Welcome, guys, we are chatting about where Audrey Crane is located in the sights and sounds of omaha, which include the berkshire hathaway conference and the slump buster baseball tournament college world series. So anyway, welcome, welcome, thanks for joining. I’m Megan Dubovsky. I’m an operating partner and CMO at Ten Eleven .

There’s a lot of new faces on this call, which is super exciting.

Um, we also are recording it.

We had some people who couldn’t make it this morning, but um, just so you know, if you’re interested in you know i, i, as an operating partner, i work with the companies that are in our portfolio to help get them the resources they need to do what they’re trying to do faster. Or, you know, share what we know, help them find each other, maybe to talk about new ideas.

And, uh, one thing i’d really like to focus more and more on um is this group, the product group, and understanding how we can think about design in as we build these new cyber security products and how much opportunity i think there is there.

So to help us with that today is Audrey Crane.

I’m going to let her talk about the opportunity much more eloquently than i could, since she does it day in and day out.

Audrey’s the partner in Chief Growth Officer at DesignMap , which is in san francisco, although he’s in omaha working um, and they’ve done a ton of really cool projects for companies like salesforce docker, netapp, ebay, and they’ve done a ton of really cool projects for companies like salesforce docker, netapp, ebay, and they’ve done a ton of really cool projects for companies like salesforce docker, uh, which i think is cool, because sometimes in cyber security we’re just in cyber security so much that it can be cool to get a taste of, you know, the things that are going on a little bit outside our universe and- and in design, i think that’s probably particularly important.

She’s also written written a book what ceos need to know about design um, and so just so you know she knows what she’s talking about. I’ll turn over to Audrey.

I do want to say i um had this little medical thing come up, so i’m going to have to drop off before the end of the call. So i’m going to have to drop off before the end of the call. So i’m going to have to drop off before the end of the call, um, but mary, who’s here on the call?

Um, she’s gonna make here to facilitate questions and to close it out. And um, just so everyone knows it is recorded. So we will send it out at the end of the call and please feel free to send to your ceo, your other teammates, all that good stuff. We will certainly use it a lot in the portfolio going forward as well.

So thanks, everyone for being here, and with that i’ll turn it over to Audrey.

Thank you, Megan, and yeah, thanks, thanks for having me.

Um, normally, or sometimes before we have these sessions, i have questions from folks. Sorry, one housekeeping thing: i have, um, the great good luck to have the flooring that was supposed to be installed in my house like a month ago happening literally right now. So if you hear anything wacky, let me know.

I could try putting in my earbuds or something and we’ll see if it works. It’s upstairs, so, and i have the door shut so, and i’m in the basement because that’s where computer people live.

So let me know, though, if you hear anything. Um, so i’m wondering, since and since it’s a relatively small group, if you all could just take a minute and say, like, i’m so and so, and i joined because i’m hoping to learn, or, uh, anything that you’re hoping to get from this session.

That will help me try to kind of focus it on what i hear.

Is that?

Okay, i can, i’ll pick a person so that we don’t have to have that awkward silence. So, uh, darren, do you mind starting?

Thank you, no pressure then. Hi, i’m darren. Coverage at device authority. We’re a very new member of the Ten Eleven group, i think, sort of since very late. Um, i’m the engineering manager here at device authority. We’re a very small team who do iot delivery of certificates at scale. So what we are looking for? Well, the biggest thing we do, we’re embarking on a big new ui up there and very keen to incorporating design and what i call design for design, for test, design for maintenance.

How do we design these things in to, to get scalability and without, in

Vulcan Cyber, at

Vulcan Cyber located in the Tel Aviv. So it’s our evening right now.

I’m looking.

Actually I’m new to the company I joined two weeks ago so yeah, so my CTO thought it would be good just to join to get to know the group, hear thoughts and also we are initiate DesignMap System project where I’m leading it. So any tips or advices I would love to hear.

Great, I don’t think you’re going to hear very much new today, but hopefully there’ll be one or two things that you’re going to hear.

So I’m looking forward to that- or things that are interesting or that are helpful ways to pass on.

Okay, you want to pick who’s next- Megan, you know, like I said, I’m just at Ten Eleven, but I do want to know how to better advise our startups to prioritize design, like how can we get it into the conversation earlier? So that’s what I’m sort of hoping for nuggets and I will pick Kevin. Kevin, can you go? Do you mind just introducing yourself?

Yeah, sure, no problem. Hi, I’m Kevin Sapp. I’m the CTO and co- founder at Ambit. So Ten Eleven,, of course, is an investor in Ambit. We actually, you know, we had redesigned our front end for our admin console, you know, about a year or so ago. We currently use an outsource UX UI firm. Okay, yeah, for all of that sort of design work. But you know, actually, Mark Hatfield kind of, you know, one of our board calls.

He introduced this idea of, you know, kind of an in- house design function and so forth, so I thought I would join and listen in great cool- I don’t know if you can see or not.

