Peter Merholz
Demystifying Design Leadership
In this episode of Brave UX, Peter Merholz demystifies design leadership, openly shares the ups and downs of a trail-blazing design career, and how we can keep design “weird” without getting fired.
Highlights include:
- What is the fundamental job of the designer leader?
- Why do design leaders find it difficult to figure out what their job is?
- What advice did Obi Wan give Luke that design leaders need to hear?
- Why are you a design pragmatist and not an idealist?
- What do design leaders need to know about politics and relationships?
Who is Peter Merholz?
Peter is the Founder and Principal at Humanism at Scale, the consulting practice he started in 2019 to amplify the practices and potential of design teams by shaping design organisations and bolstering design leadership.
Before founding Humanism at Scale, Peter was the VP of Design at Snagajob, where he oversaw design for both product and marketing. Peter has also held positions such as Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, VP of Global Design at Groupon and VP of User Experience at Inflection.
But it is his role and the almost 11 years he invested as a Co-Founder and the Head of Design Practice of Adaptive Path - then the world’s leading UX strategy and UX design firm - that he is perhaps best known for.
In 2016, Peter co-authored “Org Design for Design Orgs” with Kristin Skinner, which was the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams.
And, last millennia, Peter coined the term blog. How cool is that!?
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. You can find out a bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. 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 Peter Merholz. Peter is the founder and principal of Humanism At Scale, the consulting practice he started in 2019 to amplify the practices and potential of design teams by shaping design organizations and bolstering design leadership. Before founding humanism at scale, Peter was the VP of Design at Snagajob, where he oversaw design for both product and marketing.
- Peter has also held positions such as Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, VP of Global Design at Groupon, and VP of User Experience at Inflection. But it is his role and the almost 11 years, he invested as a Co-Founder and Head of Design Practice at Adaptive Path. Then the world's leading UX strategy in UX design firm that he is perhaps best known for. In 2016, Peter co-authored Org Design for Design Orgs with Kristin Skinner, which was the first book to address building and managing effective in-house design teams. And last millennia, Peter coined the term blog. How cool is that? Peter has shared his perspectives across the world at events such as DesignX, devcon, UX Lisbon, From Business to Buttons and UX STRAT. And now he's here with me on Brave UX. Peter, welcome to the show.
- Peter Merholz:
- Thank you. Happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I'm very happy to have you here, Peter. And as I mentioned in your introduction, you are the person who is credited with coining the term blog. I understand that was a shortening of Jorn Barger's term web blog, and Wikipedia tells me that you did that in 1999 and jokingly. Yes. Is that true? Was it a joke?
- Peter Merholz:
- It was. I don't know about joke cuz there's no setup or punchline, but it was definitely silliness. I had a weblog. There was not that many of us at the time. We were calling them weblogs on a lark. I had on my sidebar, I said that instead of calling it a weblog, I was going to call it a We blog. I was going to shift the syllable. One letter, one letter over. People picked that up, ran with it, started referring to what I was writing as a blog. And then I happened to know the people at a company that at the time was called Pyra Labs, that a weekend little hack session created a tool to support web blogging that they called Blogger. And then it all took off. [laugh] blogger got acquired by Google. Blogging became a thing, and the word kind of now lives in infamy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did you get paid any royalties? No. As a result,
- Peter Merholz:
- No, I didn't trademark it. Yes. No, I'm, I'm a giver. I'm an open source kind of guy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh] Tell me, after all of that happening and as you said, it sort of took off, what was the most surprising thing that happened to you as a result of being that person that came up with that term?
- Peter Merholz:
- Something that's still surprising, I suppose, is over 20 years later, continued interest in and curiosity about the word and term that it wasn't a blip. That it still has this longevity. Right? There's sure, this is 1999, so the web boom was in full flower. I'm sure there's a lot of things from that era that just have died that we don't refer to anymore. But for some reason, blog has held on, even though not many people blog anymore, it still has a certain currency. So that's probably the most surprising thing. I mean, joking, something I do jokingly say is that when I die, it will still be the first line of my obituary no matter what else I have done that I coined. The word blog will be that, maybe the second sentence, after Peter Me's died of natural causes at the age of 89 years old, he is best known for having coined the word blog.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, maybe this is a bit of a carb, but will it also make its way onto your tombstone?
- Peter Merholz:
- Well if I have a tombstone, sure. Right. Who knows? I, that's outside of my control.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Fair enough. Fair enough. It's not too late Peter to declare some wishes on the show for all to see in perpetuity,
- Peter Merholz:
- Considering just how the longevity of other members of my family. I'm not planning on dying anytime soon. So there's plenty of time to prepare.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Agreed. Hey, I want to, speaking of time, I wanna wind back the clock a little bit further. I understand that you have an undergraduate degree from uc, Berkeley, and I think it's in anthropology. And while you were at uc, Berkeley, you were a resident at Coin Court, which is part of the co-op there. Yeah. What's so special about Coin Court?
- Peter Merholz:
- Wow, that is going way back. So it's funny, I'm talking to you from two miles south of uc, Berkeley where I live in Oakland. Plum Court was a co-op. It was the largest, it probably still is, the largest co-op 150 residents. What's so special about it? It was a curious place to be. It was chaos. I mean, you get 150 people between the ages of 19 and 22 living together, you're going to get a lot of chaos. My best friends from school are the people who I lived with in that co-op. Not people who also studied anthropology. I don't know any of them. But I recently traveled to Europe. Two of my friends from that co-op live in Europe, I visited both of them. I'm going to be seeing they are going to be coming back to California. I'm going to be seeing them this weekend.
- It's one of those things where you realize, I mean people, it's a cliche, but college is as much about the people you meet as it is about the things you study. Coin just was an opportunity to throw together a bunch of weirdos who wanted to live cooperatively. And the other things about probably most notable was Coin Court was one of the key East Bay venues. So East Bay of the San Francisco Bay area, one of the key East Bay venues in what at the time was the burgeoning East Bay punk scene. So Green Day played at Klein. I remember one of the residents at Klein was from Los Angeles and was friends with the, got people in the band, the Offspring. And so they played our cafeteria before they hit it big, just for the a hundred or so residents. And I remember thinking, oh, they sound good.
