Tom Greever
Tom Greever - Yes, Stakeholders are Human Too
In this episode of Brave UX, Tom Greever speaks to the heart of articulating design decisions (👍＆), becoming someone worth following 🐮, and making yourself an influential force for good design 🙌.
Highlights include:
- Is it true that you occasionally wear costumes to meetings?
- What is it important for leaders to remember?
- Should you ever tell someone that you disagree with them?
- How can we get difficult stakeholders onboard?
- Why is important to be intentional in your relationships?
Who is Tom Greever?
Tom is a Senior Director of Product Design at Indigo, an agricultural company that improves farmers profitability, environmental sustainability and consumer health, through the use of nature-based and digital technologies 🌾.
Tom has also previously been the VP of Product & Design at Handled, where he led the product strategy and CX teams who were creating category-leading software for the home services and moving industry 🚚.
Before Handled, Tom was the Director of UX and then VP of UX and Design at Bitovi, a remote-first digital consultancy where he led teams to deliver new web app experiences for companies such as Apple, Walmart, Levi Strauss and Lowe’s 🖥️.
A celebrated and experienced product and design leader, Tom is best known for his influential book, “Articulating Design Decisions” 🦜, a book that has helped tens of thousands of designers around the world to achieve greater career success and greater impact through design 🚀.
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 Tom Greer. Tom is a senior director of product design at Indigo, an a agri agricultural company that improves farmer's profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health through the use of nature-based and digital technologies.
- At Indigo, Tom leads UX and design teams that are busy creating software to change the way the food system works, including a new grain marketplace and several tools that aim to make farming more sustainable.
- Tom has also previously been the VP of Product and Design at Handled where he led the product strategy and CX teams who were creating category leading software for the home services and moving industry.
- He was also the director of UX and then the VP of UX and design at Bitovi, a remote first digital consultancy where he led teams to develop new web app experiences for companies such as Apple, Walmart, Levi Strauss, and Lowe's.
- A celebrated and experienced product and design leader. Tom is best known for his influential book, Articulating Design Decisions, a book that has helped tens of thousands of designers around the world to achieve greater career success and greater impact through design.
- The success of Articulating Design Decisions has seen Tom invited to deliver workshops at major companies such as Microsoft, HubSpot and the BBC, and to speak at popular conferences including the Push Conference in Germany, JAM in Spain, and UX London in the United Kingdom.
- And now Tom is here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Tom. Hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Tom Greever:
- Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here, Tom. And Tom, I noticed that you're actually dressed fairly casually and regularly for this conversation yet I understand it's not uncommon to find you in a meeting in a costume of some description. Is this true?
- Tom Greever:
- It's true. So the word has gotten out, I suppose. I have been known to lead or show up to meetings in costume occasionally, whether that is Mario. I think I showed up to one meeting as Mario. I've been talk show host, game show hosts plenty of times. But yeah, you never quite know, but not today. If I'd thought about it in advance, maybe I could have pulled something together.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is it about the act of dressing up for those meetings? What is it that you are trying to provoke or achieve as a result of that?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, so right, the great question because it's not costumes just for the sake of costumes or just for the sake of fun, although it is fun, it's a lot of fun and I think people enjoy and appreciate it. But most of the time we're trying to communicate some important message to our teams to help them engage on business goals or strategy or anything else that the company is trying to achieve. And so sometimes the best way to do that is with something that's a little more interesting, unexpected, something that would surprise you there. There's always a connection to the content, right? It's not just a costume for the sake of the costume, but it it's also to try to make that connection to what we're trying to help people remember. So just as an example, this is actually a non costume example. One of my product partners and I recently devised an anthropomorphic cow named Robbie, who would now has a Slack account at our company and is interacting with the team.
- And Robbie is, so Robbie's sole job is to report out on the KPIs that we're tracking for the coming year. And actually the word or the name Rob, r o b b, each letter represents one of the four KPIs that we're tracking. So in a lot of meetings we're expecting Ravi to show up and tell us how we're doing and it seems silly, maybe even a little bit juvenile [laugh] at times. But it's incredible how much more engaged people can be asking the right questions and remembering the things that we want them to remember and even just be being excited to show up to a meeting. I mean, I think we all go to a lot of the same meetings that kind of run together. And so I think anything we can do to break that monotony and have fun in the process is probably well worth the risk. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, certainly seems like you're bringing some delight and also some intrigue and some memorability to people that you're exposing to things like Robbie and yourself dressed up in costumes. It certainly would be hard to forget the purpose or the point of that meeting, I'm imagining
- Tom Greever:
- For sure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanted to ask you about something which is perhaps a little bit esoteric, and that is your LinkedIn banner. I noticed it looks like a photo of the cosmos, and I was wondering what is the significance of that image to you?
- Tom Greever:
- I think there's infinite possibilities, and I don't want to pretend like I thought about it too hard, but I'm very much intrigued by astronomy and space in general and just the vast expanse and seemingly infinite amount of stars and planets that there are out there. And I find and actually the one that you're mentioning is a Hubble image, and I'm looking forward to replacing that someday maybe with some from the James Webb Space telescope. But I love seeing those images because it is a reminder of just how small we are and as much as we can worked up about work and about the problems that we're trying to solve and the change that we're trying to see in the world, those are good things. It's still a very, very small part of a larger picture. I just think it's an important reminder.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe this is a long bow to draw, but thinking about what we were just talking about regarding costumes and introducing some levity into work and some memorability of things that are important, like metrics and also what you were touching on there about the scale of our significance and the reminder that shots of the cosmos that give us about the perspective that the perspectives we can choose to adopt and change as we like. I'm sensing or I'm wondering whether or not there is just an overall lightness to the work that you're trying to introduce given how serious we can all be and wrapped up in the day-to-day of what it is that we're doing and the things that sit outside of work like family and politics and all the other things that make for a very busy and sometimes disconnected human experience.
