Matthew Holloway

Episode 81
Brave UX

Design Maturity Starts with Designers' Maturity

In this episode of Brave UX, Matthew Holloway shares what it was like to lead SAP’s design thinking transformation, why designers need to get their house in order first, and the importance of purposeful rest.

Highlights include:

What was it like working with Don Norman at Apple?
Does design maturity start with designers’ maturity?
Why can’t you impose design culture over night?
How can design leaders get a seat at the top table?
Do critics of Design Thinking have a legitimate axe to grind?

July 12, 202201:25:01

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Who is Matthew Holloway?

Matthew is an independent design consultant with over 25 years of experience scaling high performance product design teams for some of the world’s largest companies.

As VP in the Office of CEO at SAP, Matthew worked with Hasso Plattner (the Co-Founder and Chairman) and Henning Kagermann (the then CEO) leading the global Design Thinking transformation of SAPs 60,000-person development, sales and consulting services divisions.

After leaving SAP, Matthew took on the role of VP of Product Design & User Experience for Shutterfly. While there he led an aggressive programme of ongoing product improvements, as well as a strategic programme that resulted in an estimated $50 million dollars of annual savings.

He has co-founded two companies, including Atlas Informatics - a machine learning based personal search technology - that counted Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Microsoft amongst its investors - and was acquired by Xinova in 2017.

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 Matthew Holloway. Matthew has over 25 years of experience building high performance product design teams for some of the world's largest companies, generating greater customer satisfaction, increased market share, and improved profitability in the process. Based in Seattle where he currently works as an independent design consultant, Matthew is helping companies to build, improve, and scale their design organizations.
What gives him the chops to do that? Well, in a previous life, Matthew was a VP in the office of the CEO of SAP. There he worked with Hasso Platner, the Co-Founder and Chairman, and Henning Kaman, the then CEO, leading the global design thinking transformation of SAP's 60,000 person development, sales and consulting services divisions. In 2009, after leaving SAP, Matthew took on the role of VP of Product Design and User Experience for Shutterfly for the following four years. He led an aggressive program of ongoing product improvements as well as a strategic program that resulted in a cross-brand creation and fulfillment platform that delivered an estimated 50 million of annual savings. Then in 2015, Matthew decided to throw caution to the wind and leave big business behind for the rock and roll of startup life. He has co-founded two companies, including Atlas Infomatics, a machine learning based personal search technology that counted Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and Microsoft amongst its investors, and was acquired by Xinova in 2017. As a trained designer, an experienced business person, a former global design exec, a recent entrepreneur, and someone who's not a afraid to express a well thought out opinion,
I've really been looking forward to speaking with Matthew on Brave UX today. Matthew, welcome to the show.
Matthew Holloway:
Thank you. Excited to have this conversation. So that's a great intro, by the way.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I was just thinking about that because we were talking before we hit record, and you mentioned to me that you'd also worked at Apple, Netscape, WebMD, and a host of other companies that I didn't even manage to squeeze into your intro. So I I'm very excited to have this conversation. Yeah,
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, me too.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the things that I didn't mention in your introduction, Matthew, was that you are actually a fine artist as well, and for the past 20 years you've exhibited in San Francisco and Seattle, and I understand that people from across the globe have your pieces hanging in their homes. What is your art to you? What is it that it gives you that you can't get from the Russian excitement of working in product design?
Matthew Holloway:
It's a couple things. It's really interesting. I had started, when I first went to college, I started off wanting to do industrial design and then I wound up the first two years actually doing fine arts instead. And it was really interesting cause my dad was a carpenter and he built the house we grew up in and every summer we always had these big projects to do. And so I came home after my second year in fine arts and my dad's sitting there and he is like, our house doesn't have a basement. And my first thought was, holy moly, we're going to have to build a basement under this house. That's the summer project. It's like, I'm trying to
Brendan Jarvis:
Have a holiday here, dad.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. I'm like, yeah, we don't have a basement. And so he just looks at me and he's like, so there won't be any place for you to live if you get that degree in painting.
So I made sure to switch over to design after that. So I kind of set painting aside for a number of years. And then friends of mine actually bought me. I was doing a lot of travel for work at the time, and they bought me a little travel watercolor kit. And so I got back into doing art and I realized there's something nice about being able to be just purely creative with no constraints other than my own and not having to satisfy anyone else other than me. And so it can scratch that itch of just being creative and expressive and not having to solve a problem. So it just kind of balances out that need to think about design and solving a business problem and delighting your customers and driving innovation. But it's still very goal oriented with clear metrics and outcomes, whereas the art is just an opportunity for me to enjoy my creativity.
Brendan Jarvis:
And how often are you giving yourself permission to do that, to enjoy your creativity? Is this something that you have in your calendar and it's blocked out and that this is art time or is this a habitual thing that you find yourself drawn to on a daily basis? What does it look like?
Matthew Holloway:
Oh, it varies based on work schedules, but I do try to carve out a regular time to paint and explore it. It just really varies. It comes in waves. I'll get an idea for a new series of paintings and I'll really go all in on that and do that as much as I can and spend as much time painting as I can. And it just kind of goes until I started exhausting that theme and then think about something else. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
I wanna come back to your dad giving what sounded like an ultimatum to you. I mean, it was subtle, but not so subtle at the same time was
Matthew Holloway:
My dad. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. I was going to say, was this meant with love or was this a fairly common sort of stern sort of f fatherly kind of figure that would say things like that to you? How was it intended and how was it received?
Matthew Holloway:
Oh, it was his dry sense of humor being kind of sarcastic about it, but he just wanted to point out that he had never gone to college. My mom had never gone to college. My sisters and I were the first ones to go to college both sides of the family. And so it was important to him that his kids have an opportunity to, he didn't have. And so I think he was just concerned that getting a degree in fine arts may make things more challenging in terms of a career and income and stability. He had learned how to be a carpenter from his grandfather when he was 14, and he'd always done carpenter. His grandfather and great-uncle were carpenters. His dad was a carpenter and his brother tried carpenter for a while, but didn't work. I tried carpenter actually for a while. I worked at a lumber mill making cabinets. And it's, it definitely something I really enjoy. It's just something that I don't commit enough time to,
Brendan Jarvis:
Maybe I'm being overly romantic here and drawing lines between dots that aren't here. But what you have done with your training as an industrial design and subsequently in product design, it doesn't seem to me like it's too much of a stretch between say the craft and the tactile hands-on approach with carpentry to what you've actually been making and building designing in the digital world.
Matthew Holloway:
I think, yeah, I think that's true. Growing up as a kid, my dad had a big wood shop and I would go out and make toys in the wood shop if the neighbor kids in and I were going to play pirates. It's like they might just nail two boards together and have a sword. But I would go out and spend three days on the bands on the table saw and routers and all sorts of stuff to come out with this sword that [laugh] like a prop from to the Rings movie. And they're like, yeah, we moved on from pirates. We're now doing something else, but next time we play pirates, you'll be ready thing. So yeah, I think there is something I just having that tactical, tactical, tactical, the,
Brendan Jarvis:
I know how to find that one hard too as well. I know what
Matthew Holloway:
You mean. I'm so focused on strategy. It has to be tactical [laugh]. The being able to make things and build things has always just been kind of part of my dna. So the designing products and building products feels very natural.
Brendan Jarvis:
I had a look at your art that I could see at least on your website, and you've got a collection in there called memory scapes. And you wrote about this, and I'll quote you now, growing up in rural surroundings is defined by the ever-present horizon. Was that a literal reflection of an observation from your childhood?
