Andy and Tim on stage!

Leading Design Conference 2017 (Day 2 Summary)

Tame your fear. Thrive and step up as design leaders.

In late October, my colleague and I were quite lucky to represent our team to attend the Leading Design Conference and Workshop 2017 in London.

We found the speakers and topics fascinating; so I would like to share our learning with you in a series of articles.

This is the second post in the series. If you haven’t read my learnings from Day 1, visit the link below.

Leading Design Conference 2017 (Day 1 Summary)

It’s worth noting that each topic deserved their own articles. Similar condition with the first day, there were loads of topics and ideas. 😵 💫

I’ll share my notes hoping that you will be interested enough in the topic so you can reflect, explore more about them, and — most importantly — change your way of doing. Topics that we’ll cover in this article:

• Mind the leverage
• Be practical
• Fear not. Thrive.
• Things to add to your playbook
• Trust and leadership
• Lessons from scaling a design team
• The fear of a VP
• Our time to step up

Mind the leverage

We began the second day with a surprise talk with Tim O’reilly when he answered questions by Andy about the future of technology. An interesting take: possibility in the future the development shifts to the east. Quite a bliss to see him on the stage. It seems like the organizer didn’t share the video yet in Vimeo.

Then we moved to one of a designer that I admire, Peter Merholz. I’ve read his book — Org Design for the Design Org — and experiment with our product design team structure. Luckily he didn’t bring that particular topic in the talk because I had already read the book. Instead, he talked about leverage.

To be more specific, our leverage as a design leader. What I like that he categorized the foci of design leaders to several parts:

• Managing down, as a coach,
• Managing across, as a diplomat,
• Managing up, as an advocate, and
• Shape the organization, as an architect

Important points that are worth to take notes: as a leader, your impact is realized through others. Trust your team and let go.

As a coach: your team is not an extension of yourself, forget the mighty Art Director image on your head, let them bloom. Mind the diversity. Let the designers mess up but hold them accountable.

As a diplomat: design leadership is a lot more about talking than doing. Get along with other functions. Assume positive intent. Stand strong for your ideas and principles.

As an advocate: Promote your team’s capabilities. Evangelize about their awesome work; yes I agree that over-communicate is somehow better than under-communicate. Don’t give up on your team’s needs.

And as an architect: figure out your organization model. Define roles and build design levels. Establish design quality by showcasing good design out there. And mind the design operations.

He closed the talk with — a funny one — hard, or at least annoying, truths about design leadership. 👻

Reflection: design leadership is hard. No objection. And to perform on the four parts simultaneously is unfair, I know. In my early time as a lead, I somehow focused on managing down and shaping the organization. It was nearly impossible to manage across and up at the same time with the same priorities. I’ll share more on that in another article. And about letting go, it’s naturally hard to keep your hands away from your team’s output, especially when transitioning from an individual contributor. There’s always something that is just not “right”. I’m actually on the other extreme, sometimes too hands-off. I think the key is a balance between them, depending on the case.

Have you ever heard the ‘just-came-back-from-a-conference’ effect?

http://devhumor.com/media/the-just-got-back-from-a-conference-effect

That was one of my concern if I couldn’t really distill the essential from the conference. Or another spectrum is I couldn’t do anything because I am so much in awe of the topics.

Be practical

I was excited when I was reading the description of Dan Willis talk at the conference and hoping that to avoid or reduce the effect and get real. The talk, or more like a performance I can say, prepared us with practical tactics that we can implement after going back from the conference.

So the five tactics are:

1. Assess your organization’s capabilities for design.
   Some indicators we can use: check the job description (If they are still using UX/UI in job desc, change, educate, or just 🏃). How the team uses user stories, whether it’s an assumption, created by the “UX team” only and not collaborating with other teams. Are there any designers in senior leadership position above director level?
2. Adjust your stakeholders.
   Relevant with Peter’s point above about managing across and up. You can map the stakeholders using available tools. Dan used a 2-dimensional diagram with influence as y-axis and support of design as the x-axis.
3. Protect expertise.
   It used to be easy in the 90s when we don’t really have to prioritize accessibility, we could focus on the screen and technology. The user only uses PC anyway. Things are quite different now, users use several means or channels to finish their tasks. And they don’t finish a task at one time. They switch between tasks and channels. We’re not only designing the screens, we’re designing for our users’ experience. It requires experts from different domain do tackle this kind of problem.
   So, how do we invite everybody into our design process and then protect our expertise? Not only design expertise, but everybody that we invited. No more providing 3 solutions and ask stakeholders to choose. Collaborate from the get-go. Open the design review to stakeholders → “based on your expertise, did the solution solve the problem?”
4. Fit process to skills.
   Understand your team capabilities. Mushroom designers can’t be turned to be a unicorn designers (even if unicorn designers exist). Only implement a solution that can be implemented by existing resource. Yes, sometimes it’s quite underwhelming because when we see how big the problems are and when we look into our organization to realize we don’t have enough capabilities yet. My take? Work with what we have today while still going to that direction. It’s about balancing incremental and radical improvements. A small improvement that happens is much better than a grand solution that never happens.
5. Redefine the problem.
   We spend so much time discussing and fighting over solutions and spend less time understanding or seeing problems from different perspectives. Design teams can certainly help with this. Remember to align the intention.
   If the organization only see that design can only make things pretty, sure we can do that. Another extreme is to expect design to come up with a grandiose solution (in the example was to solve world hunger) then very few solutions will come. Find the balance. Define the scope, it’s the responsibility of designers.

Dan pointed out the “I need a button” below as an example of the how we fail to define the problem.

As soon as we start discuss the how, we are done talking about the what. Sometimes we fool ourselves to get back, you’ll never get back to that (the what). When someone said “I want a big red button”, that button is the only thing the team is gonna talk about for the rest of the project — Dan Willis

Fear not. Thrive.

By now we can agree that it’s hard to be a design leader. And it’s very helpful for us to have a constant practice for reflection to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Kim Lenox of LinkedIn presented five lessons she wished she knew before being a lead on LinkedIn. Great talk, I wish to see this kind of talk or content (lessons learned) more often.

As hard as the jobs are, or as Kim said, when all odds are against us, we need to move forward. Like the rule of five, here are five lessons that she learned:

• 1. Change the way of doing
  As we often heard, it’s crazy to expect a different result when our action is the same. Even more when we encountered a new problem. What should we do? Should we blame others or step up and help?
  Note that the realm of the problem in design leadership sometimes, if not most, is out of our reach. When that happens, Kim urged us to be part of the solution.
  Step up and offer help. Don’t be a victim and blame others — be player. Invest more in worlds outside of UX. Think about the business strategy, not only about users.
• 2. Empathy breeds alignment and understanding
  She learned the second point from being a parent and observed how her child threw tantrum. How to solve? Meet them where they are. The lesson also applicable to our organization. Meet the stakeholders where they are — whether product management, engineering, data analytics, or people operations. Educate them about design. Understand their concerns and motivations. Try to see them as who they are as a person. Spend time together. It will open possibilities to co-create shared vision.
  Unfortunately awesome manager is not enough for the business; in this case coach. We need to manage across and up. It’s not only about invest to create the product but invest on the relationship with your stakeholders.
• 3. From service to scrum
  We used to organize design team as an agency model, where every two weeks product team “bid resources” for the sprints. I personally think it will be more challenging for a design team to deliver strategic value to the organization if the team is still organized as an agency model. The model will reinforce the request and delivery interaction with stakeholders — less about owning the roadmap or product strategy. The team will only be seen as “the executor”.
  She then explained her team’s condition at that time with dozens of product managers with only 2 product designers. Yes. Two. She stepped up by owning the design plan. The lessons in this transition: keep the quality high and product focus. Let go of perfectionism. Meet business and customer needs. Be a team player (remember that we are working together to achieve the same organization goals; assume positive intent from stakeholders). Categorize design problems with quick wins, quick fixes, good design, and visionary design; then respond appropriately based on the category.

She’s been in the industry for around 20+ years, but only on the last 2 years she learned lesson 4 and 5:

• 4. Living life through fear is surviving
  She freaked out when promoted to a director because she realized her work can bring impact on so many people. There was fear of success and failures. Luckily, her manager offered an executive coaching. She realized that she’s spent her entire life in survival mode — fight or flight.
  It’s so much better living a fearless life (remember the belief system on the day 1?). The fear held her back. That kind of fear that made us wear our battle armor.
  Just let go of battle armor. Her battle armor: defensiveness, pessimism, and lack of trust. Be your authentic self. If you can’t be authentic, you build that battle armor. Stop making a decision out of fear. Invest in your transformation of your self. Transform yourself and become a better you.
• 5. Living life with joy and optimism is thriving
  So, how to shift from survival to thriving? Thriving is about resiliency with a positive attitude. Understand things that matter to you, it can be different for you and me. She hit the reset button every morning, forget what happened yesterday, assuming the best intention and not the worst. Find your champion or your sponsor (your advocate and supporter). Find people who will celebrate your successes. Find a champion and be a champion.

