Designing the Designer Role

The behind-the-scenes story of how Salesforce helped Trailblazers elevate design

At the top of a new year, we find ourselves looking at what’s to come. Well, I’m easing in by looking at what’s brought us here. For me, 2021 was memorable for a few reasons. It was the year we launched the new Salesforce Designer role and it was also my 10th (Koa) anniversary at Salesforce. Naturally, I have been doing a lot of self-reflection and reminiscing. I’m talking about the great friendships, challenging projects, and lessons learned on my journey. Shaped by external and internal forces, design at Salesforce has come a very long way in the past decade. Heck, it’s come a long way in the last couple years. This is a story of how I saw – and had the privilege to contribute to – the growth of Salesforce Design’s culture and community. Ultimately, I realized that my greatest tools to drive change during a period of rapid growth weren’t what I expected.

Reflecting on my personal values, what’s helped guide me through this growth and navigate my career is practicing kindness, being useful, and facing my fears with courage.

Three principles designers can use to effect change

I encountered the following quote a few years ago at Dreamforce. It encapsulated what I had intuitively practiced for most of my life but didn’t have the language to communicate. As a curious designer and adventurer, what I would add is to also practice being courageous.

“If you sum up the things I try to impart to our daughters, it has been: ‘be kind and be useful.’ ”

- Former President Barack Obama with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce

These principles have guided me, as I work with our teams to launch new products, build a thriving community connected by design, and establish career paths that elevate design–such as the Salesforce Designer role. Launching this role has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. Every day, I get to celebrate the careers and livelihoods of Trailblazers around the world. I hope you find inspiration in my personal story. Choosing to embrace courage and activate (not just advocate for) positive change has made all the difference.

Design and mountaineering require similar thinking. Here, a rock climber reflects on their principles.

What it looks like to lead with these principles

• Be Kind: Listening to internal and external signals.
• Be Useful: Building trust with your craft and sweat equity.
• Be Courageous: Using a relationship-design-minded approach.

When I reflect on these principles and my journey, it reminds me of my passion for the mountains and climbing. Since childhood, I have been an avid explorer and mountaineer. It’s no surprise that I integrated lessons learned along the way into my career as a designer.

I’ve experienced what it’s like to move up glaciers and negotiate crevasses in oxygen-thin environments. Sometimes, I’ve done this while being linked to my team of mountain climbers by a safety rope. Dramatic back-drop aside, the dynamics of a rope team and a design team are similar. They’re both strategic and team-centered. You can’t push too hard, drag too slow, or veer off too far to the sides. You need to move at a pace, diligence, and persistence that the entire rope team is comfortable with. Traversing an ever-changing landscape requires teams to practice kindness, usefulness, and courage. Over time you will build trusted relationships with your rope team and peer rope teams.

This is what we experienced when our team worked together to design and launch the Salesforce Designer role this past June.

Assessing the Landscape

Assessing the landscape as a resilient designer requires you to expect the unexpected.

Picture our design team preparing for the climb. First, we needed to survey the design landscape and see where we were relative to our peers. At the time, we were having lunchtime nerf gun wars or pranking a coworker’s desk by converting it into a zen garden or a scene from X-Files. But, deep down we were definitely on a mission to elevate design and disrupt the enterprise software experience status quo.

What was the lay of the design landscape? What were the forces at play in our ecosystem?

• Externally, consumer mental models were starting to find their way into enterprise application design.
• Internally, we had designers finding their voices, sharing best practices, and building an audience (e.g. the Salesforce Design Twitter and Salesforce Design Medium blog).
• The Salesforce ecosystem was looking to skill up on user experience design, design systems, and design strategy.

Start with the human and the most sustainable, ethical, and inclusive solutions will emerge at the center.

As designers, we instinctively lean into human-centered design and problem-solving. (You’re probably familiar with this creative approach to solving people’s problems. It begins with identifying needs and ends with creating solutions that meet those needs.) For me, it was human-centered in a different way. It was about humans – designers – looking for a creative community, access to design education, and identity in the Salesforce ecosystem. Why should our Trailblazer ecosystem celebrate only developers? Could there be space for other roles?

We needed to extend ourselves to these emerging designers. After all, when you want to design change, you do it with the audience it represents and the community it impacts. Not inside out or outside in, not bottoms-up or top-down. It’s a co-creation exercise.

So we went where designers were. We began to rally them at events like Dreamforce, where we started an annual design community networking event. We also started hosting sessions that helped Salesforce architects, developers, and admins upskill on design. Plus, we now host Camp Design, where we engage with all Trailblazers via a yearly rotation of design and research activities.

One of the most scalable ways Salesforce brought people together was with Trailhead. In 2014, the free online learning platform was launched to offer education, enablement, and career pathways. Trailhead had been successful at enabling admins and developers. Why not designers, too? We saw the Trailhead platform as a strategic opportunity to bring design enablement and community building to our ecosystem at scale while having fun.

