![[RE-RELEASE] Exploring Design Inspiration from Picasso to Cyberpunk](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/designing-next/re-release-exploring-design-kbsaem28BYH-P_dusHE0ljh.1400x1400.jpg "[RE-RELEASE] Exploring Design Inspiration from Picasso to Cyberpunk")
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Welcome to episode 22 of Designing Next, achieving growth through transformation and innovation. I'm your host, Steve Koch, and with me as always is Chad Ruff. And Chad, believe it or not, it's November already. Here we are, we're getting ready for the holidays. We're getting ready for cold, colder weather, and of course, we're planning for 2022. How are you processing all of this?
speaker-0: Steve, I think about you this time of year and known you now for several years. And I remember two years ago being down with you in the beautiful Arizona desert when we first talked about this podcast. And
speaker-1: That's right.
speaker-0: we've been doing this for two years now, and I remember that very year coming home to the cold, snowy Omaha weather for Halloween. so I just am reflective on All the guests that we've had when we first talked about this two years ago, when I visited you and the amazing things we've learned, the great people who've been willing to share their story. You and I two years ago were hoping to create a community of people around design and innovation that we could draw upon and connect in what we do. And today we've got somebody who I think will really speak to that with our guest, Tanya Browning.
speaker-1: Yeah, it is it is interesting to reflect two years ago what we envisioned and it's been quite a ride. We've had a a lot of amazing guests, and I'm sure we're gonna have many more. And we're gonna start with today absolutely an amazing guest. as you mentioned, Tanya Browning is joining us. She is with Dell Digital, and she's actually the first vice president of design in Dell's IT organization, which is called Dell Digital. And her mission there is to Build a modern design practice as the organization transforms and adopts modern methodologies as well as new technologies. And as we'll hear in our conversation, she has quite a bit of expertise and she's incredibly passionate about design, about software engineering, about usability, about content, and especially about accessibility. You know, she has so many varied experiences that that she can draw upon to share. Her knowledge with us. You know, she's implemented enterprise level applications and digital experiences for so many organizations, including PayPal, Express Scripts, Cigna, Magento, Visa, as well as a number of startups, including one she founded. So as you can imagine, there's going to be so much to talk about with Tanya. She has a really interesting perspective across all of these different subjects. So, Chad, what can our listeners look forward to learning?
speaker-0: You know, Steve I think people are sometimes affectionately called a unicorn because they've just got some really unique skills and experiences. And Tanya is is one of those people and where she draws inspiration from with her background and I think our our audience will enjoy hearing from her. I look forward to Tanya talking about the key waypoints that she uses around design leadership at large companies and also just being able to speak from her experiences working at small startups. to large enterprise organizations like Dell and how she has learned over the course of her career around failing fast and the importance of doing that from a design perspective and when it works and when it doesn't. Tanya has a lot to share, a lot of experiences that she's drawn f from, whether it be her academic background, some of her interests and in the things that she's done professionally.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. A lot to hear from when it comes to design and feeling fast and and I think it's gonna be a really great conversation and we're gonna get to it right after the break. Hi, this is Jonathan Patheis, Director of Experience Design at Cast and Hue. Cast and Hue is an experienced design consultancy and a sponsor of Designing Next. Today I'm with one of our strategists, Taylor Hughes. Taylor, what's your preferred method of qualitative research?
speaker-2: There are a lot of options out there. Most of our research is centered around needs and decision making drivers. Our process is to establish empathy, walk through the journey, and then probe deep on insights to get at the core of a thought or idea. We use discussion guides as guardrails for an interview, but we really like to have flexibility to dig deeper if we hear something interesting. Because of this, we prefer one-on-one interviews to something like focus groups.
speaker-1: Why do you avoid focus groups?
speaker-2: Focus groups create an artificial scenario compared to a one-on-one conversation. It's also been proven that people are more likely to show biases or adjust answers depending on others in the room. And there's always the risk of one strong voice dominating the conversation. We're interested in a wider range of unbiased answers.
speaker-1: Sounds great. And where can people learn more?
speaker-2: You can learn more at cast and hew.com slash interviews or visit the link in the show notes.
speaker-1: Welcome, Tanya. Thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-2: Thank you for having me.
speaker-1: Absolutely. We're really looking forward to the conversation. And you know, over the past couple of seasons of the podcast, we've found that our guests have really so many unique pathways into innovation, human-centered design, and design thinking careers. And so we'd like to start out talking about your journey and knowing a bit about your background. we'd love to hear about your approach to education. We know you've made it really a priority to learn from a lot of different perspectives. Can you share a bit about that?