Reflection: Sometimes other design leads and I discussed our own career development, but right after we prioritized our team on top of our own. Not to mention the expectation from my lead and stakeholders. I’m glad to know the lessons number four and five. It’s quite a humbling journey to identify what is our battle armor. We need to be true to ourselves to become authentic. We know we’re not perfect, and will never be, and might need help from others to be better — before transforming our business. I definitely want to live a life in a thriving mode than a survival one.

Things to add to your playbook

Started with an interesting statement, the world is a stage and we’re now on the stage of design leaders, Cameron didn’t come to talk to us about how to build great teams. He convinced us that he hasn’t figured that out yet — and the audience might already have the answers.

Instead, he intended to add more plays into our leadership playbook. Things that he has done as a design leader.

Again, the lessons from parenthood took place in the conference. Being a father of five sons aged 17 to 3, every day is a new experience. And the best thing you can do as a parent is to try. Try your solution whether it will work or not.

Before going through in his list of plays, he mentioned that humans are, well, humans. We are complex, beautiful, and fallible. He argued that we can take recent methodology and apply to the general population if we want. But can’t do much when it comes to individual treatment.

Leadership is about 20% inspire people to be the best and 80% drop as few balls as possible — Cameron Moll

So these are plays that might add a different perspective to your playbook:

1. Storytelling and metaphor.
   I think we already aware the potential of good storytelling to convey the message. As Noam Chomsky said, “It is quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”
2. Tell your customers stories
   As designers, we should be the one who advocates for our users. On a casual talk with a PM, he said that back in the day they used to randomly call customers to know their stories and experiences. As we scale, more responsibilities added and they stopped reach out to customers.
   Cameron told a story about a robber that has been interviewed by The Great Discontent. The robber apparently read the magazine and said that the people on the interviews inspire him to stop robbing and be a better man.
   Sometimes we just can’t imagine how our product or service impacts people’s lives. For good or bad. Each user has their own story. And that story, I think, is worth to share.
3. Invest in relationship
   He believes that the greatest output of your career is a relationship. Foster great relationships with your peers. 50 years fast forward we might be care less about the work we produced but how we get there. Was I jerk to work with? Did I care about your point? Had I mentored other people?
   Results are important. Agree. But life is more than your job. Pick the right thing to invest.
4. About retention
   Invest time in helping people understand how they value their contribution to their organization. Work to make the room for them to do that. Revisit the conversation over and over.

Reflection: we used to have monthly customer’s story that was created by the IxD and shared company-wide. Maybe we should push that initiative more. The storytelling point is clear for me, really need to improve that.

Cameron shared the note for his presentation here. 💎

Trust and leadership

I once learned a framework to deliver presentation during communication class in Traveloka. I learned another framework from Ben Terrett from his presentation:

• Boasting about ourselves
• Present vague theories
• And finally provide some stuff the audience might actually find useful.

Jokes aside. Ben Terrett, Group Design Director of Co-op, shared a key message for us: trust your team. He also listed five practical techniques we can use to manage our team.

Again. Rule of five. ✋

After the boasting part, he continued by showing a clip of Tony Adams, one of the best football defenders and former Arsenal captain. His point was Tony was an exceptional player but a terrible manager.

We may well aware that the best player doesn’t make the best manager. We have to put hours to learn on the fly as a manager. Just because we are good at things, doesn’t mean we are good at managing or organizing the things.

Management is not magic. Like kerning. Doesn’t just happen. — Ben Terrett

Why management important? (note that he used the term management quite loosely here). Ben is quite worried because designers don’t have interest in management and only focus on their craft.

Designers want to solve problems and want to make the world a better place. Good. But “slogan in nice typefaces won’t save the human races”. We use management tools for scaling our impact. I see that management is a tool to do stuffs in scale.

Another thing that he mentioned is about the sign off model that is still being used. Some leaders are treating the web pages the same way they sign off ads. It’s not going to work.

Traditional Creative Director type is very top down. Do you really need to sign off all the releases? Not to mention if you organization is nimble and able to continuously deliver things. You are (potentially) the bottleneck.

How to do that differently?

Trust your team.

Trust them by creating a shared standard. What is acceptable and not acceptable output. Trust them by letting the team to “sign off” the work. Not you. Not the Creative Director. Your job is to intervene.

