known for and mentioned in your introduction is design ops and of course design systems are part of that. And we may as well go there now. Do it, go there. Design. Yeah, let's do it. Let's explore design systems.
- So with design systems often a bit of frustration that I hear from designers is that they feel that the design system, while it might help operationalize design and help enterprises achieve design at scale, they sometimes feel like it removes some of the creativity from that expression and that exploration that they would've otherwise been able to go through. In your experience, what's been the tension, if any, that you've seen there with design practitioners and how do design practitioners come to reconcile where design is going in the enterprise and how they can find a place to add value as it
- Dave Malouf:
- Evolves? And there's a lot of pieces to unpack there and had this conversation often about the utility or futility of design systems and I think it's related to that. What kind of design are we talking about? That question that you asked before, and if I am exploring the boundaries of visual design, even UI design, it is holding you back. It's meant to, it's meant to bring constraints to those elements on purpose. It's meant to give you focus so that we can speed up so that we can become more efficient. Where it's not blocking your creativity or blocking what you work on is in the interaction and the architecture and in finding the best fit for human beings with what you're working on. Now, if you are completely stuck with that idea, then be on the design system team. Don't be on the team that uses the design system, be the team, be the heart of the team that is exploring those concepts at the point of the creation of the design system.
- Now what I've seen in the teams that I've been on where the design systems have been at various levels of maturity, but I'll call them mature or mature enough, is that those organizations that are running good design systems have a contribution model for the design system that allows the designers outside of the design system team to explore what the design system means and do that level of creativity as they see fit and contribute that back to hopefully improving the design system and then having a contribution in a vetting model for that. I think that that's an area of expression. If you feel that as a product designer, you should have carte blan to do whatever you want to the visual interface for every single thing in an application. You probably shouldn't be a product designer to be quite honest because you're thinking about yourself, you're not thinking about who you're designing for at that point. And when you're a product designer, it's not you, it's for other people. And the consistency and the coherency of that system is paramount to the success of that system for people at large. And so you have to be consistent, you have to be coherent in that system, otherwise you're just making thing, you're just adding friction to the system and doing it in probably doing it in a way that's not helpful for those people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Dave, are you suggesting that if you want to do that you should go and do some art instead of doing some design?
- Dave Malouf:
- Yeah, I mean even it's not even finding a new job. Maybe I've had so many, some of my favorite product designers who are awesome product designers either do two things to make them sort of deal with that. One is the first thing I suggested is they became design system people. They became people who work the design system. And even then that's sort of limiting, right? Because once you start the design system, it means you're going to hold to it even as you create new components to it. So it is sort of limiting, but at least you're in the midst of that decision making process. The other thing that most of them have done is they have got hustle side hustles. And one of my favorite designers out there that I've worked with, he had a side gig of making t-shirts, amazing print, graphic print and that's where he got his creativity and he was an art school kid, literally a visual illustrator graduate, not even graphic design. He was an illustrator and found his way into product design, but still wanted to keep at the illustration stuff and keep his heart and his mind going. And so he found that and tons of people my life, another design system person, she's she's a calligrapher and it has all these arts and crafts, not just calligraphy, but makes all these kinds of stencils and stuff from it and all. Awesome. That's where you get your creativity. Find another way to do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I remember interviewing a previous guest on the podcast, Kika nicu and I think she's a Stanford D school graduate now works over here in New Zealand leading up a research practice and product design practice. And she had her art practice as her outlet and her creative expression because she found that being a researcher, you always put yourself in the background because you're trying to learn from your participants and you're not trying to introduce too much bias and your own expression into the mix. And that was her outlet. So it seems like it's quite a common and appropriate thing for designers to do also is have those side hustles so they can get that satisfaction that they might not be getting in the day-to-day of paying the bills. Dave, I wanna just back to the bigger picture of design here that we were talking about in your talk and amplifying design value.
- You also articulated that there were four levels of value creation. And while I won't go into each of these levels in depth here, they were production, engineering, the business and then design. And you suggested that design was both additive to the previous levels of value creation and also recursive when it was applied to itself. Now that's quite a lot to think about for the people listening. What did you mean when you said that design was additive to those other levels? And then maybe when we're done with that answer we'll come to what you meant when you said it was recursive in and of itself.
