Elevating Designers to Strategic Thinkers
Based on an episode with Koji Pereira 🇧🇷🇯🇵
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 Koji Pereira (he, him), an experienced Chief Design Officer who has led teams at companies such as Neon, Twitter, and Google. He has a strong user-centric approach, strives to build diverse and inclusive teams, and has launched products that have scaled to billions of users while elevating designers to strategic thinkers
In this episode, Koji will share his insights on various design leadership topics such as his approach to scaling up UX teams while launching consumer-facing products, building diverse and inclusive teams, measuring the success of a design project, and mentoring and coaching designers on his team.
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What does it mean to be a Latino for you?
Living in the US, it became very clear to me that I am part of Latin America. That’s where I was born, and identify myself as part of the community where many people grew up in a part of America that was exploited and not necessarily had the same access that people had in North America or Anglo-Saxon America.
To me, being a Latino means that I care about things, or I lived in the context that many other people that I know that I worked with may not have the same experience. So, to me, for instance, it means that I have to move out of my country, I have to apply for a visa, I have to go through interviews where people may judge me by the specific way I talk or my accent. So, to me, it means these things, but also means that I identify myself with. The people in Latin America who I grew up with, who I believe have a good heart, and they’re definitely welcoming, and we have our own ways to do things, and to live and to share experiences.
What initially drew you to the field of design and what do you find most fulfilling about your work?
I started with design at a young age. I always liked to draw and to paint as a kid. Then as I grew up, I was, “Okay, this seems to be something that can be directed to a specific place in my career that it doesn’t need to be necessary art,” which was actually my undergrad. Then I discovered design, which to me made a lot of sense, because I always had this side of myself where I was a little bit more on the mathematics, the exact things, the logical thinking.
Then another side of myself which was very artistic, very exploratory. Design to me is the mix of these two things. So, initially, my experience was with graphic design back in 1995, and I started by doing posters and album covers for bands. Then at that time, a few years after 1997, the internet was becoming a thing in Brazil. I started to build websites for bands. That’s when I actually transitioned to what we call back then, web design or interactive design, which today evolved to be more like product design or UX design.
How do you approach scaling up the UX team while launching consumer facing products?
Scaling up design to start with, it’s all about processes and creating a design system which can help a company to reduce the stress of rebuilding components and rebuilding ways to design all the time. So, having a design system is the first thing you have to think about.
Design system is basically a way to transform design for a product into something that can be reproduced and scale up as a product internally. So, imagine that you have a button. That button doesn’t need to be recreated all the time. So, you create a mini feature or a product for that button where you have rules. Let’s say that button is applied under a dark theme or a dark background, then that button is one color, it’s a brighter color. If that button is in a brighter background, then that button will be a darker blue color. Then you have three different sizes of buttons, like a small button, a secondary button, a primary button. All the schemes or patterns that you apply to a specific component, that starts to build up what a design system is.
More importantly, the design system is a connection between design and implementation, because for each of those components, you have a component on Figma, where designers can drag and drop a specific item. But also on the engineering side, you have a snippet of code, where front end engineers can reuse that specific component, and that’s part of the design system is both the digital visual side of it on Figma and then also the code component for that specific item.
Do you think there’s a way to scale design without a design system?
No, I don’t think so. I think either you have to have your own design system or you have to adopt one. For instance, there are a lot of open-source design systems like Material Design from Google. If you don’t do that, then every time you build a screen, you’re rebuilding the same elements on the screen. So, it’s not scalable. It’s definitely not something you want to do. I would say, you have to have a design system.
How do you approach scaling up UX teams while launching consumer phrasing products?
Scaling up the team, it’s very important that first you identify how big the team will be in, let’s say, one or two years. You’re talking about a team of 20 people, 300 people, 15 people. And of course, to understand that, you need to also make sense of the size of the company in one or two years.
What kind of challenges do you have? There’s not really a recipe for that, but you have to look at many, many things to understand how big the design team needs to be. Then you have to understand, “Okay, from the things I want to do, what kind of profiles do I need here?”
Sometimes, you will need someone who will be more like a visionary designer who thinks about the vision for your product within five years. Sometimes, you just need someone who will create an operation to deliver fast results. Those are very different types of designers.
You also have different types of skills, people who are more prototypers, people who are more visual designers. All of that will create different spectrums of designers, and that plus the amount of designers will give you a sense of how your team will look like.
Then I think the last thing that to me is very important is to think about the structure. How do you want to shape your design arch? That could be a centralized design arch, which right now it’s quite, I would say, trendy. Most of the medium size, large size companies have centralized design teams, meaning that design research, content design, all report to one CDO, Chief Design Officer, or VP of design.
You also have cases where companies are too big and you have to have decentralized design work. For instance, at Google or some companies like Square, it’s also decentralized. Meaning that you have a general manager and everybody that works in that specific organization or business unit will report to a specific general manager. In that case, designers report also to a general manager for each specific business unit.
Can you tell us more about how you build diverse and inclusive teams and what steps you take to ensure all voices are heard?