speaker-2: Certainly. So in my own background, I have a number of different types of degrees as well as experience across startups and large corporations. I think that this matters in the way that you approach the work. So for me, I started out as an English major. I I love content, I love copy, but I was also very obsessed with computers. And so what I was looking for. in my graduate work was an opportunity to learn more about design and specifically multimedia design and how that aligned with humanities. So the even the literature side for me, I was incredibly interested in cyberpunk. So I was really interested in the combination of science, biology, humanity, and where that was taking us. So all these things were connected. And I was able at the University of Texas at Austin to shift into more of that interdisciplinary type of role. So for example, I received my doctorate from the University of Texas and I petitioned the university to allow me to take computer programming courses as part of the stipulation for having two languages for your dissertation, right? So I was the first one. Allowed to do so. And it was incredibly meaningful. I took the entire undergraduate curriculum in computer science and it really gave me the toolkit for design and content and the work I do today. My dissertation was about multimedia and the humanities, and really how I looked at it was what I called the virtual palimcest. So I don't know if you know what a palimcest is. But when paper was super expensive, people would take things like animal skins, treat them with like a citric acid, scrape them, and reuse them again. And so palimps us have all this embedded meaning beneath them. And I really think of the computer in that same way. a computer has how we're interacting now, maybe it's audio, maybe you're doing video underneath that. Is the operating system underneath that is the context and constraints for that communication. Maybe you're using physical artifacts like a microphone. Maybe you're looking at motion design. Maybe you're using an assisted device because you can't visually see to interact with the same content. So we work within Palent Cess today. They're just virtual. And I was really interested to see how. We moved from manuscript to book. And if we were going to move from book to virtual, the interface in the same type of way. So the way to think about that is books did not just emerge, right? Books were not just, you know, you didn't come with pagination, you didn't have colophons, you didn't have any of the sort of architecture artifacts for books structurally and navigationally. We didn't have that for computers either. So, where we started with computers was really more from a skeworphic perspective. We started imitating things we already knew. So when you see a save icon today and it looks like a floppy disk, be aware your kids have no idea what that is. They think that's that just means, okay, I'm gonna save. Or you know what? It should be saving in the background. So I think that this is really important for people to hear that to have those types of academic experiences across. I took courses in architecture, computer science, yes, mathematics, you know, humanities, that all mattered because I was, you know, really learning at a time when the internet was growing and evolving. And I think that that becomes very much a part of how we grow and evolve in our own careers. And so what I learned there was that you had to learn the foundations. I don't have to be the greatest visual designer in the world, but I have to understand basic color theory. I have to know from a content or generative content perspective, what are the best rules and foundations. And so from there, I thought, you know, I would become this professor at some small liberal arts college. And instead, I went to my first startup. So I worked. during my career at four different startups, along with some pretty large companies. But I think it's really important for all of you guys to kind of hear that journey, that even as we're evolving our own practices, you know, be aware that there is a lot of malleability in the way that our own technologies work. And the thing I loved about the book, so when you would moved from the manuscript to the book, you moved into the democratization of technology. And what Gutenberg did for us. And there is a Gutenberg at the University of Texas, I've actually touched with gloves, with gloves, whoever's listening. But think about it the same way in terms of our technology, of access, of ability to learn, to have that as a tool. So when you say education, I think of this really deeply because I think we're still growing in the way we use our tools, the way we understand our tools, and the way we evolve them. And then how does that enable that democratization approach? So it's probably way more than you wanted to know, Steve, but I could go on and on forever.
speaker-1: So fascinating, yeah.
speaker-0: I'd say not at all. I I think it's fascinating to hear about manuscript, the book, and the computer, that history, and and how you see how that evolves with the malleability of our technologies. Tanya, you that background you just spoke of has enabled you to work at startups and large organizations. Can you talk about your career path and how it's it spans those different sizes of it organs or of organizations and and how design is approached differently? from your experiences.