“Trailhead is your guide to a design career in the Salesforce ecosystem. At its core, Trailhead utilizes modules and projects as building block components where learners can skill up on design and build their career pathway with and on Salesforce.”

- Chris Fox, VP Trailhead User Experience, Salesforce

In assessing the landscape, we discovered that people wanted access to design education and enablement. Now we were ready for the next step of reinforcing the idea.

Building a Base Camp

Before we set out for the next checkpoint we needed to rally our stakeholders around a base camp. The most effective basecamps are open and inviting to all travelers and perspectives. Amazing things happen when people from diverse backgrounds and skill sets rally around an idea. Our base camp was the promise that design could and needed to play a more strategic and relationship-building role. We knew designers, when supported, can play critical dot-connecting roles across the ecosystem.

Fortunately, as our base camp grew, there was also energy building around the business value of design in the market and across Salesforce.

Infographic from 2018 McKinsey report on “The business value of design.”

In 2018, McKinsey published “The Business Value of Design” report (illustrated left). InVision launched the Design Maturity Model and published industry benchmarks. Fortune was bringing the business value of design conversation to executives. And IBM was connecting design to customer success in their annual State of Salesforce reports.

Partners and customers had formed Salesforce centers of excellence. They looked to us as technology thought leaders – but not necessarily as design thought leaders. We are an amazing platform for change. Shouldn’t we lead others to design this change with intention, reciprocity, compassion, and courage?

Over the years, Salesforce’s internal design community has grown a ton. Some of that growth has been organic, some has come through acquisitions. Now we have more than 1000 creatives, strategists, product designers, and researchers helping our company and customers succeed.

Executives at Salesforce have also gotten more invested in design as an important strategic capability for our business. (Once, I ran into our CTO & co-founder, Parker Harris, at an offsite and even he asked, “How can we become more design-led?” This was, not going to lie, extremely empowering.)

Salesforce has continued to signal its commitment to elevate design. And my team, led by Chief Design Officer Justin Maguire, is responsible for defining how we go about doing that.

Over and over, our idea that design could play a bigger role was reinforced. We had built a strong base camp. Next, we needed a route.

Charting a Path

Illustration of map showing how to navigate teams’ different locations

Route planning requires a few things. There’s listening to the ecosystem and then reading the ever-changing environmental conditions. It’s both an art and a science. For the newly formed Salesforce Design team, this meant establishing a solid foundation of research and insights. Hundreds of Trailblazers, partners, customers, consultants and employees eagerly took part. Salesforce Design Research Architect Cynthia Kaschub led our rigorous efforts and outlined the three key aspects we were trying to understand:

• How people define design.
• The language they use when talking about design.
• The biggest challenges and pain points designers experience.

We didn’t want to assume all stakeholders had the same definition of design and the role it plays. So we simply started by asking:

“What does design mean to you?”

Alongside these interviews, we worked with Burning Glass Technologies to carry out a comprehensive market analysis. Our goal was to really dig in and understand what design practices and skills were in demand across existing, foundational roles such as admin, developer, and architect. Even though design was an increasingly required aspect of their jobs, Salesforce roles and certifications didn’t reflect it. Design as a skill, practice, and role was missing.

According to data from Burning Glass Technologies in 2019, Salesforce job posts required at least one design skill.

Research yielded these themes:

• Design has an enormous total addressable job market outside of Salesforce. It also has high job growth potential within Salesforce.
• Design is both a prominent profession in the market and an in-demand skill across Salesforce.
• Designers are foundational makers who work closely with adjacent roles like developers and architects.
• Design is a critical role for diverse teams that want to ensure experiences are equitable, sustainable, and inclusive.
• Design is often marginalized and misunderstood.
• Those who have dedicated their career as designers are not recognized and equipped.
• Salesforce’s talent ecosystem would benefit by investing in designer roles and careers.

“Whether specifically called out or not [in the research], successful design was always in service to the humans using the systems — making it easier, more beautiful, more efficient, and delightful. With more design skills and knowledge across the Salesforce ecosystem, the outcomes will be better.”

- Denise Burchell, Senior Design Director, Salesforce

Our research also validated the need for diverse specializations and career pathways in design, including the following specializations:

User Experience Designers
Producing and improving flows, interactions, and experiences, user experience designers use an aesthetic paradigm for creating end-user value. User experience designers are interaction-, visually, and scale-oriented.

Design Strategists
Directing systems-level solutions toward business goals and desired outcomes, design strategists use a business paradigm for creating end-user value. Business-minded, design strategists are systems- and process-oriented.

Design Technologists
Developing and delivering flexible, functional solutions that meet technical specs or requirements, design technologists use a technical paradigm for creating end-user value. Design technologists are technically and feasibility-oriented.

Salesforce Trailblazers Angela Conway and Asterisk Loftis are founding design community members.

“We’re all designers in our own way and can communicate design with thought, intent, and purpose that ultimately changes people’s lives and solves their most important problems.”

