Steve Fisher

Episode 36
Brave UX

Content, Complacency & the Courage to Change

In this episode of Brave UX, Steve Fisher opens up about the importance of diversity in technology, the challenges of design leadership, and the role conflict plays in making change.

Highlights include:

How do you ensure diversity at the Design & Content Conference?
Is conflict still the key in achieving positive momentum?
How can new design leaders make a more effective start?
What do you look for when hiring junior designers?
How do you help others to understand the value of design?

August 17, 202101:22:23

Listen on:

Who is Steve Fisher?

Steve is the Head of Product Design at Zipline, a San Francisco-based store operations platform that’s designed to improve the lives of retail workers. He is also the Founder and Producer of the Design & Content Conference. A world-class event that’s been held annually since 2015.

Before joining Zipline, Steve was the Head of Design and Senior Director of Strategic Programs at TELUS, one of the largest telcos in Canada. There, he was responsible for developing design culture and practice, at scale.

A sought-after speaker, Steve has presented at conferences around-the-world like TEDx, SXSW, Future of Web, Web Visions and DrupalCon.

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 Steve Fisher. Steve is the head of product design at Zipline, a San Francisco based store operations platform that's designed to improve the lives of retail workers by giving them the right information at the right time in the right way. Before joining Zipline, Steve was the head of design and senior director of strategic programs at Telus, one of the largest telcos in Canada.
There he was responsible for developing design, culture and practice at scale. To put that challenge of scale in perspective, TEIS as a company of over 45,000 people, but there's much more to Steve than what he does for a day job. He's an incredible design community builder and leader. And his spare time he founded and continues to produce the design and content conference, a world-class event that's been held annually in Vancouver since 2015 and I believe just recently held online as of last week. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Steve has had a broad range of experience working as a freelancer consultant in-house design leader and agency owner. He's seen how designers practice from all the major angles through his most recent agency, the Republic of Quality. He worked with clients such as Microsoft dpl, TEDx and Jared Spools Company u i e, to help to make the web a little more human as sought after speaker. Steve has presented at conferences around the world like TEDx South by Southwest Future of Web Visions and Duple Con described by his peers As someone who brings people together, a unique gem of a leader and a wonderful human, I get the sense we're in for a special conversation today. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Fisher:
Wow, that I don't think I could have introduced myself better than that. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here and be part of the conversation and to share.
Brendan Jarvis:
You are most welcome Steve. It is really, really great to have you here. And I noticed that we have a few things in common actually, when I was preparing for the conversation, one of which is that I understand that your nickname is Fisher. Is that right?
Steve Fisher:
It is right. There's a bit of a story behind that. It maybe seems like an obvious nickname cuz it is my last name. But when I was at Telus, even in my department, so about 450 of us, there were six other Steves or some version of that name and all of us essentially gave up our first name to be [laugh] Fisher, TaNaK, whatever that happened to be. Although as a teenager too, a lot of people would call me that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I was the same. My nickname's Jarvis, which is again, it's not very imaginative and mine came from college where everyone where a boy's only school and everybody seemed to get called by their last name. So there's not any great imagination that's been exercised there. Also, when I was preparing for today, I couldn't help but do a bit of a stalk on Instagram and I saw that you have an affection for RVs and then I also discovered that you have an affection for zombie films and I couldn't help but wonder are those two things connected in any way
Steve Fisher:
Someday? They probably will be and I'll be happy that I have an RV with solar and all of that. You
Brendan Jarvis:
Are good to go.
Steve Fisher:
I'm good to go. I can head out to the mountains in the hills, get us some cold region and be safe from the zombie apocalypse. But no, yeah, I love getting in my RV right now. I've got this 21 foot camper van that's completely go off grid if I want to and I try to spend as much time as I can living and working from that. Now I also have responsibilities back at home and a house and those types of things too. And so I'm not always gone and the last year and a half have made that a little bit more difficult for sure. But I love exploring and it's actually one of the things I love about my current situation at Zipline is that we are a completely distributed company and so we don't have to be anywhere and that's a beautiful part of the work that I do.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what was the motivation originally to get the rv? Why did you decide to make that part of your life?
Steve Fisher:
Yeah, so this isn't the first one. There were trailers and other caravan type things before, but it was really around being able to explore but still being effective and doing the work that I can do. Plus I've got a couple dogs. I wanted my son to be able to come along. He was doing what's called a self-design program, so really learning on his own through early high school days. And so it allowed us to all travel together and to do some of that work and to explore and have a bit of a better balance in life. I also get very restless. I'm not the type of person to sit still very well. And so that helped not just with a wander lust, but to put me in new situations all the time. It was a fun thing to explore to do because I remember a lot of people saying, Hey, this is a bad idea.
It's not going to work out. You're not going to be able to sustain your business. And then when I talked to all my clients, cause I wanted to be open with them about it, they're all like, can you still show up for work? Can you still get our work done? Yeah, great. Go for it. I think we get stuck in our routines around things and the way life is maybe sold to us and there are lots of other possibilities that may or may not work. And this was a one I wanted to try and then very quickly found that I loved. Well, it's hard in that you get to a place, one of my favorite places in the world is the big highway in California camping on there, but there's no cell signal there so it can only stay there so long or you're at another place where you want to go and explore Utah, but you have to still get your work done if you're working and you wrestle with the guilt of not exploring as much as you want to or making sure that you're present for work enough and it becomes this balance.
But once the balance is achieved, it's pretty special. I realize there's a bit of privilege around that too. Not everyone can do that, but was I'm pretty grateful that I've been able to and to share that with some others.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what impact, if any, has that had on your creative practice as a design leader and design practitioner?
Steve Fisher:
That's a good question. I think it's really helped me hone communication, being able to say, this is what I'm up to, this is what I'm doing, here's what you need to know. Here's the documentation behind this because ours may be a little bit different or I may and come into a constraint that I didn't expect. There is no cell signal or there I've lost power [laugh], whatever that happens to be. But also it's thrown me into so many different places just like travel does or visiting another culture where I'm looking at things from different perspectives to say, oh, this is how someone is experiencing this part of life. I didn't think about that because my experience is so narrow and this is all I have to base things off of. And so it's helped to broaden my perspectives. I think that's really good and to really make me focus at times it can be easy, especially right now during a pandemic where a lot of us are working from home. Just say, I'm just going to keep working today. But that's not healthy for anyone. And I've found that when I'm in the RV and things like that because there's things I know I want to see and accomplish. I get really focused on the work that I need to do and when I need to do it. But overall, my day-to-day doesn't change too much and still get up and cook a breakfast, get to work, go for a walk with the dogs, those types of things.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I suppose having the experience running your own agencies as well as being inside of a corporate environment, you're naturally a self-starter. So managing your own time doesn't sound like it's really ever been a problem for you. Before we sort of move off the zombie and RV section of the conversation, I have to ask you, what is your favorite zombie film or series?
Steve Fisher:
Oh my gosh. Well, I don't think it's my favorite, but recently I watched Zombie Land and Zombie Land two, the Double Tap one, and those definitely make me giggle. I love that. I love Sean of the Dead too because of the play off of it. I think the one that it's definitely not the best, but the one that kind of triggered a connection point for me between some of the design work I'm doing and the zombie genre, which of course is a natural thing was warm bodies. It's like it's a zombie romcom but there's this moment in it where in a zombie apocalypse everything is lost. That the world is not going back to what it was. It doesn't matter which movie it is, those people are not recovering in a way that is going to be okay. So the world has changed, which is what we're experiencing right now.