- Dave Malouf:
- Sure. So I think the levels are sort of meant to be the most minimum form of value creation is production. I whittle something in wood, here's my little whittled bear, I produced it, boom, there it's right. The next level on top of that could either be business or engineering or both, it doesn't really matter. But the idea is that they add to that production, meaning that from an engineering side, I can now scale the production of that carf bear in some kind of engineering kind of way. Either engineering the form of production or engineering the scale. So it's a bigger bear, whatever. But engineering starts to add value in terms of various parameters beyond just the production. And then the business adds value on that by maybe helping refine the bear to make it cuter by doing analysis and bringing those tools in. Or it's like, I don't care what kind of bear it is, I can sell ice to an Eskimo and I can do that because I bring sales or go to market and that part of the business into it or the other side of the business is operationalizing the whole thing and I can get the best team to do whatever and that's the other part of business, all of those MBA different degrees, I can finance it, whatever.
- And that adds value to both the engineering and to the product or just the product. Now the reason that I say design is sort of at the end and also additive to all of it is well that original bear may have gone through a creative process. It wasn't just produced enough thin air. Maybe they sketched a whole bunch of versions before they started carving it and started using process. Maybe they tested it and said this bear versus this bear and the AB tested it, all those processes maybe they did a study of global history of bears and which kinds of bears would be best. And we all know the koala bear is the best bear versus probably panda comes in a close second in terms of cuteness. So there's sort of those kinds of things. And then the business I'm going to do applying to the business, well marketing tells me I need to sell it this way.
- Well who then designs the commercial that then creates the advert. Well design does that right? And that's being very simplistic. And then when you think about engineering versus design, well you can bring design into the creative process of how to engineer the best things or best way. So I was saying before, if you look at all the verbs of designing, and I think I go over what those different value propositions are from designing, you can apply those value propositions to all the parts and you can apply it to design itself, which is the recursive part that you can then design your designing, which then gets you into design ops really quickly, which is the designing of the designing. And that's where it becomes recursive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanna go to design ops, but before we do that, I wanted to bring things down to the practitioner level. I sense that there's a lot of frustration out there in the design community, those people that are hands-on delivering or executing design and also those that might be sort of at that sort of more strategic level of design when it comes to being able to articulate the value that they deliver. And you can see this being reflected in the downward pressure that's often applied to creative services more broadly when they're procured by the enterprise. And also in the conversations that design leaders within enterprise are having with other business stakeholders, there's still this frustration that we just don't have that seat or respect yet at the table that we've talked about ad nauseum for so long. Now, is there any merit in these concerns that we seem to be in a circular conversation with internally as an industry? Or are we just a bunch of whinges and we need to get over ourselves?
- Dave Malouf:
- I don't think we need to get over ourselves. I think we're asking the right questions. I think sometimes where it gets circular is maybe sometimes looking to ourselves for the answer instead of asking the other people. We aren't eating our own dog food. I don't know if that's an American phrase or not, but we're not doing our own work to apply to the answers. Normally when we wanna say, well what's the problem? We ask the people who hold the problem, we don't hold the problem, the problem is held by others. And so are we talking to those people and are we listening and are we changing how we're doing, what it is we designing, how we work to fit the audience for whom we need to be doing? We talk about portfolio a lot, just an easy example and it's like, well the portfolio is not for me, the portfolio is for the employer.