- Asterisk Loftis, Trailblazer and Practice Manager of Design Services at Togetherwork

We knew we could do better. We needed to recognize each human and the investment they made in their career. Our conversations with Trailblazers like Asterisk Loftis and Angela Conway confirmed this.

Their affirmation was the icing on the cake that our investment in charting a course would pay off. The only thing left to do was climb.

Advance

A rope team working as one

This past summer, it was time to advance to our next milestone. We launched the Salesforce Designer career pathway and the User Experience Designer Certification. It marks the first of many design credentials to come for supporting the growth and elevation of design. Now designers inside and outside of the Salesforce ecosystem have visibility on what a design career path looks like. I can’t explain what a milestone moment this is for me and my team. And it’s only the beginning, because raising the profile of design benefits everyone.

“Architects, admins, and developers all championed the role of design [in a large-scale survey]. Resourcing the needs of designers by formalizing design processes, tools, and methods will empower all roles to better understand and practice design.”

- Joel Fariss, Researcher, Halibut Flats

In the year ahead, the Salesforce Design team will continue to bring more education and enablement. This includes certifications, role specializations (such as the emerging design strategist), thought leadership, and community events for our design Trailblazers. We will work with partners to support Salesforce designer job growth and enable their design teams with additional design career pathways. We will support career-changers who want to explore other roles and opportunities within the diverse Trailblazer range of careers. We will do all this with our allies – the awesome admins, developers, and architects at our side.

Looking at the horizon

In a recent conversation with Domenique Sillett Buxton (aka “Astro’s Mom”), we talked about how design and designers are like keystone species. A keystone species is one that other species depend on so much that, if it were removed, the ecosystem would change drastically. Consider the parable of the sea otter. There aren’t many of them, but they influence their environment in big ways. Designers have a similar cascading effect on their ecosystems. Without them, connections weaken between the technology, the business, and the customer.

I can’t stop thinking about this analogy. It captures how I’ve navigated my career and represents how design is critical to the future of Salesforce. We must continue to protect and be stewards of keystone designers.

As urchin density decreases from sea otter predation, so does the grazing pressure on kelp and as a result kelp forests flourish in the presence of sea otters. Let’s support flourishing user experiences.

If I’ve ever been precious about the craft of design, I honestly don’t know if I’d be here sharing sea otter analogies, diving into the economics of design, and building community.

Like many designers reading this, I often find myself navigating people, places, and the “gray spaces” in between. My tendency is to take on any design project while extracting value from every career opportunity. Each relationship-building reciprocal interaction matters. I learned that a simple request is an opportunity to help teams appreciate the value of investing in and building their own research and design teams. These collaborations are empowering and they help me build trusted relationships.

Salesforce believes that business is the greatest platform for change. Could we build on that to help create a more ethical, equitable, and sustainable society? Imagine the impact if everyone connected to Salesforce and our platform practiced Relationship Design? Relationship Design is a creative practice that drives social and business value by building strong relationships. (Skill up on it here and be on the lookout for the full story of Salesforce Design soon!)

Take the Get to Know Relationship Design Trail on Trailhead.

Today, advancements in technology are launching into the world quickly–perhaps too quickly. This has opened up the “could vs. should we build it” conversation. It’s too easy to inadvertently do harm or accumulate tech debt, or worse, design debt. Especially when the scope of impact is as wide as it is with a far-reaching platform like Salesforce. Trailblazers, stakeholders, and Salesforce teams have a responsibility to get out in front and consider consequences. We can all use a Relationship Design-forward mindset. I feel this on a personal level. My entire team shares this urgency. And, in my opinion, it’s actually irresponsible if we don’t.

“[The Salesforce Designer] is a critical role in the Salesforce ecosystem, where you help us collectively live our value of ‘the business of business is improving the state of the world.’”

– Justin Maguire, Chief Design Officer, Salesforce

Could we move the needle on improving the state of the world? I am confident a design-minded approach will be a part of it. But is that enough? Is being an ally to a designer enough? Is being an advocate for design sufficient? I don’t think so. We need to be more intentional and accountable and have a design activist mindset. We need to leverage the power of design to mobilize communities, leverage technology, and drive positive change. We all need to do this across the Salesforce and beyond.

It sounds like a steep mountain climb. I know. So let’s start small. Let’s start with #DreamDesigners everywhere being kind, useful, and courageous.

On the summit of Mt. Denali (20,310 feet), Alaska, USA.

Continue exploring…

• Take the Get to know Relationship Design trail
• Understand the Salesforce Ecosystem

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Kate Hughes for encouraging me to embrace my authentic voice and guiding me through this journey of self-reflection. Noelle Moreno, Madeline Davis, and Hsiao-Ching Chou for your editorial expertise. And of course, the amazingly talented Justin Rheinfrank for illustrating our journey.

Salesforce Design is dedicated to elevating design and advocating for its power to create trusted relationships with users, customers, partners, and the community. We share knowledge and best practices that build social and business value. We call this next evolution of design Relationship Design. Join our Design Trailblazers community, become a certified UX designer, or work with us!