Andy Budd

Episode 108
Brave UX

Design Leadership is Poker not Chess

In this episode of Brave UX, Andy Budd speaks frankly about designers’ limiting beliefs 🙉, the siren song of perfection 🦄, and how to start playing business better ♠️.

Highlights include:

How does one wrangle sharks at the Great Barrier Reef?
What is the best way to ensure design is valued?
How many designers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Why should designers start playing poker and stop playing chess?
What is the most limiting belief that design leaders have?

April 18, 202301:18:37

Listen on:

Who is Andy Budd?

Andy is an independent executive product & design leadership coach and a venture partner at Seedcamp, Europe’s most successful seed fund, investing in over 450 companies who have gone on to raise over $7 Billion 🌱.

Before joining Seedcamp, Andy was the founder, managing director and then CEO of Clearleft, arguably the United Kingdom’s first User Experience consultancy 🚀.

During his 17 years there, Andy relentlessly promoted the value of design and founded two product businesses - FontDeck and Silverback 🦍. The latter a popular usability testing app for Mac.

In 2008, in the midst of the GFC, Andy founded UX London 🇬🇧, Britain’s first major user experience conference. It would become the longest running UX conference in all of Europe, and it was an event that he lovingly curated until 2021.

Andy is also the founder and curator of dConstruct, which was the first digital design conference in the UK and Leading Design, an annual event and 2,000 strong community that brings together some of the world’s best design leaders 💪.