So, to charlotte, is that you from Silent Push?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, I can go actually.

I’m not sure what show it’s on. So I had to call them here from Silent Push as well. So I’m the head of product at Silent Push. And I apologize, I’ve been on pause for the last three hours. So I’m starting to go a bit hoarse here from all my talking. But our product is actually, it’s quite a technical product. So what we’re trying to do is actually make it really intuitive for users. So we’re trying to simplify the product in a way to make it a better experience for our new users coming in.

And we have a self- registration model so people can actually sign up and join and use it without any interaction with the team. So we’re trying to figure out a way of when they come on board, how do we take them through that process of making, you know, we think our data is really good. So how do we make that accessible to them and for them to value the tool? So any tips on the process would be great.

We have a couple companies, a few companies with a self- service, you know, free premium type model. So definitely those. Victories or those small wins that you get when you first sign in and how you make everyone feel good about those things is definitely always interesting to think about.

Okay, great.

I’m Kaylee. Are you there? Sorry, I’m like calling people out.

Yeah, so I’m Kaylee. I’m lead designer at Harmonic Security. So we’re sort of like a super early stage startup still. So yeah, I’m just kind of here to kind of. Help knowledge and kind of see what you guys are talking about.

Thanks, Kaylee. Ben, I think you’re.

My last, I’m always last. Like, it’s like, no, it’s like my last name in school. My, my son says he’s always last. So, you know, no, it’s all good. I’m Ben. I am the VP of engineering at Sundry security. I’ve been with Sundry since we started in 2018. And I believe we’ve been a 10, Eleven companies. Since 2019. I think they were our, our first one in our series. A we’ve had a number of into design. We’ve outsourced to a firm in San Francisco early on to do a, do a study.

We’ve had in- house designers and most recently we’ve contracted out to a house source company to work with us through a new version of the product that we’re coming out with and had an incredible amount of success with that. I’m here to listen, to understand, I’m very curious because I’m, I’m on the engineering side of the house to understand interactions between product engineering, how design sits in, in between that it’s, it’s, I like to read about this stuff. I like to listen. I, it’s just to absorb and, you know, I’ll share where I can. Thanks.

Great.

Cool.

Thank you. Uh, you all seem kind of far a lot.

Like.

More far along in your journeys than sometimes the groups that I speak to, but, uh, I’m gonna, we’ll go through this and I hope that you’ll interrupt me and say, um, like push on things or ask deeper questions than, than maybe necessarily what I have in, in the slides, just to make sure that it’s useful for you all. Um, all right. So this is the, the exciting part of any, uh, zoom share when I share.

My.

Screen and then I go to keynote and I put it in play mode to work. It seems like it works sweet and I can see you all. So that’s very, very, very exciting. Okay. Um, yeah, so I’m gonna introduce myself just briefly and we’ll, we’ll hop into this. I work at a firm called design map with two other partners. Um, and just a little bit about me. I feel like I need credibility when. I speak to, to firms that work in it and, and, um, tools for it and developers. So I wrote my first computer program on a TRS 80.

This is a radio shack machine when I was five years old. I feel like it’s important to say that. Um, I studied theater in college, but I also studied mathematics. My favorite course was non Euclidean geometry. That’s Euclid. Uh, my favorite postulate is Euclid’s fifth. I’m happy to nerd out on that if anybody wants to. And I also, I worked, um, at Netscape from 1995 to 1999. So, um, I worked for directly for, um, the great Marty Kagan, who just had a book come out. Uh, I just got to go to his book launch party last week. It’s awesome. He’s awesome.

Um, lesser known, but as great Hugh Daberly, who is kind of a luminary in the, in the design field. I was around, uh, Ben Horowitz. I was in the meeting when he rolled out his good product. Managers, bad product managers document. So, um, lots of, lots of other amazing people. It was a great place to be from. Um, and I have worked since then inside companies, running design teams, as well as outside companies, freelancing and consulting for some amazing clients, including the ones that are here.

Um, I’m especially proud that we designed the first Docker Hub. And so that kind of like self- service onboarding for tools like that, uh, definitely.

So, so today I’m a partner at DesignMap.

I coach leaders and work with product teams who struggle with design or really with how design should serve both the customers and the business. And so I want to share some of that, some of that stuff with you today. So the, the, you know, I read a book, the genesis of the book was this, this guy who’s a CEO of a company called me and he said, like, you know, I am CEO. I was a developer. So I understand technology.

I’ve learned about HR and marketing and finance stuff. And I’m hearing that design is really important for company success, but I don’t know about design. Like, I don’t know what I should know. And I don’t know where to, where to find it out. And I thought that was a really good question. Like, we don’t want him to go learn Figma, right?

Like he shouldn’t go to a design class, but really where, where could he go to learn what we all wish CEOs knew about design? So I started calling other leaders in the industry who were great advocates of design, but didn’t come up through design, but really leveraged it to make their companies more successful. And it was interesting to hear like how they got there and also what they thought design was supposed to do. And there was a lot of overlap, but there were also were some gaps.

