Interview with Braden Kowitz

In advance of the Leading Design conference in London on the 24th-26th October, I caught up with Braden Kowitz to discuss his background, experience and thoughts on the subject of Design Leadership.

What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?

Ha! Yes, I’m in a lot of meetings. I work at GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet. So my job is to help over 300 of our portfolio companies build better products and stronger design teams. That keeps me very busy.

Some days I’m meeting with five or six companies for about an hour each. In the first meeting we might discuss how to hire a designer. The next meeting might be critiquing a design proposal. The next meeting might be coaching a leadership team on how to approach product development. There’s a huge variety depending on what a particular startup needs.

But if every day was completely filled with meetings, I would go nuts. So I reserve time to work on longer design projects too. For example, the GV design team often works with startups in a week-long design sprint. We’ll gather up a few folks from the startup’s team, a few designers from our team, and work to solve a big problem together. Our process helps teams make fast progress, and it also introduces them to the design process. We found these projects were so effective that we wrote a book called Sprint about how to run these workshops at your own company.

But week-long projects can feel a bit short too. So I recently embedded with a startup, ClassPass, for three months to help grow and manage their design team. Diving back into the day-to-day details of product development was a great challenge for me. I had a terrific time working with ClassPass and learned some great lessons about how to lead design teams.

Do you still get to do any “real” design?

Absolutely. I get restless when it’s been a few weeks without doing “real” hands-on design work.

You might argue that most of my design work isn’t “real”. I spend a lot of time sketching out storyboards and wireframes in meetings. At first it bugged me that I wasn’t polishing pixels, writing code, and working on the little details. But over time I’ve learned to appreciate working at this higher level. It takes some patience, but watching rough sketches grow into new products and features is extremely rewarding.

Still, old habits die hard. I love busting out Sketch and diving into real hands-on design work. When GV needed a new website, I volunteered to help design and build it along with my team. And because I’m such an interaction design geek, when I see a challenging complex problem, I can’t help but try to solve it myself. Doing hands-on work helps me stay current and able to offer good advice about tooling and process. But it also takes tons of time, which is why I do it in moderation.

What are the qualities of a good design leader?

The most important quality of any leader is to be an excellent manager. Leaders are nothing without their team. We must listen to our team, make sure they have enough responsibility to be challenged, and enough autonomy to do a great job. We also need to help our teams feel appreciated and connected to the company’s long term mission. All of the great design leaders I respect have always put their team first.

But beyond doing the normal leadership work of running projects and managing teams, design leaders have a few other special jobs within an organization.

1. Be an advocate for quality.

Designers know that much of the value we create is hard to measure with short-term metrics. Every new feature or line of copy can be A/B tested in an attempt to determine it’s worth. In general, optimization is a good thing. But it can also be short-sighted. Many analytical organizations overlook the value design brings to the product. Design leaders must fight for this balance and get everyone in the company excited to ship a quality product that creates long-term value.

2. Make design everyone’s job.

Design teams have a bad habit of disappearing into a corner to develop their own ideas. Although it’s fun to design in isolation, it’s not an effective way to develop ideas that succeed across an organization. Design leaders need to break down tribes and infuse design activities into every role. We must encourage engineering, product management, and leadership to join in the design process. Everyone should be participating in critiques, watching user research, and sketching new ideas.

3. Find the big challenges.

Leadership teams often believe design can only help with visual, interaction, and marketing challenges. But design can do much more if given the opportunity. As design leaders, it’s our job to dig for the deeper product and operational challenges that face the business. We need to find ways for design to engage with these important challenges and demonstrate to the leadership team that design can help solve them.

What is the design culture like at GV?

GV is a venture capital fund, so it’s different from a typical tech company. We have five design partners on the team, which means that no one is really in charge of design. Instead, we lean on each other for help, and push each other to do meaningful work. It’s a very different structure than I’ve had on any other team, but it works well for us because of the trust we’ve built over the years working together.

The most defining part of our design culture at GV is that the design team has an excellent awareness of each other’s expertise. That means we’re conscious of our own limitations and aware of when we should be getting feedback from others. Surprisingly, this unlocks a ton of efficiency by allowing each of us to be empowered to make decisions without a rigid processes.

For example, if I want to make a change to the GV website, I’m empowered to do it alone if I’m confident the change is within my capabilities. But I’m also very aware that Daniel Burka is better than me at visual design, and that John Zeratsky is better at copywriting. So I check with them both of them before making any substantial changes.

Because we have knowledge of each other skills, we can dynamically involve the right people to make good decisions quickly. That respect of each other’s skills also extends into the rest of the culture at GV. I’m frequently asking for advice from our marketing, communications, engineering, and operations teams. And they’re frequently asking for advice from design.

What are you most proud of achieving as a design leader?

I am most proud of the times I’ve been able to teach teams how to use design themselves. At first, I thought that teaching design would be easy. I thought I could explain how design works, that teams would understand the logic, and then change their approach to building products. But try as I might, this approach never worked out.

What I’ve come to realize over the past 6 years helping startups is that design is something you learn by doing. So now I jump in with teams and design together as a way to show them them how design works in practice. It doesn’t always create change. But when it does, it’s magical! I smile every time I hear back from one of our startups about a prototype they’ve built, a lesson they’ve learned from customers, or a decision they’ve made through design methods.

Any advice for a new design leader?

The biggest misconception I had was that design leaders need be the best designer on the team. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

If you’re a new design leader, chances are that you’re already a great designer. Congratulations! But now here’s the bad news: your job is no longer design. High-functioning teams can create much better solutions than any individual. Your new job is to build talented teams, keep them happy, and make them effective. It’s some of the most challenging and rewarding work I’ve ever done. Good luck on your new job!