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 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 keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
My guest today is Andy Budd. Andy is an independent executive product and design leadership coach and a venture partner at Seedcamp; Europe's most successful seed fund investing in over 450 companies who have gone on to raise over $7 billion.
At Seed Camp, Andy helps to assess the potential of startup companies and once a company joins the portfolio, he provides the founders with advice on how to grow and scale.
Before joining Seedcamp, Andy was the founder, managing director, and then CEO of Clearleft, arguably the United Kingdom's first user experience consultancy. During his 17 years there, Andy relentlessly promoted the value of design and helped clients such as Channel 4, Virgin Holidays and Penguin Books to realize their digital potential. Andy would also found two product businesses, of which some of you might be familiar, Fontdeck and Silverback, the latter, a popular usability testing app for Mac.
In 2008, in the midst of the GFC, he founded UX London, Britain's first major user experience conference. It would become the longest running UX conference in all of Europe, and it was an event that he lovingly curated until 2021. Andy was also the founder and curator of Deconstruct the first digital design conference in the UK and of Leading Design, an annual event and 2,000 plus strong community that brings together some of the world's best design leaders.
First rising to prominence in design circles in 2006, after authoring the best selling book CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standard Solutions, which seems fitting at least for this sentence, as Andy became a founding member of the Adobe Design Circle in 2019.
And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Andy, hello and a very warm, sunny New Zealand summer welcome to you.
Andy Budd:
Oh, there, I have to admit it was tough kind of not listening to all of that stuff. There's a lot of stuff in there, so I applaud you through getting through it all. But yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It's really nice to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's very nice to have you here too, Andy. And I have to say, traveling around the internet looking at some of the weird and wonderful things you've done was a great pleasure and I discovered that you're a fellow diver, although you're on another, you're in another echelon to me, you're a qualified paddy dive instructor and you've also dived in some pretty interesting locations. One of them is the one of the world's most extensive cave systems. And for anyone that knows anything about diving, diving in caves is possibly one of the most dangerous situations that you can put yourself in. And you've also once dived on an abandoned or sunk World War II shipwreck that was still packed full of live ammunition. And I couldn't help but think about this. What on earth possessed you to want to do something as dangerous as that
Andy Budd:
I, I've been like, yeah, I kind of really enjoy scuba diving. I love the kind of sense of adventure and discovery and I think, I guess I'm intrigued by being able to go to places that other people haven't seen. So I think when I first started diving in caverns in Mexico around the Tulum area, when you just cavern dive, you're not allowed to go into the caves. And so you see these big signs with a skull and cross bone saying, do not enter [laugh]. And a lot of people very sensibly would go, well, that just seems like a stupid idea. I don't want to go in there. But for me it was like, oh, I wonder what's in there and I wonder what I need to do and learn in order to be able to go and explore some more. And I think the same is true of diving in shipwrecks.
I'm not a big, big diver. I'm much more into cave diving. But there's something really interesting about going into somewhere that's not meant to be there. Going into a shipwreck that's like 40 meters underwater that's got a whole story in history and your, you're swimming through these holds and there's trains and there's motorbikes and there's cars and tanks and loads of guns lined up and shells and all these kind of things. And it's fascinating there. There's a whole kind of pivoting slightly, but there's a whole kind of group of people that call themselves UXs, urban explorers. It's a very French thing. And they go and they explore disused warehouses and factories and kind of nuclear power plants. And I guess it's a similar thing. It's the ability to go somewhere where people haven't been before and wanting to explore and poke around. And so yeah, that's kind of what I get I guess from the cave diving and the rec diving.
Brendan Jarvis:
So when you were entering that sunken World War II ship, I believe it was a German shipwreck
Andy Budd:
It would've been, no, it would've a English wreck that was taking munitions and arms and stuff to resupply during the second World War.
Brendan Jarvis:
I imagine that people may have died as a result of that shipwreck. What was the sense that you had, if you cast your mind back to when you first entered it, what was the sense that you had or the feeling or the thoughts that came to mind when you were doing that?
Andy Budd:
I mean, there are definitely a lot of wrecks that are kind of scheduled monuments that you really aren't meant to go to because they're war graves. So these are all the places that I kind of dive. I don't do, I don't dive anywhere that is illegal or moral or not something that you are not allowed to go to. So these wrecks are places that you can go to. But I do think that I see a lot of people who dive, who don't necessarily respect the space because these are sort of graves and like you say, people have died on them. And so it is interesting, it is eerie to go into a place and being able to imagine that 50, 60 years ago there were people walking around and playing cards and you notice a knock over cup and a kind of disused set of plates or whatever, and you can tell that these people's lives were sort of momentarily stopped and you've got this sort of sense of eerie about it. And so it's, it's a fascinating experience to be in that space. And like I say, it's similar to, I know people that have been to disused nuclear power plants and places like that, and it's that sense of people used to live here and were here but aren't anymore. That is interesting. I guess
Brendan Jarvis:
Perhaps as a bit of an aside I've only traveled to the United Kingdom once and it was maybe six or seven years ago. And New Zealand being a relatively new nation, albeit the Maori people have been here for over 800 years, there isn't the same sense of the built environment and the age of the built environment. And I got a sense when I was visiting my uncle in Farnham looking at the cobbles on the streets and just realizing that there were hundreds, maybe a thousand years worth of footfall on those cobbles that had worn them down in certain places. And it does give you a greater sense or an appreciation of lives that have previously been lived. And it is quite airy when it's in their absence as well.
Andy Budd:
I mean, I think it's the same. Yeah, I had a trip up to Scotland over the autumn and you go to all these kind of old castles that hundreds of years of history in different clans and battles. And so yeah, it's kind of interesting being able to feel like you are living and getting a sense of what it must have been like 56 years ago for a soldier, merchant, Navy person in the Second World War or five, 600 years ago as a Highlander having to deal with British or English incursion. So yeah, it is interesting.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, we've been talking about the absence of life in those spaces and I want to talk about a space where there was a ton of life, and that is, I also found out that you had a go at being what you described as a shark wrangler, something that you've retired from. How does one wrangle sharks?
Andy Budd:
Well, I mean, to be honest, that was a little bit of a jokey name. There was a terrible movie called Deep Blue Sea from I think the early 2010s maybe. And one of the characters in there was kind of described as a shark wrangler. So I just kind of mentioned it jokingly. But what I did do is I worked on liverboard boats going out of the Barrier Reef and we used to do shark feeds. And what would happen is you would drive out with a tender, you'd put a whole bunch of fish heads on a wire, you'd drop a weighted wire down and it would attract the sharks. And I best, my job was effectively we'd have all of the guests who would be floating or sat on a rock outcrop or bomb. And basically our job was to position ourselves between the sharks and the customers. And if the sharks got a little bit interested, you'd just be a kind of human shield or you might give one a little gentle kind of not bump, but you, you'd make your presence felt just so there was a little bit of a say, a barrier between the sharks and the customers. So yeah, I guess I was a shark food bouncer or some other way of describing that. But yeah,
Brendan Jarvis:
A fierce line of defense. Andy, have you always been comfortable facing your fears like this?
Andy Budd:
I don't think I face my fears particularly. I like doing pursuits. So there are a bunch of people out there who are adrenaline junkies, and to be honest, that's not me. I think they're kind of idiots that, you know, put your life at risk or whatever. I like doing things where there is a level of skill and control, and if you do what you do well, the risk is very minimal. So I don't want to do stuff that's risky. I want to do stuff that is very low risk. And it's the act of training as a cave diver, being aware of animal behavior and when sharks are starting to feel a little bit aggressive or a little bit kind of stressed I recently learned to fly, and I'm a pilot, so I'm a trained pilot now. And the joy of being able to do a risky thing, I guess taking off a landing. But if you do it well, the risk is minimal, but what you get is you get access to seeing amazing things, having great adventures. So yeah, risk is not something I'm particularly interested in chasing. It's something I'm interested in minimizing through talent, skill, training practice.
Brendan Jarvis:
It also lends itself to interesting questions at the beginning of design focus podcast interviews.
Andy Budd:
Well, I think this is the one you've I that is the early interview I've had where you've lent someone's lent in so heavily to those areas. Usually it's a little kind of touch on that and then diving straight into the topic. But I've really enjoyed chatting about some of this stuff. Yeah, thank you.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're welcome. You mentioned risks and how it sounds like you feel like you're more of a calculated risk taker and you mitigate that risk by putting in the appropriate training. And one of the risks that from the outside looking in that I could see that you've taken recently is stepping down from the day-to-day leadership of Clearleft the agency that you founded way back when, and you went on to join C camp, as I mentioned in your introduction, which is at least from my way of looking at quite a remarkable departure from the professional life that you were living for many years into something which is an entirely new, although albeit tangential area of design and business that you had been exposed to previously. So what was it that predicated this shift or that made you feel comfortable assuming this risk of this new role in spending your time instead of leading an agency sifting through pitch decks and working with founders to help grow and scale their companies?