And so, so I decided to write the book, um, what CEOs need to know about design.

Really?

I think it should be just like what business leaders need to know about design, but that was too long for the title. So, um, it it’s, it is about, uh, I’m not pitching it.

Like, I’m not saying that you need to buy it.

You’ll what you hear today will be sufficient.

It is like a 40 minute read. It was tricky though. And, and for the designers in the room, I’ll say, you know, if somebody asks you like, write a book that you can, read in about a half an hour that contains everything that business leaders need to know about design.

Um, you would probably be smarter than I, and say like, that sounds terrible. I will not take that assignment.

So it’s, um, it’s really condensed and hopefully not insulting in that condo condensation.

Um, you probably will know a lot of it, but, but hopefully, you know, 10% of it will be useful.

So I’m going to go through.

Really the form of this conversation is like the big mistakes that we see business leaders making most often when it comes to user experience design, and I’ll call them out in a slide that looks like this.

Cool.

Great.

Okay.

Here’s the first thing design makes you more money.

And we missed to know that. So we’re not doing design for the sake of design. We’re not doing design because we like pretty things.

We’re doing design because it’s, it’s a pretty design. It’s not just the design side.

They’re going to find that design.

And they’re makes us more money by making our customers more successful and thus making our business more successful. And I’m going to talk here really about digital product strategy and design. So not necessarily about physical products. There’s definitely a difference between marketing and product design. I’m not going to talk about product or marketing. But if we just focus on digital software design and strategy, there’s a lot of data that show that investing in user experience design makes you more money. And I really wanted to start here.

There’s been years of designers saying like, but we’re important and we should be there and we need a seat at the table. I don’t really want to start with that.

I want to say there’s a good reason to have designers on your team.

I’m happy to share, I assume, the folks that are here or I’m maybe preaching to the choir a little bit.

Or you would be like, why would I even spend my time doing that?

It’s not that important.

But if you want these resources, I have an index at the end of this deck that includes links to all these resources so that you can pass this information on.

I just cherry picked a few things. This is a McKinsey report on the business value of design. So it shows that, well, you can see what it shows. I don’t need to read this slide to you. Forrester has a great one. The index is super interesting.

It’s a great one. It’s a great one. It’s a great one. It’s a great one. It’s interesting.

It’s really deep on how long meetings were, how long decisions took to get made, how satisfied people were with their jobs.

But over three years, they invested significantly in design and saw a significant return on their investment there, 301%.

I will caution you, everything here says design thinking. It’s not design thinking. It’s design. So just want to throw that out there.

Some of my favorite numbers from the index are that before the investment in design, 10% of projects returned no profit or never reached the market, and after their investment in design, that number dropped to 2%. And I use this statistic especially with engineers to say: you guys and gals are sweating and sleeping under your desks and bleeding. Maybe it’s not the dot- com boom, but you’re working really hard and you want your work to go towards something that’s useful for the business.

Right, and this is a case where we seek engineers’ advocacy to bring in design and have a solid design team. Envision has one. I’m sure designers in the room have seen this. Is that really loud? No, okay. So Envision wrote this report on the new design frontier and sort of had an index where they said these are companies that are design mature and then, based on their index, like how those design mature companies performed, and you know it has had a significant impact.

My favorite, like encapsulation of all this stuff, is from Leah Buley, who was a Forrester analyst and was at Envision for a while. I’m not sure where she is now, but she wrote a book called DesignMap design Team of One. So if anybody here is a DesignMap Team of One, it’s a great book to pick up. Do you know Leah Renana? I’ve read the book, great. So this is for Leah. She spent a while trying to make this case while she was at Forrester and then at Envision.

So there’s data to support each of these points: that design makes employees more efficient and productive, which puts products in the market quicker that are more innovative and drive higher customer lifetime value and ultimately leading to growth, and we can point to reports that supports each one of these things. So that’s kind of sorry. This is the, these are the. I should have taken these out, sorry, so I’ll send this stuff over to you.

I’m not sure why everything is building so that you have the links, but this sort of point here that I say to everyone is that expect designers to be capable of making a success based out of new market design. So that’s kind of hard. So that’s kind of hard. So that’s kind of hard: specific, meaningful and significant contribution to your company’s success for you all in particular. I was kind of doing a little research just on the state of cybersecurity today.

I don’t know if the ISC2 cybersecurity workforce study is credible or not, but it maps to data that I’ve seen over the years that there’s just a big gap in. There’s a lot of open jobs, jobs that are never filled in cybersecurity, and so, as a result, lots of really junior people are filling those roles or senior people are trying to do a lot of things at once, and we’ve seen examples where there was a breach.

The software caught the breach and alerted the SOC- you know the tier one guys and gals- but the people using that software couldn’t understand what was happening and so so they weren’t, they didn’t catch the breach as early as they could, and it’s surely a user experience design problem. We see this in healthcare too, where people get sick or die because of user experience design problems.