- I'm not a big music guy. But even I was like, they're different than other bands. They actually act, they have their act together. So yeah, it was just the kind of environment that, again, you get all these people lots of different backgrounds and thrust them together with no adult supervision. You live in the dorms, you have resident assistants and you have a hierarchy of management. At least at the time were very, I mean they felt a lot more like what people imagine or how movies portray fraternities and sororities, [laugh] kind of as a place where people like to party, don't wanna study and a lot of carrying on takes place. Yeah, it was key to my development actually. Still a huge advocate of cooperative and collaborative living.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just wanted to touch very briefly lastly on your time at Coin. Before we move on, you mentioned that it was I think you used the term formative or something similar to that. You obviously had some friendships that you've maintained as a result of your time there. It sounded to me it was quite a bohemian, chaotic cooperative space. Do you feel that in your design practice and what you had done as an entrepreneur, I suppose with adaptive path and now where you see yourself as a design leader and thought, think a thought leader? Gosh, I could have bit tongue tied.
- Peter Merholz:
- I'm also a thought thinker,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A thought thinker, [laugh] a thought leader. Can you attribute any of that? And I don't dunno if this is the right term, but that punk attitude or that bohemian attitude back to your experiences at Coin.
- Peter Merholz:
- Maybe not specifically coin. I think it's probably goes even farther back where, I mean I started working as soon as for money as early as I could when I was 14, which is as early in the state of California as you can work and have often been able to work without a lot of management. I'm able to manage my own myself and get stuff done. And so people tend to leave me alone and realize that I will do better if left alone than if they try to manage me working in an environment like CLO where it, there's a lot of, not quite on this, but autonomy and self-starter ness and necessary in order to get this thing to actually function. It's likely that I was attracted to live in an environment like that because I knew I could function well in an environment like that just given my nature.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What drove you to work at such a young age?
- Peter Merholz:
- So I had been earning an allowance. I had done small jobs for my family before then. Understood the power, the value of earning money and saving money. I mean, when I was 12 or 13, I went in with my parents and bought an Apple two, which was not an inexpensive purchase at the time in 1984 or five whenever we bought it. And they weren't going to buy it for me outright. I had to demonstrate my own I had to demonstrate my own kind of interest in it and passion for it by earning my own money. Mostly through allowance my parents gave me. But I also, I did my brother's taxes one year. I mean he had very simple taxes. He was in his early twenties and so he had simple waiter jobs or whatever, but he paid me money to do his taxes. So I would do that kind of thing. And so I always just liked, I've always been a worker and liked to work and liked to earn money. And so started when I was 14, I got a job at the Boys Club, now the Boys and Girls Club, but at the time it was just the Boys Club of Santa Monica working in the library, which meant working where the Apple two E were [laugh]. Right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I see his method in the madness.
- Peter Merholz:
- Mm-hmm. Worked my way through school. I'm one of the few people you will meet who left undergrad with more money than I started because I had
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A lot of people just got very jealous. Right. The second
- Peter Merholz:
- I had, well cuz I had scholarships, I lived cheaply and I worked and my parents contributed almost no money to my education. It was all self-generated, self earned. So yeah, I've, how I operate, there's a certain hard for me to, I haven't necessarily delved super deeply in it, but a desire for independence and autonomy and I don't like people telling me what to do, which makes me somewhat unemployable, which is why the company I worked at the longest was the one I helped start, which was Adaptive Path. I have not had a job for more than two years working for anybody else. And I am now independent because I've realized I'm all but unemployable.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about adaptive path. Most of the people that are listening to this will likely be familiar with Adaptive Path and if they're not, they're going to be familiar with some of your co-founders. Jeffrey v, Jesse, James Garrett, Janice Fraser, lane Becker, Mike Kovski, indie Young and yeah, actually and past, past Brave Guest Indie Young. Oh, okay. So after a nearly 11 years at Adaptive Path, you left in 2012, which is a couple of years before the firm was sold to Capital One. Yes. Which I understand you then went on and did some contracting act. Yes. Was that leaving the firm that you started, was that a hard decision?
- Peter Merholz:
- Not at the time. I'd been there 10 years. Most of those 10 years were glorious. But 2008 there was a big financial crisis around the world that actually wasn't a huge problem for adaptive path. We muddled through that, but due to some mismanagement in 2009 and 10 there was some challenges that I ended up bearing the brunt of Cuz I was one of the few remaining founders, most of the founders left. Jesse and I were the only remaining founders by this point. And I learned that I don't, I am not good with equanimity and started to take on a lot of anxiety as the company was having. These were financial problems from a work standpoint, quality of work, all of that great. But consulting companies are cash flow businesses and when the cash, when that spigot is drying up, it's a cause for concern. And so there were a couple of forces that led to my exit.
- One was I had kind of gotten up to here with some of those challenges of muddling through. I was about to have my second child, in fact in 2011 I did have my second child and wanted to focus much more on that and family and those types of things. And then something that had been kind of nagging me for a couple years, probably starting in 2009, was a feeling that design consulting was no longer where the action was when it came to the field of design. When we started Adaptive path in 2001, design consulting was where all the interesting work was happening and conversations were happening and thought leadership was happening in innovation was happening. Not all but much of it. And that had been true for design for pretty much since the start of design as a profession going back to graphic design and industrial design.
- But by 2008, 2009 you started to see the energy shift and companies building big in-house teams and hiring amazing design. Sorry, could you, Siri likes to get involved in my conversations [laugh] hiring amazing design leaders. And the frustration I had as a consultant was handing over designs to clients and then seeing that what ends up getting shipped does not uphold the spirit of what had been delivered. And having a couple of realizations with that. One was I wanted to be in house cuz I wanted to be where the thousand little decisions are made that actually end up having a much more material impact on what gets delivered than the big idea upfront. But also, and this is something that I, upon reflection, I had been writing about almost since the start of adaptive path, but a recognition that the shape of the organization affects the shape of the design.
