Jesse James Garrett
Flying the Jolly Roger While Sailing With the Navy
In this episode of Brave UX, Jesse James Garrett reminds us that once we were pirates, encourages us to understand how soft-power works, and to know and be true to our red-lines.
Highlights include:
- How are UX designers like classical composers?
- What is the role of personal preference in design?
- Should design leaders leave strategy to product leaders?
- Is design leadership about actively resisting the status quo?
- What have you learned as a result of the “no’s” in your career?
Who is Jesse James Garrett?
Jesse is the Principal Leadership Coach of Intentional Associates, the executive design leadership coaching practice that he founded in 2020 to help design leaders develop the skills to lead with greater purpose, intention and creativity.
Many of you may know Jesse for his influential model from the year 2000, “The Elements of User Experience”, and his book of the same name. It’s this foundational thinking, at frontier of UX, that has helped to inform, inspire and enlighten multiple generations of UX designers.
Jesse was also a Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path, one of the original and most renowned User Experience consultancies. At Adaptive Path, Jesse worked tirelessly for 13 years to put UX design on the enterprise map.
Throughout the years, his writing, teaching and public speaking has been unfailingly generous, taking him all over the world, including to events such as UX Lisbon, UX Salon, and USI.
Jesse’s contributions continue through the “Finding Our Way” podcast, a show about design leadership that he co-hosts alongside Peter Merholz.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace 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 little 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 Jesse James Garrett. Jesse is the Principal Leadership Coach of Intentional Associates, the executive design leadership coaching practice that he founded in 2020. And it's through his coaching work that Jesse is helping design leaders to develop the skills to lead with greater purpose, intention, and creativity.
- If that sounds like important work. It is, and it's only the most recent chapter in what has been a career overflowing with activity that's helped people to make sense of UX and of each other. Many of you may know Jesse for his influential model from the year 2000, The Elements of User Eexperience and his book of the same name. It's this foundational thinking that was at the frontier of UX that has helped to inform, inspire, and enlighten multiple generations of UX designers. Jesse was also a Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Adaptive Path, one of the original and most renowned user experience consultancies. At Adaptive Path, Jesse worked tirelessly for 13 years to put UX design on the enterprise map. In 2014, Adaptive Path was acquired by Capital One, and Jesse took on the new challenge of going in-house as a Senior Director of Digital Design.
- In that role, Jesse helped Capital One to build out its design capabilities and to coach its design leaders. Throughout the years, his writing, teaching and public speaking has been unfailingly generous and has taken him all over the world, including to events such as UX, Lisbon, UX Salon, and USI. He's the Co-Host of the Finding Our Way podcast, alongside his good friend and previous Brave UX guests and fellow Co-Founder of Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz. Finding Our Way is a podcast about navigating the opportunities and challenges of design leadership. So, if that sounds like a bit of you, definitely check it out! Jesse is also widely credited as the person who invented the term AJAX. For those of you wondering what that is, it is not the household cleaning product, or the Dutch club football team. It stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. So yes, an acronym within an acronym. Anyway, enough from me. I better welcome Jesse to this conversation on Brave UX. Jesse, welcome to the show.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Thank you, Brendan. It was a wonderful introduction. It's wonderful to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is wonderful to have you here too. Jesse and I couldn't help but notice something on your Twitter profile and that was the emoji flags that you fly there. I was wondering, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing with me the significance of those flags starting with the jolly Roger.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well, the jolly Roger, it comes first for a reason. I think that there is an element in everything that I do that is a bit of standing on the outside and questioning from the outside and maybe sometimes instigating some change again, usually from the outside. And I feel like the pirate flag kind of represents that I'm out here sailing the high seas with no navy behind me and kind of pursuing my own agenda.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I, I've certainly am preparing for today, watching some of your challenges that you've put out there to the design community and some of the content that I've watched. I definitely got that sense. And while we're on this topic of standing on the outside and this kind of pirate attitude towards what it is you've done with your career, how did you navigate that tension? If there was any tension when you made the move from being the captain of your own ship with Adaptive Path into a larger organization like Capital One?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- It was challenging. It was definitely challenging to my practices to how I engage with people from day to day and to my sense of my own identity. Things really significantly shifted for me in going in-house and being a part of a much larger leadership team and a much larger organization. And so within Capital One, I sought out as much as I could to be the inside outsider, and that took the form of a few different things. Usually I was working on cultural initiatives that would bind this very large distributed team together in some meaningful way that would provide us a sense of a common philosophy or a point of view about the work that we were doing. That role in and of itself meant that I was not part of any team because I was supporting all of the teams, and it meant that I was necessarily asking a lot of questions all the time about what was working, what wasn't, and how we could make improvements. And that is ultimately what led me to doing the leadership coaching work that I'm doing now, because I came to realize that the most powerful improvements that I could make inside that organization had nothing to do with design process or design practice, and had much more to do with the leadership skills of the people who were running those teams.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I definitely want to come to your work and that capacity and some of the things that you've been able to help other design leaders to overcome. Let's just come back now to the rest of the flags before we move on. What do they represent?