But it’s significant here, especially because of that gap in hiring- and I was- I was just telling Megan before we started- there’s a quality, there’s a kind of consumer grade user experience in the B2C world. But then in the the B2B world it’s not as good, because often people who buy the software don’t have to use the software, et cetera, et cetera.

But then often even below that are tools for IT and developers, because sometimes you get this feeling of like: well, I’m an engineer and they’re an engineer, so I can be self- referential, or it doesn’t have to be that good because they’ll be able to use it. But we’ve seen over and over again that that’s not the case we work with at design map, when we work with security.

People building software for security, software for networking, software for storage, like the people making the software, are experts and specialists and spend all day, every day, thinking about storage. People using it- depending on the, the customer, um and the size of their team- really may not be thinking about that all day, every day. So it’s a really huge opportunity, um, and and big risk as well. I’ll stop. There is any like any reaction to that?

Yeah, that relates a lot to what we find actually, you know, so our tool was designed by a technical staff, almost for a technical team, you know, and we’ve continually overestimated the technical capabilities of our users. So we assume that they should know stuff. And the attitude was a little bit, well, if they’re good at their job, they should understand that. And so what we’ve been doing now is we’ve been stepping back and say, that’s not the role. It has to be intuitive. You know, anyone should come into our app and know what to do.

It should be obvious what they should do, even if they don’t understand the data, it should be presented in a way that makes sense to them. So navigating around the system, using different features should be very obvious. And we shouldn’t expect them to know certain in order to use our tool. What we found initially was that, you know, some of the very advanced users thought our tool was excellent, really, really good, but everyone else got lost.

It was just too, and they don’t often feed that back to you because they’re almost a little bit embarrassed to kind of say, well, I didn’t understand what you’re doing. So they just stopped responding, you know, so we just don’t get feedback. And so what we’re trying to know is actually to simplify everything, continually simplify it to make it a really nice experience for anyone. You don’t have to be super technical, but that’s a challenge.

You know, it’s finding how do you deal with technical data and make that available and available in a way that’s not technical, you know, that anyone can understand.

Yep. Yeah. We saw that attitude exactly at Docker. And really, I mean, I’ve been doing this a long time for tools for IT and developers, they, in the olden days, there used to be this kind of feeling of like, well, well, if you’re a real man, you’ll use a CLI and GUIs, I don’t know why the word GUI like only sticks around in this, but GUIs are for beginners or people somehow deficient, right? And we’ve, we have seen that change. We did design work for a company.

A company called CloudGenics around networking and younger users are, are, don’t feel threatened by GUIs or don’t feel like the use of a GUI makes them less capable or it’s any, in any way, less powerful. It happened that Docker, Scott Johnston is the CTO, CEO, and he’s a big believer in the power of user experience design, which is why we came in. But it was very much, you know, if, if you have. The self- service model, then it’s got to be delightful to use, right?

The reason that, that B2C software is so much better is because people don’t have to use it. They’d be like, yeah, this dating app is shitty to use. So I just won’t, right? In, in the B2B world, it has to be consumer grade user experience, especially if you have like a freemium kind of self- service model. And so the bars is pretty high for that. And I love that. You’re doing that. And I love that you’re, that you’re thinking about it that way. The, there’s a book called the inmates are running the asylum. It came out in like 99.

It was written by Alan Cooper who invented visual basics. So it’s by developer, but he’s really the, the grandfather of interaction design. And he’s, he’s kind of a jerk too. I’ll tell you that I, I once got fired for sending. A box of. Of copies of inmates who were running the asylum to the engineering team I was working with. But so it’s, if you take it with a sense of humor, like Allen makes a really good point that engineers, my father’s an engineer, my brother’s an engineer. I love them.

And they just don’t think the way that, that the rest of the world does. And so even to say like. Even if you’re designing a tool for another engineer, they’re just very from the past.

That’s it. Yeah.

they’re just not going to think about it the same way that you think about it. So anyway, read inmates, don’t read inmates, but it’s a good, it’s a good way of reminding yourself of how we have to differ. We have to stay aware that we are not our users, even if we’re developers and they’re developers. So, it’s a good way of reminding yourself of how we have to differ.

We have to stay aware that we are not our users, even if we’re developers and they’re developers.

So, it’s a good way of reminding yourself of how we have to differ.

That was like sorry.

Yeah, no, I was just gonna add- I don’t mean to over pivot on it, but that really resonates with you know our company, in the sense that our founders and even myself we come from, we’ve we’re in the business of cloud security right now. But we come from another company that was all on prem that did security. Event management would have started like the early 2000s where you know a lot of the users of those systems came out of SOC and NOX- very technical users where the user experience was there.

