Uday Gajendar
Increasing Your Influence and Impact as a Designer
In this episode of Brave UX, Uday Gajendar dives deep into what it takes for enterprise design leaders to thrive, and calls on all designers to amplify human virtues through their work.
Highlights include:
- How is designing a political act?
- What is meta design and why does it matter?
- How can agile and design coexist to the benefit of all?
- Why do people want to kill your ideas and how to protect them?
- What are the three levels of design craft you need to master?
Who is Uday Gajendar?
Uday is a UX Architect at Automation Anywhere, a San Jose, California based company that develops world-leading robotic process automation software.
Across his 20 year career, Uday has wrestled with design challenges in enterprise, startup, and agency contexts, including for well-known companies such as Adobe, Frog Design, Facebook, Netflix, LinkedIn, PayPal and Cisco.
Uday is a regular speaker at popular conferences and events, such as SXSW, UX Australia, and IxDA Interaction. He has also taught interaction design at San Jose State and served as a Stanford d.school executive coach.
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 Uday Gajendar. Uday is a UX architect at Automation Anywhere, a San Jose, California based company that develops world-leading robotic process automation software. At Automation Anywhere. Uday is responsible for creating a cohesive user experience across the whole product, family, and working with leaders of other disciplines to shape a progressive design culture.
- Across his 20 year career, Uday has wrestled with design challenges in enterprise startup and agency context, including for well-known companies such as Adobe Frog Design, Facebook, Netflix, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Cisco, an active contributor to the global design community. Uday is currently the enterprise UX community, co-curator and previous conference curator and an advisor and instructor at Women's Startup Lab. He's also been a regular speaker at popular conferences and events such as South by Southwest UX Australia and the X D's Interaction Conference. On top of all this, Uday has taught interaction design at San Jose State and served as a Stanford D School executive coach. He's also been a guest lecturer at Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, and California College of the Arts, a seasoned design practitioner, design leader, and deep design thinker. Be prepared to be challenged as we explore design, leadership, and the future of product design. Uday, welcome to the show.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Thank you, Brendan. It's great to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here. And I noticed when I was researching for the conversation today, Uday, that you consider yourself an artist at heart, and I got the sense from looking through your website that you're never far from your sketchpad. Where does your love from sketching come from?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh, that goes all the way back. I think when I was a child I always enjoyed just drawing and sketching, particularly toys. I collected Transformers and GI Joes, and I love just positioning them and then just tried drawing them, literally just trying to emulate their poses and so forth. And that's where it all kind of got started. And then it kind of evolved into comic book drawing. Once I got discovered comic books on Kenny X-Men, and I realized, oh wow, you can actually get paid to do this. And it kind of became a little bit of a dream of mine. Still a dream. One day I'll become a comic book artist. Who knows?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have you still got your collection of GI Joe's and Transformers?
- Uday Gajendar:
- I recently came upon them, rediscovered them when I was helping my parents kind of clean out our storages closet. And lo and behold, we found the boxes with some transformers. Wasn't all of them. I'm not sure what happened to all of them. And some of the GI Joes and I actually did kind of set them up and post them around, took some photos posted on Facebook. That was a fun little nostalgic moment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, very cool, very cool. Were you tempted at all to have a look on eBay and see how much any of them may have been worth now?
- Uday Gajendar:
- I was tempted to, but I didn't actually quite do that instead actually, because part of that cleanout we discovered or rediscovered my old collection of comic books and it was a big box and I had to find out how much those were worth. Sadly not too much. I was hoping for a little bit more value, but it was nice to see, to have them rediscovered.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, especially considering they were quite important in terms of how you got started in the creative arts. And I understand that when you left high school, you went to study at the University of Texas at Austin, and I couldn't help, but That's right. Yeah. I couldn't help but notice that you studied, I believe it was engineering and fine arts, but you didn't complete, and I was curious, what's the story with your first foray into university education there?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Sure, yeah, it's a fun story. So when I left high school and I'm looking at different colleges, trying to figure out what I wanna do next and so forth, I really wasn't sure. And at the time, kind of the good thing to do if you're a good Indian American is to go into a field around computer science, engineering and so forth. And so I did receive a scholarship or got a scholarship from UT Austin, specifically through the College of Engineering, and I was looking at the majors and I saw civil engineering, and it caught my eye if only because I thought, wow, this could be really fascinating to explore what it means to build massive things like I guess bridges and airports and highways and all kinds of things like that. And so I thought, okay, that can be kind of interesting. It was technically within, I believe, the architectural engineering program or college at that time.
- And so I thought, okay, architecture, engineering, building, some interesting confluence of activities there. And I guess the sketching and drawing can somehow play a part in that too, as well as my pension for mathematics and engineering. But I quickly realized that civil engineering just wasn't right for me. There was an introductory class I had to take Intro to civil engineering, and I'll never forget the, basically it was concrete that hit me hard, [laugh], quite metaphorically and literally, because you gotta understand the materials of concrete and wood and steel and so forth. And I remember reading the book and trying to process this and understand it, and it just wasn't connecting with me. I had a really hard time just developing, I guess the gestalt of what that means, and I barely got a c I think on the final exam, something like that. I struggled really hard, really mightily with that subject.