Andy Budd:
It's a really good question, and there's probably a whole range of different ways I could answer that. I think it first helps for me to maybe describe a little bit about my own personal mission, and I don't kind of mean that in a kind of a fuzzy, airy, fairy way. Not everyone has to have a mission or that kind of stuff, but I think the thing that I'd noticed that has driven me throughout my career is a real belief in the value of design, a real belief that how design can transform people's lives, individuals lives, users lives, and also through the process of doing that can transform business outcomes. And so when I started noodling around on the web, I discovered CSS and HT m, L and web standards and really felt that this was a benefit to the world. The old way of doing things was very inaccessible information locked up in proprietary flash files, information locked into hard to read kind of table based layouts.
And so I thought design had the ability to open up this information and open up the web. So one of the reasons I got into the web, and particularly design cause I thought it could make that experience better, one of the reasons I started blogging was because I felt a desire to take any information that I'd learned and share around freely because I had benefited from other people's free sharing information and I wanted to do the same. And this was all in the service of trying to make design better, discovering and leading in this kind of UX field. When I started UX, there was really only one agency, other agency in the world called Adaptive Path that kind of acclaimed that term. And I really believe that this was a great way to bring quality and value to people's lives. And so I helped kind of drive that forward.
It's why I speak at conferences as why I wrote books. And so starting Colle was a natural progression to that because sure, I could help a bunch of designers and engineers do a better job, but also I felt that I needed to help end customers. And so going into an agency setting and every two months helping a new company, helping them solve a bunch of meaningful problems, helping them get value in the hands of their customers that they could really use was a big driver. If you kind of think about where the industry was in the kind of the early 20 to mid 20 20 hundreds, two thousands, anyway, whatever the term is, the teens, the people who were making a difference, the people were having an impact on the industry were people like Adaptive Path, people like Happy Car people like Cuban Council, people like Claire left, the people who were speaking at conferences, the people who other people looked up to and wanted to be like, were those companies partly because they were forging a path, partly because a lot of the big tech companies were not big at that stage, they were quite small.
And so I think the pioneers in that early, those early days were the freelancers and then the agencies. But if you jump forward to kind of 2015 and you ask a designer where you want to go and work now, they were no longer saying I wanted to work at Adaptive Path and Clearleft. They were saying I wanted to work at Facebook, I wanted to work at Google As somebody who has always liked working in small independent companies, I didn't necessarily want to go and work in a big tech company. I think if you've founded a business, it's really difficult to step out of that and then go and work in a very, very large hierarchy, particularly if you're someone like me that kind of believes in kind of small, independent kind of organizations. But I still had this desire to have an impact and I realized the influence of agencies was diminishing.
And if I wanted to carry on trying to raise the profile of design, I needed to find another outlet. The two outlets I I've followed, one is I coach, so I coach heads, directors and VPs of product and design. And what I'm doing there is I'm helping those individuals improve their impact and improve the impact of product and design in their organizations. And so a couple of days a week, I spend my time focusing on that and I feel that I can have a huge impact by working closely and directly with people who work in those big companies in order to rather than just help one company help 10, 20, 30, 40. So my impact is multiplied, but a lot of those design and product leaders are facing the same problem. And that problem is they are in an organization that culturally doesn't value design and they are struggling to sell design and to unlock the power often to an organization that has become incredibly successful without really needing to think about design.
They lent into technology, they lent into marketing, they lent into sales. And so it's really, really tough if the culture of the company at its core doesn't value design to transform it. And I'm trying to do that with these people. I'm trying to help them transform the companies, but the other part of me is thinking, well, what if rather than having to transform companies, we can bake that value in from the start and what's the best way to bake value in at the start? Well, you are there at the start, and if you can be, I could have just gone and started an early stage company or been working for one, but what if I was actually working in an institution that supports lots of these companies? And so going and joining a venture fund allows me to work with a couple of dozen founders who may don't have a full appreciation of design.
Often founders just think it's the pixels and they're making it look pretty. But design is also around understanding user needs. It's about solving problems. I think designers have a huge amount to offer when it comes to that zero to one phase of figuring out what the product needs to do. They have a great amount to offer around kind of growing and scaling, product led growth and all that kind of good stuff. And so at C camp, my personal mission is to try and show through my knowledge and my experience to all these founders how valuable design can be. So they hire their first designer, they hire their second designer, they hire, they hire their third designer, they see their performance improve by having a design full mind so that when it is time to hire that first design leader, that first head of design, that first VP design, they are already bought in to the value design can bring so that the people that they hire have an easier time. They're not running uphill, they're not trying to create a new culture, they're already surfing on the existing culture. And so I guess I'm trying to close the circle by attacking the problem from both sides.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, you've spoken about your time working with founders and I don't know specifically what I'm about to quote now relates to your time while at C camp or your time that preceded that or perhaps both of those times. But you've said, and I'll quote you now, you'd think this truth would be self-evident by now how companies like Apple, Airbnb and Deliveroo have dominated markets through superior convenience, experience and design. Yet it's amazing how many startups are still optimized around an old model of doing things, of being a technology business first and only considering the customer experience at a later date. So it sounded to me like founders are making a trade off between the business focus or the technology and design almost as if they can't, they feel like they can't afford to do both at the same time. So to find product market fit while having a great user experience, is that how you've seen them look at this challenge of working with design?
Andy Budd:
To some extent, yes, but I actually, I'd kind of turn it around. I don't think as an industry we have done a particularly good job of explaining the value that we can bring to companies. We just expect that founders will understand all the things that we know and we know these things because we've read dozens of books, we've seen Jared Sport talk at conferences, we've done all this stuff. So we have a really, really burning belief in the value of design, just that everybody else out in the marketplace should just get it and are surprised when they don't. And so I think it's on us. I don't think it's on the founders to somehow intrinsically magically know this value. I think it's on us to communicate it, and I think we've done a terrible job of communicating it. When I look at the different disciplines that founders gravitate to, those disciplines have done a much better job of adding their value.
They hire a marketer because it's clear the value marketers bring, they hire a product manager because it's clear that the product managers are kind of shaping the shape of the product and trying to find product market fit and figure out what's the most kind of feature that's going to drive that growth. They hire customer experience people and customer success people and sales people, and all of these people are contributing to the value creation that happens in a startup. The design is often kind of like the icing on the cake is that, well, now we know what we're going to build and now we know how it works. We kind of need to get someone in to make it look pretty. And this design is like, oh, but we are more than pretty, but we haven't communicated that in a way that's landed. And so I think that's the real problem.
I don't think it's the founder's fault. I think we've done a really terrible job of communicating the value design. And I think a lot of it is because of all the kind of infighting, oh, I'm a UX as I know I'm an interaction designer, I'm a product designer. Oh, design doesn't exist. Oh, we're all designers. Well, that's not a very credible way of communicating your value. I'm not seeing product managers have those conversations. I'm not seeing marketing managers having those conversations. Marketing managers are saying, and product managers are saying, we should be consulted here. We should own this space. Whereas you have a whole bunch of circular internal conversations, don't help anybody. You have designers go, oh, well like NPS net promoter score is a rubbish made up term and we're not going to engage with it. Well, that's great. You're not engaging with it.