- Tom Greever:
- Right, exactly. Well, and I mean that last part that you said there, that human experience, and I think it's interesting even in product design and in tech where a lot of us work, we specifically are tasked with designing for that human experience. And I don't know that we're really doing ourselves any favors by [laugh] designing our work lives and our conversations and our routines the way that we do. And yet we have the training and the power and the insight to be able to create the kinds of experiences that we want to be having at work. I really value that for sure. As much as I probably am a serious person much of the time, I always try to push myself to find those moments to not be so serious because if we're not having fun, if we're not enjoying the work that we're doing, and it doesn't have to be as silly as wearing a costume, it can just be enjoying and being fulfilled by the things that we're doing. That's incredibly important. And I think we have, or should we believe we have the agency and the power to make those things happen, not only for ourselves, but to influence and affect the people around us too. And I think we sometimes underestimate how much influence we have on everyone else,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Bringing us back down to earth now, and also into a territory, which I believe is a great source of fulfillment for you, which is your family. And you've described yourself, and I'll quote you now as a dedicated family man and toddler wrestler with five entrepreneurial kids and a marriage worth bragging about now, first of all, five kids, that is some serious, that's a serious commitment and imagine takes a lot of time and energy. How do you manage to make that work with a very busy work life as well?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, I mean, we all make time for the things that are important. And I think it just comes down to the fact that that's a priority for me and for my wife and for our family. And so sure we spend all our time with our kids but we love doing that. We love seeing the impact that they can have on the world. I should probably update that because I don't even have any toddlers in my house anymore. My oldest is 19 and then, I mean, I have four teenagers basically and then an eight year old. So they're all in kind of a different phase of life now, but they are entrepreneurial and I don't know if as a culture, we really appreciate as much as we could the influence that having and raising families and kids has on the rest of the world. And I totally get that having a family isn't for a lot of folks, and that's totally cool.
- But from my experience, being able to see these kids grow up and become fascinating, wonderful, smart, intelligent, helpful, caring people, that's the kind of change I want to see in the world. My impact is limited to just me, but I can multiply that impact through my kids and my family and my kids are doing amazing things. I'm shocked almost sometimes, maybe I that that's not believing the best about them, but it's always inspiring, I should say. It's inspiring to see kids and the way that they grow up and learn things and do things and exceed our expectations. And it's been an incredibly rewarding experience for me and my wife. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What influence or impact, if any, has your family life in your marriage had on the way that you've developed as a leader of people at work?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah it's had a tremendous impact, I think, because one, when you have five kids, especially when they're all young, and there was a period of our life when they were all really little and they were all toddlers and we were wrestling a lot, you know, learn very quickly how to manage your mental capacity such that you can take on multiple different things at not at once, but in a serial fashion that a allows you to do diligence with everything. It's tough to go to work and to come home and meet the needs of one person to then try to help another person. And I think when you do that for years means sometimes that is very much what it feels like as a leader on a team where you're going from one, one-on-one to the next, one-on-one to a meeting about a budget, to a big presentation that you've been preparing for mean back to to back back.
- And that context switching and need to always be present for that person is incredibly important. If I go in to my home after work and one of my kids really needs to talk through a thing or wants my attention or praise or whatever it is, it could be totally selfish. It could be something totally practical. If I'm not present, if I'm not there, that has potential to damage that relationship. And it's no different as a leader when I go to one meeting where I found out that our budget is cut or that project is canceled or big things happen and I go into a one-on-one with someone on my team who genuinely needs my help to be unblocked or to get some advice or to move forward with their career, I have to make that change and to be present for them to really make sure that I'm serving them well. And so I think doing that in a family environment has been a huge contributor to my success. I think as a leader,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had my son come up to me, it would've been maybe two weeks ago when I was too busy and I'm an only child, so I find it very easy to stay inside my own head and focus on my own needs. And being married and having my son has certainly been a wonderful journey of letting go of a whole bunch of selfish tendencies that I have had over the years. And he asked me to play with him. This is in the evening, early evening, and I still, I think they'd come home early actually, and I was still working. And I said to him, I think I said, and this is terrible. I think I said, N no, I don't. And then immediately I was like, man, that's a really bad dad moment that I've just had and had to reframe it to. I do want to play with you, I just can't play with you right now. And what I think I heard you articulate there is that having such a busy family life and needing to be present for everyone when they need you is a really good reminder that leadership, whether it be within a family or within an organization, it's not about you and what you need
- Tom Greever:
- That that's right. And I don't intend to infantalize our relationship with our coworkers and our peers and the people that report to us by any stretch. I think it's it, it's a good parallel because it is a reminder that we have the opportunity to have the same kind of impact on our peers and colleagues at work. And it doesn't even have to be someone that is within our reporting structure. It can be someone who is just another person in the organization. We have the opportunity to influence and help people. I think we could do more to recognize how impactful we can be on other people in our organizations, but really just all over. And it was convenient for me that I have a family and I have kids that kind of forced that in my own life, but I think everyone has the opportunity to be intentional in their relationships that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I remember an author called David Baker, he wrote a business book called, I think it's called The Business of Expertise. And I listened to his podcast called Two Bobs from time to time, and I've heard him describe that moment at the end of your life when you're reflecting back on your career or perhaps that perhaps you've actually passed away and other people are reflecting back on you. It's not the projects that you delivered that they're going to remember or the metrics that you were chasing or that you managed to hit or didn't hit. It's actually the way that you made them feel when you were working with them. That is the thing that people remember about you.
- Tom Greever:
- And not to put too fine a point on it, but if we tie that back to the costumes or Robbie the cow, those kinds of interactions that people have had with me over the years, I hope will be a reminder to them that I was human with them, I was real with them. I genuinely wanted to engage with people in a way that would help them be more effective in their and in their roles. And that that's the kind of lasting impact that I hope to have as well. I will sometimes even conjure up one person on my team recently called UX sermons [laugh], where we have our regular kind of team meetings and we're going through work and we're talking about upcoming stuff. And I try to set aside the last, I don't know, three minutes, maybe even as much as five, to just provide some measure of inspiration for folks, Hey, we're dealing with this really challenging partner in the business right now, but look at that bigger picture.