- So are we figuring out how to design our portfolio? It's sort of the same question. Well, are we designing how we communicate what it is we're thinking about or how to make our value known? I think where I might begrudge, and I was probably guilty of this as much as anyone, so I'm not like I'm included in my begrudge here, is saying that our ego sometimes is, the phrase is, well you hired me, why aren't you listening to me? And there is some truth to that and there is this way where there are some problems with the way design is looked at in industry. And I, I'm treading carefully here, but I do think though we need to own it more than we do or have decided to. And in my last role we just decided to just own it. We decided to say we are going to turn our product design team into a business and we are going to do what we have to do any other business unit in the company to be held accountable to be talking the language of every other executive in that business. When executive, when the CEO asks, what's your business? We need to be able to say here's our business and talk exactly the same way as marketing does as HR or whatever. Everyone is held accountable, why it does design be held accountable to that same standard. So we decided to just take that off.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's a huge point. And yeah, I couldn't have put it better. I think you're right, design does need to own it more. We need to stop looking for other people to approve of what it is that we do and we need to be able to have that value conversation that other areas of the business aren't afraid of having. And part of that I get the sense is actually being able to talk about the numbers and not being afraid of a quantitative aspect of business and thinking that design is just going to get by on qualitative insight. I wonder in your conversation with North Northwestern Mutual when you decided to take on that challenge, what were some of the roadblocks that you ran into within the design org or within the wider org in terms of accepting your proud statement that design is business and you were willing to treat it as such?
- Dave Malouf:
- Talking about some roadblocks are still a little sensitive, so I kind of wanna cautious there. I would say, I'll answer the question in a more positive light. I'll say what did we decide to do that started to make a difference? The first thing we decided to do, and it's something that's available on the, we've made available on the design leadership forum that Envision runs their site, has this thing called the unbroken chain of Y that we took it and we made a version of it for the design forum, onsite leadership forum and the TLDR version. There's a lot to it. So I highly recommend you googling it and finding it. We call it the AL on unbroken chain of Y, right? And it's really like saying here's why the business exists, here's why we exist and here's all of the chain in between so that we are driving down and saying we exist because of the business, but we're doing it in a way which is making it very clear that what we're doing connects directly to the business.
- And so that was one of the first things and we started communicating with that about that to everybody. And we used it as one of the ways that we prioritized the work or even chose what work we were going to do if it didn't fit into that chain of why were we doing it. So in essence, we were helping the organization, the enterprise, make better decisions with this tool and we weren't the only ones in the organization to have it. Other parts of the organization used it too. So that was one thing. The other thing I would say is, this is just a general statement. Once you start hitting a certain level of management, you need to open up the spreadsheets you need to make Excel your friends. It was this great thing ages ago sometime in the knots that said, your design tools change this way and you know, start out and you're in Photoshop after effects and blah blah blah.
- And by the time you end it's just 100% PowerPoint in Excel. And those are the only tools you use, maybe Outlook. And that's what it is. You need to live in those tools more once you hit a certain level and you have to give up. And this is the hardest thing of designers cause we got into it because we like pushing pixels, but you have to give up pushing pixels or if you push pixels, the pixels are in PowerPoint and you have to leave the pixel push into the people who you hire who that's their focus. And you have to let you do the work of the spreadsheet and PowerPoint and that's where you build a business. And I'm oversimplifying it, but that was the other big push. We just really lived the numbers. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There really is this practitioner path or the managerial path and I seem to observe that it's around the mid thirties where people either have to decide one way or another. And I somewhat feel sorry for those designers that continue down the practitioner route, not because it's not a valid choice, it's totally is. I feel like it's harder for them to stay relevant than when they were in their mid twenties or early thirties at least in the expression of how they push the pixels around. And I wondered if you'd sort of experienced that in your career or if you'd seen other designers have the sort of crisis of what do I do? I'm not really that comfortable with Excel, but I'm also realizing that I'm not able to keep up with the kids that are coming outta college.
- Dave Malouf:
- Definitely. And I came outta college twice because I graduated from college when I graduated. And that's a whole other story about how I ended up where I was. But when I came out as a professor from being a professor, it was such a hard transition back into industry for me. It was dramatic in that way. I often tell people that I decided to do design ops because I just figured out I just suck at design. And so it was like
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's brave, that's Brave UX, that's what it's all about.