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well the next flag is the rainbow flag, the pride flag, which represents something personal about me, but it also represents, I think, something about the way that I choose to engage with the world, which is from a stance of inclusion. And I just feel like it's so central to everything that we do as user experience designers, that we broaden our understanding of the diverse range of experiences that other people bring to what we create. And it's that I think breadth of empathy that is necessary, that breadth of understanding of people who are different from us, that is literally why we do what we do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There is a popular view on empathy or a increasingly popular view on empathy, which seems to be, it's talked about too much. We get it. We've ticked that box, and I seem to think that there might be some danger in us writing that off in the way that we have come to. And I understand that we need to be careful in terms of how we apply empathy in the craft of our work, but I totally hear you with what you're saying about how it is really the central tenant behind what we do in this field.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, yeah. Well, I've said, I, I've said in the past that empathy without compassion is so sociopathy if you're seeking to understand without seeking to give care. To my mind, that's a distortion of our mission as user-centered designers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, very well said. And you've got, I think, two few further flags on that list. One is the US flag and the other is the Canadian flag.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- The other is Canadian, the Canadian flag. I was raised here in the United States. My parents are American, but I was born in Canada and mm-hmm My connection to the Canadian culture and the Canadian people has always been strong throughout my life, despite the fact that I've only been able to visit a handful of times. So it just is something that speaks to who I am and my values.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, really, really good. Now, as before we were recording, I mentioned that I'd also spoken with your good friend and format, adaptive Path co-founder Peter Holtz. Now Peter's the person who's credited with creating the term blog, and you are the person that's credited, as I mentioned in your intro with creating the word Ajax.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This can't be a coincidence, can it? Well,
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Is it a coincidence? I think that Peter and I, throughout our careers, both individually and together, have sought to grapple with the emerging and the unknown, and he was doing that when he gave a name to Personal Publishing in the late nineties with the word blog. And then I was think following a similar pattern when I came up with Aja in 2005 to talk about the dynamic web
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what was it about Adaptive Path or perhaps the way in which you and Peter have approached your careers that made the agency, and there's a number of other notable that have come out of that agency. What made it so creative and so influential?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think Adaptive Path was the right company for the moment. We had a culture of inquiry and exploration, and especially a culture of sharing our discoveries. It was exactly the right thing for design at that point in its evolution, because there was still so much to unpack, still so much to discover and still so much education to, to help the people around us understand exactly what the ramifications were of what we were discovering about how to do this work well. And so there was a certain restlessness about adaptive path as a result. In addition to being a consulting business, we were also an events business, and we ran conferences and workshops all around the world as a fully functional standalone business that drew on our consultants, our designers, as event programmers. And what that did for us, it forced us every year to get together as a group and ask ourselves, what are the most important topics we could be talking about right now?
- What are the voices that we want to amplify in the conversation about design right now? And all of our designers were invited into those conversations about the conversation. That constant inquiry kept us on our toes. It meant that we couldn't just pick a set of topics and say, these are going to be the things that you're going to hear us talk about forever. Every year we had to have new stuff, we had to have new inputs. And that I think, fed our creative practice at the same time as it was feeding the practice of the rest of the UX design community.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a very virtuous cycle. And I spoke recently with Lou Rosenfeld around something similar actually. And he said to me that if you really want to understand what's important in an industry then j, and how that's evolved over time, go back and have a look at some of the most important conferences, programs, and you'll see how that conversation's unfolding. I went back and had a look at one of the conferences that you spoke at, which is in 2014, and you delivered your talk, which was called Design for Engagement at UX Lisbon. And you said, and I'll quote you now, you said, I feel really fortunate to have been part of user experience as a field. It's been a fascinating and exhilarating time to do this kind of work. Now, that was eight years ago, and we've talked about how adaptive path was quite important in the genesis of promoting UX across the world into enterprise. So thinking about where you were in that place eight years ago, and then thinking about where you find yourself now, how do you feel about the field today?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Wow. Well, that is a big question in part because the field is so much bigger now. I mean, I think for me, the scale is the part that is really hard for me to get my head around because we went up a hockey stick curve in the last few years, such that the dynamics of a professional community at the scale that I was accustomed to when we were starting out, they don't apply anymore. The professional community is far too large. There are communities within communities in UX now, so it's hard to sort of paint the whole field with one brush anymore. Anymore.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we think about that, we think about that growth, that scale that's emerged. The fact that no longer it sounds like can know everyone who is influential within the field, where that may have been the case going back 20 years or so, it sounded like there might be a sense of loss there for you.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well, I think they're inevitably is a bit of wistfulness for a smaller, more closely knit community where you really could know everybody and meet them and have those conversations about ideas that are really hard to accomplish when it's just people sort of lobbying comments at each other over Twitter and LinkedIn. But at the same time, those small, tightly knit communities tend to fall into dogma, into group think, and they tend to fall into lockstep in ways that I as a pirate find uncomfortable. So in a lot of ways, I really feel like the growth of the field is the best thing that could happen to the field to have thousands upon thousands of people pouring into it with their own perspectives, with their own backgrounds, with their own creativity and their own ideas. Now along with that comes an inevitable sort of dilution of some of those ideas.