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, I grew up in rural Ohio. There was a friend of mine from graduate school who started working at Crown Industries in Ohio, which is a company that makes forklifts and things. And he and I were chatting on the phone and he had grown up in northern Ohio up by Cleveland, and this is the first time he was kind of out in the farmland area of Ohio. And he made the comedy. He's like, I was standing there at the sink doing dishes or whatever, and he looked out the window and he said, I could actually see the curvature of the earth. There's out this flat. And so the horizon in Ohio is in the farmland area especially. It's like there'll be woods here and there and stuff, but there's always this sense of horizon. And we'd lived very far out in the country growing up could, if somebody who was coming to visit, you could see them coming for 10 minutes. Cause you could see their car on the other side of that field over there like,
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, these Auntie Doris, she's coming quick, hide, pretend we're not home.
Matthew Holloway:
I see you've met my aunt. Oh yeah. So yeah, the horizon was always kind of there and weather would come in on the horizon, so you would see storms coming in or sunrises and sunsets were always really spectacular.
Brendan Jarvis:
If you think back to when you were growing up in Ohio, you are looking at that horizon and if you think about now the sense that it gave you, was this a sense of comfort or was it a sense of confinement or something else
Matthew Holloway:
Interesting? It wasn't confinement so much as it was. I think it's kind of the opposite. I think it's more opportunity just the space and the vastness of the world in terms of what's out there. We had a big woods behind our house, and so you could just spend hours out there and not see other people. And it's just being out in the country that you have this deep appreciation for the environment and how much space is out there. Everyone around us, all of my friends were farmers and my dad was a carpenter and so he would build stuff for them, but everyone around us was farmers. And so you had this great appreciation for the earth and the cycle of everything. And so just growing up in that environment, you just have a different perspective of, I think space and our relationship to it.
Brendan Jarvis:
I grew up in, well, I suppose you'd call it a city by world standards. It's probably a fairly small city. It had about 350,000 people. So I didn't have that big open spaces, rural upbringing. What I was wondering though is from your own perspective, do you feel that whether it's easier or more difficult to find in yourself where you need to be outside of the busyness of an urban environment?
Matthew Holloway:
It's weird. I don't move around a lot. I spent 20, 20 some years in the same house in Palo Alto. And so the sense of place, it's like when I find myself in a place that feels really comfortable, it's really lovely. But yeah, I rarely find myself in a place where I'm uncomfortable, where it's even traveling internationally and things growing up. I know some friends of mine who have grown up in the same area in Ohio, if they go to a large city, they become very claustrophobic because there's just too many people. And that's never happened to me. I love exploring new spaces, new cities, meeting new cultures. And when I was in graduate school, I basically did a minor degree in anthropology to understand graphic methods better and to learn how to appreciate different cultural influences on the designs. And so it's always been really fascinating to go to other places and explore other spaces.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you've been a particularly busy person from what I gather, your whole career. But definitely in the last seven years you, you've barely had a chance from what I can tell anyway, to take a breath. And in your own words, you've said, and I'll quote again now. Now I have run from startup to startup moving so quickly, all I could focus on was what was coming next then. So this is the end of the quote, so this is me now and then your time at your last startup, a company that you co-founded, I understand that ended with a bit of an unexpected phone call.
Matthew Holloway:
The last startup that I co-founded, it wasn't so much an unexpected phone call. It was a conversation we had. We were building a product that was very data science focused and we were not making as much traction on the data science side as we were on the business development side. Siteworks is looking at back office processes. And so thinking about the robotic process automation, the UI path, and those types of companies Ben and I founded that company based on the siteworks, based on the idea of Socos, automation, socos, what else? And so one of the questions was how do they know what to automate? So a bank for example, may have 40 back office processes, everything from commercial lending to whatever. So which one of those are they going to prioritize to automate first? And so we started looking into it and talking to different companies.
We did about 40 different discovery interviews to different companies in different section segments. And they were all pretty clear. They don't know. The consultants show up and say, Hey, we can automate this process. And they're like, okay, automate it. And they don't know don't how much money they're saving cause they don't know how much money they were spending before that process was automated. So we developed the idea of Zeit work, so would allow us to do that analysis and then help them do that prioritization and selling the product was super easy, but doing the data science was super hard. So Ben and I and our c e O at that point, we had a conversation and about needing to extend the runway of the company. We didn't wanna go back for another round of funding too quickly. And so we opted to basically Ben and I to step away from the company in order to give the data scientists and the engineering team more bandwidth in terms of the planning. So
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you sacrificed yourself,
Matthew Holloway:
But I still have [laugh]. Yes. It's like I still have equity in the company, so I wanted to be successful and I still help advise every once in a while with them on things. I tried to leave them with a pretty cohesive and complete roadmap for the next few years in terms of the products and the capabilities. I was the product manager and the sole designer there. So I actually designed out all of these admin screens and all these admin workflows for the management of these analytic dashboards as well as the types of visualizations that we should try to deliver to people. And so they still have lots of work to do on those things before they need to do any more additional product development work or design work.
Brendan Jarvis:
And from what I could gather anyway from reading what you'd written about this, you made a conscious decision after stepping away from Zeit works to do. Not much.
Matthew Holloway:
So I, I definitely wanted to take some time. I was very fortunate, actually, this kind of goes back to the painting thing that we were talking about earlier, about, I don't know, 15 years ago, 18 years ago I had started painting again and the house that I was living in Palo Alto, I actually rented this house for all these years cuz the people who owned it never raised the rent. And it was a fabulous house. They built me an art studio. When the wife found out that I painted, they took what was this little garage and converted it into a really lovely art studio. And I was at the startup company that was pretty toxic and fairly stressful. In fact, we got written up in a HR book about how not to do layoffs because we did such a bad, the CEO did such a bad job of doing the layoffs at this company.
And so I was very fortunate I negotiated a nice severance package with these guys before I joined the company. And so when I left, I got laid off and the day that I get got laid off the carpenter finished the art studio. So I came home and he is like, here's the keys your studio's done. I'm like, what? It's done. He's like, yeah, it's done. So I took that as a sign from the universe that I should take some time off and just paint. And so I kind of been repeating that same thing when I left Siteworks where I felt like the universe was just saying, okay, you need to take a break and just relax and then figure out what you wanna do next after you've had a chance to take a breath. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, taking a breath, what a necessary thing for probably everybody at various stages of their career to do. And when I, I read something you'd written about this and it really bugged me, not in a way that you bugged me, but it was something, and I'll explain in a second, but it's something within myself. I was like, oh, this is territory I need to go into you. You said, and I'll quote you again, if you have never been at the point where you no longer wake up knowing what day of the week it is, you need to relax and make that happen. Being in a place where you don't have to save up all the fun things for the weekend is awesome. So that bugged me because I can't tell you whether or not I'll ever experience that. And I know that if I don't that it will be my fault. Yeah. And that's what bugged me.
Matthew Holloway:
Oh, it will be your fault then you should do that. Actually after getting laid off from the startup company and at painting, I would just get up and paint every day and I'd walk down to the coffee shop, get coffee, come back and go right into the studio and just paint. And one morning I called a friend of mine and said, Hey, do you wanna go get brunch or something? [laugh] silence on the other of the phone. He is like, it's Tuesday, I'm at work. [laugh] like new asshole [laugh] kinda thing. He was just really not happy that I'm like, oh, I didn't realize it was Tuesday. I thought sworn it was Saturday.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, cuz it reminds people, it reminds people of their current state and they may or may not be happy with it.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, it was fantastic. I did that for over a year. And the one thing that was really interesting about the house that I was in, this house was just the place everybody wanted to go to hang out. And it had just fantastic mojo. And it wasn't until after we moved, the people who owned the house finally said, Hey, we'll sell it to you. They hadn't wanted to sell it before. And they finally said, Hey, we'll sell it to you. But then I had this opportunity to come up to Seattle, so we kind of looked at our options and decided to move up here, but the person who bought the house off of them knew something about the house that they didn't know and we didn't know, which was, it was Phil LE's House and Phil Lesh, one of the founders of the Grateful Dead. This is the house where the Grateful Dead was created.
