Andy Vitale

Episode 137
Brave UX

Scaling Your Design Organisation

In this episode of Brave UX, Andy Vitale shares his experiences as an executive design leader 💡, how he’s successfully scaled several design orgs 📈, and why a career in pro wrestling wasn’t for him 🤼‍♂️.

Highlights include:

Why do you create a five year plan for the design orgs you lead?
How has Grey’s Anatomy informed the design of your design organisations?
Why go to the trouble of helping someone who’s struggling in an interview?
How do you navigate the expectations of being the most senior design leader?
How do you feel you’ve enabled people on your team to speak to you as an equal?

June 25, 202401:11:21

Listen on:

Who is Andy Vitale?

Andy is the Chief Design Officer of Constant Contact, an automation platform that helps small businesses to simplify and amplify their digital marketing 🔊. In this crucial role, Andy is responsible for providing executive leadership for the design organisation.

A master when it comes to scaling design teams, while at Rocket Companies 🚀 Andy grew the design team into a multidisciplinary organisation with over 170 people working across design, research and brand.

Aside from his busy day job, Andy is also helping to shape the thinking of future user experience professionals, through his work as an adjunct professor for Kent State University’s Masters of Science in User Experience Design programme 🎓.

Andy is the co-host of the Surfacing Podcast 🎙️ where, alongside Lisa Welchman, he engages designers, technologists, and business leaders in inspiring conversations.

He is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board, an Adobe Education Leader, and - believe it or not - he still finds time to mentor designers on ADPList 🦉.