- It's fascinating for me because you know, mentioned my book, the Elements of User Experience, which has been in print for more than 20 years now. And for a lot of people, I meet people all the time for whom they consider that work such a foundational part of their own practice, that they just assume that everybody else around them has read it too. I can tell you, I meet people all the time who have been in UX for years and have gotten themselves very well educated without ever coming across my work for me. Of course, I would like to extend that influence as far as I can, but also it's not all on me anymore. That feels good.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a, it surprised you, the difference in awareness, but also the reactions that have people have had to the work that you did 22 years ago now. Yeah,
- Jesse James Garrett:
- It's really, it's extraordinary. I mean, at the time that I published the book, I was advised by another published established author of tech books to brace myself for what was going to most likely be a very short lifespan in the marketplace, because that's the nature of these books because technology is always moving on, and our understanding of the practices are always moving on too. But there's something about what was captured in that book that has continued to speak to people despite all the changes of technology and design process in the last 20 years. And that is, it's a wonderful unexpected surprise. And the impact that it has had and continues to have is just such a wonderful gift to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me. From what I understand, you created that elements model to help people to have constructive conversations while creating the things that they were creating while creating digital products. And you've said, and I'll quote you again, now you have to have that baseline agreement on here's the landscape, here's what we are working on, here's what we are trying to accomplish together. And the model provides a useful tool for people to find that common ground. Now, this encouragement of collaboration, of seeking common ground, this seems to me, at least from the outside looking in to be a central theme of your life's work.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, I don't know that I would have called it out in exactly that way, but I think you're right. I think that implicit in the work that I've done has always been trying to bring people together, trying to forge common understanding, whether that's through language or through diagrams or through introducing people to new concepts and new frames for the things that they do. Yeah, I would agree with you. That has been a strong driver for
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me. You mentioned creativity a little earlier, and creativity is a word that, at least from my experience in the field, it has not been as closely associated with what it is that we do these days. And I just wanna come back to your talk at UX Lisbon in 2014, and you were touching on in that talk that assuming this UX mindset means that we start to see the world through the lens of a UX designer. We see things as design challenges. And you suggested that composers such as Beethoven are, in fact, I think you went so far as to say they are UX designers, but you might have been suggesting they're like UX designers through the way in which they bring their music to life. And you said, and I'll quote you again now, it's subjective, ephemeral, and intangible, deliberately crafted and shaped by the composer and delivered by the orchestra. So thinking about that, could you also extend or reflect the same attribution to UX designers? Are UX designers in effect also composers?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yes. The principles of composition may be different, but I think that the point that I was making about the composer and the experience is that the work of the composer isn't writing down the music because that instantiation of the idea of the composition doesn't actually have meaning until it is realized by the orchestra. And in this way, our work is the same work because your documentation, your prototype is meaningless unless you are able to get it implemented in a way that someone can experience the intention behind it. And so that I feel like is the strong parallel between anyone working in design and any of the creative arts, not just music, but film or writing novels or painting or any of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This link between say, music and design and the role that the designer plays similar to the composer, it strikes me as quite a romantic notion to be exploring. And you created a model in that talk that explored how UX impacted people in their internal worlds through their hearts and minds, but also in their external worlds, through their senses and through their bodies. The actions that are experienced can encourage people to take now this thinking, this way of expressing what it is that we do, like I said, feels very romantic. It also feels very aspirational. And my take on the field currently is that it feels like we've lost some of this aspiration and some of this romanticism about what it is that we do. Am I seeing something that isn't there or is this actually something that has played out as we've become more corporatized, if you like?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, I think that, again, part of it is simply scale. There are many, many people coming into the field now who have never been introduced to a more romantic outlook on the work and what it means. They've been introduced to it as a way to get a good job in technology using their creativity to help other people. And that's a fine and noble reason and approach to the work. But I do think also that romantic vision has taken a few knocks when it has collided with the real world of product development and delivery, and especially the hard realities of organizations and politics and resources and priorities that end up leaving designers feeling like the level of quality that they aspire to in their work is continually just a little bit out of reach because of their circumstances.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I've heard you reflect on this reality that the people that you coach experience when they become design leaders or while they're design leaders, and I'm getting a sense that there's a very personal connection that you have to this as well, possibly from your time at the helm of adaptive path and then subsequently going internal. And you've said about this very topic you've said, when someone becomes a design leader, they often find themselves confused or just distracted by the priorities that aren't really their own, that aren't the reason they started doing this in the first place, that aren't the things that really motivate them and that aren't the things that make them successful. So this confronting reality of the organization, it's politics, it's conflicting and competing priorities. Is this a signal to those designers that have found themselves in leadership? And by that I'm imagining management, design management. Is this a signal that they need to reconsider going and go back to being an individual contributor?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I don't think it necessarily means that. Well, one thing that I say on my website, [laugh] about design leadership is that leadership is a design problem. What I find is that a lot of leaders, when they are elevated to that leadership role, they feel like they have to leave design behind. And in a lot of ways they do. They have to get out of the weeds of making line item design decisions in some really crucial ways. That doesn't mean they have to leave their design skills behind in their design mindset. And in my work with my clients, I approach designing their role and designing their organization as just as much of a creative process as any of the creative processes they were familiar with from being a designer previously. So I think that it's a matter of shifting their focus and while not leaving the skills behind and not feeling the need to like, oh, I've been moved up to the executive offices now I better go get the suit cuz the suit might not fit you and the suit might not be who you are and the suit might not actually give you the tools that you need to be successful.
