Interview with Steve ‘Buzz’ Pearce
In advance of the Leading Design conference in London on the 24th-26th October, I caught up with Steve ‘Buzz’ Pearce to discuss his background, experience and thoughts on the subject of Design Leadership.
Tell us about your first design leadership role? Who did you model yourself on?
I got thrown in the deepend at Deepend back in bubble one and leading design work from the get go, but the management of Design and leading a team didn’t really start until joining Skype in 2007, and wow, I’ve learned loads (mostly from epic fails!) along the way.
Over the years, I think I’ve subconsciously modelled myself on a shepherd, which is more about servant leadership and paradoxically, I lead from the back more often than the front. Inspiring from the front; serving from the back.
What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?
I try not to make it a typical day, but invariably yeah, my diary gets chocka too easily. Primarily most of the conversations are about understanding what various disciplines mean when using the same word, but thinking something very different! I like the fact we’ve given ourselves a simple guide across the company; meetings should only be 22mins or 45mins. This allows folks to get to the next meeting / write up / respond to other things — we’re liking how this is going so far.
My favourite day is Maker Day. Every Wednesday at Skyscanner, everyone in the business has a blank calendar to make and get stuff done. We’re all makers of various things and it’s really valuable to have a dedicated day where we’re not constantly switching contexts, but can get stuff done to a quality where we’re not compromising due to fragmented time. We love the theory of constraints, so we applied it to our calendars across the business.
Do you still get to do any “real” design?
Cheeky provocation there!
I think of real design on 3 dimensions — craft, invention and influence. Your question alludes to the craft as ‘real design’, but i spend more of my time on invention and influence. In other words, gathering folks together and harmonising our collective thoughts on a solution/solutions, or sowing ‘thought seeds’ around the business so that folks can own the solutions by internalising it. Low and behold it’ll crop up a few weeks later as someone’s concept.
I’ve found real design is about giving gifts and being ok with not getting any credit — this can make design very vulnerable to being perceived as not contributing much and being simple, but that’s another subject.
I get what you’re asking though; do i still use the traditional tools and software a designer uses — yes (although often asking others why a certain shortcut has now changed!), and I try to keep my craft up to scratch, it’s also my work therapy.
Many design teams (and engineering) are perceived as just a production facility for making things, which is nice on some level, but doesn’t allow for room to think and challenge presuppositions embedded into user scenarios. Everyone ‘designs’. Few do the 5 ‘whys’ and get to root cause. Real design is about intentionally understanding and solving the user job to be done.
What are the qualities of a good design leader?
If you’re not inspiring folks to dream more, become more, take more action, challenge more, then I don’t think you’re a design leader.
For your design team, it’s all about credibility. Designers will naturally gravitate to those leaders who have come from a place of design practice, just like engineers would. However, the qualities need to be bifurcated for that of a leader, and that of a manager. I don’t believe they are the same. A design leader often doesn’t want to be a people manager, and a good manager is often not a good design leader. All too often companies try to force both on a single person with unsatisfactory results.
For the company, a design leader must know and understand the business and design industry. What drives what, metrics, people, governance but isn’t necessarily involved in those groups day to day. A design manager however would be running those things on a daily basis. It just depends on what shaped diary we want. I think many design leaders think that you can only give direction via direct line management and fall into the trap of climbing up the company ladder, only to find they’ve lost their first love, which is designing, not management.
As a leader you shoulder the burden of being accountable. That’s not about being right, it’s about soaking up the negativity when things go wrong and not passing it on to others. Mental fortitude is forged in the toughest of circumstances, and we need good healthy dollops of it everyday.
What is the design culture like in your current company?
We design for traveller happiness. We design like we’re right: We test and listen like we’re wrong.
Someone once said, “Process is codified culture”. Design is everywhere at Skyscanner, we’re all doing it, all the time. Every team does it. We’re at an inflection point to curtail design being all over the place. We have a wonderful support culture that enables design to deliver on our 4 C’s. Context, Continuity, Coherence and consistency.
I think we’ve embraced what John Meada calls ‘Computational Design’ which is an evolution of traditional design thinking. We think it, design it, build it, test it, tweak it, break it, rethink it, design it… etc. We’re fortunate enough to have reached such a scale now globally that we can test so much. However, it’s amazing to see how quickly incrementalism sets in. I like to think our design culture has more of an exponential mindset and I’m really excited about our future.
What challenges are you facing at the moment and what are you doing to overcome them?
To use NASA’s old adage, Good, fast, cheap — choose 2. I don’t want to choose 2, I want all 3. Clear definitions of each is an area of critical focus. I don’t believe this is exclusive to us, but every company. Design is often the bastions of the area we call ‘good’. Folks typically don’t like being slowed down because of the dimension of quality. “it’s good enough” is something we hear way too often for the sake of ‘learning’ cheaply and quickly.
The main area of focus for the design team at present is all about quality and trust. Just going a fraction slower to spend just a little more care before releasing (even just to 1%) will pay back dividends in so many ways, not least the designers emotional wellbeing!
Time to achieve quality of design craft is a challenge. Holistically, interactively and visually
General keeping up and sharing is a challenge. We’ve been using wake.com, invisionapp.com and others, and that’s been great in getting all the designers posting and seeing what’s going on. We do things very rapidly that it’s hard to keep up. It’s helped with quick feedback loops, but it’s a safe zone. Designers only. It’s really critical that we feel comfortable sharing things in very early stages, it’s the most fragile and chaotic part of designing that can easily be crushed and snuffed out if it’s not given a bit of time to develop and mature as a concept.
Our design crit culture is another challenge as we’re geo distributed. We’ve partly solved this with ‘covens’ that look at a number of specific areas. The folks in that coven have the collective knowledge and background to the problems so that we don’t have to go over it each time and can focus on the invention with constructive input.
From talking to friends all over, these issues seem to persist and get ever more pronounced with scale.
How is your design team structured and how is that working? Anything you’d tweak?
No single team is larger than 12. This is a squad. Squads are grouped together into a tribe, which is responsible for a number of specific user and business goals. (Yup, we got this from our good friends at Spotify) Designers work within a squad or across squads acting as ‘glue’. We’re always tweaking it’s the nature of wanting high velocity and throughput. We also have a specific enablement squad, that’s internal tooling — we call it Backpack: Its our living design system, based on atomic design principles and our open source model. Its the most symbiotic designers and engineers get and it’s great to see the impact that’s having. We hiring, so I’d like to tweak that up a little!
What are you most proud of achieving as a design leader?
I don’t like pride, it’s the thing that has ruined me in the past and I constantly try to suppress it. If i say what i’m proud of, it’ll just inflate my ego once again. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
The more you achieve, the more you realise there is to achieve and how little you’ve actually achieved. I take each day as it comes and keep chipping away doing my best.
I’m happy I’ve worked with folks far better than me, and it’s to them I owe many of our achievements.
Any advice for a new design leader?
Stoop to conquer.
When you have hard things to say, find the gentlest means to say it.
Hire and work with people who are better than you, and who will challenge you to your face.
When you know you have a cultural shift you need to drive, spend very little energy on the nay sayers, you’ll achieve approximately zero trying to convince them.
Don’t try and get everyone to care as much as you do, but rather help them appreciate the value of the thing. You’ll see folks start caring more as you prove value.
Anything else on your mind at the moment?
My dear wife and 3 kids. Am I giving them the time they deserve? My family and friends who are suffering through illness, bereavement, or lack of employment. Our infatuation with materialism and humanism. Will Andy Budd stop asking questions? <wink>
I have so so much to be thankful for, and want to keep the things that really matter at the forefront of my mind.
