Interview With Chris Leckie, Product Design Director at FanDuel

This post is part of a series of interviews that we are conducting with product leaders across various industries. In this interview series, product leaders share their advice with their fellow product managers. We hope this series will shed light on trends and challenges in the profession, and be helpful to new and experienced product managers alike.

The following is a conversation with Chris Leckie, Product Design Director at FanDuel, a fantasy sports company. Chris has been at FanDuel for two years — or “two NFLs” as FanDuel employees would say — during which time the company has grown rapidly and implemented new processes to accommodate their distributed teams.

We talked to Chris about the maturation of product design as a discipline, and about how FanDuel has transitioned from employing a few siloed designers to embedding designers in their cross-functional teams. We also discussed the skills that make designers successful and some design trends we can expect to see in 2017. Listen to our full conversation and learn what Apple and Uber in have common (hint: they’ve both invested heavily in beautiful user experiences), why Amazon’s Alexa represents the next frontier in design, and much more.

Also in this episode:

• Transitioning from a hands-on design role to a leadership role
• Building trust and unity when your team is distributed across the Atlantic
• Why friction between designers and product managers is a good thing

Listen to the full interview or, if you prefer, read the the transcript below.