- And we had some projects and I really had a tough time with that. And so around that time, a friend of mine, very good friend of mine, we grew up together. He had actually gone out to Stanford and he was majoring in, I think, biology or something like that. But he had mentioned there was a product design program at Stanford, which is a blend of art and engineering. At least that's how it was framed at that time. And that piqued my interest. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I wonder if I can look into that. And so I actually came across the Rhode Island School of Design summer program in industrial design or product design. So I'm thinking, oh, maybe I should try this out. It's like a nine week summer course and see where it takes me. At least do the exploration and try it out.
- I was also eager and excited to try a different part of the country. I've never been to the northeast the United States before, so I had to convince my parents to shell out, I think it was like 4,000 bucks or something like that, plus travel room and board and all these things. A little bit of a hard sell. The question that comes back, especially from kind of first generation immigrant parents is so, what kind of job are you going to get? Are you going to be successful? Are you going to be able to take care of yourself? And so forth. And I was able to find some data around that at the time, labor statistics statistics kind of stuff around industrial design and people who hire them. And so I think reluctantly allowed me to go there. And so I did the program for that summer.
- I fell in love with design. I knew that's what I wanted to do. It was the perfect blend of yes, kind of the mechanical engineering side, as well as the artistic side of sketching and creativity and manifesting something that you can put in people's hands and bringing all those pieces together from psychology and art and engineering and so forth. So I just had to pursue this further. So I went back to UT Austin for my sophomore year, changed my major knowing that at that time, I think it's different now, but at that time, UT did not have a design program per se, in product or industrial design. So I knew I had to transfer to another college or university to pursue a degree. So I'm already thinking strategically, how do I make that happen? Okay, first step, change my major, define art. Not exactly the [laugh], the proudest moment probably for my parents. I don't know.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's go into that actually, cuz you mentioned that earlier. Yeah. That there was this expectation that being, I think you used the term being a good Indian American, that you would go and pursue a career like you had set off when you first studied at UT Austin. What are those sort of pressures like to live with and where do they come from and why are they so strong?
- Uday Gajendar:
- It's interesting. I think part of it comes from, and again, I have to speak from the Indian American experience. I cannot speak for any others, other cultural identities and ancestries, but certainly for being an Indian American in the South, [laugh] in Louisiana which is where I was born and raised as part of a small kind of collective or a community of Indian Americans, most of whom were affiliated with the local universities at the time Louisiana Tech and Grambling State. There was a sense of doing the right thing or the good thing, which was either you major in, you know, go be a doctor, lawyer, business person or engineer, computer science or engineering. And those are the fields that are known to lead to a sense of being successful and still a sense of pride, I think, within the family. And that I think from a parental perspective, they made the arduous journey to come to the states, get settled in a very different kind of environment, in a very different context,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Possibly not as accepting as other areas in the US as well.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Sure. I mean, let's face it, look, north Louisiana was certainly an area which I remember my father was telling me about incidents of both racism, prejudice. He came to the US in 19 69, 70, I wanna say. And yeah, he told me how he went to a, I think it was like a restaurant or diner. He had to sit in a different part or use a different bathroom, that kind of thing. As recent as 69, 70, it's astonishing. And so I think that's part of the thinking, the philosophy and mindset to, okay, we'll settle here. Here's a good job. He's a tenured professor and so forth. Many of them were, but we wanna make sure we're doing this so that our children can go off and become more successful and go someplace else and can get really established and settled and develop their families and so forth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's incredibly high expectations. You're living with the sort of weight of, we've made this whole move from our home country to give you this life in America and you shall make good on it.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think there was quite a bit of externalized pressure and discipline to do that. I know that for pretty much all of us again, the Indian American kids who are in that community in north central Louisiana, we powered through elementary school and junior high and high school, taking all the kind of top level classes, a level classes and advanced placement and so forth, trying to get the scholarships and move on to other places, [laugh], other colleges and so forth. I took a slightly different path to go to ut, not quite finish engineering, now switch to fine arts cause I wanna pursue something called design. It was kind of high risk, high intensity high tension, but being able to transition to a good school, university of Michigan in Ann Arbor, that I think reignited the sense of pride in my parents. I'm going to a good place pursuing a program that actually is or can be successful in terms of your own career.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you went on to move on from University of Michigan to get a master's of interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, which that's right. I also understand is a very highly regarded university in the us. How have your parents reacted to your career decision as it's played out? Have they come around?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh yes, absolutely. Okay. Yes. Oh, for sure. If only because when I went to Carnegie Mellon, again, that's another kind, it's a nice big check mark again for kind of Indian pride and so forth. Going to a very good school that's highly reputable, well established, known for very strong credentials, again in all the main areas, engineering, business and so forth. So that was very good. But then also when I was wrapping up my second year, so it was a two year master's program. In the middle kinda that summer between the two years, I was able to get an internship at Oracle in California. And so Oracle, Silicon Valley High Tech, another big check market pride and opportunity and so forth. And so I think that's when my parents realized, oh, okay, this is good. This is working itself out. The Oracle actually funded my thesis project. I was one of two recipients of effectively kind of like a, oh, what do you call it? Well, I'll say scholarship, that's not quite the right word. They gave 10 grand to two people based on the thesis proposal and so forth. And then I landed a full-time job at Oracle upon graduation. And so yes, my parents are very happy and excited and glad that everything worked itself out
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And happy.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Am I happy right now or at that time
- Brendan Jarvis:
- With how things have worked out?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh yeah, quite a bit. I mean, it's not what I originally imagined for sure. I can say quite honestly, at the time, so this was going back to 99, 2000, so 2001, I officially graduated. So this was after the big hoopla around the dot coms and startups and so forth. Also various UX agencies. This was the time of science and Buyin and Sapien and the Allion and cp, and they all rind and so forth. Razorfish, there was an expectation to go to one of those companies. For me and a few of us in the program, we were thinking aspirationally like ideo, Sony Phillips, they were kind of the leaders of hardware, hardware, software, integration, and maybe pursuing something that's in the realm of networking, technology, internet of things. Of course, we didn't call it that back then. So in a sense, I may have been disappointed that I did not end up in those places per se. Yet at the same time, I have to acknowledge that I took a road less traveled. And despite the twist and turns along the way, things have worked out quite favorably. And I'm still quite almost astonished [laugh], I've been doing this for so long in a variety of companies I never would've dreamed or imagined even existed. And I would be working there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's been 20 years. If we fast forward to present day, I mean, you started work I think at Oracle in 2001 as you just mentioned. And
- Uday Gajendar:
- Right,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Recently, you've just shared your top 20 insights from this two decades in the field that you've now had. And it was quite clear when I was researching and also listening to you then, that you definitely have walked to the beat of your own drum as the saying goes [laugh]. Yeah. Is this something that you've always gravitated to or something that you've become more comfortable with this sort of experimentation, this willingness to take risks, but being able to obviously achieve some great outcomes in the process?