speaker-2: certainly again. So I started out after my graduate work at a small woman-owned multimedia company. And still the only place other than my own startup that I've ever worked that was owned by women. And we worked on a lot of educational multimedia software. And it was a really wonderful learning ground for me. It was a company called Top Drawer that's no longer around. But what I learned was one how to design motion and multimedia using tools like Macromedia's director at the time. Also the programming languages that accompanied it. Early in my career at another startup such as Globeset, I've always had a foot in both the design and front-end engineering part of the world. So I was able to write in the appropriate code base. I was able to design, and of course, I really loved the copy and content part of it because of the real start of my career. And at that time, really I found what was so interesting at startups is that no one cared I had a PhD. In fact, in fact, you had to prove yourself, I think, even more. In my whole career, I think I've really only mentioned or talked about having a PhD once. And that's because I was at a company that had MDs. So it was important that they talked About who was a doctor. But what I loved about the startup culture and smaller companies is that you could do it all. I was like, hey, I've never done that. Let me raise my hand. let me learn more. And I really learned about the nature of failing fast, being flexible, questioning and having conversations and collaborating. that really became the testing ground for what I think of as a feedback type mentality and really focusing on the human. But I have tremendous respect for people working in those environments because you wear many hats. And wearing many hats means you get a lot of experience. What I did not understand till I moved to a larger company was actually scale and scope. So when my startup imploded, half of the company went to American Express and the other half of us, myself included, went to Visa. And Visa taught me scale and scope and managing both engineering and design teams as I have done in my entire career. Now, again, my sweet spot is more front end, but I've always had content developers, behavioral scientists, designers on my team. But I have a deep love for really understanding what we started out with, the context of the palimpsess and constraints. I can design anything in sketch and Figma and Photoshop. If you're a developer, you may not have a chance in heck of actually implementing it. You know, part of it is kind of understanding the rules so you know how to break them, how you know how to transcend them. I I really think that those two things go hand in hand. So going to a place like Visa, which just had a tremendous amount of investment and strength. And being reliable. The five nines of what we think about it in terms of reliability to a company like PayPal, where I took what I learned about scope and scale to invest in a company that I thought was really interesting in terms of again, democratization and approach to enabling anyone with access to payments, to financial support. I I love the egalitarian nature of it because think about it. Prior to PayPal and solutions like PayPal, you had to go to a bank. You had to work with a bank. If you had problems with your financial history, maybe you had personal problems, maybe you're an ex con. You know, it doesn't mean that now you're not able to perform and be successful. And I loved PayPal gave so many entrepreneurs then and today opportunity to work outside traditional. structures. So again, kind of evolving. I worked at a company called Magento, which is now part of Adobe, that was all open source e-commerce. So instead of closed networks like a visa, you know, able to think about Magento and how we looked at open source, open source commerce, ways to provide information, data, ways to make choices. And then there was this really robust developer community contributing. To that core offering. And this is making me at the risk of making me sound a million years old. You know, going from there to healthcare, I was really interested in working at Express scripts who are going through a transformation in technology. They're now part of Cigna. But, you know, again, so much of this comes out of our personal experience. You know, I watched what had happened in the United States was that a lot of people who have been relying on general practitioners to help them understand their journey from my own, it had disappeared. And so seeing my own parents struggle with I have five specialists and none of these medications work together. And I was really interested in digital transformation there. And today, being in a company like Dell Technologies, which is not the hardware company of old, with EMC and the acquisition in 2016. Yes, we just hit five years. I really love the notion of connected commerce. We are a full infrastructure company. So we have software, services, cloud. And it's very egalitarian. We have an environment that allows you to buy a $400 computer or a million-dollar piece of equipment for your data center. And there's a real power to that. So my professional journey. has been led quite a bit by good partners, people I've worked with in the past, but also my own interests and learning more about these different areas to which design could be brought in to really empower the experience.
speaker-1: Yeah. I love your perspective on your experience too, in terms of what you learned at each at each time in your career as well as what you were looking for in that next step. It it was thank you for taking us on that journey. And and so you've learned so much over the years, right? And and in fact you you just wrote recently wrote a piece on medium, on design leadership at large companies. And I thought that piece was really great. And
speaker-0: Mm.
speaker-1: We think a lot. And you identified in the piece three waypoints that you learned along the way. So I'd love it if you could share with our audience those waypoints and and why they are so important.
