Act of Kindness
Based on an episode with Leo Gomez Blum 🇪🇨
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Leo Gomez Blum who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in advertising design. She has also studied design leadership, interactive media, and front-end development, among other things.
Leo is a Latinx in Power because she’s an inspiring and successful immigrant from Ecuador, who started her design career in advertising agencies, then transitioned to product design, and worked at Grubhub, Spotify, and now she is a senior product designer at Disney’s streaming service.
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What does it mean to you to be a Latina?
I would say the word Latina is bigger than myself, and I think about it as a force, a superpower. That is very tangible, I can feel, and you feel Latina, every time you speak, you choose sayings, maybe you have a preference for music or just the way you interact with things on a day-to-day basis. I always want to think about people who really made the way for us so I think about my mom and women before her. I like to think that I use their strength, in the form of perseverance, because we all learn to expect a lot of different things out of life, and sometimes we are so open to the good and the bad. When I think about the word Latina, it definitely speaks to a side that has struggles, but also cherishes life in a very different way, and that’s pretty powerful to me.
Where does your life story begin?
I was born and raised in Quito. I moved to the Bay Area actually to go to school. Since a very young age, I always liked to design and paint. I guess, the more I think about it, my professional story starts with a single act of kindness, and now I am super aware that I actually had to be introspective to answer this question. I realized how lucky I am as an immigrant to the U.S.
My primary goal when I moved with my family was to settle and pay bills to support my family in this new land that we were not expecting to move into. My dad was learning a new language at a very different age than mine. He was 50, and he was just getting started. My mom was able to get a job as a chemist as she was in Ecuador.
When I moved to New York, my expectations were very different. I had done some college work in Ecuador, but I started working in retail because I knew that was really my goal at the time. A coworker found out that I went to school in Ecuador and saw my portfolio. That person literally changed my life because she helped me apply and fulfill my potential. I like to think everyone has potential, but not many have the opportunity, and that’s the reality for a lot of Latinx people as well.
So when I think of dreamers and immigrants, like myself, I know our priorities aren’t usually grand fantasies or unrealistic lives, just living in a different way. That person that took time out of their day to provide guidance that would change the rest of my life is basically how I would define my professional life altogether. It’s really one of the many opportunities that made me the person I am today.
I see this as a progression of doors, but that first door is the one that allows you to have the courage, and then you can continue knocking on those doors or trying to find the key. There are different ways in which you are going to enter those rooms. More often than not, you’re going to have to trust in yourself to make sure that you take that next step, and I always like to go back to that initial way of thinking. Especially in school because that was a moment where I could have gone in many different directions, but I didn’t because of that person. I feel my life is a series of events after that. I definitely look back to that with a lot of respect for that person.
What does a Product Designer do?
Sometimes I still have a hard time explaining what a product designer does. There are a lot of ways of emphasizing the role and thinking through product design at the core. I like to think we’re builders and creators who constantly advocate for users. We have to use insights and data, in some way, there’s also different kinds of product designers or digital product designers.
It’s just about the toolset that we use and the problems that we’re trying to solve with the toolsets that we have as a product designer. I would say it is closer to the digital product lifecycle, which is this idea of defining a problem or shaping it, in some way building something, an artifact.
Then learning from it, delivering it ultimately to the development team, and usually, this process happens multiple times, and you have to go back and forth from what we consider the end to the beginning, I like to think as a product designer, like that person reading, but also using some insights to develop something that is somewhat tangible.
What do you do at Disney? What product are you working on?
I am part of the international team at Disney+, and we focus on launching experience beyond the U.S. Growing up in Ecuador, I remember going to the movies and thinking, this doesn’t feel like the movie speaks like I do, or they don’t speak or act the way I do.
This reminds me of how impressionable I was as somebody who was just going for entertainment and then realizing that the content was not really as relatable as I expected. So when Disney said they were building this team from scratch to help us to have better experiences with their content, I needed to raise my hand.
I grew up watching movies, I know the pains people may feel when the content is not created for them in some way, or services are not built for them, so I just had to join this team. Beyond that, it’s been mainly a focus of launching business everywhere. It means everything from what we discussed on the product design side to building insights and really using empathy to create products that people can use and enjoy.