The world has changed and we're forced into this and it's how you retain your humanity through that. That is the story part of the story that I love. And so I'm always trying to make connections between design work and how we can distance ourselves from the people using the things the products we're making, but we're building it for someone to use and to be successful as to work for them. And there's this moment, spoiler, if you haven't seen Warm Bodies where Chris pulls, yeah, [laugh] where the lead in it, which is a zombie sort of a young twenties let's say, or old teens, I'm not sure the age he would be, but looks at this one romantic connection or will become and his heart beats for a second and as the movie progresses because he's learned how to make that connection, other zombies learn how to make that connection and their hearts start to beat.
And there was this moment during that movie where I was like, this is what I do. I help connect people in my case that cross the web or digital products and I really believed in these wholehearted connections that took place for a whole person. And so it's probably one of my favorites in that it flipped things on its head a little bit. I did also really love first season of The Walking Dead though there was a walking going through that for the first time was like, oh, I don't know if I can handle this. I don't know if I can handle this. But I love that experience.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's come back to making connections. You've said that that's something that you love to do and that's clearly evident when you look at what you've done with the design and content conference since 2014. This is, as I mentioned in your intro, the world's leading event in this space and you just finished it last week. Why did you start this on top of everything else that you do?
Steve Fisher:
Well, it's a bit of a story and I think it's a good one. But so I was traveling around to different events and I'm a big believer in sharing the knowledge I have whether I believe I'm the expert or not. I have my perspective and experience just like we all do. And I also really enjoyed travel. And so it was this perfect combination. I was at events think you had mentioned South by Southwest future of Web lots of others. And at one point when I was looking around at events in general that I was part of I began to see, I was like, hey, there's just a lot of people like me here that are speaking and when I say me to be clear, I mean a cis white male in tech, not exclusively. And I'm not picking on any event at all, but that was the landscape that I saw at that time.
And I remember thinking that this something felt off, which is also revealing sort of the level of privilege that I had that it felt off when I was experiencing this travel and talking at events. And I spoke to this one woman at an event that I was at and I just had only been doing it for three, four years and just said, Hey, if you're open to talking about this, I'd love to know what you were able to negotiate for getting paid to speak at this event. And she just turned and looked at me and said, you're getting paid. And it was like this heartbreaking moment probably for both of us. Definitely I would say more impactful for her where we talked through some of that. And I wish I could say that my eyes had been open before that a little bit better, but they weren't.
And so over time, to bring this a little bit shorter, I started to reflect on the events I was part of. And as I recommended people to be go speak at others and say, Hey, I don't need to present at this again, you have this perspective there. I know this other person with a different experience, different background, wherever it happened to the, but at certain events they'd go to, it became almost like a token person or they would've give me feedback afterwards and say, I didn't really feel like I belonged there. And I began to reflect on what a impact I could even have. Was I helpless in this? And what it came down to is I thought rather than recommend people to other events, I wanted to start an event. A friend of mine, Brian Rashon, helped me found the design and content conference in 2014.
Our first one was like 2015. And we had some core tenants around. Everyone gets treated fairly, meaning like attendees come and they get what they expected, that all speakers are paid, all contractors are paid, this is a business, this isn't like a volunteer effort. Some events are that I don't want to pick on things like DrupalCon is a great example, huge open source organization where there's lots of people that volunteer their time to that they believe in it, but that's not what I was putting on and what I was seeing other places. I wanted to be able to run an event that was fair, equitable and diverse and also profitable. And I don't mean gobs of money, that's not what happens there, but that it was sustainable every year I could run this again because we were able to pay everyone. My time was fairly compensated too cuz I can't give it all away.
And that we were able to share what we are learning. And so we founded the design and content conference with a focus in on the intersection of design and content in the digital realm. We've come more and more towards product, digital product over the last few years, but it was more and more towards digital service in the web at the start. And I would say a very, very close second is diversity, equity and inclusion in an event. How can you do that? That is a way of being fair to everyone and to learn and grow each year. Well
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's talk about that. How are you doing that with the design and content conference? How are you ensuring that the people that are there, both the attendees and also the people that are speaking are representative of a more diverse set of views and cultures and identities than you may have experienced at those other conferences you'd attended in the past?
Steve Fisher:
That's a great question and I have kind of, again, a bit of a story around that. When we founded the conference, the people who were primarily were kind of was my friend Brian Marshawn, who I mentioned another white guy in tech, my partner at the time. And she was a cis white woman working in tech. And we were super well-intentioned. We looked to make sure that we had a, and this is sort of revealing where I'm going here, a binary gender split. We had enough women at the event as or not enough. Oh my gosh. We had about the same amount of women and men speaking at the event. We had a well communicated, trained, and enforced code of conduct, meaning that we are trying to create this safe space. And we took it seriously within that. It wasn't just a post on a website, it was something we were ready to work with,
Brendan Jarvis:
Not just the tokenism that someone sort of copy and pasted from somewhere else.
Steve Fisher:
Oh yeah, there's been so many discussions around that and I really do appreciate people that are saying this isn't enough. And that's maybe true, but it's not something to ignore either. And so we worked towards all these things. Our first year it was like we launched it was scrappy, I bootstrapped it all myself and we are almost to the event. And I remember this woman reaching out on Twitter, the interaction has since been removed. But to be fair to her, I'm going to represent this as clearly as I can, and there's a blog post on the conference site about this, but she essentially said, how come you don't have more black and brown people speaking at your event? And I
Brendan Jarvis:
Replied, and that feel, Steve, when you first read that email, take us back to that moment. So you're opening up your own box, you see this email come in, you read that comment. What was that moment like for you?
Steve Fisher:
Well, it was very public. It was Twitter.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay, right. Sorry it was on Twitter
Steve Fisher:
Yet. And I replied, I believe through as English director at the conference, it would've been the conference Twitter account and just said, oh well we have these two people at the event and [laugh], she replied and is like, no, that's not what I'm talking about. That is not good enough. And I said, well, I'd be happy to talk to you about this. So I'm making many classic mistakes here. I'm asking her to do the emotional labor for me. I am all these things. And she just said, no, do better. This is what I'm asking of you. And I'm grateful for the people that were around me at the time cuz how did I feel? I felt defensive initially. I felt like, hey, I've done something good here. You acknowledge that I was not acknowledging her lived experience or what I hadn't done or what I hadn't learned or what I was asking of others.
And I, so I paused. Thankfully I paused. And the other people that were working on the event with me we chatted and they're like, yeah, you know what? She's right. She's right about this. And well, we were able to make a little bit of change in that year. It stuck with me afterwards. And I remember my partner at the time, Shannon, she sent me this article and it was transformative to the work that I do and we do with the event. It was about Shonda Rhimes in her writer's room. So producing shows like Grey's and Anatomy and all that where sure, it's kind of Soap Opry and all that, but the characters are not cliche characters. They have real depth and lived experiences that resonate with their communities. And how she was accomplishing in that wasn't because she was some genius that understood all the communities.
She created a diverse writer's room. So the people writing the content for the show came from different backgrounds, had these really broad conversations about what it's really like to interact with someone to live their lives. And it was just this moment where it just clicked and we're like, we need to have a diverse group that helps us find the voices at the event. And so we started what I call our production team at that time, it's maybe not a super accurate term for the team, but we contracted four to five people depending on the year plus those of us that were already working on the event to really come in and be equal voices to get paid for their time, to bring forward new voices, to help vet speaker applications so that we had people coming from different backgrounds, experiences, ages parts of the industry, not in the industry that could bring those voices forward.