- Dave Malouf:
- Yeah, it's just like I found my place. I love design, I love design and the real powerful decision is how can I add more? How can I bring more value to a design practice as a designer or as a leader, an operational leader as just a general leader, a strategic leader. And I just decided that that's where I can bring more value. The other thing I'd say is that to your caution that you were giving to people who focus on practicing, this is another inconvenient truth in the world of what most of us are designing for mastery of design is actually not that valuable. That there's sort of limited return on the extra value that that is. And it just becomes how much more you need that isn't about managing and leading and directing others and about being pixel perfect. And there are places where the mastery is important. Can't run a funk foundry unless you have masters of typography involved there. That's where that mastery is important. You can't run a data viz organization without people who are masters of data viz. But how many people does an enterprise need that are masters of data viz? And when you think about classic UI design and what we're doing and out in SaaS applications and basic web applications or even mobile applications, the difference from the business between good and absolutely amazing, the value difference there is just not there. And that's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Because I just can't see it. They don't see it.
- Dave Malouf:
- We can't see it as consumers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah.
- Dave Malouf:
- And maybe there's these really off places where there's a Rolls Royce and a Ferrari, are there Rolls Royces in Ferrari of digital design? Are there products or services that require that level of craft, let alone a Mercedes or a bmw, right? What would we equate those two in the worlds of digital design where really the differences that we're thinking about is the difference between Whole Foods, which is in the US the natural market premium natural market where we call it whole paycheck because you're paying premium for the same food but versus your corner neighborhood supermarket. What's really the difference there that you're getting and it's premium experience or some kind of comfort level or something. That's the level of difference that we're talking about. But even that didn't require someone to be a Ferrari, it just doesn't require that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The Ferrari is closer to a work of art as well. Because it's done when it's done when it's manufactured and may dur, you make so many the designs agreed, it's signed off, it doesn't evolve. It evolves through time through different models, but the digital product is never done.
- Dave Malouf:
- And I think even a better example is watches, right than cars even. There's a, used to be a client of mine called Varon Constantine. I was trying to do their American web presence in the early knots and I remember they did a photo shoot for one of the website stuff and they were like, here hold this watch. And I'm like, okay, how much is it? And it was like $500,000 for a watch and at the time I was making 60,000 a year, $60,000 a year or something ridiculously low like that. And it's like that's ridiculous. I'm holding five times my salary in my hand and I ask, what makes this so valuable? And they go, oh, they make three a year, they make and sell. They basically sell it before they make it right? And it's completely different level of crop
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And there's a whole other value conversation we could have have there Farrah, we could go down that rabbit hole B before we go down another rabbit hole. I did wanna come back to design ops with you and I don't wanna necessarily go through a blow by blow of what exactly is design ops, but I do wanna ask you, as someone who's led the thinking in this field, what is the purpose of design ops
- Dave Malouf:
- To amplify the value of the design practice
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And in practice, what does that look like?
- Dave Malouf:
- So again, design has a value proposition that it's trying to create. Everything that a designer does is to create that kind of value, whatever it is you're trying to define that value. But there's so many things that go into the moment of the creation of that value. All that stuff that isn't about the creation of the value, but is about the creation of the moment of the creation of the value that's operations. So anytime a designer is not designing, they're doing operations. So the more that I can limit how much time that a designer is doing operations and increase the amount of time that they're actually spending, designing on amplifying the possibility and hopefully the reality of them creating more value. That's sort of the purpose of design operations to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So given that framing, what's an example of an activity or a design process or an aspect of a design process that shouldn't be operationalized?
- Dave Malouf:
- Shouldn't be,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. What shouldn't you sort of throw in the design ops camp?
- Dave Malouf:
- The actual decisions for what is being done, I'm trying not to use the word pixel, but if you're doing a digital design, the actual work of the decision and the execution of that decision of laying out the UI that is not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So the think the thinking work. The thinking stuff, thinking work, yeah. Yeah.
- Dave Malouf:
- And obviously there's a lot that goes into that thinking work even before you're actually, or maybe before you're actually manipulating the mouse screen. Maybe I'm on my pad and I'm sketching, but the operation of that pad and sketch is the operations person made sure you had the pad you want and the pen you wanted or pencil that make you the best sketcher of the world. And also creating the space where you have the private or a focused moment or the space where you get to collaborate in that moment the way you want to, how you want to based on your thinking style, based on your needs, based on the timing that's required and everything else. I also think operations is about creating focus so that you have the information you need, you have the guidance that you need and as clear a way as possible so that you're not wasting time designing things that you shouldn't be designing. So the more that you can make requirements clear, which a great program manager sort of aligns a team towards is a part of that operations, which then impacts the design as well. And I think to take on more of this sort of where the operations is creating the space where you're getting the feedback loops around that design as part of that operation, creating the culture that allows feedback to be given and taken safely and well is part of that operations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like the design ops, design ops is really about adding efficiency to design while not applying that efficiency to the actual practice or the human aspect of making those decisions that you would consider to be the actual value creation instead of the cost out component of how design drives value.