I’m constantly enhancing the experience to make sure that when we launch it, it’s ready for all those cultural nuances. This is what we do on our team. We just want to make sure that the experience is ready for every user everywhere. We’re still learning every day, and even for somebody who grew up not speaking English as a first language, it is still a challenge. There’s a lot of empathy that has to be built beyond just my understanding, for example.
Another thing that I would do is, I’m learning how to design for CJK which is Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I didn’t grow up learning any of those languages so I’m learning small things on the design side from legibility, line spacing, and contrast. I make sure that whatever we build speaks to that audience and serves the same purpose. It is a huge part of our day to day and a lot of design principles have to be used to confirm that we are assigning the right experiences. To me, you definitely need to have a lot of empathy and be open-minded, learning all the time.
What are you curious about?
Life after COVID to me has opened up a lot of different questions, like my assumption and even a hypothesis that fundamentally life is not going to be the way it was. There will be things that are going to be just fundamentally different. When I think about those challenges as a product designer, I get actually very interested in how services are having to be redesigned with thought-out service.
All of these new audiences and users will need to rethink the way things were done in a very linear way before, and that is something that keeps me up at night. Not only in the context of what I’m doing today, which is maybe closer to entertainment, but just, in general, like how mobility will work, how healthcare would work, and services, that’s definitely one of the areas where I’m just very curious about life and services post-COVID.
When we talk about Latin America, music is a huge part of our daily life and shared experiences. Sharing music and really sharing that experience is super important to us. So when we think about how we continue to be who we are, while also transitioning to this new way of living, that’s really interesting to me as well.
Where can Latinxs make an impact?
For me, it’s about representation, and this is what I love hearing every time I hear a podcast with Latin people. We’re just expanding, people who actually want to represent the voices are not usually represented in the room, or have part of conversations where new technologies are constantly being built.
At the same time, people are building those technologies that will satisfy billions of people. When I think about how we can have an impact, it’s about being present, and hopefully, we can be part of those conversations in some way or another. I’m not saying it will happen overnight.
I think it’s being part of the different areas where technology happens. To me, technology has been the biggest equalizer just in general. We have access to phones and computers, they are more affordable than maybe 20 years ago. Just in general the way that we are able to access information/content, just education in general has been democratized, and it’s super important for Latinxs to be exposed to that level of empowerment.
We should use technology to continue to move forward with some of the conversations that are happening that sometimes we’re just not a part of, so embrace it. I think one of the most empowering things beyond just that, what I like about technology is that it has given us a new way of seeing the world like we now have such a level of closeness to other cultures and languages.
People become bilingual and trilingual faster because the availability is there. You’re able to see it all really fast, and that’s fascinating to me. I really hope that we can continue to be strong enough to know who we are, fundamentally and not forget that. That is really the superpower to continue to build, who we are, whether we live in a small town or in an area in Ecuador, or a big city area, and we have access to Tiktok or Twitter or whatever it is that we use to get that lens to the outer world.
Let’s not cross the line where we are on the other side, stay within that balance, where we want to use our superpowers, which are pretty important. We have a lot of superpowers. If anything, what we do is enhance those superpowers with more information that could get us to a different place to be empathetic, knowledgeable, and prepared to have those insights about how the world works or how people live in different parts of the world.
Tell me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear these phrases:
Your superpower
I like to think tenacity is a big part of that, and I also think that I dusted off very well because not everything is easy for everyone. My thought process had some challenges, but I just had to continue going, roll over, stand up, and open that door again.
Last skill you learned
I took one Future Reality Class, it’s an augmented reality focus, it was from NYU and I took an AR and VR class. I learned how to prototype any frame in Spark VR Studio. I’m looking forward to continuing to use those skills to create my own side project more than anything. I’m very interested in using tools that are easy, not only to use but to be accessed by everyone.
Favorite Disney character or movie.
It did take me awhile to think about this one, my favorite Pixar movie is Monsters, Inc. I love the script, I think it’s super solid. Every time I think about it, I’m like that’s genius, how they were able to connect all the different ends. It always gets me, it’s a good movie.