And so when somebody says, we need to increase the sentiment of our product and UX is going well, we're not having nothing to do with that, then they go to marketing and they go to product managers who are willing to engage. Every time we get thrown a ball to hit, we don't try and knock it out of the park, we just go into some kind of self narcissistic internal squabble and while we are squabbling in the corner, somebody else goes in and kind of knocks the ball out of the park. And so I kind of think we've had lots of opportunities and we've squandered many of them. And so if we're squandering these opportunities, why do we not look a little bit more internally rather than just constantly blaming the executives or the founders for not getting it? If they're not getting design, why aren't they getting it? It's because we haven't explained it properly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's dig into that a little deeper because you've touched on this before. You gave a really great talk last year from business to buttons called, I think it was called Design's Midlife Crisis. And in that talk you talked about the challenge of communicating the value of design, particularly to executives. So it sounds like you're aware that designers are trying to do this, but perhaps the methods or the ways in which we've been approaching this haven't been that effective. And you said, and I'll quote you again now, you said the majority of execs don't want to have some designer educating them about the benefits of design. In fact, it can come across as quite patronizing and antagonizing more often than anything else, more often than not at backfires. So if taking a McKinsey's the business of value of design report to an executive and giving them a reading isn't the thing that's going to help them to understand what it is that we do and the value we can bring, what approach or approaches have you seen that are successful, that have worked that people do understand and do connect with and can actually help to shift the perception of design as a cost center into one that contributes to profit and helps the business to get ahead?
Andy Budd:
I think you've sort of answered your own question there. To reposition it from a cost center to a profit center by demonstrating the value that it does bring and can bring, rather than telling people about it, if all you do is go, oh, you need to give us more money and you need to give us more resources, and if only you just believe in us and do this, that and the other, we would show you that design is valuable and that's great. But if marketing over here can point to a bunch of figures and say, we spent this much money on marketing and it had this kind of increase, and you can do the same with sales and you can to do the GA take, same with your product lift growth team and then you've got a bunch of designers whining and going, oh, but billion dollar button, oh, you 52 shades of blue or whatever.
It doesn't come across as credible. What tends to happen is, and I often try to find myself kind of trying to walk some of my coaching clients back off the edge because they're like, okay, I've not spoken to anyone in the business this year, but I've, I've been given 20 minutes at the big executives meeting. I'm going to go in there and I'm going to show I'm give them the best deck ever and they're going to listen to this deck and the scale's going to come off their eyes and they're going to be realizing, oh, stupid us the value of design, we should have seen it before and we're going to applaud the person and we're going to lift you up on our shoulders and we're going to carry out of the room screaming and that's all I need to do the 20 minute presentation.
And so they work on it and they're work on it for weeks and they want to get it perfect and they give it and no one cares because it's a theoretical argument. What you need to do is you need to show, you need to say, Hey look, this quarter, this month, this year, whatever, you gave the team this much and we delivered X for every dollar you gave the team, we turned it into five. Imagine what could happen if you gave us $5. Imagine what would happen if you gave us $20. And the way executives work is they, most executives work in a series of it says, okay, well that's good point. If we gave you a dollar, you turned it into five here have $10 and let's see what you can do with it. And if you turn that into five, then it say, well, that hasn't worked.
You are your are cost center because all you do is you can only have whatever we put in, you still have the same output, but if you turn it into 20 or 50 or a hundred dollars, then they're going to give you more and they're going to keep giving you more until you stop making them more money. So I think a lot of it is around, the other thing I talk about is kind of this idea that I think a lot of designers think that what they're game playing is a game of chess. And with a game of chess, there are specific rules and the best chess player always wins. The reality of most businesses is they're not playing game of chess, they're playing a game of poker, they're playing lots of rounds of poker, lots of hands of poker, and most of them will not work, but occasionally they'll get a good hand and that hand will win.
And so what I tend to find is a lot of designers trying to optimize each hand and going, oh, well, if we just went out and we did six months worth of research, we could really, really win this hand. And the way that you win poker isn't by doing that, isn't by slowing everything down, it's by spitting things up, getting that sense of we release this thing, it didn't work, we release this thing, oh, it worked a bit better. We release this thing on us is good. I'm now getting understanding of who the other players are. I'm now getting an understanding of the market. I think this hand is a winner. I'm going to go all in. So I think we're playing the wrong game. I think we need to realize that even though we want it to be chess, we are playing poker and we need to realize that it's a series of small bets. You can't win everyone. So it doesn't need to be perfect. It's about volume, it's about velocity, and it's about doubling down when things are working. And if we can demonstrate that, then I think we're onto a winner.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. So we're playing the wrong game. We're trying to apply a set of rules to business that no one else is playing by and therefore we're getting a pretty poor result.
Andy Budd:
And to be honest, I kind of have a little bit of a joke. How many designers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Well, first we need to do a six month research project on the role of light in society. Now that's an annoying joke because it's so true because every time I talk to an engineer or I talk to a product manager, I talk to an executive and they go and talk to the design team and say, Hey look, just it's really difficult to work here because we can't see any light. Can you just screw in a light bulb? They threw their ties out the pram. So you don't know me, I'm an artist, we can't work under these conditions. You can't possibly tell me to screw in a light bulb. I have to understand the problem. I have to go out and I have to speak to a whole bunch of people because maybe it's not a light bulb we need, maybe it's a candle, maybe it's a bonfire.
Just let me do my art and I'll go out and I'll do all this discovery work and I'll tell you in six months time whether it's a light bulb or not. And then so you know, let them go that. And in six months time, yeah, it's a light bulb and the rest of the organization are hitting their head on their hands going, we told you this six months ago, why have you taken us all along this sort of merry path? So that's not to say you shouldn't do research, research is really important, but sometimes you just have to go, I've been asked to do a thing, let's do it and let's do it to the best of possible ability and let's see how it works because it's a hand of poker rather than a game of chess. If you only have one chance to win, then you go and do the six month research project. If you've got multiple chances to win, by the time you've, you've done the six months, you might have missed opportunity cost, you might have missed 20 winning hands. And so we just need to understand the balance. So we need to be a little bit less dogmatic. We need to be a little bit less following the gut double diamond to precision and getting really upset if we are not allowed to do what we were taught in business school or what we have seen people advocate on stage. We seem to be more pragmatic. Basically
Brendan Jarvis:
You've put this down to previously that it's our inability to really grasp the concept of opportunity cost and that the business needs to make money or do the thing, whatever the thing is that they need to do as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And there's definitely a pervasive business culture globally, at least in New Zealand that I've experienced and through my interactions with companies in the United States that favors speed over thought perhaps. I mean that's maybe a tension there that I'm purposely placing. But being a business owner myself, I understand that I understand the need for speed, the need to make money in order to perpetuate what it is that the mission of the organization is there to achieve. But I also understand that an unbridled pursuit of profit at speed can lead and has led to some pretty poor decisions in some large companies. And also it's led to the end of many, many other companies that have actually misread their market and made significant mistakes by making bets that weren't well considered. So I was curious about your perspective here as to whether or not there is a role for design to be somewhat of a counterweight to the dominant culture that does favor just getting the light bulb and screwing it on. And actually if there was any benefit that you see in a commercial context from design intentionally slowing things down to encourage a more considered approach to decision making.
Andy Budd:
I mean, I think that's a really, really difficult question to ask because I think the behavior of organizations changes depending on the size and the state of the market, and a lot of it I think depends on the amount of potential harm and blowback. If you have no customers or five customers or 10 customers, the amount of harm you can do by moving quickly I think is limited by the small size of your market. If you are building a social networking platform that could fundamentally undermine the Fabrica democracy, the risks are much higher. And so I think, again, going back to some of the things we were saying earlier, if you were the Wright brothers and you were so worried about crashing the plane that you had to make sure that there were airbags and parachutes and seat belts and a metal frame that would be, you know, would never have got the plane off the ground.
But at the same time, if you are expecting passengers to go in it, if you're expecting paying passengers to go in it, there's a constant demand to iterate and improve. And if you look at the aviation industry, the aviation industry, I studied aviation history, the BSA wood kind of death traps of like 150 years ago versus how risk free so risk averse kind of the current aviation industry is. And so I don't think you can look at it as a homogenous thing. I think you need to understand it in the early stages. You need to move fast, you need to prove that the thing works. You get a bit of leeway, you have early adopters who are willing to take a little bit more risk in terms of what they're getting themselves into. But as soon as you start realizing you've got a market, then there is a need to start taking these things seriously.