So let’s move on to the practical tips:

• Cancel all of your 1:1s
  What a strong statement. He has a reason by the way. From his perspective 1:1s are not the metrics. As long as he can answer these three questions, he don’t really need 1:1: What are they working on? Is that work any good? Are they happy?
  It depends on how you see it, if you see 1:1 is one of the tool to answer the questions then good. If you use 1:1 for other purposes, then reconsider.
• Share all your objective with the team (even personal).
  Ask them to do the same. Don’t manage in the dark.
• Don’t manage more than 6 people.
  I wish 😀 . Maybe not directly applicable for us.
• Set aside half a day a week for management stuff.
  Like mentioned above. We can’t expect management to happen automatically.
• Start with AOB.
  AOB= Any other business. We can start a meeting by asking the attendees if they have other things to discuss to uncover their concerns or agendas. I already tried it during 1:1s and it works well.

Remember, trust your team.

Phew…

Lessons from scaling a design team

We’ve discussed scale before.

Scaling organization is just hard and doesn’t have the right answer. It’s more of trade-offs that we make as an organization. I’ve first encountered more detailed discussion about scaling an organization in Scaling Up Excellence. I recommend you to read the book for your reference.

Back to the conference.

It’s really useful to hear scaling stories from other design leaders. On the next talk, Stuart Frisby the Design Director of Booking.com shared his journey from 5 designers in 2011 to 200+ designers in 2017. Quite a long journey. More interestingly because he was started as a designer when there were only 5 designers and work his way up to where he is now.

In his second day, a funny thing happened when he was asked to deploy the website. Yes. Designer. Deploy. The engineering culture is quite strong in Booking it seems.

At that time Design was reporting to Engineering. Now the organization is quite hybrid between Engineering and Product. They combined embedded and centralized. Embedded teams are, as the name suggests, embedded on the vertical or product team. So, the design grows with the business.The central team is finding ways to support the embedded team. The arrangement is similar to what we have in Traveloka.

He mentioned that measuring design makes scaling possible. At Booking they rigorously use A/B testing.

Then, what are the lessons learned from scaling from 5 to 50 and 50 to 200?

He said that 5 to 50 is quite challenging. Some things that they can do better:

• Invest in design ops. This is more about tools and system.
• Formally define a career path. We’re almost done with it.
• Bring disciplines closer together. Our design team is also diverse and it’s an ongoing effort to bring them together.

Going from 50 to 200 designers is another level. They need to rethink their approach, which I tend to agree: to design the community. He provided a list of things they are doing. (More like a homework for us, lol). We’ve partly done some of the things on the list, but it’s quite a relieved moment that: (1) we’re not the only one doing this (2) we’re not the only one having this kind of challenge.

How they are designing the community:

• Provide types of equipment needed for designers to work.
• In-house design curriculum.
• Designer onboarding programme.
• Revisit job specs.
• Design leadership AMA.
• Skill assessment model. What design is and what design can do.
• Formalized the mentoring programme.

As a community, we need to clearly articulate our values and culture to inside and outside of an organization.

An implicit design culture is a fragile culture — Stuart Frisby

He closed the talk with interesting concepts about design gifting and design as a strategic partner where the design team offers service or consultation to other teams in the organization. They are offering services such as design facilitation, assessment model, hiring innovation, community event format, and prototyping.

There are lots of homework to be done to be a strategic partner for the organization. We need to redefine contribution of design, that we can’t only contribute at the end of the process, but from the beginning. Then, forming strategic alliances with product leadership team. Help the product team or CEO articulate the vision. And filling the blank between where we are now and where we want to be.

Reflection: We’re quite privileged to have our own design department and get support from the co-founder. Albeit quite late, it’s good that we’ve been doing similar things to prevent fires to spread in our team. And yeah, scaling is still hard.

The fear of a VP

From the talk, we moved to Cap Watkins, Buzzfeed’s VP of Design.

A question that usually comes up to him is “What is the typical day for you?”

His answer is by any chance the same with mine when being asked several times by candidates: it depends.

He admitted that he could give a better answer, so for this conference he tallied his schedule on a certain week. Bonus. He gave tips about using google calendar: keep it private. So you can make your own decision about your schedule.

Back to the calendar. On a certain week, it consists of: 2 design critiques, 3 team leads meeting with his peers, CTO, VP product, 5 midyear review, 9 recruiting meetings, 14 1:1s (see), and 15 fearful thoughts.

The thoughts?