And it really helped us take one of our, maybe it's our second step, but an early step around creating a more diverse and inclusive event in that we saw representation on the stage that wasn't just brought forward from well-intentioned white folk in the industry. Cuz it doesn't matter how much I care, I still don't have that experience and I need people around me and I need to treat them fairly and have them be part of this. So we all had equal voices at the table. There's no veto from Steve. It's like, no, how are we going to bring this together Each year we've done something more and we've tried to, the production team keeps operating at changes year after year. Me giving up MCing the event was another critical thing saying, no, we don't need to see more of me on stage. This is a little bit of irony there.
The that was that on the ego. Yeah, well no, it was good. It was well so that was my call at the start to say, I don't need to be on stage. This is like if people wanna associate the event with me, that's fine. But there have been people attending the event that were rising up in their own careers and I wanted to hear their voices and to have them be the ones to introduce others and to run the q q and A and all of that. And one of the more recent things for us that has helped us with that overall, it's not just representation on stage, not just representation in the audience because they see themselves on stage and not just through our MCs changing and having different experiences. We had another call out that just said, Hey, this is great, you're doing all this, but what are you doing to help people get to the event?
And so about three years ago, maybe it's four now, I'm a little blurry on the dates. We created the DCC fund Design and Content Conference Fund. We're a super plain language event around getting people from racialized groups, people that couldn't otherwise attend the event to be able to come to the event to essentially sponsor them. They can apply to this fund At the time it was a physical event. We covered travel, accommodation, the event costs, those types of things. And we've had different companies and individuals support that over the years and that really helped open up the event even more. But honestly, the thing that's helped us the most and most recently is going virtual. That was a terrible thing for us in some ways. We had to pivot, we had to take care of hotel costs, all these things that were just kind of nightmarish in the middle of dealing with being scared about getting sick in a pandemic.
But last year we were able to send over 80 people to the event cuz we didn't have to send them. We gave them access to the event, we were able to do better with captioning, we were able to accommodate time zones, have everything recorded so it was available the minute the talk was done, you could then watch it. So if you couldn't take time off work, you could still attend parts of the event and participate. And so there's been a lot of efforts, this is a long ramly answer to that, but each year we look for a way to do better. That woman's words at the start were so powerful. And in some ways I of course wish I hadn't been defensive, but acknowledging my real position, my privilege and power was important. It was an important step for me and for the event too.
And since then, really like that wasn't my only point of acknowledging or learning, of course it is happening daily, but was to say, Hey, if I have privilege and power, I should use it for the vulnerable in society. That's what that's for. And so the event has become, the designing content conference has become a way for me to not just prove you can do an event that is fair and sustainable, but you can also have an impact in your world while you're learning and being impacted yourself. It's one of the few places where I've been able to consistently do that. I try to do that everywhere, but honestly it's the thing that I look forward to every year that has that direct impact on me. And I hope the industry and I really hope everyone that touches it.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it's one of those great stories of the power of the internet and how one tweet can help shape the impact that an event like yours can have on so many other people. Have you since connected with that person that sent you the tweet?
Steve Fisher:
No. If I could she wanted to. The tweet is gone unfortunately. And that's fine. She owes me nothing and I ho her a lot and I want to honor that moment too. And not just that moment though, there's so much that goes into an event like this and I think any event organizer that puts on something that cares about it will tell you the same thing. It is definitely some kind of labor of love or whatever you're looking to call it, but it should cost me something. It should be the thing where every year I have to push forward and have a bit of, I don't wanna call it pain cuz I love it, but that level of growth that makes me reflect and say, yeah, I need to take these evaluations from this event and truly learn from them. I need to acknowledge the things that I was unable to do for others, but that maybe I should have too. Whatever that happens to be because I'm still sitting in a pretty good position of privilege.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what has it been since you received that tweet and you started making changes every year to the way in which you increase the diversity and the inclusion of the conference? What's really surprised or delighted or challenged or provoked or stood out for you that has had an impact on either yourself, your team, or the people that attend?
Steve Fisher:
Oh has been a lot of things. I guess it's not a surprise anymore that every year there's something more we can do. That was definitely naive Steve and team at the start. I think the thing that has delighted me the most is seeing some of the impact it does have on people, the relationships and connections that I've made that otherwise I couldn't have. Whether that's from the production team that we work with annually, our MCs, the attendees, the speakers, those are things that I couldn't have had otherwise. And so selfishly there's that, and I don't believe it's design and content conference that is creating change across a conference industry, but it is great to see other events start to do a lot of the same things too. And for us to be able to learn from each other. I made a commitment at the start that anyone who reached out that was putting on event and was going to take it seriously, I would just give my time to them to say, yeah, I'll let you know what we're learning and what we're doing and what we're trying.
No expert in this, just because I was speaking at events didn't mean I knew how to put one on those types of things. But those connections and seeing some change across the industry within conferences in general, those conversations has been deeply impactful for me and humbling too. I run the event, I make sure it happens, but the event happens because of other people and their contributions. No one comes to see Steve at the event. Well, unless they're a friend and we're trying to connect. There's those things, but everyone comes to hear whether it's a new voice, someone they haven't hear, heard before, someone that will share the perspective that they're hoping to see represented or a volunteer that understands their situation and can really connect that way. Or other attendees, they're like, yeah I am struggling with this. And so the things that have stood out to me is the community. I don't know why I wasn't prepared for there to be a community around this, but the connections and the bonds that are made at this brief event every year are astonishing to me. And I do believe it's having an impact on the industry overall in our own small, scrappy Canadian way.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's really positive to hear. Steve. And you touched on just how much energy that you put into it and clearly also your team and also the people that are speaking. But I just wanna come back to you and the amount of time and energy and effort that you're investing in this on top of your day job, you clearly love it, it's clearly challenging you and it's had a big, big impact in your life and the people that attend or and involved. But how do you look after yourself? How do you sustain the energy that's required to put on an event of the scale every year?
Steve Fisher:
Well, if I'm honest, this year I didn't look after myself. It was really hard. I did not promote the event in the same way either. I'm really thrilled with how it came off and how it went. I think that people had a good experience and really proud of the speakers, our MCs and actually my son got involved this year with helping to run some things. But it's a lot of work. It is an omnipresent thing for me once it starts and it usually starts the day after the last event ended. I've learned to give myself a bit more space than that. But I would say from a piece of advice to people that wanna put on an event plan for it to be a business, I've seen other events where they're shocked that they couldn't pay their bills or [laugh] that something that they were expected to follow through with paying speakers, whatever it happened to be.
And this is a business, you need to dedicate the time and resources to it just like you would anything else. And so what I've done in the past is to make sure that I had a good team around me to support me. This year was a little harder that way because all of us have probably had a terrible year. Even those of us that had an okay year, it was still not our best year. And if it was, you're really the outlier, [laugh], no, having a good team around you and willing to give up certain parts that are really important. When I was running the physical event, the in-person event in Vancouver, I love having people visit Vancouver. It's amazing city. You come in the middle of July, it'll be sunny, beautiful, great temperature, all these things. And there's so much to explore whether it's mountains, ocean, city, but I shouldn't be the one making sure that the volunteers are where they need to be.