- And by the suit, I mean just adopting the patterns of leadership behavior that you see, especially among non-design executives who have different considerations and they have different things going on because again, design is at a different place and of maturity as a field and therefore within these organizations than engineering is, than even product is in most cases. And because, because the design leader has an obligation to some extent to create what I think of as kind of like a wild garden within the regimented order of the metropolis of the enterprise, and it's the design leader's responsibility to insulate that garden to some extent from outside forces so that new things can grow there, that in turn requires a shift in their thinking and a shift in their skills.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I got this notion when you were describing that of design leaders needing to understand the rules of the game so that they can know how and when to break them because the reason they were hired was not to conform. They were hired because they were flying a little bit of a jolly Roger and that it's a disservice to themselves and also to the organizations that have hired them if they comply 100% with the status quo.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, I mean it's very interesting because I talk with so many really very senior executive level design leaders who first and foremost see themselves as change agents. They see themselves as having been elevated to the role in order to upset the status quo. This when you look at a table full of senior executives, this is unique among that group of people. Nobody else has the mandate at the table to upset the status quo. And in fact, everybody else's incentives are the opposite. So it puts the design leader in a very specific and challenging place to continue to hold that ground while not burning bridges, while maintaining a constructive stance and maintaining healthy partnerships that are necessary to actually realize that vision.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just want to come back to something you were speaking about a little earlier on this topic of that confronting reality. And that is I was curious whether or not you have observed in your coaching work whether or not there's an unspoken shelf life, a clock that ticks above the heads of designers while they're in practice that forces them or encourages them to seek out leadership through management. Is there a shelf life for designers and craft?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I don't think so. I am thinking about it now. I don't think I have very many conversations with leaders who left design behind because it got bored with design. Usually they left design behind because there was a leadership vacuum that needed to be filled and somebody around them said, you're the person here who knows the most about design. Congratulations. You're our new design leader.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Of course, that presents its own challenges, doesn't it? Because if you've never been a leader, then how do you know how to lead?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Right? And if you got the job, because you are the person who knows the most about design, what that means is that the people who gave you the job also don't know what a design leader looks
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Like.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- [laugh], right.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did you get a sense then there's this feeling of building a house of cards or standing on quicksand at least initially while people try and find their way.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah. Well in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So just getting a little bit of perspective can allow you to step into that leadership void and be the one who can for the entire organization say, here's the north star, here's where we need to be going. But it takes that extra level of awareness and I think groundedness on the part of the leaders in their own values, their own sense of purpose that allows them to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You were speaking about the role of the design executive and amongst all the other executives and how that sort of sits apart from the expectations that are placed on those others, maintain that status quo. And that really does speak to me at least to this tension that exists between the design mindset of aspiration, wanting to seek a future state and helping people to move into a better version of today, tomorrow, and the engineering mindset, which to me, and again I'm simplifying here, which is that very much let's do what we can in today's terms more efficiently and effectively than we've done it yesterday. So it's a very different level of gaze when you're thinking about what it is that you're doing. Now, you've spoken about the harsh realities of being in a leadership position, and so far as that other decision makers can often not have the time to get to depth on an issue that a design leader, given the way that they've been trained and are used to working is most comfortable doing, and how that's at odds, those things at odds from one another. What is the change in approach that this reality of other leaders don't necessarily have the time to get into the details with you that you encourage design leaders to adopt?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- So much of it is just about speaking other people's language. The trouble that design leaders get into is that they tend to frame their design solutions in terms of design values, that they have their own sort of criteria for quality that are rooted in, as you put it, their training, their culture, their background, just what design practice teaches us that may be very different from those of their peers. And if you stay stuck in design language and design values, which is to say when I talk about design values, I mean principles of good design and principles of good design process and good design practice, which have some philosophies underlying them that are about think before you do anything and iterate a lot and get all the details and test everything, and all of that sort of philosophical stuff that your peers may or may not share with you. And if you leave that stuff unspoken, that is a recipe for disconnect and conflict. So being able to articulate where you're coming from in a way that connects with the values and the motivations of the people that you're sitting across the table from ends up being the most important thing a design leader can do there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I had been wondering about this aspect of collaboration across functions, and it's clear that an enterprise design can't, occu can't operate in a vacuum. You've just been talking about there that it's really important for you to understand what's going on for those peers and communicate with them in a way that they can understand you and you can also show that you understand them. And I was particularly interested in your experience and understanding of just how, if at all, important it is to understand with clarity what the incentives that those peers and other functions are specifically optimizing for.