They used to have concerts in the backyard. And that little garage that got turned into my painting studio was where they rehearsed apparently in 1972, led Zeppelin crashed there with them and stayed in the house. And so this house just had such fantastic energy. So even though I didn't know what day of the week it was, friends would show up on Friday to have a barbecue. And so they would just call up, it's like, Hey, we're coming over this for barbecue tonight. We'll bring everything. And so I just had to make sure there was ice and something to drink and they brought stuff to cook and we'd just hang out. So that was my only indication of what day of the week it was.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wow. And really interesting to hear that. And whether or not it is objectively true, as in whether or not it can be proven. It's really interesting to hear about certain spaces, in this case, this house that have this creative energy that sort of permeates across different owners. There's definitely hear about these houses that exist and maybe it's the law, I don't know, but there are some places that have this sort of pool to them. They,
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, it was really wild the moment I went to see the house, and it was just kind of a fluke that I even saw the listing for this house. The owners were there, super sweet couple and they're just like, yeah, come on over right now and we'll show you the house. And just walking through the gate into the backyard, it was just like, this place feels amazing. I want to be here. This feels like home. And it's just a tiny little bungalow in Palo Alto. But it was awesome,
Brendan Jarvis:
Matthew, it sounds to me, and I have been wrong at least once or twice in my life, but it sounds to me that you have had a conversation with yourself at some point about how much is enough
Matthew Holloway:
I have and the trade off of how to get there also. So working in Silicon Valley for all those years, it's very possible to work on a product or in a company that may not have the best ethics or morality. The products may be a little sketchy or questionable but you make a lot of money if you work there doing those types of things. And I've always found it really hard to make that trade off and say like, all right, I'll work on something which is ethically sketchy, but I'll make a lot of money at it. And the same is true just in terms of how much is enough and what are you willing to get there. Yeah. And I decided a long time ago, you, I'm not going to endow a chair at Stanford or have a building named after me on some college campus probably. So I'm not going to make a lot of money and do something like that with it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, there's probably a few of those coming up for grabs once they scrub some of the oligarchs names off. Some of them I'm imagining we'll soon see.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
They might be going at a discount, you know? Never know. I
Matthew Holloway:
Know. Maybe they should just name them after things. It's like, this is the Redwood tree hall or this is the Sparrow Hall or something
Brendan Jarvis:
That seems to be every meeting room in New Zealand is named after a tree or something like that. Maybe we were leading the way. You just haven't heard about it yet.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. I was curious about the pivot that you made out of big business mention in your intro into startup. I thought that startups were this the game of the 20 something?
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. What you're saying. I'm not that young anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. What? Hey, look, I'm, I'm not saying anything. I'm just making an observation. Yeah
Matthew Holloway:
It's really interesting. I was at Netscape in the early days and I was also at WebMD in the very early days. And so while I had been in large corporations, I'd also been in startups earlier. And startups. Startups are really fascinating because nothing is set yet in terms of the culture or the process. And so being able to get in with a team of people that you have a strong connection with and you have a lot of trust with, and being able to create that culture and those processes, and especially with design and making sure that design is a key part of that culture and is a core aspect of the product from the inception becomes just, it's kind of intoxicating actually, because then you can set it up to just keep rolling that way as opposed to going into a company later that's already established in terms of its culture and how it sees design and its customers, and then trying to get them to shift perspectives. [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Sound, it sounds like maybe you were slightly disillusioned.
Matthew Holloway:
It's not disillusioned, it's just, it's how you wanna spend your energy. So either
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a question,
Matthew Holloway:
Spin the spend your energy making something go cool and fast and far, or you can spend your energy trying to steer it in the right direction and
Brendan Jarvis:
Steer the Titanic. Yeah. Was that rearranging the deck chairs, I think is an analogy that can sometimes come up when it comes to changing how companies perceive design.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, I've been fortunate that most of the companies I've been at have an appreciation of design. They may not know from a process perspective where it belongs or organizationally where to optimize it, but they understand it's value. They just don't know how they recognize that value in other companies. They just don't know how to get it themselves.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, that's easy. They just have to pay McKinzie to tell them.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. Yeah. They could ask McKinzie that question. Sure. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I know you've got some strong views on the las latest report that McKinzie released on the design org. Possibly we'll come to that later. But while we're on this tangent of your stepping out of big business into startup business. Yeah. What was it like so dramatically changing the scale and scope of your role going from being a leader of leaders to a leader, but hands-on back on the tools?
Matthew Holloway:
Well, I think getting back and being hands-on was definitely a huge shift in terms of how work got done because you couldn't just orchestrate it and delegate it and facilitate it and do those types of things. You actually had to do it and while you were doing all the other things as well. And so during pitch meetings, I might be actually working on the roadmap in the background when it wasn't my turn to talk. If one of the engineers is pinging me on Slack during one of these pitch meetings and it's like, Hey, you said this, but I need that and I can't make that happen in the timeframe we want, so can we do this instead? And so then I'm try to work that out while listening to the pitch. So it's a very different working style in the startups, but it's much faster and it's much more tangible with larger organizations, the coordination and the conversations that need to take place lining everybody up, making sure everybody's heard, everyone's seen, just the scale of that, it takes more time. Whereas if you're in a startup situation, it's much more immediate in terms of being able to have those conversations and being able to make those changes. So it's a different way of working.
Brendan Jarvis:
You touched on there the sort of need to help others be seen in the bigger tech environment in terms of the design leadership role. And as far as I can tell, you're someone that is incredibly proud of the investment that you've made in the leaders that you've hired and that you've managed. You've mentioned on your website that many of these people have gone on to very senior leadership roles, some of them C-suite level at companies such as S A P, ge, Twitter, and Mercedes amongst some others. You're a few words on your website. Why is it that you felt compelled or that it was important to articulate your investment in others in that way?
Matthew Holloway:
Well, I guess I feel it's important to me to celebrate other people's successes and being able to help people have those successes is important. And so I guess the only reason I put that up there was so it would clue other people in that if they are looking to move up in their career, I'm somebody who's helped other people do that, and I may be able to help them do that. It was just kind of like, Hey, I do coaching and I do mentoring. I mentor other startups here in Seattle and I've done coaching for design leaders for a number of years. So just kind of putting it out there saying like, Hey, I have this experience and I've done this before and it's worked out well for some of the folks. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm sure that,
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
There are some people listening if not everyone who has certainly I dunno if I'm using the right word, word here, maybe it's too strong, but suffered under the hands of people that aren't like that. And so I think it was real. It was just an interesting observation that you did call that out. Yeah, because like you said, it's kind of almost like a beacon for people that are looking for that. And who did that for you in your career, Matthew?
Matthew Holloway:
Oh, lots of people. My first job out of undergrad was at a design firm, and it was a large design firm. It was like Id o, but it was a decade before Id o, it was a company called Richardson Smith. They'd done work with Xerox on all the copying machines. So Xerox would do the ui, but Richardson Smith would do the industrial design aspects of it. And so while I was there, I was hired originally to do packaging and other stuff but there's a person on the team there Liz Sanders, who was doing interaction design. And Liz came in and said like, Hey, I need a designer to help me work on this stuff. There was a interface for a blood analysis machine. And I was like, cool, that sounds like fun. I like designing stuff. And I was also the only designer at that point who was using a Macintosh.