I need a volunteer coordinator for that. I shouldn't be the one probably MCing if I'm also doing other things. In my first year, I think I was MCing, taking photography, making sure that all the supplies were there. It was just too many things. And so the best thing I can do for myself is to treat it like a business, be fair to whether it's my company or an employer I'm working for, to really set aside time and expectations around that and make sure that that level of energy can be sustained. Because once the event is kicked off, I read every single email that comes through, every single tweet, whether it's my role or not, I still pay attention to all that as a, most founders probably do. And so having those healthy boundaries around role is important. I would say that's been the thing that has helped me the most overall. This past year just sucked. There were so many personal things outside of the event and other things that made it difficult. Pandemic, health, family, all that stuff. But having a great team is important and letting them run with it, trusting them to do it, getting the right people and trusting them.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thank you for sharing that Steve. It's really, I suppose it's an important message for other people to hear. I know just personally that there are a number of people around me that are working big jobs that are struggling with the sort of stress and anxiety of what seems like the weight of the world on their shoulders. And I think it's really important as a community that we're able to talk about these challenges openly and there's no better way of doing that than sharing real stories for real people that have gone through some real things. That's
Steve Fisher:
One more thing with that actually. There is one other thing that helps is I really care. It doesn't create energy, but it creates passion. I think if I went to work at a place I didn't like working at and then went to running an event that I just had to because it was a thing and it was about the money, which it is not, that would be terrible. I wouldn't be able to do that. I burn out immediately I think. But I love my work and I care deeply about this event. Doesn't mean it's always fun or exciting or joyful, but I'm not looking to be happy. I'm looking to be someone that accomplishes things, that does things that matter and it matters. And so that helps as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
And the things that matter aren't always easy or often aren't easy. I think that's a really big point you've made. To sustain that input and energy, it often has to be something that you know really care about. And I wanna wind back the clock a little bit, Steve, take you back to 2004 when you opened your first design agency in a small Canadian town called Lacomb. Now I looked at Lacomb and Wikipedia and found that Lacomb has a population as of 2019 of 13,000 thousand 985 people. So it's not very big. You called the agency Idea Market and I read somewhere that you said that you started it because you just couldn't get hired as a designer full-time in a company. Is that true?
Steve Fisher:
It is true. It is partially situational. But yeah, I was looking to make a bit of a career change at that time. I had been doing freelance work, that type of stuff for a while. Kind of had the good fortune of seeing the web emerge from its beginnings, at least public beginnings. But at that time I applied at a few places. There weren't a lot of places to choose from. I wanted to keep my family in the close to that community too. Dad, I couldn't get a job anywhere. And I remember my dad actually saying, well maybe you should go off on your own and give this a try. I was clueless about that. I resigned at my job, gave them quite a bit of notice cuz they needed it. I started to take on a few contracts here and there. I'm just taking on anything I could at that time.
You wanted a business card, I'd do it. You wanted a PowerPoint presentation, I'd show up. But I was not different than I am now. I was extremely driven and focused in on what can I do for others that will bring value to them. And had a bit of a communications background through university prior to that. But yeah, I couldn't get a job anywhere as a designer in the communities that I wanted to be in. I didn't even bother to apply to places that were too far away. I was not going to commute for an hour and a half for example. And as you pointed out, it was even smaller then. I think it was under 10,000 people a lacomb, just a tiny little town that became a tiny little city, but very rapidly idea market is incidentally enough. I was going to call fish market and my partner told me, nope, do that. Keep thinking, keep thinking
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] good advice.
Steve Fisher:
Didn't good. Very good advice. Very quickly went from just me to a small team and partially because I found loyalty from the people that I was doing work for and I offered that back, but also partnerships in business as well. People that I could partner with and deliver on a better experience for them. It was a real steep learning curve. I remember getting to my first tax year and thinking, oh, how much am I taxes going to be? I was only successful because I was good at the design work I was doing. Not because I was really great at the finance side of business. I'm good at seeing opportunity in taking it. There's that. But I very quickly reached out and found a mentor, eventually a business partner too, and helped grow that over the course of about five years, I think it was before I exited.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I wanted to go into this with you because it seems like you also discovered the benefits of specializing quite early on, which is often something that a lot of agency owners or agencies in general are reluctant to do. They sort of feel like if they walk through that door of specialization that they miss out on a bunch of other opportunities. What was it that drew you to specialize? I believe it was in tourism and government projects so early on in your business career.
Steve Fisher:
Well there's a couple things actually. There's maybe a few things. I don't even remember when it came out or if it was his conversations before that, but there's a concept around when without pitching, Blair ends.
Brendan Jarvis:
He's a fellow Canadian, I believe
Steve Fisher:
He is, he is. And there's this concept around it's very easy to commoditize, design, development, all these different things. You could go to anyone to create a website. Hey you don't even go to someone if you wanted to. Less so those days. But it was definitely a thing. And his concept was basically if you specialize, you become the person or the company, whatever it happens to be, people will pay more for your services or demand it. You don't even have to respond to RFPs that never really translated it idea market. We were still definitely responding to RFPs and all of that, but after the days of saying I'll do anyone's business card at any time, it became obvious to me that the more I learned about something, the more I could offer to a business or an organization and that if I just started to do all the things for all people, I would never get to a level of depth and that's where I wanted to go. I wasn't interested in templated solutions or things like that. I wanted to solve problems for organizations. And so I also had this background, this connection of helping people. Little known fact to me, which you may start to dig into cuz this is an on my LinkedIn, is that I worked as a family and youth pastor for a while. I'm also now an atheist. So there's a bit of a story there,
Brendan Jarvis:
But oh yes, let's tell, let's get into this story.
Steve Fisher:
Okay, well maybe we'll come back to it. But that time helped me to really, I was connecting with families and seeing them in good and terrible situations. And some of the agencies that helped them were government agencies. In fact almost always, sometimes religious, sometimes other things. But government agencies were the ones that a lot of people, at least that part of Canada were going to. And I thought if I'm going to make impact in people's lives and the current work that I have, why don't I do it there? I also saw all these smaller communities struggling to describe themselves. Lacomb has this amazing 130 year old Flatiron building. I think it's the oldest one in the province who cares. [laugh] really nice, but it's one building. And so I wanted to help the communities that were around me too be able to attract business and for people to understand that they could stay home and play hard.
This idea of staycation before it was pandemic was really present in my mind. And government and destination marketing organizations are connected often through funding. And so you think about a region, I very rarely worked with an operator in tourism. It was more like someone coordinating the Canadian badlands or Travel Alberta or those types of things. And over time I moved away from doing the work of saying, this is what it will look like and your experience will be to this is the strategy behind how we'll deliver on this digital service for your constituents or this city or whatever it happened to be. And it became incredibly meaningful work. I think a lot of people look at government work and think, oh no, I have to put in my time or something. I've heard people talk about going to the Canadian digital services or equivalent in other countries and saying, yeah, I'll get paid a little less and put in my time.
Those are actually really great organizations by the way. I am not in any way saying you shouldn't do that. But I found it exciting, I found it meaningful. I found depth that I wasn't finding in other work. And then I also found that the more we specialized got better outta that, the easier it was for us to get more and more work. And it was a successful business strategy that aligned with a bit of wow, like the win without pitching for sure. So it came out of meaning came out of desire, like saying I wanna do this type of work, I wanna have meaning to my work. And then it also came into an advancement for what I was doing personally for the company and a business strategy
Brendan Jarvis:
And a bit of discipline also by the sounds of it, you know were really determined to drill down and to specialize. So you could see the things that you saw happen more than once and be able to connect the dots for your clients to add value, which seems to be a key theme in our conversation today. Something else that might add a bit of value for people that are just beginning their UX journey and listening to the podcast is your perspective on how people entering the industry can most effectively do that. There are a lot of people at the moment that have gone through UX courses at university or boot camps. There are a range of different ways people are trying to get into our industry. And our industry is often talked about as being an industry that's super hot right now, but there's such a chorus of frustration at the entry level almost every major city or around the world that I have some insight into through the community I'm connected to. And I really wanna be able to help in some way, shape or form these people that are super frustrated Right now. When you last hired a junior entry level person in design or in UX, what was it that you were looking for? How can these people really stand out to the people that are hiring for these positions?
Steve Fisher:
That's a great question and I think an important one too. So TELUS is a much better example than that massive scale was in so many interviews and junior or not, I'm looking for how you think we're like how are you thinking about this problem? How are you approaching it? Sure the output matters, but it's more did you understand the outcome you were working towards and what was your process in moving towards that? So being able to demonstrate how you thought about a problem is just as important as being able to demonstrate the end product or result. And your role within the work is important too. That's hard for an interviewer and a hiring manager to pull out. It's like what did you Brendan do on this project? And so thinking about that when you begin to write out your portfolio or a cover letter or whatever it happens to be or thinking about responses to questions is what was your role within this and how did you contribute as a team member?
And the other thing I looked for consistently was what are you learning? Because if you know how to work and how to learn and how to think about problems, I know that you are going to continue to do those types of things or I believe you will, anyone can change. But that was really important to me when looking at juniors, people entering in intermediates, whatever, it doesn't matter that you could demonstrate how you thought about a problem, how you worked on a team and what you were learning. Sure, portfolios do still matter I would say. But those other things were the things that helped people stand out for me that they were thoughtful about their work themselves. And I think the other thing that now this relies a little bit on a good hiring manager I would say, but it's normal and people expect you to be nervous when you're applying for jobs and interviewing.
I like to believe that a lot of people will look past that. It's okay to acknowledge that people are looking for well real people. I wasn't looking for the perfect image of someone. I was like, no, who am I going to work with? Who is this manager over here that you will be working with and these peers? Who are you? And so that mattered a lot to me as looking to hire juniors and people entering into the industry. I would say what didn't matter to me so much was your education. That doesn't mean that education doesn't matter something. But I wasn't hung up on did you go to a good school? Did you achieve the best grades at your school? I would pay attention to that, but I cared far more about how were you going to continue to grow as an individual and what can you demonstrate to me now that will tell me about that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's the key difference between learning and education. You know can have all the grades at the highest level that is possible, but you still could have gone through that and really not have a sound story to tell about what it is that you learned and how you might apply that in a context that's outside of the ivory tower of education. I think those are really important points that you've made Steven. It does sound that you are putting the challenge out there to the people interviewing as much as to the interviewers to actually dig into what that story is. Don't just come and show me the portfolio and tell me about the output. Tell me about the journey. Tell me about what you learned and how that's made you a better practitioner.
Steve Fisher:
Yeah, well I believe the work that we do is really important in how we do it, but how we're going to work with others is important too. Equally as important cuz we're looking to achieve. Unless you're joining a company and you never intend to be part of a team, which you probably will be someday how you work together is really matters. So there's the culture side of it. I don't mean culture as in backgrounds. I mean how does team culture work out and then what are you capable of both from growth and currently? And it is a challenge to people that are interviewing to say, we all have our biases. We go and do this. And one of the things that I believe in hiring is that yeah, sure I'm a part of it if I'm the hiring manager, but I need other perspectives at the table. This kind of gets back to the whole discussion around Shonda Rhimes, the writer's room, the production group. We all have biases. Some of them conscious, some of them are unconscious. And so it's important to have other voices and a consistent process for doing these things. When I do an interview where there was a Telus Zipline anywhere else, it's very similar if not the same questions every time, the same criteria. Our conversations may take us different places, but having the ability to remove as much bias as possible from this or to acknowledge as much too is really important. We're not doing it perfectly for sure, but it's a critical part to all
Brendan Jarvis:
This. Yeah, 100%. Now let's talk about, tell us a little bit more. So before you were head of design, you were director of CX and digital services as well as principal designer. And I found this really interesting because it seems like you had a foot in the camp of both the management track of being a creative leader and also on the tools camp of actually being a practicing designer still. How did you do that? I mean that sounds like a crazy amount of work and two almost related but quite different worlds to live in at the same time.
Steve Fisher:
Yeah, well short answer is it was and it was exciting. I remember, so I was the first principal designer at the department I was in was Telus Digital. If I bring it down to a really succinct thing, we were there to change a hundred year old telco to help digitize what they were doing and provide those services that way. And which of course is a challenge in any organization, but when you're trying to steer or change the course of a ship that is like 50,000 people, it's massive. And so I remember my very [laugh] very first day and I reported to the chief digital officer and he was like, so what do you want to do? And I was like what do you want me to do? There's this awkward moment. He is like, no, you have to define this. You are first in role, these are the things I think you need to do, but there's a lot more to be accomplished here. And so yeah, for sure at the start of it, I was an individual contributor working as a principal designer. Now that is a director level position. So I'm meeting with the other directors in the organization and helping to plan strategy, but I had no one reporting to me. There was a community of practice of about 70 people of designers, content strategists, content managers, researchers, all of that that needed a direction to head in. They were all doing great work at the time, but also maybe not all heading towards the same direction.
Brendan Jarvis:
You had had some cats and
Steve Fisher:
Yes, definitely hurting some cats and figuring out what even that direction should be. What is a north star for a digital department within? It's not really a telco, that's the odd thing about Telus. They're also the largest health provider in the country, the largest agricultural tech provider. They were all these things. And so that was an interesting challenge. And about just a year into that our chief digital officer moved to another company and we had to restructure a little bit. And I think the thing that surprised the department and the people that I was working with was they expected me to be this good team leader, designer, that type of thing. I'm going to set design direction and what they also got. And so I'm not really good at tooting my own horn, but I'm going to a little bit here around, hopefully that's a common phrase. And people understood that. Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
I think so. All I did and you go for it
Steve Fisher:
To platform, okay, was that there were other team building things and leadership and management stuff that I brought to the table too. And so at that point they're like, Hey, we need someone to step into this digital services role around customer experience. And so I moved from being an individual contributor to managing a team of about a team of many of the time, four to five managers and 40 to 50 people and 13 million a budget. And that was again though a related position. It wasn't around saying necessarily this is how we will meet these financial forecasts, those sort of things. Definitely that mattered and I was part of those conversations, but it was around how do we deliver a better customer experience digitally, how do we measure these things, which are really tough questions to answer, especially when your customers could be anyone in a country.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, literally. Yeah, pretty much. How much of a friend did you have to become with the spreadsheet? And if that was something, how comfortable were you with that initially?
Steve Fisher:
I love spreadsheets, so they've always been my friends. I'm as much a content practitioner as I am a design. I've all, this may seem promoting the event, but it came out of a reason. It was like, no, this is what I do, this is what I know, this is what I love. But yeah, no, I had to dig, really rely on my managers too that were working for me and helping to lead their teams is to say, cuz suddenly we have, well suddenly I had all these budgets and timelines and things that had to be delivered on that. There was a lot of structure and accountability to, thankfully we also had a chief of staff and a whole team that was working towards those types of things and giving us new tools. But yeah, lots of time managing people budgets, really making sure that people had understood what they, not trying, what they needed to accomplish and to help them refocus on that. I'd say that was a really big growth time for me though too, cuz I took that role because I realized that I had never worked in the house in enterprise situation. I had consulted to Microsoft and companies like that and they had, but it's