• Am I doing a good job?
• Am I doing what I said I would?
• Are people on my team happy?
• What if this person quits?
• What would we do until we hire someone?
• How could I make more time? (so that I can focus to do give more strategic contribution)
• What if we hire the wrong person? (and how to mitigate the effect on our culture)
• How would that affect the team?
• I feel like I’m forgetting something.
• What am I forgetting? 😂
• Did I choose the right meeting to go to?
• Am I evaluating people fairly? (related to review season)
• Am I even being helpful?
• Am I useful?
• Do I even matter?

I think the questions above are really good for reflection, as long as they don’t consume us. And this is something we all feel. It’s quite related about the fear that Kim discussed earlier.

The Fear.

When he started working as a designer at Etsy, he was quite surprised because his coworker asks him to deploy a website.

I found out from other source and turned out it’s an Engineering team KPI to enable other functions to deploy to production, even people in front-office, so that they can appreciate what it takes to deploy things. Interesting.

He then talked to his friend Mike, “how can I be more confident to deploy the website?” Mike answered: “You should never deploy without The Fear.”

It’s quite contradicting, isn’t it?

I see that we can use the fear to be more cautious.

Times goes by and he shared an event when he screwed up by releasing a feature without a flag; a feature that should be a secret. He received lots of message of confusion. Thankfully somebody reverted his change. He was so confident. See his story here (starts at 14:05).

The Fear is good.

He argued that every successful person has The Fear. From his perspective, it’s comforting to know that someone he admired to also has the fear. The person shared things that she’s unsure going to work out or not.But what about confidence?

Shouldn’t a leader be confident?

Actually, The Fear can make us confident. Confident that we could be wrong. That we are, indeed, human.

Fear is a reminder to be thoughtful. Not something to be paralyzed on.

Switch our mindset so 15 fearful thoughts can become 15 thoughtful moments.

Reflection: I see the positive side being vulnerable and not being the “knows-all-perfect-kind” of leader. Because it’s impossible to master all the disciplines. And in case you do, it might be hard to collaborate with others. Interesting tips on how they open documentation about the design org here.

Our time to step up

The last talk on Day 2 by Kate Aronowitz, a Design Partner of GV, was such an elevating one. She encouraged us, design leaders, to step up as a community and use our superpowers.

The boasting part: she’s been working with CEO to solve a big problem by showing the power of design. Graduated from design school 20 years ago, she joined the first design team on eBay and started to manage. Then, she became a design director on LinkedIn with 3 designers before moved to Facebook managing 20 designers. Finally, she moved to Welfront to better use design within the business.

From her experience, she always joined the team pretty when the design was under-valued. She needs to prove design matters.

But there is a good news: there is more demand for design leadership than ever.

Design is an essential part of any modern business — Kate Aronowitz

However, she paused, there few things that we are continue to get wrong as a group.There are things that we can do better as leaders for company to the team.

Leadership key pillars:

• Work.
  We are responsible for the work, whether the output is good or bad. Good design is our responsibility.
• People.
  Hiring, firing, feeding, praising them.
• Vision.
  Tough. Where design can be applied elsewhere. Figure things out.

Design + leadership:

• Hard work
• Most of us are not formally trained on management
• Many of us are very few people that holds design leadership position in our companies.

Moving from design to design leadership is a very transformative change. Leap to management is a big leap. What was your first moment of leading like? she asked.

I don’t think enough of us are stepping up on the leadership of the role. — Kate Aronowitz

How can we show up as better leaders? Serve our team, company, and also people that use our product?

There are five of them. Again 😂

1. It’s not about us

Too many designers and teams are sucked up on their disciplines and forget the purpose of the work.

She told a story of a design team sharing strategic priorities to the company. There were three items on their list: (1) Really big budget to travel to fancy conferences, (2) A budget for pottery workshop because their culture is suffering (no kidding), (3) A full-time writer to start writing a blog for them because they want to be seen as the thought leader within the community.

This was a small startup, not yet profitable, and they were excited to share the list with her. There was no request for user study, no ask for time to build design standard, really no mention of jobs they were hired to do. Yet they had seen other companies are doing and picked up. No business rationale for things that they asked for.

Our priorities: users, business, team, self.

If you don’t know how your goals mapped out to business, do your homework. Take anybody, sales, PM, engineers, understand what drives your business and figure out how to align your goals with it.

2. Design is more than designers
It takes more than just designers to deliver good design.

She told another story when a startup searched for a VP of design. They were so excited to share their studios. There are special woods on the wall, removable whiteboard, giant screen, beautiful couches. Pretty awesome things you can expect from a world-class design studio.