- Dave Malouf:
- I mean I try to stay away from that word efficiency cause sometimes it gets misinterpreted to mean in speed. So one of the things that an efficiency person would say is if I'm making something more efficient, that mean it happens faster. And so let's say that I have a person make it easy and a single person working on a project and I've learned that there's all these inefficiencies in the way that they design iteration one. And I'm going to go in and I'm going to analyze, I'm going to try and figure out how I can operationalize that. Let's say I figure out that I'm able to increase the amount of time that they spend designing. I have 50%, I double their efficiency so I make them having doubled the amount of time basically. Well as a design operator, it's my job to make sure that that time isn't then shortened for them.
- That's not what I tried to do. I didn't try to change their deadline from two days to one day by making them that much more efficient. Now what I'm trying to do is say, no, no, no, you can be that much better because you can spend that whole two days, that whole two days, that whole days doing designing and not having to do operational bullshit. That's what I've done with the efficiency. And by having more time to do that design, having more time to do the exploration, more time to doing the reflection, more time for doing the job of designing, we hope there's more quality, there's more satisfaction to the end user experience. There's more efficiency and time on task because you've spent that extra time doing that exploration and working and making it that much better. That's the idea there. I'm not trying to take time away. And I think some people think that design ops is just about reducing deadline times and it's actually the opposite. It's about taking the same amount of time but giving that much more quality to the time being used. Cause you're making it more efficient that way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is actually a bit of a battleground that exists in most organizations, which is the camp of the efficiency seekers that try to drive value through cost out and squeezing every person down to doing their tasks as efficiently as possible, which seems to me to be a bit of a race to the bottom. And then there's the other culture that exists in organizations and people that are intent on creating value, providing people with space, enabling them to have better tools and better environments and better time to allocate to the actual value creating activities that out in the marketplace make a company successful. And it seems like this is in your definition of design ops, this is more how you see things in that you might have to work quite hard as a design leader or a design ops leader to protect the design organization from the forces within the broader organization that want to drive efficiencies as in cost out and speed things up, but forsaking that quality and that time.
- Dave Malouf:
- Yeah, I think the reality is, let's say you move it from two days to one day is worth of time. If I'm doing my job really well, I probably save them a half a day. In reality, if someone's going to want to eat, eat some of that efficiency on schedule in some way, shape or form. So you know, also have to deal with the reality of the business at the same time. You can't just be all idealistic all the time,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But you should try as much as you can for as long as you can. Now this is making me think of something else that I came across in the research for today, which was the X that it seems you have to grind with engineering and product, or at least you have in the past. You suggested that they were keeping design down by wanting to fit us into their processes. And the context that you were speaking of was agile in its various applications or bastardization as it would be. Why is it that so many organizations have seemed to grab onto Agile so quickly and so strongly, but still can't seem to get their hands around what the right kit conditions are for an effective design organization?