But I mean you had a bunch of people that you know the comment you made, you know what’s a GUI like. They were proud of their VM experience and their regexes. And I’m getting really technical right now. But when you talk about the cybersecurity staff shortage, it’s even worse because you get a lot of the people on the cloud security platforms that have been trained for seven months and they don’t. They don’t have a lot of experience.

So this you know, you can’t have this expectation that they come with all this baggage of knowing all these technical things and I I just want to. I took this totally resonates and it’s something that we’ve we’ve had to adjust to in our company from, from our old world.

That’s great to hear. Yeah, all right, I’m going to carry on here. I’ll get get off my soapbox, quick soundcheck. How bad is that? Now it just stopped. Okay, quick, I want to talk quick, all right. So it’s fine. By the way, I can’t hear it.

There’s more noise behind me.

Okay, I’m just gonna breathe. Let me know, please, if you hear it. Mary, it’ll be Mary’s job to let me know, and then I won’t worry about it, all right. So there’s always this question: how many designers do we need? Marty? I saw, Ben, you were nodding when I brought up Marty marty’s like.

I loved it. I just loved his book inspired, just loved it. So sorry, I’m interrupting you again.

No, no, I’m glad you are. I wanted to be more of a conversation. I’m a huge, huge fan. I’m so lucky to know him and he’s a huge proponent of user experience design. So I use him a lot to talk about design without being like: design is so important. Listen to me, right, like, don’t listen to me, listen to Marty. So Marty uses this one to eight ratio. We see more often and more appropriately a ratio of one to five, and to five makes more sense because this stuff is just more technical, and so we more often see a one- to- five ratio.

I think a much better way to do this- and it’s something that we’ve been doing recently- is just looking. Just look at your shadow design spend. So we have a survey. It’s publicly available. I’m happy to to share a link with it. This is the readout from a survey that one of our clients did and, um, they found actually 22 full- time employees worth of design work being done outside of the design team of 12.. That was a big company. You guys aren’t gonna.

You probably don’t have 28 full- time employees altogether, but, um, you can run a quick survey and ask developers, qa people, product managers, business analysts, if you have those, or masters, if you have those, how much time they’re spending alone doing design. So if they’re talking with somebody else about it, great, that’s great. We don’t i’m not gonna call that shadow design, that’s just part of the process.

But if they’re spending time alone doing design work, then, um, you can kind of quantify what that spend looks like and maybe adjust your hiring accordingly, your hiring plans accordingly, um, and keep measuring over time so that you can kind of keep an eye on this. In big companies sometimes this is like political and fraught and but hopefully you guys are all at a size and in organizations where it’s just a diagnostic, just to understand shadow design will never be zero. Just like shadow, it will never be zero.

But we can understand what it is and then we can we have we have strategies for, for addressing it. Does that make sense? Um, once you have your ratio figured out, or a sense of how much design you’re you’re paying your engineers to do design work. Then there’s often this question of like: should i have an internal, should i make an internal hire or should i use an external vendor? Um, some of you- it sounds like you’re already you’re you’re having this conversation right now. Um, i don’t really like that. The either or i i like to use both.

Um, now i’ll say you should hire.

So what that, sorry, I’m going to go back for a minute. What that does for you is that when you’re interviewing designers, you can say, look, we’re really investing in design. Like we really think design is important. We’re spending money here. And then the design consultancy can help you with job descriptions, how to source. It’s a great time to hire designers right now. Like whole giant teams of designers are being laid off. So they can help you with contacts, connections, recruiters, be part of the interviewing team, all that stuff.

So it’s really more powerful, the two together. And I really like that combination. If you can hire, a couple points about the internal hire.

If you write a job description, like they can do logo design and they can do marketing and they can do interaction design and they can do visual design, but they can do it in HTML. And their CSS is super tight. Like you’re just saying, basically, I’m pretty naive about the world and I just want a unicorn.

So generally designers are going to have specializations and specifically visual design or interaction design. They might do both. There’s a new kind of product designer title that’s implies both, but usually they’re better at one or the other. For a startup, you probably want somebody with research experience. Later, you’d get a special, a specialization, but sorry, I have it listed out. So either they’re doing designer code, either they’re working in marketing or products, very different skill sets, either interaction or visual.

And then when you do interview them, I really like to ask about this. You know, of course you want to see if their work looks really good, but I like to see under their portfolio. So I say like, I would like to see the sausage making. So can you show me the messy middle?

The middle of this project and kind of how, what I’m looking for is how they think we, because we focus on technical design products like you all do, probably they’re not going to know all the stuff I need them to know, but if they think the way that I need them to think, if they’re organized thinkers and flexible, then I can, I know I can train them up. So be careful not to just see like the shiny glossy cover. And then I would hope that.

I’m looking for them to be.

Interested in things besides design. So asking questions about how you make money, the revenue model, the, the tech stack, like whatever, just so they’re not like all that matters is design. And that’s all I care about.

And then finally, I have a rule that I always say something critical about something in their portfolio.