So I'm not saying you don't have to have the qualms. I do think that designers are often into the mohart. I think it's not a surprise that designers came up with the term dark patterns. It's not a surprise that there's been a lot of pushback against aggressive marketing tactics and the growth hacker mentality, which I think is as thankfully waned. You know, see a lot of unethical practices that organizations have taken often not realizing they're unethical because they're chasing a target and they're motivated to do whatever they can to deliver that target. I do think that designers provide a really, really important conscience and break, but at the same time it's difficult if you are constantly riding the break, you kind of need to earn your position in the organization so that when you say no people listen. If the answer to everything is no, then people are going to ignore you.
If the answer is like, I'll help you here, let's do this, do this, but we can't do this because of gdpr, we can't do this because of X, Y, Z. Suddenly if you are someone that's delivering value and delivering outcomes and are able to demonstrate to the business that they can grow it in a way that balances their drive for commerciality with a caring approach to user needs, then you are onto a winner. So I'm definitely not saying, and I don't want you or your audience are misconstrue construe that I'm saying, Hey, you just build and it doesn't matter. I would hate to live in a world and I'm kind of slightly concerned around Twitter of stripping out all of the checks and balances in order to drive faster growth. So I think you need to have an understanding of both, but in order to do that, to have the permission and power design needs to have a much more influential role.
Let's remember the challenge I think in a lot of organizations, a hierarchy design reports into product that might report into technology that reports into the ceo. We don't necessarily have the raw power in order to stop things. And so we need to use the soft power, we need to use our political abilities, we need to use our ability to network, we use our ability to show that some of these practices that people are trying to do might make short term gains but sacrifice sort of longer term gains. But we need to be able to show this rather than just like, oh, I believe this to be true. It's like, no, we need to demonstrate a better way. And I think this is one of the great things that designers have. A lot of the time a product manager will say, here's the product we need to do X because they are in belief that this is the only way to do it.
And I think designers can come back and say, well, this is a great way, but also how about Y N Z? And if we do Y N Z, we might actually get a better outcome and we might avoid these potential harmful risky scenarios. The other thing I'd say, which again I think is just a real tricky thing is I do think that, don't think it's necessarily about the think it's really easy to blame capitalism, but I think a lot of development processes are also the cause if you are breaking big problems down into tiny little bite size features and the whole focus is just push this next thing out, push this next thing out, you are not necessarily seeing how everything connects and how bad actors can take control and do bad things. And so I do think the delivery process of agile doesn't necessarily make it easy for us to have a more mobile center when it comes to making product decisions.
Brendan Jarvis:
Is it more of a framing of rather than being as fast as possible and more of being as fast as is sensible where I know the nuance there is on defining what is sensible, but from the perspective of designers needing to think more critically about what's sensible given the goals of the organization and the needs of the user and for the business to consider or to be more mindful of what they might sacrifice if they per pursue speed as the primary objective? I
Andy Budd:
Think so I again, I think it sort of comes back a little bit to, again, interestingly the conversations we had earlier. I think there's a perception that things like diving and flying are risky and they are only risky if you don't know how to do them properly and you are slapdash and you are irresponsible if you are responsible and do them well. The risks are relatively minimal, but if you want to minimize the risks entirely, you sit in your front room and you play Microsoft Flight Simulator, you watch a Jack Cau movie, you don't go out into the world because it's scary because things go wrong. So what you need to do is you need to find the balance, the way I describe it best is going around a corner fast. You could go around a corner really, really slowly and it's relatively risk free, but you are not getting around the corner as fast as you need to be.
You can go put your foot down and not care and there's a really good chance you'll spin off and you'll hurt yourself and you'll hurt somebody. There is this beautiful point when you're go in the corner where the traction is the maximum you get a little bit too fast and you spin out, but when you can feel that sense of the tires are gripping the road, you are in full control. That is the point I think most organizations kind of need to be in because it's the highest performing but still safe solution. And so yeah, I think a lot of people have such binary thinking, it's like, oh, you either have to go fast or you have to go slow. Either you have to make money or you don't make money and I think this is wrong. I think there's a balance there and it's about finding the right pace that is right for your time, for your company, for your needs, but is optimizing a whole bunch of different things.
So I think that's what you are looking for. You're looking for that kind of perfect curve, that perfect kind of cornering where you are in control and what you're doing. And so yeah, that's what I think we need to look after. And so the designers I gel the best with this is a whole idea of it takes 20% of your time to get 80% of the way then the other 80% of the time to get the last 20%. If you are working in an environment where you've got billions of customers riling relying on you yet and you've got a ton of resources, spend the time getting that last 20%. But if you are early and you only have one shot, if you spend all your money, that's not a good sensible thing. If you get to that 80% and you can do it really quickly, you can do it four more times.
And so I love designers who know when they're starting to get diminishing returns and you go, this is good enough, this is not perfect, but it's good enough and I'm moving to the next thing and that's good enough, I'm moving to the next thing. And that's good enough. And that doesn't mean that you are not thinking about users or you're not thinking about ethics. It's just when the extra tinkering isn't really adding value and you could be doing something next that is a much bigger value add because you're creating new stuff rather than moving the deck chairs around.
Brendan Jarvis:
And are you, very briefly earlier on, touched on designers seeing themselves as somewhat the ethical heart of the organization. And this has been a theme that has been a recurrent part of Brave UX and it has come up many times that this is definitely a thing. We definitely feel that we are, and this conversation around speed, the conversation around designers understanding opportunity costs and being able to better interact with the business is also a central theme. And you've raised that designer's default more often than not. And I know we're generalizing here to know and that gets you shut down and not invited to participate in conversations where you can have more influence. But I'm curious about this tension within design around the ethical ownership of decisions and your perspective on if designers were to say yes more or flip to the other side. And I know that there's many shades of gray here and that sometimes dealing in absolutes is not helpful, but say that we were the other way around and we somewhat abandoned that responsibility we feel to our users and we just went and implemented whatever the business wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it however it wanted to do it.
Who do you think within the organization who would step back and think about and challenge some of the ethics behind the decisions made in product that might negatively affect users?
Andy Budd:
I mean I think that's to be fair, that's an incredibly leading question and it's a sort of hypothesis that I'm not advocating for. So you're, you are sort of very, very clever positioning me to advocate for something I don't necessarily agree with. My position is, again, it is not black or white, it's not by and white. I don't think designers should be doing things that are unethical. I don't think that just because you are trying to deliver value and you're trying to deliver value quickly that automatically equates to being unethical. I think you need to find a balance. And I do think that designers are people. We user centered, we want to understand what's going on in our customers lives, we want to make sure that the products we build are safe and responsible and I think you can do both. So I kind of dismissing the premise.
In order to gain status in the organization, we need to stop caring. What I think we need to do is we need to build our value so that we get listened to more. If we are people that are delivering business outcomes and we're delivering business outcomes on a regular basis to the point that the company's like, wow, this design team is amazing. When we then say, actually this thing you're deciding to do here, we don't think it's ethically sound and here are the reasons why you will be heard. If you are not delivering value and you have no voice in the organization and there's no reason not to ignore you because you're not really adding a huge amount of value, then you will get overwritten and you'll get ignored. And so that's my point is if we really do want to have more ethical outcomes, we need to balance that, not by doing some bad things in order to do some good things, but we need to be delivering value in order to be better equipped and listen to have that argument.