- Dave Malouf:
- Well I think one part of this is this isn't about engineering necessarily versus design. I think there's some aspect to it there, but I really think it's the business that in most organizations has taken Agile and used it as a reframing for the culture that they want.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what is that culture
- Dave Malouf:
- Is efficiency, optimization, cost cutting, time cutting and control. Here we have time caps here, we have two week sprints and we have scope controls and all these different things. And most of the versions of Agile that I have seen have been not in the best interest of what really Agile is about. And I think a lot of it is about the original language of Agile. When you look at the manifesto, it wasn't as clear as it, it's over 20 years old. The manifesto, most people never really reference it at all anymore, but its language hasn't evolved in that 20 years. And I think [laugh], when I think about design, it's just been all evolution in that 20 year period mainly cuz we haven't had anything written down. I think the worst thing they've done is write it down. It's like it's now static and it's like sacro scent. It was carved into stone in a way
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it was like Moses going up the mountain and returning with the tablets. Yeah,
- Dave Malouf:
- And I think one of the things is I think Lean Startup and what people like Eric Reaser, like the UX version of it that Jeff Goel and Josh Syon have tried to promote as well as many other, which is really learning how can we learn as fast as possible about how can we ship as fast as possible? And I think one of the mistakes in Agile is this notion of working code as the end point of success on any given iteration you have to have working code. And I think that's where it became this engineering value because that's what engineers deliver, engineers deliver code. And then it became this sort of, well, designers aren't making code or are they or should they or whatever. And then that became a whole confusion of what is a designer. And I think for the most part we've taken code out of designers recently and I bought that, but I think we missed the opportunity that Lean Startup was trying to do, which is about learning as quickly as possible.
- And I think that's because the business was not interested in learning. They were interested in delivering. And that to me is has been the problem. And if we talked about learning and all of the different ways that there are to learn, design can actually be a so much more valuable contributor if we opened up how we learn, what does it mean to learn? I can learn in the sketch, I can learn in the exploration, I can learn so many things from the research that we do really quickly. And then somebody said, and somebody, and then people just bought it. Somebody said the biggest myth of all, which is the only way you can learn is the customer working on live code. Working on live product
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In terms of pro, yeah, something's in production. And you can see with scale, the
- Dave Malouf:
- Only way you can is to see the user with the product. That to me was the death mail in a lot of ways because everyone bought that hook line and sinker. And we've been recovering from that for the last 10 years and just
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What an expensive way to learn, incredibly expensive way to learn
- Dave Malouf:
- Incredibly. And somebody also bought the whole notion of refactoring is cheap, is the other myth. And I think both of those are myths and it's not true. So we've learned how many MVPs have stayed the final shipped product. Oh, but they're doing it wrong. Well they're not doing it wrong, they're doing it their way. It doesn't work because you've given them a statement that now they live on. And that statement is shift code is the only way to learn. They're living that they're doing what you told them to do, now you need to tell them something different. If that ship code is not the only way to learn that, there's other things that we could be doing to learn that we had been doing to learn. And one of the thing great things that I've been seeing is the rise, not just of design ops, that's been great to see, but even more important than design ops is the rise of research. I have been seeing UX research, user research, design research, pick your phrase, growing and not just analytics. For a while it was just analytics, but I'm seeing usability and qualitative research growing in so many organizations right now, and I think that's great and I'm so happy we're finally figuring out that you can learn in so many different ways. And there's not only one way to learn, but learning is so important and learning fast is
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Important. And one of the big challenges or tensions that those product managers, some of which are leading the charge for this sort of integration of qualitative insight into the production process and other cases, it's research leaders within organizations that are establishing it. There's often a bit of a challenge around how do you integrate the discovery activities or the learning activities at a cadence that works in with or is complimentary to this delivery mindset that Agile seems to have imparted upon everyone that's bought the promise of what it might deliver. And that is something that you've had to wrestle with in your experience?
- Dave Malouf:
- Oh, totally. All the time. And I think it's, again, it's a false framing because what you're saying is I'm starting with the cadence. I'm not starting with the problem. Shouldn't the cadence change to what it is you're trying to solve or what it is you're trying to learn? And I think when I think about what, one of the things that I feel really proud about in the work that I've done in design op is this idea of a try track model in that there's different types of learning that we need at different parts of the process, whether it's three parts or four or 10 or whatever, it doesn't matter, but you have to do things in different ways at different cases in order your team just needs to be working differently. And sometimes that can be more syncopated, sometimes that can be more regimented and more rhythmic, but different parts of the process require different things.