- Uday Gajendar:
- For sure. And I think this kind of connects back to the opening statement around an artist at heart. And I think the central premise of that is being willing to try new things take a creative approach, being a little bit daring, but it's iconoclastic, whatever, but doing so with an intent of let's explore, let's see where it takes us, how does this kind of benefit and improve me, and where does this take us in terms of the overall industry and profession? I think one thing I've become very comfortable in terms of being in my own shoes about is the contributions I am making for the profession and industry at large, and making sure I sustain and continue that kind of feedback loop through the writings, the presentations and so forth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I get the sense that you're a bit of a provocateur when it comes to that conversation that you want to have with the profession and the field, and more broadly the whole sort of product ecosystem and the people that are making product. And it's something that struck me when I was reading through your 20 insights was that none of them seem to relate specifically to the craft aspect of design. They all were about relationships with others, which is what I gather is what has enabled you to have the impact that you've had. The one that stood out the most to me though, was number eight, which was designing as a political act. Yes. How is designing a political act?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, so there's some context to that. A little bit of a backstory, way back at Carnegie Mellon, I studied under Professor Richard Buchanan, Dick Buchanan, he was the head of the design program at that time. He is now, I believe at Case Western Reserve leading a new kind of design management program. And so we all had to take his introductory seminar, grad seminar, and he made the point that design is a political activity. And we're all like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? And what he meant by, and what I mean by it is that when you are designing, and if you talk about design from the perspective of Herb Simon which is that designing is the turning existing situations and do preferred situations to do so, you are in effect, yes, you're creating change whereby certain stakeholders, participants may not feel invested in that change and they feel invested in the current conditions and situations they want to preserve and persist that.
- And in that sense, it becomes the politics of the different agendas and motivations and how do you make sure that what you're striving towards can still maximize the benefit and gain for everybody. Dick Buchanan, he also mentioned to me was way back in an email. I was having some correspondence with him when I had just left C M U and joined Oracle, and this was my first full-time job. I'm looking around, wow, this is really fascinating, all the stakeholders and arguments and discussions going on. And he said something to me in an email about the subtle maneuvering of ideas and how you maneuver those ideas through an organization and through different people in relationships. And that in effect is politics. And that always stuck with me. And it connects back to what does it mean to, for design to be a political activity in that regard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And politics isn't a game that one can play with oneself obviously involves, as you mentioned, other actors, other stakeholders, people in different departments. Yes. Even people within your own department sometimes yes. Can get in the way or enable change depending on how effective you've been at managing those relationships. What are some of the ways that you have found effective in, I suppose, first identifying allies and or potential allies and then developing those relationships to enable that agenda to take hold?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, for sure. Let me start by going back to a share a brief anecdote. Again, going back to Oracle just a few weeks after I first started one of the managers who was kind of a mentor for me just kind of called me into his office just to check in and see how I'm doing and so forth. And he asked me, so how are things going? I'm like, yeah, everything's fine. I'm kind of cruising along with my projects and I think I'm doing the right things. Producing some wire frames and flow diagrams and stuff like that, your standard kind of artifacts. And then he asked me, so what do you want? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that question. So it was just so generic. I just said, I don't know, I guess I want good design to happen, something really nice and cool to ship.
- And he said, no, what you want is influence. I'm like the I word influence. And it brought home to me the artifacts I'm making on really just laboring over these artifacts, spending hundreds of hours or whatever it is. They mean nothing unless they serve some kind of well influential maneuvering that you're trying to accomplish. You know, gotta build a relationship with somebody and you gotta help influence somebody's point of view and get them around to seeing what are the real problem or challenges. And so I did a couple things. So one, I printed out this massive diagram this information architecture analysis thing, pinpointed all these problem areas, it was seven feet long. I printed it out and took it out to this executive review. The expectation of that review was to look at some screens, not a whole IA architecture kind of diagram, but only to look at some screens.