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think it's essential. Almost no organizations have incentives that align with user-centered outcomes, period. Not even for designers, nevermind for anybody else. So yeah, understanding the incentives that have been set up for your partner teams is going to help you understand how they make decisions and how they set priorities and to help you understand a bit of the implicit values underneath that,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You have also said something about the realities of design leadership that was so on the nose. So in a good way, it was such a strike of lightning clear lightning that I wanted to bring up again or wanted to bring up today, which is you said that people can say no to you and they don't have to have a reason. It's not even that they have to have a good reason, they don't have to have any reason. They can just say no. So what have you learned and changed as a result of the nos you've experienced in your career?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think I learned a lot about the difference between hard and soft power from the various times I've been told no over my career. I think that both as an in-house leader as well as a consultant in a consultant client relationship, I often either put too much emphasis or not enough emphasis on the know that I was hearing based on my read, just purely of the hard power at play, the formal authority at play. And I found myself more than once tripped up by not paying attention to the soft PLA power and the power that could turn a yes into a no and can turn a no into a yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that. Go into that a little bit more if you can.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- There are people who wield an influence that you can't detect or deduce from their title, from their business card, even from where they report in an organization. I have, I've worked with design leaders who felt they had absolute ironclad, super clear authority about things that they felt were design decisions that it turned out the product leader actually had a different level of influence with the senior executives and was able to override things that technically were not in their domain. That technical stuff actually doesn't matter when it comes down to the interpersonal dynamics and the individual conversations that actually make up a decision making process.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And so that is super useful to know and it's evident or can become clear after the fact when that soft power's being wielded. How, if at all, can people understand what that is in advance of putting their necks on the chopping block and having a bad outcome or not being able to achieve what it is they were trying to achieve?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah. Well, honestly, it's funny. The first thing that comes to mind for me is pay a little bit more attention to the company gossip. It actually matters. And if you are the kind of leader who thinks that shutting it out is going to improve your effectiveness, I would reconsider that the who people spend their time with has so much to do with the influence that they wield. And people can spend their time with people in lots of different ways inside and outside the context of Prague delivery and build that influence without you realizing it, which is why really the best way to engage with soft power is to wield some of your own and to have your own influence in the room and not to allow yourself to be constrained or bound by exactly what it says in your job description is yours to think about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And when you think about how you've built and used your own soft power when you're inside of larger organizations, what's something that comes to mind? What's an example of how you manage to do that to good effect?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I hesitate to get too specific because of the sensitivities of some of what's involved. For me, soft power is always about finding the, the alignment, finding the places where there are shared intentions and complimentary capabilities where you have shared intentions and complimentary capabilities, you have the potential for activation and you have the potential for larger scale alignment that goes beyond horse trading to try to get individual product needs or project needs met, but is more about ongoing partnership.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So this comes back to what you were saying about turning your air towards the company gossip, which can help you to understand intentions and also what we were exploring there around the incentives, the actual hard incentives that the others are under.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned in your example before around soft power in terms of the product leader actually had more influence with the executive in that sort of hypothetical now. Mm-hmm. A previous guest who you may know, Christian cruk. Oh, sure. He wrote, yeah. So Christian wrote a book recently called Product Management for UX People, and as you know from Christian, I believe he came from a content background into mm-hmm [affirmative] IA and into UX and then he pivoted into product leadership. Now that pivot fascinated me, and I like the intentional provocation that Christian brings to his work and to the design community. And we explored on, in our conversation this question of whether or not designers, more of us who are struggling in our current organization or context to achieve the kind of influence that we are looking for to be invited to that decision table, whether or not we should cross the aisle and bring a design lens to a product leadership role. What do you think about that idea?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I've been advocating for designers to get into product leadership roles for more than 10 years. Now it's the more people we can have on that side who, well, let me put it another way. The ideal product leader, they're going to have the sensitivities of a design ops leader to what it takes to manage delivery and execution. They're going to have the strategic business mindset of what we would think of as a product leisure leader, someone who is looking at how the part product is going to play in the marketplace, in the competitive landscape against all of the various business drivers and factors that are going to determine the product success. And they're going to have the design perspective, the user perspective, the perspective of the experience that's actually going to be delivered. Now, we have seen people who have that hybrid of the ops mindset and the business mindset, and we have some people who have, we see a lot of people have sort of two outta three. It'd be awesome to get more people out there. I think that a lot more design organizations would be more successful if they had more design aware product partners.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get that sense as well. I want to turn our attention now to an area of design that doesn't necessarily get too much air time, at least not on the things that I've been listening to. And that is this idea that somewhat maybe flows from what we were exploring before with Beethoven, the composers, these named creators, this idea of attribution in many other creative disciplines. And this came from a conversation I had, I think it was last year or maybe the year before with Bob Baxley, and he pointed out to me that in UX design or product design, whatever umbrella you want to put around it, that we are one of the only creative fields where by and large yourself and some of your other company that have been on this show excluded. By and large, there's no attribution applied to the work of the UX designer, hardly anyone in software and definitely no one outside of software can actually name the lead product or UX designer on their favorite piece of software, their tool that they use every day. Now I understand you also, you had a recent experience with your work not being attributed.