- And I think Agile is great for production, meaning I'm moving things to delivery. That's where that belongs, is agile in that way, that kind of sprint mindset. And when you think about, well, what kind of design am I doing? Then the design you should be doing then is how do I get the design that I know that I'm doing right? I've already solved the problem, but how do I solve that problem best or as best as I can with my constraint? That's what the delivery track should be focused on from a design perspective. But when you're doing discovery, that should be more like a combine model where you just say, here's the problem we're going to be learning from and we will do this and we'll keep learning and iterating, and at some point we'll be done with that learning module and we'll put it into delivery to move on at that point. And that's going to be on a more syncopated basis or a more ad hoc basis. And then you have foundational things in that third top upper track, which is just constant ongoing questions that you should have as an organization all the time depending on what kinda business you're in that you're always learning about and always studying.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This becomes difficult though, coming back to our conversation about having to treat design as a business and be able to stand behind some of these, I suppose, less tangible research activities that aren't tied to delivery. It becomes more difficult to defend the merits of. How have you had those conversations with other areas of the business to enable that sort of foundational research to continue?
- Dave Malouf:
- Yeah, it is more difficult for sure. The more abstract become the harder it is. I think people in general, everybody has problems with abstraction. We know this is user interface designers. The more you abstract the interface, the harder it is to use it, the more cognitive load it has, it's the same one. We're trying to do anything. It just requires more. It requires more for us to talk about it more for us to demonstrate the value for it. One thing that we were trying to do just at the discovery level, not the foundational level at Northwestern Mutual when we were early in these phases when I was there, was to think about, well, how do we track the success of insight development? I can develop an insight, but how do I know that that insight actually impacted the business? And so we were trying to say that we were going to trying to create a system where we were insight tracking against requirements. How do we know that this insight or how do we know which insights were used at all in development systems so that we can even say that the research used to develop that insight was valuable? So we were trying to connect insight to delivery in some kind of way. We were early on in the phases of that, but that was part of what we were thinking about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You also have said that procurement has been a bit of a challenge in the past when trying to establish the design ops practice. And I constantly have interesting situations with procurement being an external provider of design services where we won't go into those. But I was interested in that and I was curious about in establishing design ops practices where you've experienced the most pushback or just general lack of understanding, where are the aspect, what are the areas of the business that need the most sort of vision painted for them or handholding to actually understand what it is you're trying to achieve? With design ops,
- Dave Malouf:
- A lot of the parts of company that fall under operations, parts of an enterprise that fall under operations, not design ops, just operations procurement being one of them. Operations has had a general history of being a cost control center. And the way that they've done that and the way that they've been sold on, what's the best way to do that is through hyper measurement and not just measuring every penny, but every keystroke that's required to save that penny. So it becomes how many micro units of currency am I saving to just, and what's that led to as a few things. One is it becomes an organization of optimization. It's just pressure all around. And organizations built on optimization really, like you said, is just moving to the bottom right? It's just always going to the lowest income denominator. And that's one area of the problem.
- The other one is it becomes a governance system as opposed to a value creation system. And when the few operational systems that I've been able to work with are able to move out of that and instead of seeing themselves, and this has happened for me at individual levels, but also in organizational levels, but those times where I've been able to work with a partner about creating value for me and my team as opposed to saving money as their primary purpose for being compliance officers as their primary purpose, that's where it's been good. That's where I've had success, but it's also been about me and the way that I've asked for help has led to that relationship. And it's been a learning lesson because you have to poke the system to figure out where you're going to get pushback versus then what you need to work on.
- But I think the thing that's changed for me when I'm working with procurement as an operator, as an operator who needs to partner with them is to partner with them first. I'm going to partner with them and not think about it as partnership is a deun of two-way relationship, but partnership is actually a decision by one party to say, let's work together first. Someone just going first. And the way that I've done that is by going to an organization like Procurement and saying, I have an idea for a tool or a service. Here's the problem that this tool or service is going to be solving for me. I need it by when this is the business value that this tool or service is going to be providing. Help me get there. As opposed to saying, okay, I need this SaaS software. I'm going to ignore all of your rules and just ask for it and expect it to be done.