- Or, Hey, I know that we didn't get the result that we wanted from this project over here, but keep in mind we've got this over there. I think it can, as the person delivering that message, it can feel a little awkward, if not kind of cheesy in the moment, but I think it tends to land pretty well on people. They appreciate the acknowledgement that, Hey, we have these challenges, but we have so much to look forward to. And I think reminding people of where we're headed and how this contributes to a bigger picture of our organization maturing in UX or product design process, it's so easy for people to look at the here and now and forget those things and be sad about the current state of where we are as an organization. And I think part of my job is to, is point to where we're headed and to remind them and encourage them and inspire them as awkward as it can feel. I think it's still really effective at helping other people really feel that right, to know that we're doing important work and we're doing it together as a team and we're headed in the right direction.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Andy Budd and Andy and I got talking about designers tendency to feel the need to perfect their work. And as a result of that feeling that even when good things happen, the team delivers a great project or a feature or whatever it may be. We have this, and again, generalizing here, but we have this tendency to look at that and think of the 20% that we weren't able to achieve instead of the 80% that we were. And he was very much echoing similar sentiments to you that it's important as the leader to actually ground the team in what has been achieved to date, but also what we need to focus on next. So that's really important reminder.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. Yeah. It's never going to be a perfect process. We're never going to get that a hundred percent. I know on my team recently we had this experience with a, because we're a startup and a smaller team, we don't have a lot of mature processes in place. And even if we did we would have to reinvent them every [laugh] six to 12 months anyway, because things are changing a lot more rapidly in our environment. But we back in April or May of last year, we kicked off an initiative to do some early discovery work on a part of our customer bases workflow that we didn't understand as well. And prior to doing that, our organization had not done that as much. We were a lot more focused on, Hey, here's a problem. Here's a solution. Someone create a UI for it. We'll throw it out there, see what happens, and maybe do some user testing along the way.
- So this was intended to be the beginning of a cycle where we could get people in our organization accustomed to how we would tease out the problems that we need to solve and how we would eventually arrive at those solutions. And we spent six months on this initiative and we did a lot of great work, a lot of great research. We had great data coming out of it but the way that the timing landed at the end of the year and when goals were set and decisions were being made for the roadmap, by the time we actually wrapped up that project and delivered the final readout, I think a lot of people on the team felt a little bit like, oh man, we didn't really get to include that those learnings and the planning for the roadmap yet we just kind of missed the mark there.
- And I remember telling them at the time, no, yes, of course that was valuable learning and insights that we have, and we absolutely will use them. Maybe not right now, but we will eventually. But even if we took all that work and threw it away, it would be valuable just for having created the cycle and the habit and the awareness for everyone else across the organization to understand this is how we want to work. This is a part of our process for understanding our customer's pain points and how it can and should influence the direction of the roadmap. And so I told him at the time, I was like, and now we just finished this one, we're going to do it again, and that one will be a little bit better and a little bit more mature and a little bit closer to the roadmap.
- And then when that one's done, we're going to do it again. But building those habits take time. We're not going to do it perfectly the first time out of the gate. We should be celebrating the fact that we had so much support across the organization for the fact that we were even doing it at all. Right? And now people are talking about it and they're already asking us about the next one and when we're doing it and what it's going to be called and what it's going to be focused on building that momentum and that energy. That was as much the exercise as it was the actual insights and influencing the roadmap.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about the work that went into the point before you got the approval to do that first generative project.
- Tom Greever:
- What do you mean the work
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Before that? It's often easy for us to look back at a project like that and go, that was successful, and I have no doubt that it is, but you had to do something in order to get, you spoke of broad support across the board for that type of work. And I often hear designers talking about the difficulty in convincing, and I know we'll come to articulating a design decision soon but convincing the business to invest in that earlier stage, research, the stuff that's not immediately tied to a product that's coming up or in market.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I understand the question. And the short answer to your question is that we branded it and we packaged it so that it was memorable. And I'll explain what I mean by that. I think prior to this initiative, a lot of the work that we had done had been kind of one off things. So we're going to do a little bit of discovery here. Someone worked with one of our subject matter experts over there, and we put together a deck and we had some ideas and we would do a readout at a different meeting. It was independent, separate measures of insight coming in from customers and subject matter experts and product people on the team. But they were I don't know, every six or eight weeks depending on what we were doing with research or where we were with different discovery work. Someone was working on that and sharing it out.
- But when they would do that, it landed, I think as like, oh, well, this is that person who had some ideas about that thing. Isn't that nice? All right, well, let's go back to the roadmap now. And we just struggled to get any traction with these individual efforts. So what we did differently this time was we gave it a name, we said it was going to last six months, and then I spent a majority of my effort socializing it among lots of different leaders and parts of the organization for that six months, including getting our c e O to come to the final readout. At the very, very end of that project, we would make what we called trailer videos, which were either me or someone else on the team that was helping with the project, give a brief five minute recap of what we were doing or where it was, and it had the same brand name and kind of imagery and logos that kind of went along with it.
- And we would share these out. We had a dedicated Slack channel. We would send out the videos. I was sharing them with our leaders in the organization, including our C E O, so people knew what was going on. They knew the name, and so you could say the name and people knew what you were referring to. Now, in reality, all we did, and I don't want to minimize it, but all we did was take what used to be multiple, I think individual and kind of put them in this container and package it up such that it was easy for people to point to and go, oh, yeah, that's that larger discovery effort that the team is working on. And I think that packaging is really what made it successful. And we put a timeline on it too. We said, okay, it's going to be done by this date, and we could have just rolled right into the next one and just done a separate study over here or done a survey there or done some concepts with this one problem area over there.