Transcript

Andy Vitale:
It's not about a good leader can lead people that are not from their natural discipline. It's how you bring the best out in people and get them to solve problems.
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. You can find out more about me and 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 field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
My guest today is Andy Vitale. Andy is the chief design officer of Constant Contact an automation platform that helps small businesses to simplify and amplify their digital marketing.
In this crucial role, Andy is responsible for providing leadership to the design organisation that ensures millions of small businesses and nonprofits all over the world receive an intuitive and powerful user experience.
Andy is a master when it comes to scaling design teams, having previously done so at Rocket Companies as executive vice president of Design, and also at Truist, where he was a global vice president and head of design.
To give you a taste of Andy's experience, while at Rocket Companies he grew the design team into a multidisciplinary organisation with over 170 people working across design, research, and brand.
Aside from his busy day job, Andy is also helping to shape the thinking of future user experience professionals through his work as an adjunct professor for Kent State University's masters of science and user experience design programme.
Andy is the co-host of the Surfacing Podcast, where alongside Lisa Welchman, he engages designers, technologists, and business leaders in inspiring conversations.
He is a member of the Fast Company Executive Board, an Adobe education leader, and believe it or not, he still finds time to mentor designers on ADPList.
A sought after speaker, Andy has spoken on many podcasts and stages across the globe, including at SXSW, Adobe Max, the AIGA conference, UX India, World Usability Day, and the FinTech Design Summit. And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Andy, a very warm welcome to the show.
Andy Vitale:
Thanks, Brendan. I appreciate being here listening to that intro. I'm thinking, wow, I should shorten that bio a little bit, but nice to hear and super excited to spend the afternoon with you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes, it's really great to have you here and perhaps I did get a little bit carried away when crafting your intro, but as people have just heard, there's many wonderful things that you've done Andy, and I'm looking forward to discussing some of them with you today. I want to start on a fairly light note though, and that is with hopefully a fairly simple question. Did you listen to Andy? You are a star by the Killers before you jumped in this virtual studio today.
Andy Vitale:
That is so funny because Andy, you're a star by The Killers is a song on my playlist when I need to clear my head before I'm going to do something almost because it's comical to me, but I have this lengthy playlist before I'm going to speak somewhere. That kind of puts me in my zone and it takes you through the full gamut of emotions. And I go from like, all right, I'm really upbeat to alright, I feel that a little bit and then I'm like, that comes on and I just laugh and I'm like, I'm great, let's go.
Brendan Jarvis:
Have you seen them play it live?
Andy Vitale:
I haven't. No.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's worth it. It's definitely worth it.
Andy Vitale:
Putting them on the list, adding the killers on the bucket list,
Brendan Jarvis:
They've still got it. Yeah, believe it or not, they've still got it for sure. That's cool. That's something that else that I wanted to ask you about and if people are watching the video version of this, they may have caught a glimpse of this and that is you share something in common with a couple of other previous Brave UX guests including and Alistair Simpson of Dropbox and that's an affinity for sneakers. Just how many pairs of sneakers do you own Andy?
Andy Vitale:
Oh, I actually don't know. I'm guessing it's around 140 pairs. It's funny, I met Alistair in San Francisco and we talked a little bit about shoes and Morrow was the chief design officer at 3M right before I got there. And then he went to Pepsi, Eric Clint came on at 3M. So Eric also had a pretty different types of shoes, but at Maro too, different types of shoes. These are mostly sneakers, but yeah, I mean I love them and I was just talking to someone about this, so in sixth grade I was robbed at gunpoint for my shoes and I kind of didn't really think about shoes for a long time. And then back in 2015 when I was working at 3M, I saw a pair of Nikes and I was like, ah, I've got to get these. They remind me of the pair that I lost in that moment. And since then it's sparked this. I don't know, there's ones you can't see that I just got that. It's like, alright, I think this is becoming a problem. I've got to now if I add something, I have to take something away. There's just not room. It's floor to ceiling like wild.
Brendan Jarvis:
I respect that, but I also can't let you get away with what you just said. I want you to wind that clock back and tell me more about being robbed at gunpoint. That's wild.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, so I was in sixth grade. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York and someone in high school and someone in my school decided they wanted the shoes that I was wearing. It happened outside of the school and people noticed, so they started to flee inside the school and resource officers and police were involved and they were caught and yeah, that was weird. My family took me out of that school and put me in a private school and I haven't even thought about that really much until today and it's funny, I'm telling that story twice the same day.
Brendan Jarvis:
Where are you at with that? I mean it's come up twice a day, you've said it's such a huge thing. Is it something that you just kind of buried and moved on or where are you at with such an experience?
Andy Vitale:
I guess, I mean I honestly don't think of it that often. It's one of those moments that as a kid I guess it kind of shapes some of the things being that age, it wasn't feel as scary in the moment as it actually probably as an adult you would think of. I'm like, alright, I'm kind of getting robbed here or something. But at the end of the day it's just growing up where I grew up, it wasn't an uncommon thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
Almost sounds as if you're quite cool and calm and collected while it was happening.
Andy Vitale:
Maybe probably not. I can't imagine being that. I think there were people around, so I knew that it wasn't going to get super dangerous. Not today. In today's day and age where people just kind of like there's mass shootings and things, this didn't seem like it was going to be a potential situation like that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wow. What a story. Coming back to your sneaker collection now, Andy, have you had to set yourself any rules or limits or constrain the urge to purchase in any way?
Andy Vitale:
I've been trying, the new rule is when I finally run out of room, I have room for about 10 more pairs. At that point, I can't get anything new. I have to replace what I have.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's so funny because my Achilles heel is whiskey and not in the sense of drinking it. It's more in the sense of wanting to buy as many bottles as I can so that I can experience the tastes and flavours and sensations of as many different types as I can. But I too have had to say once the shelf is full, I can only replace, I'm not able allowed to buy anymore. I had to put that
Andy Vitale:
Nice.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's probably a good thing. That's
Andy Vitale:
Great. Yeah, exactly. Whiskey is something that I really enjoy. I like it mixed. I've been going more tequila because it's lower in calories, but I miss the whiskey a lot.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well hopefully I don't restart that fondness for you. You can't attribute that to your time with me on Brave UX. I also wanted to ask you about something else that I know that you're into because you've got so many interesting hobbies, things that I can definitely respect and somewhat understand, but I don't directly understand because I'm not part of on the ground culture there in the States and it's such a diverse culture too. And this thing that I'm speaking about or coming to very shortly is called Lucha Libra and
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, Lucia Libre.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. Yeah, Libre, what is it, I mean obviously I've had a little look into it, but for people that this is a global audience, people that aren't from the don't know what it is, what is it and what is it that you enjoy about it?
Andy Vitale:
So Luta Libre is wrestling, pro wrestling like you see everywhere else, but it's a Mexican version of it. So it lives in Latin America, famous in Mexico, lots of big full body suits and masks and it's flashy. So I used to wrestle professionally in the us. That was what I did before I got into design and I learned really early on that I wasn't great at it. I wasn't going to make a full living doing it, but it was fun and I eventually got out of it and started to produce, started TV show, edit videos, create designs for flyers, and then start to even figure out some of the storylines for that. So growing up I loved wrestling and I think what I loved was the athleticism, the storytelling, and then I saw this flavour of it that was just so colourful and full masks and costumes and I was like, this is even cooler. This takes it to a whole nother level and they're fast and they're quick and they do a lot of high flying and flips. So it's real acrobatic and exciting. So still to this day it's gotten a little to the point where it's super cheesy and I kind of like it even more because of that. So it's just something that if I want to just enjoy myself and veg out a little bit, I just turn that on and it'll either put me to sleep or crack me up a little bit.