- One of the early assays I wrote on adaptive path.com, if I don't, you can find it in the way back machine. All the adaptive path essays are kind of lost to the mists of time right now except in the way back machine. But one of the early essays I wrote was called Organization in the Way, this was in 2003 or four. So just a couple years into Adaptive Path. And I was talking about how the silos in a company led to these crappy websites that were being launched because they reflected the organization structure. I mean classic Conways law stuff. But I was obsessing on that a year or two into Adaptive Path. So by 2009, 2010 and seeing Subpar Designs launch and my understanding in working with those clients realizing it's because those client organizations, the organizations were not set up to deliver good design. I realized I wanted to get in-house to be able to shape organizations that could repeatedly sustainably produce good designs. That's where my head was. So there was a confluence of factors that led to me leaving adaptive path and going in-house.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking back to that first day after you left the business, this is the business that you dedicated a decade of your life to. Where were you, what were you do, what did you do with the day? How did you feel that first day after you'd actually finished up and left?
- Peter Merholz:
- I honestly don't recall. I'm trying to think because I left and then I started my job shortly thereafter. I probably took the month of December off cuz I started my job in January, literally whatever the first Monday in January was. And I had left Adaptive Path towards the end of 2011. I forget if it was November, December, I don't know those details. And as I mentioned, I just had a second kid in March. So I was probably just spending time like reveling and spending some time at home with my kids. I have, my older kid is two and a half years older than the one that it was born in 2011 and probably just honestly felt a weight off my shoulder center and relief and
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Freedom. You mentioned the weight of the payroll. Yeah, yeah. And I personally, I know what that feels like and I was curious and I still carry it. So I was wondering what was that like for you that no longer having to worry about financial issues?
- Peter Merholz:
- Well yeah, I felt so by the time I left. I believe when I'm about to say is true Brandon Showerer had taken the helm of Adaptive Path and he is m was more than capable. It was a decision that should have been made years before and we probably wouldn't have had the problems that we did have. And so I could feel fine about adaptive path as a company, as an entity. I knew I was still going to maintain a strong relationship with it, but I needed a new challenge. So actually a fourth factor that I injured into this equation, thinking about consulting. So the issue with consulting isn't just that clients, the spirit of the work gets lost once handed over to clients. There was, and still largely is something fundamentally broken about the relationship between design consulting companies and their clients because of how those clients purchase design procurement processes and all that stuff.
- The way the contracts are written up to engage a design firm, start the relationship off on the wrong foot from before the companies are actually working together. And there was so much that felt so broken about it that I saw needed to be fixed in order for me to feel engaged. But I didn't have the energy to be the one to fix. It wasn't where my passion was. I was just like, I'm out, I am out of consulting. I need to get a far away from this. Things have improved in the 10 years since then though there's still a lot that's broken, particularly with how enterprises procure services, all of that just meant that when I left Adaptive Path, I was just like, oh, I was turning over a new leaf, new lease, new whatever, new leash on life, new lease on life, all those phrases and just kind of excited to see what it was.
- I had worked in house before pre adaptive path when I was at Opinions, so I was familiar with it but just wanted to dig into that set of problems and was more than anything I was excited. Since then in the last actually few years since I've been independent again only starting in 20 18, 20 19 have I started to feel regrets, probably too strong a word, but a little melancholy that adaptive path wasn't able to maintain. Because I actually think if adaptive path had gotten past 2014 and into 20 17, 20 18, it could have been that much stronger. But bygones be bygones that's all in the past. But when I'm wistful I do reflect on how adaptive path, if it had evolved could have been an interesting force for positive change today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So while I've got you in a reflective mood then, Peter, what rough edges did you have to round off moving from your own organization into someone?
- Peter Merholz:
- Well one of my challenges is I'm not good at smoothing rough edges, which is I think part of the reason I'm unemployable. But I mean that's a fair question. So I mean there were rough edges that I had even within adaptive path that I had to smooth, particularly when we went from a small tightly held partnership of seven people and then we would add, we had a couple of employees in our first four or five years, we only hired one or two PO folks. And then in year six we decided to scale. And as we started to scale, we were bringing in more and more people. And it took me a while to realize I couldn't engage with staff the way I engage with my partners. What was the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Difference? Very direct. Yeah, right. Okay.
- Peter Merholz:
- Well I'm very direct in my communication style to a fault. When you're working, when you're engaging with people who are see themselves as your peers and equals in terms of authority, status, et cetera, that's great. You're able to have that kind of sparring relationship and nobody really gets hurt if you try to engage in that mode with people who think of themselves as your staff, that you are their boss in some capacity. Even though we tried very hard not to have a typical kind of hierarchies and those types of relationships as we grew, my direct mode was perceived as aggressive as shutting down conversations, which was never my intent. And so I had to learn how to shut up, how to make space for others, a whole set of practices that served me well as I left adaptive path and moved and then in moving, what are some of the other rough edges I would've had
- Brendan Jarvis:
- To, well let's focus on listening cuz you mentioned that you needed to be more careful about what you said and I think you mentioned also you had to listen to others more. And I understand you've got a heuristic that you use or have used as a design leader throughout the years to remind yourself of that. What is that heuristic
- Peter Merholz:
- Leader speak last is that the heuristic you're referring to? I actually just said it on a tweet today. There's a tweet thread about design leadership. I won't get into the specifics, but there was a design leader who was taking issue with someone saying someone encouraging design leaders to not talk over other people basically [laugh]. And I was kind of fascinated that there's design leaders who think their job is to speak for others. Occasionally that's true. Occasionally the design leader is the representative of a team in a cross-functional setting. But when the design leader is with the team, let the team speak, the design leader doesn't need to do all the talking. In fact, the design leader should do the least amount of talking. The design leader should be shining spotlights and elevating the voices of those within their organization. And a lot of design leaders don't get that. Many of them came up with a creative director kind of agency mindset where that person, their perceived value was their vision and voice. And so they think that's their value and we need to upend that sentiment if we want to have healthy scaling design organizations. So yes leaders speak flat.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How much are we fighting against the predominant culture? I know that's quite an amorphous question, but the sort of culture we have in the west pa, perhaps more pronounced in the US specifically of the sort of hard charging a type personality you have to be seen, get a grades, be on the stage, be the center of attention, how much of the bad behaviors and design leadership are actually attributable to the pressure that the overall culture places upon us as we're growing up and maturing.
