Design Voices: Interview with Benjamin Farrow, Director of Design
Welcome to this edition of Design Voices, where we invite industry leaders and experts at Carta to share their insights and experiences on the world of design.
Our second guest is Benjamin Farrow, Design Director of the Ink design system team at Carta. Benjamin has led teams at tech powerhouses including Microsoft and Amazon, and brings experience in everything from semiconductor manufacturing to ecommerce. Benjamin joined us to share about his career journey, what keeps him inspired, the psychology of design and the importance of balance to avoid burnout.
How would you introduce yourself? What’s the Benjamin Farrow summary?
I’m from the southwest. Albuquerque was really home for me. It’s where I went to high school and had a lot of really close friends there. It was a very diverse experience and I think it really shaped me. I’ve been married for 21 years — I got married pretty young, have four kids who keep me pretty busy, and a dog.
My journey, especially on the career side, as I reflect back on it, really started in elementary school. I had the best art teacher in the world and absolutely loved her. She made us write in a journal every day — thoughtful messages, self-affirming ones or inspiring ones. Taught us a lot about art appreciation and we did all kinds of cool projects. It was phenomenal and it really influenced me even though I don’t consider myself much of an artist — I think there was just enough of an appreciation there. Later, in high school, I was in yearbook, so I learned a lot about layout, spacing and typography and all of that. I enjoyed it, but didn’t think much of it. I got my undergraduate in psychology because I thought I was going to be a therapist, but decided to not go that route because in order to pay for school, I got a job with a company next to campus and quickly became a software engineer. I worked full time while going to school full time, and that’s what paid for school. And I was just lucky I had some amazing mentors. I had this amazing opportunity of a company. And so that’s where my career started is even before I graduated with a degree, I became a software engineer, self-taught.
It was Visual Basic with ASP and .NET, and a lot of HTML and CSS, so I was a software engineer for a while. But then I wanted to use my psychology background, because I felt that it was missing in my life; and that’s what made me switch over to design. I started doing design and research at SAGE Software, a CRM for real estate agents and other sales types of roles. That influenced a lot of my passion for personal productivity; but then I wanted to get more into management. So I went and got my MBA while working full-time, with a part-time MBA program. My second daughter was born right before I started getting my MBA, so I had two little kids at home. It was pretty intense. I was nonstop busy, even doing a lot of volunteer work at the time, so my days were full. When I graduated I had an opportunity to move to Germany, and moved over there and loved it. But after four years we wanted to be closer to family, so we moved back and that’s when I joined Amazon, where I learned a lot about working at scale, working with data. After six years there, I told a buddy of mine at Microsoft about my passion for personal productivity, and he said there was a VP that had this big vision that aligned with what I wanted to do.
So I signed up thinking I was gonna be able to work on building this solution that I’d been looking for; but then I show up and the research was flimsy, strategy kept changing. I had three managers in six months and it was just not a good fit. It wasn’t a design role, it was on the marketing side. It was supposed to be a product management role, but no engineering. So I felt pretty bamboozled by it all. And so I did a year there and then the pandemic hit and then that’s when I found Carta and was excited to come here to work on the design system, really looking to connect engineering and design together. That would be my long winded intro.
I’m really impressed with the number of pivots that you’ve made, inspired by the arts as a kid and then you get into psychology, being drawn to therapy and then a really stark pivot into STEM and engineering. This was just post dot-com bust, and software engineering was really big, but the design and software field as we know it was quite a different landscape. It’s changed enormously in a very short time. But was there anything that kind of drew you to tech in particular? Was it just a convenient job while you were studying?
It was more of a convenience thing. With yearbook I was using a computer a lot, in the earlier years for some of that kind of software, in the early to mid nineties; but really tech was just a way to get into college. I just went to a job board on campus and they were like, we need somebody to do some basic programming, no experience required, and I said “sounds great!” I was a great engineer; I got promoted pretty quickly, and in that five year time I was a full stack engineer. I built their whole backend load balancing system, all of their translation tools, I was the go-to for their complex calculator that was written in C, and I just geeked out. I think that’s what drew me into tech — I like to learn, and there are endless opportunities to learn in tech. You talk about pivots and I think that’s another factor, I can’t focus on just one thing. I have too many different interests that I have to pursue, and I don’t do well when I get cornered and told to do one thing, I have to do a lot of things. I’m finding that’s just kind of the way that I am wired.
Speaking of which, to jump away from work momentarily, you mentioned you have a lot of different interests. Do you find yourself picking up hobbies? What do you do when you’re not working?
I’m athletic, so I get into sports; I play pickup soccer, pick up basketball a lot. I’m really into cycling. I’ve been biking into work and so it’s about 10 miles each way, so it’s a good amount. My wife has gotten into running, so we run together a lot. I’m also just a big nerd — I love my Rubik’s cubes or any other challenging puzzles. I’m a spreadsheet nerd. I do all kinds of stupid things in spreadsheets. I’ve created complex games like Mastermind, a 2-player game where you have to solve a secret code — my brother came to Germany to visit me on Christmas and we just created the whole game in Excel where you could play it by yourself. That’s what we did for a couple of days while we hung out. So yeah, I get into nerdy things like that. And then I love to just tinker with things. I got into ham radio a little while back, I do woodworking, I’m in the middle of building a firewood shed.