- But instead we said, okay, no hard stop on that, and now we're going to devise and come up with a new one that we will then launch and promote in a similar way. So that internal promotion and getting people excited about it and sharing it out and making it simple for people to remember and know what it was that we were doing was really, really important. And actually on the topic of using humor and levity what we called it was Kopi. Luk was the name of this effort, and if you're not familiar with it, kopi Luk is the name of the most expensive coffee bean in the world because it is harvested from coffee cherries that were eaten by a wild Indonesian civic cat and harvested from the droppings of that cat. And so the reason that we named it that, and I had a whole thing in our initial trailer route, why we were calling it Kopi Luk is because we were looking for the most valuable coffee beans among a huge pile of crap that we have all these problems, all these known pain points from our customers, a ton of different information to sort through.
- And we wanted to really take the time to go through it. And the name was funny, and it was interesting. It had a tangible kind of representation. And in fact, I bought these packages of coffee and I mailed them out to some people on the team as a thank you for participating or as a reminder of the project, but finding something that people could connect with and associate kind of the content of what we were trying to accomplish to a creative expression of that the project I found to be very effective.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So there's several things in here. There's storytelling, the Kopi Luk story that you just told me. There's structure in terms of the way in which you approach the engagement with the other senior stakeholders, the way that you communicated back where you are were at on a regular basis. There's also in here there's a degree of bravery in terms of the level of transparency that it sounded like you were affording others in the company to see what was happening with the design and the research as that was going on.
- Tom Greever:
- And the transparency thing and maybe I highly value this more than a lot of folks, and I feel like a common message for me on all my teams is to just share early and share often that the more visibility that we can give people into our team and our work and our processes, the better off we are going to be. And I know that a lot of designers are hesitant to do that. They don't want to share their work too early. I have, while I understand the sentiment, that it can be difficult to feel like, oh, this is a work in progress, or I have to provide some measure of disclaimer or context, or I'll get the wrong kind of feedback, or it may reflect poorly on me because I haven't thought through it well yet. I understand those risks and that feeling. But what I've found is that when people see what we're working on, it actually gives them more confidence that we know what we're doing, that we're going to deliver on time, that the result is going to be really, really great.
- And people actually are less inclined to speak into our process and tell us how to do it because they can see it happening. And it makes sense when you think about it. I mean, people tend to fear what they don't know what they can't see. And if our work is happening in a black box and people don't have access to it, or they don't know where we're at with stuff that they're going to be asking a lot more questions. Or if they're not asking questions, they're just sitting over there going, well, no idea where the team is on that thing. Oh, well, I guess I'll find out and then tell them they did it all wrong. Whereas if you go the opposite direction and you open up everything you actually have I have found fewer questions and a lot more confidence from people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's actually mitigating the risk of things getting derailed if you do the big reveal rather than the fear that designers have with exposing their work when it's unfinished and them perceiving it as being risky. I've heard you previously talk about stakeholders and sociopaths in the same sentence. And just to give people some context here I believe you were describing that the general population, roughly 4% of us are sociopathic, and that tendency is reflected by a scale of four, an executive ranks greater than the general population, but it's not that our, it's more likely that our stakeholders are actually suffering, you've said, from an unconscious form of bias rather than them actually being sociopathic. Now knowing this is one thing, so knowing that a stakeholder is likely suffering from a bias, and we've got some work to do here to close that is one thing, but knowing what to do about it is another. So what can designers do about it if they're having a difficult time convincing a stakeholder of something or they're receiving some erroneous feedback that really isn't connected to the purpose of the work, what can designers do to unravel that and get things back on track?
- Tom Greever:
- So people tend to trust their own bias and their instincts over yours if they don't trust yours. So if you've given a choice between you and me, and I'm not too sure about you, or I don't necessarily have as much confidence in you and your skill and your ability, then I tend to rely on my own. So a lot of these issues can be mitigated just by building trust, and that is a simple thing to say, but is really hard in practice because it requires building the relationship. So I like to describe it sometimes as a spectrum where, or maybe a more appropriate word is more like a trust thermometer where you've got trust on one side and communication on the other. And if I have a very little bit of trust with someone, then it's going to require a lot of communication to really get support from them.
- If I have a great deal of trust and the amount of deliberate communication I need to apply to that relationship is actually much, much smaller. And this is why things can happen so quickly in smaller organizations where we have more time to build stronger bonds. This is why a startup founded by two best friends can just text each other and say, Hey, I'm going to do the thing. And they go, okay, sure. There's a high level of trust. And so there's less need for deliberate communication. So the more that you can focus on building trust and relationships with the people who you need to communicate with and whose support you need, the less deliberate effort you have to apply to actually gaining that trust and support in the process.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And in your years as a leader in a position of needing to build that trust with your peers, what have you found is the most effective way when you're starting from a baseline of zero or minimal trust?
- Tom Greever:
- So it doesn't always feel good to say this, but it actually has less to do in my experience, with my own individual expertise or that of the person whose trust I need to build. And more to do with just finding something that we can have in common. There's a ton of research out there that shows that anytime you can find anything in common with another person, it kind of instantly builds rapport. There's one funny one that I read recently. I'll have to see if I can find the link and send it to you afterwards. You can include it in the show notes if you want. But these researchers brought in participants to smell an American college football jersey in a box, and they had taken multiple college football jerseys and soaked them in some material that made them stinky, made them smell like body odor.