So one of our creative directors had gone out and bought an Apple computer and he had the vision that people were going to be designing on these things. They weren't going to be doing it by hand. And so I volunteered to be the Guinea pig to do that. And so Liz is like, all right, so you know how to use a computer, which I barely knew how to use a computer. And she's like so you're going to design stuff with me. And after a series of long conversations, she's like, all right, so you think in time, which is different than most designers that think in space. So this is going to be good because you can see how things transform over the experience somebody has with it. And so we design two or three products together. And then she really encouraged me to go back to grad school. And so that's what I wound up doing. And I went and did a master's degree in cognitive systems engineering, which at the time there wasn't an H C I program or UX program anywhere. And so that was definitely a big influence. And then at Apple, I had a series of managers who were very supportive and very helpful. I was very fortunate to work with Don Norman when he was at Apple. I was in his user experience architect's office. And then when he took over the advanced technologies group, I worked with him there as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Matthew, that's not on your LinkedIn profile, I mean, not that I'm suggesting that guy around dropping Don Norman's name on your LinkedIn profile just for shits and giggles as they say. But that's an epic experience. Why is it that your LinkedIn profile only looks so far back as your time at WebMD?
Matthew Holloway:
[laugh]? To be perfectly honest ageism.
Brendan Jarvis:
Really?
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. I have interviewed at companies, I interviewed at a company in Silicon Valley this was a number of years ago. I was working with a VC firm. They asked me to go interview at this position. They needed somebody to come in and run their design. So I went in and I was sitting there and the CEO's office and the ceo walked in reading my resume. And when he sat down in his chair, he looked up at me and the first thing out of his mouth is, God, you're old [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
No way. What did you say to him?
Matthew Holloway:
I said, you know, can't that to candidates in an interview? And he's like, but you are old. I'm like, that doesn't matter. That can't be a factor in your decision making. And we chatted for a few minutes. I'm obviously this is not going to work out. So I left and I spoke to the VC shortly after that, the who sent me over there and [laugh] like, you need to get this guy some coaching and you need to get an HR person connected to him really fast cause I'm not going to sue you.
Brendan Jarvis:
He's a liability. Yeah, [laugh],
Matthew Holloway:
Everyone's going to sue you. Yeah. But ageism is, unfortunately, it's not uncommon and tech, and the sad thing is that folks over 50 have a lot of experiences and they have a lot of value that they can contribute to these companies. But unfortunately, most folks feel that that's a young person's game and they have to stick with the 20 somethings or maybe the 30 somethings and if they're really daring, maybe someone over 40. But what's fascinating for me is that in the UX community as well, this shows up in other ways where people will be talking about something as though it's brand new. This just came up not very long ago. There's a discussion where folks are talking about some stuff within the design community and design processes and other things. I'm like, this is back in the nineties. Or one of my favorites is invariably somebody will have a post saying, well, when user experience was invented in 2005 when so-and-so wrote a book about it. And it's like, no, actually UX the first time anybody talked about that with Don Norman at Apple. And that was back in 1992. And this has been around for longer than you've been alive.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about your experience working with Don Norman at Apple. What stands out the most for you when you think about that time is maybe it's a feeling or there's a story that encapsulates it or just describe, give us a bit of color. What was it like?
Matthew Holloway:
The funny thing about Don was my grad school advisor this guy Dave Woods since retired. But Dave was an expert in human error and resilience engineering and things. He had known Don for a very long time. In fact, Dave was a candidate as Don's replacement at uc, San Diego when Don went to Apple. And so I don't know, the first couple weeks Don was there at Apple, he sent out an email to all of the design teams as was his style at the time. He was very opinionated and very blunt and would just make these pronouncements. And I replied back to the thread, take a chill pill. You've only been here two weeks. Which I got an immediate email back from him saying, come to my office now. Please
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Matthew Holloway:
The guy who was my manager at the time is like, oh
Brendan Jarvis:
Dear,
Matthew Holloway:
I, I'll try to get some moving boxes for you in case. But Donna and I had a conversation, it was really fascinating. So where did you go to school? And I told him, he's like, oh, so Dave, I'm like, yeah. So he's like, all right, so tell me about his theory of visual momentum and how it applies to user interface design. And it was this super intense conversation. He's like, okay, you know what? You're doing all right. You're like, you're legit and you're one of Dave's students, so all right, you're fine. We kind of hit it off after that cause he respected people who were smart and they knew what they were doing. And he himself is utterly brilliant. His capacity to identify the root causes of problems, whether they're product or organizational, is phenomenal. He also has a really funny sense of humor. He's very authentic and really genuinely wants to solve problems and make things better. But he is utterly brilliant. He's a organizationally at Apple, there was a lot of challenges. And I don't know if it was all those years in academia or just his own insights or how, but he navigated the politics of Apple so gracefully so well. It was kind of stunning. This was the time before Steve came back. So I was there with Michael Spindler and then Gill Emilio and it, there's a lot of upheaval. At that time,
Brendan Jarvis:
Were you there only in the period between Steve or did you see Steve return and see that
Matthew Holloway:
Change? No, I, I'd gone to Netscape before Steve came back and it was really funny cause I still have the email, I still have a printout of the email. I sent Don a note saying, Hey, I'm going to leave Apple and go work at Netscape. Cuz Don, Don wasn't convinced that the internet was going to be as big as it is cuz coming from academia, he felt like it was pretty marginalized. And so I, I'd gone to Netscape by the time Steve came back.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I understand Netscape had some pretty colorful characters too. I think Mark and Dreesen being one of them. Did you have any recollections or any experiences with Mark?
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, Netscape. Netscape was really fascinating. It was such an optimistic company that really felt like we could do anything. And the impact we were having was very tangible and just constant and ongoing. Every day something new would come out of the internet whether it was finding the complete works of every author, ever published online kind of stuff, or the first e-commerce things. Or one of the teams I worked with, we were working on, we were shipping versions four of Netscape communicator and I was working on version seven. So we were doing very advanced work and one of the engineers this guy Mike McCue, who's gone on to do Tell Me and Flip book and a number of other companies, Mike was on a flight back from the East coast and he came up with this idea of how to use JavaScript and layers to create the sense of dynamic HTML to create movement within a web. No way, it was kind of a hack, but it was stunning. It was just amazing. And then we were working on push technologies to push events out to the browser and we built a system called Constellation, which was an immersive browser that basically took over your desktop and the window would constantly reset itself to be the back most window on your desktop. And so you couldn't see your Windows desktop you would just see a desk.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is that why Microsoft crushed an escape in the end? Were they pissed off about that?
Matthew Holloway:
Yes, they were. So there was a demo of this at the cs. Apparently Bill Gates was in the back of the room with a couple other folks and after that, ie. Got a lot of money and took off a rocket. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
And then later in your life you ended a deal with a devil for some funding. Yeah, only tea, only teasing.
Matthew Holloway:
But yeah, Netscape, Netscape was cool. The team people at Netscape were just incredibly optimistic and there was perhaps too much enthusiasm for the company. One of the engineers I worked with, he and his wife we're having their first child and he sat next to me and his phone rang and his wife had gone into labor and he was just about ready to check this code in. And he stayed a few more minutes writing code, doing stuff, doing stuff. About 20 minutes later, I'm, your wife is in labor, you have to go to the hospital. We literally had to take him away from his computer to put him in his car to send him off to the hospital. Cause he had to check in his code cuz it was like [laugh]. Yeah, we're all a little obsessed about things back then. So
Brendan Jarvis:
I know we are doing a bit of a walk down memory lane and there's possibly one or two further stops that I'd like to make. The first of which is a call that I believe you received at some point around 2005. And it was a call for a job to work at S A P. And I mentioned it in your introduction. It seemed to me anyway, A was quite a special position. It was a VP position that they'd created inside the office of the C E O. What was it that you were hired to do for S A P?