Um, I broke this rule one time and it did not go well. Um, the reason for. That is because we’re one of the great things that design school does for you is it separates your ego from your work and we’re looking for this kind of inquisitiveness where if I say I’m really confused about the choice here, like when it had been better to do it this way, what I’m looking for in their reaction is an openness to that and an interest in why I feel that way.

And they might, if, if there’s defensiveness, like, oh, that wouldn’t work then.

Um, you’re going to be having these conversations all the time. And that’s a pretty good indicator that they’re not going to be productive or enjoyable when you’re working together. I know it’s an interview, but like I said, one time I was like, well, it’s an interview and it didn’t go well. So that’s my advice on that. I just said that. So I will not read this slide to you.

Um, all right. So we talked about, we talked about, uh, the, the wild being the external consultants, helping you hire people into your organization.

And just listing out some of the benefits for that. You can start now, if you get a consultancy rolling and some of you already have, like, you can get going really quick. Um, they can help you with hiring. As I mentioned, you’re demonstrating that you’re invested in design. A lot of designers get sort of stuck being the only designer on the whole team. Imagine being like the only engineer in the whole organization. It’s not that fun. You don’t have anybody to bounce things off of. If you’re stuck, there’s nobody there. They’re gonna help you.

So demonstrating that, that you are invested in design literally right now can be really helpful. And then also that internal person can be a great steward for the work that the outside consultant is doing. So they’re kind of like part of that team and they understand the thinking and they understand why certain decisions were made. Then you get a lot more value out of the work that you did with the external consultant.

Yeah. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree.

Um, in terms of choosing outside consultants, you know, again, I like to see sausage making and see the work in progress, like to understand how they measure success.

If the word handoff comes up, like all kinds of red flags and alarm bells would would go off for me to where we’re in an agile world. Even if we weren’t like we all know there’s a potentially infinite number of decisions that have to be made when we’re shipping software. And so we want the designers around to provide alternatives, if dev is like, oh, I thought this was going to be a week, but it’s two months, how important is it and design can maybe like work with them to come up with something else.

They’re answering questions, designing edge cases, all that stuff.

And then I also really look for what they don’t do. For you all, like, I can’t imagine you accidentally hiring a marketing firm that just tacked on like interaction design, because the, I don’t know, the Grey Goose site lets you click on the geese and they honk or something.

But, but it does happen where like really marketing advertising agencies tack on interaction design and then people or user experience design, people look for that. So I would recommend asking like, what kinds of things don’t you do? And you’re looking for them to say that they’re specialized a bit in what you’re looking for. My favorite clients say, what do you, what will you need from us? And I think that’s really important. And then also understanding what kind of investment that you’ll need to be making with them is important.

So it’s really, this is all for your internal hire, like having that consultant is, is a cohort and then having at least two folks. So you aren’t a design team of one for very long is important.

Yeah. All right.

Let’s talk about working together. And I think Ben, you had kind of talked about this a little bit.

Okay.

So in the beginning, we, before we start our products, hopefully we’re doing a little bit of research, right?

So this is like feed forward research or researchers would call it generative research. And a lot of times entrepreneurs, product managers has a product founders are doing that research. And I want to share a story about a little research study. There was a study where a researcher had like a clipboard. A bunch of papers, and they were holding a drink and they were in a, I don’t know, let’s say a mall. And they were asking people if they had five minutes to participate in this university research study.

And when people stopped and said, yes, then they’d say, okay, can you, I need to get something out of my clip.

You can’t see me.

I need to get something out of my clipboard.

Can you just hold my drink for me?

The person would hold the drink for a specific amount of time, like 10 seconds.

The researcher would get a photograph of a person with just a neutral face.

Okay.

And then take the drink back and then say, can you describe the person in this photograph to me? And if the drink was cold, the research participant was much more likely to say negative things about the person in the photograph.

And if it was warm, they were much more likely to say positive things, 10 seconds, holding a drink, nothing to do with it, with the study itself, right? So this slide is silly. I’m going to skip it.

I’m just going to say like, like entrepreneurs and founders and product managers and CEOs are successful because they’re persuasive. They’re exciting to listen to. They’re the best looking people in the room, right? They’re charismatic. And if they take that hat that helps them persuade investors and potential new hires and potential customers and sales calls, if they take that hat and they wear that hat into research, then they’re going to find out that they’re charismatic.

And persuasive and everybody wants them to like them, right? So we do a specific training and every time we do it, some, so it’s research for non- researchers and non- designers. Somebody says like, oh, this is harder than I thought. And one participant said, I really have to take off my normal hat and, and wear this different hat. And I like that idea of just being neutral and being there to learn and to hear what the person had to say.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So if you don’t have a researcher and you’re doing your own research or somebody else on your team is, this is a really big mistake that people make. Another one about working together is really about the level at which designers work. So this is an old book. Jesse James Garrett read this book, The Elements of User Experience, again, I think before 2000. But it is kind of foundational. And so I think it’s helpful to talk to your designers if you guys are like, oh, you know, Jesse James Garrett, look, The Elements of User Experience DesignMap.