- Peter Merholz:
- Definitely that's a factor. Many design leaders I'm sure behave that way because they have been given reinforcement, I was about to call it positive reinforcement, but it's actually not positive. But they've been given reinforcement that is how to behave. And so they continue behaving that way. I do think we're seeing a shift in corporate cultures. If you read your Amy Edmondson's and your Brene Browns and your Simonson X and a lot of folks who people now listen to Adam Grants and there's a recognition of a need to lead more humanely, [laugh], lead with vulnerability, lead with listening. It's still not dominant. It probably is frankly marginal, but it's growing And I would hope those leadership practices are particularly true for design teams because of the empathetic nature that designers bring to their work. And so I would hope that design leaders would be early to embrace these more humanistic approaches to leadership because it is their teams who will most directly benefit soonest.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm going to paraphrase you here cuz I've heard you talk about the state of design leadership before and as we've been talking about there's been this large transition of design talent out of consultancy into internal teams over the last decade at least. You've said that by and large you feel that design leaders aren't prepared for the demands that leadership is placing on them and they don't really understand what the job is. So what is that job in a nutshell and why aren't people recognizing the reality of the mantle that they're assuming?
- Peter Merholz:
- Well there's many jobs. My most recent talk is about what it's called the evolving design leader and recognizes the job of the manager is different than the job of the director is different than the job of the VP or executive. So there's many jobs, but even if we start with just manager too many design leaders, as they shift from being a practitioner to a manager, think that their job is still kind of creative director or to tell other people how to do the design. And they often have trouble getting out of the details and out of the work, which means that they are no longer leveraged and they are no longer able to, they're not fulfilling their new organizational mandate, which is to enable this team that they are managing to produce greatness as opposed to be some extension of themselves making in their work.
- And so it's that flip from what does it mean to be a practitioner and a creator in a hands-on person to what does it mean to enable others to do their best work. And that continues as you grow from manager say frontline manager to middle management, which is director level. Direct directors change again though because the manager does have a responsibility for quality, creative quality because their teams are the ones doing that work. And so it's one of those challenges they have. There's a lot of critique and review but they have to be hands off or they're not leveraged. When you get to be a director, you're no longer able to do as much critique and review your job is this kind of information conduit. Middle managers good middle managers are like information traffic wardens, making sure people have the information they need when they need it. Connecting people who might need to work together in order to solve problems. They're not really problem solvers themselves, that's not their job intermediaries.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Peter, you're not really selling the design director roles particularly
- Peter Merholz:
- Struggling. No, it's a hard role and not a glorious role, not a thankful, it's a thankless role. It's a necessary one. You know work with a strong middle manager and it's like night and day. There's certain middle managers who, because of the thanklessness of this job, start hoarding power and you can do that right? Because you're this nexus of communication and communication broken in an organization is power. You end up using that as a way to wield what little power you have and make folks reliant on you in terms of understanding what's going on. That's the negative view of that. The positive view of that is you're trying to get out of the way. You're like that old switchboard operator, you're making connections for folks and then letting them do what they need to do and checking in and making sure it's okay but you're not an active participant.
- That changes again when you become a vice president or an executive because now you need to be this strategist and you need to be a business person and you need to be able to the way you help your design team. So there's this seeming contradiction when you are the VP of design, the head of design, running a design team you are helping your team most. The less you engage with them and the more you're engaging with the rest of the organization. Your job as the head of design isn't to manage down and try to control this organization and what it produces. You are most helpful to the design team because you now have access to a set of relationships with other executives that can determine strategy and provide resources That will is what will enable the design team to do its best work. And so the higher up you get in the organization, the more you are managing up and out. Which seems again kind of counterintuitive because you think the higher up you are the more you manage down cuz that's where most of the organization is when relationship to you. If you do that, you are not, you're not establishing the relationships either with your peers or your seniors that only you have access to that are what provide the decision making strategy and resources that actually are going to be what most supports your team.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it fair to say that the more senior the design leadership position, the larger the umbrella that is required?
- Peter Merholz:
- I don't know if I Say that again. What do you mean by the larger, the umbrella that's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Required. So I think you've used an analogy in the past where talking about the manager of a design team, there's that role there to provide cover Yes. From above for the inevitable poop and swoop from an exec or something like that.
- Peter Merholz:
- Yeah, so I'm thinking about this definitely at the frontline manager and even the director level the you're an kiwi so I can swear there's the idea of the shit umbrella and where there's crap coming down from above and your job, part of your job is to shield the team from executive either unhelpful executive feedback or random requests for people's time, right? Oh I just needed to I need a deck created for I need a deck created for some corporate presentation. It'll just take a couple hours and all this, there's just all this random stuff that can come at your team from executives. And so managers and directors definitely need to be the shit umbrella. Kind of keeping the team focused on what matters. The executive is a slightly different role. It dominion, it depends on the scale of the organization, but the challenge the executive has is they become the shit [laugh] that their team has to deflect from if they're not being responsible, if they're focused too much in managing down, but their role is less that kind of poop umbrella trying to keep the executives at bay and it's much more of an emissary.
- They're in these conversations constantly trying to help the other true senior executives and their peers really understand what it is that their team is able to do for the organization to get the resources they need to have the relationships they need to potentially reshape working relationships, process and practice with the other functions, product management and engineering and those types of things. And so it's less protecting shielding function when you're at that most senior level and more this, I don't know like a diplomat, high level diplomat kinda leader to leader working together to set things up to the degree to which they're a shit umbrella just trying to prevent the shit from ever even starting.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've just really clearly outlined at multiple levels of design leadership what the essential part of the role should be. Why is this so opaque for so many people?