I also do a bunch of renovations in the house, electrical work, plumbing work, woodwork, the framing and all of that. I do like to draw and to do artistic things. And then just being outside, hiking, backpacking, disappearing into the wilderness. I also have a lot of bears that come by my house, so I chase off bears; that’s been another hobby of mine.
Did you find working styles to be markedly different in Europe as opposed to the US? Are there like different approaches that we could learn from here, either with work life balance, or approaches within tech and problem solving?
Tech felt much the same. It was interesting, the official language of the company ended up being English because we had offices in Estonia and Northern Ireland. But the Irish had a pretty strong accent that the Germans and others struggled with, so I often had to be the translator of English to English. The work life balance was definitely a difference, and as the evening wound down, everybody was done working and left. One thing I do appreciate here at Carta is that Slack messaging doesn’t really happen after hours and on weekends; I think that feels more akin to what the German work style was. In fact, they have a word for it, they’ll use Schönes Feierabend when they leave for the weekend or the evening. Feiern translates to “celebration”, so when you left you would say, you know, have a beautiful celebratory evening; and so even the language reflects this culture that, hey, it’s time to step away from work and to go be who we are. I really love that notion.
I like that too, that balance is an important factor. You mentioned earlier that you learned a lot about working at scale coming into Amazon and later at Microsoft, which are both huge companies. Carta is growing quickly, from being a tiny startup to now employing around 2000 people. What lessons about scaling can we apply here?
Scaling is hard. Microsoft was very large and not very nimble. Amazon was structured to afford a lot of autonomy in individual groups. There was a lot of ownership in the ability to make things happen, so even though it was a big company, it certainly didn’t feel as big as it was. At Carta, we’re going through the awkward stages of shifting from a startup to being more of an enterprise, and we want to avoid bureaucracy. So we’re in a position to work through a lot of these challenges. How do you find the balance between the benefits that it does provide? Communication and collaboration become much more important as things get bigger, how do we still find ownership and find opportunities to really drive things forward?
Especially with scaling and management, it’s probably an opportunity for you to lean on your knowledge of psychology. Would you say that’s helped you with management and dealing with people and the politics that come with that?
For sure, it helps. I feel like I still have lots to learn there to have the influence and impact that I always want. But certainly, understanding people and being aware of their different needs and motivations is always important.
How do you apply psychology when you come to UX problems? You mentioned like engineering didn’t have enough of that aspect in it, and wanting to get back to your roots and methodology there. How would you say that influences your design process?
A lot of research methodology has influenced my work on usability research and different methods. Even though my classes were more on the academic side, I think that psych background really helped with the research process. When we’re at a business, the scrutiny is not the same as an academic research study. There, your confidence intervals have to be much higher. Your sample size has to be significantly larger, it has to be representative. In business you have to make bets and get it close enough. There are definitely best practices to follow to not taint the research, but there’s even been studies that show you don’t have to be as robust as what academic research might be.
Statistics is another subject that’s been helpful. And then just some of the other aspects, the perception and sensation, memory and cognition; and I’m pretty passionate about it. There is what I call “a science behind the art of design” — a lot of psychology principles show up in the design work that we do, and it draws on psychology for color theory, for typography, gestalt and all of that.
You have a really great career path that has encompassed a lot of facets of what we do in tech — you’ve worked in engineering, you’ve worked in design, UX and then things that are design-adjacent, psychology and management and all these things. You’ve seen the field change massively, just in the past decade or two. Do you have any lessons that you’ve taken from how it’s evolved so rapidly, or thoughts on how you see the field moving in the near future?
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen design getting more attention, but I think it varies from company to company and industry to industry. There’s still a struggle to quantify the business value. There’s a McKinsey study from a couple years back that showed companies that focus on good design outperform their peers by a considerable margin; so I think the evidence is growing, and more companies are realizing the value of a design process and thinking about their customer experience, but we still haven’t arrived by any means. There’s still a lot of work to be done on our part. And I think it’s hard because it can be quite subjective — we have working groups here at the company trying to work through some of these challenges here at Carta, where we have a good sized design team.
One of the challenges I see in the design field is that we sometimes struggle with trends, and understanding them — designers often follow them quickly, without understanding how it became a trend, or why it’s a trend. It’s just, “oh they did it, that looks great for them, so I’m gonna adopt it.” There’s a tendency that designers have to not really get deeper into some of the concepts, and it can stay very surface level; and a lot of design education I’ve seen focuses a lot on the surface level rather than core principles. Perhaps it’s a little of my own bias because of psychology, understanding how the human brain works and how our eyeballs work and how computer interactions work, that there’s a lot of human factors involved — I’ve seen the industry slowly move away from that and it becomes a bit more like a series of repetitive actions. Following a formula, even though the formula doesn’t always get you the best results.