I think it’s always a learning experience and you’re improving over time and learning how to do that. I don’t think there is a silver bullet solution for it. But the first thing to me and I am of the school is that you first hire the leaders who will help you to build a team, instead of trying to build the team yourself, because it’s very hard, especially when you’re growing very fast.
I would say spend a lot of time, dedicate a lot of time finding very diverse leaders who have very distinct backgrounds in all senses and then they will help you to make the team diverse and make everybody heard.
If you speak the truth, and you speak about that, and you talk about this topic with your leadership team. In my case, I have three people in the leadership team. They will reproduce it, they will do the best work possible, and they will hire people in the same vein, in the same type of approach that you did originally. So, that’s one thing.
Another thing is in the US, you cannot do that. But in Brazil, you can have affirmative job openings and say, “Okay, this is an affirmative role for African-Americans or for a woman.” That makes it very, not very easy, but easier to hire diverse talent.
In the US, what I would say is, whenever you’re growing the team, make sure that everybody in the team can make a referral for that specific role. In that way, you’re going to get a more diverse pool of people instead of just having you or a couple of people making referrals.
Other than that, I think once you hire people, hiring honestly is not even the hardest part. I think the hardest part is once they are hired, how you make everybody feel like they belong. For that, what I would say is make sure that people can bring difficult points of view that are uncomfortable and maybe not very popular.
If you make people feel like they can bring any topic to the table, then it makes it easier and more comfortable to be responsible and be accountable for how things are and how things could be better. If you have that transparency, if you have that dialogue, I’m pretty sure your team won’t be perfect at any point. At least, you’re committed to listen, learn and improve.
How do you measure the success of a design project and what metrics do you use to evaluate its impact on the organization?
My answer is that I’ve tried many ways to do that with internal metrics. All of them are either insufficient or not successful — sorry, for me, not complete. So, to me, the actual best way to measure success of a design team is by looking at the product, is by looking at the results of changes that the design team led. It’s hard because, of course, there’s many, many teams involved in the process in most of the products that we launch.
I think there are ways to say, “Hey, this specific project is very important for design,” and design is either driving it or they have a very strong say on how the final product will look like. This could be a launch of a new version of the design system, the implementation of a design system, the redesign of main screens or main flows, or the relaunch, or the launch of a new product, or a new feature that was mostly done because of the user experience depth, or because the user experience was very important to that launch.
I will give an example. Let’s try to get an example of Facebook. If I were to measure the impact of the design team on Facebook, I would probably look at, for instance, the profile page, or how many people are organizing their profile page, or putting down information about themselves in the profile page. Meaning that they’re engaged and they’re interacting with the customization of the profile page.
In that case, if the engagement goes higher, it means that, yes, the design team is successful and they build upon a hypothesis, they did research, and they designed and implemented a new version of the profile edition, which added more than increased engagement. So, again, to me, the best way to measure design success is by looking at the product metrics and trying to, as much as you can, isolate the parts that the design team had a stronger say or a stronger influence.
How do you approach mentoring and coaching designers on your team and what strategies have you found to be effective in helping them grow in their careers?
I think it’s first to be honest on what you know and what you don’t know. So, there are some things that you know as a leader, and there are certain things that you don’t know, and it’s okay to say, “Hey, I don’t know about this, but I will look up and I’ll try to find the solution or find that specific information.” So, being honest is maybe the first step.
The second step for me is taking 100% of the accountability of the things that are related to your team, even when you’re not sure if you’re the person to be accountable. I’ll explain that why, because you want to set example that you’re not afraid of taking accountability, you’re not afraid of being responsible for your acts and even for acts that are coming from the team, but you know you’re the leader and you’re accountable for that, so you want to set the example.
The third thing to me is, again, creating the space for people to challenge you, bring difficult points, bring points of disagreement, and making the space to listen to people, even if you don’t have an answer, even if you don’t agree, even if you just listen.
So, to me, those are the three most important things. Listening, being responsible for your acts and the acts around you, and just making sure that people have the space to ask you questions, even when you don’t have all the answers, even when you don’t have all the full big picture of everything. So, being fully honest about it.
Is there any resource that you would like to mention that helped you in your journey?
For design, I really like The Design of Everyday Things, which was the first book that I read about design. Very easy book to read. It gives you very interesting ideas of how design can impact our lives, good design and bad design.
In terms of leadership, I think probably the book that I liked the most was Emotional Intelligence, because it gives you a very scientific basis on how emotional intelligence can actually make a big difference in your work relations, in your personal relationships too.
Just doing a lot of exercise, and therapy, and I think meditation, all of those things, I think it helps a lot too, and they are definitely very important. If you are under a lot of pressure, if you are under a lot of difficult work to do every day, use those resources in order to make sure that you’re safe and you feel like you’re your best self and you can act on things with clarity.
I would say, don’t feel afraid of taking the hard decisions in your life. I think we are in a moment where there is a lot of uncertainty and people feel afraid of moving in the wrong direction. It’s very important to make sure that you won’t regret the things you’re doing. Make sure that you’re very intentional and you do the things that you believe are right, even when things are difficult or uncertain like it is today. So, that’s it.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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