Brendan Jarvis:
Pretty So you walked into that role and you hadn't had any enterprise corporate experience from the inside?
Steve Fisher:
Nope. Not one. And
Brendan Jarvis:
Now that's brave.
Steve Fisher:
I don't think I realized how brave it was until I was there and cuz the first month or so was a fire hose of things. And thankfully I had people that were saying, okay, here's what you need to know. But I remember in my third week presenting to our all team around our targets for what we were trying to achieve in the next quarter and the successes we had had. And I barely knew people's names or processes and things like that too, but I wanted to growth. I wanted to learn something new and that definitely helped me achieve that. It also helped me really understand what I didn't know around.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's what I was going to ask you about actually. I was going to ask you for someone else that might be in this position or coming up to this sort of scenario, what were the things that on reflection that you're like, ah, that would've been good to have done differently?
Steve Fisher:
Well, as a principal designer, there were things that I was doing that those were fine. When I became not an individual contributor, what I should have done at the start, and I did a little bit of this, but what I should have done better was make sure that I understood what rituals we needed to do, what are the regular things that we're going to do as a team that keep us connected to very clearly set the vision, my understanding of the vision of our department, of our chief digital officer to that part of the department, to really dig into those team things first rather than to just go ahead and try to accomplish things. I should have done the non-urgent important things and then moved into the urgent important after that. And so if I were to say, Hey, here's a tip and you're not in this situation before, is make sure if you're leading a team, that they know where they're headed, they know how they'll be measured and they know the parts that you'll connect with on those rituals, those, whether it's team meaning design, review around regular communications some of them are more obvious than others, but all of them matter.
And thankfully we made it through that. I had a really good team of managers that helped me along the way too and other peers that were there. And during that interim period, I was able to really help deliver on some important outcomes. And I do believe in people and I do spend a lot of time making sure that they feel heard, listened to and wherever I can that they have the resources they need to do their work. So one success was that the team itself felt like, yes, we are supported in this way, but the learnings of it were, Hey, I should have got down to some of those other structural things earlier.
Brendan Jarvis:
So something else that is sort of evident in the stories that you've just been telling Steve of going from not having worked in a corporate environment to now war, working at one of the largest companies in Canada leading up a digital and a design aspect of that business is this drift from agency to corporate that design and design teams experiencing and have done so now for perhaps the last decade now, what is it that you believe is driving this change of talent leaving agency and going into these in-house departments?
Steve Fisher:
Well, I think there's a few things, and I don't really know the answer is the other side of this, but there's some pretty interesting work being done in some of these larger companies that an agency doesn't really get access to. You can imagine the sheer data that some of these companies have that you can learn from and actually apply to your design work, your user experience during the start of the pandemic with Telus. Does a company keep selling its products when people are afraid for their lives but you're an essential service and they need your products? Well, we were able to make changes and monitor the data, connect with our customers and see that, oh, if we do this thing, it actually helps these people get what they need in a way that you maybe couldn't do as successfully or as easily as an agency because you'd be on the outside of that.
And so there's a lot of companies that are bringing in-house talent and helping to make that happen. And it's really interesting problems. The other side of it, at least for me, so this is more of a personal anecdote of that, is that I believed in my consulting work with the Republic of Quality, I was helping people, I still think I was. And a lot of the contracts I would do would say, Hey, if you achieve this outcome, maybe not. Maybe we get a bit of a bonus as a result. Or maybe it's our full payment depending on how the company perceives that. And so they're like, oh, so the work you're doing, if it achieves the outcome, we pay your full amount and if it doesn't we get a discount. There's another way of looking at that. But it is really easy as an agency, as a consultant to say, Hey, here's this shiny thing, it will work for you.
We've done this in the past, a bit of hand waving and then you walk away and you are not held responsible or accountable for any of that afterwards. And for me that became a bit of an empty feeling to say, I don't even know if it did accomplish the outcome. I believe I did good work or we did good work depending on the situation. And so there's a sense of can I continue to push the needle forward and see that happening? There's also a lot of just uncertainty even before the pandemic, it was like, are we going to get enough work? What is going to happen here? These other companies, the more the momentum shifted to larger companies buying agencies or bringing it in house or whatever it happened to be, the less meaningful some of the, unless you specialized the agency work became. And so those are the things that I was seeing the trends behind it.
It's definitely not always about patho, but sometimes it's about the type of work that you can do and what you could accomplish there. That's what it was for me. It was the type of work I could do and what I could accomplish in seeing the long term of it. It's actually the same for me at Zipline right now. Very different company. No, we've gone from, can't remember, I was like 30 something to hundred something in the last nine months. Lots of growth that's difficult and all of that. But we're moving towards this common outcome together where it's this new challenge for some of us, but there's a real sense of, hey, we're here to see this product, product through. We're not here to do one neat thing. Sorry, that probably sounds really negative. I don't mean that about agencies. Some of them do that. Yeah, some of 'em are shallow for sure, just like any company could be. But there's a different sense to can this product be successful long term versus can I help this product do this one thing for three, four months and then move on? I take greater satisfaction in the latter, I would say, but have enjoyed both.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like they've shifted for you over time and it's now the sort of the scale, the complexity, the longevity of the problems that you're trying to solve are more enticing on the enterprise or in this case fast growing startup side of things for you as to where you are in your career right now, often are trade-offs though aren't there from going from one side of the fence to the other side of the fence. And one of those frustrations or those trade-offs that I often hear from people that have moved that way into enterprise is that there are often entrenched ways of working. There are silos, there are difficulties with enabling cross-functional collaboration, which seems to be the CRA catch cry of the modern age. What methods or experiences did you have when you entered enterprise and how did you find it worked best to enable that collaboration to happen?
Steve Fisher:
Well, very quickly at the start I spent a lot of time reaching out to not just my peers but the people that were doing the work to really understand what is the work that you're doing. I think it's so tempting to come in and just start to work to accomplish those outcomes, but your first outcome is really to understand that's the thing that you're trying to achieve. And in enterprise, for me for sure, it was new. So there was a bit of a struggle around that too just because of the sheer volume of information. But to see what those connections are and how they're working to understand and to hear people, it's no different than doing some good user research and sitting down and say, oh, you run the security part of our department. What are you doing? What are your goals for this quarter? What are your goals for the year? How are you laddering up to our chief digital officer, you know, are building this product? You are doing this go to market for internet solutions. It doesn't really matter what it was. It was understanding why you're trying to achieve those things and how you're going about it. And
Brendan Jarvis:
That were people quite surprised when you'd come to them and you'd, you'd be inquiring at that level about what they were doing and why?
Steve Fisher:
Mostly, no, I would say I think that's a key to enterprise and anyone that gets to be sort of successful in management director or a really good individual contributor is making connections. I saw it as basically half of my role to understand what was going on and to have those connections so that the community of practice, those designers, researchers, content strategists, whatever role they were in, could know that I was at the table with our agency of record, that I was connected with marketing. Not all those connections were super successful. You're totally right. There are silos that are, feel like they're made of some sort of titanium that's impossible to pierce [laugh] and those are entrenched and they're going to require more work and more time and other partnerships and may never be successful. There's just some reality to that. There's no perfect picture, but it's still the same type of work.