- Peter Merholz:
- I think it's opaque not just for designers. I think it's opaque for most professionals in the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why is this right? The knowledge is out there, it exists. Why is it so difficult? Why do we struggle so much with leadership?
- Peter Merholz:
- So a few thoughts on this front in a largely speak, speak, I'll try to use I statements and speak from my experience, which is focus primarily in design. Part of it is the experience of being an employee and looking up at the person managing you and thinking that is the job is managing you cuz that's what you see. And so when you then assume that management role, your inclination is to do what you thought the other person was doing and only do that, you didn't realize if they were doing their job well, there was all this other stuff. I didn't realize that, especially as someone who I did an end run around the career ladder, we scaled adaptive path. I was able to kind of ride that wave as it grew from seven to 50. And then when I went in-house in-house as an executive, I didn't start at the bottom of the ladder and make my way up. I hadn't thought about that but that might have given me something of a different perspective than someone who had [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So just briefly on this, sorry to segue into this and you definitely take us back to where you were going with this, but when you did that, so you mentioned you did an N run around the career ladder and you went in at an executive level after you left adaptive path, did you ever find yourself looking in the mirror and doubting or seeing yourself with no clothes on? Was there ever any of that internal voice of holy shit, I'm now an executive design leader and while I'm good at what I do, I've never actually done this before.
- Peter Merholz:
- I am not one to experience imposter syndrome, just not, I think kind of in my nature given a responsibility and given other people's belief that I can do the thing. I'm like, okay, I guess I can do the thing. And you also realize pretty quickly if you're perceptive that no one knows what they're doing, right? No emperor has any clothes. So if no one has any clothes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is such a key point people, this is a huge point.
- Peter Merholz:
- If no one has any clothes, then what does it matter that I'm naked cuz we're all naked and then I'm trying to be not modest or immodest, but honest, one of the things I do well is break things down into their constituent elements and then build them back up again and kind of play with models and frameworks. When I, that's why as a UX practitioner, I primarily identified as an information architect, as an org design nerd. Most of my org design approach is very framework based levels, career frameworks and levels, frameworks and organizational charts and all that kind of stuff. And so I'm able to bring this mindset to problem solving in whatever context I'm at. And so when I became an executive, I'm like, okay, this is essentially an IA problem, let me solve it as I would solve an IA problem. And I felt pretty good about how I kind of unpack that. Where I struggle is in the interpersonal relationship aspects, I tend to get kind of lost in my
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do can I tell you something funny? So Sure. When I was preparing, I was preparing for today, I watched one of your talks, I think it was from 2010 or 2011, and you must have known the person who was introducing you. And they said something to the effect of, and here's Peter and I can assure you that Peter does really care about people [laugh] no matter what his reputation might suggest. And I thought, gosh, that is I, I don't say it's scathing, but I mean it was very honest. And I think it's interesting hearing you acknowledge that still. Yeah, even listening to you speak, actually comparing to that conference talk, you are way more fluid, obviously way more confident. You've got another 10, 12, 13 years of experience under the belt. But that is the thing that is the voice on your shoulder that as a leader had to work hard to overcome.
- Peter Merholz:
- Exactly. Being I am a compassionate person, but I am not an empathetic person and those often get confused. And so I have trouble understanding other people's perspectives in kind of an innate way, whereas a lot of designers actually do that part really well. I've never done that part well, but I want to make the world a better place for everybody and that is a value that I hold very dear. I just approach it in a way that people don't always jive [laugh] with my wavelength. Anyways, rewind. You asked about imposter syndrome, but there was I think a step before that when we were talking about, oh, leadership and why so few people understand what the job is. So I think there's a few things involved. One is what I was saying in terms of what you know about the job is what you saw someone else do.
- And what you saw them do was hopefully only a narrow part of their work because you weren't exposed to their peer relationships in their managing up relationships. And so you don't realize just how much of the job is not just managing down, but managing up and out. So that's part of it. Another part is companies are really bad at training their staff. I was just reflecting on this with last week. I spent a week in the woods at a family camp, a affiliated with uc, Berkeley. And I found myself on a hike with a lawyer who works in employment law. He ends up dealing with companies that where leaders have behaved badly, [laugh], not necessarily in a harassment or way, but just like they, they're not doing their job well. And I was talking to him and reflecting on how companies scale rapidly have hundreds of thousands of employees, they grow quickly and they just start dubbing people, managers like, oh well we're grown, we need management.
- So you're now a manager, you're promoted congratulations. And then provide almost no support to that person. Or if they do provide support, that person is expected to ask for it as opposed to it being a requirement of them ascending into that role. And what's bizarre about this is the moment you become a manager, particularly in a mature enterprise, you are now a representative of the legal entity that is that company. And if you misbehave not even again in a harassing way, just into recruiting and hiring, you ask someone their age or whatever that is illegal, you now the company is liable for your behavior and the company has done nothing to make sure that you're going to behave appropriately. And it's just bizarre. And so companies don't do nearly enough active investment in their people as they mature and grow in their careers to ensure that they are doing their jobs well.
- And so I hold companies very much, I don't know to account, I was about to say to blame, that's probably not quite right. But I hold companies to account on this because they're extracting a ton of value from these folks, but not providing the appropriate training, mentorship, guidance that these folks need in order to do their job best. So you end up with a lot of people who are making it up as they go along. And that's super disappointing. And every company I work with is basically the same. I don't know if I've experienced a company that actually invests in its people appropriately to support that kind of leadership growth. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had a conversation with Marty Kagan probably about two years ago now, and we were also talking about this issue, the lack of training and mentoring that goes on in enterprise. And he didn't experience that. He came up through h p I believe, and then he went to Netscape as he was a bit more seasoned before he left and did his own thing. But we were reflecting on that period, that sort of eighties, nineties period in the Valley at least where the tech giants of the day did have a strong emphasis on coaching and mentoring. And I think at one point he had two coaches, one in engineering and then one in product management, which he wanted to move into. And you can see the effect reflected and I don't know how directly attributable it was, but on the market cap and the value that those companies were able to create. I'm talking about the Apples and the hps and probably the Microsofts to some degree as well off the day. But you're right, it doesn't seem to be a huge emphasis. And I wonder what it communicates to the people that work there and the marketplace about what those companies actually value.
