Holistic Strategy and Vision — from graphic design to product leadership
Design Leadership conversation with Rodrigo Hurtado
Design Impact spoke with Rodrigo Hurtado, design leader at the Argentinian company San Cristobal Seguros. Before taking on this role, Hurtado was the Product and UX Manager at Grupo Clarin. In this conversation, Hurtado shared his experience about the most difficult challenges in his transition from designer to product manager.
As a designer, it is relatively easy to work with other professional areas like psychology and anthropology, because these disciplines use similar methods and share common areas of interest. Their main objective is focused on understanding people and the environment in which they use the products we design.
Embracing the challenges
Designers contribute to specific areas of the product: they handle the task flows, the information architecture, and the content strategy among other things. However, when designers transition from individual contributors and move on to leading teams, they have to understand that their role and level of responsibility shifts. They are no longer responsible just for the execution of key tasks; they are now accountable for the well being of their team and their contribution to the organization.
A division leader must balance many areas of responsibility and impact. For example:
- Build a cross disciplinary team, identifying the roles and skills that are important to achieve the goals.
- Identify the resources that are needed to accomplish the tasks.
- Ensure that the end user is at the center of the different stages of the product development process.
- Define the goals, objectives and metrics that will determine the success or failure of the projects.
- Adjust budgets on periodic bases according to the organization’s forecast.
The pressure increases when the responsibility also includes the changes associated with the digital transformation for the entire organization, in a business with a stagnant view of business practices. Under these circumstances, the cultural change is more difficult and the resistance antibodies become a bigger hurdle that Hurtado has to skillfully navigate.
In order to achieve the level of impact and the clout of influence needed, Hurtado assembled a different type of team. He built a team with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, training and levels of experience. He made emphasis design and system thinking, product management, development, research and content strategy.
Main obstacles in a change management initiative
The roll change from designer to product manager and division leader is daunting. The change requires taking responsibilities over areas outside of the design realm. For example:
- Developing business plans
- Managing budgets and in some instances responsibility over P&L
- Tracking metrics and developing management dashboards
- Leading product development teams; plus,
- Leading the design team
In a situation like this, designers may feel intimidated and overwhelmed with the amount of new information. The advice that Hurtado gives designers is that they should be willing to be learning continuously. It is important for designers to take advantage of opportunities to learn something new and refine their knowledge in those areas where they already have some experience.
Hurtado also points out that the communication style with other leaders in the organization requires important adjustments too. Executive presentations, in many organizations, are brief and direct. The expectations are centered in the key numbers and metrics. In addition, the product owner is responsible for preparing financial projections at three different levels — pessimistic, realistic and optimistic.
The epiphany was clear at this point — design is not the center of the universe, like many designers would like it to be. Design is simply an important business area in a much larger ecosystem.
Going to the “dark side” — an important change in perspective
Hurtado explains that for designers to have a successful transition to division leadership roles, they must be open-minded and have a global vision. The new leaders and their teams cannot be complacent and always stay up-to-date with industry trends across many areas. Teams can train formally in structured settings, or informally, through their participation in conferences, local meetups and reading books or blogs.
The dark side, says Hurtado, implies the need to make business decisions to create a product that adds value to the consumer, the business and is also technologically feasible. Sometimes this approach requires scarifying certain aspects of the experience for the benefit of the whole. Designers in business leadership role may feel that they are acting against User-Centered Design principles. To a certain extent, it appears to them that the customer is no longer the main focus of the product decisions and becomes one more element in the business ecosystem.
Hurtado explains that the decisions he makes in his team are weighted in three level matrix — business impact, consumer impact and technology impact in the following manner:
- High user impact, low business impact, goes to the back log (Technical Debt)
- High business impact, low impact to the user, goes to implementation
- High viability impact and high business impact, goes to revisions and iterations
Leadership’s dark side — “I felt like a “traitor” to the user. I have to make decisions with my team that will impact the business, at the expense of other areas that should be important too.”
The pressure is high and many division leaders consider design simply as just another element in the list of variables that they need to consider. The mental model of business leaders is quite different than that of the designers.
Designers must learn to measure results
Design education programs fail to provide clarity and to prepare designers to manage business metrics in their professional practice. Many designers do not have the knowledge or understand the tools they need to be effective and demonstrate the business impact of design.
Hurtado explains that the key metrics you choose are dependent directly on the type of project you are involved in. He shares some examples that he thinks designers should understand and manage when necessary:
- Conversion — what is the final result?
- Drops and pain points in the funnel? — the user journey is important for the product team to understand, so they can identify the critical pain points for the consumer experience and how they impact the business.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) — gauges the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. However, Hurtado asks for caution. He only uses it as a temperature gauge, not as the only metric.
- Feature and UI control usage in the application — determine what is being used and what is not.
- User heat maps and aggregated metrics for user sessions
- Flow diagrams and user journeys, including user feedback and validation
- Business metrics
Designers have to work in close collaboration with the product manager to determine with clarity, which are the important metrics they need. They have to ask questions, they have to get a shared understanding and alignment for the benefits of team.
Strategic vision with a holistic perspective
In practice, as a designer and product leader, you have to get out of your comfort zone. You may have to get involved in areas that are unknown, or where you are not an expert.
In this case, Hurtado says “I had to get involved in areas that I had zero interest, like social media campaign management, or content strategy development.” As an example, Hurtado used to consider the role of [Social Media] Community Manager as a made up role. However, he realized very quickly the role that this person plays in shaping and influencing consumer opinion in the market.
“The education foundation and readiness of design leaders is solid, however, there is complacency in many designers. We need leaders who are curious and always proactive”
Higher education in Latin America is very competitive in comparison to the rest of the world. Design graduates get a multidisciplinary, 360-degree education. Hurtado points out that in his case, designers needed to solve problems in all areas of the business: design, development, marketing and sales. He sees this integral approach has now evolved into design thinking, with a comprehensive approach to solve problems from all areas.
Hurtado is concerned because in many cases, newer graduates are not applying the education principles that they have once they get into industry. There is no clear explanation for this behavior; however, it is possible that external factors, including organization culture, curtail the designers approach and contribution.
Making connections, solving complex problems
UX leaders must leverage their ability to make connections that are not clear to others. The designers’ ability to solve complex problems in combination with their education and professional development give them the ability to produce the best consumer experience. In order to be successful in product leadership role, they have to work in close collaboration with product managers, designers, developers and other business leaders.
Este artículo está disponible en español / this article is available in Spanish
About Rodrigo Hurtado
Follow him at — LinkedIn — Twitter: @RSHurtado — Medium: Rodrigo Hurtado
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
We invite you to share your comments, questions, and perspectives.
Follow us on Twitter @DesignImpact_ and on Medium Design Impact