- So I presented the screens, but then I also said, Hey, look, there are big problems with the overall product kind of architecture. And it just made this massive impression upon that executive at the time and how reframe the project goal and timeline. And I thought, oh wow. So through the power of the artifact, I can actually help influence and shift opinions and get certain things happening a certain way. There's another thing which I only developed later. So that's through the power of the artifact. If you don't have the artifact and you're trying to get someone aligned before the project even starts, how do you do that? And I realize it's quite simple. Literally just talk to that person one-on-one, go out for a beer or coffee or whatever it is. Usually outside the confines of the office, I found that the office itself can be constraining and well, I know in pandemic times is a little bit different with Zoom and so forth, but basically have that one-on-one conversation and you tee off, tee up that conversation by asking the question, what do you need for me to be successful? How can I help you? Right. Question become successful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great question.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, that catches folks off guard. I gotta say, I don't know if it's because they've never been asked that question before, which is quite telling in itself, or just haven't heard that question from a designer. Usually there's that kind of, I think it's still there 20 years later, that expectation that the designer makes the mockups based upon the requirements from somebody else versus a strategic partnership of how can we continuously discover and understand this problem space and figure out what the right solutions are. So that was a very long winded answer, but
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That was a great answer. I mean, it's two great stories there and there's a lot of value in just applying those insights from those stories back to people's careers. And it sounds almost too easy to be true that mm-hmm. Just by spending some time with people, taking a genuine interest in what they're trying to achieve can actually help absolutely unlock doors for you professionally and also do what the organization needs to do in a better way. We're not just there to build our own fems, we're actually there to help everybody achieve. So continuing on this theme of politics, it would be crazy for us, I suppose, to suggest that things always go to plan and that everybody always buys the ideas that we want them to. You've noted that everybody wants to slay your ideas, and I think you did contextualize that in the sense that they're not always doing it out of malice, but it doesn't sound like very much fun. Why do people want to kill your ideas?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Ideas are fragile. This is something Johnny I himself had spoken about in one of his, those videos for the iPhone reveals and so forth, but it's really true. Ideas are fragile. They have to be nurtured and protected. There is, I think, I don't wanna say fear as a strong word, maybe a little bit anxiety, nervousness, when ideas are shown in front of people and concerned that this could impact something somebody else is invested in, or they've already made some decisions that went a different way and they're like, oh, great, now we gotta revisit this again. So I think maybe the issue, I think there's also, this is more from an ego perspective to get your digs in, get your kicks in or whatever it is when you see an idea and then you that feeling like, okay, we're going to throw some slings and arrows at it, bulletproof it and see how smart I am. Haha. If they're a supervisor or boss is in that meeting, well there you go, right? Cause they're trying to show off and stuff like that. I think there are lots of little things that are happening that are going on, but the key thing here is how to preserve and nurture and develop the ideas to a point where now it becomes suitable to, okay, now we're going to bulletproof it or test it or whatever, to the right level, to the right degree.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. And how much of that bulletproofing of the idea actually takes place before the presentation? And I mean by that, how much of it has to do with what we were talking about just before, about using influence to get alignment on the objective, and also to give people some idea of what it is that they might be seeing before you sort of turn up there and you go, tida, here it is.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah. Well, the key thing is first of all, that we bring stakeholders in through the whole process and they witness the messy ideas being born so that there is no tida at the end. It's actually, oh, this is how it's evolved and nurtured and developed along the way. And maybe we took a few pivots or shifts, maybe a U-turn here and there but making sure they were part of that process, or at least had visibility into it and some understanding of the rationale. I also learned many years ago when stakeholders are giving feedback and so forth, there is sometimes a conflation of understanding the idea versus agreeing with the idea. And so I first wanna make sure everyone in the room, do we understand the idea? Do we understand the premise of it, the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish? Okay, next. Do we agree with it? Oh, we disagree. Okay, now let's talk about the disagreement. And so I often try to make sure we have in a sense two parallel conversations around that, or just kind of set it up so that they're separated because the reaction to something, a negative reaction or adverse reaction may be more around just misunderstanding what the idea is about in the first place. And the problem is trying to solve.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important that you have separated those two layers. I can see how that could be hugely valuable. I mean, if you're disagreeing about the fundamental concept, it's a completely different discussion about aside from disagreeing, about the execution of what a solution might be.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Exactly. Exactly. I get it mean within software development cycles, it's very easy and almost feels natural to jump to the execution because we've got urgent timelines, sorry, urgent, I'm doing the air quote signal around urgent. And so everything or a lot of things start to become qualified through that lens of executional timeframes and so forth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I wanna come to execution, and in particular, I want to come with too agile in its relationship with design. But before we do that, I want to touch on something that you just said before, which was that the stakeholders had been involved in the process and they've seen that we've made a few pivots, they've seen the mess on the cutting room floor, so to speak. So they know that we've considered multiple potentials for our solution or whatever it is, our idea that we're presenting. And it's not the first thing that we thought of. Design's often a challenging area for people to work in ego wise, because it is a creative act within a business context. So unlike fine arts where you can sort of work with cart blanche, albeit you might be a little hungry from time to time and design, we've gotta deal with other people as we've been speaking about. How do you know from your own experience as a designer, how do you know whether you are holding on to an idea too tightly?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, that's a great question. Honestly, I think that's something I still kind of wrestle with, and that's that artistic spirit or vibe within me. I think it comes back to what are you feeling, your emotional kind of vibe or the signals and being cognizant of them as you are receiving feedback from others. And if you're starting to realize, hey, maybe I'm getting a little too personally wrapped up in this thing,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So hot, it's getting hot in here.