And again, I think there's an interesting tension when I talk about moving quickly, I'm talking about trying to get value into the hands of customers as quickly as possible. That's not a bad thing. That is about value generation, that is about spreading as much value as possible as quickly as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't also think through the negative outcomes. I'm not saying be slap dash, I'm not saying just get it out and move on, or we'll deal with the Spanish or we deal with the abuse issue later. That's a very different approach from saying this product I've spent five days perfecting it in Figma, I could spend another 20 and it would look perfect, but I'm going to be happy saying actually five days is enough. That's kind of the speed I'm talking about.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well Andy, thank you for engaging with my very intentional provocation there. I think that's been highly valuable and a very useful way of framing the challenge that lies ahead of designers. You've been talking about perfectionism and the whole balance of 80% of the result coming from 20% of the effort and I suppose our predisposition to want to refine things to perfect. And I think everyone intellectually understands that that is not a wise way of spending our time and can lead to some pretty frustrating outcomes for the people around us. And you've touched on this as well, and you've taken this to another level where you've said, and I'll quote you again now, you've said chasing perfection is a risk to our own mental health and our collective wellbeing. Now I want to zero in on the mental health aspect there as I feel like we've covered the collective wellbeing in the sense that it's not doing design a service if we pursue perfection. So how can the design leaders that are listening to us today, how can they help themselves perhaps but definitely their teams to let go of this white knuckle pursuit of perfection so they can build a healthier culture for design and help to increase design's influence?
Andy Budd:
I mean it, it's a difficult one because in a weird kind of way, I don't think designers should let go of wanting something to be perfect because that's, that's one of our key skills to some extent. But we have to get more comfortable with the fact that it can't be in and never will be in probably. So it, it's the balance, you know are always driving perfection, but you need to be comfortable that you're never going to get there. And so the way I kind of explain this is I see so many teams who have been slogging to produce a new version of a product and they've been doing it for maybe a week, a month, six months, whatever, and they finally get it out. And you look at it as a product manager, as the owner, as a customer, and this is so much better.
It's so much easy to use, it's so much faster, it's so much more intuitive. And you look around the team and you'd expect the designers to be happy and high fiving and really tough that they've made this thing better and it looks like a wake, it looks everyone's really depressed and you're like, what's going on? It's like, oh yeah, it was fine, but I wish they'd have listened to us. It's always, I wish they'd listened to us because we could have done X and we could have done wine, we could've done Zed, and if we'd have just done these things, we know it would've been perfect. And what's happening there is, while everybody else is looking at the 80% that the team did do, the designers are looking at the 20% they couldn't get through and they have this vision of like, well, if only would've done all of this, it would've been perfect.
And so actually the thing that we are left with is significantly worse than what they had in their mind. And if that happens, you start initially, you go, oh, this is really annoying. And the next time you start blaming people and the third time this company doesn't get it, I'm going to go somewhere else. And the cycle repeats. And so I see so many designs, particularly in they start to get them rid of their career feel so crushed, so fed up with it all because nowhere they've been allowed to produce the perfect thing that they know is possible. But a lot of that I think is because they're trying to get perfection in one go. They're trying to play the perfect game of chess. They're not playing multiple hands of poker with a realization that you can never have the perfect hand through skill alone. Because the nature of poker is that it's so dependent on luck and chance and randomness. And I think the business world and the product world has a similar set of forces. And so we're always looking, so I wish we played this perfect hand. If only we'd been playing a different player. If only had to got two ACEs, if only that person hadn't put all of their money in, I could've won. It would've been better. And so
Brendan Jarvis:
Are you suggesting that we're at risk of becoming those old people in the pub that complain about what life could have been and reflect on the glory days? Ones that they could never quite capture?
Andy Budd:
Possibly. I don't know quite about that, but I just think that we are constantly setting ourselves up for a level of expectation that the reality of the situation that we find ourselves in just doesn't allow. And there's only so many times that you can be disappointed before it starts to really, really hit you in your core. So to answer your question, because you actually had a really good question. The question wasn't like, what's the problem? It's like what you can do. So as a design leader, I think you need to constantly be reminding people how worse the product was before the designers got involved. You know, did this great thing, you did that great thing, you've massively improved the experience. Our experience has gone from a three out of 10 to a eight out of 10. I know it wasn't a 10, but it's an eight out of 10.
This what's going on with our net promoter score, this is what's going on with our conversions. All of these great things are the things that you and the team did. So constantly reminding people, bringing them out of the morning period of the things they didn't get done and focusing on the great things they did. I think as leaders, we need to be praising people more. And I think there's a tendency for leaders to assume that everyone accepts it. They know they're doing really good work. And so we ignore the praise bit because we know Mary, we know heck Kim, they know that I really, really appreciate their work and so all I'm going to do, the only feedback I give them is negative feedback. Why didn't you do that? That was wrong. This was wrong. But if we are not vocalizing the good stuff, actually the reality is all our team here is pick, pick, pick.
That wasn't good enough, that wasn't good enough, that wasn't good enough. And if someone is constantly picking at you, then you are going to be predisposed to be looking for all of the problems and all the errors. And so I kind of think that we need to praise people five times the amount that we criticize them. And actually the praise gives you the power to be critical. Cause when you're critical, people listen to you. It's the same as I was saying about kind of designers being able to have the moral input. It's like if you are delivering value, if people know that I feel safe, I feel looked after that my boss really appreciates my input, then when they say, oh actually that hasn't worked and this is why, and this is what I'd like you to do in the future, you're like, oh well this is great because I know all the other things are kind of reinforcing me with all.
If all they hear is negative stuff, then you are going to start to behave the way that I've described on the designer's point of view. Again, this is a real common problem. You do all this stuff, you get to the end of the year and you're like, what have I done? What have I achieved? What actually have I kind of contributed? And you know, did a bunch of workshops, you know, put a bunch of screens, some of which have launched, some of which have haven't, but it's really easy to forget. And so on the designer's point of view, I always recommend people create a brag document. And the brag document is, every time you've done something good, note it down. Oh yeah, I did help that person prep for their workshop and that workshop really well. And they thank me. Okay, I'll note that down.
Oh yeah, actually I did kind of talk the marketing manager off the cliff from including that three extra steps on the signup form. And what we've seen is actually as a result, signups have gone way up because the friction was down. Oh, oh yes. I cycled back on the project. I launched and found that actually we hit all our KPIs and got better. Keeping a constant log of all of successes brings your mind more into this expansive kind of success kind of space rather than constantly picking out the bugs and the problems, but the picking out the bugs and the problems is what we do. I kind of think it's really frustrating being a designer because everyone else bumbles around the world being perfectly happy using broken experiences. Go and you'll buy a train ticket from a kiosk that no one else is moaning about and you'll be like, why was that button put there and not over there?
Because actually it, his hair is much better if it's in the corner rather than floating around in the middle of the screen. That's really, really bad design. And actually why they use that language, not this language. We are so predisposed to find broken things everywhere, but we also have the power to fix them. I think that's the brilliant thing around designers. A lot of the rest of our peers, they don't see the things that we see and I think we have a duty to shine a light on this stuff and if we can shine a light on these problems, a lot of the time it's not because our product managers or marketing managers are evil or our engineers are evil, it's just because they don't see what we see. And when we go, oh, there's a problem here and we explain it in a way that isn't petulant and annoying, but it's actually this is going to be a really important thing we need to focus on, they'll go, oh yeah, I hadn't really thought of it like that. So it's a superpower. I don't want to give it away, but we need to balance it with feeling secure and safe and knowing that we're doing a good job.
Brendan Jarvis:
So speaking of seeing problems in the world and then wanting to fix them and also of criticism and rather self-deprecating fashion, you once said that as a manager you felt like the living embodiment of the Peter principle, which is the idea that people rise to the level of their incompetence, which I had a laugh and clearly you were joking here, but I suppose the key thing here is that you are self-aware enough to realize when you're running up against your own limits. And I wanted to know and understand from you, what was it or what has throughout the years made you from time to time realize that you needed to become a better leader?
Andy Budd:
Oh, I mean, again, there's a bunch of different things in there. I don't think this is quite the answer to your question, but I think there are fundamentally two different ways that people express their leadership. You have the typical kind of black turtleneck design genius architect God who wants to surround themself with kind of sick of panic juniors who look up to them. And that's incredibly ego driving. It's great to be a creative director and an agency when everyone runs around and your word is got, but it's this kind of weird, slightly problematic behavior where you've built an organization to meet all of your needs. Don't like that kind of top of the pyramid kind of approach. I much prefer servant leadership, which is basically having a really good understanding of what you're good at and what you're not good at and the things you're not good at.