It's understanding what are people trying to accomplish, why are they trying to accomplish it? A little bit of does it align even with our company goals? Because for some people they're motivated by their careers, others are motivated by data, others are motivated by their team. And if I don't understand those motivations and those connection points and what we're trying to accomplish, I can't have influence. That was the really unique part for me about being a director at TELUS but having no reports at all for the first year was that every bit of influence I had either came from a chief digital officer or the relationships that I had built. Being able to demonstrate data, all those things matter. But what it really comes down to it is that this director understands why this matters to their department, to their role and their outcomes that they need to achieve for the company. If I can't demonstrate that there's nothing, there's no reason for them to really move forward with the stuff that I'm presenting. And there were
Brendan Jarvis:
Confidence.
Steve Fisher:
It definitely undermines the confidence. And there were times too where I would, I definitely pitch ideas and they're like, that's stupid. I'm more, I thought about it, I was like, yeah, that is stupid.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you also developed a thick skin.
Steve Fisher:
Well, I would say that's the other side of enterprise work. Maybe any work if you're a designer in any way at all or anyone that enters into critique, you just have to be able to take the critique too. Hopefully people are delivering it in a respectful manner where it is productive. But enterprise is about a lot of breaking down silos, a lot of relationships. But it's also can be about achieving some pretty large things too. Those things just may be really hard to get to and take longer.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now I also am recalling a talk that you gave, which I believe was before you started an enterprise, which was called conflict is the key. And maybe you can see where this is going here, but I'm curious because in that talk you said that you are never looking for compromise in these situations. You are looking for agreement and that was, I believe a sort of an approach you took when you had the benefit of being the impartial independent expertise in the room. You didn't necessarily have to live with the people that you are trying to form an agreement with day in, day out. And how, if you reflect on that conflict being the key prior to enterprise experience, how has that shifted, if that shifted at all for you having now had that experience?
Steve Fisher:
The fundamentals of it haven't shifted for me. And what I meant by agreement, I helped define that during that is that it's not like the hug it out. We're not like we're like, oh, this feels so good. Thank you for this
Brendan Jarvis:
Go team.
Steve Fisher:
It's like, no, I understand the business outcome, the organizational outcome, whatever that happens to be that we need to achieve. And yes, this will help us achieve that. Really bringing it to a very low level is that if in a designer view someone says, I don't like green. And we're like, yes, but we're trying to get accessible colors that communicate success. Oh, okay, yeah, it doesn't matter that I don't like green that thing achieves that. And so that's the level of agreement they're looking for. Cuz I always saw, and I still do that there's certain levels of compromise. Not the compromise is bad, but if you aren't actually getting to something they can solve and provide the outcome that's intended or needed for a customer, a user, a person, a business goal, well you've failed. There was no point in doing this. Why are we bother building this thing?
Yeah, why we talking? Why are we building this thing? Let's just move on and do the other thing then. And so there's that side of it. I would say that it was a lot harder than I expected being in-house and enterprise to get to that point. Because as a consultant, you're brought in, you are the expert, they hired you for a reason, that's the whole win without pitching thing. But when you're in house, you have to constantly prove that your ideas have merit value and will deliver on whatever that outcome is. And even though you may be the expert, it doesn't mean that you'll always be seen that way. And so the underlying river of conflict that I talk about in that presentation is just around the unspoken things. The things where we leave a meeting and say, yeah, sure, I'll do that. And then you do something different afterwards.
And so I would constantly be mining whether I was in-house at Tellis anywhere before, wait, you said this thing, can we confirm that this is what you meant? Because before we were talking about this thing here and this is very different. Or just being a good facilitator in a workshop or a workplace and then seeing that no someone's holding back, they're not even sharing and making sure that we have clear communication documentation around what we decided why and what it's going to achieve. I think it's really easy for designers to try to create the best experience and forget that they're trying to create the best experience for people and for a business outcome, those two things are not mutually exclusive. They should actually be somehow tied together. If this business is meant for this purpose, it should achieve that. And if you're trying to take it to a purpose that's different than that, and if you feel bad about that, maybe go somewhere else it's not an easy thing to do. So I'm not trying to be glib about it or anything, but it also might mean that you're trying to do the thing that isn't right for the people using your product service or design. So business goals are so critical for designers to understand
Brendan Jarvis:
And we are touching on challenges around alignment here as well, getting clear on what the outcome is. And when you're at Telus, you were in charge of designing the design culture and the practice at scale, and we talked about there being 50,000 people in the broader organization. What were some of the ways or the plays or the methods that you found were most effective to help people to understand what it meant to design customer-centered experiences and to really understand the value that design was trying to bring to the organization?
Steve Fisher:
Well, a lot of that was work that other people were doing that I was just highlighting or had been done or that we were continuing to advance. I think one of the most successful things was the TELUS design system, that it was this codified design system that was a living, breathing representation of our standards, but also developers, other people in the organization, contractors, vendors could grab and use. It was an easy thing to point towards to say, Hey, we have this 9 billion brand as Telus, here's how we're using it in our digital services and our digital products, those types of things. So from a practical, being able to point to something and for people understanding that that was key. Another part of it though was again relational. Making sure that when marketing directors, anyone working with the brand was getting together that either myself or someone else that was my proxy, was there to be part of those conversations to represent the digital side of things because there's just so much work happening at any given time.
I think one of the most inspiring and difficult moments though was we knew that we needed to bring a different service, kind of like an product offering to the market. We had a limited amount of time and it was really difficult because there's these deep systems that we have technical systems, they're not easy to change. We've bought companies, we've created things and we brought together, basically you can think about our IT services, marketing, the digital side of things, like different parts of the company. And we kicked them off at this workshop and I think there was 40 of us. And that was really limiting the amount of people in the workshop. And by the end of it, we had a clear direction and understanding of what we were going to try to accomplish over the next five to six months to deliver this major new thing.
And what that really highlighted was just how important communication and those cross collaborative times and working groups matter. Cuz no one of us could have achieved that on our own. No department, no individual, nothing wouldn't even matter if our c E O had just said, this is how it is and it couldn't have happened. And so that was another moment to point back to and to take those success stories and say, Hey, this wasn't perfect, but look what we accomplished. We're able to lead the market in this. We delivered quality in the amount of time that we had, our customers were able to purchase and get the service that we talked about. And even though that at times, I remember there being real concerned about other competitors launching first that this happens in any industry. You catch wind of something, you're nervous about that, but we remain focused on the quality and collaboration of it that if a customer goes to access this, it will work. Now that's actually a principle of carried forward into Zipline that one of our design principles around make it work, then make it awesome. That doesn't mean they're exclusive. I still want it to be awesome, but if it doesn't work for a customer, again, why are we even doing this? This was a pointless exercise. So that collaboration across departments really important.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I picking up here, not just in this conversation but in others that I've had that in enterprise, it also seems to be a mark of good leadership to know when to apply synchronous communication and when you can just rely on asynchronous communication and email, just being really purposeful and knowing when to bring people together on which problems is a really important thing to be able to do. You also, Steve, you talked about the customer a lot there, and we talk about customers a lot in design users, whatever your sort of languages you wanna put around the people that are experiencing what it is that we create as designers, but often there's a lot of abstraction that exists around who these people are there. There's tons and tons of data, just people referring to the customers if they know every single person that they serve can be lumped under one umbrella term. What did you do to make the customer real to the organization? How did you achieve that?
