Yelp Product Design Leadership Q&A Part 3/4
👋 Welcome to the third part of our interview series!
We’re back with our great design leaders from a few different teams across the org: Clara MacDonell (Product Design Manager, Consumer), Martin Werner (Product Design Manager, Multi-Loc), and Chris Short (Product Design Manager, Design Systems).
Clara, Martin, and Chris bring a wide range of skill sets to the great Yelp design team — from unbiased empathy for users to a keen eye for vision interactions to reusable design thinking. Their teams tackle our consumer reviews experience, our larger businesses with multi-locations, and our robust design systems.
Why did you join Yelp?
Clara:
There were lots of reasons that I joined Yelp but the main deciding factors came down to…
1) It seemed to be the right company size for me, it was big enough to have stability but it was small enough to have a big impact. The design team also seemed to be the right size to get to know everyone well.
2) When I interviewed with Yelp almost everyone mentioned how close the design team was. Since I would be moving across the country for this job, I wanted to be on a team where everyone was close and there was a good culture. I think that has definitely remained true and some of my closest friends now are my colleagues.
3) Yelp was a product that I used frequently prior to joining and I knew that I wanted to work on a consumer facing product that I am passionate about.
Martin:
Over the years I have gained experiences in both areas of creative agency and product design on a national level in Germany. Thinking about my next development step I was always interested in working for a California based company to get to know more about the international way of working.
On top of that I really like the challenge of working in a marketplace, which has to balance the needs of both consumers and customers. Yelp offers both aspects, therefore it was an easy decision for me.
Chris:
Before I joined Yelp I wasn’t actively looking, but when I found out there was an opportunity to help influence the future vision of the product it was very intriguing to me. I liked the idea of working for a well known company that wasn’t too large where I could be challenged while growing and having impact as a designer. I was also excited about the opportunity to work with a talented design team while also helping to startup a design system.
What are you excited about for Yelp Product Design in 2022?
Clara:
I’m excited to see how our team can help local business owners and community members as the world starts to reopen. It has been such a challenging year and I hope we can make a positive impact. Also, so much work has been going on behind the scenes to make our product more user friendly and more modern so I can’t wait for everyone to be able to see those changes!
I am also pumped to see our team continue to grow. The Product Design and Research teams have already grown a lot from when I first joined. We have gained so many great new members and I’m exhilarated to bring in even more amazing people. Excited to see what our team will become in the next year!
Martin:
I think it is exciting that Product Design is still a considerably young and fast growing discipline within Yelp’s product organization. Still we are seeing a lot of design involvement on important company wide initiatives, as well as inspiring vision work for the annual planning process being led by product design. This both highly motivates me and shows me the opportunity for growth and impact on a team level, but also as an individual.
Chris:
I’m most excited about evolving Cookbook our design system and seeing the design team continue to grow and start to have a bigger impact within the design community. We have a diverse team with a lot of talented and bright people that I believe can impact and make a difference for the community and for design.
How do you maintain and grow a remote design culture?
Clara:
I am a huge proponent of design culture and its impact on the team. I tried to grow that culture as much as possible back when I first joined Yelp. However once we moved to being fully remote over the pandemic, I found it harder to maintain that same feel. Over time I have learned new ways to build and maintain design culture with distributed teams including: making everyone feel welcome from the get-go, creating a culture of open communication + feedback, and leveraging social activities so that teammates can get to know each other better.
As we have grown our team this past year, it has been very important to the culture to make sure all new team members feel welcome and excited to be part of the group. Since feedback is such a crucial part of creating good design solutions, I try to lead as an example by communicating transparently and providing constructive feedback to our teammates.
Last but not least, having more informal activities to get to know each other better helps us all connect as human beings and maintain our relationships. Overall, I think we all still have a lot to learn about how to continue to grow remote design culture but I think we are definitely on the right track.
Martin:
I believe that a healthy design culture is based on diversity, inclusion and the willingness to openly exchange perspectives with others and learn from each other.
The new remote first working setup has helped us in this matter in many ways. For example communication and information distribution is now much more inclusive because everyone is remote. We also all have learned how to effectively work together without the need of being physically in the same room. So the boundary conditions are good.
But at the same time day-to-day remote work increases the risk of focusing too strongly on operational tasks within your own business area, which limits your team’s solutions and also the growth of the company’s culture.
To maintain and grow our design culture we encourage and make room for this kind of exchange. A couple good examples are, collaborative company wide design initiatives, cross team design critiques and mentoring relationships throughout the entire design organization. There are many more ways to foster this exchange, the most important part is to consciously plan for it to happen, especially in a remote setup.
Chris:
Find ways to keep others engaged. Whether that’s through communication on slack, virtual team events, or team syncs. It’s also important that you trust others on the team and stay hands off while providing support when needed.
What’s the best design/leadership advice someone has given you?
Clara:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”
This is less design advice but more just life advice that really stuck with me. I hope to always have a positive impact on people that I work with. I think it is so important as design leaders that we make our teammates feel supported and cared for. This year has been tough on everyone so I hope to always lead with compassion and make people feel good.
Martin:
My first boss (agency world) always said “you need to know your audience”. Back then this meant to me high level desktop research about the target audience to create an emotional connection between their needs and the respective brand we were working for. But it also meant knowing your stakeholders (internal & external) in means of their expectations, needs & pains to connect those in an easy to understand and convincing way to your storyline.
While this helped me a lot in the idea and desktop research driven agency world to create buy-in and getting concepts signed off, “knowing your audience” created an even stronger impact for me when I transferred onto the product design side. It reminds me every day how important it is to really build up unbiased empathy for our different audiences (consumer, customer, partner, stakeholder) to create meaningful impact.
Chris:
Don’t try to do everything yourself, make sure to delegate. One of the harder lessons I needed to learn as a new manager is that as much as I wanted to hold on to being in control it’s best to delegate responsibilities. This has helped me to not only entrust the team more, but freed up more of my time to do what’s most important as a leader.
What does your WFH setup look like?
Clara:
My work from home set up has changed a few times over the past year but currently I work from this cozy window nook. I love looking out to see people walking cute dogs up my street and to see the weather change as Karl, the fog in San Francisco, rolls through. My WFH essentials have been: lots of coffee, great music to help me get into my flow state, and comfy clothes (until I have to adjust back to wearing jeans again 😅).
Martin:
I have kept my home office setup very basic with really just a normal desk, a good chair and my MacBook. Even when I am visually designing I don’t use a secondary monitor or a mouse any more, because I value being able to work from anywhere at any time. In the past I was always struggling when changing from my “at work” setup to be working somewhere else like on an airplane or in a café. Minifying my work setup solved this problem.
As we all know, the last year actually limited the geographical moving around a lot, but I still enjoy changing my work location within my home. The video calls are really the only thing that I always do in my home office room, to keep the family background noise away from the conversations. :-)
Chris:
I have a home office space that’s split between work and play. One side is dedicated to work and the other is reserved for creating music, playing video games, and watching movies, after work of course. It’s actually become one of my favorite places to hangout in my house, as strange as that may sound.
That’s it for part 3 of our leadership Q&A. Thanks Clara, Martin, and Chris for sharing your thoughts about Yelp design and keeping up remote work culture.
Please check in for our next set of Q&A posts where you’ll hear more about Yelp design leadership. 🙌
❤️ Huge thanks to Product Design Blog team: Rose Chang, Dandi Wang, Clara MacDonell, Brenda Kaing