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, I still don't know a lot about that situation, so I'm not sure how much I should talk about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So let's talk about then what is it that sits behind why is software, why is what we do in UX and design, the design of experiences where they be digital or otherwise? Why do we seem to be an exception when it comes to the attribution of the creativity and the design that goes into the work that we do?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think we've inherited several different cultures that all kind of add up to the designer being rendered anonymous. Part of it is the historic culture of software development, which is an enormous influence on what we do these days in which design wasn't even a role. So there was no designer to credit there was only a team of engineers. I remember when Adobe used to list all of the, everybody who worked on Photoshop in the About box that popped up when you loaded the software, they quit doing that because those engineers all got poached
- By other companies in software. It became a matter of protecting your talent to put an extra layer of secrecy around the product. Additionally, a lot of UX work. Initially when we started adapted path, there were no in-house departments doing this work. So any work that happened almost by definition was being done by an agency. And agency arrangements, again, inherited from other fields and no notably industrial design and also I would say advertising. We followed the practices of those agencies and those agencies don't get credit for their work except among other designers. And that's kind of the thing that has happened for us is that the only famous designers are not actually famous for their design work. They're people like me who are famous for being teachers and for speaking about the work more than we are famous for the work that we do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is this lack of attribution a good thing or a bad thing then?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- That's an interesting question because on the one hand, I would love to see designers elevated and recognized for their creativity and for the just enormous disproportionate amounts of value that they deliver to the organizations that they work for on an ongoing basis. That said, I don't know if we need more ego in design. I don't know if we need a culture of rockstar designers who roll from one company to the next, making bigger and bigger promises and gathering bigger and bigger paychecks. I'm not sure if that serves the field either. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The model that I've been wondering or trying to draw a parallel with is the way in which say something like Hollywood operates, and there seems to be this recognition that's stole out in the credits, which occupy about 10 minutes of any running movies time at the end. But I can definitely see what you're saying there about how that can feed the egos whose name is in front of whoever else's name, right on the credits. And what that means, it can lead to a host of behaviors and outcomes that are not necessarily positive.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well, importantly, I will note that those names are not all in the credits as an act of kindness on the part of the movie studios. Those things are obligations, contractual obligations that the studios are bound to by their agreements with the various trade unions that they have to work with. So the reason that you get every member of the set decorating team up there is because the union that they're a part of, insist insisted on it. We haven't had anybody insisting that we get credit for our work and we haven't had any kind of professional representation in the same way that Hollywood trade unions do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why aren't we unionized? Why don't we have that?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well, again, I think it comes from the cultures that we've inherited. Union unionization was strongly resisted in the software industries for as long, as long as I've been paying attention, I have I've known some folks who have attempted unionization. There have been some acce, some successes at Union unionization, particularly in the gaming industry, in other kinds of digital media. But in product development as a whole, no, I don't know. There's no demand for it. I'm not sure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's come back to creativity and this notion of creativity, like I mentioned earlier, it seems to me to be something that's not often nowadays associated with the field. I watched a short interview you gave with Optimal Workshop, which I think is Ah, yes. New Zealand based company. Yeah. Back in 2016, I think it was for what they called UX picnic. And you said something that made me sit up straight when I was watching this. I was like, oh, okay. This is really super interesting, which was, I don't think all design decisions have to be rationally justifiable. I don't think all design decisions have to be defensible under cross-examination. I feel like there is a place for individual voice and personal choice and just following your gut, that sounds very unorthodox and slightly pirate, Jesse.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Well, yes, you're on to me. It's an interesting thing because we were talking about how designers when as they ascend in organizations feel like they have to leave behind some of what made them designers. And one of the things I feel they often seem to feel they need to leave behind is their taste, which has served them so well throughout their careers that got them to that place where they were a good enough designer, they were judicious in the application of their taste, in their careers to create better design work. And then when they ascend to leadership, somehow the sense is that that's now off the table and that they have to turn into sort of leader bot who has [laugh] data behind everything and data helps. But I think that there is the question of if you didn't get this job because of your taste, what exactly are you here to do? If you're not using your ability to tell a good design from a bad one at that higher level, are you still leveraging your strengths or are you starting over?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And is this evidence through this tension between cultures that are either not data informed at all, which is very rare these days I would imagine, but to sort of shoot from the hip, make something that you think's great, not a lot of user research going on versus these cultures of we are just going to run a thousand AB tests on a particular page design and whatever wins out is the design that's going to go through.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, I mean, think that there's, what I've always said about analytics is that data should inform the designer, not the design. So the data is always about helping the humans make better decisions, not making the decisions for the humans. The idea that you can substitute a statistical analysis for a design choice is just fundamentally
