Wendy Johansson
Effecting Change in a Messy World
In this episode of Brave UX, Wendy Johansson shares some of her leadership learnings 🦉, speaks frankly about the challenge of changing the status quo 🏔️, and what she’s observed in the best designers 💡.
Highlights include:
- How do you balance your personal views with what’s best for your business?
- What can people ask themselves if they’re not able to effect change at work?
- Why is it important to focus changing the minds of the people in the middle?
- What can we do when we are asked to do something we strongly disagree with?
- Why is it important for us to speak up when we see injustices happening?
Who is Wendy Johansson?
Wendy is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Experience Officer at MiSalud, a company that’s on a mission to provide affordable, culturally-authentic, physical and mental healthcare for the Latinx community in the USA and Mexico 🩺.
Before starting MiSalud, Wendy worked at Amazon, where she launched the inaugural UX Design and Research Apprenticeship Programme 🌱; a programme that provided a pathway to UX careers for people from underrepresented communities and non-traditional backgrounds.
Wendy has also been the Global Vice President of User Experience at Publicis Sapient, where she led a team of over 1,000 designers and partnered with then CXO, Dr. John Maeda, to transform a largely traditional agency into an experience-led consultancy ⚡️.
Back in 2013, Wendy co-founded Wizeline, a global product development company where she was also VP of UX, managing a global team of over 75 designers, and VP of Academy, where she led the global expansion of Wizeline Academy 🌎.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do 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 Wendy Johansson. Wendy is the co-founder and chief product experience Officer at MiSalud, a company that's on a mission to provide affordable, culturally authentic physical and mental health care for the Latinx community in the USA and Mexico.
- Before starting MiSalud, Wendy worked at Amazon where she launched the inaugural UX Design and Research Apprenticeship Program, a program that provided a pathway to UX careers for people from underrepresented communities and non-traditional backgrounds.
- Wendy has also been the global vice president of user experience at Publicis Sapient, where she led a team of over 1,000 designers and partnered with the then CXO, Dr. John Maeda, to transform a largely traditional agency into an experience led consultancy.
- And while that's all very impressive, it's not what Wendy is most proud of. Back in 2013, Wendy co-founded Wiseline, a global product development company where she was VP of UX and Academy.
- At Wiseline, Wendy built and managed a global team of over 75 designers and founded Wiseline Academy, a training organization that democratized the learning of tech skills and entrepreneurship in the emerging markets where the company operated.
- Wendy is an official member of the invitation only Forbes Technology Council, a mentor to the next generation of design leaders through the On Deck Design Fellowship, an advisor to the cybersecurity company, Cerby, and the design mentoring platform, ADPList.
- She's also part of the venture board for CompuSoluciones' LatAm Fund, as well as a UX fellow and advisor to Wiseline. And now she's kindly here with me for this conversation on Brave UX.
- Wendy, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Wendy Johansson:
- Hello, Brendan. Thank you for that mouthful of an intro and now I see why my team likes to have bingo games. About how many roles does Wendy actually have on LinkedIn? I didn't realize there were so many in there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you certainly have a rich profile and it provided me with lots of interesting things to tell people about. In your intro, you've certainly led a very successful and very well storied career, and I'm looking forward to getting into some of those things with you today. I want to actually start by winding the clock back quite a lot here. Taking us back to between November, 2006 and April, 2007, and that's when you took a self-described career hiatus and you did something pretty interesting. How did you spend that time?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Let me start with how that career hiatus came. I'm sure a long time ago I wrote on some resume and LinkedIn as a career hiatus. That was the first time I got laid off. That was my first job out of college. I got laid off, and it was such an interesting time back then because I was working for a startup and I had built the UI of their video platform and they said, that's cool. You're done with the UI now. We don't actually have any other work for you either learn to code or you have no job, which today in what design is, nobody would ever call design done. So I just wanted to share that's where that came from and that, I mean, even back then that led to so much self-doubt out of university. One of my first jobs, I literally went home and cried to my parents of what am I going to do? And they're like, well, you're not going to learn a code. So time to take a break was what they told me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How did that break and how did that unfortunate event, how did that change your view on what it meant to be a designer and design maybe more broadly? How did that affect that?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I think what it helped me realize, at least starting from my parents' perspective of well, go ahead and take your break. It's not like you're going to learn to do something else that you don't enjoy doing because I actually started in university as a CSS major. I couldn't get through that first coding course, JavaScript. And I was like, this is not it for me. And so I stayed on this path of cognitive science and design, and I think what it taught me was just with the support of my parents at that such young age, don't give up on your principles. Stick to that. If design is what you want to do, you'll go find another job there and until then, go do some stuff. And that goes to the second part of my story. What did I do During that period, I was in a band and that day after I talked to my parents and I was all devastated and I went to band practice to see my band mates, they were bummed out and I was like, why are you guys bummed out?
- I'm the one who lost my job. And they said, well, you're the only person with your full-time job because they worked at cafes and whatnot. And they said, we just got a touring deal in Japan, but you're the only person with full-time jobs, so we all know you're not going to go, so then we can't go. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is what my parents meant. It's going to work out. It worked out. That same day, serendipity, my got a touring gig in Japan. So we went off and did that and I said, I don't have a job, let's go. And so we had something like about 30 tour dates over a month and a half in Japan, and it was just spread out and we went a little early. We just got to know different neighborhoods. We stayed there a little longer afterwards. It was just a whole lot of fun.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now Japan is a bit of a mystical place for me. I have to admit that I've never been there. I have had a number of family members, friends, people that have traveled there and they really rave about it. It's got such a strong culture and it seems to be such a unique place in the world. What was your first impression or what is maybe the lasting impression that you still have with you of your time in Japan?
- Wendy Johansson:
- That the first impression, also, a last impression for me really sits around what the venues look like actually. So first day we show up and a van show, they take us there around two o'clock for soundcheck with the other bands. And we're in what looks like a downtown central business district, financial towers all over. Everybody in black business suits just looking very serious. And we're like, did you drop us off at the right place? You just dropped off a bunch of strange looking American kids with all their band gear in the middle of a C, B, D, what's going on here? And they said, oh no, it's this door right here in the base of one of these financial towers. And they opened it up and it is just like blasting the moment they open the door, but you close it, totally silent and soundproof.
- And the first saw for me that was just like, oh, so this kind of creative creativity, this what most people call a nightlife scene, a little more punk rock. This is just integrated in the middle of this. There's no district that's the punk district, the club district. It's just part of everyday society and they have really great soundproofing, so you couldn't hear anything. But the second part of that is when we started playing the show that night, I was also hanging out at the merchant table. We weren't playing first. And so I'm watching all these people coming in and paying their fee and the folks coming in were the same people who were outside in the daytime doing these jobs in their business suits. And they would come in, loosen the tie, take off the jacket, buy a merch t-shirt, pull it on over the button up, and they're like, yeah, we're just here to see these cool bands from America for the night.