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, right, exactly. That beat of sweat starts to trickle down. [laugh] like, yeah, I'm really getting anxious or excited about something. It's interesting. I think there are times when you wanna hold onto something. I don't know if it's because of a personal sense of the preciousness of the idea, or is it because you believe it hasn't been brought to fruition yet, which connects back to the whole thing about the fragility of ideas. You wanna kind of hold it and nurture it and cultivate it, and then at a certain point now we can kind of rip it apart and break it down and so forth. And it's just trying to figure out what's that right time, which can be a tricky balance. Part of it is just practical, right? Okay, we've got a timeline, we've gotta hit this deadline and so forth. We've got certain constraints. Your boss or whoever is kind of demanding certain maybe a certain direction or a certain kind of output by a certain time. And that kind of drives things in such a way that, okay, I'm just going to have to let this go, or we gotta make a pivot here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I'm not going to let that go. So let's talk about timelines and pressure. And I think I touched on it before, agile and its relationship with design. It's often I get the sense not a healthy relationship, there's a focus extreme on extreme delivery that Agile has brought to the way in which we produce products and that has impact how we design products. And you seem to agree, I've got a quote here from you now, which was design and agile or fundamentally at odds with each other and that trying to make them fit into each other isn't the point. So my question is, if that isn't the point, what is the point? How can they coexist to the benefit of all concerned?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah. Yeah. And I still stand by that. I mean, look, I think the point is really more about how do we create the conditions where the design, good design that we're striving to accomplish and deliver and put in the hands of people, how can we create the conditions for that to happen and break away from the labels of is it agile, is it scrum, is it waterfall? Are you doing lean, et cetera, et cetera. What are those conditions? Because maybe the conditions are we have to create maybe multidisciplinary disciplinary pod, we have to create a skunkworks unit. Maybe we had to create something else, but how do we create the conditions where we are learning about our users? We're feeding that into the design and development process. We're constantly iterating and prototyping and gathering feedback and using that to drive what gets built. And that's really the point I think at the end of the day, what it's about, what is driving, what is being built in shipped? Is it an artificial schedule and deadline? [laugh]?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like you've had some firsthand experience with those.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh yes, indeed. Well, when I hear the timelines, I always wonder, where's that coming from? Okay, we gotta ship it by end of q2. Why? What is driving the decision to say end of q2? Why not end of q3? Why to end of q4? Is it because we have a huge customer that's willing to pay 10 million bucks and so we really gotta get out there? I just wanna understand the rationale. And then is there flexibility around that rationale? Could we maybe chunk it up a bit into different phases and so forth? So just having visibility into that and then some kind of, well, it goes back to the conversation. Can we have that influential conversation around improving that schedule? Because by improving the schedule, it actually would and will improve everyone else's effectiveness at delivering the right thing the way it should be done. And this is including engineers, software developers, the best ones I know, they're craftsmen, beautifully elegantly crafted code leads to beautiful execution. And they're the ones who are already thinking in a systems point of view, modularity and so forth rather than hastily cobbling something up that could have downstream effects.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well the business seems to really have grasped onto Agile, though I can see why it's attractive. Oh sure. You have discreet units of time, you've got defined outputs from those discreet units of time. It allows some feeling of control over where things are going and how they're being made. But the Agile manifesto itself was specific to software development. Do you feel that it's been applied too broadly and perhaps to areas where it was never intended?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you read the original manifesto, which I've done, I mean they do talk about people and customers and users and so forth. The whole point of it was a reaction against very long timelines. The waterfall kind of approach where they were handing off to different teams and so forth over long stretches of time. And there was not an ability to respond quickly enough to changing customer requirements. That's what it's about. How do you iterate quickly because the customer requirements are changing? It is not about continuous learning, and discovery is not about creating a product or service that serves customer needs. It's about tweaking and optimizing the executional method. And so that, I think that still stands. So when you think about how it's being applied now, and let's face it, I mean pretty much every company I've bid been at, it's not really true agile. I mean, you either do some of the ceremonies, it's being applied in slightly different forms and fashions suiting their needs into whatever they can do or want to do. There's always going to be some variations of it. The question is, are we being driven by the methodology of agile or are we be being driven by, we want to produce the right design that will help solve our customer's problems. Those are two very different questions and I think they lead to two different answers, which then collide with each other.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about something that I get. The sense is come out of a collision that you've been having in your career, which is this talk that you gave recently at IX d A this year, which is titled The Rise of Meta Design as Starter Playbook. Now, in that talk, you suggested that we might currently be trapped in UX design as it's currently practice. And a lot of that practices influenced by what is the most popular mode of the day, which is agile. What inspired you to conceive of this notion of meta design and what change are you really seeking to make by putting this out there in the community?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, for sure. Thank you for asking me about this. This is something that's become a recent passion of mine. Although the seeds for this notion of meta design for me were kind of planted and begun, I wanna say in 2015. So this was when I had just switched over from one startup to another startup, and then I kind of transitioned into consulting for myself. But I just remember at that time very much deeply in the throes of a heavily regimented, agile driven kind of culture and process, which was not benefiting the quality of the design that were striving for. And it had really awful effects, or the way to put it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you say quality, what do you mean? With the quality of the design? What is it that you're getting at there?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, multiple levels. One, it's just visual quality, just literally the alignment of the pixels and the colors and fonts and so forth. But also a sense of integrity, the information architecture, the interaction models and so forth, all coming together in a very cohesive way. So it feels well made and well crafted cuz when you touch something and use something that is of quality, that is this, it's almost like a connectedness of all the pieces. We all just harmonize with each other versus something that was kind of piecemeal. Certain pieces aren't working because one team worked on that feature, another team worked on a different feature and there's no sense of modularity. And so now they're all over the place anyway. So yeah, that's what I mean by quality. But going back to the question around meta design and what do I hope to accomplish? So it was written in the throes of that kind of situation where I felt quality was being impacted and had awful impacts on the team.