Matthew Holloway:
So Paso Hael, the chairman and one of the founders of S A P, saw a business week article about ID o and got very excited about it. In the early days of S A P, when the company was just getting started they didn't have their own data center. And so in order to test anything or see if their product was working better or easier to use, they would have to go out to a customer to actually run it. And in the course of doing that, they would talk to these customers and they would find out what their needs were and what their issues were and how they were using the product and what they could do to make the product better. And over time, as the company got bigger, they lost that practice of really connecting with the customers, the end users. S A P, like most enterprise companies, the person who buys the software is not the person who uses the software.
And so they spent a lot of time with CFOs and CMOs and other folks at these companies, but not the end user. And so Hasso read this article and got really excited about what he was hearing about design and design thinking. And he reached out to David Kelly, they had a great conversation and Hasso tried to buy I D O, but Steelcase owned I D O at the time. And Steelcase was also an SAP customer. And they politely said, no, it's not for sale and we're keeping it [laugh]. So Hasso decided he would create his own internal version of that team. And I'd been teaching at Stanford for a few years. And so I'd also been working with Cisco on rolling out a human-centered design process across their organization. And so I was asked to consider this role at NS a P. They'd created a position in the office of the c e O called design services, which a lot of folks on the team really didn't like the name because they felt, it sounded like we were just making slide decks or something.
And reading the job description and the mission statement for this team, it was very clear that was not the goal. And that we were there to actually do an organizational transformation of the company around design thinking and to embed it in all of the development tools and practices across the company. Hiring folks, you'd have to explain this to them and show them the mission statement and [laugh] this stuff. Cause they're like, I'm not going to make slide decks. It was an unfortunate name, but that didn't really slow down our mission at all. And so joining the company, we took the team from about four people, five people when I joined to 35 people within the first 12 months. And the design services team had designers, user experience designers, interaction designers. We also had business analysts, we had software engineers and architects. We had an animator, we had user researchers.
We had a whole mix of folks. We had folks whose background were in training and education. And so we kind of had a multi-pronged approach where we would do key project key projects across the company that were very high profile to show how this method improved the results. But we also had a training program to teach design thinking and the methodology to folks to give 'em that creative confidence to solve these problems. And then we also did a lot of organizational work in terms of how to structure the development organization and realign the development processes to include the designers early on in the process and make it much more design-centric. You
Brendan Jarvis:
Sum that up so nicely, just for the people that are listening or watching this seriously, this is not a small undertaking. This is a global transformation. There's a lot of work that went into this. Now, clearly given what you've done and accepting that role, I think you spent four or five years at SAP your, well, hopefully this is an unfair, a big prop proponent of design thinking in enterprise. And you're probably not unaware of some people in the broader design community who I think the test wouldn't be an unfair word design thinking. They feel that it waters down the expertise of what it takes to solve design problems that undermines their credibility and the credibility of the field. Do they have a point
Matthew Holloway:
Only in as much as they're using the word design? I feel like oftentimes the word design, it's very unfortunate that design is used in so many different contexts to mean so many different things. If in fact, I'll share with you one of the projects that we did at sap, it was in the human resources department, the perform, the individual who ran global performance evaluation for the company and the person who did compensation planning for the company hadn't agreed on anything in months. And there's a lot of tension between them. And so we did a design thinking workshop with them to try to align both the tools and the policies around how those things were done. And we successfully got them in a room together, spent a couple weeks working through all this stuff and we came up with the solution that was primarily a policy change.
And so I went back and David Henning, who was the CEO on this, and Henning paused and he's like, wait, you designed, and this is a English to German translation kind of thing. He's like, you designed a policy. I'm like, yeah, we designed the policy. And he's like, but you don't design policies, you craft them. And then it took him a second. It's like, well actually, yeah, it's design. I'm like, yeah, it's an intentional arrangement of the things to create a better outcome and maximize the resources. And he's like, oh yeah. And we also redesigned this contractual relationship with one of our vendors for some of our data analytics and we're going to save about 7 million per quarter on this. And he's like, you designed a contract. I'm like, yes, we did. The light went off. Because for him, the word design coming from a German language meant very aesthetic aspects of design, not the structural, they have a different word for that.
And in English, we use design to mean so many things that I feel like the people who are quick to dismiss the impact that design thinking has on both giving their colleagues confidence around their creativity and their creative problem solving, but also on just making design part of the conversation. In terms of the planning I feel like they're being rather short-sighted. To be blunt, I have not found it. At first I was a little skeptical. I'm like, when [laugh] coming from an actual real, legit bachelor science of industrial design kind of program, and knowing what you go through to learn how to do that type of design, it's like, yeah, design thinking isn't going to give you those skills. It's not going to wind up being ROMs or Johnny Iif when you're done going through a design thingy workshop. But you should have greater confidence that you can creatively solve a problem and not just use reductive logic to kind of come to a conclusion that's the safest, most secure thing, but that you can actually have the confidence to take a risk to try something new, to potentially fail and recover from it.
And the things are plastic and malleable and you can change things like you can change an organization. You have to do it carefully and through consideration because you're moving people around and not pixels and they have emotions and pixels don't care, you know, still can make changes. And I think that's the piece that a lot of the folks who are like ve opposed to design thinking are missing because design, I had a chance when I was at S A P, I spent a lot of time behind the curtain at I D O and design thinking is in addition to all the other things, design thinking is also one of the most brilliant business development tools I've ever seen in my life. Because IDEO companies would trip up to ideo say, design this thing for me. IDEO's like, all right, it'll cost you this much money.
And the company's like, holy crap, I'm not going to pay that much money. And IDEO would be, okay, come out and spend two weeks with us. Pay 40, 60 grand or whatever for this design thinking workshop and we'll teach you how to do this yourself. And something like 87% of those companies converted to a client at the end of the two weeks, it was so popular with one of SAP's clients craft food. The guy who ran supply chain for craft food actually in his own budget, budgeted for 20 other teams outside of supply chain at craft to go take design thinking workshops from I D O. And he would pay for the travel and the cost of the workshop. And it was all about the creative problem solving and the confidence to actually do that. It wasn't about gaining the skills to create the final artifact.
It was about how do you solve this problem? How do you reframe the problem? How do you know if you're solving the right problem and the needs of the people? It was never meant to replace the craft of design and the details of design. It was meant to basically allow other people to work comfortably with designers on the creative problem solving aspect of it. Designers have always historically been really bad about explaining how they got to their solutions. A lot of times it's a very internal, you see all the problems, you deconstruct them either in front of you or in your head, and then you start rearranging things and you do all these sketches and all of a sudden out of all this pile of sketches emerges the solution. And it's fantastic. In fact, when I worked at this first design firm, the guys who worked in the model shop, cause at this point everything was hand-built, 3D models, they took great pride in the idea of their model sitting next to the final product that came off the assembly line. You could not tell the difference between them and that level of craftsmanship and the understanding of the forms and the aesthetics and putting it together that way. Design thinking was never meant to do that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, it sounds like you feel that people that aren't a fan of it who are designers are needlessly feeling threatened. They feel that the craft side of what they're doing, they feel that that's threatened, but they need not feel that way.