- And then they put them in these boxes and they had participants come in and smell them one at a time and then rank them from most smelly to least smelly. And what they found was that people ranked their own college as being the least smelly, and they often ranked the college that was perceived as being their closest rival as being the most smelly. So something as simple as acknowledging, Hey, we went to the same university, or we grew up in the same neighborhood, or I mean even just we're connected with the same people on LinkedIn. We have kids, we both have pets, we both like to go hiking. Those seem kind of trivial things when we go back to that human experience that we talked about earlier. And you're creating now that human connection because people become unreasonable and they rely on themselves and their own biases when they're not having that human connection, when they're in the throes of work, when they really are maybe thinking and operating a little bit more robotically. And that that's maybe a pessimistic way to look of looking at it. But I do think that anything we can do to remind them that we're human, we're people, I have things in common with you and you have things in common with me just starting there, it makes a huge difference in the relationship and in building trust.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tom, you seem to have some really keen insights into the human condition, and perhaps this has to do with your experiences a designer, and maybe it's to do with natural curiosity or maybe it's an innate thing that you just have. I'm not sure, but I wanted to quote you again now because you've said something else that I feel is really important for us to talk about with regards to our relationships with stakeholders. And that was the vast majority of people who appear to be unreasonable have a much simpler need than we give them credit for. They just want to be heard. That's it. Now, I listen to you describe, when you were saying that how you once dealt with a stakeholder who brought up something in a design review that wasn't relevant at all to what you were there to discuss, and the way that you framed it, the way that you framed that conversation with that person, it was both in terms of your tone, it was both direct but it was also disarming. You had this way of helping them to see that they were off track, and then to get the meeting back on track, you allowed them to be heard without agreeing with what they were saying. Have you always had this ability, or is this something that you've had to purposefully practice?
- Tom Greever:
- I definitely have had to purposefully practice it. Certainly early in my career, I was not skilled at this at all. And I have some very acute memories of mistakes that I made earlier in my career with even my own boss and my boss's boss that I look back on now with embarrassment. We won't talk about that anymore. But in that example that you describe, the key there is to be sure that you're always validating the other person's perspective and even repeating it and rephrasing it back to them to demonstrate that you heard them. And the most common way that I have found to do that effectively is to lead with the yes. To start with the word Yes, yes, I understand where you're coming from. We did it this way for this reason. I'll be sure that the team follows up that word. Yes. Really does have some magical quality of letting that person know that, hey, they're valued.
- Right? Yeah, I hear you. And you're not saying yes to the specific request. You're saying yes to them as an individual to their participation in the process. You're saying yes to their energy and their excitement over being involved in the thing that you're working on. We do need our stakeholders to help influence the outcomes, and we do need their support. And if you don't lead with that, yes, if you don't validate them or repeat back to them that you really understand where they're coming from, they're just going to say it in a different way, maybe louder [laugh], right? They're just going to repeat themselves, and eventually they'll just play that boss card because they feel like you're not listening. And so yeah, anything you can do to demonstrate. Yeah, I hear you. I totally understand where you're coming from, and you're right. We do need to solve that problem. Maybe there's a different way to solve that. I completely agree with you that we need to solve that. That's not why we're here. Let you know. But I, I'll be sure that we follow up. Let's keep going with the meeting. And sometimes just doing that is all that it takes to help people move forward
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Saying yes. And it is something that, as you've said, is very disarming. It avoids open conflict, it helps people to feel heard. But is it being a little disingenuous sometimes? Are there situations where you actually disagree with a perspective that is being leveled at you quite forcefully, and you should say, no, I don't agree with that.
- Tom Greever:
- Right. That's a common question. And I would say that it would never be disingenuous if what you're saying yes to is them and their participation in your process and their collaboration right with you, their ideation in that time. Of course, you shouldn't be saying yes with the purpose and intent of just turning it into a no, right? This isn't like the compliment sandwich where I compliment you and then I give you some negative feedback, and then I compliment you again just to make you feel good about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm. People say through that.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. But I think it's important to add here that leading with a yes is not only about disarming them and helping them understand the framing of what they're asking us in the wider context of what we're doing, but it's also to help keep us open and help us to not be biased in our own ideas. Because when you say yes to another person, you're now being vulnerable. You are opening yourself up to that risk, and you're saying, yes, I'm open to the possibilities here. I was leading a workshop in New York recently, and we were talking about this principle, and one of the participants told me that he had been practicing this for a while, and he went to a meeting where a stakeholder gave a suggestion that he thought was a terrible idea, and he led with the intent of just trying to turn it into a no.
- But in the process of leading with a yes, he explained it to himself such that he realized it was actually a much better solution than the solution he had in mind. And if he hadn't done that, he would've missed an opportunity to solve that problem in a way that would actually be better for both the customer and the business. So I don't think we can discount the possibility that we also have our own biases. We also have our own preferences that we're relying on. And this is meant to help, I think both sides of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really a tool for leaving, as you said, leaving open the possibility, but it's the possibility that you might be wrong about something, isn't it? Sure, yeah.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. And the possibility that there's more than one way to solve a problem, there's always multiple alternatives. The reason we disagree on the specific solution is cause there's always another way we could come up with to solve it. So just objectively, it's simply not right to just say that that person's idea for solving it is wrong, don't, unless we've tried it and actually have evidence of that we don't know yet. It's just my idea versus yours. And of course, I have expertise as a designer that I poured into that solution. So in that way, I know better. But also in theory, my subject matter expert and the other people in the business, they also have valuable domain knowledge, information about the business and how things work that I don't have. The whole point is that we have to find the way to bring those two together. And if I go into these conversations truly believing that my designed solution I is absolutely the only and best way, well then I'm missing a huge opportunity to actually build the right product for our
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Customers. So following that thread along something else you've said, which there perhaps there's some tension in there with what you've just said previously, and I'll quote you now, you've said, because design is visual, people being business stakeholders believe that just because they have an opinion about design, that it means that their opinion is just as valid as that of the expert that they've hired. The same way we can choose the music that we like, but that doesn't make us a good musician. So stakeholders do have valuable domain knowledge, things that they know, things we don't know, and we need that knowledge, but sometimes they have weird opinions as we all do. So how do you avoid in that context, the stakeholder as, I'm going to use an analogy here, perhaps it's a flimsy one, but how do you avoid the audience from trying to be part of the band when it's in the context of some well thought out design work?
- Tom Greever:
- Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely opportunity for us to demonstrate our own expertise. So let's presume for a moment, we've built that trust that we talked about earlier. We're leading with the, yes, our stakeholder feels really good about the interaction. So we don't, we're not having challenges with the relationship there necessarily. It's really just about a subject matter expert thinks this, and I think this about the design. Then that opens an opportunity for us to really think about why we've made the decisions that we've made, right? Because it wasn't purely just our intuition isn't just that we are designers and think intuit these things from the natural way in which things look, it may feel that way to us sometimes, and it's true that a lot of us are designers because we are more inclined to do that intuitively. But in reality, all of that intuition is based on some experience or learning or insight from earlier in our career or in our education.
