Changing Lanes in the Game of Design
Lessons from the path to design leadership with Byron Gronseth, Director of Product Design at Royal Caribbean
Byron Gronseth’s UX journey has taken him from the military to Disney to his current role as Director of Product Design at Royal Caribbean. Along the way he has learned the importance of showmanship, the power of a strong design culture to foster a new UX team, and how to communicate seamlessly with stakeholders and engineers.
These days Byron has a lot of teams and initiatives in motion at any given time. Keeping them all on course for excellence requires all the creativity and leadership skills he’s gained in the course of an unconventional career.
An unlikely path from the Air Force to Disney UX
Byron wasn’t sure what he wanted as a student. He loved art, but everything he read said it didn’t typically pay well. So he followed his parents’ advice and studied marketing and business management instead.
While business school wasn’t his first choice, he developed an interest in entrepreneurship. “It was that spirit of building something from scratch and getting people excited about new ideas,” he explains.
Then the September 11th attacks happened. “I had this renewed interest in helping, serving, doing what I could.” So he joined the Air Force as a commissioned officer. He found himself working long, grueling hours as a project manager for government research projects.
His teammates began tapping him for graphic design projects. “They would say, ‘Hey, you’re a creative guy. Can you do t-shirts? Can you do this logo?’”
Byron took all the design tasks he could get. “They gave me a government license to Adobe Photoshop, and I was teaching myself how to use design software for the first time since my Mario Paint days. I got really, really into it.” He began to see how he might build a career doing what he loved.
From the military Byron launched himself straight into an art gallery job. Momentum built fast. He joined one agency, and then moved to another. His titles morphed from webmaster, to interactive designer, to art director. He worked on everything from print to web.
Agency work led him into mobile design, which fascinated him. “Then I got a call from Disney, and I was basically dumped into product design and UX.”
If you want to win over execs, put on a show
Byron and his new partner at Disney, UX Designer Ben Painter, began to make big, showy mobile design pitches. They played off each other so skillfully, they were able to cut through the many organizational layers that isolated designers from executives.
Their pitches wove storytelling and design thinking fluidly into a single presentation, taking executives on a journey from a well-framed challenge to a vision for a solution. “We pulled out all the stops on our decks,” with Disney-inspired music (including the theme from Tron, for one pitch), animated visual explorations, and engaging narratives.
Their approach was a hit. Executives invited them to continue presenting ideas exclusively. “After a while, it was Ben and I pitching to Disney VPs and SVPs on our own, and catching our teams up afterwards. I developed a passion for it, and a deeper understanding of products that would endure and last. Millions of people would use something we made to help plan their vacation.”
Task #1 when starting a UX group: Set a healthy design culture
The step from Disney to Royal Caribbean felt more like a leap, but although the market was slightly different, the problems were familiar. Byron came in as the first designer of the new digital UX organization.
In the early days he felt like a grade-school teacher on the first day of school, trying to establish processes, order, and rigor in a wild west of agencies running on limited direction. He pulled together a few small ‘value’ agencies and one expensive, world-class agency to make a cascade of advances. The more expensive agencies got the job done, but the costs were multiplying.
Once orderly processes were in place, he began to focus on creating a strong in-house UX team. “My charge was to build a team that could tackle everything from booking dining reservations, to questions like, how do we use facial recognition to check people in, instead of making them fill out a form? How do we get a drink brought to a guest from anywhere, sitting beside any pool on the ship? AND how do we do all that on budget and at scale?”
To make things even more challenging, he had to build this new team in Miami, far from the usual digital design hubs in New York City and San Francisco.
Strong design culture creates its own gravity
Byron now works with 32 designers total. There are seven in-house designers and 25 contractors. The need for agency help has been cut back significantly.
Mobile customer experience wins are piling up quickly. But the wins Byron counts most important are less public. They pertain to maturing the Royal Caribbean design organization.
It’s hidden, inward work that happens in a storm of outward design projects. “We have our processes now. We have design reviews. We have all of this infrastructure that didn’t exist before. We’re here in the background creating all this plumbing and ventilation, while people are trying to build buildings on top of it at the same time.”