- And I'm like, this is so cool. And the last thing impression for me is just coming into, again, this corporate world out of university got laid off on my first job looking at this and being like, just because you look some way doesn't mean you are some way. Whereas I feel like in the United States, even in, let's just say I go to a bank and all the coworkers there are very serious looking. You can tell the person with the eyebrow piercing or the tatts popping up on their sleeve. You can tell when somebody's a little different. But in Japan, everybody looks exactly the same and you just don't know what they're into. And I think that's super cool. You just cannot judge people the same way that I feel like we do so much in the us
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What an insight that is. And I think it's something that plays out here in New Zealand. I feel like we conform quite strictly to perhaps the expectations of others or it's just less obvious. I suppose what you're saying about the people in Japan, you couldn't really pick them on the street as to who was going to be in the club and who wasn't. Music clearly was important to you at that point of your life. And I haven't actually come across anything that you've said about it since. So I'm curious, is this something, this playing in bands, this energy that you must have had, you were on stage, is this something that's still part of your life? You're a busy founder now, you've done many other things in your career. Is this something that still stays with you?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Yeah, I'll phrase it this way. Oftentimes people will ask me either after a conference or even coworkers within my company to say, how did you get so brave and you can go speak in front of anybody about anything? I was like, oh no. Total introvert, super shy person. If I have to go to a business dinner and it's more than four people, super awkward. I'm not going to say anything. I don't know how to interject into conversations with groups. So it appears some way, and I would say being able to have played in a band, have sung in a band that really helped me build up a persona in the same way I've read interviews about Beyonce, about how does she come on stage in these costumes and she is queen day, how is this possible? And she's like, oh no, it's just a character I play when I go on stage.
- I'm putting on these costumes for this character and I'm that character when I'm up there. But as a normal human being, she's like, no, a little introvert, a little shy, a little quiet, but not the same character you're putting on stage. And I would say that's how I feel about business is I know a lot of people tend to say, well, I'm an introvert. I get so exhausted by all these meetings and negotiating on design and talking to executives. I don't feel that it's exhausting because I treat it as, all right, we're putting on the costume, I'm going to go sell something, I'm going to go convince somebody of something, I'm going to go close a deal, I'm going to go close a candidate, whatever those things are like, alright, we're putting the costume on. Here's the persona, this is who I got to be.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about that in relation to your time working with Dr. John Maeda at Publicis Sapien, because I feel like, at least in my head, I'm wondering if there's a connection between a couple of dots here. So you left Wiseline, which was the company that you founded, and I want to go into that as well separately to work with John at Publicis Sapient. And I think I mentioned in your introduction that was a really large design organization, over a thousand designers across 30 plus offices globally. What did John say to you to compel you or to at least light that fire inside you that you might want to move on from your time at Wiseline? What was it that he said that made you feel like publicist Sapien was the next thing for you?
- Wendy Johansson:
- It wasn't the company, it was him. Actually, it could have been anywhere and I think it would've just been at the time, I had never, number one, never had a design boss in my entire career. I'd always reported to business people, president of product, A C E O. Some points I reported to A C T O, but I'd never had a design leader in my organization that I could report to. And then second, I had largely been an early startup tech in the two thousands where it was a bunch of rows. They were literally doing keg stands at seven 30 at night or they would pull out poker. And then one of my second job after I got back from the band, and I remember the one guy came up to me the first day, he was like, I had to put on a clean shirt today because of you.
- And I was like, what the fuck? Today? You wouldn't imagine people saying these things in the office much less than a woman, much less than only woman of color in the office. So it was a different time. And so I think for John, I had never felt like I was missing something or I didn't know that. And just seeing an Asian American just rising up to leadership in these very homogenous spaces was really, really interesting for me. And I dunno, it was just something where I'm like, okay, I don't think I've worked with a design leader. I don't think I've worked with somebody who looks like me, so let's go see what's going on. And I think this was a burgeoning moment back in 2019 when there was now being a lot of conversation within corporate within these tech spaces and teams of what's happening with Black Lives Matter, what's happening with all these injust black deaths from the hands of police. And so people were starting to talk about that in workplace. And I think race was coming up more because before that the big conversation was gender equity and now this was just equity equity and so how do we bring these conversations in? And that started opening my eyes with like, okay, what would it look like to actually report to also a leader who's not a white guy? Let's go figure this out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've spoke earlier on about Beyonce for example, needing to put on that persona or play that particular role. And I think you likened it to the way that when you were on stage, you had to do the same naturally, you inclined more towards the introverted into the scale, or who did you have to become working alongside John to lead a design org at such scale? What shift and at such a critical moment in cultural context for America, how did you have to change or adapt or behave in a way that you were able to be successful or have the kind of influence that you were seeking to have in that leadership position?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I had to learn a lot. I did not walk into that role at a pivotal moment coming in knowing how to talk about race, how to talk about trauma, how to talk about walking into the pandemic and everybody's remote and all the duties that especially women had at home. And I didn't know how to talk about any of that. And I think what really worked for me within John's team, and there's a couple of us, but being able to have that open space to say, Hey, okay, we're going to learn to talk about this. And John said a great example of every week saying like, Hey, this is what I learned this week. I'm going to share it back out because some of you don't know this. I've learned some new terms, I've learned some new news, I've seen some new data, and we're just going to talk about this.
- And learning together, learning out loud I think was really pivotal for me because that not only set the model for having these conversations with people, but also being able to say, this is just a great leadership behavior that can be modeled around anything. And I think because he was so open and curious and unlearning and constantly learning, that made it a safe space for the entire organization to say, okay, I want to go on this journey. I don't know how to talk about this. This is uncomfortable. They're talking about this. Or why are we having a C X O and some super VPs talking about this in a meeting? Like, this is weird. We've never done this at the company. Well, we're shifting. We're changing the culture. And it definitely takes, I would say, top down green light to be able to do that, but it does take the rest of the organization to say, I think this is a safe space that I can be brave in.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, you talked about changing the culture and there's obviously the corporate culture of a global agency like Publicist Sapient, but there's also, I suppose the culture that exists between colleagues or the culture of maybe the awareness of noticing that everyone looks fairly similar. There's that kind of cultural awareness as well. What we look like on the inside of our organization doesn't necessarily reflect what the world looks like on the outside. And the status quo is often a very powerful force. It's a very difficult thing to shift, yet it does shift. Now about your time at publicist Sapien, you've said before, and I'll quote you now, the goal was to modernize what was very much a legacy agency mentality of art directors, creative directors, creative talent who were just told to make things pretty. Now you are talking about there just that traditional dynamic of an agency trying to modernize itself to deal with the challenges of a digital world and a changing world. Now that sounds like a really challenging situation on that degree, but please feel free to expand this to encompass any of the conversation around equity that was also happening alongside of the work stuff, if those things can be separated, where did you and John and your team when you first arrived at the agency, where did you decide to focus your efforts? You can only do so much, right? Where did you decide to start changing the culture and why did you decide to start where you did?