- And you're definitely going to say no to that for all of the procurement and all of the compliance reasons that you're going to say no to everything that you say no to because I have given you no reason to think that this is something that will provide value to the business. I've just asked for a thing, I didn't ask for a reason, I didn't give them a why to move forward just to make it that simple. Give people a why and they'll be much more accommodating to work with you. Now, that doesn't help you as a vendor because it's the partner who you are working with. So if I was the internal contact, which I would be in your case, we need to develop that so that we can go and pitch that buy together to get through that system. So you rely on someone like me, but if you don't have that person and they're just trying to just use what exists, right, then you're, you're going to get caught in that mess in various
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Points. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, their job by and large is to standardize, to break apart value propositions and understand how to reach an apples to apples comparison. And yep, you, you're right, a hundred percent. If are working as an external, you need to work with your client, make sure that that value proposition's really clear and figure out how to articulate that together to the procurement team. I think, yeah, you made a huge point there. That's really, really valuable and insightful piece of advice. Can great design exist in an organization where the predominant business culture is efficiency seeking?
- Dave Malouf:
- No, but I would also ask, turn that back and say, is great design the necessary solution for an organization like that to be successful? To my point earlier, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's an important question. Where are you going with that?
- Dave Malouf:
- Yeah, exactly. I think that there's a way where great design needs to reframe itself a bit, not we have all these awards for design and you're so connected to the output of what's, of what is there. The best designs are so invisible, not like the classic, the UI is invisible, but they're so invisible because they're just the business. It's just getting business done.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sometimes it feels like our industry is caught. And we touched on this before in a bit of a Groundhog Day moment with itself in terms of the conversations that we have within the industry. And I hear, and I read, and I listen to a lot of podcasts and blogs and everything else that's out there that are saying a lot of the same things. What do we need to sort out right now in this industry as a practice of design and move past so that we can move on to bigger and better things?
- Dave Malouf:
- God, there's so many things to answer that question. It's a few things. One is the outcomes are more important than the outputs. Verbs are more important than the nouns, meaning how we do things is the most important thing. And when it comes to designing in our practice as opposed to what it is that we deliver or in terms of the value that we have. And then the last thing I'd say is people, planet, profit. Those are the three things that we need to be focused on. Not all design has been or is focused on people the way it could be. And we do need to be focused on people, and I don't mean that only from a usability perspective or a user experience perspective, but we need to be focused on people in an ethical perspective.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Both are our employees and also our users.
- Dave Malouf:
- Employees are our users in so many worlds, how many of us designers work in it that we're developing things that are used by employees. But I also think that there's nothing that we can do without our peers either. And that's the other thing, we can't work alone. So it's all about the whole ecosystem of the people and then going to the planet. I think that we've only got one, and despite illusions of colonization and whatnot, counting this solar system, the expanse has shown us what that will look like. But I think that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great show, by the way,
- Dave Malouf:
- I think that we need to realize what we do impacts that in many, many different ways. I know I'm very bad at that personally when I think about it, it's such a mind stretch for me to do that. And then profit, and I don't mean profit in the currency sense, I mean profit in the value sense, you know, can be working for a not-for-profit or working for the government or in any sense, and are we develop creating value for people and are we creating value for all the people that are involved there? And some of those people are going to be related to currency in some way because they're doing it. That's their motivation. That's what value means for them. And that them getting that value gives us value because we gotta eat and have a place to live. And unfortunately, we haven't figured out how to all live in the world of Star Trek yet. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, that's a great place to leave things. And yes, it would be quite exciting if we could live in the world of Star Trek. I'm not sure everyone that's listening would share that perspective, but it isn't rather idealistic society. Dave, this has been such a great conversation. You've given me, and I'm sure the people that are listening today, many interesting and challenging things to think about. Thank you for so generously sharing your insights with us today.
- Dave Malouf:
- Thank you for having me. It's been fun, it's been different. I really appreciate it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome, Dave. If people wanna find out more about you and what it is that you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Dave Malouf:
- Twitter @DaveIxD. I'm also on various Slack communities. It's probably the new email list in the world. It's the Slack community and then LinkedIn computers find me under David Malouf on LinkedIn.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks, Dave. Make sure that we post links to those in the show notes for everybody to everybody that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything, as I've mentioned that we've covered today will be in the show notes, including detailed chapters so you can hop around on YouTube that is to the various parts of the conversation that interest you the most. If you enjoyed the conversation and you want to hear more like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.