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Flawed, and that thinking has actually led humanity to some very dark places in other contexts over the years. Absolutely. If that's the only lens at which you look at the way we make decisions.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Absolutely. And I think in a lot of ways, the pirate flag that design ought to be waving inside the organization is the flag of non-data driven decision making,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Be we, we've explored a number of times on the show the designer's role in influencing or enacting an ethical view in the work, which is fraught for many reasons. Yeah. So I was curious about your experience here where if you have been involved in, or you've had other design leaders talk to you about their efforts to introduce that humanity that we spoke about when we first started talking through an ethical lens and whether or not that's been well received or whether it's been seen as virtu virtue signaling or something else. How have you seen designers occupy that position and adopt that posture in a way that's worked or perhaps not worked?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think that we are still in the early days of design leaders really grappling with how to bring these ethical considerations into their processes. What happens is that you'll have these one-off initiatives, you'll, we'll do a speaker series or we'll do a half day offsite and we'll get a facilitator in to come and help us unpack some of these kinds of ways of thinking, but then it never turns into actual day-to-day week process stuff. The other challenge with it honestly, is that we don't always know exactly what we mean when we talk about establishing a place for a discussion of ethics in this work. The work right now it feels like is just getting to a common understanding of the ways in which we can create harm through our work, and that until we have a way to talk about the ways in which a design decision can lead to a negative outcome for people, not just the net negative outcome for an individual user, but a negative outcome for society.
- Getting to that place means defining for ourselves what a negative outcome for the individual, for soci, for or for society even looks like. What are the outcomes we're willing to tolerate and what are the outcomes we're not, again, going back to design and its role in challenging the status quo. These are not questions that most of your business executives are going to have a lot of time or patience for. I'm not sure that it's even this generation of design leaders that's going to get there. It might take another full cycle of leaders retiring and other leaders taking their place before we start to see some serious traction around that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Stuff. The danger in that changing of the guards though, in terms of what you've touched on there with the lack of definition that exists around what constitutes harm, what do we mean when we say ethics and possibly what is UX? What is design? How do we define ourselves at that broader level? I can see that going one of two ways, and it possibly won't go in a positive direction if we still operate in this sea of ambiguity around the terms and things that when we say these words, what do we actually concretely mean? It's very hard to take action on something if you don't actually fully understand what it is that you're talking about. Right. So assuming if you agree with that,
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But you don't have to, of course. But if you do [laugh] and being someone who's been in the field for the time that you have occupied the position of influence that you have within the field and witnessed the field grow exponentially, particularly over the last decade that you have, what action do you feel is critical for enough of us or enough of the people that occupy positions of influence and authority in the field as it stands, needs to be taken to ensure that when that changing of the guards happens that we're actually building towards something better than we have and we are not racing down a road of harm and actively contributing to things that call into question the entire purpose of the field that we love and work in?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- From what I've seen, each individual leader has to figure out what's missing in their toolkit, what's missing in their awareness, what's wi missing in their understanding. If you get to a place as a leader where you feel like you have got this stuff pretty much figured out how to set up a team, you know how to run process, you need how to build a healthy design engine and you're content to just do that, that's not going to be the kind of leader we need. And so for leaders to continue to push themselves, to challenge themselves, to think bigger, to be more ambitious, to be ambitiously inclusive in their thinking and to challenge every time somebody, a voice, whether it's a voice in your own head or a voice in the room that says we can't bring that level of insight, we can't bring that level of compassion to what we're doing to be the one to challenge that and say, let's find a way, let's to push beyond what's been done before. And I think that as much as we've built up this fantastic foundation of best practices to support design and product delivery, that can also be a weight on top of us holding us down if we let it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So zoo zooming out now, and we've been talking about defining things, the role of the leader and really critically thinking about what's missing and what needs to be added into the mix in order to create better out outcomes and have better impact. You have, at least in the past, you've held a fairly expansive, wide ranging view on what UX design is and that it's the type of design that operates outside of the bounds of any particular medium. And I was thinking about this, and again, it kind of ties back to this romantic and very aspirational place. Perhaps you found yourself in then and perhaps the field was in, and perhaps we should find our way back to, and it doesn't seem to me at least that that is the dominant view about what UX design is today. It seems as if other design disciplines, if I can call them that like service design for example, have done a better job and taken the strategic high ground. Is that the case?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I don't know. I don't see many organizations with robust service design practices, anything like the robustness of their user experience design practices. So I think while in theoretical conversation about design practices and how they relate to each other, service design has certainly claimed a place for itself. It hasn't claimed that place in the world yet. The conversations about experience design that are happening are happening in the context of user experience design right now. Now I would say that we are on this hockey stick growth curve for UX as a field. And so it is difficult to characterize the people who are just jumping on board as being really even on board with the same project as the folks who have been here for a long, long time. It may be that what actually is attracting those people to this work is making digital products, and that's what they want to do and that's what they want to get good at.