- The team was suffering, burned out, frustrated, and not feeling truly appreciated just kind of grinding out the stuff without recognizing the harmful impact on their own kind of work-life balance and so forth. And just being contributing members of a broader team and the company. So I realized, yeah, maybe it's not about designing the thing we have to design the processes and services and systems around the thing, which goes back to the people and culture and organization. And then I realized, yeah, you're designing design. Is this the right way to design? Maybe there's another way to do it. And that's when I started to realize this is starting to get into some dangerous areas
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Going back, I was going to say, this sounds like Pandora's box to me. Open it, see where we go.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Exactly. Our designers, philosophers are designers in a sense, therapists who are facilitating and enabling cross-functional dialogues, which could open up its own Pandora's box of all kinds of tensions within an organization who are designers, what are they really, what is their purpose? But I feel, and I believe by asking these dangerous questions, it will lead us hopefully to a better place [laugh] where we are feeling a little bit more positive and just have a stronger relationship amongst ourselves and with our cross-functional peers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And in that talk, you said that it feels like we're simply shipping to ship and service of high velocity goals. And I really like the segment of the talk because you also suggested that we've had a great run at improving design efficiency and the utility of what it is that we do, but it's come at the expense of the poetics of the experience.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Has there always been a tension between the sort of efficiency seeking mechanistic aspects of mm-hmm the business of design and the humanistic and expression driven aspects of design as a craft?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh, for sure. Always. I always go back to the famous Eames diagram in which he has this kind of overlapping segments, all these kind of dynamic, they're not quite circles or kind of blobs the ideas that they're all very dynamic representing different points of view different stakeholders different competing interests. Again, going back to the political activity aspect of design, but also recognizing, yes, there's going to be this kind of balancing act between the mechanistic and the humanistic that's always going to be there. It's a question of how do you create something that is a harmony of the two where they feel like they're connecting with each other and it's not overly mechanistic and overly about utility and efficiency and likewise, not overly poetic either. And kind of, yeah, a little too romantic, a little too beautiful. I don't know [laugh], what that would mean.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not useful enough.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, not useful enough. Exactly. Right. It's done purely for the romance of it. So that's always going to be intention. I do believe we have over rotated on utility and efficiency sake, partly through agile, partly through design systems. There's almost like an over glorification of design systems. So we may be over dialing on that. And once systems are in place, what's next? Does other thing become kind of sterile? Is there an opportunity? Would there be an opportunity to inflect a little bit more poetry, elegance, quality and so forth of a slightly different dimension than what has been systematized?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think the design systems undoubtedly have been great in some ways for establishing patterns that don't need to be reinvented every time you come to do a particular piece of design. And I don't think there's any argument against that, but I do hear what you're saying there with them being overly relied upon. And I think the danger with them seems to be that they're almost treated as a project and they become an effect, almost like company policy, which becomes very difficult to evolve and change if it's not set up in the spirit of that evolution and experimentation that we've been talking about.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yes, exactly. I've been involved with design systems, both my current company as well as previous ones, and I try to advocate for the notion of a living system. The design system is not frozen and rigid and brittle. It has to be living and dynamic. There are places maybe you have to be a little bit more firm and it's gotta be rigid or strong. But on the whole, again, as conditions change, customers are evolving, users are evolving, their needs and use cases are changing, evolving, the devices the user are changing. We have to maintain that flexibility. And there are times for refresh, the brand has evolved, things of that nature of change. So if we think of it as a living system, I think that offers a very powerful kind of reframing of what a system is. And now we're start talking about ecosystems and biomimicry and biology and all these other things, which I think are quite fascinating metaphors.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And well, let's come back to this notion of design existing in a broader system. And if we are going to push further than where we currently find ourselves with craft, that we need to tap into some of those other aspects of what design or design leadership might be. Now something that I found particularly refreshing in the talk that you gave and how you articulated this was you've broke down design into three different aspects. You had the trade craft, which is what we've been talking about with design systems, the actual application of design, the expression of design, the UX and the UI of design. But you also mentioned a second, which was stagecraft and a third, which was statecraft. And there's a bit of a theme flowing through our conversation around influence, but I just wondered if you wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about each of those and why it's important to look at design as a whole in this way that you've articulated
- Uday Gajendar:
- For sure, those three levels of craft. I mean, for me, it's a way of thinking about the different pieces and activities that are involved in designing. And I think it gives a little bit more nuance and understanding of how we apply our craft. Obviously trade craft is what we all know and talk about and think about the craft of making whether it's artifacts like a flow diagram or wire frames and so forth, prototypes. But we also want to think about what is the purpose of that trade craft? Well, a lot of it is we make in order to understand and interpret like a set of requirements, translating it from a hundred page document into a prototype right now, we can have a richer conversation about our intent and the benefits for the users. Then there's another level of craft I call it stage craft. And what I realized for myself, and as I observe other designers and the teens I've worked on or worked with, we're staging workshops all the time, collaborative kind of efforts.