Steve Fisher:
Well, again, it wasn't really just me. Some of the early things that were maybe a little bit shallow was to change language. There was a lot of dehumanizing, our customers talking about them as users of the system or this segmented group and all that. And I was like, no, these are the people of Canada. These are our customers. This is who we're working for, who we're in service of. Without them we fail. And so changing the language around that mattered. And I think it helped to gather a bit of attention. There are other people doing work on how we engage with our customers from customer surveys and things like that that maybe are sometimes annoying, I gotta admit, but are also really important. We would spend time, and this was part of what the digital practice was doing and different people at different levels doing this, but where all our customer comments that were coming in, we were able to go in and see nothing. So any personal information was stripped. I don't want to sound like it's creepy any that, but someone's saying, Hey, this is not working for me. This is amazing by the way. It's hardly ever someone shares this is amazing. It's usually this.
Brendan Jarvis:
We do like to complain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steve Fisher:
Well, and we knew that. And so you're, your scores that come outta that are different. But making sure that we had that connection to the voice of customer. I do believe that data and what we're observing, especially in the scale of something like telecommunications company, is really, really important. We can actually see how people are using something and gain some understanding, but there's a different weight to qualitative as well. And so one of the positions and things that are brought into the company is we had a researcher that was doing primarily just usability testing us. Sorry, I shouldn't say just usability testing is so important. We get so much information from it, but we also need those generative moments, those conversations that bring us a different kind of insight. And so that was happening in different parts of the organization for sure, some market research, all of that.
But we didn't really have it consistently and Telus Digital to work towards bringing that in to help balance also that part of the voice of customer. But there were lots of people in the organization, data scientists, other directors that really, everyone really did care about the voice of the customer. What does our customer need? Because they saw it as success to the business too. That sounds maybe cold and maybe business is cold, I don't know. But changing the language around it, making sure that there's a balance between qualitative and quantitative where possible really helped with that. And also helping designers understand that a lot of them are testing their own things and sometimes you need to, if you're a sole designer, you are probably testing your own things or you're hiring someone if you can afford to do that to a contract. But when you're a team of 70 people, you should not be testing your own things
Brendan Jarvis:
Someone and why is someone else that? Why shouldn't you be testing your own things? And as a designer?
Steve Fisher:
So I think people are capable of doing it. It's not that we can't, but you bring in bias to it. You bring the thing, the knowledge that you have of working on this thing, you're listening differently. Whereas if you even bring in another designer, so maybe it's not a researcher and they are testing your things, they're questions, their ability to stay relatively unbiased is different and they'll gain different insights and pass it on in a way that you could not on your own. And so working with our lead researcher on helping to get some of those practices in place I believe made a difference and helped us not do UX theater where you're saying you care about your users, but you're not actually doing that work. That said, I really do believe that in different ways, a lot of the people, maybe most of them at tells digital department I was in, really did care about how our customers are interacting. Sometimes we're just almost handcuffed by the enterprise itself though. The time we have to achieve something, the business outcomes, the systems that we can't change quickly, it's difficult. That's the downside of enterprise.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's definitely a reality check for people that may go into it with still a bit of idealism as to how designers applied. I think people have to be able to reconcile that about against the practicalities of these large entrenched and established organizations and just focus on what they can change and make as much positive difference and their sphere of influences as they are able to. Steve, thinking about where we currently are as a community in design and UX and products more broadly, and all the things that you've seen in the industry in your career so far, the good, the bad, and the ugly, what is your greatest hope for the community over the coming years?
Steve Fisher:
That's a big question. My greatest hope I'll, I'll probably do the typical thing and say one of my hopes is that we can be a lot more inclusive and broader in who we are and who we look to as our experts and our voices. I do see some change in that. I don't see enough, I don't think, one of the things I love about working at Zipline is I'm working with retail companies primarily, not exclusively, but that is the core of what we're providing. This ability for a centralized company to communicate through various levels and get reporting back to have engagement, all these different things. But retail is maybe the most diverse industry out there and underserved. You think about all these people that are making minimum wage in some of their jobs and having to deal with difficult situations at times and really complex work.
It's not like it's simple as selling a t-shirt a lot that's going on behind the scenes and business outcomes and customer management, sales goals communications, compliance, [inaudible] like what happened during Covid, like it's just all these things, but the work that I'm doing and whom I'm doing work with and who I'm doing it for is incredibly diverse and it's easy to look at it and say, oh yeah, well, this is retail, whatever. What if the company, the team saves someone 30 minutes of time today at their job and they have 30 minutes more time with their kid, or 30 minutes less anxiety or whatever that happens to be. I would hope that as we do our work, we find ways to not just think about being more inclusive, but to be that, to spend time on our recruiting, to spend time and really put in the effort to say, it's not about filling a quota.
It's about saying, have I actually done the work to make it safe for someone to apply for this job? Is my interview process fair and equitable? Those are the types of things as an industry, and I'm not sure if this is the answer you're looking for or not but that I hope changes and grows for us because our services, our products are designed. All that will be much, much better for so many more people. I'm not going to, well, maybe I'm going to pick on Facebook a little bit, which is easy. It's sort of like the lob, this went over because I don't work there and I haven't had to deal with their issues and all that, but there has been so many times where it's clear that some of the work that they're doing hasn't considered that. Maybe they're trying to make up for it now. I don't know. I'm not going to dive into that, but if I could have something that's changed is that people feel safe included in our products and services, because we have been thoughtful and diligent in the work that we've been doing leading up to creating teams, hiring all that in our work, not just the research and the design itself, but the things that lead up to having designers on our teams.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really important point and a great place for us to wrap things up today. Steve, what a great conversation. Thank you for all the stories that you've shared and your insights and your experiences. You've certainly given me, and I'm sure the people listening today, a lot to think about and a lot to reflect on how we can make our work more impactful, more representative of the people we seek to serve. So it's been a huge pleasure and thank you for coming on the show and sharing those perspectives.
Steve Fisher:
Yeah, I love being here. Thanks for inviting me, Brendan. Happy to be part of the conversation.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, you're most welcome. And Steve, if people wanna find out more about you and the design and content conference, what's the best way for them to do that?
Steve Fisher:
What's really easy with design and content, you go to content.design. That's the URL for it. You can find all the information there. We just wrapped but you can see all the talks from 2020. We release them every year sort of year afterwards, and then some of them trickle out. If you're looking for me though, I'm just, hello Fisher. Pretty much everywhere you find me on Twitter, Facebook, wherever. I do really like to connect. Sometimes I'm pretty busy, so it may take me a little bit, but I still like Twitter to say it being a dumpster fire sometimes. So you can reach out to me there @HelloFisher?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go and check out Twitter feed. There is an interesting conversation there with Airbnb, I believe [laugh] that's been going on. Leave that one there. Shall we [laugh]? Yes. Thanks Steve. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including the links that Steve's just talked about, plus any of the resources that we've talked about. If you enjoy the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product management, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, keep being brave.

Steve Fisher

Content, Complacency & the Courage to Change

Subscribe

Who is Steve Fisher?

Transcript