Matthew Holloway:
Right. A lot of designers I've worked with coaching, they tend not to spend as much energy as I feel that they should in having conversations with their colleagues about how design can help them make better products. I feel like sometimes there can be a sense of entitlement with design. It's true with engineering and marketing and everyone, but I feel like sometimes the designers aren't spending enough time listening to their colleagues, talking to their colleagues, being proactive. Designers do have a tendency to sit back and listen and synthesize and then come out with an idea. And ironically, that's what design thinking is supposed to help them overcome by getting everyone else to understand how to do that exact same thing. But a lot of times operationally or organizationally, they will listen to a new manager comes on board, they'll listen to them for a few weeks and then the manager will come back and say like, Hey, we're going to do this now, or we're going to do it this way now.
And the designer will be really upset because it's not inclusive enough of design or it doesn't use the right words. It's like, well, you haven't said anything in the last three weeks while they've been doing all this planning. And so they assume that that doesn't matter to you. And now you're upset with them, but you never told them, Hey, I have an opinion about this and you should do it this way, or we've been doing it this way and it's worked out really well and here's the evidence that shows this is the better way of doing it. They just kind of sit back and they get the answer. They get their boss telling them something and then they get frustrated about it, but they haven't made the effort to kind of engage. So
Brendan Jarvis:
A brooding teenager,
Matthew Holloway:
That would be one description yet. I don't wanna, I don't wanna label people, but yeah, kind of like a birding teenager. A lot of times designers just don't engage with their colleagues and they don't engage with the leadership. Or if they do it in a very hand handed way where they'll just make a statement as opposed to asking a question or I was just having a conversation with one of the people I coach and they were complaining about this and I'm like, well, did you take a human-centered approach to this? Did you ask them what their needs were? Did you ask them what their motivations were? Did you ask them to explain the context of where this is coming from? Or did you just go in with your own solution that you assumed was the correct solution because that's the one you wanted and just drop it on their desk and say, that's what we need to do. And it was the latter and I'm like, yeah, of course they're, think about it. This is what you've been doing for decades as a designer is telling people, don't do that with your products. Don't listen to your customers and talk to them. And I feel like a lot of times the designers ironically don't do human-centered design when it comes to their role in these organizations.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. The truth is sometimes a dish best serve cold or is that revenge? I'm not sure. I'm probably munging up my analogies here or my sayings, but I think that is a cold hard truth, ego, maybe I got that one. Right. I heard, I've heard you reflect Matthew though on your time at S A P and trying to overcome the challenges of scaling design or design thinking in this case. And you said, and I'll quote you again, the big challenge though, to be honest, is not always our team to the other team. A lot of times our challenge is designer to designer or more specifically school to school, and it sounded, this is, I suppose tied into what you were just talking about, but more between designers now. It sounded to me that you were suggesting that design maturity needs to start with designers' maturity
Matthew Holloway:
That yes, I [laugh]. I might use that as a quote at some point. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I feel like a lot of designers, their individual maturity as professionals kind of sets the maximum level that they can function at in terms of helping the design organization mature within their company. At S A P, if you talk to other people who are at S SAP, at the time, there was a well known schism between my team and the UX team, and it was fundamentally for these reasons where we had access to resources and people that they may not have access to and they felt that they should have access to them. I was like, well, we're working to get you that access and we're working to change this process and we're doing it a step at a time, not a wholesale change. Organizational transformation is a long process and it takes a long time to turn that boat, especially in a company the size of S A P. And it's just because you have the opportunity to change the development process, for example, doesn't mean you can do a wholesale change of that process and swap it out for something that these engineering teams have never seen. And forcing them to give up all the muscle memory around this, all of the infrastructure for the management and the planning of those, the development processes, all the tools, all the training, all the resources, the mindset, everything across 60,000 people, you're not going to just do that overnight and you
Brendan Jarvis:
Need to, why not can't you do that?
Matthew Holloway:
Why can't you change the mindset of people overnight?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I suppose what I'm getting at is people were on your case about the speed of the transformation. What risk or risks were you balancing at the cadence at which you were approaching it? What were you trying to avoid doing while still achieving the outcomes you were trying to achieve?
Matthew Holloway:
So one very tangible example there's a number of reasons, but one of the more tangible ones is that over 80% of the world's business transactions go through s a P. At some point, if SAP's systems are off by a millionth of a penny within a year, less, far less than a year, actually there would be economic catastrophe because money would just be disappearing off the planet. So going in and doing a wholesale process change and requiring these people to learn a whole new way of building products will probably introduce greater risk to the stability of that code base than what they would be willing to undertake. And as a result, you want to do it carefully in a well considered way and make sure they're comfortable with it and they're on board with it. On top of that, a lot of these developers have spent their career at S A P and have never once talked to an actual customer. I had one individual who's actually a pretty senior member of the development team, the development organization. We took him out to see customers. When we got to the customer's office, he locked himself in the men's room. We were going to be there for two hours and he locked himself in the men's room
Brendan Jarvis:
And good head i b d.
Matthew Holloway:
And he could have, but he didn't. Right? I checked in on him a few times and he is like, Nope, not coming out. When I, we get back to the office that I'm going to get an email from Hasso wanting to know how this went cuz he's the one that, this is his, and what do you want me to tell him? And there's silence in the door. And he was willing to basically get on, ha's radar for not being following the program because he just could not bring himself to talk to a customer. He was terrified of it. It was just so foreign to him. He just didn't know why he should be doing this. And so a lot of that's one-on-one time. You can't just, like hasa would get up and say, Hey, we're going to do this. And people love hasa and they have utter respect for him, but then they're like, yeah, but we still have this other stuff we have to do.
So eventually we'll do that, but it'll take some time and they'd wanna have training on it and they'd wanna have a process. And so that's what we're working on, is basically giving them that creative confidence, showing them how do you talk to a customer? How do you actually get a meaningful conversation with a customer that's not biased, that isn't leading, that isn't just confirming some hypothesis that you have? How do you actually deconstruct the problem? And one of the products that we'd worked on, the two guys that ran the product had both written books on this topic, and they were considered experts in the field, but no one was using the product because it's not the way companies actually did this particular task. And so we had to work with them to understand it's academically where your books came from when you were teaching this stuff in a university, this made total sense, but in practice, no one actually does it that way.
So let's go figure out how they actually do it, and then we could update your product to meet their needs. And that conversation took three months. They're just very this, it's very foreign to them if they've never done this before. And so doing that wholesale change overnight is, it wasn't really an option. It took us many months to basically embed design thinking and design in the standard development. There's three processes at S A P, like one for long-term sustaining products, one for middle products that are going through iterations but not super fast. And then there's net new products. And so for the net new products in the middle products, the design piece was played a much bigger role for the other kind of sustaining products. The systems that haven't like the, just don't change that fast. There was still a role for design to play to make sure that we weren't missing anything in those products.
Brendan Jarvis:
I wanna come back to the story of the engineer and the bathroom
Matthew Holloway:
[laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Clearly not all people and perhaps an unfair stereotype these days, but engineers have the stereotype of not being people that gen generalizing here who have signed up to work in enterprise because they want to spend lots of time in front of people they don't know. Customers exploring things that they're uncomfortable exploring. And in terms of a design thinking, design thinking would've been new to them we've just been talking about. So there's something around the pace at which you were trying to get them comfortable and build the confidence to do that. But does design thinking push people sometimes unkindly out of their comfort zones given the design of design thinking?