If I have watched that content originally in a language, I would probably keep it in that language because it reminds me of the first time I watched it. There are older movies that I watched in Spanish. The Pixar movies to me they’re too recent, I almost remember Mike Wazowski speaking. It would be difficult to change his name to Miguel if I watch it in Spanish. I actually should probably watch it in Spanish, just to confirm that I’m not missing out on something.
I always compare the experience of watching movies to listening to an album, watching a band that you like. Then going to Disneyland is like going to a concert, so when you experience those two different things, it feels different. If you go to a concert you might walk out of that place as a super fan or somebody that just connected with that person, and you’re like, oh my God I can’t believe how good they are live, or you might have a terrible experience, who knows?
What I love about that is there’s a level of natural melancholic feeling that comes with that, and you’re always going to remember that special time. You might just be inclined to remember that feeling by replaying that through a movie or using your headphones to listen to that song again.
You’re ultimately always relating that to that feeling that you had in person. That’s usually what I think about when we think about the streaming service. I definitely want to make sure everyone knows the streaming service owes everything to the people at the parks. They created that foundation, those feelings, those memories.
What we’re doing is creating a space for everyone to continue to enjoy and go back to relive that memory, but the Disney Parks really continue to build that very level of familiarity that will connect people to Disney and the characters and movies that they know and love. That’s another reason why pulling it is really interesting, now that part of the connection has been removed. It doesn’t mean that it will completely go away, but it makes me wonder how those two things are ever going to come back since we’re still living in a pandemic situation.
A good product
I actually had to look this one up because I don’t get to use a lot of different products, but Varjo, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s a new mixed reality headset. I’m very interested in what they do, and again because I’m very interested in AR and spatial design. They are based in Virginia in the U.S., and then they’re in Europe too. I think they have a really interesting proposition for a mixed reality headset.
Klarna as well, which is an app that allows you to pay in installments, and an interesting way of thinking through the future of shopping, especially for post-COVID. So I’m interested to see that transition from shopping today, or what it was a couple of months ago and going to the stores and doing retail in person rather than doing it online, which I think we’ve already transitioned into, but the payment part is interesting as well.
Now, I actually like Snap a lot, I think it is a very innovative company. I like the digital application, but I also like the hardware that they’re constantly thinking through. Those are some of the products that I can think of.
You were a mentor at Designlab. I imagine there are a lot of people looking for a job and a mentor right now. What advice would you give to someone in this situation?
I think mentorship is an interesting exercise in general for new people who are just starting their careers and people who are farther along. I would say to get the most out of any mentorship session, you should definitely consider taking the time to learn more about yourself, and you can do that without any experience. You just need a clear understanding of your own areas for improvement and to be honest enough to identify them as weaknesses or strengths.
Then see if you can find someone who is able to speak to those areas where you want improvement, and at that point, you can laser focus on direct feedback. If they’re very good at something that you’re not so good at, then that’s what makes it an easier conversation to have.
I will say the design community, in general, is very, very generous, and I’m going to give a shout out to Koji Pereira for being my mentor. I really believe people genuinely like to help each other. I have seen that firsthand during really good times and then that’s a great time.
It’s fine to approach someone you admire and ask for feedback or some level of help, but I would definitely try to tackle specific questions that you admire about them, maybe you’ve already seen them at some conference, or you have an understanding of who they are. When you approach someone maybe you can ask about the way they build great teams, hire people and make decisions, or empower designers.
There are ways in which you can focus your question so you can get the most out of them, and if you already have an understanding of who they are, it’s a lot easier to get the right people. There’s a win-win situation, you can learn a lot more about human nature. Hopefully, you can get that level of feedback that will allow you to grow and become better in the areas that you want to improve.
I think people are generally looking to have that level of opportunity, sometimes they just don’t know how to do it. The more focused you are on what you’re looking to get out of a mentorship, the better. You don’t go up to someone and necessarily say, I want you to be my mentor. I think part of this is just allowing for some level of fluidity to happen. Sometimes you learn it from somebody at work, and then you see their strengths, and you can set up one-on-one and say, I really enjoyed how you did this, can I have the time to chat with you about this?