- Wendy Johansson:
- John's a developed something called lead and what did it stand for? Light, ethical, accessible, and data full. And he said, these are the four elements that make really good design. And he was basically trying to define user experience or product design to our customers with some unified language. And it wasn't groundbreaking in the way that, well, yeah, having light experiences, data, full accessible ethical experiences we all know we should do, but it was the fact that he put unifying language around this. So not only within the organization, we knew how to define this more progressive product design culture, but also we had that same language to our clients and we were able to use that in the marketing when we had sales conversations. So the clients were able to say, this is how we're going to measure what you had before, and then how we made an impacted change.
- We're going to benchmark product behaviors and loading times, we're going to see how people are using it, we're going to see how people are feeling about your brand and the digital products there. And so I think in bringing that to the table, that was something that helped start shifting the culture because what I did was I kind of took this internal roadshow tour over Microsoft teams and I talked to every single team about lead. I did a presentation with them, they were very interactive. It helped them kind of look at their own work as recruiters, as marketers, as data scientists, as HR people. How do we create light, ethical, accessible data, full employee experiences, candidate experiences, visitor experiences to our website or people who are coming into any of our trade show events as a marketing team. So it gave everybody kind of common language to measure success and define good design, whether that's for clients, for people we're building for our own employees. And I think that really kind of started a little bit of rethinking of cultures like how do we center this within an agency? Consultancy again about people rather than just margins.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Ethical is part of that lead framework now. Ethics extends way outside the purview of design. It's something that should really be part of all decision making regardless of whether it's design decision making. You've previously spoken about, and I'll paraphrase you now about how it's really refreshing that young designers in particular come into the workplace feeling empowered to have a voice, to point out things that aren't quite right with the status quo, and that is perhaps different to your own experience when you were around their age, a recent graduate and the type of conversations you felt that you were empowered to have. What is it that you feel has shifted in that time since your first job, for example, and these jobs that these recent graduates were having at publicist sapien, what is it you feel that has allowed them or is empowering them to have perhaps a more substantial voice than our generation did when we first entered the workplace?
- Wendy Johansson:
- What's empowered them? I am going to go back to learning and knowing how to talk about it. The fact that they're in high school, they're in university, they're looking at Instagram, TikTok, whatever, and people are willing to call things out and willing to talk about this is what it means to have generational trauma as an immigrant child and be able to learn the terminology and I guess learn to navigate the situations where they can say, Hey, I think this thing is happening to me. Of course there's the far other end of it where everybody 24 7 is like somebody's gaslighting me is like, no, that's not what gaslighting is actually. But being able to learn how to talk about it and learn that that's not okay, that people are doing that to you, basically learning to understand how they could set boundaries in their life. I think this has been able to empower a lot of this new generation and say, Hey, I don't think this is right.
- I think you should be telling us how we should be completing this learning while we're also working on projects on the clock because there's about a 40 hour a week and my Amazon apprentice said this to me at some point. They're like, we have about a 40 hour week. We're supposed to be spending two thirds of that time learning in our online bootcamp basically and doing the homework, but the homework takes a whole 40 hours itself. Where are we supposed to find that time? And one answer is definitely, Hey, if you want it, this is the opportunity. Work your butt off and do those extra hours and get there. But on the other hand, who am I to say that to? Women with children who are sitting at home during the first couple of months of the pandemic or folks who are worried about, am I even going to have enough for rent next month or how this is going to work out.
- So it is something that I think as people have learned and been more open to talk about it, it's empowered them. And I think learning how to bring those conversations up in the workplace is something that a lot of managers of new designers can help them learn. It's not just, Hey, let me teach you all these new things in Figma or this new research process, like teaching them workplace etiquette, how to breach conversations, how to bring these things up, how to have a conversation with others about a problem that you don't know a solution to versus where does that borderline into? You're just complaining and being negative and toxic. Being able to have conversations with your team about what those boundaries are also as a leader or a manager, I think is incredibly important. And that continues to empower people say, I haven't heard, or this is how I can bring things to be heard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's go into that because I've heard you talk previously about a story of a young mentee of yours who was getting branded with this label of being a bit negative or overly negative at work. And it was because I understand that they were regularly pointing out problems, and you asked them when they were pointing out these problems, if they were also coming along with some solutions to the problems, and they said to you that they were, but it was often just one solution, which was their preferred solution, the one that they felt was the best. What did you share with that mentee about the approach that they were taking that was perhaps they could perhaps change to be more effective in trying to address some of these issues, these problems, perhaps these injustices that they were seeing at the workplace
- Wendy Johansson:
- In that particular story? Humorously, I can think this could be a number of people, so I'm going to follow on what I think of. Most recently, I did have someone basically bring up the same problem of I keep bringing these things up in the workplace and they're not fixing it. And as we kind of dug into the conversation, I came to realize their idea of fixing it was their one single idea of what the solution should be and the only way it should be. And there was no give for understanding. This only actually directly answers your perspective of the situation. It doesn't answer other people who are having similar issues. So this broad solution that was implemented, it wasn't specific enough for them, but it actually helped more people. And so we talked through that. We talked about how that generally impacted more people, how that person's direct solution was too specific to them and it actually caused more problems for other people if it was implemented and how they didn't actually go dive in and go find out why did this get solution get implemented?
- Somebody heard your problem, that's great, you complained enough about it or something, but why wasn't your solution chosen? What other considerations were put in place? And so when they went to investigate that after a conversation, they came back a little more thoroughly humbled about it and say, actually, I realized that they didn't implement what I wanted, but I feel really good that I brought my voice up because it actually helps solve the same pain for so many other people that were too nervous or didn't know how to bring it up or didn't know who to talk to. And so they went from being angry about, they never listened to me to kind of proud of like, oh, I have impact here. I just need to broaden my view and take off the blinders and say, wow, okay, this impacted a lot more people than I thought it could. And so they started opening this up to thinking what's the next problem that they wanted to solve within their organization? To go talk to other people to get their perspectives and say, all right, let's figure out more of a universal solution or a bunch of ideas and then bring it up to leadership to say, Hey, we see this problem, we see these different ideas that could apply to other people. What should we do about this? What do you think a good direction is?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So there's lots in there. There's lots in there about being inquisitive, collaborating with others, not stopping or not getting frustrated, the first sign that things aren't necessarily playing out the way that you'd like them to. Being able to see success in various lights, heaps of stuff in there. I wanted to touch on something that perhaps as apparent in our careers as we progress from being juniors, for example, through to seniors and then potentially into management, and we sort of shift from being those people that point out the problems and agitate for a change to the status quo to being the establishment, or at least we can be perceived to be the establishment the further along we get in our careers. And maybe sometimes we do fall into that groove as well. You've spoken about how organizations need to create more of a bottom up culture so that people can surface these problems and that leadership isn't all command and control.