- You set up a war room, these kinds of stagings of events and situations and moments with cross-functional peers, and you'll get something out of it. But that may not be the purpose. Maybe the purpose is around the conversation. We need to get these five stakeholders talking to each other because they never talk to each other or the right hand, left hand kind of a problem. So in a sense, we are setting that up. It is performative, admittedly, but there is theater [laugh] a theatrical quality to it. And as long as it enabled dialogues to happen, that's a good thing. And then it's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Also leadership as well, isn't it? I mean, it's something that we're doing in the act of trying to change and alter the status quo as part of our political activity. We're actually, as you said, setting the stage for change to happen.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yes, exactly. And that's why you have multiple levels of craft in order to exude or demonstrate that leadership capacity, which then takes us to the third level of craft state craft. And this is around, yes, the politics, influence management relationship building, all that kind of stuff. And going back to what I've said previously, it is through the relationships that the designs can happen and hopefully the output and quality can be achieved through that. Well, relationship building, partnership building especially with an eye towards a strategic connection between yourself, your team, and those cross-functional peers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You know, spoke about them as levels, and I couldn't help but think also as we were talking about some of the softer skills that may be required to achieve in particular state craft at the level that is useful for furthering design, that there may be some correlation between the levels of design craft and the seniority of the design practitioner or leader. Is there, or are these skills that anybody at any level or any number of years of experience and design can actually learn and apply?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, the way I think of it is it's almost like proportionality over the course of your career. So maybe in the beginning of your career, proportionally you're doing a lot of trade craft, you're cranking out lots of stuff, maybe you're participating in some workshops, you may not set them up, but you may participate in them. And you're probably not doing a lot of state craft just because you're not having as much visibility. But then the proportions start to shift as you evolve in your career path. Let's say if you're moving from, let's say, an associate designer towards becoming a lead, a principal, an architect where the rotation or the sort of proportionality, it's a little bit higher now on the statecraft end of things, and a little less so on the trade craft. So that's kind of how I see it. And you're going to reach a place where maybe you'll hitting all three equal levels depending on your role and the company and so forth. So that's kind of how I see it. But ideally, you should be touching all of them at some point in some way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just reminds me of what you told me earlier in the conversation about your first job at Oracle and how your manager pulled you aside, told you that what you actually wanted was influence, and then you went to that meeting not long after with the seven footprint out of the architecture. That's right. You presented after the screens. Yeah. Now, to me, that sounds like you were exercising some statecraft with a healthy dose of naivety as to what the impact of that might have been.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Oh, for sure. I had no idea what I was doing. It was very high risk. It was quite a gamble on my part, but luckily things kind of worked out. So I have done other situations where I actually printed out a whole set of screens. I just kind of mock up a bunch of crazy ideas, printed out a big poster, clear up next to my cubicle, and that was not well received, but my supervisor at the time. So you gotta know when to kind of flex that capability, that skill.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. It's all good, as I said, talking about best case scenario, but are there, other than what you've just said, are there any situations that you've experienced where you've been burned from trying to exercise state craft in a way that wasn't well received?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, for sure. Mainly because I did not prepare enough on my own or prepare the people who were involved. I remember back at Citrix, I forget the actual topic of the workshop. We were trying to drive some kind of workshop thing, and I just went ahead and kind of emailed a bunch of people and tried to set everything up. And there was quite a bit of pushback and resistance to that effort. And it just never happened. It just never materialized. I don't think I suffered any harm from it but it was a little bit of a bummer especially since I did reach out to some fairly high level people in the organization. And then, I'm just trying to think even more recently. Well, this is only because we shifted into the pan pandemic mode. So everything went to Zoom. And so we originally were trying to do a workshop in person, and suddenly we have to shift to a whole new mode.