And then your designers will be like, whoa, you guys are so cool and knowledgeable, right? So he talks about the five layers of user experience design. He talks about it vertically. That’s frustrating for me in a slide format. So I’m going to make it horizontal. But the top element is often what people think of when they think. DesignMap is like fonts and colors. Oh, fonts and colors. Fonts and colors are so important. And that’s really the surface. That’s the top of Jesse James Garrett’s five elements of user experience design.

What will the thing look like? There’s this other thing that people think of when they think of design, which is called strategy. And it’s right now we are talking, thinking a lot about, like, design. Thinking I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase design, thinking that kind of lives in that strategy layer.

But if you want to make an impact, then it’s not just the surface and it’s not just the big plan. It’s everything in between.

So it’s like, how big is this product? What kinds of problems are we going to solve? And how are we going to help solve them? And how do we put together the solution that helps solve through structure and skeleton?

And.

So one opportunity is thinking of design. One problem is thinking of design is just the fonts and colors.

And we’re saying here, one of the things Marty says actually is that design is an excellent tool for managing risk, but it’s really not going to help you manage risk if it’s just if design is just picking fonts and colors. They have to be involved more deeply than that. They’re at the risk of beating a dead horse. Here’s here’s Marty Kagan talking. About that. And then the other risk problem that we see sometimes is that people think, oh, I did design thinking, so therefore I’ve done design.

So we are looking for people to work deeply with designers, not just at the surface. This one, and I think this is my second to last point is about giving feedback. And I, I wonder if you’ve ever had this happen. There’s a designer. You could tell it cause they have the cool glasses, right?

And they.

Present something and somebody in the room says, oh my God, that blue color. That’s so great. I love the blue. And the designer’s like, I thought it was just random. I’m not really, that’s not our blue, that color will change. I was trying to ask you something different about this page. So that’s not a good experience. Now the designer looks defensive. The person who said they liked the blue looks kind of dumb because they can tell that it wasn’t the brand blue. Or whatever, right? So we try to get in front of that.

And we try to coach designers to say, um, at the beginning of the meeting, this is the kind of feedback that I’m looking for.

And I’m not too worried about these other things. Designers don’t always do that. So we would ask for you to start the meeting by saying, what kind of feedback are you looking for? And, and is there anything I shouldn’t worry about at this point? Because if we go back to this model, Jesse James Garrett’s model. The kinds of feedback. That’s appropriate at the strategy level, like questions about who this is for and how it’s helpful to them are completely different from the kinds of feedback. That’s appropriate at the surface level.

Like, is that the right blue? I see a typo and we want to spend our time together and more productively, but also we want to build a better working relationship than that. Um, the other thing related to feedback is, is my advice. To, to anybody giving feedback on design is to focus on intent. Um, I had a hard time coming up with an icon for intent. That’s what I came up with. If anybody has other suggestions, I’m very open to it. This is my icon for intent for right now. So, so users have an intent, right?

And then the designer is keeping the user and the user’s intent in mind.

The business has an intent, which maybe it goes up or up into the right.

Um, and the.

Designer is trying to square those things and has his or her own. But people outside of the design world have perspective to kind of see it all, whether that’s like technical challenges or the. The, how the business intent may or might not align with a user intent. So giving feedback.

So giving feedback.

So giving feedback, So giving feedback.

So giving feedback. So giving feedback. So giving feedback.

Through. Focus on intent usually means asking a lot of questions. So you might be asking: when you’re you, when you’re seeing designers work, you might be asking about the user’s intent, like: how does the user do it today? How would this make it better? What’s the most important thing on this page? What other things? And then they might ask about the designers intent as well. Which version do you like? Why did you do it this way? What did you do before this?

Um and also um, you can stay your own intent in the feedback sessions, and that focus on intent means that you have to be working together deeply at the like, strategy, scope level, because you’re really thinking about what- what people, business and technology are trying to accomplish. Right, I’ve said that. I will not say it again.

Last point on working together: designers, design, all the things we’ve talked about, shadow design, um, one of the folks I interviewed for the book actually was saying something to me, um, about how important design was and he had had two successful exits and he really felt like that was all thanks to the user experience, design and blah, blah, blah. And then at some point he said his team was working together and then, and then the product manager was doing some mock- ups and I was like, wait, what? Why would product managers be doing mock- ups?

And he said, oh well, the designers were on to the next thing and so all kinds of questions, right about process and how they, how they treated their teams and their resources, that they were really like got to stay together or they got switched around, but you’re paying. The alternative to good design isn’t no design, it’s it’s bad design. So just pay the designers to do design and pay the other people to do what they’re good. I it seems crazy that I have to say that, but I find I still have to say that.