- But you've also touched on the other side of this, which is perhaps it's the less popular part of the discussion. And I just want to quote you now you've said also it's on the new generation to not just look at leadership as, I need to break this, this is wrong, but how do we educate and meet somewhere in the middle for something that works for both of us? So in that framing of people that are in positions of management needing to come to some middle ground with the people that are newer in the organizations or younger, or the ones that are surfacing up some of the issues that we might not be privy to, what does that healthy middle ground like? What does that relationship, or how does that dance ideally look? How should we be doing that together?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Yeah, I'll reframe that as well into, I don't think change can be made unless it's both grassroots bottoms up and also top down. That kind of fits in the parameters of either that corporation, the goals, somebody's relationship, whatever it is. And I think that in approaching both ways and being able to build this relationship where you're hearing both sides and helping them understand, we heard you, but we're going this way because, or we decided that taking a mishmash of all these ideas and coming up with another one worked because giving a little context of the why, I mean, honestly, the majority of the time, even as kids, we just wanted to know why our parents told us we couldn't watch TV after 8:00 PM They just said, you can't watch TV after 8:00 PM But why? Because I think back to when I was a kid and my parents told me I couldn't do that, and nowadays as an adult, I'm like, what would happen if I just turned on that TV at 8:00 PM I'm pretty sure nothing would happen.
- I wasn't going to magically turn on pumpkin or something. But I think it's questioning the why that people get stuck in because if you don't give them that answer, what you're left with are people who get to make up the worst case scenarios. They didn't listen to me, they don't respect me. Really, this is something to do with junior designers or people like me, however, I want to define and identify, and you don't want to give people that space to make up bad things. And so being able to explain both bottoms up and ups down, I think that is really, really important. So being able to create these safe spaces within your teams where people feel like they can actually share their feedback, their thoughts of things they don't understand. I bring up all the time very openly with my team. I have a stupid question because I am not a doctor.
- What does acute or acuity mean when it comes to care? To me? I know what acute means, but what does that mean in medical terms? One, is it that somebody has something that's low acuity care because acute is already low? And I was like, now you got low acuity. I'm what's happening here? And so I will just regularly bring up to my team, Hey, I have a stupid question. And they're like, that's not a stupid question. I was like, it is because I didn't know it, so I felt like it was dumb, but I'm going to say it out loud because if I don't know it, somebody else doesn't know it. Basically setting that tone of it's okay to have these questions where you're like, am I the only one who, and the answer is always no, you're not the only one who, so just go ahead and say it out loud and help a bunch of people because they were thinking it. You're just brave enough to ask it. And so I think it's building that relationship to answer the why and set the tone. And I think this one largely comes from top down to, okay, we're going to hear you and we're going to explain things to you. And I think that is that relationship that needs to be built and committed to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And would it be unfair to also suggest that the people that are bringing up issues to management, surfacing it from the bottom up, that also having the why clearly explained is an important part of building that understanding between those groups?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Absolutely. So you can hear probably back in the rich tech days, which are bygone era. Now, people would complain, my favorite chips are no longer in the office. This is awful. I'm just going to complain that you stopped serving my favorite chips. And people up top would just be like, who are these entitled children complaining about losing their favorite flavor of Cheetos? What the heck is going on? When in fact, a couple of times I've dug into these what seemed like silly requests from people and asked like, okay, so what's wrong with not having these Cheetos anymore? Well, it looks like the company's cutting costs and it makes me wonder what's happening up there? Do we not have enough money? Should I be looking for another job? I'm like, okay, just because your favorite chips aren't here, it's actually causing you to wonder if you should find another job, not because we stopped serving your favorite chips, but because it makes you worried about the financial status of the company that we can talk about, that we can help address, versus, oh my gosh, look at these children.
- They don't get their favorite chips. And so I feel like that, why are you worried about this thing? What is really that underlying root cause? And the underlying question there that sometimes it could just be like, those are my favorite freaking chips. What's wrong with you? Could be as simple as that, but other times it can really bring up some other deeper questions. And several times I've uncovered things that I didn't realize people were worried about until I dug in a bit more. Like, what does it mean that they moved your team from over there to over here? Oh, it means you're sitting next to the bathroom and it kind of stinks. Okay, let's go figure this out. Not just they moved us away from the windows.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, the willingness to question or the willingness to also provide rationale, such a key thing. I mean sometimes you touched on there, it's kind of like, why are you putting me on the couch here? This is just like an arbitrary whim of mine. But on the other hand, it could be something really significant. It's making people doubt the health of the company. That's really key. You've spoken about the dangers of framing the world in binary terms before, and that's often something that we see play out in our own lives on the media where it's really easy for us to paint the term, the world in terms of black and white and ignore all the shades of gray in between. Just jump to conclusions without really having an inquisitive mind as to why people did a certain thing or are not doing a certain thing. Now, you've said something about the risk inherent in, and I just want to quote you again, this is a little bit of a long quote, so bear with me.
- But I feel like it's important for the overall context of the question to follow. You've said oftentimes there is a demand that team members bring change. This bigger picture for everyone like this is inherently binary, good or evil. Either you have a job or you don't. Either you have a client or you don't or do this thing or you don't. But actually we should really start with how do I impact myself and then how do I show others that they can have that impact? And then maybe with the change we can impact the bigger company. So it sounded like to me there you were challenging people not just to rail against the status quo, but also to look into themselves. So what is it, if that is a correct way of interpreting what you were saying, what is it that you feel that people would gain by starting with themselves and what does it look like in practical terms? How do you do that when you run up against something that you really are annoyed by or that you really want to change?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I think starting with yourself, it gives you a sense of whether or not you're also the other end of that binary. And being able to see and hopefully frame that is important, and then being able to understand because after that, you're probably going to hit a wall. If it's such a binary in your head that you're probably not going to make that much change, to be honest, especially in a big corporation, are you going to get them to cancel that customer because they build vapes and you don't believe in getting children hooked on candy flavored vapes and causing lung cancer, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't believe in that, are you really going to get your company to cancel that? Or are you more thinking of the impact of, okay, if I start with myself, if I'm working the spear, what can I do?