In order for the company and for your team to grow, you need to get someone who's better than you. So I was an okay program but wasn't a great programmer. So you get programmers in, I was okay at css, but there were much better people out there than, so you hire better frontend developers and frontend JavaScript people. I was okay at design, but there were much better designers out there. And so you slowly start bringing better people in than you because that's the only way that you get good is surround yourself by amazing people. But the reality, and that's how a manager sort of thrives. I think there's this old fashioned notion that comes from the industrial shop floor that the foreman is the one that knows how to use all the machines and knows how to make all the parts. And their job is to teach every single person how the machine work and how the parts is made.
That's not how knowledge work functions. Knowledge work is basically you hire all these people that are great craftspeople, that are experts in their field, and if you hire all these people experts, you can't hope to be as good at every single one of their jobs as each individual. So you have to be comfortable in knowing that a lot less than the collective knowledge of the organization. What you do is you become a talent scout. So you find these amazing people, you create the space in the environment where they can do their best work, you help coordinate and when there are disagreements, you help decide which of the paths is the right path based on competing outcomes. And I think this is the role of a good manager and I think it's the role of a good product manager as well to not necessarily be dictating, but when somebody has a domain expertise, you appreciate the expertise and you don't think that your level of knowledge is the same as theirs. And so if someone says, we absolutely have to do this, you kind of defer to it. But if there are trade offs or if people can't decide, you kind of cast the sort of deciding vote and balance these things. And so I think that's the way in a modern knowledge working kind of fashion you have to present as a manager.
Brendan Jarvis:
Given all the design leaders that you coach and the designers, the design leaders that you've met throughout the years, what would you say is the most obvious limiting belief that regularly occurs in those people or perhaps mental block that they have that is getting in the way of them being more effective leaders?
Andy Budd:
There is a really clear pivot point I find in the life and progression of a design leader that is most design, well, a lot of it is about the journey they go on. So a lot of designers become design leaders, become managers because of the frustrations they've experienced as an ic, as an individual contributor. And they're like, Hey, I will solve all these problems when I get a manager. Because when you become a manager, you have all the power in the world, you can change all the things and everything will be fine. And then you become a manager and you realize actually that's not the case at all. Actually things are just really hard. I think it's kind of like, you know, are a kid, it's unfair, why can't I stay up late, blah, blah, blah. Then you become a parent. Actually this is messy and horrible and difficult and I dunno what I'm doing anymore than my parents did now.
And you come to kind of realize the sort of limitations. But what typically happens is you still view your job as a manager to gather up all the gripes of my team and take them to your boss and say, fix all of these things. And what happens then is you are seen as somebody that just comes with problems and makes it somebody else's job and somebody else's job to fix. And that isn't great because you are not hired necessarily just to come up with a whole bunch of problems and then give them to somebody else. And so it can be really difficult to move on and to reposition yourself out of that. And I think what typically happens, the switch is a realization that you've not actually been hired just to kind of take all the gripes of your design team and pass 'em on.
You've been hired to deliver a set of business outcomes, a set of strategic initiatives that the organization has designed, and your job is to deliver them through the medium design. So your design team is no longer like your design team is a conduit for the delivery of a set of missions, goals, strategies, outcomes. It's not a group of people that you're trying to be best friends with in order to solve all their needs in order to create this design in Nirvana. And what typically happens is you switch to what's known as having a first team mentality. You go from thinking the people I am serving are my designers, to the people I'm serving are my peers in the organization. I'm actually serving my marketing colleague, my sales colleague, my business colleague. My job is to work with these people, my executive team, my first team to understand how I can use design to advance the mission of the organization.
And you want to do it in a way that you still have a great design team and they're working efficiently and they're happy, but your job is no longer just to solve all the gripes to make this sort of perfect nirvana. So that might mean that sometimes you have to make decisions that your design team aren't going to like or appreciate. I'm sorry, we can't hire that extra design leader or salesperson or sorry, not salesperson, like content marketer or content designer, whatever this year because we just don't have the budget cause we need to deliver X, Y, Z. And you end up becoming the baddy, you end up becoming the parent that says, I'm sorry, it would be lovely if you stay up till midnight at eat sweets all of the evening, but actually you've got to go to bed because you've got to get to school tomorrow. And you know what it's like if you eat all the sweets you'll probably vomit. And that's not good. So we need to start realizing that it's the other partners, the parents that we need to be supporting and the teachers rather rather than just trying to pander to the whims of the design team. And that is a tough switch to make and I think that's where most design leaders get kind of stuck in that kind of gap.
Brendan Jarvis:
I spoke with Peter Holtz and separately, Jesse James Garrett a little while back at the end of last year. And they also, you have a keen emphasis and coaching practice on helping design leaders to become more effective. And it seems to me at least they share a common thesis around one of the core problems here is that design leaders who are going from IC into their first design management role often are modeling their behavior on the design managers or leaders that have come before them, but not having the full 360 perspective on what that design leader was contending with when they're dealing with their other parents. As you've suggested, first of all, I suppose, is that something that you've also observed to be true in that there is a sort of lack in tools and resources or coaching or whatever it may be to help designers see the role for what it needs to be? And if you don't then I'd be keen to hear your perspective on it. But if you do, aside from getting outside coaching, what is the thing that needs to happen here so that this isn't so much of a stumbling round in the dark exercise for design leaders as they progress through their careers?
Andy Budd:
I think so. I mean I really like Jesse. I really like Peter. I think I would probably agree with 95% of what they say. So I haven't heard the conversation that you've had with them, but I suspect they're on the money there possibly because of my kind of geographic location. I think I'm a slightly different place to them where a lot of the people that they coach are a lot of people that I coach, they are often the first design leader in their organization or the first design leader of their level in the organization, which means that they actually aren't moving into somebody else's shoes. They don't have a model of good or bad behavior to follow that there's no model of behavior are they've been given a sort of ful promotion and they're told to sort it out and figure this stuff out on their own.
And that's really, really tough. We've only really seen, I think an explosion of design leadership in the last sort of six or seven or eight years. So I think a lot of people are first, second, third time design lead don't have that kind of history, which is different from engineering leadership because engineers tend to outpace designers five or 10 to one. These are all problems that our engineering partners have been having to deal with a lot longer. And actually one of the pieces of advice I give a lot of my coaching clients is to go and befriend the design. They'll be going go and befriend the engineering leaders because the problems that you are facing now, they probably face five years ago and the things you're trying to solve now, they've already figured out ways. They already know how to scale a team from 10 to 50 to a hundred.
They already understand how to do good performance reviews or one would hope they already have an understanding and are focusing on things like diversity. All of the problems you're facing as a five person team have already been solved somewhere in the organization. They might have been solved in the way that you would like them to be solved, but the very least there's a, there's prior art. And so I think that's the challenge that I see. Most of my people that I support, even if they're a VP of design or VP of product, they're the first VP of product, that person that company's had. And so there's no clear path to follow from designs. They have to look elsewhere.
Brendan Jarvis:
I had a conversation a couple of years ago with Jane Austin, I don't know if you've come across Jane over there in the uk. I think she's most recently the chief experience officer at Digita uk. She came from, I think it was the Telegraph and then Babylon Health and a few others that she was at before in a design and product leadership role. And she found that when she first stepped into design management, that being promoted from an IC to a manager came with a whole bunch of baggage and feeling and consideration for the people that were previously peers and that now she was in charge of managing. And it was a really rocky thing for her to navigate early on until she figured out what the boundaries needed to be and how she could be effective in the management role. And you said something that again, sort of intentionally, I'm going to put this to you as a provocation that I somewhat struggled with, but I suspect that there's some wisdom here that I didn't fully grasp.
And that is you, you've said that if you are a design leader, you need to look after your team. They are your own family. Now, the family metaphor has been used before when it comes to leading people. And I've always struggled with it because as a metaphor, I feel that family is permanent teams are temporary and the relationships that we have with family members are often not appropriate in the workplace. Some of the things that go on there. So how do you treat people as your team, as a family while still challenging them and holding them accountable to the objectives that are important to that team and to the wider business without them, without you not being effective in doing that. And I think you've described this as a dissent and to ruin this empathy if you don't quite get that balance. But how do you that, how do you position yourself?