- And so we need to be better at doing homework to go back to understand, well, in my experience, we know that people look from left to top to bottom, and we designed this to make sure that they were tracking through the application in that way to get to that call to action button. Just providing them either with anecdotal understanding that we have from our own experience or ideally finding our own research and even third party information to back it up to say like, Hey, in a common e-commerce checkout flow, this is the standard. And the reason that it's the standard is because of the data from this source over here. It doesn't have to be our own original resource, but I, sorry, research. But I think anything that we can do to present ourselves as the experts, not just because we decided it looked better or would work better this way, but because we have some experience doing it, we have seen it work or not work, even if it wasn't from our own own work or our own jobs, we could have collected this information over the years from being exposed to the design industry in general.
- Those little snippets and insights are important for us to keep track of. And actually, a real simple thing that you can do is when you stumble upon some really interesting research that is influential in your design work, just bookmark it. I mean, sometimes with individual projects, I will keep all my reference material in a folder and know that all these things, these studies, this article, this research, it was in this conference that I went to, it was influential on the decisions that I made on this project. And if a stakeholder asks me, hopefully I can go back and look that up and share it out. It may not even come to that. Sometimes them just understanding the idea that we have some reasoning, there is logic that underpins why we did and what we did. Sometimes that alone is enough, especially if there's a high level of trust,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Your personal practice and the practice that you've encouraged others to adopt and communicated through articulating design decisions. You have a very structured approach to describing for yourself before you even have to communicate it to somebody else why you did what you did. And I understand that there are three main questions that you favor here. The first is, what problem does it solve? The second is, how does this affect the user? And the third, and this is where we're getting down to brass tax with design, is why is this better than the alternative? So it sounded like to me, if you've actually invested the time yourself to think that through and to write that down, which sounds like a lot of work, but it also sounds like it comes in incredibly handy when you do get challenged on certain points, you are going to have a ability to relatively quickly articulate the rationale behind the decision, which is great. But it's the third question that I wanted to dig into deeper with here, which is why is it better than the alternative? Because to me, that seems like you will have had to have considered the alternatives if you're going to have an answer to that before you arrive at the solution that you did. So how much effort needs to go into, maybe this is how long is a piece of string question, but how much effort needs to go into considering alternatives?
- Tom Greever:
- So it's going to depend on the fidelity and importance of the meeting. So for bigger, more important meetings with lots of people or executives, it's going to be worth spending a lot more time exploring those alternatives and being sure I understand how my solution is the preferred one for simple hallway conversations or impromptu Zoom calls. Maybe I just have it in my head. Maybe I jotted down some notes on it. Maybe I have a section in my Figma file where I've got a couple of concepts that I kind of tried. As long as I'm able to verbally walk through them, then that's sufficient. But I, I've found that a lot of times we throw away those alternative solutions. And I think that part of this process is telling the story of how we got from point A to point B. A lot of times people will show up, Hey, here's the design.
- This is what we think the solution should be. Thumbs up, thumbs down. And they missed the opportunity to help the other people be, again, have visibility into our process and our thinking to understand where we started and where we ended up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should put 10 solutions up on the whiteboard and have people make the Frankenstein of their dreams, right? Okay, we're not doing that. We absolutely should come to the table with this is our recommendation. This is the one thing that we think is going to make the difference here for the customer and the business. And yet we also have to be able to tell them how we got there in with just enough information to help them get the context. But I think if you just go straight to, Hey, here's the solution. This is what we think we should do.
- They're going to have the same instinct that you did at the B. They're going to come up with the same obvious idea that you and your team did at the very beginning. And so if you're able to say, yes, I love that idea. We thought about that too. Now let me show you where we tried that and how it helped us get to where we are now. That makes a much more compelling case than having to be like, oh, yeah, well, I don't know. I didn't think about that. And then now it's kind of back to the drawing board,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just hearing you say, yes, I loved that. Again, I was pretending I was your stakeholder there for a second. I felt really good about it, even though you were saying, I've already thought about it and you are just trying to catch up. But you had, you've actually, you've talked about this before and it was a huge light bulb moment for me. Isn't talked about it elsewhere, where you were saying, you said something to the effect of, by the time we get into the room with our stakeholders and lay it all out, whatever it is that we are presenting, we've had the benefit of spending a week, a day, a month, however long it is crafting what it is that they're about to see. And they haven't had any of that benefit or very little of it. And yet we assume, or we treat them in such a way that we assume that they have the same knowledge coming into this meeting as we do when it's clearly there's an ayy there in terms of the knowledge that we are holding and the cards that we're holding.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. And that's why just very quickly set in context at the beginning of any conversation is really important. I've been a stakeholder overseeing projects on multiple teams myself, and I'm a designer, and I even found it difficult to go from one design meeting to the next, and these design teams would just launch into this epic presentation of their work. And the first thing I'm thinking is like, wait a minute. What product are we even talking about now? What did we talk about last week? Why is that still on the design? Because I thought I remembered. We said we were going to remove that, right? I'm just trying to catch up. And I don't think that we recognize that that's the life of a lot of these stakeholders is going from one thing to the next. We have the opportunity to create the user experience of our meeting for the person who's coming into it.
