Looking forward, looking back

Lessons learned since making the internal leap

One year ago I made the decision to make a major career change. I left IDEO, an amazing company to work for, in order to join a very different kind of organization, considered “one of Europe’s most interesting technology companies”.

Since then it’s been a remarkable 12 months.

On the second day in my new role, somebody asked why I would make such a move. For me the reasons were three: people, purpose, and platforms.

My initial justifications still hold true, though now they are complemented with examples and evidence of how my past experience and current and future motivations have all come together.

For 12 years I worked at IDEO, the genesis of human centered design and everything that’s come out of it. When working at IDEO, you are constantly catapulted into the heart of driving massive change. You get to define an opportunity and make it tangible. But I got to the point that I wanted to actually help implement that change.

For the last year I‘ve been growing Design at Zalando as their Vice President of Design, a role that didn’t previously exist. And I am proud to say that I have been part of lots of massive and positive change.

So, back to the reasons why I loved the work I did in the past, and what I love so much about what I’m doing now…

People.

As a designer working in a consultancy, I was surrounded by incredibly positive and optimistic people trying to solve the most complex problems out there. Consistently changing topics, projects and industries makes you incredibly versatile and adaptable, training you to see human patterns, business opportunities and universal truths.

When I went internal, I joined a small but growing team of designers at Zalando. They had planted the seeds for what is becoming a more and more mature design organization, with centralized and embedded designers defining and designing both customer and business facing propositions along the entire product life cycle. It’s been a delight to work with a group of people from around the world, who have moved to Berlin seeking a different kind of impact. People who role up their sleeves to deliver something new and outstanding, and where execution mode is the default mode. Another highlight is the cooperation among teams…pushing out a new “outfit” section within three weeks would not be possible without the smooth collaboration between product, design, user research and engineering.

Having a leadership team that enables and trusts me to tackle new, grand ideas has helped me grow wings in truly unexpected ways. The essence of effective leadership is having a vision, and creating the belief and conviction in your people that even if there are unknowns, you can conquer them. We recently spent a couple of months working on a full blown market facing pilot of our next generation digital experience. Seeing it become reality, despite several setbacks, makes you humble, grateful and more confident, if not bullish.

Note to self: Don’t pick a role or title, but the people you believe in to lead and to be lead by.

Purpose.

Having positive impact has become a common theme of our times. But how do you translate purpose and connect it with business strategy on a day-to-day basis? At IDEO, I tried to turn every connection to the outside world into an opportunity for design in order to come up with a more valuable, meaningful connection to customers with new value propositions. But how would this tactic translate once I was the one inside a large corporation? Surprisingly well, I must say. But patience and persistence are required as fully dedicated resources and time are rare, and there is also no final presentation. Because our goal is to reimagine fashion, we are constantly connecting the dots and resetting priorities. Once in execution-land, purpose must become a guiding principle, especially in light of business objectives and the many trade-offs made on an ongoing basis: who benefits in the short term to set the foundation for the long term? How do you define success when what we’re building can not be simply evaluated by an A/B test? How do you align teams with different incentives and objectives? A clear purpose is what keeps decision-making velocity high.

Note to self: Only if your own motivations match the purpose of the organization, will you be able to achieve something bigger than what you do by yourself.

Platforms.

Platforms are by definition about creating value at scale. In the past, when working on developing new financial services, I learned how difficult it is to go beyond traditional business models, legacy technologies and regulations. And yet, the largest transformations happening right now are those that fundamentally question one-to-one relationships by creating opportunities for many-to-many players at the same time.

I see design as a platform for change, enabling teams to collaborate, to look at customer problems differently and, most importantly, to help nurture a different culture. A couple of weeks ago, we started measuring design’s impact as a capability. We undertook this task to assess Zalando’s design maturity, in order to understand how we, as a fairly new capability, are progressing and how much value we create for the organization and the business.

The path to build a platform is long and windy. I heard myself saying over and over, that you have to start small, keep iterating and not confuse the experiment as the scalable solution. The temptation to settle on early, unrefined ideas as the solution is so great, especially when so many people have put so much effort and love into the work.

Building a platform is a fascinating endeavour from a organisational, technical and business point of view. It’s an enormous task to make sure that everything we build scales, allowing us to steer our business while remaining lean and nimble, without creating a fragmented customer experience — it is certainly not for the faint of heart!

So stay tuned…the best things are yet to come and will start to go live this summer.

Note to self: Pick your next assignment in light of the unknown use cases you want to tackle, not the parts you already know about your new job.

It’s time to scratch the “external”. I made the right choice to go internal. Join us and help reimagine fashion.