Then she sat in the conference room asking the CEO what did he look for and what has happened. Turned out, the previous VP/Head of design remove the access of other teams to the studio and said: “if you are not a designer, you can’t get into the design studio”.

They isolated themselves and embraced the sacred studio model. They alienated people. They thought that there was only one team responsible for great design — that was the design team.

Great design ships with more than just designer. You, your stakeholders, and research that shaping the product. Writers, marketers, engineers, business partners, product managers, operations, you name it.

Yes, what we do is super unique. But let’s not make it exclusive. Turn them into advocates, turn them into partners. Involve them in your process.

3. Use our superpowers
We know that design as a discipline covers a wide range of skillsets — it’s impossible to put all the skills into one person. But there are skills, sometimes overlooked by designers, that can bring real impact to the organization. Unfortunately, we’re not using them just enough.

Let’s start with facilitation: we are amazing in facilitating difficult conversation and coming up with the conclusion. We do this every single day. Storytelling: like we’ve seen previously on Cameron’s section. Synthesizing: how to make sense of all the information, see the connections. Sketching and prototyping: we are the only team that can take an idea from nothing and makes it into something.

She shared her experience in an executive meeting where she sat there and said nothing. She already got a seat at the table but stunned by the deep financial expertise of other executives.

The CFO pulled her aside and asked why she didn’t say anything. “I’ve got nothing to add”, she said. “No,” the CFO replied, “before you got here we sat together and decided that we want to make sure that users’ perspective got a seat at the table”. That was such a powerful conversation to her.

Think: where else could we help with our skills and talents?

A few months later she facilitated engineering planning meeting because the engineering reps couldn’t agree and helped prioritize. The other time, she tried to look finance engineering decks and helped them. Her team also contributed to design the entire office.

As their organization got bigger, she volunteered to rethink the employee experience. She said to another executive, “I want designing employee experience as we designing user experience”. Couple weeks later she piloted a brand new performance review process.

Look outside the design team and see what we can help. Talk with the business, engineering, people operation team or the CEO, bring ideas to life much faster. Facilitate discussion between departments.

4. Embrace pioneer spirit
This is more about the mindset. Design leadership role is hard and mostly new for most companies.

Our job is to define what design can contribute. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t come to the stakeholders and ask “what design can help?”, because your stakeholders might not know the full potential of design. But you know. Instead, ask for their biggest problems — one that keeps them awake at night.

She narrated a story when two experienced designers consulted with her before a conversation with their new boss. The boss is not a designer but a product manager, who didn’t have a design background.

They went through the list of questions such as “how should design works in this company?”. It’s not quite right because they know exactly how design should works.

Three of them flipped the question into a statement. Something like: here are things that design can contribute to this company, and this is what we think it should work. But remember. Strong opinion, weakly held.

Whether or not you chose to be a pioneer. You are a pioneer. Let’s embrace the spirit of being a pioneer.

Find out what’s important to them and make that important to you. But don’t ask what design can do.

This is also what she learned in GV when she went into startups asking what design can do to help them. “Well, this project, this branding thing doesn’t look too good, look and feel kind of stuff”.

Instead, look for the executive and ask what keeps them up at night?

If your jobdesc doesn’t resemble design, rewrite. If people don’t understand design, then share, advocate, and educate.

5. Be there for each other
Learn from others. Teach others. It’s quite hard to find extraordinary good mentor. Seek support from your peers and reach out to people that you looked up to. She seems to value reciprocity.

It’s a lot. But if we don’t keep these extra responsibilities, I don’t know how we keep the seat at the table. Step up.

List of videos

• Coach, Diplomat, Advocate, and Architect: The Leveraged Design Leader — PETER MERHOLZ
• Tactics for Today While You’re Redesigning Tomorrow — DAN WILLIS
• Executing Against All Odds — KIM LENOX
• A Playbook for Building Great Teams — CAMERON MOLL
• Bad News — You’re the Bottleneck — BEN TERRETT
• Scaling Design — STUART FRISBY
• How to VP — CAP WATKINS
• Our Time to Step Up — KATE ARONOWITZ

That’s a wrap for Day 2.

I find the conference useful for me and Traveloka Design team. And I hope you can benefit from things that I learned too.

Nothing beats coming to the conference and see it the firsthand of course. So come to the 2018 conference if you can, go check it on their website. Meanwhile, you can watch all this year’s talks on Clearleft’s Vimeo page here. Yes, all. I know. They are quite generous aren’t they?