Matthew Holloway:
It definitely has the potential to do that. I think it falls on the people facilitating the process. So most people, when they first use design thinking or learn about it, it either comes in kind of the abstract workshop idea of let's redesign this train ticket machine or parking meter or something. Or it's on a product that they're familiar with where they're going through that iteration. But usually there's a coach or a facilitator or multiple facilitators or coaches in some cases, helping that team go through that process. And there's still the here's basic idea and the basic skillsets and the steps and how we're going to be doing this and what the outcome should be comfortable with in terms of the outcome. And then being able to work with them to actually go through a real product and take the time to do the research and the synthesis and talking to the customers and deconstructing the problem.
It is going to push people outta their comfort zone. It's going to make them give up some of their assumptions, especially if the thing they're being asked to deconstruct is something that they've spent a number of years building they may be less comfortable kind of questioning it or taking it apart. Our approach was to show them projects where we had done this, where the outcome had these successes. And so we would show them, here's a human resources tool that we redesigned using this methodology and the impact and the customer acceptance of it and the adoption of it. We can do the same thing for you, and you can do it more importantly, you can do it for yourself. And the trick is around the creative confidence and the deconstruction of the problem. And so it's getting them to be a little more comfortable with that, but it's definitely pushing 'em outside their comfort zone. And designers are just as guilty as engineers of not one of be pushed out of their comfort zone. And marking people and other folks, they all have the same, it's like they have a routine, they know how it works, they can plan, they can schedule their time.
It's a routine and it's not to be pejorative about it or anything, but it's like people have a comfort to that. They know what they're doing. It gives them confidence that they have value in the company. And you're coming in and shaking all that up and saying, trust me, there's a way for you to increase the value you're giving to the company. And they're like, but who are you? So
Brendan Jarvis:
You must have had to have developed a fairly thick skin.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah. There's a lot of disparaging efforts. Yeah. Fortunately, I don't know if you came across the thing it wrote about the c e O of being the most important member of the design team, but that experience at S SAP definitely made me believe that you have to have the support of the executives, especially the C E O, if you really wanna make a design transformation of your company. Doing it from the bottom up is very, very hard. It takes a very long time. It's very ENT and it's structure, but if you can get the support of the CEO, E O and the other leaders, it's much easier to push through a design-led organizational change.
Brendan Jarvis:
So just coming to that article that you wrote about the C E O being critical in enabling design to transform the organization, you said in that article, building a great design organization is not about it being there from the beginning. It's about it being a cultural priority and hiring great design leaders. And that means it has to be a priority for the C E O. That's the end of the quote. But you've also said, and I'll quote you again here, if your company's strategic objectives do not place the same burden on design as on engineering, marketing, sales, finance, et cetera, you need to take a long hard look at your organization and its design leadership, those two statements appear to be in conflict with each other.
Matthew Holloway:
Okay, I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. I should go back and do some edits there. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Sorry. I feel really now it wasn't meant like no, no, but it was to explore that tension because in one hand hand, one hand, you are suggesting it really comes down to the c E o. And on the other hand, it was like I was reading it and it seemed that you're suggesting that if the outcomes aren't optimal, then you need to look at the design leadership, not necessarily the C-suite leadership.
Matthew Holloway:
So I think of those as an added statement, and I'll explain that. Mm-hmm. So design to make design a core part of a company, it really has to be the culture of the company and the culture really comes from the ceo. Mm-hmm. Like my colleagues in HR would perhaps disagree with me about collective creation of a culture and yada, yada yada. But the prioritization of the culture, the embodiment of the culture really starts with the C E O, especially within startup companies. And if that individual values design, design will be one of the values, if they value engineering over everything else, that's what the culture's going to be. And even if the CEO loves design, super passionate about it, places it front and center in the organization over time as leadership comes on board to run that design organization, if they're not taking same, if they're assuming the same burden that the engineers are or the marketing people are in terms of stepping up and taking on, I own this milestone, we will deliver these things if they're not willing to make that commitment, that's where you should question your leadership. Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
If you have
Matthew Holloway:
A chief design officer, an VP of design, VP of design, director of design, head of design, whatever, and they're not willing to basically put a stake in the ground to say what their value is what their team's value is, and how their team is delivering value for that company, that's a big red flag for me. A lot of times the designers are like, well, there's no metrics. It's, I make the design in itself evidently better. And to, which is like, yeah, that's the equivalent of you walking into your parents' dinner party and saying, Hey, I drew this picture. Validate me. When you're five years old,
An instant, you're not at the table with the other people. You're not at the big table, right? Cause you're not willing to put any skin in the game. You wanna make sure that your design leadership is willing to make commitments and other, their team has a purpose. It's, it's very hard otherwise to kind of manage a design, design debt and a engineering debt is a well-known thing that has to be addressed because the engineers, until we pay down this debt, we can't meet this milestone. We can't achieve this k p design it. It's still very novel for a design leader to actually track the design debt on a product and be able to say, we can't meet this K P until we pay down this design debt. And the actual cost of having a very inconsistent set of micro interactions with things or the words are different, the icons are different, the shades of gray are different, whatever. It's like this is contributing to the customers not being satisfied with our products. And if we get those things paid off, our customer satisfaction score will go up.
Brendan Jarvis:
I come back to the brooding teenager here. Yeah. Sound sounds like, and I'm not afraid to go into this with you, and you are clearly not afraid to talk about it because it is the elephant in the design industry's room, the biggest one at the moment. It is this idea of the table and the why aren't we at it? And it really sounds like what you are suggesting is that the reason we're not at it is actually more than we are is because of ourselves.
And when you've said, and I'll quote again, you said that designs been at the table since the 1960s, just not designers. And you went on to say, the unfortunate truth is that the designers who had been the champions were not interested or more often not capable of having objective business discussions. So they were never invited to. The big table would design leaders who have an aversion to numbers to business, maybe even just to the general idea of what it means to work in a profit profitmaking enterprise. Would they be better off if they embraced the dark side, if you will, and went and got an mba?
Matthew Holloway:
Well, I don't think that's the dark side. First of all, we'd have to have a conversation about, to me, the dark side is creating a weapon system. It's like right,
Brendan Jarvis:
Designing,
Matthew Holloway:
Designing chemical weapons or something would be the dark word. I think design leaders who can have conversations about business are very valuable and can have a lot greater impact than the design leaders who just talk about design engineering folks in the engineering side of the house who find themselves in leadership roles can talk about business. They can also talk about engineering, but they don't just talk about engineering. They don't just talk about algorithms. Glowingly saying like, oh my God, we have this new algorithm and we have to roll it out because it's such a cool algorithm. It's going to be great. No, they framed that up in terms of business impact, being able to say, we can reduce our costs this way, or we can automate this process this way, or we can do these other things. Designers who can do the same thing from a design perspective, they can be at the table.
And a lot of organizations that I've worked with, it's very clear that the executives value design, they understand that design is a core differentiation and that it's something they have to have as an organization. They don't know how to manage design teams themselves. And so they go out and find somebody who's going to manage the design team. But there's the difference between managing the team and managing the function of design. And so a lot of times these design managers wind up being people managers, and they may have huge organizations of hundreds of designers, and they're looking at the operations and the processes and the tools. They're doing team building exercises and coming up with design systems and all these types of things. And they're managing the design team as a set of people, but they're not playing a role at the strategic level in the organizations because they're not able to translate that into the business strategy. And so they're relegated to you manage the designers, make sure they're happy, well cared for motivated. Other people will come in and give them work to do, and they'll be talking about why this product has to be this way, or what this customer needs. You as the design leader just have to make sure everything's taken care of in terms of the base needs. It's like
Brendan Jarvis:
The delivery,
Matthew Holloway:
The delivery and infrastructure. And so they're not really prepared to engage at that level of saying, why are we building this product and why aren't we building this product? And have we ever looked at this market and doing a quick analysis? I think we could probably increase our market share over here by this percentage if we did these types of things. And
Brendan Jarvis:
People will say, though, how do I know or who coaches me on how to do that? It's very easy for the design leader to sit back and go, well, that's not my thing. I'm a designer, and I know this is something that you've railed against in your UX Strat 2021 keynote that you delivered when you opened that conference last year, and you finished off with a really interesting section. And there was tons of value in the whole talk, but the end of it's particularly good and people should definitely watch it. You had a seven point plan, and I'm just going to read these out really briefly and then you can riff off this however you like, but you said under the title of How to Earn Your Seat, first of all, learn politics, then know how your company really makes money. Then know something your C E O doesn't and deliver impact with that knowledge. Do it again. Five is take responsibility for a specific financial target that, and then meet or exceed those targets. Six is Do it again, and seven is joined and found another company and do it all over.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yep. That's it. Mike, drop moment. We're done. No, I'm just kidding.