Brendan Jarvis:
What age was it that you realised that this wasn't the in the ring career for you?
Andy Vitale:
Probably by the time I turned 20, I started at 18 ish and by 20 I'm like, this isn't what I'm going to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
Was there a particular incident or a moment that you knew that was the case?
Andy Vitale:
I think just getting your body gets beat up a little bit. So I was wrestling in a match in Florida and one of the spots was this was when garbage wrestling was coming in, so people were hitting each other with chairs and garbage cans and going through tables and thumbtacks and all of this stuff that you don't really see that much anymore. It's more hardcore stuff. I remember getting hit with a garbage can a few times and it sliced my head open and then I got pile driven through a table on a floor and I was like, what am I doing with my life? This isn't going to be what makes me successful at my size. I'll always be the person that's on the receiving end of this. So I just made the decision of like, Hey, you know what? It's time to go back to school and design was what I went for after
Brendan Jarvis:
That. And I would like to segue here and tell people that things got immediately better for you, but in 2001, after you graduated design school at Kaiser College, you went to work at a tabloid media company that became infamous and not for the activity that people may be thinking of when they hear me say that about Tabloid media company. What was it that happened in 2001?
Andy Vitale:
I love you definitely have done some research. So I was working for a company called American Media. They were responsible for all of the tabloids, so Suns, star inquirer, the Globe Weekly World News, all of the trash magazines and papers at the newsstand or the grocery store like endcap. So right after September 11th, we were the target of the first anthrax attack in the United States. So somebody had sent a package to us. It ended up being a photo of J-Lo with a substance in it, and our photo editor, he opened up the package in the mail and he breathed it in and they didn't know that at the time. So throughout this whole weird week, nobody knew anything that was happening. They start to instal a loudspeaker or intercom system in the building and I'm like, that's weird. Then I walk in the next day and they're talking on this intercom system and talking about this person that worked there that had developed anthrax that I don't know if he had passed away yet or he was just hospitalised, but ultimately they're like, we think he got it from a stream in North Carolina.
If anybody talks to you from the media, don't say anything. And he ended up dying. And after he passed away, I was the last person out of the building except for security one Friday night. And I remember that next week my dad called me and he's like, your company's on the news. You have to go down to the health department. They found anthrax in the building and we went down to this hotel ballroom in Delray Beach, Florida and the FBI, the CDC, the Florida Department of Health. They basically said, Hey, we honestly don't know what's happening right now. What could happen, there were anthrax attacks or there was anthrax outbreaks in Russia in the 1960s and we know that the spores stayed dormant for 58 days, so we're going to go ahead and give you 60 days of this medication that should prevent this and we'll keep you monitored.
And it was a time where you don't know what's happening but you trust that. And then you'd give your nasal swab and they'd check in and they'd be like, everything seems fine. You'd hear the special alert tone on the news and find out another coworker's hospitalised with it. It turns out they found it in lots of places in the building. It must have gotten into the inhalation systems. So thankfully I didn't get it, but it was one of those things that it really brought some of the people that were through it together and I remember they were like, Hey, do you want to go back to the, we're not going to work out of that office, but do you want to work at some other building? I was like, I don't know. Who knows what's going to happen here? So I ended up going back to the school that I graduated from Kaiser College and started to teach there and help them transition to a university
Brendan Jarvis:
Just coming back to the person who died, his name was Robert Stevens. And looking into this in preparation for today, the effect that anthrax can have on the body, particularly if it gets inhaled, which is where it seems to cause the most havoc. There's no chance almost once it goes into your lungs that you're going to recover or a very slim chance. So yeah, what a time,
Andy Vitale:
Anything. What was super interesting about that too is we were first, but after that there were a lot of anthrax attacks in the us. There were letters mailed to politicians, it was found in post offices, there were traces of it in so many different places, news outlets, and I don't know if we were the test run or no one really figured out, there was just a documentary on Netflix about it and our company's story. The brief part of it was like the intro to the show and then it went deeper. But it was really interesting to see. I remember watching it last summer.
Brendan Jarvis:
I think they've identified the prime suspect and they eventually took their own life in advance of being arrested, but it's still not conclusive.
Andy Vitale:
Exactly. It's another thing that I remember and I tell that story as an interesting fact now, but going back to that point in time, I don't remember a lot of the details of it. I was young, one of my first jobs and just, it's funny what we take away from experiences.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's also funny and not a haha funny sense. Listening to you today, you've told two stories where you've had what I would call a brush with death or the potential for death or quite close proximity to, right. Is there a trend here or are these just two completely isolated incidents?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, I mean those are two completely isolated incidents and I hope that there has been none since nonsense.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well that's good to hear. That's good to hear. Just before we move on to talking about scaling design teams, which is something that quite a bit about, you've had a lot of experience doing it. There was one other thing that I noticed about you and that is in your photos, in your profile photos and different photos you have on your website, on LinkedIn and other places, tiles for podcast interviews, for example, you very rarely smile yet you're quite a happy smiley person now that I can see you on this call. Is this by design? What's the story here?
Andy Vitale:
I don't know. It's magic. If a camera's in front of me, I just get kind of button up a little bit and it's become my brand. So now I've got to the point where it's my goal in all of my photos to look like I got transported into them at the very last second and I don't know where I am. It's kind like how do we do that? Yeah, it's interesting. I love that you call that out because everyone says that. They're like, I thought you'd be so mean in person. I thought you'd be so serious and here you are and you're always smiling and laughing and joking. I
Brendan Jarvis:
Feel good that I'm in on the joke now and I feel like I can move on with my life and this interview knowing this
Andy Vitale:
Nice. Perfect. Yeah, I have no idea. I don't know what that's all about. Actually, it's funny,
Brendan Jarvis:
For some reason I get this picture of you as a wrestler and you're sort of channelling your inner wrestler when you're in this sort of corporate design land now. And I kind of like that. I kind it. It's not what
Andy Vitale:
You expect every day is another thing that we have to actually go and grapple and pull people along and have healthy debates and have that conversation to just make the case for design and prove it out. And sometimes it's super easy and a lot of times it's not. It's a battle. So how do you bring your game face to go ahead and advance design?
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, you bring something else I think to the way that you think about advancing design or at least scaling the organisations that you've led. And I suppose it's somewhat of a metaphor. I'm not sure if that's quite correct, but I understand that you're a bit of a Grey's Anatomy fan. I am that this is somewhat the show or the design of the show or something in the show has somewhat informed the philosophy that you've brought to the design of your design organisations.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, I think the funny thing about me is I love to use examples and analogies, but I'm not great at analogies. I kind of find a way to flub them one way or another. But the Grey's Anatomy one was really landed with me. I watched it for a while and what I want to do is build an organisation that's a lot like a place where people could come and learn. So Grey's Anatomy is a teaching hospital. There's a lot of students and med students that are going on and becoming the main star of the show. So I look at that as I'm building a team, I want people to come and I want to build an environment, create a place where they can learn where they do their best work, that environment that's conducive to that. Then they may move on, they may go run design somewhere or find an opportunity that's the right amount of growth for them at that moment, but hope that because they had such a great experience and they learned so much when they were there, that they refer people back to the team and the model so that those people that they believe in can actually get that same experience and opportunity for growth that they had.
Brendan Jarvis:
This is making me think of the conversation I had last week, which was with Ben Ser and Ben's just written a little book called Death by Screens and his whole thing at the moment has been helping designers to become more compelling communicators of their design work. And he also has delivered a talk in the past, which is to do with organisations over indexing on efficiency and all of our verbiage, whether it's the way in which we're working in agile or whatever it may be, that there's this very strong pull for organisations to pursue efficiency almost at the expense of everything else. And I was curious listening to you describe that analogy of a teaching hospital and that these people that you are employing people who will one day become the you of tomorrow, they're the people that have the potential to go and lead their own design organisations or at least some of them. How have you made the time and justified the time, this is my own lens here, but how have you done that in your design organisations in such a way that you're able to accommodate people's learning needs and not just get swept up with the demands of today
Andy Vitale:
It's about investing in people. So I think for me, I try to lead by example but also explain to the team, there are some things that I do because I have to that I don't expect you to model that behaviour. And some of that is time management. So even as a designer early in my career, I thought to myself, I'm going to deliver really good design here. I'm going to deliver what might be the best design at the moment, but I'm not the best designer, so what I may have to do is put in 25, 28, 30 hours to build this thing that someone else super talented could do and half the time a quarter of the time, but I'm going to put in that work, I'm going to work that much harder so that I can deliver that result. And for me now, I invest my time in people because people are so valuable.
So I look at every person on my team as in 10 years I might need that person to hire me for a job. So how do I position them to be able to do this and build that relationship with them where they want, what I bring to the table even 10 years from now to see that as value to their team. So I have a group chat with two people that I used to work with that reported to me at my last job. We still talk every single day. It's like we're our own support system, but we're providing guidance to each other, everyone, three different companies. How do you just start to know people on that level and understand what motivates them, what growth opportunities they need, what ones are they actually interested in? I've got someone on my team now that is like, I want to understand the business side of the business and of design. So it's like, alright, I'm going to drop a couple of books off for you to understand that and learn that and we'll talk about it and we'll spend some of our one-on-one talking through some of those things. So I think that people are the most important thing to invest in the work and everything comes out of those relationships. It's how well you work with people and understand what they need to do their best work.
Brendan Jarvis:
Totally leading question coming. Do you get the sense that at least some of us get caught up in trying to think through or design through a perfect solution for how we can practise this type of, I don't want to call it mentoring, but this type of fostering of future talent and therefore don't do anything where listening to you there, you've given a couple of really good examples of just small things that you can do in your daily rhythm, bringing these kind of conversations into one-on-ones that actually start to make an immediate difference.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, I think we as designers, we're all about analysis paralysis sometimes. Whether it's like where's the process that we're waiting for or we overthink the whole end to end and it's like we have to think our own guidance of just do something small and see if it works and get feedback and build upon it. So I go to bed super early, I'm in bed between fall asleep on the couch, sometimes seven o'clock at night, but by eight o'clock, nine o'clock I'm out, I'm up at three o'clock. So that gives me time in the morning to catch up on some other things. So one thing is I'm known for sending a text or sending an email like 4:00 AM I've got to get better at that. Use the said later feature that comes in overnight. I reply when I see it. But ultimately it's those mini interactions, the micro interactions that start, we would design a micro interaction to build habits.
We coach with micro interactions to build trust. And as you start to develop that trust, I want everyone on my team when I say something to be like, that idea is crazy. I don't want them to feel like I've got to drop everything and do that because he said it, but I also want them to feel comfortable not only challenging me but coming to me with opportunities that they need that they want. Because I can look at them and kind of say, Hey, it would be great if you did this. I think you need to learn in this area. But they also have something in the back of their head that's like, I really want to learn this thing and I want them to tell me what that is because tell me now. So it doesn't take me six months to figure that out because I can get you on that path faster.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's something in here, there's something definitely in here. There's this way in which authority or the position that you occupy for example, changes the way that people talk to you and also how they hear what you say. And I understand what you're saying there about you. You want to try and circumvent that or provide an environment where it's safe for people to ask you things or challenge your ideas. And I've heard this before, but I'm really keen to get your insight into how you believe you're making that a practical reality for people because the status roles that are at play in a hierarchical organisation are so, so powerful. So how is it that you feel that you've been able to foster that kind of culture within your design organisations?
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, that's a great question. So right now we're going through a process of doing design reviews directly with me on a weekly basis coming out of smaller team design reviews and the first slide of the Figma file, the first page where people have to drop in their work that we're going to review. It says in here, titles don't matter. We're all just trying to make the product better and that sets the tone for the room so that when we bring in heads of product, heads of engineering, they understand that we also have some chats and some of them are like show some early work for design and get feedback in a Slack channel. And I noticed heads of product chief product officers in that Slack channel and I was like, Hey, I appreciate that you've got feedback, but that channel's not that place. We'll set up a place for that.
But that's for the team to be vulnerable and show really early work and they need that space so that they can make mistakes and help each other grow and get to the right solution. And he's like, I got it. Take me out of that. Put me where I need to be. So it's how you model that behaviour first and then also the way you ask people questions for their opinion, you start to see are they struggling with an answer? Are they getting nervous because I'm in the room because then how do I like, hey wait, stop, let me ask you something else. Interviewing somebody. Sometimes I love to interview people and I notice a candidate is reading from a script, getting really nervous that I'm there and I'm like, Hey wait, I've got a question for you. Tell me about your favourite food. Tell me your favourite project that you worked on, the favourite thing you learned from the favourite piece of feedback that you got. How do I get them to start to show passion and open up and start to understand, hey, they're nervous, they're maybe younger in their career designer. How do you start to put them in a place where they're gaining confidence in that conversation? Then it kind of changes the dynamic. And then I'll ask them for feedback on something like, Hey, I'm thinking about that just triggered a thought that I have. What do you think about this? And see where that goes.
Brendan Jarvis:
That behaviour of interrupting someone who's in the process of drowning, throwing them a life preserver, that's a very kind behaviour. Andy, why go to that trouble?
Andy Vitale:
Because I think ultimately if I was in that same situation, I would hope that someone did that for me. I've learned so many things the hard way that there are better ways to learn them that don't, two types of ways of learning and things that we remember. And I remember more the times where people gave me that opportunity, that opening as opposed to people just piled on top and slammed that door and I learned that lesson the hard way. I'm not going to do that. I got burned. You remember that, but not in the way that helps you grow. You just kind of like, that wasn't a great point in time, that was a terrible thing. Now it's different with feedback. So I think one question I like to ask people is tell me about a time that you received feedback that at the time it really stung a little bit, but now looking back on it, it was so true that it helped you grow in that moment. It helped you realise something that you didn't know and that's how you kind of take that and turn it into a positive. But for the most part, people are doing their best, always assume positive intent. I think we all want great outcomes with our partners, everything. But really, I don't know, people seem to remember that moment where you helped them more than when you piled on top.
Brendan Jarvis:
You asked a really powerful question, and maybe this is unfair of me to turn that around on you now, but when was a time when you received that kind of challenging feedback where at the time it really stung, but now with a bit of distance you've come to see it as being a gem?
Andy Vitale:
So I had a boss, Casey Wolf, who I worked with at SunTrust before we became Truist, and Casey became a really good friend and there was a time where I remember he said that I have all or nothing thinking. And he's like, you're either all in on something or you're all out. And I think about it through my life. There are times when I'm all in on work and my health starts to go and then I go all in on health and then I'm like, wow, I'm obsessed with this and maybe not the most healthy way. So as we come across different interactions I have with people, I'm like, oh, that person, they love us. That's great. Perfect. That person forget they're out, not even going to deal with them anymore. That's not good. That puts you in an unhealthy place. And he would call out when I would have that all or nothing thinking.
And to this day I remember that and I think twice like, hey wait, am I going in the opposite direction here is everyone knows what all or nothing thinking is. So thinking about my time at Rocket when I was scaling this team, a lot of times I'm kind of motivated by being angry at something like a lot of us are, right? It's like I've got to damn the man, I've got to fight this cause and I've got to dig in. And I had an executive coach that came from the outside and she said, Hey, why does everything go to the fight, the battle, the you've got to get mad at it. Why can't you channel that into a different way? And I, I think that's better when it comes from a positive place, but at the same time, how do you turn that into a motivating thing? So that's something I still work on is am I getting mad at a thing for no reason? What is the outcome that I want and what is the best way to collaboratively get there? So that was helpful.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it sounds like really, really helpful observation. That's very difficult to get from within your own head. Sometimes you need these people, sometimes they're paid, sometimes they're friends just to point out things that you can't see. What do you attribute that groove to this all or nothing? Is this sort of like a hectic childhood on the streets of New York or are you modelling behaviour somewhere? It's quite remarkable. So sorry, that's one question and then it's also just an observation of mine. It's quite remarkable that you've got to the point where you can start to interrupt or it sounds like you're trying to interrupt that pattern, but where does this pattern have its origins?
Andy Vitale:
I think growing up, playing sports, being competitive, playing in a team that travelled all around and in high school, one of the pitchers in my junior year, his senior year got drafted, played in all the top teams and it's just like how do you get fired up to go do something, right? You look at these football players and they get themselves so amped up to go out and deliver results and it's like I'm not there to hit a ball anymore. I'm there to grow a team and work with people. So going after things from, even from a team sport perspective, but an individual gain is not the outcome that we want. Design's not done in a vacuum. It's definitely a team sport. So for me it's like how do I embrace that way of thinking? That's like pick everybody up, lift everybody up, support everybody and bring them along.
Brendan Jarvis:
And scaling that team at Rocket, I believe it was around about 40 when you joined and it was close to 200 or sort of north of 1 70, 180 when you left. And about this, I'll quote you now, you've said we've got all of design, we've got all of research including market research, we have all of brand, and we keep adding more competencies as the needs arise. Now that's quite phenomenal. That's over four times growth. That's a big increase in headcount and influence. Given the way that the design team grew, what do you attribute that to the most, that growth, your ability to do that?
Andy Vitale:
I think trust. So when I got hired, I think it was, Hey, we don't really know what design should look like here. Can you show us? Can you teach us? And we're here to invest in it. So we hired over a hundred people my first year. We lost some along the way, but it was such a period of growth also for the business and that industry. So we were just doing so many things and it's like you need people to do these things and then as you get a taste for service design, you're like, oh yeah, I need this everywhere. Or conversational design. So we started to scale the design team and then build a design system or redo our design system and you need people to do that. And then we had a UX research team that was decently sized for the amount of designers that we had and it's like, alright, we're getting a lot of this qualitative research, but we need quantitative research.
So there's market research team that was moving around a couple of times, sat under product, sat under product marketing. It's like, wait, shouldn't they be with other researchers to be able to grow and collaborate more? And then there's this small little VOC team, how are they actually getting to impact strategy, not just reporting on numbers and what does this look like? So just making the case through building a community. So what I think people think how do you scale a team? And it's like there's ways to scale it. There's ways to scale it based on the amount of work that you need to do or the amount of growth that the organisation sees or the amount of new competencies that you need to bring in. But really sometimes it's not about a land grab, it's not about where all of the designers sit in the moment.
It's how do we teach this organisation design and how do we find every designer in the company and give them a place where they could collectively learn and come together and solve problems together? Then it turns out if this person works on a design team that they're the only designer, the person that's managing them might be a product person, an engineering person. They're like, Hey, wait, I can't actually teach this person all the things they need to learn. They may make sense more being in your organisation. So there's opportunities to scale a team that way too. It's about, to me it's never about the numbers of the team, it's about the impact we have across the organisation, all the reporting lines and all of that. That starts to work itself out over time. But scaling that team was so much fun. We ended up moving the brand team over.
Brand team was small. When you said all of brand, I'm like all of brand was a handful of folks. That's not the marketing side. The marketing side was huge at Rocket. They've got a world-class marketing team with commercials and Super Bowl commercials. When I was there that was super fun to just see and kind of be part of but not directly. So the brand team moved over as we were working on a rebrand with an acquisition of a company and it just kind of made sense because at that time 80% or more of the brand experience took place within the product. That happens in a lot of places now.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's not that long since you were designing lucha Libra posters, right? To now you've just given the story of bringing these different disciplines together and into what was arguably more than just a design organisation. Maybe that's contentious of me to say, but it almost feels like you started to see and do things that are outside the purview of your run of the mill design leader. Did you ever feel out of your depth while you were doing it?
Andy Vitale:
Yes and no. Right? I think that we all always feel a little bit out of our depth. I think there's imposter syndrome, but I think design at the core foundation of what it does is it solves problems and it solves problems for people. So all of the different disciplines that we have, they all bring a lens of information, of data to a problem. So sometimes it's easier when you've got a horizontal view of multiple things happening that you collect horizontal opinions of things that are happening and put the picture together and design through its ability to tell stories, ability to visualise things, ability to bring something to the table that's a starting point. Sitting at the horizontal just allowed the organisation to not have duplicative work in different places to be able to solve problems faster, to be able to take an idea that works somewhere and move it somewhere else and share that data and share that information.
It's interesting because I fortunately my time at 3M under Eric Quint, Eric Quint as chief design officer believed in big D design. So design was in all of 3M. It was in industrial work, it was in healthcare, where was, it was in consumer and there were futurists and researchers and all sorts of disciplines within design that partner with technologists and product. And I think the more you work with these people and the more you learn from them, some of these things that are design adjacent could very well fit under design and maybe design or the organisation or the culture of the team that you're building is the right place for that team at the moment, but maybe not. So maybe you move a team in that can learn how to collaborate, learn how to solve a problem, grow a little bit mature, then it's like, hey wait, you know what? Maybe this team belongs back in marketing or maybe this team actually belongs in product marketing or somewhere else. But in that moment it made sense for them to be part of that team to help deliver certain results for the business. So again, it's not about a good leader can lead people that are not from their natural discipline. It's how you bring the best out in people and get them to solve problems.
Brendan Jarvis:
You just mentioned a little earlier delivering results for the business and when you are doing what you've been describing, which is configuring and reconfiguring a fairly large headcount in terms of the organisation, I can't imagine that doesn't come without some sort of large expectation from whoever you are reporting into. Tell me about the nature of and the reality of navigating those expectations and what that meant for you as the person who was responsible for that organisation.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, so thinking about that time, I reported into chief product officer at one point, chief experience officer at one point, the CEO at one point. All of them have a different level of expectations of the team, of the output. We stood up some zero to one products. We had a large acquisition looking at ways to diversify the portfolio, try to find ways to bring value to people over a longer period of time. We did this at my time at truist and SunTrust too is like how do you help people through their whole financial life cycle? Everyone's trying to figure out the end-to-end customer journey and how to provide value to customers there. So when we talk about providing value to the business, my goal is always help them understand that by providing value to the customer, that customer gives us business and provides that value to us.
So it's all about what do the customers need? What are their unarticulated needs? How do we start to understand that? How do we start to rally around these problems? How do we start to reframe problems and what they are? But at the end of the day, the team is accountable for metrics. So sometimes we measure design by how we grow in maturity. So one of our OKRs was literally grow design maturity. What does that mean? That means many things for us. It was like show work early and often start to develop ideas that turn into products, start to identify things that end up on the roadmap. But then once you get to that point, it's a little bit harder to measure. So ultimately we have goals, even wherever you work, it's like grow business, grow revenue, increase conversion, all the businessy metrics that we have to track design's accountable to those metrics.
We're not the end keeper of those metrics. So you have to think about things like contribution margins and you have to trust everyone that worked on this product if it was successful, if it made x million dollars more this year, then it's last year. It's a combined bunch of efforts and people that work on it to get there. It's not like, oh, the product team gets all of this because they run the product. It's like, no, everyone contributed to items on the roadmap. Everyone brought them to life. Everyone was involved in iterating in that. So we all kind of delivered to that. But sometimes it takes the maturity of the organisation to understand that, not just the maturity of a discipline and that's where there's lots of collaboration and education and evangelization that has to happen.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perhaps this image is unfair and tell me if it is, but I get the sense that you've had to be willing personally to fight for that contribution margin to show people and foster those conversations both with your peers but also with the people that you are reporting into about design's contribution. It's not something that just naturally happens or it's very rare if it does.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah, it's funny because part of leading is knowing when to lead from the front and knowing when to lead from the back. And for me, in those instances where we're trying to build those relationships where we're trying to show the team, how do you lead from the front? How do you get involved in the conversation? How do you have those hard conversations of like, Hey, you know what, in this process, I know we're calling it the design phase, but design is not even represented in it. This is the activities that we need to happen to be successful here. And then you find the right advocates and allies that get you kind of bought into that and that's super important to do that. But then what you have to do is make sure that whatever vision you're setting for the design organisation, that your team, whatever we're communicating as the value of design, your team has to show up through that lens and add that value every day.
And if you are speaking the same language, then you're actually like, I'm going in first. I'm opening the idea for the conversation, I'm setting the tone for the conversation and my team is the one playing that music and backing that up and proving that out. And then we've already got the buy-in from the head of that area, whether it's product, engineering, marketing, whatever. And then the team is just showing up and grooving and it's like, great. And sometimes we stumble along the way and it's like, okay, accept that this is what we learned from that moment. This is how we're going to change the approach going forward. This is our path and let's get another shot at it. And it's all about the relationships that we build.
Brendan Jarvis:
It also sounds like it's almost as important to have a straight line between the activity that's going on on the ground and the measure of that success to be able to draw that straight line. As in without that it's very difficult for you to have those kinds of conversations with your peers as the most senior design leader.
Andy Vitale:
Right? Exactly. Spot on
Brendan Jarvis:
Something that you do, which you mentioned before we hit record, that really blew me away. And I think it's highly interesting and I really want to understand your reasons for doing this here. And that is you do a five year plan or a vision for the leadership roles that you step into, or at least I understand that's what you do. Tell me about that. Why go to the trouble of thinking that far ahead when the average tenure means it's unlikely that you'll be there at the end of five years?
Andy Vitale:
So my goal is never my tenure there. It's how I set this organisation up for success with a design competence for perpetuity. Obviously that path could change, but it's a two-parter. One, how do I get the team excited about where we're going? So it's pieces of aspirational in there, but then it's things that are tangible too. So how do we get this company to buy in that these things are realistically going to happen and see the value that they have. So some of the things in the first stage of get awareness that this team exists, make sure we're represented on all the major projects, make sure that we've got a way to communicate and a hiring process. And then it moves to how do we create this value system of helping people understand the expectations of their role, how it's going to be measured, but identify opportunities for growth and build a career platform, not just a career ladder for them, but literally how we help them get to those stages and what they need to learn going down to super aspirational.
In five years we'll have a design headquarters somewhere else outside of where we are. That may never happen, but if the company's growing and design is a part of that, then we need to be where the company grows and we need to have that opportunity. So it's pieces of, and then the company realises, Hey wait, if we're really investing in design and we see it as a differentiator, we want, of course we want to have this, we want to have the thing that we can point to and say, look at that. This is how important this is to our organisation, the success of our organisation. Some of it's like how do we have a communications plan in place for design, not just winning awards, but how do we become thought leaders in the industry as not just this person that works here, not just me, but anytime you hear this company's name, you associate it with design, you see anyone from this team is speaking out here on this topic and it just adds some credibility to the team and the organisation.
So some of it is internal, some of it's external, some of it's aspirational, some of it's easily tangible. And it's just a path to how we get to where design should be and how it should be positioned within the company. And the thing that I learned at this most recent role at Constant Contact, my first aha moment was I went in with like, alright, I've got a playbook. I've got a plan. This is what I think a few weeks in this makes sense, let's go with it. And it's like I built almost this structure out of cards. And then someone comes in on day 20 and says, Hey, wait, here's 15 more cards that you have to keep track of and the house crumbles. And I'm like, all right, 15 more cards, I can build a house. I got a house of cards. And someone else comes and they're like, here's 20 more things you have to be aware of.
And now I'm like, you know what? I'm not building this house anymore. I'm just going to shuffle this deck. We're going to throw the playbook out the window and we're going to assess exactly what we need. And every company, every team is different. So how do you start to understand what's going on at that moment and start to try things? And one of the things I always say is everything that we're doing, it's a prototype we're going to test, we're going to learn. We may have to make changes. If we do, I'm going to own it. I'm going to be transparent on why, and I apologise in advance. You may get moved on a couple of things until we get this right. And the team, if you build that relationship and that trust and they know you have their best interests in mind, they give you that grace, which is fantastic.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's a lot of ambiguity in the scenarios that the current scenario that you're in, you started building this house of cards and then it kept changing and you had to be comfortable with, or my interpretation is you had to quickly come to comfort with the fact that things weren't set in stone, that your thinking needed to evolve and it needed to evolve quickly. You talked about getting the trust of the team to roll with that to realise that they may be assigned to different things and that could change tomorrow. That can be deeply unsettling for people that, I suppose it's a forming stage of a new organisation or with a new leader. Are there any things that, or practises or types of conversations that you have with your immediate direct reports in terms of the design leaders that report into you, that you go to help them feel prepared to manage that period of flux with the people that report to them?
Andy Vitale:
That's a great question. And so I'm going to backtrack to the team first. People are very resistant to change. Certain people, it's normal. People see a lot of change and there's change fatigue. There are some people that thrive on change. So how do you find those people, those people to help be catalysts for change? Like, Hey, you know what, I noticed that you want to be on this thing and this thing and on the next thing, so how do we get you involved, plug you in, get you excited, and then you've got the relationship with this team. How do you start to communicate like, Hey, this is awesome, I'm doing this thing. How do you build those on the ground? People that are, again, advocates or ambassadors for what you're doing Now, taking on a new leadership team is also a very interesting challenge. So depending on what had gone on before you got there, how they're feeling about things, I'm always transparent.
Sometimes I say things to get people excited that may be brash. Like, yeah, we're going to go ahead and do this. And then it's like, let me walk that back a little bit. I'm trying to instil a behaviour. I think that I want my team, my leaders to really go out and do what they think is right. And I don't want to worry about silos or lines. I would rather have to walk something back for them overstepping than them not get super excited or engaged. So my leadership team hears a very immediate version of what I'm saying, and then usually I hear it and I'm like, well, let me walk that back a little bit. It's not that drastic the things that we have to do or the change that we want to bring, but they know that they're here to be change agents. They know that the things that I've done and kind of what I was hired to do, so how do I get them excited about the mission that we're on, which is to transform an entire organisation, right?
We are here to bring a level of transformation through the value and lens of design that the company has never seen before. And that's not easy. This is probably every moment. This is funny. As I think about it, I say this a lot, we're at the hardest part of our maturity journey, but the thing is, they're all hard. So when you get past the part that felt hardest, the next part's even harder. So how do we think about the moment that we're in and know this is going to be hard. We're in this together. Let's roll up our sleeves. Let's have each other's back. Let's speak the same language. But at the end of the day, we're going to make mistakes. We're going to get some things right and we're going to be there to support each other in it. But sometimes that's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for leaders to raise the bar.
It's uncomfortable for designers to hear Your work is good, but normally it's not. But your work is good and we need you to come even more. Like everything that we do raises the bar where what was good today is not good enough tomorrow. So how do you start to get a team that's that excited about the next thing, the next piece of change, seeing this thing go live? How do we have that impact? And then you just start to crave what's the next problem that I can solve? And how do we bring these people together to do that?
Brendan Jarvis:
It's interesting to hear you describe what sounds like the process of getting to know the team, the leadership team and the wider team, and also continuing to provoke in way that you are testing out their aptitude or their leaning towards change so that you can put the right people into the right positions. I think that's a really interesting thought and also your refreshing acknowledgement of the pain or the uncomfortableness of where people are currently at. There's no gloss. It sounds like there's not really much sense you see in glossing over the fact that hey, things are going to be pretty challenging, but we've got each other's backs and we can all move forward from here.
Andy Vitale:
Yeah. I don't know if it's an easy job, but if I wanted a job that didn't challenge me in many ways, but I also enjoyed, I'd probably open up a hot dog cart and I'm sure that comes with a lot of different challenges and things, and maybe one day I will, but now I'm all about how we provide value to people, how we change organisations, how we find that next opportunity to unlock value. And part of that role and that responsibility is having lots of difficult conversations and helping people grow. And sometimes it's like how do you find an opportunity to help someone improve? And when you tell them, Hey, you know what? I know you think you're really good in this area, but there's opportunity here still. That's hard to have that conversation with someone and have them leave that feeling good, not defeated of like, I get it because it's all about how you coach people and how you get them where they need to go. It's part of what we talked about from the beginning. How do you help them unlock what takes them to that next level? And that requires getting to know them and understanding how you build that way to communicate.
Brendan Jarvis:
If you think about, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30 years, I don't know. But if you think about when you come to retire and then you think about the people that you've worked with along the way, what is it that you hope that they will remember you for?
Andy Vitale:
I think providing them maybe their first opportunity or their biggest opportunity or the moment that challenged them the most, that shaped the way that they challenge their teams going forward. Because I love to kick the tyres of ideas. I love to throw out hypotheticals, what could be we're trying to solve now ways of communicating. And I'm like, what if email and text messaging and all of this stuff didn't exist? What does that look like? What does an interface look like when there actually is no interface? If I wanted to send you a message but we weren't looking at each other through the screen, how would I do that? How would I get that to you in a way that you could digest that? I don't know that answer. We may be 20 years away from that technology, but I want to think about that. I want my team to think about that and get excited about that part of it. So I want people to be like, it was that moment you stretched me to think about that thing that was almost impossible and we never solved it, but it just challenged the way that I think, and I've taken that and learned from that, and I challenge everyone else I work with in the same way.
Brendan Jarvis:
I might go and start a carrier pigeon business and see if constant contact is open to acquire it, but I digress. Speaking of challenge though and stretch, it clearly sounded to me that you would like to be remembered for providing people with those inflexion points, whether they're small or large in their careers, to challenge them to be more than they are in the moment that preceded them. Now, you've previously spoken about the transformation that you believe that design leaders must go through in order for design itself to play a greater role, a more impactful role in their organisations. And you've said, and I'll quote you again now, you've said they become an organisational leader, not just a design leader. An executive is an executive capable of leading anywhere in the organisation. Having the design lens just ensures that it's with a deeper human-centered perspective. And you did touch on this earlier as well, this ability, I think you mentioned for a leader to lead people outside of their immediate discipline. When was it though that you first started to think this way about the challenge facing design leaders or the challenge that design leaders needed to overcome? I
Andy Vitale:
Think, I'm trying to think of a particular moment. I would say at Rocket, I worked with someone, Rebecca McDonald who used to tell me, leaders lead, go lead. So there's just a perspective of how do we, and as designers we know, and as you get closer to executives and being part of that conversation, I think one of the most eye-opening things probably at 3M because we had a chief design officer was like, I have conversations with this person and I see the conversations that they have and they're able to carry them forward. Then you go to other places where design isn't represented at that level, and it's like you've got an advocate who's got a voice to someone at the table, doesn't always mean your voice is actually heard or makes it to that table once you get closer and closer to the table or whatever the analogy I'm going to mess one up of.
Once you get closer to the sun, you're under more scrutiny. It's hotter. So you've got to be able to adapt and react and answer questions under a different level of pressure because when the CEO asks you what's going on here, you better have an answer. Or if you don't, at least don't make something up, be honest and say, Hey, I don't know, but I will find out. I will get back to you. Give me a little bit of time. You learn that by not having the answer and making something up that's wrong, and they probably already know you better check those numbers. That's not what I'm seeing or that's not right because my background is in design and I see how it unlocks opportunities. And when you talk to these people, they understand the customer, they want that customer perspective. When you can show up with that, that just adds value.
And then at that table, when decisions are getting made, should we do something, should we not? And you say, Hey, what's the problem we're trying to solve? Are we just creating a solution that really has no problem because it's easy or because we want to and that carries forward And people, the thing don't realise is that most of the time the executives, they don't have the answers. They've got an idea of what it should be, but they don't want someone to be like, yeah, that's right, and let them make a mistake. They want to be told like, Hey, you know what? I don't know that that's right. Hey, you might want to think about this. They want other perspectives because they've got to lead the whole company and anyone else. There are times where if you just make a judgement call, you're making that call in the moment with the best amount of information you have, but if there's more information you don't have and it's available, you want someone to tell you that, to give that to you so you could reframe your perspective and make a different call.