- Can I ask to not be put on those projects? Because this is something you feel very strongly about. You bring up examples and say, this just doesn't work for me. Can I work on other projects? And then you can ask yourself after that. If I'm able to help people understand that they have a say in their own ethics or principles or worldviews, then maybe they can feel empowered to actually not just be like, I'm stuck working on a vaping product and I don't believe in smoking and tobacco and being able to push and help people feel empowered and being heard just a little bit. It doesn't change a company company's not going to give up their 20 billion contract or whatever it is, but you have to see where you can influence yourself. And I feel like a lot of the screaming that we hear in social media and the news today just has to do with, it's just screaming out loud.
- We want everybody to go the opposite way, which is our view, and that's it. Rather than, okay, what steps of influence can we get to? Because when I look at the US political system, for a long time it was that negotiation. It was diplomatic within the different people in the government, senators, the presidents, et cetera, and being able to have those diplomatic conversations to meet some sort of mutual consensus, some sort of compromise. That's really what the world has been when it comes to politics in the last many, many decades and probably millennia. But what's interesting is today is just either my way or the highway, or I'm just going to freeze everything. In the US right now, we're having this conversation about freezing the debt ceiling. Is one side going to agree with the other or are they going to say, we want all our terms, all or nothing, and then we all end up in this place where everything's frozen, interest rates go up, it just impacts the people because suddenly the adults in the room couldn't negotiate anymore.
- And so I feel like if we're able to have our team members, especially our early career team members, start to look at what can I influence within myself? How can I show others that makes an impact and improve my quality of life? And then how could that maybe potentially change the tide of a corporation and a culture? Those are the things those grassroots, starting with yourself, starting with the individual one, two people at a time, that's what changes tides. You really can't come from that top down and throw everything abruptly. So I do think when a lot of people are looking at these kind of binary decisions saying, I will only do this, it's like, okay, well, that's also a choice that you can make. But think about the impact you can make going into a company. Let's just say a B two B SaaS company. It sounds really boring. Oh my gosh, it's so capitalistic, whatnot. But what if you could bring your ethical design skills, your inclusive design skills into an organization like that and show them something different and slowly change the tide a little bit and show those coworkers that there's another way to work other than just chasing that latest deal or the latest customer. So I think those are all things worth considering.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's heaps in there as well. On the political side of things, I would hope that this is the case that while we see a lot of the polarized ends of the spectrum, most people globally, and I would like to think in the US as well, still don't live at that fringe, at that polarized end. And so what I'm thinking as you're describing how you bring that back down to the context of work is that if you just go out and you are really angry and you paint yourself into a corner of being in one of those polarized ends of whatever the binary is, the people that are in the middle and that are subject to change. So the people that aren't the opposite of you are going to be repelled by that, or they're less likely to be listening to you as a result of you taking that really angry stance. But if you're able to demonstrate, like you were talking about there in terms of your ethical approach to design, if you're able to do it through conversation, if you're able to show people rather than beat them over the head with something, there's actually something really powerful that you're touching on there, which is the ability to shift the status quo over the longer term because those shifts come from the people in the middle that haven't yet closed off all their hearts and minds to doing things differently.
- Wendy Johansson:
- And John Madea used to say this when we were to make some change early on, is he would basically refer to the team as you're going to have your ones or twos, the people who are net detractors from you, you are not going to change their mind for whatever reason. They're just not going to like you, and that's okay. You leave them there. Don't, don't engage. Don't raise your breath, don't provoke. You're going to have your fours and fives who are just for whatever reason they're behind you. You could just say, design is engineering. We're all going to learn a code and they're going to come with us just because they're such believers. He's like, the people we want to focus our energy on is the people in the middle because they could be swayed either way. And so if you're really trying to make change and change that tide, that's where you want to focus is everybody in the middle who if you just happen to be unlucky in the office and you're siloed by toxic positivity or toxic negativity, you're going to go that direction. You hear it all day long around you, you're on that project, you're on that team. You sit next to that person. And so I thought that was always a nice way to look at it was focus your energy on the people in the middle because everybody else has made up their mind.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's often not the thing that gives people that immediate sense of gratification. There's something powerful and satisfying about being angry with something. It's often harder to take what it sounds like you are touching on there and what John's talking about, which is a sort of longer term view of how you're going to be and the change that you're going to make. I want to drill down into another specific example that you've shared previously about your mentoring of designers. And it was tied into this. This is like a grassroots on the ground type, practical, ethical quandary that one of your mentees was having, and that was they were given a directive to remove the flag of and from a country dropdown, now your mentee was, so this is undoubtedly a situation that caused them being the person that was going to make that change a lot of strong feelings about what it was they were being asked to do. What did you say to them about this particular situation?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I believe if I had shared Taiwan, I was trying to obfuscate the actual situation probably because it was fresh at the time. It was actually the flag or for a client who had a large face in and they said, our clients aren't going to want to see that flag in there because it's not a country it's part of. And to make this even more complex I'm from and hearing that wow, the feelings I had, and then I had to distance myself from them and say, okay, what is it that you need? Because this is not about my feelings about it. Wow, that was such a throw because I remember throwing down on leadership saying, when you say nothing about this, you are saying something by staying silent, you are sending a very loud, clear message to those of us who are reading between the lines because leadership refused to say anything about it.
- And so the best I could do in the situation was say, Hey, let's go ahead and move you to another project. You're have to turn a blind eye and ear to this. We're not going to win this one. We're not going to take this all the way up and we're not going to cancel that client here. But it was such an interesting ethical dilemma because for me, everything inside was ready to throw down and say, no, F this. Flip the table. I'm not working here. This is that kind of client. I really felt that way. And that's exactly throughout this whole talk where I'm like, you should calm down and not do those things. But when it is very close to you feelings, right? They come up and it really does kind of shade it when it feels like such a very clear question of this is just human rights.
- So this was also during all of the and all that. So I think this was a very, very kind of openly seen political situation as well. So it wasn't just some people from some country feeling like, oh, you're deleting my flag. But ultimately I think where I learned my medium on that and where I felt I had learned a lot being an executive was being able to have that conversation with somebody and realizing that at the end of the day, they really weren't trying to say, we should cancel this client, get me off this project, remove me from the spear of this situation. And that's good enough because they also recognize, yeah, it's kind of a big client for the company. We're not getting rid of them, but also I'm not going to change a tide by fighting to not delete the flag from one website because you know what?