- And that was a bumpy start, at least trying to get [laugh] some stakeholders who, again, not aligned, different KPIs, different kind of motivators and all that kind of stuff. So I didn't really have enough time to do that. Hey, let's get coffee, let's chat before I set up this big workshop for everybody. Because the point of that workshop, by the time you're there, everyone should already have a little bit of an inkling of what's about to happen and feel pretty good about what we're going to do. And this one got actually, things worked out somehow miraculously, but it took a little bit of some bumpy twist and turns along the way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, so it sounds like what you're saying is it's equally as important in designed to design the conditions for that stagecraft. Yes. Or statecraft as it is to actually be on stage and act out that role. Yeah. I actually wonder how much of an impact this whole move to remote will have or is having in your experience on people's ability to exercise influence and organizations where otherwise they would've been in close physical proximity to one another?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, it's tough because now you have to think about how do you relay your, it's your energy. I mean, it's your vibe through different channels and through remote and so forth. It all comes back to conversations, visibility, transparency, active listening, being authentic, the kind of trite things we hear in this kind of management training and stuff like that. But it really matters because at the end of the day, you have to figure out how you can convey a sense of trustworthiness. And I would almost really say humility that again, you are there to drive a benefit for the team or the company for the customer, and just try to, A lot of repetition. By the way, I've noticed that someone had mentioned to me a long time ago, maybe this is from a book or something, when you are tired of repeating something over and over again, tired of saying it, that's when the other side is just beginning to listen and hear it because you have to repeat again and again and again, which goes back to evangelism and so forth. You have to do it over and over
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Again. It's interesting, you talk about repetition. I mean, that's one of the old sayings in advertising that it's seven exposures to a piece of communication before someone takes an action. And often we think that if we say things once or twice to people, that they should just get it. And I think the thing with just having words is words open to misinterpretation, where we were talking earlier in this conversation about the role of design artifacts and one of designers superpowers is the ability to create something visually, you know, do that through your sketchbook at a very basically level, and actually put that in front of somebody and have a conversation about a third thing, a third space. I know Teresa Torres is quite big also on this notion of visualizing thinking in order to actually reach alignment. And I hear another, a range of other people are as well. Speaking of sketching things out, Uday, you sketched out a four part playbook for meta Ton in the talk that we've been speaking about and encouraged designers to think about what they do differently. What are those four areas of the playbook for meta design?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Yeah, so those areas, and they do have this kind of intersection amongst them. I mean, it comes back to a few basic things. So with strategic way of thinking, kind of strategic foresight, you wanna look ahead to the interconnection of processes, opportunities, activities, and how they all relate to each other. And keeping that in your mind. It is very much systems thinking in a sense, at same time, you know, wanna be provocative and bold and kind of risky with your ideas. Really kind of push the envelope, help folks get comfortable with being uncomfortable and get out of those comfort zones. Let's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Go into that one. How do you yourself get comfortable with getting other people uncomfortable? Because I know there are a lot of people, probably the vast majority of us are not friends with conflict. We would do almost anything to avoid conflict or at least the risk or perceived risk of conflict. How have you become more comfortable being the sort of design activist?
- Uday Gajendar:
- Sure. That's a great question. I don't like conflict either, but I do, I guess debating challenging, provoking around the ideas and the possibilities, the potential. And when I hear no I wanna understand, so what's really going on here? What's the risk? What's the trade off? What's the fear, the anxiety? And let, let's kind of navigate around that. And then basically close with, let's just try it out. Let's see, what's the worst thing that can happen, right? And often it turns out the worst thing really isn't that bad or likely to happen. So yeah, why don't we take a few days and explore this idea and see what comes of it. And so just continuing onto the other pieces of that playbook. So reflection in action, this is really important I think, for designers to really kind of, and this is going back to Donald shown and reflective practitioner as you are making, creating, making workshops, having relationships and so forth, we're setting them up.
- What's the impact here upon yourself, upon a team the company and so forth? What are the consequences of those actions? And will this lead to career growth for yourself? Will it lead to habits of excellence for others and so forth? That kind of reflecting. And then the last one give it that fancy phrase, that intellectual humanism. I mean, this is my way of getting into the whole is a designer or philosopher and asking those kind of dangerous questions, getting away from the tech tech talk, jargon kind of stuff. But really kind of getting at a deeper, more nuanced level of understanding why are we doing this? What is this purpose? Who is benefiting? And can we kind of approach things with a sense of genuine, really human curiosity? And I think when you do that, it shifts how we approach the work that we do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's pick up and close on that notion of intellectual humanism. I get the sense that you feel that that's something that has been lacking from design lately. If you could get a message out to all of the designers on the planet, what would you want them to know and do
- Uday Gajendar:
- That? That's a good one. So I think the message is, remember that as designers, we speaking collectively for everyone. We bear actually a tremendous responsibility in terms of creating something that can amplify really human virtue and the virtues being good, honest, authentic, trustworthy, just and so forth. We have the fortune and the privilege of making apps, products, services, systems and so forth. We wanna make sure that whatever we are making is imbued with a real sense of human character and dignity, more so in certain areas. Medical, for example, healthcare, financial services. But this is true for everywhere because at the end of the day, people are using what we make and we wanna make sure that they feel good about it and maybe reflect a little bit of human virtue in terms of what they're interacting with.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's an important message and a great place for us to leave things today. Uday, what a great conversation. We've certainly covered a lot of ground. It's been very challenging. At least it has for me. It's made me think about a lot of things differently. Sure. And I really wanna say thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with us today.
- Uday Gajendar:
- Absolutely. Thank you Brandon. It's been a real pleasure and thank you so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are most welcome. Uday. If people wanna find out more about you and the things that you're up to, your writings, your presentations, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Uday Gajendar:
- So I've got links over on Medium. I had a collection called The Designer Speakeasy. These are essays pulled from ACM interactions that I've written as well as various other writings. That's probably the best place going to Medium. I do have my own website www.udanium.com, which also has additional resources.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here too. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Uday and also the resources that he's just mentioned. If you've enjoyed 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.