- Peter Merholz:
- Yeah, I mean that's basically pre my time. Netscape was a client of mine and at a design firm in 1996 but I was two years into being a professional at that point. So I can't know enough about eighties era and earned earlier Silicon Valley. But I can say that with the rise of the.com boom and the speed with which companies grew, and Netscape is one of them, I mean they were as guilty of this as anybody. It became, it just got kind of frenzied and something else. And this might touch on, so I call my company Humanism at scale, but I don't actually usually lead with that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's very empathetic title there, Peter.
- Peter Merholz:
- Yeah, well it's not my website. My website's peter me holtz.com, but the company name is Humanism at scale. That's all my that's my Lll C name, et cetera because I'm desiring to reintroduce humanism into the work that we do. But one of the things that's happened particularly in the last 20 years, 20 or so years, and maybe I bet this has some tangential connection to what we're talking about, is that companies are no longer seen in a humanistic way. They are no longer, and I'm not going to sit here and pine for the glory days of working for a company for 35 years and getting pensions and gold watches. And they took care of you because there was a very kind of paternalistic and patriarchal mindset there. That's not necessarily great though there's, there's probably some elements of that that we would do well to re-embrace.
- But what has happened is companies are simply vessels of financialization. They are entities for investors to extract as much money out of as quickly as possible, regardless of what they're doing, who's in there, the effects on those folks. And so this lack of connection of people to people connection that we see in these companies, I wouldn't be surprised, would also be connected to how when Milton Freeman said the purpose of a company is to increase state shareholder value. And in the nineties and two thousands and 2010s, we saw a lot of shareholder value created at companies that behaved in fairly toxic ways that, well, I guess we don't need good management cuz we're still making shareholder value and that's what matters. Right? And this disconnect between human values and corporate values I would suspect is part of this equation as to why people don't know what their job is as they grow. Cuz it's not deemed important by the ultimate leadership of those organizations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a huge issue, a very thorny one to try and solve.
- Peter Merholz:
- This let's certainly let get to the heart of my cynicism to go back to that theme. Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's draw this back down to what the design letters and the trenches are able to achieve and how they are able to evolve perhaps the way that they are leading and managing their people. And you've talked about earlier on that leadership is about leverage. This is clearly an insight that you've come to through your own experience. And I believe that Luke Skywalker, when he was making his attack run on the Death star, was given some really pertinent advice by Obi one Kenobi. And that's that advice is something that you believe can also or should be internalized by design leaders. What was that advice?
- Peter Merholz:
- Oh, simple. Obi one tells Luke to let go, right? You need to, there's a desire upon anybody, but particularly management and more than more senior management to try to control affect a specific outcome through that direct control. And that doesn't work beyond a certain point in a certain scale. And leaders need to let go of those specifics and that the details and instead focus on the broader conversation and story and let the people in the teams that they're leading be the ones to focus on the specifics.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What are some clues that people can look for that may suggest that a career in design leadership is not for them?
- Peter Merholz:
- Let me think about this for a moment. I think, well, and it depends on what we mean by design leadership cuz there's definitely distinctions between management and leadership that are worth at this point kind of clarifying. Especially as we see more organizations enable career growth, not just through management, but through what I somewhat gli refer to as super senior IC roles, individual contributor roles. We're starting to see that kind of dual track growth. As a manager, you're not going to be a well-equipped as a manager if your passion and your mojo is in making and creating and doing the work. Because almost immediately, once you start managing more than five or six people, you just don't have time to do the work unless if you're starting to then burn yourself out. And so that's a suggestion of like you're probably not cut out for the manager track if is where you get, again, your love [laugh] is through making.
- But I think one of the happy still relatively nascent developments for design organizations is there is this individual contributor track that more and more companies are adopting where you can be more, I mean, if you're truly senior, if you're operating at this principle design architect level, you've got 15 to 20 years experience, et cetera, you're still not knocking out wire frames or comps. You are focused on the practice, you're focused on strategic and creative leadership. But at some point, even as an ic, you need to be leveraged. So one of the books I have behind me is the Manager Path Manager's path by Camille Fornier. It's actually one of the best books on management I've read Super totally applicable to designers, even though it was written for engineers and developers. She actually recently wrote an article about how the different kinds of leverage that leaders embrace even as individual contributors and that holds true for designers.
- And so if what really stokes your passion is dwelling in the details, great. You're going to find a certain cap to your ability to grow. Because in order to grow as a leader, you need to be more leveraged. You need to be influencing the work of more people or influencing the what more and more customers and users are experiencing. And to do that usually means letting go of the specifics and embracing a more general or a broader purview. You also might not be cut out well you're not cut out to be an executive if you simply won't learn MBA basics and they're not that hard. But if you're not going to be comfortable with spreadsheet math, and if you're not going to be comfortable with understanding how to do the math for things like lifetime customer value and how understanding the math of lifetime customer value is relevant to design and user experience so that you can use that as a means to figure out what interventions are actually worth doing, then you might be not cut out for truly senior management.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if you are 14 and you're listening to this, start doing your family members' tax returns because that will stand you in good stead from when you're a design leader. You
- Peter Merholz:
- Need to figure that stuff out. And so Ryan Rumsey, who's a friend and a fellow individual, I don't think he likes to think of himself as a consultant, but someone who helped
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Second wave dive, right? Second wave dive people should check out second wave dive,
- Peter Merholz:
- Second wave dive. And what he does is he likes to lead cohorts through learning in that intersection of business and design. And he had a tweet thread that was a little while ago now, but I quoted in this recent talk of mine and it's specifically about that VP role. And what he says is that the VP role is a, I forget exactly the quote, but something along the lines of the VP role is a whole hell of a lot of what you avoided at every other stage in your career because it's about being an executive, it's about understanding business, it's about articulating value. You need to be able to articulate the value that your team is providing in the language that the company understands, which is likely some language of business and metrics. And so it's numbers and spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff, which a lot of people got in design to avoid that, right?