- The next designer in line is more than happy to delete that from the Figma file and hand it off to the engineers. So they recognize that their stance right there, it wasn't going to make a big change, but there was a way where they can remove themselves from the situation and just help people understand this thing happened. I just want to be able to share with my teammates, this is why I got myself off the project and what I believe in. Just help them understand this is why it matters to me. And they were able to, within the company, have a conversation with those teammates and explain, this is what this means right now. This is what's happening. It's happening to my family. And I think that was the important part that they felt heard and they could share and educate others in that situation. And although other folks, they ended up doing the work, they didn't feel betrayed by it. They said, Hey, I get it. It's the work. But now that you understand where it's coming from, that's the best I can feel about this, is I help somebody understand why I was heated about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's go into that further from the perspective of your perspective being the executive and being someone who's from, so like you said, you kind of had to, in that mentor relationship, take a step back and park your own feelings, but clearly you still had them. They didn't necessarily just disappear. Where does that sit with you now reflecting on that time, that situation? Where did you put that? Did you just bury it and move on and just accept it? Or is this something that's still very much part of what you with when you are dealing in a global business world?
- Wendy Johansson:
- It's something I still wrestle with today, not just the example, but other considerations. So you and I, we started talking about being able to have really bold conversations in here. So I work at Hispanic focused health tech company in the United States, pride month is coming up. Do we say something on our social media to what is a largely Catholic, largely conservative, largely older audience that follows us on social media? Do we say we're aligned where allies will treat anybody with anybody however they recognize themselves? Do we do this? So these are things that still come up today, and I wanted to get ahead of that with my team because we do have a strong LGBTQ plus space within our team where we're having great conversations and learning, and particularly about impact in medical and mental health for the community. We're talking about two underrepresented communities here and the intersection of that. Where do we find our voice that represents our team and their values, but also respects where our patients are?
- The answer so far that we've gotten to is we want to say something. We have kind of formulated some language about how we want to bring that up, but the more important part was it wasn't coming from above that we said, this is all we're going to say, because there's one way I could have just said, this is the sentence. This is all we're going to say during the month of June on our social media. That's it. That's the only thing we're going to do and say versus bringing up the situation in all its context to my team. And in that LGBTQ plus channel, ask the team like, okay, do you have ideas on what we could do, what we could say, how we can balance this knowing the demographic of our patients and the ones who follow us on social media? And I think that opened people's eyes to say, okay, we get that.
- I talk to these patients. I'm a clinician. I completely understand where they're coming from. My parents are still like that. So I think there is an in-between of what we can say where we're not alienating them because we still want them to feel safe to come to us for care in Spanish because there's basically not a lot of solutions out there and not a lot of Spanish speaking clinicians out here in the United States. And so we know that our help is necessary, but we don't want to alienate our own population and community that's coming in for help. And so as a team, we've kind of come together on, okay, this is where we think we should land on a statement. And we're all pretty okay with that. We know it's not as bold as we would like to be as a company or a team. However, we understand that if we alienate people, they're not going to come to us for help and they're going to have no one else to go to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that's really it, isn't it, in the context of what you're doing with Alud, it's trying to reduce the gap or close the health equity gap that exists for the Latinx community in the us. Yet what you're talking about there is this tension or this trade-off between also being public as a company about what you believe in terms of LGBTQ plus equity. And you could look at this from a binary framing and go, oh, it's just all about the money.
- Wendy Johansson:
- Yep. Very easy to say. They don't care about it. Yeah, they don't care about us. They only care about the customers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But you are trading off here your mission, which is an equitable mission. So this is, again, many shades of gray. You don't want to cut your nose off to spite your face and not be able to have impact in closing that health gap. But coming back to the example, there are, and I don't know if this is the case, so I'm just projecting here, but sometimes people may be right in their assertion that companies are simply not willing to take a stand on certain issues because it only comes down to the dollars.
- Wendy Johansson:
- Yeah, I mean to put it, frankly, it was a handful of us that it mattered to in the United States within that team. I can count us on one hand probably. That was it. So not loud enough. Doesn't matter that I had whatever title, just not loud enough, not big enough, not enough of us for that to matter. But if we were to say, okay, the company is working on a project where they want to remove any references to trans visibility and LGBTQ plus space, especially coming up into the pride month. Okay, so we're going to have enough momentum, enough noise that it will probably get that customer canceled. So a lot of it does come down to what is the impact of the employees and who's going to stand and be an ally and say, this is not right. And I think I sound horrible and defeat us on this as I'm thinking about it, but we're always going to lose on a, we're just not a lot of people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've said that though. And yet I'm thinking about this geopolitical state at the moment. Maybe we're getting into topics that are outside of brave view purview, but I feel it's relevant. And so far as there's talk out there that if invaded, which they wouldn't see it as an invasion, but say that happened, that would we see the same response or a similar response that Western democracies have taken to Russia's actions in Ukraine where pretty quickly, even international bodies like the Olympics for example, and others have made it impossible for Russia to compete even in sports and for those athletes to be representative of their country. So it's almost like, again, I'm just going where my head's going, so feel free to jump in. But it's almost like you talked about if it was an L G B T Q issue at work, that you would have enough momentum as a result of the employees that identify in that group and the people that are allies to that group to actually get that client canceled. So it's almost like once there's critical mass against a certain action, whether it's a company that's taken it or a government that's taken it, that companies will follow, they don't necessarily lead, but they will follow because they will weigh the relative risk of pursuing the course that they're on versus changing it and pursuing something different.
- Wendy Johansson:
- Yeah, I do think that momentum matters. And if you think about similar but completely different example, bud Light recently, if you've heard about that in the marketing campaign in the US where they used a trends influencer, I believe or model, yes. Do you promote Bud Light Beer to get to a younger, more open liberal audience? And then basically all the conservatives try to cancel Bud Light and their stocks did go down for a little bit and they balance back out. Even things like that, I think there's a lot of noise, but there's also the other side of the noise. And then I think companies can decide where they want to end up on this as do they want to be brave and try to find a new market or do they think that the existing market was enough momentum for them to fire the marketing person or did they put them on leave or something like that, one of the two, and kind of retract their statements and try to blame some nameless agency about this, kind of make things like that.
- That's how I ended up with Bud Light. So I'm going to poke one last thing on all of this is I think that in all of that conversation of Shades of Gray, this brings me back to just the other day I was on bart, which is in San Francisco at one of the trains here. There was a guy who seemed kind of volatile sitting behind me and he was just muttering to himself like, F this, F that. We've got those people in San Francisco. It happens. I felt slightly uncomfortable like, dude, if he decides to do something, he's literally going to stab me in the back first because I was sitting right in front of him. So at the next stop I got up and I moved to another seat facing the door, and after that for the rest of my four stops, I just got endless. You f-ing chink and all these other slurs thrown at me and I'm just like, should I just move to another car? There's enough people now looking that they're like, okay, hopefully this guy doesn't attack me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did no one speak up?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Nobody spoke up. No
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One spoke up.
