Interview with Kim Lenox
In advance of the Leading Design conference in London on the 25th-27th October, I caught up with Kim Lenox, Director of Product Design at LinkedIn, to discuss her background, experience and thoughts on the subject of Design Leadership.
How did you make the jump into leadership?
I started in software R&D at a start-up back in the CD-ROM days (pre-internet). It was an unpaid internship. Within 10 weeks I was the International Product Manager (and getting paid a little). I wore many hats as one does at start-ups (coding, designing, business operations, production management, etc), but my primary role was to make sure the international titles were ready for manufacturing for the holiday seasons. I shipped 13 products in 18 months, eventually having a staff of two interns and my own P&L budget to manage. After a few years working as a Producer, Product Manager and Program Manager, I shifted into an individual contributor (IC) role for another decade or so, which grew into lead designer roles. In 2009, I took another IC role as an interaction designer at Palm when I was pregnant with twins. I wanted to focus on design and being a new working parent. While I was on maternity leave, Palm was acquired by Hewlett Packard. The week I returned from maternity leave the VP of Design and eventually my manager left for Android (as did about four others from Palm’s design leadership team). I was promoted to my manager’s job and spent a year recruiting a VP of Design while leading the Human Interface Design Team at Palm/HP. I was the Software Design Director of the HP TouchPad which was launched while I had infant twins at home. It’s all a blur of sleep deprivation, adrenaline and a lot of learning the hard way. Since then, I’ve focused my career on design leadership opportunities — LUNAR’s Director of UX (pre-McKinsey acquisition) and for the last three years as a Director of Product Design at LinkedIn.
Tell us about your typical day. Is it all meetings?
My typical week is a mix of listening, advising, reviewing, advocating and most important of all — inspiring.
From a product standpoint, I am currently overseeing the research and design of 3 platform products (advertising, billing/payments and account management). This requires a lot of collaboration and conversations to help stitch together cohesive product experiences. I’m fortunate to have two great design managers leading these three teams of talented designers. I also have an awesome design research partner who continuously finds the best areas to focus on and consistently delivers actionable insights. We (research and design managers) work closely to find ways to level up the design quality through strong relationships with our engineering and business partners. We seek out opportunities to operationalise and normalise research and design into often engineering-focused initiatives. The end result is improved product experiences.
Beyond my product areas, I work closely with our VP of Design and my design leadership peers on a variety of initiatives covering a many areas including team culture, hiring, retention, training, product strategy, design quality and operational scaling. Additionally, there are cross-department initiatives and external community events that I’ll support and guide. One new initiative is related to expanding our Women in Tech program into other areas of the business beyond the technical fields.
I also mentor a variety of designers and career-changers in and outside of LinkedIn. Design reviews, coaching for challenging conversations and inspiring them to think beyond doing just what’s asked of them by their product managers. It’s gratifying to be able to guide the next generation of design experts.
And yes, most of this is accomplished through a mix of meeting/communication types including workshops, video conference calls, one on ones, shared docs, Slack, Teams, email and text.
What was the last thing you “designed”?
As a design leader, I design organisations. I recently helped my engineering, product, sales, marketing, and business operations partners merge two separate product teams into one. On the design side, we went from two separate products with one designer each and no researcher to a design team of seven, researcher, design manager and plans to hire more. The engineering and product management teams stayed roughly the same staff size during the research and design growth. We now have the capacity to create product experiences our customers will enjoy using and will accomplish their business goals. Given the team growth we now can incorporate design research into the initiatives that need it and bake in design experimentations into our process. My process to get here was using user-centered design methodologies to redesign the organisation.
What makes a great design leader?
Compassion and empathy for not only the customers, but for the creators and builders of the products.
What do most new leaders get wrong?
Through my unscientific observations over the years, I’ve seen new leaders focus on managing or micro-managing their teams output and not focus on leadership. There is a difference between managing and leading, a lot of new leaders do not know the difference and struggle.
Some people make an assumption that one has to be anointed “leader” before they can lead. This is not true. One doesn’t need a title to actually lead. The best leaders are those who collaborate, take risks and inspire others through their own work. New managers are often given the title, but don’t know how to embrace the role as leader.
How would you describe your own leadership style?
Pulling from my LinkedIn profile(!)… I build healthy, intelligent processes and relationships that result in products with a lasting influence. I connect business needs, the product ecosystem, and all the people who touch it, so we can come together to meet the practical — and emotional — needs of the business, user, and team, with an open process and elegant product.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced managing people?
Helping people recognize their untapped talent and their skill gaps. I’ve found the best approach is to hire for humility and high emotional intelligence (EQ). When someone is self-aware, they can listen to feedback and make changes to improve.
Many people are focused on the destination — the title, the promotion, the recognition — where they want to go. They lose focus on the journey — the process of learning, gaining experience and growing. The most successful people are those who are continuous learners, can recognize their mistakes and quickly adapt their style to meet the needs of the business and their partners.
Are design tasks a good or bad idea?
Take-home design tasks are a good way for design candidates to show their process, expertise and unique perspective. Unlike portfolio examples, which can be challenging to know the candidates involvement, the results of a design task often show a candidate’s creativity and problem solving skills which can help in assessing their potential (and not that of their team members). Giving each candidate the same task also helps with comparing and contrasting each candidate’s solution.
An alternative to a take-home design task is having the candidate do the task in realtime during the interview on a whiteboard and in collaboration with a designer from the company. This saves the candidate time, if they don’t want to do the take-home design task and provides the company a chance to see the candidate think on their feet while collaborating with a potential coworker.
What are your views on distributed teams?
Distributed teams are a fact of life even in the smallest of teams. The best thing to do is embrace this fact and provide the best tools for communication and reducing friction. LinkedIn provides ample bookable and drop-in rooms, large video conferencing (VC) monitors, flexible VC software, and collaboration software as well as a chat apps like Slack and Teams.
What one piece of advice would you give your younger self?
Stop waiting for others to do the right thing, do it yourself.
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Join Kim, the Clearleft team and a host of other fantastic speakers at Leading Design, 25–27 October 2017 — book your tickets at https://2017.leadingdesignconf.com/tickets