Matthew Holloway:
Yep. That's it. I know. Yeah. Yeah. The trick about knowing something your c e O doesn't know and delivering value against it, that to me is the fastest way to get a seat at the table. It's not about risking bruising their ego. It's not about, well, I guess you could, depending on how you show up and tell them that something they don't know [laugh], it's
Brendan Jarvis:
Plenty of ways to muck that up.
Matthew Holloway:
Yeah, there's plenty of ways to, yeah, definitely. But assuming you do it authentically and sincerely and from a place where you wanna benefit the organization and not shame your C e O or the other leaders, being able to deliver that kind of value is critical. It's having that insight is what got all of them that seat, being able to do that, and in terms of who mentors me to do that, it's like, who mentored the VP of engineering to do that? Who mentored the chief marketing officer to do that? That's just the nature of moving up in an organization if that's what you want. The other piece that's super critical is a lot of times designers think they want that seat, but when they get it, they realize, Ew, I don't want to be here. When you're involved in a conversation at Siteworks, it's like myself and the other two co-founders, at one point we had to have a conversation about where are we taking this company and what does this mean? And we're going to have to cut people loose and we're going to have to realign things. And you're having a direct impact on people's lives and on your own life, and you have to be very objective about it. And it can be a very uncomfortable set of conversations.
Brendan Jarvis:
I had to make my first person redundant when I was 21 for the company. The design studio I was working for, and this was someone who was 30 at the time, had just gotten married, was my senior by years. And I still remember that sense of dread and a little bit of self-loathing. It was the time of the G ffc and just the gravity of the situation is, it's a horrible thing to have to do a necessary thing, but it's definitely not something that if you don't want to be in that situation, then leadership is certainly not the seat for you.
Matthew Holloway:
And you know, can't always find a creative solution to that problem. And so I think for designers wanting to get the seat at the table, it's like they should know what they're getting into before they really talk about it and really try to do it. But being able to repeat the success of identifying an opportunity that your company hasn't exploited yet and taken advantage of yet, and deliver value on that. Being able to take financial responsibility for one of the key milestones or aspects of the company, that's where the real skin in the game comes in. It's businesses, generally speaking, most businesses wanna make money. And so if you're one of those people accountable for the actual making of the money, your relationship with the other leaders changes dramatically. There's an individual I worked with at one large company who was notorious. If you got him into a conversation he was uncomfortable with, he ran sales.
He would just simply ask you, how much money have you made for the company today? Because he can tell you how much money he made for the company today. And so it's not all fun and games and it's not happy. Joy, joy, they get all these companies and each one's different, and some of them are much more laid back and chill, and others are much more serious and cutthroat, which is where the politics, the very first thing about politics comes into play. I tell a lot of the people I mentor, ask them, it's like, have you read Machiavelli? And they're like, oh my God, that's horrible. No, it's not like you can use Machiavelli for good the same that you can use it for evil and allegories in there. One of my favorites is, I forget which chapter it is, but there's one about when to build a castle and when not to build a castle, you're, and it's basically, if you're a prince and your people love you, you should not build a castle because you'll just tax them heavily.
You'll take up all the resources and they'll resent you. If your principality is attacked, your people will defend you because they love you. However, if your people hate you and they already resent you, then yes, you should definitely build a castle because you're going to need to defend yourself against them. And whoever comes in to try to invade your principality, which is just a nice way of, if you have a great relationship with your coworkers and your team, which is what you should try for, you don't need to build an empire. You don't need to put up all these defenses, but you may want to think about some defensive postures and gestures. So stuff in the organization. If you're not well loved and well respected at which hatred could probably fix that so
Brendan Jarvis:
That there's some nuance there, it would be easy to listen to that story and go, if I'm not the prince or princess or prince person who is having all their people love them, then I must be the bad person who has to build a castle. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the relationship that you have with your peers is going to be cordial, at least to begin with. And I imagine you experienced some of that at S A P. You kind of touched on that it wasn't because you weren't necessarily doing a great job or you weren't loved by the people that mattered, it's just that you needed to do practical, take practical steps to ensure that you were able to protect the transformation that you were there to see through,
Matthew Holloway:
And to also help them understand that while it was taking more time than perhaps they wanted, it was going to help them in the long run. And
Brendan Jarvis:
Matthew, you are someone who has brought a lot of depth to the work that you've done as a design leader. And clearly from our conversation, you deeply care about design playing a role at the highest levels of business and designers. Sort of stepping up into that role, what's, what story or stories do you suspect that design leaders are telling themselves that they need to reexamine if they're going to have greater impact and more enjoyable careers?
Matthew Holloway:
Well, I think the main one is kind of this assumption that because you have the title that it somehow magically grants you all sorts of access and influence. And a lot of companies individuals who may not even have a title but who have been at that company for a very long time have far greater influence than somebody who has a string of titles or executive senior global vice president type of thing. And so I think that's one story is to really be aware of the influence that you have regardless of the title that you may have. And I think that that's probably the big one. The other one is that design as a corporate resource or differentiation or a practice of design is independent of the people. It's like saying, this is a technology company, but only as long as this same group of engineers exists inside of that company, they would be a technology company.
Even if they swapped out that entire engineering team, they would still be a design or an engineering company. And the same is true with design. It's like they could still be design-centric, even though they may swap out that set of designers, they're still a design-centric company. Apple, the team that brought you OSX and the original iOS and all of the hardware and everything, some of those people have moved on and done other things, but you still have Apple as being the design icon that it is. And so I think that's the other piece is that not to assume that they are the only reason that company has design or that they're the only capability that company has to bring design, I think is probably the other big lesson. If it's a design led company, it's going to be design led company. Even if you leave, they're still going to be design led company. Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
So keep your egos in check people. Yes, you're part of it, but you're, you are not whole. So, right. It's a really important couple of points to finish on there. Matthew, what an excellent, thoughtful, and wide ranging conversation. Thank you for taking the time today to share your stories, your expertise and experiences with me.
Matthew Holloway:
Thank you. It's been a great opportunity to chat with you, so I hope it's valuable. So.
Brendan Jarvis:
Most definitely. Most definitely. Matthew, if people want to find out more about you and all your wonderful keynotes and art and the great things you've contributed to the design community, what is the best way for them to do that?
Matthew Holloway:
They can probably reach me through my website at MatthewHolloway.com. They can go from there.
Brendan Jarvis:
So, perfect. Yeah, thanks Matthew, and you, to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Matthew and all of the great things we've spoken about. If you enjoyed the show and want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe, and also pass the conversations along, pass the link to Brave UX to someone else in your network that you feel would get value from these conversations at depth. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, you'll find me pretty easily. Or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Matthew Holloway

Design Maturity Starts with Designers' Maturity

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