- Wendy Johansson:
- I think the thing there is just I don't think that enough people are willing to be brave and be allies when the situations come up. It's usually the people who are already brave and allies or part of the community that are used to having their voice and speaking up. And I think that's going to always be the challenge in turning that tide is, I'm not sure how many new allies you really create in these kind of hot topic situations,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about that situation and not to make excuses for no one speaking up, this is not what I'm trying to do, but just thinking about my own experience in Auckland recently in New Zealand here we've had an increase in violent crime and while we don't have the gun problems that you have over there or that I understand you've got over there, I believe there's a mass shooting every day in the states, which again is another topic for another day. But I've certainly, we've had some road rage incidents where someone was dragged out of a car recently and stabbed death with a screwdriver just for not even, it wasn't even their fault. And it does send a chill down people's spine when they think about the risks to their own self by saying something. And I feel as a society in New Zealand, at least we need to get on top of this violent crime because we don't want people to withdraw so far within themselves that they're not willing to take a risk in a situation like on the BART where someone's saying something that's clearly racist and upsetting that they're not willing to stand up because they're concerned about their own physical safety.
- That just shouldn't really be a thing for us, but it is a consideration.
- Wendy Johansson:
- And to go all the way back to Japan, Japan has such a unique special culture that it's one where society is looking out for the greater society. Your actions are generally geared towards the better the society. They have this great show on Netflix, I think it's called Coming of Age or something like that, or First Task, first errand, depends on the country you're in, has different names and it's about Japanese children who when they're anywhere between three and six, they get their first task from the parent. It's kind of like the coming of age moment. The parent will tell you to do something, mail this letter, or here's $5 and go to the store and buy carrots. And the kid will go take that task alone, like cross streets, take trains, go to the grocery store and the grocery store clerk is going to say, oh, okay, your mom told you to come for what?
- Carrots and curry. Okay, you forgot your curry. Go back and get it. Let me get it for you. Alright, where's the money? And then they take the money and they put the change back in the kid's backpack and the kid goes home safe and it's says coming of age moments where the parents are in tears like it's first task alone. So beautiful because society's looking out for them and you can let them do that. They can take trains as elementary school kids to go to school and it'll be okay and people will ask, Hey, it wasn't that the school stop, you should have gotten off and people will look out for the kids, but there are other countries where it is very well known, especially now with TikTok and all the video services where you see things like, okay, somebody got hit by a car and everybody was just looking and was walking by or these terrible things happen. People just look and walk by. And I see a contrast in those two types of societies, but it's heartening and also distressing to hear with New Zealand you expect that people should step up, but you're hoping the culture doesn't degrade to a point where nobody, it's normal to not step up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I am personally feeling pretty dark about the trajectory that we're on and feel like there are significant changes both within individuals and at our governmental and societal level that need to be made to perhaps put us back on course. I don't have any solutions. And I just want to pick up on something that you were saying earlier there about society looking out for these children in Japan, for example, that are on their mission, their first coming of age task. I want to talk with you about something that I feel is a mission that you've been on and you've been looking out for certain people in society and that's evidence through your time at Wise Line at publicists and also at Amazon where you've sought to enable designers to grow in their careers to make design more inclusive as a result of the types of designers or the types of people that you're bringing into design into the field. What was it that lit this specific fire inside of you?
- Wendy Johansson:
- Probably a whole bunch of imposter syndrome. If I really dig in the root of it, a whole bunch of imposter syndrome. I grew up in a time where for me to have had that dream Google internship my junior or senior year of university, I needed to be like a 3.95 or above was nowhere near that. My G P A barely graduated. So I think it is something that probably is that kind of resistant and fight back part of me of you know what, you don't need to be uc, Berkeley or Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, whatever mega fancy university title to go work in a big tech company or any of these places. There are people who will open those doors and gatekeep and I genuinely can't tell, and I probably won't be more on the negative side of this, I genuinely think that a lot of people will gatekeep that you need that four year university and then if you're in the us, all of that student debt to put it that way because they had to do it. It's the kind of like, oh, I had to suffer so everybody after me better suffer. And I genuinely think there's two types of people and I tell this is are you going to be the type of person who's like, this is really hard for me. I'm going to make it fricking hard for you, or this was really hard for me. It's got to be better for other people.
- That actually is a binary. You get to be one or the other and there's really kind of no gray space in between. You can't say I'm going to make it tough for some people and not tough for others. I think I've just chosen the path of why not make it easier for others. I think that also falls into my UX design background and spirit. My whole job in what I do is to try to make things easy for people to meet their goals and why wouldn't I treat employees, candidates, people within design industry the same way they are. My product, and I think actually probably heard me in other talks say this, which is I think that design people, the moment you step out of Figma, you forget all those beautiful inclusive principles about learning, research, hearing others, trying to understand your audience. We forget those things. The moment we step out of Figma and then we fight with our engineering product, marketing sales colleagues and then we fight with everybody. It's just like, come on, use the same principles that every day in your life because that's why we do this work, right? Because we want to make things easier for people. At least that's I guess how I started it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's funny you're talking about the two types of people, the ones that want to make it better and then the ones that just want to impose the same or more level of pain on people coming up. My wife's in medicine and she's not yet a specialist, not yet a consultant. She's certainly experienced those two binaries and her time coming up in that field. It's certainly a field that likes, I would say go so far as to say it loves its hazing rituals, these things that we do to people for no other reason other than we feel that they were done to us. Let's go into the Amazon UX design and research apprenticeship program. This is a really great example of some change that you were able to make and no doubt you had help, but the change that you were able to make through that, you sought to remove the inaccessibility of a career in UX and design and you talked about not needing to go to those fancy universities, not necessarily having to conform to some sort of predefined mold here. How did you do that? How did this come to be and how did this program actually enable that to happen?
- Wendy Johansson:
- It started with Amazon. They wanted to do something different. They wanted to make change. And the leaders, the design leaders who came together Amazon to convince the organization they needed that change, they wanted to put this program together. Those are the people to credit. They believe in something that something needed to change. They believed in opportunity and the people it could open doors for. And I think that's incredible to be able to work with people like that and then build that program, that part was the easy part. I jokingly tell people that I might've been one of the few people who joined Amazon and said, this is a lot easier than I thought it would be. It was really maybe because I loved it. It was a delight to do that work. And that's why I felt it was easy. It was a lot of work I had done before at other organizations, but it was always my plus one nights and weekends job on top of my regular job.