Or similarly, if you see somebody on LinkedIn maybe that you admire how they do different things, whether it is their points of view, what they stand for their vision. It’s really important for you to understand who you are first in order to confirm that you’re able to get the best out of the questions that you have for those people. You don’t want to miss that opportunity. It’s fine to reach out, just make sure that you’re super-focused as well.
It’s intimidating to hear that somebody wants something from you when you don’t know if you’re going to be able to meet their expectations. I think a lot of people feel undecided or maybe they just don’t know if they’re going to be able to deliver what is expected.
I think there’s an opportunity for everyone to normalize asking for help, while also understanding that sometimes delivering help is also about providing the best outcome that you can. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have all the right answers all the time but you can learn to get there. I think that’s an important part of any conversation.
What are the actions and mindset a designer should have to be a great leader?
This is based on observation and obviously my own interpretation of who I want to be, but based on the people that I admire there’s an equal balance of hard skills, things that you just know how to do as a designer, maybe people skills and presentation skills, and a really good understanding of what makes people happy day to day and how to empower people.
So that’s why I feel it’s also an important trait of a great leader, emotional intelligence to me is a mindset that needs to be worked on every single day. Then there is intelligence, what you learn and how you’re able to understand feelings requires a really strong leader with a really important personal mission because the idea of a neutral position through a lot of the conversations that we have is important, depending on what the person that is providing this insight is looking to get out of the conversation.
Sometimes emotional intelligence will mean taking some level of stand on something and then requiring somebody that has an opportunity to provide that level of feedback. A stand might just mean, today I want you to solve your own problems your own way. I need you to look deeper into some of these areas. I think it’s really important to have emotional intelligence and also act on it, so you can empower other people.
What’s the importance of personal projects in your life? I saw that in addition to your full-time job, you also work as a Lead Designer with startups, agencies, and other design folks.
I personally feel that side projects really allowed me to have not only a perspective that I’m not able to have in my day-to-day job but keep me challenged as a designer. My day job is perfectly great from 9 am-5 pm. They gave me that level of challenge, but to me, it’s about never really getting too familiar with what I’m doing. This is just a personal preference, not everyone has to do this.
If I get too focused on these problems that I’m trying to solve, the less I am able to see the problems from different perspectives. So for me, projects I love constantly need that outside view for different services and products that I want to think through and rethinking what is challenging what I believe is a possible solution.
Personal projects also allow me to think beyond the challenges of my main job, which sometimes is very dependent on balancing a lot of different goals. When you have your personal projects, they might be smaller, the team is smaller, and maybe the way in which the problems and goals are defined is still very new. There’s that huge opportunity to come in earlier in the process and use a completely different set of skills that you might not be able to use every day.
It’s a good opportunity to constantly challenge yourself as a designer, think through different lenses, and provide different insights, and maybe in some ways not get too comfortable so you can build that level of empathy, which I find really important. Actually just focusing on projects that you wouldn’t be able to find in your daily work is very useful.
I am very passionate about food waste for example or things that are actually more about removing foodways for that level of waste in general. There are companies that are doing that, but maybe not bigger companies. If you can help a mission that is happening on a smaller scale, you can still do that without having to compromise your day job.
There are a lot of great movements that are just groups of people coming together and doing really interesting things. I think that’s an important part of just who we are. As a designer, I really like to think that I’m very mission-driven, that keeps me going both as a person and as a designer as well.
What’s your favorite thing about the professional experiences you already had? For instance, working as a Product Designer for Disney and Spotify, mentoring designers, and working as an Art Director.
I really like the constant sense of discovery that I’ve had in every job, in every role I had with each professional experience, and this actually brings me back to the first question about doors and just pushing through it. There were a lot of times when I questioned myself whether I wanted to make different decisions, but I did end up relocating for multiple roles, actually for the past three roles.
I’m really happy to be settling very soon, but my experience extended beyond that understanding and commitment to a company. It was learning about dislocations, people, neighborhoods, and cities that I had not experienced before.
It’s interesting to think about the words immigrant and ex-pats. It is interesting how some cases we choose one or the other. Being an immigrant and an ex-pat, depending on the city or the country, I was able to be both, but I’m super glad that I was able to experience something new and bring my family along. That is something that I will always remember and cherish.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders every first Tuesday of the month. Check out our Latinx In Power website to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, but always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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