Um, I’m going to skip this section, the three ideas for tomorrow, um, just in the interest of time, and just hop to the end, which is questions and conversation. I think we have, yeah, oh, that’s great. We have eight minutes left. Very exciting, okay, questions for you all. Did you feel like? Oh, yeah, I knew that already.

Let

me actually, since I’m screen sharing, I’ll just show.

I’ll just show you.

We have a blog post called cost of Shadow DesignMap Teams. Oh, there we go. I’m so glad you asked Ben, I’ll get, I’ll Venmo you that 20 soon. So this: you can make a copy of this survey and then we just ask where you work, how much time you’ve spent. You know, obviously these are estimates. There’s a definition of design kind of embedded in these questions and we also ask: why. So why did you do? Why were you the one doing the design work, work? Is it because you didn’t know how to work with the designer?

Is it because there were no design resources available? Is it because you thought you were really good at it? Is it because you just think you like it? Um, and then we also asked: do you think the outcome was better because you designed it, or would it have been better if it designed today? And it’s been really interesting.

We’ve run this in like five companies and if you all run it, I would love to hear about it because, um, I would like to collect a body of information where we can kind of say, like, write a white paper or something like: generally, this is what we’re seeing in organizations, but it’s the shadow. DesignMap is always between 50 and so far, 250 percent of the design team did the design team’s capacity. Um, so that by itself is shocking, and then also interesting that they’re.

I expected a lot more of like I do it because I like it or because I think I’m really good at it and the designers are just okay, um, but that’s much more rare than I expected it to be. So, you know, I I would love to hear if you all do it, and we’ve run this a couple times. A couple of PhD researchers have looked at it, so it’s pretty tight at this point.

Yeah, this is really interesting for us actually, because this is like that last slide you said to say there’s design- all the things I mean definitely in in our organization, their design, but then there is a group think so people that all have a view on it and sometimes that their view takes precedence, you know. So you have a design, comes up and say this is how we think it should work, and but the group then think, well, actually we prefer it this way here.

And and you sometimes get into that discussion where, where it’s not so, everyone has a view of design, everyone wants an input. I think everyone sees it as a really cool kind of part of the job and they all have a view on it, and sometimes so it’s not like we don’t have that hard room where the designers design all the things you know, as designers give prototypes and then and then the group decide what what gets designed.

And that is something we’re working with, because I think to get a coherent design- I tend to agree with you- you have to have that single view of how do we create consistency throughout the whole application and make sure that it’s coherent from from a user point of view, and if you have too many voices in there, you can end up with quite a disjointed kind of experience there for people.

So it’s something that we’re working through at the moment- actually is is to know to have a real dedicated design function and that takes care of that end of it, and it’s quite interesting, yeah, yeah, we, we see that an awful lot, especially with, like, a younger designer who, like they, do not get taught in school how to manage feedback.

So the questions of who gets to give feedback on this? When do they get to give feedback? How much should I wait their feedback? Do they all have to give feedback at the same time or can they give feedback on different times? Like that, stuff does not get taught in school, unfortunately, and it can completely, like the good design work can completely degrade. Now it can get much better too with feedback that’s well handled.

But interestingly, feedback is kind of this: like I mean, it’s a thing that happens to everybody, that can make your, your user experience 500 percent better or 500 worse, but we don’t pay a lot of attention to it. So it’d be interesting to just check in with your designer and say: how do you feel like the feedback process is here? Um, a lot of times they’re very quiet too, like as much introverts as engineers- or introverts, I would venture the same percentage. So they don’t.

They don’t say well, what I was thinking is that when the person comes to this page, they will have already done this process and this way i’m making it they’ll. They may not say that. They’ll just say, okay, i’ll change it. And then what did you? You know you paid them to think those thoughts and then you’re just flushing them down the toilet. You don’t even know they thought it. We also, i like to people, executives and stuff- to give feedback earlier in the process when we’re really talking about strategy, intent of the business and the user.

It’s more impactful there and it’s more useful there, like, do we need the ceo weighing in on font size, maybe, i mean, but less impactful at least. Great thanks, Audrey.

Um ben had a quick question. Could do you mind dropping that survey link in chat? Oh, yeah, sure, right, and i’ll include it.

Um, wait, i’m gonna clean the email so we get web traffic, but the link’s right here, perfect, um, yeah, so i thank you.

Um.

I’d like to thank everyone uh for attending today. Uh, i did throw up a poll. We’d love to get your feedback on the session and also, this is an opportunity for you to let the Ten Eleven team know which other topics you’d be interested in learning more about. Um, i help uh coordinate these events with them. So your, your feedback matters a ton. Additionally, um, after this event, you’ll get a recap email with a link uh to contact Audrey for any further questions. Uh.

Additionally, with the video, the recording of this event, the slides uh, and a question and answer link in the chat box. Quick, like you know, top 10 takeaways.

Well, this is great. I really appreciate the conversation um Rihanna and Kaylee. I hope it was okay. Good, awesome. Well, thanks everybody.

It was fun. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody. It was fun. Rihanna