- But that does not mean that there is not still a contingent within the field that sees a bigger potential for it. And my sense is that this is going to be one of those things that is going to be a pendulum swing that things are going to continue to get very, very tactical and very outcome driven and process oriented as we solve some of the key challenges inherent in this burgeoning of digital product at all in the world. I mean, just think about how many more digital products there are now than there were five years ago or five years before that, or five years before that. It is such a huge rapid expansion that we need to get to a place where that has been able to run its course and mature a bit. And so again, I think that what's really interesting is the prospect of all of these people who are coming into the field now with the benefit of these past decades of trial and error on our part and best practices and other kinds of formalization of the work. My hope is that in 20 years time, they're going to be ready to go above and beyond that as leaders.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's a messy time. And recently I heard you interviewed and you touched on what you've been touching on here, which is in particular, you said in UX, in our collective thinking about the work, we have been much more comfortable to stay in the realms of user research and interface design than we have been in developing robust strategy processes. So I get a sense from what you were just saying there that may be to do with just the explosion of software and the growth in the field and that it's been important to somewhat stick to, to our knitting and to get things done in the tactical. But I did wonder, given that we have tangential disciplines to us, such as product management or product leadership, whether or not design is inherently strategic and whether or not we should just leave the strategic decisions to a discipline like product management instead.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think there are two ways in which design will always be strategic. One is in its synthesis of our understanding of the people who use what we create more than any other function in the organization design. And in particular of course, design research has the ability to give us a deeper, richer, more nuanced, more complex, more sophisticated, truer sense of the people that we serve than any of the other functions in an organization. So there's a fundamental strategic role for design to play there. I would say there's also a fundamental role for design to play in product definition through concept development and prototyping. There will always be a place for discovery through making. There will always be a place for the exploration of ideas through prototypes that are meant to push something in a new direction. You can't do that through conversations over spreadsheets. You have to do it by making an artifact and putting it in front of people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Jessee, thinking about all of the wins and maybe some of the losses that you've been involved in or that you've been associated with through your efforts as a coach, what themes or theme, if any, have emerged around the threats and possibly opportunities that you see ahead of us? We've taken quite a look backwards today. We've also examined some of the current state in our present, and we've started to turn our attention now to the future. What is it that you see out there that could be a risk or it could be an enabler for design, and that you want to encourage those who are listening to our conversation to think deeply and critically about?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- I think design's role as challenger to the status quo and as instigator of change is going to continue to present challenges for leaders of these teams as well as just the designers on these teams. They'll be challenged to figure out how far they can push meaningful change in these organizations, and they'll be challenged to know when it's time to walk away and where are the right places for them to invest, where they are sufficiently empowered and supported by a culture that welcomes the kind of inquiry that they bring. Mm-hmm. A culture that welcomes challenging what we think we understand that welcomes scrutiny of assumptions, and so continuing to seek those cultures out and to promote those cultures, I think is going to be essential for design to achieve what we all, I think see as its potential.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a great note to bring our conversation to an end. Jesse, thank you. This has been such a personally rewarding and very thought-provoking conversation. You've certainly shared some real depth of insight and some great stories today. Thank you for going to depth with me and thank you also for your outstanding, impactful and continuing contribution to the field of design. They've been greatly appreciated.
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Thank you so much. It's been wonderful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome, Jesse. It's been my pleasure. And if people wanna find out more about you and your work doing your executive design leadership coaching, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Jesse James Garrett:
- Yeah, the easiest way for people to keep up with me is my website, JesseJamesGarrett.com.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Jesse. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be available in the show notes, including where you can find Jesse and all of the great things that we've spoken about. 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 follow the show, subscribe to it, leave a review. If you've enjoyed what you've heard and if there's just one person you can think of that would get value out of the conversation like this that Jesse and I have just had, then please pass the podcast along to them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and also on the podcast platforms. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.conz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.