Speaking of human factors, you have a passion for personal productivity. I feel like that’s a big question recently, with everybody working remotely, surrounded by work 24/7 — people feel burnt out a lot and struggle to be productive even when working more hours. It’s an important topic right now and I’d be curious to hear what you have to say about personal productivity and how to harness that without getting burnt out.
Oh man, this would require a full afternoon. It’s hard and I still haven’t mastered it. Meditation ends up being really important. It’s important to be intentional about planning my days and my weeks. I have this philosophy that there are three key things in life that we need to budget, and we need better tools on budgeting our time.
Firstly, we have to be mindful of where we’re spending our time. Am I finding enough time to take care of myself? I’m a big Stephen Covey fan, that you have to take care of the producer, and not just focus on how the production is happening; because if the machine breaks down, then the line stops and you’re not producing anymore. So if you don’t take care of yourself, that’s a big problem. So you have to budget time. Secondly, it’s important to budget people — who you spend time with and who you don’t — so that you focus on those that help build you up and to make you better, and not those that might be negative factors or not impactful in your life. And lastly, money. Those are the three things that you have to budget on.
My other big philosophy is that we have different roles that we play in our lives, and I’ve broken those down into what I call my six Fs. Fitness, where you take care of yourself. Family is super important to me. Financial, your career, managing all of that. Faith, or spirituality, seeing something bigger than yourself. Friends, making sure that you’re having social interactions; and last but not least, Fun — it’s important to have fun, and we can’t forget that we can’t be serious all the time. I try to balance my weeks to make sure that each of those categories are being included in some way. How am I making sure that I’m choosing what I’m doing, and is this the right time to focus on it or do I need to take a break from it? I could go on and on.
How do you find balance amid all the Fs?
That’s a challenge. It’s like building a wall — you have to ask yourself, what are my big rocks? It’s easy to just wear myself thin trying to do everything, so my constant challenge is identifying the big rocks, making sure that I’m getting those in, and then filling in the rest of the gaps with the smaller rocks. A big benefit for me is just stepping away and being by myself, pausing a lot more; and that’s a hard thing when I have a long to-do list. No silver bullet there, but it’s all about finding ways to prioritize.
How did you start identifying patterns or building a framework around the priorities?
I’ve tried to use other tools. I created a spreadsheet system, with reminders of birthdays or other important dates, and it would keep track of how frequently I needed to check in with people in my circles, or important people at work; but it was so manually intensive that I couldn’t maintain it. Early in my life when I was working full-time, going to school full-time, when I had little kids at home, when I was busy volunteering and playing sports, I needed something to balance all of those schedules. Someday I’ll build a tool that will allow me to prioritize my schedule, to be aware of when everybody else important to me is doing something, but have a way to keep all the calendars distinct. Most available tools don’t have a good way to separate your calendars, so that’s a feature that needs to be built in.
Another question along the same lines — you have a family, four kids, pets, you’re all working on different things, there’s a lot going on. How do you balance family and career, with budgeting the time and the various priorities?
It is busy. I’ve got four kids, so my two oldest are in high school and one’s even applying to college; so we’re now figuring out how that’s gonna all work out. And then I have a third and fifth grader. My wife is a cancer oncology nurse and she’s amazing at it, she works 24, 27 hours a week. It’s so awesome just to see her succeed in that and support her. Those are just some of the balances that we have to make. My wife and I try to make sure we have dates and make sure that we’re connecting as adults. We’ve realized we’ll have the kids for maybe less than half of our married life together, and then we’ll have all this time afterwards just the two of us, so we want to avoid being one of those that just struggle coming back together.
I also am getting my kids to start using a calendar to let us know where they’re gonna be and what they’re doing and when we can expect them home. We’re a very open family, we talk about all different kinds of things. We yell inappropriate words and things out loud just to break the ice. We try to make a really open environment for us to screw up, and to learn from each other, and to support each other.
I love that concept of treating your kids as humans, not as babies — kids may be young but they’re not stupid, and it’s doing them a disservice to treat them as such.
I think that’s a great point. We are building the relationships with our kids that we want to have when they’re adults, because they’re only kids for such a brief time. It’s almost like the concept of meditation — we’re present in the moment with them as they are kids, but our long term perspective, especially as we see the ups and downs and the weirdness of the relationships with our parents and the generation that they came from, we want to have that quality relationship with our kids and we don’t want the estrangements that we often are seeing in our own families. We want to have a tighter connection. And so I love seeing them as humans; that’s the approach we’re trying to take.
Thanks Ben for taking the time to sit down with us! There are some great takeaways to apply here around work/life balance, productivity and burnout in particular — organizing and balancing your F’s, making time for creative pursuits outside of work, and budgeting time within the organization.
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Thanks for reading this edition of Design Voices! This article has been conducted and edited by Joseph Alessio. You can also follow us on Instagram and read our other articles here.