- So if you put yourself in their shoes and you think about, if I were that person, what would I want? What would I need? What must it look like from their perspective to come in that changes things. And you don't want to spend minutes of a 30 or 45 minute meeting explaining the backstory. Of course, that would be too long. It'd be too boring. They'd be like, come on, get to the point. You have to find that right balance of, here's what we talked about last time. Here's the problem we're trying to solve. This is the kind of feedback we'd like to hear from you today. Any questions before we jump in? Something super brief to just bring them up to speed and now we're going to tell the story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So this is what you meant when you said one of our jobs as designers is to align our needs with the expectations of our stakeholders.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think we have to be able to see it from their perspective and just to have empathy for them. I mean, it really is difficult going from one project to the next. I mean, sometimes our stakeholders, depending on where they sit in the business, they have access to information that we don't have. They came to some big meet. They know things about where the business is headed that we don't know, and the way they react to us might not have anything to do with our project at all. Right? And I think sometimes we underestimate just how much is in their own mental capacity. We talk about reducing cognitive load on our users. We want to try our best to do the same thing for the people in our meetings.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So let's stay on those meetings for a little while longer, and I'll quote you again. You've said, I think the big problem with design discussions is that we see the purpose of these meetings as being there to receive feedback when really we are there to facilitate a conversation about what the right solution to these problems are. So are you suggesting that the design itself, so if we have an artifact, whatever it may be, that that is actually simply a provocation to be used to understand how far or close to whatever we define as success we are.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah. I think that's a really good way of setting it up. And I mean, sometimes it's not wrong to deliberately design an offensive provocation, something that is really going to get the conversation going. I think that if you see yourself as just being there to receive feedback, I designed a thing, now you tell me what you think about it, that's just going to set you up for being defensive. And when you get defensive, you feel pushed on right? By your stakeholders. And when you feel pushed on, you start to push back. And it just completely sets up the conversation in the wrong way from the get-go. But if you go into it with a mindset of like, okay, this person has a valuable perspective. My solution is one of many solutions. The purpose is for me to be a facilitator to get the best out of all the people who are here to participate in this conversation.
- And that's not strictly about feedback as much as it is about insights, right? And feedback sounds like make it bigger, move it over here, drop it down there. That's feedback. But insights are like, tell me what doesn't work about having it over there. Why do you think moving it over here is better than having it over there? Not focusing on the prescriptive feedback that they're providing and instead trying to uncover the problem that they're attempting to solve. Because most people aren't thinking in terms of problems and solutions. They're just going straight to the solution. They see something visual, they think they know that if they move it over here, that's going to solve something for them, but they don't know what that is. And so if we see our job as to help them uncover that, then we'll be more successful because it opens up the possibility that there are other ways we can solve for it than just their suggestion. And they will see that too in the course of the conversation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So just the same way that our customers or users can't really articulate their problems without us asking the right questions, our stakeholders can't either.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, absolutely. And they probably have more exposure to product processes, and they understand things like user research. So they probably have some terminology and guardrails there that most of our customers maybe don't have. So that should be an advantage for us too though, right? Because now we have a shared vocabulary. We already have a construct and kind of a framework within to work with them on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I'm curious about your framing of the role of design within the organization. And you've framed it. And again, I'll you've said, we've got to see our roles as one of service because serving people forces us to see the perspectives of another person. Designers are on a team to serve. Perhaps I take a little issue with this notion of service. It's not that I necessarily disagree, though. I don't want to come across too strong here in how I feel, but it's just this nature of being subservient that I suppose that the term service may communicate, and maybe that just rubs up against clearly some of my own perhaps limiting beliefs about design and its role in the world. So what is it, or to whom should we be in service of? What is it behind the service notion that you feel is important for designers to connect with and to understand?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, before I answer that, I think it is important to touch on this idea that it definitely not intended to communicate a sense that we are subservient or are not equal, or are less than certainly design and research and product are equal partners and creating these solutions. And we absolutely should have the confidence in that. When we go into these conversations. The concept of seeing ourselves and taking on that attitude of service is really about humility. And if we go back to some of our earlier threads on wanting to eliminate our own bias and leading with a yes and validating the other person, that's where this all kind of comes together to connect. If you go into these conversations believing like I'm here to help them be successful in their role and in the company, that's a very different attitude from I'm here to push design and make this a design led the organization or process or product, or even my own idea, my own agenda was a totally different thing.
- But I do believe that when you position yourself to set up someone else for success, then I think you will find success more easily just simply as a byproduct of that. Because when our partners in the business see us making them successful, they will naturally want to do things that help us be successful too. And in fact, a lot of our businesses are set up that way anyway. My partners are incentivized to achieve their own KPIs or OKRs for the product. So anything that I can do in service of that will make them happy and successful. Well, I'm also measured on those same things. And in fact, one of the things I'm measured on is how effective my partners in the business believe I am at working with them. I mean, one of the number ways that we evaluate people in a lot of organizations now is by doing these 360 feedback loops where we're asking partners in the business, been your experience working with Tom or someone else. So when people know that they can come to me with a problem and I'm game to help them figure that out, it means that I now have permission to go to them when I need something too. There's a reciprocity in our relationship that we're both there to help each other be successful. And it's just harder to accomplish that if you don't see yourself in that role. If you're going in with a different intent,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost like you're going in with an intent to invest in them more than you are going in with an intent to withdraw something or extract something. It's a much more additive, virtuous framing of the relationship. It's also making me think of I'm, I'm not, I'm going to get the adage quite right, but maybe you can connect with this. There's a saying, something to the effect of if money is what you are pursuing for the sake of money, it's going to be more difficult to achieve that than if you pursue something for the sake of itself and then the money will come. And again, that, I didn't quite frame that correctly, but it's almost like if you want design to have influence, don't pursue design, influence directly help to help other people to achieve what they're there to achieve in the context of the organization. And then that will make it easier for design to have influence.
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, right. So two examples from my career that I think demonstrate this well. One was a person on my team who met with their product owner and their product owner came to the meeting with the designer and the engineering developer lead with a deck that was basically like, Hey, here's where we're headed. Here's what we're going to do. This is the vision and this is the strategy and these are the things. And my designer came to me after that meeting and was really down and was like, I don't know why they didn't involve me and ask me. We have all these insights. We've talked about strategy together. It just feels like they totally left me out and they wrote up the strategy all on their own and then just told me what it was. And that's a common feeling for designers, that product or even engineering is just telling us what to do.