- It's unfortunate that perhaps the most visible design leader in the last 30 years is Johnny who is so idiosyncratic in so many ways that he can't be a model. And one of the ways he's idiosyncratic is he probably had to care about COGS as an industrial designer, that's something you pay attention to, but he didn't have to really worry about COGS is cost of doing cogs of cost of goods and services and it's a factor of any building, any hardware product. But he probably didn't really have to care about things like total addressable markets and acquisition costs and retention costs and engagement costs and a lot of other things that design leaders actually do have to worry about because he could had other people worrying about that for him, particularly Steve Jobs and then Tim Cook. But most design leaders in order to succeed need to be able to speak that language of business because they're working with leaders who don't understand design the way that a Steve Jobs or Tim Cook understands design. And so it's up to them to help those leaders understand design. And that means once you get to that true executive level, behaving a little bit more like a, or a lot more like a business person and an executive and a lot less like a designer,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is a common frustration that designers hold as this feeling that in their current state or their current context, they're not able to realize the full potential of design within the wider organization. And you've touched on some really key points there about, well, actually it's more about becoming more like the people that you've potentially been pushing against than you'd like to think it is. And you've said something and I'm going to quote you now, and we talked about your cynicism a little earlier, and I don't know if you wanna take it down that path or another path, but we'll see. He, here's what you've said anyway, I'm a prag pragmatist at heart. I'm not an idealist. I recognize a certain idealism. What is it going to take to actually make something happen? How are we going to get this problem solved? And if it's an 80% solution, I'm okay with an 80% solution. So it sounds like you are suggesting that some of us in design have drunk too much. Well were you ever an idealist? Yeah.
- Peter Merholz:
- So I realized this kind of starkly about myself back at Adaptive Path and I think Jesse and I have talked about this on our podcast, so I'm going to call him out by name. And Jesse was telling me years ago his frustration with client work because he would deliver amazing work for clients that would never see the light of day. Whereas he saw me when I would work with clients, I can't say I, I'm going to use an Americanism, can't say I batted a thousand. That's a baseball term for those of you who don't follow baseball I don't get it, I don't get it right every time. But the designs that I delivered to clients were more likely to be shipped and launched than the designs that he delivered to clients. And as we engaged, he realized, oh, it's because I'm trying to give them the a hundred percent solution, the best thing that's going to change everything for them, regardless of their ability.
- He realized it, or upon reflection, he realized regardless of their ability to actually deliver it. Whereas I was willing to compromise or sacrifice my a hundred percent solution and instead I took into account their organizational ability to ship as one of those factors that informed the design such that yes, it might not be the perfect solution based on the research and our vision, but it was the solution they were likely to likelier to ship that would to use a different American sports metaphor, move the ball down field, right? I don't need to score a touchdown each time. If I can get 10 yards down field, that's a win better than just staying where you are. And so that has been my philosophy throughout my work as a design leader. When I moved in-house, that was my philosophy. Whereas what I see as a design consultant now or so, basically what I am now as a management consultant for design teams.
- And one of the things that I still see are design teams or research teams that are so beholden to an ideal of quality that they kind of close ranks. They black box themselves. They're like, give me the requirements. We're going to do our magic and we're going to give you specifications and we don't want you messing with this. And that's just not sustainable. At least you need to figure out how to weave yourself into other people's work and how to weave them into your work. Even if that means ultimately sacrificing kind of that a hundred percent ideal vision of what you all could, you could maybe possibly launch because you never add that. If you hold out and insist on that, you're just never going to make change. And I'd rather make some change than hope for making the a hundred percent change.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So this sounds like an exercise in judgment. How do you judgment which battles are worth fighting and which ones aren't?
- Peter Merholz:
- So it's interesting that you talk about judgment because something that I don't think is appreciated enough is simply the value of experience. [laugh], particularly in Silicon Valley contexts and a bunch of 30 year olds who think they figured it all out but who don't actually know anything, don't understand judgment, and don't understand the value of experience and don't understand what it means to, I don't wanna say fail, but try a bunch of things and learn what type of things tend to work and what types of things don't tend to work. And so yes, it is a lot about judgment and that's actually part of the reason we need to train and mentor and grow and be very much more mindful about how we develop our leaders. Because what we rely on our leaders for is their judgment is their discernment, is their ability to navigate a situation that is uncertain, where the best way forward isn't known, and to make some calls and to make some hunches and try to nudge things forward as best they can.
- And then if it's not working out, kind of nudge it again and try to, another book that I have somewhere here that's not shown is Creativity Inc. By Ed Ka. And he talks about one of the philosophies, ATS Pixar, is that you don't want stability. Stability is brittle. Stability is actually not a thing to aim for because the moment something changes, stability breaks. What you want is equilibrium and balance in this kind of ability to constantly kind of course correct as you get new information, which is something else that a lot of firms lack is that ability to give a new information. Not like I'm not saying go 180 degrees or even 90 degrees changing course, but five degrees here, five degrees there as you're making your way towards that goal. And so
- Brendan Jarvis:
- More akin to more akin to sailing or playing a game of football, there's always another dynamic at play, whether it's the wind or the other team. And if you just stick to your original plan, while you might still have the same destination, you're going to find yourself dead in the water or losing the game princip.
- Peter Merholz:
- And so that's where to get back to your question around judgment and what we were talking about before in terms of idealism versus pragmatism, knowing how to navigate, if we use the sailing metaphor, how to navigate those choppy waters. If we get out of the realm of metaphor, right? Maybe you've got a product management partner who's on board, but the engineer is being intransigent. And so there's certain strategies you take there, but if it's vice versa where the engineers are on are bought in, but the product managing partner is being difficult, you're going to use different approaches and that kind of judgment to know in the moment this might work here, this might work there to be much more, something that design leaders don't often recognize. And this is probably true of product development leaders. I think folks outside of product development get this better sales and marketing et cetera, is just how much leadership is relationships and simply being a human with other people and leaning into that humanness with other people.