Andy Budd:
Well, I don't recognize the quote, but to be honest, I say a lot of things on the internet at conferences. And I do think when I started Clearleft, I think we did run it. I did run it as a family and there was a lovely period of time when that worked and that clicked. But I definitely feel in the last 10 years I have moved away from that as a particularly helpful framing. I actually think it's, I think it's a problematic framing because you don't have to make your family redundant. If one of your family members is underperforming, you don't necessarily have to have a kind of difficult conversation with them. I actually think a better metaphor is a sports team. And it's a challenging metaphor because what happens if you have a sports team, you have players who are performing on a game to game a season to season basis, but there is a point at which they might stop performing.
And if you can't raise their performance up, you might need to reposition them or you might need to eventually let them go and bring somebody else in who's a better performer. And that might seem harsh when a period where there were really challenging layoffs at the moment. And a lot of people are having questions around why they've been let go and whether this is fair or not. And I think there's a lot of emotion and kind of debate going on at the moment, but I kind of think that if you take a sports team mentality, you can kind of understand, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but you can understand why you might have to reshape teams when the mission changes, the strategy of the opposing team changes, the market changes. And I think a lot of the reason why a lot of people are feeling really stressed at the moment, apart from the fact that frankly losing your job is horrible, finding yourself, a lot of these people that have been made redundant recently had plans and healthcare needs and visas that were reliant on these jobs.
And to have that ripped away without any kind of notices really challenging. And also I think lot, there are some companies that have done really well and have given people incredibly generous redundancy packages and have helped them land their new jobs. And there's some really good practices there. But there are also practices where people have gone into the office one day and just they've found that they've been made redundant because their passes are no longer working, which is awful. And I think what happens there is a lot of people have been sold on this idea that we are part of a family and they buy into the idea they're part of a family. And in a family, your family members go to bat and you don't get cut free. You don't get let go. And so a lot of this language is being used to make people feel warm and welcome and homely.
And when suddenly there's a international kind of downturn and companies start making people redundant, there's a real sense of betrayal. And that betrayal happens because they have been taught that they're part of one kind of organization and suddenly they're waking up to realizing, well actually no, I'm not. I'm a different kind of organization. So I think there's a bit of a bait and switch going on. So yeah, I've definitely don't use the family metaphor anymore. Cause I think it's actually, not only is it inappropriate, but I think it can be emotionally manipulative. It can be a great way of getting people to work really hard by going, oh, don't you care about our mission? And you kind of want people to care the mission, but at the same time, organizations don't have any or large organizations anyway. They're not in it to create long-term value for the team.
They're in it to create long-term value for their shareholders. And we can debate the benefits of capitalism, but we need to be a little bit more realistic about what working for these kind of companies is like. And again, I think the reality is I think a lot of people, a lot of smaller companies want to maintain really, really, they want to have a family kind of experience. And so founders will drop in salary, they'll do everything they can to keep the team cohesive, but in very, very large organizations that's not their goal. And so it's problematic, that kind of language I think.
Brendan Jarvis:
Mm-hmm. Andy, just mindful of time, I've got one final question for you today. You are clearly someone who's thought a lot about what it takes to be a great design leader. You've convened a massive community globally of design leaders to help try and figure this out. In your personally mentoring and coaching design leaders, and you've touched on that we're entering and we're already in a very difficult economic time and a lot of people are under stress if they haven't already lost their job, they're worried about whether they will during such a time. What do you believe is important for designers to remember or perhaps do?
Andy Budd:
That's a very good question. I don't think I have a very good answer. I think one of the challenges is that a lot of people in the workplace at the moment have never experienced anything other than a rising market. There are a lot of people that entered the workplace in 2009, 2010 amidst the last downturn. And actually to be honest, the last downturn, at least in the uk, while a lot of other industries were sinking, the tech industry was still going up. So the previous downturn was kind of in the late nineties and very, very few people in the current market were around in that turn. So I think there are few old JD people like me that have seen two or three downturns and have realized that this is a cyclic thing that happens and are comfortable that this cycle will happen and will continue to happen.
But if you never experienced it, it can feel like the world is falling in your head. It can feel like, I thought it was always going up and to the right. I were making plans based on the slow and steady increase of my salary, the slow and steady increase of my option package. And now the bottom fallen out. The only thing I can say is it is a really crappy experience and it is going to be hard for people to bounce back. I think if everyone's tightening their belts, we are going to see a lot of people who are really, really talented, who are going to struggle to find new places. And so I think people will be looking for longer. I think they'll be downward pressure on salaries as well. So I think it'll be a tough time. But I also know that these cycles do repeat themselves, and I'm sure in a year or two's time, the economy will get better in interest rates and inflation will be down, there'll be another boom.
And in the meantime there is opportunity. I think a lot of new products get started in downturns. A lot of people, if they are unfortunate enough to find themselves unemployed, might use that as an opportunity while they're looking for work to start new initiatives, to start small agencies, to start new product companies, to start thinking about what they can do, where they have a bit more control over their own future rather than be controlled by other people. And so I really hope that the outcome of this as is often the case in downturns, will be a blossoming of value. It's not quite the same, but some of the best times of culture, if I think about the culture that came out of the seventies and the eighties, the music, the art, the movies, a lot of that came out of a really, really tough economic climate because it forced people to go to places that they wouldn't necessarily have risked otherwise. But now there's nothing to lose. And so they can start experimenting. And so I do hope that culturally we will see a lot of positive out of this, but that doesn't change the short term pain that a lot of people will be experiencing. So yeah, I dunno if I've got a good answer to that, but all I can say is it's cyclical and this will pass. I think the internet has shown, and digital technology has shown an awful lot of resilience.
Brendan Jarvis:
Andy, this has been a hugely insightful conversation about design and design leadership today. Thank you for so generously sharing those insights with me and also everyone else. And thank you for your outstanding contribution to the field of design over the past 20 or so years.
Andy Budd:
Thank you so much too kind.
Brendan Jarvis:
You're most welcome. Hey, Andy, if people want to keep in touch with you, follow along with what you're up to and all the wonderful writings and other things that you put out in the world, what's the best way for them to do that?
Andy Budd:
Oh wow. I mean, the real answer is an answer. I also almost feel a little bit kind of guilty about saying, which is Twitter. I've been a long-term Twitter user and I, I've built up a community of followers and people and I feel like I'm kind of the last kind of holdout. I feel like I'm the grumpy old man in up where everything else has been demolished around them. And I'm still wanting to stay on Twitter, but it is a health site. I do not support the things that Elon Musk is doing to that site. I can totally understand why a lot of people are fleeing to other platforms, including Mastodon, tried playing around with Mastodon. I can't get my head around it. And so I'm kind of sticking with Twitter in the hope. Yeah, I dunno what I'm hoping for, but to be honest, frankly I feel the same with the uk.
I'm British. I've seen the UK completely decimated over the last kind of five or six years, but it is my home. And so it's one of those things where I hate what the government's doing. I hate the narrative that's happening in the UK at the moment, but I like, I dunno any other place to be. This is where I'm kind of bought up. And so I feel the same with Twitter. If you want to come and follow me, I'm @andybudd on Twitter, but don't judge me. But also, if you don't feel that you want to spend time on Twitter, I completely understand. I'm also andybudd.com or Andy Budd on Medium, if you want to read some of one of my ramblings.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I believe you can also find you Andy at Andy Budd on LinkedIn as well. So if you want to follow along there, I'll make sure that we link to all of those locations. And Andy, if you change your mind about Twitter in the future, let me know and I'll change it to Mastodon or whatever it is that you decide to do there.
Hey, thanks Andy, and thanks to everyone that's tuned in. It's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including detailed chapters and where you can find Andy and all the things we've spoken about.
If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management where we get to real depth on topics that matter to us, then please leave a review on the podcast. Also pass it along just to one other person that you feel would get value from these conversations and subscribe, so it turns up weekly.
If you want to find me, you can find me on LinkedIn just under Brendan Jarvis, or a link to my profile is at the bottom of the show notes as well. Or just head on over to thespaceinbetween.co nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Andy Budd

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