- And I told this person, I said, well, did you go back to them and ask if you could still have some influence or help them tweak it? And they're like, oh, no, I didn't. I was like, well, did you have ideas for it? Well, yeah, I did. Why don't you go do that and see what they say? And they came back the following week and said, oh, yeah, they were totally open to it. They loved that I wanted to jump in and it wasn't final yet, and they were trying to share it out with me specifically to get my own perspective, but that would've been a missed opportunity. Instead, it's like they were waiting for a product owner to come to them and say, oh, please come and help me. But instead, we have to find these opportunities when they're presented to us. So that's the first one that comes to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mind. Are you saying that people can't read our minds
- Tom Greever:
- They can't read our minds, and I don't think we should assume that they're deliberately trying to leave us out of the conversation. I think anytime someone comes to you with an idea or with a suggestion, even if it's in a slide deck, that doesn't make it permanent, and it's a great opportunity for you to jump in and say, Hey, well, did you think about this? Right? So that's the first example. The second example that comes to mind is more generalized. There's not one specific example here, but I have made it a habit in this line of thinking that I, I'm here to serve my partners in the business. I will frequently offer to help people with their slide decks in our business for other meetings, especially my partners in product. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One for them and for their benefit it's much easier and faster for me to design a slide and to make it look really, really nice for if I do it for them than if they do it themselves.
- And they're always appreciative, right? Like, oh my God, thank you so much. This was such a huge weight off my shoulders. They can just give me the outline and I can make a few slides and it looks really nice. But selfishly for me, it often gives me access to the content of meetings that I'm not invited to [laugh] meetings that I didn't even know about. And so just as often I'm helping someone with a slide deck and they think I'm doing them a favor, but really I'm looking at some stuff and I'm going, oh wow, that's interesting. This is coming. And now I have a conversation point with my product partner and I can be like, Hey, I see you're talking about this and that meeting. What about this? Oh yeah, that's right. We should add that, right? That's design influencing where we're going as a product.
- And again, if I waited for someone to just come along and invite me into that process, it would never happen or it would not happen nearly as often as I would like it to. But if I can find ways to be influential to find the influence, then I'll be much more successful. And one of the ways of doing that is seeing myself as being there to serve other people and make them successful because by trying to make my product partner successful, I'm successful as a byproduct. Cause now I have access to information to people, to meetings that I didn't have otherwise.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Structural influence is not the only way that you can achieve influence. That's right. Yeah. You're making me recall a conversation I had, I think at the end of last year with Jesse James Garrett, and he almost, not to the word but in another story articulated the same point just as fine. So I think it's another key insight today. Tom, I'm mindful of time, and I also wanted to acknowledge the work that you put into articulating design decisions, which is now, I think seven or just over seven years old. It's sold over 36,000 copies. It's been translated into seven languages and it's now in its second edition. What surprised you the most from bringing that book into the world?
- Tom Greever:
- Well, I mean, I never anticipated that it would be as influential as it appears to have been at the time when I wrote it it seemed like a nice idea. I felt like articulating design decisions was a fairly obvious thing that all of us have to do every single day. I just happened to have developed some structure around how I articulated design decisions and wanted to share it with the community. I always thought it would be kind of like a nice line on my resume and it would sell a few copies and it would be like, oh, that was a fun project to work on. I'm really glad that I did that. And I never anticipated all the messages that I would get from people. I mean, I've had people tell me that they got a job, they got a promotion, they led with a yes for the first time in a meeting, and it just completely changed their conversations.
- I've had people tell me that it totally turned their careers around, and I'm honored, quite frankly, I wanted to help people. I hope that it, I didn't anticipate that it would help people quite to the extreme that it appears to have. And so in that way, I'm super humbled to think that something that I feel like I was good at or learned to become good at, that I could put out there and share with the world has helped other people. I mean, there's no, I think greater feeling than to know that you've contributed something to the world. And if I have helped a few people in their careers along the way, then that's great. I'm super, super happy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, you certainly have, and I have one final question before we bring the show down to a close, and not to finish on a somber note, but it is that you've observed a sad reality when it comes to designers who aren't able to articulate those design decisions. So people that haven't yet picked up a copy of your book or heard you speak about this, and in your own words you've said, and I'll quote you one last time, sometimes people are just nervous about what it would mean to speak up and communicate their thoughts. There are some really, really talented designers whose work we will never see. So in the spirit of encouraging those people to find their voice, what words of wisdom or perhaps encouragement can you share with them?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, I think it's important to find a mentor an accountability partner I would say that can really help you in this area because it is important. And being able to find that voice and to develop confidence in this area really will make the difference in your career. We want to see your work. We want your work to be influential in the world. And I know that when we all started out in design, we thought that we were going to create things that would just automatically go out and change the world. And it turns out there's this huge barrier when it comes to getting the support that we need inside organizations. So that first step is recognizing that, acknowledging that that is a part of our reality, that we have to have that in order for our work to be influential. And so it's just as important for us to put the time and effort into that as we do into the craft of design. We have to put maybe just as much effort into developing skills in this area to make sure that the work and the skills that we have and the craft is actually going to be able to influence our customers' lives.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tom, this has been such a great conversation. I've really enjoyed our time together. Thank you for taking the time to share your stories and insights with me today, and also for taking the time seven years ago. And I know you've done the second edition as well, which would've taken some time to distill them into your book, articulating design decisions so that the rest of us don't have to learn everything the hard way.
- Tom Greever:
- Great. Well, thanks again for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. It was definitely my pleasure. And Tom, if people want to keep up with what you are doing, any new developments or announcements or contributions that you're making to the community, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Tom Greever:
- Yeah, so I'm active on LinkedIn and Twitter and to a lesser extent on Instagram I'm the only Tom Greever, so you can just Google my name and it's pretty easy to find me. But feel free to look me up. Add on LinkedIn or Twitter, tomgreever.com is my website. You can find a way to get in touch with me there as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Cool. Thank you Tom, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Tom.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe, and also tell someone else, maybe just one person. If you feel that they would get value from this episode and the others, tell them about the show, send them the link.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.