- Whereas I think in product development, because it's so technical, we tend towards assuming that the best solution will win out when in fact what wins out is that person who plays politics best. And so be the person who plays politics best, just use that playing politics as a force for good because this becomes this other issue that design leaders struggle with is like, well that feels smarmy. It feels backhanded, feels disingenuous. Well if the goal that you believe in, if that's how you achieve that goal that you believe in, play those politics and not the evidence might not win out if you haven't yet. There's no braver contrarian out there than Erica Hall and she and I talk a lot about this kind of stuff and Erica, she works with research teams who think that simply by having evidence, they should be able to persuade others.
- And she's like, no, that's not going to work. Look around when his evidence changed people's minds. And instead, it's very much about the stories that people tell themselves or that organizations tell themselves. And our job is to figure out how to take what we're doing and frame it in the story that others are telling themselves. So again, it's not to be disingenuous, it's not to lie, it's not to fabricate, but it is to shape a frame in a way that others will be receptive to that message. And that's something design leaders need to get way better at that. I think folks in other disciplines, marketers kind of that's their job are just tend to be better than design leaders. But yeah, so that's something Storytelling, persuasion, again, understanding how to communicate and relate with others so as to influence them. That's not a sin the job,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Especially if the outcome that you are seeking is a positive outcome. Like you said, it's not a sin to help people to see what it is that you see without beating them about the head with a stone tablet, which you just assume that they can read. Exactly. Is actually probably nothing more empathetic than trying to influence people positively. That is design an end or is it the means?
- Peter Merholz:
- I think design is a means. Design is a tricky word. It's the one that is, it's still the best single word that we have. But there's a reason I don't use the word design in the name of my company and I use the word humanism. I think design is a means towards humanistic ends. I've said this in talks particularly I think my design at scale talk, I can't remember now. They all blend together. I see design though the word design and the concept of design as this Trojan horse. It's this thing that these organizations now recognize they need, but they don't usually understand all that they could be getting with it. And as as design leaders, I think what we recognize is, oh, design is the word they get. But wi with design we can bring in research, we can bring in content, we can bring in all these humanistic endeavors that can help these organizations do better in terms of how they engage with their customers, with their users, with themselves. So I see design as a means to a broader humanistic end.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Peter, I'm just mindful of time. I'm going to ask you a final question and then bring the show down to a close. While you've said that you are not an idealist, you are clearly someone who believes in the power of design or humanism, and I'm framing this as your inner rebel, which sometimes comes out in the things that you've said to the design community. Now you've called on designers too, and I'm going to quote you again now keep design weird. So how should designers do that? How should they push back against the dominant paradigm that exists in their organizations, whether that be agile or something else with enough force that they're able to affect the kind of positive change or humanism that they're seeking but not so much force that they get fired?
- Peter Merholz:
- Yeah, this is the job figuring out that balance and one that I am better at teaching than perhaps doing myself. Those who can't do teach, I think this is where that ability, and there's some contradictions that emerge a as we unpack this, keep design weird is something I say and we wrote about it in the book to remind designers that what makes us, I don't wanna say special cuz that others us, but what makes us interesting within these organizations that we operate in is that we are approaching problem solving in a different way than how others are doing it. So we're bringing kind of a diversity of perspective and thinking styles, which is good, that is healthy in an organization and we kind of need to protect that though because while these companies say they want design and get the sum that there's this value in having designers in this organization, the dominant culture tends to be very mechanistic, tends to be very numerical analytical.
- And so their nature is to try to squash what makes design interesting. And so the job of the leader is to protect what makes it interesting, but not to other design from the rest of the organization. You have to figure out ways of still weaving it in. And we were talking earlier about judgment and balance. It's continually kind of finding that balance and I would say probably nudging it forward into a more and more design friendly way. So this be leads into things like change management or transformation management. I actually think I'm one of those design leaders who's more supportive of is of matters of design thinking, design sprints, those types of qualities and helping others understand a little bit about design and the power that design can have as a way to keep nudging things forward in a design friendlier way. So you don't want design to be the black box, but you do need to protect this design organization from just accommodating to the dominant culture and no longer being weird.
- And so the job of the design leader is to continually operate at that interface, making sure that designers are able to be their full designer selves but not be seen as so foreign as to be a rejected by the host and to continually, so the design leaders maybe can't be as weird, right? Because they're the ones putting on the suit and tie, but they recognize their job is to enable that weirdness within a context that could otherwise squash it without their ability to, I don't wanna say protect it cuz it, that feels a little paternalistic, but champion it [laugh] continue to advocate for it and help the rest of the organization understand the value of this kind of swirling chaos that is good design and give them confidence that it seems like it, there's a lot of uncertainty and confusion, but good things will arise. We just need a kind of allow the design organization to do the things it does well and we will all reap that benefit.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like design is a benevolent virus.
- Peter Merholz:
- [laugh], hopefully.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey Peter, I've really enjoyed the conversation. Like I said, I am mindful of time. This could have gone much longer. There's so many more topics I would've loved to have covered with you, but I'm really pleased about the ones that we did cover. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me and also for your continued contribution to the field of design for the past 25 or so years.
- Peter Merholz:
- Well, thank you for the opportunity, for the invitation, for the engaging dialogue and I look forward to further conversations.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds good. You're most welcome. And it was definitely my pleasure. Peter, if people wanna find out more about you, what is the best way for them to do that
- Peter Merholz:
- Three ways. My website, petermerholz.com, my Twitter @peterme, or on LinkedIn, Peter Merholz. Pretty easy to find.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Peter. And to everyone who'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 Peter and all of his wonderful work. 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 a review, subscribe to the podcast, and also pass it along to someone else that you believe would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.