So design just happens to add a human perspective, which delivers human outcomes, which translate to business outcomes. It's about an experience. One of the things that I started to do here is I have a design steering committee with the CEO and everyone that reports to the CEO and I spent the first couple of ones that I have walking through the experience and pointing out, here are some gaps that we have. Here are some opportunities we have. Here are some areas of opportunity that we're going to go after and we're going to solve. Because sometimes you don't even realise that because you're so involved in something else. So how do you start to help people understand what the right end-to-end experience looks like? How do you bring that to life, how that translates to value design's got that opportunity. And then by being involved in those discussions, you're learning how to lead different parts of the organisation. You're learning how to be involved in technical platform discussions and what that looks like. So when it comes down to it, you got to learn. It's funny now it just hit me the role of any executive, especially design because designers are naturally curious, is to ask the right questions. It's about getting the right information, getting team inspired and really helping do those unlocks we talked about. But it happens by asking that right question
Brendan Jarvis:
Questions can be really dangerous, things as well, really powerful but also really dangerous. I'm curious to know whether or not you have any particular, might not be a role, but any sensibility that you apply to, particularly when you're dealing with another executive or perhaps someone that you're reporting to the way and perhaps even the place where you ask certain questions. Are there some questions for example, where you're really trying to shift that perspective where you feel it's just not appropriate to do in a group setting? There
Andy Vitale:
Are some times where maybe a side chat or a slack message is the right thing, so that if there's not a heated debate that takes away from the discussion. So I truly believe in if you know you're going to discuss something, try to have those conversations beforehand. Walk in with some aligned perspective because sometimes people are not willing to ask a question. So this happens a lot with technology. So I'll align with the CTO on a reason why we're going to do something or not do something. And when I walk into that room, I don't want to go and rehash that argument, but someone else may be thinking what I thought originally. So I'll say, Hey, you know what? In the beginning I actually thought we should do this instead. But I talked to this person, I talked to the CTO, and this is the way I understand it.
It makes sense to do it this way. They're feeling like, all right, I've got an ally. Someone else is like, all right, I got my question heard. Everyone else is like, all right, that seems to make sense. So you're kind of building that alignment beforehand, but sometimes you don't have that opportunity to. And the one thing that I really believe is that if you care enough about something, you'll say something. And if you see something, say something, it shows you care. So don't be afraid to be the one asking the question because someone else might be thinking it. They might be afraid to ask it, but really by asking it, it shows that you care because someone will take the time to explain it. They may get a little mad at it in the beginning, but you're like, Hey, look, I don't mean anything by it. I truly don't understand this. I need to believe in that so that I can go ahead and lead my team to do this or follow this
Brendan Jarvis:
Through. That sounds like a very clever way of disarming what could be like an inflammatory situation, particularly if someone has that immediate kind of anger reaction to being provoked in a certain way. Andy, I'm conscious of time and I wanted to touch on a couple more things before we said goodbye. And one of those things is that there's an upcoming generation of leaders that are coming through our design organisations and they're entering a world where business is perhaps more aware and has embraced design more vigorously than it ever has done before. And people like yourselves and others who have been on the show have been directly leading this influence of design within the organisations that we work in. What have you observed in the new upcoming generation of design leaders that you feel they are doing differently to what you've done? Anything that you're seeing within them that you feel is really interesting or different that they've been embracing?
Andy Vitale:
I think they embrace humanity even greater than we have. I think our generation learned by the mistakes that we've made by creating products that maybe weren't inclusive at times, maybe technology that we rushed out and we didn't know or didn't understand the consequences of, and we're spending a lot of time trying to fix that. I think they're coming in with the already, we know that some of this is wrong and we're not going to do that. So I think that that is still refreshing. I think generationally it's just interesting to see how people communicate. So for me, I think it's a little bit of how do you coach them? Because some people seem a little bit more reserved, which is fine, it's great. How do you embrace that? But how do you help them understand opportunities that when you say something, it's meaningful and people are listening and people understand and they want to hear that.
I think the next generation of design leaders, they're more in touch with digital natives. They understand, although it's funny to see how many analogue things people are using now with cassettes are coming back and vinyl for a while and people are putting their phones down, they're taking more time for themselves. They believe more in mental health and focusing on the mental health and work-life balance of the team. So I think they're creating even healthier environments and they're being willing to call out when things aren't healthy and when things are crossing the line. So it's funny, I mentioned that maybe they're not always as vocal, but they're vocal in a movement type way, in a way that's really changing the way companies work. And that's inspiring to see. I want to find ways to help them move that forward.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a hopeful note for the future. Speaking of the future in our near future, we need to bring the show to a close. So for me to do that, I have one last question for you, Andy, and that's, as someone who's a design executive and you've been in the top leadership design position for some time now, what do you feel is the most important action, or maybe it's a belief that you hold that's helped you to get there?
Andy Vitale:
I think for me it's my assumption is that I want to be wrong and I want to understand what right is that my first thought, my first reaction, our first attempt at something is going to be incorrect. How do we take what we've learned from that and not repeat those same mistakes? It all comes together. It's funny how things work. As I reflect back on years, we just had an all company meeting in Boston, our 2024 company kickoff, and we had a speaker, Alex Benign. And the thing that he said, he had a conversation with Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones in the moment taught him a thing. It was about cherishing your mistakes. And that resonates with me as something that I've always done. It's like it's okay to make mistakes. And we talk about this all the time. We iterate, we learn it's okay to fail, but really what makes those mistakes not failing is one, we actually attempted something.
We didn't not do anything. And two, what did we learn from it so that we're not repeating those? So throughout my career, my philosophy is like, it's okay to be wrong. It's actually assume that you're wrong and figure out through iteration, through experimentation, how you get to that right point. Because our first attempt is never the right thing unless we're super lucky. And even then we've got to realise that was luck. We need more learning behind that because we're not going to be lucky twice. So how do you really be humble in that, humble in making mistakes and learning from them?
Brendan Jarvis:
That is such an important and refreshing point to end on. Andy, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
Andy Vitale:
Awesome. Thanks Brenda. It was fun. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Brendan Jarvis:
Me too, me too. And Andy, if people want to keep in touch with you, they want to follow along all your wonderful contributions to the field, what is the best way for them to do that?
Andy Vitale:
LinkedIn for sure. I'm super active on LinkedIn, not using much other social media except for being a lurker and consuming it. Tiktok's great to unwind for a half hour. Don't get caught in the vicious loop, but LinkedIn's the best way to get in touch with me or kind of see some of my thoughts.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Andy. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Andy and all of the things we've covered will be chaptered, particularly 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 on the podcast. Those are very, very helpful for helping people to understand what it's like to be a listener. Subscribe, so it turns up every two weeks. And also tell someone else, perhaps just one other person who you feel would get value from these conversations at depth.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. Or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or visit me at my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Andy Vitale

Scaling Your Design Organisation

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Who is Andy Vitale?

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