Batteries included — Design DNA embedded
Design Leadership conversation with Celeste Olivieri
Design Impact spoke with Celeste Olivieri, Head of UX Design at MURAL. Her focus is to design a product platform that helps multidisciplinary, distributed teams collaborate and participate in the design thinking process. Design Impact expands the conversation to include design leaders from organizations of different sizes. In this case, Olivieri’s experience with MURAL, an argentinian startup company, brings certain perspectives that make her lessons learned different from those leaders from larger organizations.
Her professional career splits in two big parts. As a designer in a management consulting firm, there was a limited level of impact and value creation from design. Later, as a freelance consultant working with different startups she was selective and chose only key projects to work with. After a few years, Olivieri found the startup organization that offered her the opportunity she was looking for. She saw the chance to take her skills and have a deeper impact, rather than as a consultant creating value for someone else.
By working with startups, the design conversation is more about strategy. She characterizes start-ups as an extreme situation — these organizations make many mistakes and many pivots. However the need for everyone involved to generate real value is more prevalent than in larger organizations. Design also has the opportunity to exert a higher level of influence.
Design DNA is embedded
With the co-founders of MURAL, Olivieri found a great place to invest on building a culture together. The executive team recognized the importance of design from the beginning. They asked Olivieri to help them create a design centered culture. As an organization, MURAL was born with the Design DNA embedded in it. For her, as a designer, being there from the beginning was a great opportunity to explore, make and propose ideas to shape the strategy and vision.
As part of the IDEO Futures Startup Residence program in 2014, Olivieri traveled with MURAL’s CEO, CTO and Head of Product to California. The IDEO program gave the leadership team more clarity around their vision, assimilate more design and research tools and gave design a louder voice.
The founding team was leaning more towards a classical business approach, including reliance on data, analytics, and quantitative methods, The workshops at IDEO, opened the team’s perspective into business design. They assimilated and understood the value of qualitative research methods at a different level. The exposure to the people they were helping with their product opened the eyes of the executive team.
A key pivot took place while the team was in California. For 3 weeks, they concentrated on research interviews and synthesis. The team was fully embedded in this learning journey. They basically “stopped” working (i.e. “coding”) and realized that they had to place as much emphasis, if not more attention, to the problem as they did to the solution.
Design Continuum
Designers have to stop believing that they own all design decisions. Many designers — often more junior than experienced — confuse the need of design to be holistic, with the idea that they will make all the decisions throughout the design process. Instead, designers need to take a step back and consider that everyone in the team has an impact, and somehow, all decisions that influence the resulting experience, are ‘design decisions’.
“In the design continuum, all decisions that impact the product or service, are design decisions regardless of the roles or responsibilities of people who make them.”
In the initial stages, startups like MURAL took an holistic approach. They defined small experiments, with a lean approach to test hypotheses, implement, learn and reflect. Olivieri says “we have to look at what we learn, whether we were successful or not with quantifiable results. Even if the hypo was wrong, we learned and we moved to the next experiment.” They leverage both qualitative and quantitative methods to gather feedback from their team and the people they are designing for.
True engagement — Beyond superficial collaboration
Olivieri suggests caution and avoid overusing the word collaboration. She says “we should make it meaningful and purposeful.” She has been successful at introducing methods like Design Studio, to get all areas of the organization to collaborate effectively. Everyone knows what they need to do, they contribute to the solution in a co-creation environment. The power of different roles getting involved is overcome by the power of the ideas that all contribute.
As a team, they reduce risks with important decisions that have impact not just in their customers, but also in their own teams. They feel empowered to explore, and to do it with different groups in the room.
Moving from defending design to sharing ownership of design
At a design critique at the university, a professor told Olivieri — “you have an advantage, you know how to defend your work.” She did not take this comment as a compliment. It was something that remained in the back of her mind.
In the early part of her career, she saw a big challenge — her work with all different types of people and disciplines was 10% design and 80% was defending the design work, and selling design beyond the cosmetic and superficial aspect. She was involved with never-ending debates. As a designer, she felt misunderstood.
Through time, she came to a big realization — conversations became smoother when she learned, as designer, to communicate, coordinate and collaborate better with others. She describes it as “feeling liberated when designers become better in collaboration and sharing ownership of the design solution.”
As a result, she felt she no longer had to fight to be heard. Everyone was working together gaining a shared understanding of the solution. Everyone in the room understood what direction they were going towards. They knew what their responsibility was and what to expect from each other.
Creating Design value for customers
Olivieri says that by helping organizations of every size, making remote design thinking work, MURAL helps design create value. They are in a journey where they enable teams to map and visualize complex information. Design is facilitating the conversation, putting order where there was chaos.
“Design helps us get out of opinion and futurology. We go from abstract to concrete, we visualize, we prototype and we make the ideas real.”
Design’s influence in organizations comes from “design doing, through collaboration rather than through arbitrary, self-centered decisions. Design helps teams make informed decisions and save time.”
Olivieri sees the influence and value of design touching organizations at different levels. Many teams get tired of talking about culture, however, she believes that shaping the organization and team culture is absolutely critical. The emphasis must be on the team, not on the individual, and to bring everybody on board to maximize the value.
Designers need to be humble
Olivieri shares some advice with designers — “check your design ego at the door.”
Sometimes designers see themselves as the owners of the design truth. However, designers cannot work in isolation, as they need their business partners to succeed. Designers need to learn how to communicate effectively with other people and areas of the organization. They must understand the language of business and technology.
“Designers must speak the language of business and technology. Designers must negotiate effectively; facilitate the conversation.”
Olvieri believes that designers should have a “generalist mind set.” Be intellectually curious, learn and demonstrate interest in business, industry, and technology, not simply hone in our craft and areas of expertise.
Take action and show results
A closing piece of advice from Olivieri — let’s avoid expressions like “getting a seat at the table.” She makes a reference to Scott Berkun’s article “Stop saying Innovation — here is why,” where he writes that truly innovative people rarely said the word innovation. Berkun adds that “people cop-out for clear thinking.” As designers, we need to communicate clearly and find ways to exert influence with actions and results rather than clichés.
About Celeste Olivieri
Follow Olivieri at — LinkedIn — Twitter: Celeste Olivieri— Medium: Celeste Olivieri
Watch Olivieri in her Interaction South America presentation “Collaboration beyond design methods” (in Spanish |en Español)
About MURAL
Get the latest information for MURAL by following them at: MURAL’s Blog, LinkedIn, Twitter @ MURAL, and Medium
IDEO Futures and MURAL — blog article
About Design Impact
At Design Impact we are always open to meet and connect with design leaders. If you would like to share your story, have design people in mind, would like to facilitate an introduction or suggest folks we should reach out to, please let us know @ DesignImpact
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