Elevating design: An interview with our Product Design SVP
After having spent three years at the helm of Zalando’s Product Design team, Anne Pascual has been promoted to Senior Vice President of Product Design. In her new role, she will be responsible for translating the Zalando Group Strategy into an inspiring, uniting, and leading digital experience. We thought we’d take this opportunity to sit down with Anne to find out how she feels about her promotion and what the future holds for the Product Design team.
You were recently promoted to Senior Vice President of Product Design, congratulations! How does that feel?
It feels magical! [laughs] It‘s truly an exceptional acknowledgement of what I have personally achieved at Zalando since I joined three years ago. It also reflects the accomplishments of my whole team — whose role it is to influence and direct Zalando’s overall digital experience by making use of in-depth customer insights. It’s also a testament to the management board for continuing to commit to elevating the role of the digital experience as part of our strategy. Not to mention, I am simply very grateful to everyone who has supported me on this journey: to my partner, friends and family, peers, and leaders at Zalando.
CTO Jim Freeman said, “With Anne as SVP Product Design, we are looking forward to next-level digital experience solutions that make a difference to our customers and create memorable moments.” Can you tell us about how you’d like to bring Zalando’s online experience to the next level in your new role?
Over the last three years, we have invested in building some of the fundamental tools — such as the Zalando Portraits or the Zalando Design System — that will be instrumental in taking the digital experience to the next level. The Portraits provide all of our product teams who are defining and solving customer problems with a holistic representation of our customers. The Zalando Design System has not only elevated the overall efficiency of teams developing solutions across the entire customer journey (as well as the quality of those solutions), it also allows us to position our brand as the starting point for fashion. That doesn’t mean that we’re creating one huge monolithic experience, but rather listening to our more than 31 million active customers and creating experiences; emotional and memorable moments that are defined not by transactions but by feelings. The next level is now going to be about creating a distinct and differentiated experience that our customers have an emotional bond with, and that they love coming back to again and again.
There are some exciting new initiatives on the horizon, one of which is the Pre-Owned category. It’s the first new category announcement since Beauty in 2018, what inspired the move toward pre-owned fashion?
Customers responded very positively to our Wardrobe app, which is a C2C marketplace for pre-owned items. We also know from our research that they are eager to extend the life cycle of their wardrobes. Zalando is much more than just a place that sells fashion, so by applying the principles of circularity we decided to offer our customers the chance to buy pre-owned clothes and declutter their wardrobes by selling items back to us — with the same convenient service they are already used to! By offering a new, pre-owned fashion experience that’s unmatched in the industry, we’re catering to even more customers in greater and more meaningful ways.
You’ve said that deepening our relationship with customers and creating memorable moments is a priority. How do you translate abstract concepts (like for example, delivering a personalised online shopping experience) into concrete components that engineers have to implement?
Starting with our strategy, we always work backwards: we identify problems that our customers face and translate them into concrete, meaningful customer experiences. This is a highly iterative and collaborative process, which leverages the capabilities of product, design, engineering, and project management teams. Throughout this process we gather feedback from customers as well as input from internal teams in other areas of the business.
When you look back over your past three years at Zalando, what are you most proud of?
Every time we do our monthly Campfire (our All Hands) and the entire design community across Zalando comes together to share their work and learnings, I am blown away by the entire team’s creativity and their drive to make an impact. The fact that we were so small when we started out and are now steering such a huge variety of exciting topics (from B2C to B2B to enterprise) from early strategy through to final execution, makes me super happy.
The design community is made up of a group of people who are experts in their field, knowledgeable about the latest industry trends and innovations, passionate about making an impact, and creative both in their jobs and beyond Zalando. You’ve managed to successfully cultivate a sense of community which is rare in the tech industry (and very appealing to potential candidates), how have you made the team members feel inspired, empowered, appreciated, and connected?
I would say there are two crucial aspects when it comes to creating a sense of community:
- We have been very intentional in creating our organisational structure in order to streamline our ways of working. As well as having centralised design teams lead by design managers, many of our designers work in an embedded manner. The different design teams collaborate and support each other on a day-to-day basis. Working in this way has ensured that we continuously raise the bar as well as provide opportunities for professional growth.
- We align ourselves very strongly with the company’s purpose and business strategy. Our goal to “Reimagine fashion for the good of all” forces us to think big and keep our long-term objectives in mind. It also underlines the fact that we have a remarkable opportunity to change an entire industry, and that’s pretty exciting. As well as building a platform for brands and our partners, we strive to create remarkable experiences, and to become the starting point for fashion. By focusing on our goals and values each of us can see the significant ways in which we are contributing to the big picture and the growth of Zalando.
Where do you see the Product Design community in 5 years?
We are going to continue to mature and grow as a team, and our impact is going to be even more noticeable for our customers. I am also certain we’ll be able to come up with many more opportunities in the future as a result of customer insights. We’ll be able to learn a lot by applying Machine Learning and to pave the way for what’s next for design. With Ralf Herbrich — our SVP for Builder Platform and AI — we have a real thought leader by our side, and I know he is equally excited to leverage the synergies of our respective capabilities.
International Women’s Day has just passed, and it’s no secret that there are fewer women in tech than men, when you started out in the industry who were your role models and were any of them women?
There have been many people and sources of inspiration! If you’re asking specifically for female influences, Amy Franceschini, Caterina Fake, and Susan Kare come to mind. But I’m also inspired by Ada Lovelace, Sadie Plant, and Ray Eames. While they all worked in different fields and eras, they do all have one thing in common: they fearlessly used and looked to technology to advance their ideas and make a huge impact.