Byron credits a wealth of local talent for the ability to move quickly on both the inner and outer workings. “There was a sentiment in the market when I arrived, that you couldn’t find good design talent in Miami, and Royal Caribbean has proven those people wrong. We have incredible designers, folks who were really amped up about the challenge — people who bring really solid UX and visual design thinking to our company. It’s impressive.”
He plans to build on that momentum and the company’s unique market position as the design team grows. “I want to see us as a beacon to folks interested in product design, as a place where they can sandbox and play. We’re tackling really interesting challenges that you can’t get anywhere else. And we’ve got great people who, themselves, are magnets. In another six months we could be a new center of gravity.”
Craft a cohesive design language
As Designer Zero, Byron is the person ultimately responsible for crafting a cohesive design language that brings unity to visual design, interaction design, and animation design.
He says he and the Royal Caribbean Digital team have come to rely on InVision Enterprise as an end-to-end platform, where they can build and socialize their product design process.
Designers build in Sketch (and a few in Figma or Framer), using a quickly evolving library of components that will soon form the basis of a fully-fledged Royal Caribbean design system. Then they use the InVision Craft plugin to port designs into Board, where projects gather steam among design team members.
“Since we’ve gotten the enterprise license, it’s opened up a lot of possibilities for us. We have ten or twenty InVision boards where we blow out massive ideas, to get people excited about reference images, illustrations, logo explorations and things like that. It’s a great way to consolidate things that people are working on collaboratively. They can all edit and throw ideas in there.“
Engage leadership with prototypes and diplomacy
Senior leaders from across the organization interact with new, high-fidelity prototypes constantly. “We send Prototype links to executives, senior leadership, product leaders. We typically show things in InVision non-stop.”
The old method involved sharing Sketch files and static screenshots of designs, along with a heavy helping of explanation and context. Now Byron and the team use a mix of Google slides and Prototype. With Slides, they present the goals for new interaction designs. With InVision Prototype, they demonstrate exactly how the new design behaves, and how it transforms the customer experience.
It’s all part of Byron’s ongoing work to build consistent communication and trust with other teams. “My main job in all this is to build good relationships between the digital teams, the key stakeholders, and design. I’m a consensus builder. I need to do the daily work of going to everyone individually, talking to them one-on-one and understanding their needs.”
Working from a place of compromise and keeping an eye on everyone’s goals helps him succeed. “That’s the only way I can serve up a solution that meets their needs, with compromise and consensus and negotiation and sweet talking. You can’t just walk into a room and throw down the gauntlet and say, ‘This is what we’re doing!’ In the game of design, you’ve got to be a diplomat.”
Bake design ethics into the system
Royal Caribbean, as a leading travel and hospitality brand, works hard to accommodate all guests equally. That, in turn, creates a mandate for the digital design team to act as a driving force for inclusion and accessibility in responsive web and mobile app design. “We want to make sure everyone can have the same experience whether they have full vision, or limited vision, whether they have full mobility, or limited mobility. Royal Caribbean already works to accommodate lots of different scenarios that our guests face. Our digital team is figuring out the best way to do that through mobile app design.”
The new design system initiative has provided a framework to think through accessibility on a much broader scale. Byron and the team are working on ways to bake in visual accessibility considerations like color and contrast. They’re enshrining those as new, standardized design system components that will eventually be used across the entire web and app ecosystem.
Build a connected workflow with engineers
On top of the move toward a shared design system, recently the digital design team has started to use InVision Inspect to ensure clear and seamless communication with the engineering team. “We use Inspect to deliver design notes and specifications to engineers. We ended up adding a bunch of engineers to our InVision license, so we could share everything from the hex colors they should be using, to the individual sizing specs, padding margins, everything.”
The improvements to cross-team collaboration and efficiency have made waves across the entire digital production system — with more to come. “We really have used InVision from end to end, and that’s been really powerful for our teams. As we work to get more buttoned up in our processes, InVision definitely helps us get there.”
What comes next? Spread the design team love
Now that the digital design organization has a solid foundation of processes, systems, and talent, Byron and his team have started to pay it forward into the Miami product community.
“We just helped 500 Startups by sending our designers out to mentor product folks and coach them on how to infuse design thinking into their work. We’re hosting Dribbble meetups, recording podcasts… It’s starting to become that beacon I hoped it would be.”
Learn more about how Byron spun up a world class design team in Miami over at InVision’s Inside Design blog.