- And in the case of Amazon, they were going to pay people 32 people that we hired as apprentice full-time for a year and then guarantee them a headcount that they could graduate into after that. So a full-time living wage, like an amazing living wage coming from Amazon too, to enter into a big tech company and get that credential on your resume, that was incredible. And that's in my previous programs because they were very nights and weekends, people often had jobs or they were doubling up and trying to be a career switcher from one role to another and it was a burden on them. And this really opened doors to people who wouldn't be able to have that extra time. People who were coming in from just basically interesting curiosity and demonstrated in user research or user experience design that they hadn't been able to actualize.
- There were some folks who came in and said, my friends have always told me this is what I focus on. I didn't know it was a job. And now they're an amazing user researcher. So I really love the opportunity and the belief in it. And what I did was just kind of build the motions in place to get everybody in. But I do think that where we did make a miss was we made a lot of assumptions because even in my previous two companies, publicists and Wiseline, when I built these programs, these were tech relational people. Like they had heard of tech companies or they had had full-time office desk jobs. The majority of the people coming to our Amazon program did not come from any kind of full-time desk job, much less remote in a pandemic. And so I think where we made a miss was not starting with a kind of corporate etiquette basics.
- Let's talk about when you join a meeting or when you even something like how many times a day you should check your email and that you should be living by your calendar and that's it. Whatever your calendar says, you're going to go do that during that time and these things that seem normal to you and me. But even today when I'm working with our Hispanic community, a lot of agriculture farm workers who utilize MiSalud, they schedule appointments with us. Half of them don't even come on time or even come at all because they're like, oh yeah, I had an appointment. I couldn't remember when that was because I don't live my calendars. So it is a very, very different mindset to transition into. And I would say that's my big learning lesson going forward is if I were to help people transition into a desk job environment, I think there's a set of training that needs to happen there first.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Wow. That's like a really fundamental insight and
- Wendy Johansson:
- We all take it for granted, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well, that's the thing. We're in our bubble, we're in that fishbowl. It's very difficult to see it from an outside perspective until I suppose you've brought those people in. Why are they not turning up to the meetings on time? What is this all about? Yeah, I understand that part of the program was a training course, and then there was roughly half of it was on the ground in the field and doing the role that they were going to then go on to do One of the modules though in the training course, and I was fascinated by this. It was a major module on writing. So what does writing have to do with designing?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I would say that it has a lot to do with design, but at Amazon it has a lot to do with Amazon. Amazon is a very heavy writing culture. They don't do presentation decks. They write one pagers or six pagers. And if you can't concisely explain and bring the data in without flowery language, like it's amazing. It's huge. You have to give data about these things, then you're not going to be able to get your project or whatever approved. And the thing with Amazon in that writing culture is I think it really helped a lot of people distill the arguments they're going to make because these are the same things you have to say out loud. And if you're going to make a big presentation like that, you're going to write those things down first. But you need to learn how to be influential in that kind of decision making and pushing people with the right data.
- And I think that's really important from the Amazon perspective. And then second is from a UX perspective, wow, writing is so important. I would say the most pivotal thing I've ever done in design that helped me be a better designer was when I became a product owner and I had to sit in Jira and write freaking stories and acceptance criteria all day long that I had some very pedantic engineers who were like, well, the acceptance criteria didn't specifically say that. That's why I didn't do that. And I was like, okay, let me learn to write and use words to describe design and interaction in such a way that you hit every single point. And that helped me with clarity of thought and work. And I would say for me as a designer, until I could verbally articulate these things, visuals weren't going to help get my point across because it comes down to are people visual thinkers? Are they listeners or are they readers? And I think that there's at least those three types of people out there, and there's a lot of people who just don't see the same visual detail. That's why you have designers coming in and saying, during the QA process, you missed all of this, or the pixels are off, or the interaction's not the same. And the engineer's like, there's dropdowns, a dropdown like dropdown, there you go. So being able to help people understand in their language I think is really important to our jobs.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a gift it must have been to have given or for those people to grow into that capability of being able to clearly communicate through their writing at such an essential just outside of Amazon as well. Such an essential skill as you touched on in terms of building influence and also clarity of your own thinking that you mentioned as well. It's a hugely, hugely important skill for people to master. I'm just conscious of time and I'll bring this show down to a close. Now I have a final question for you. And Wendy, you've worked with managed and created these training programs that we've just been speaking of for a significant number of designers over the years. Now, from these experiences, from all this effort and energy that you've invested in this, the things that you've observed and the people who have participated in these programs, what is it that you feel that the people that were the most successful that went on to become the most successful designers understood that the ones that were less successful did not?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I think they understood their peers. That's for me, the single thing. You can be a fantastic designer. You can be so connected to your users and know them inside and out, their pain points, needs and goals, and you can design the perfect thing for them. But unless you can convince your peers, your engineers, product managers, your marketing people, this is why this needs to be built this way to meet the needs of these people. Unless you can actually articulate, negotiate, and influence people to go along with you, or compromise of like, well, that's going to take engineering extra week. What if we loaded the data differently? That would take an hour. And until you can do that, you're not a successful designer. You are a successful artist. If you can create for your user, but you're a successful product designer or UX designer, when you can actually execute and see those things through as you intended them so that the user can actually benefit from them. And back to what I said earlier, the moment many designers step out of their design tools, they forget to apply that same thinking and compassion and empathy for their users to their colleagues to be able to see these things through. And I think part of being a good team citizen, corporate citizen, or even world citizen is understand the people around you in their context. And you don't need to make space for them all the time, but you just need to understand where they're coming from so you know how to navigate.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wendy, such an important point and an important reminder. Thank you. I've really enjoyed today's conversation and you've given me plenty of things after we hang up to think about for the rest of my day. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Wendy Johansson:
- Hey, thanks for being a generous host and having such a great conversation with me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome. It's been my pleasure. Wendy, if people want to connect with you, keep up to date with what you're doing with me, Salud, and all the other things that you've contributed to the field, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Wendy Johansson:
- I'm on Twitter as @uxwendy, and then I'm also on LinkedIn and my tip for LinkedIn, give me some context why you're adding me or where you heard from me, I get a lot randos and I just don't respond to the ones that say nothing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's also an important point. Hey, thanks Wendy, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes as per usual, including where you can find Wendy. And all of the things that we've spoken about will be completely chaptered specifically on the YouTube video.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review or rating on the podcast, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks and tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can also find me on LinkedIn, just type Brendan Jarvis, and I'll pop up. And please, as Wendy just said, add a little note to explain how you found out about me and what you want to talk about. Or you can head on over to our website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- And until next time, keep being brave.