speaker-2: Course, and thank you for taking the time to read that. I was really excited to use a meme. So there's a Lord of the Rings meme in there as well. but I really thought of it in the context of the things that I've learned. You know, I didn't really talk about as much of my startup experience, but I had my own company, my own startup. I learned that I was terrible at sales. I learned quite a bit about myself. in that experience. And I really wanted this to sort of inform others. So, from a design leadership perspective, but I think it's fairly relevant in any kind of technology leadership kind of role, building allies and champions, especially because design had not always been institutionalized in companies when I joined. There is a period of time you really have to spend time building those allies, making sure that those folks are funding those efforts, are working with you, are seeing outcomes driven by that. My dream is always for those champions. So those are the advocates for design, design thinking, customer sentiment measures. So those champions are saying, why isn't design at the table? How are we thinking about our customers, the humans using these products. I think what we've really seen shift in the last 10 years. It's not, hey, I have a great product and everyone's going to love it. And I'm an expert and I know this area and I'm going to build this. It's, you know, what questions are we asking, answering? What problems are we solving for these customers, for these humans? and I think champions get that. It's not about Hey, I know everything. I know everything about infrastructure and I can tell you exactly how this is going to work too. I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to enable the people using these tools every day to be the best they can be. And then how you do that? Funding, funding, funding. This is probably the least comfortable part of it for me personally. Nobody likes asking for money. Having champions who advocate who set aside money, but we this is really how everyone deals with thinking about planning and strategy. You know, are you a quarterly company? There's a big difference between a publicly and privately held company. I've been at both, right? Are you measuring things in terms of your quarterly outcomes? Are you looking from a longevity perspective? I also think. There are a lot of different ways. I've been in models where we were, I thought of it as a tithing model. You know, 10% goes to design of the 100% of the allocation. Sometimes it's a ratio. What I have found is that understanding the measures that the company uses to really talk about success and value have to be integrated into your own plan. So as a design leader, we all know. Customer sentiment measures. We can all talk about ease of use scores or CES, customer effort scores. You can talk about MPS, net promoter score, CSAC, customer satisfaction. You can talk about all of those time to interact. You can talk about all those different things that we measure to understand that experience, but they have got to be tied to outcomes that drive the company. So if it's revenue. if it's a brand measure. And then further up in the chain, you've also got to tie it to your larger strategies. So if your company is using like KPIs, key performance indicators, or they're using OKRs, objectives and key results. Or in our case, we use OGMs, OGSMs quite a bit, objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. So you have to tie these things together to show that value. And that is what helps drive those font funding conversations. Now there have been times when I've led teams with a PL. I could manage with that money, but you're still having the larger conversation about how much do you need to be successful. I always find it interesting when people are like, well, there's lean UX. You you guys can handle that. Lean UX means you don't need all these people. Like, that's not what lean UX means. It's about being iterate rapidly and Understanding your customer, but it doesn't mean that we come in at the last minute and make something look good. It should never be about what it looks like. It should be about what those experience outcomes are. And in fact, for almost all the teams I've worked with and worked on, we always have examples that have no visual components. Here's where we went in and optimized the workflow. Here's how we saved five seconds per agent, and that translated into X number of dollars. Those are the kind of things that matter to a company and you've got to learn that language. And then finally, transparency. I think being transparent with both your team and your customers is incredibly important. It speaks to your integrity. It also speaks to the way you communicate things like lifetime value, right? And all those loyalty measures. But transparency is even greater from a team. Perspective, which I talk about, which is what what are your job descriptions? What is your career trajectory? What is your opportunity? And from a customer sentiment measure, all of our dashboards are available to anyone at the company who's a full-time employee. We are not here to hide data. We are here to share data and drive the larger outcomes. So that was the quick and dirty version. If you want to learn about my obsession with Lord of the Rings and a lot of Writers from a cyberpunk perspective. Feel free to read more.
speaker-1: Yeah, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes.
speaker-2: Yes.
speaker-0: I'm tanya, you know, Steve said to you early, it's really awesome to listen to you, you know, talk about your journey and how you draw meaning from all the different steps in that journey. You you talk about failing fast. And I love what you said in the early days when you got started, you know, with technology, changes couldn't be made quickly. And when the race was over, you kind of got what you had, you know, you it you were finished. And nowadays everybody talks about failing fast, and you talk about What works and what doesn't in terms of cultures who who seek out to fail fast. what what are some of the the things that you believe have to exist inside an organization to do that well?
speaker-2: Failing fast is a term a lot of people say and a lot of companies say, but not many of them do well. And we're very fortunate in this era of technology in that we have modern architectures that can help us fail fast and make changes quickly. I think to have those foundations matter. So the way I think of it is a modern data platform. Your data has to be reliable. And it has to be reliable on and offline. You know, the prices you tell people need to be the same, right? The medical information you provide to doctors and the humans using it and nurses and people helping them, those that data reliability, those modern data platforms are critical. Then you have to have the flexible architecture to enable rapid change. So obviously there are companies, technology companies that have grown organically. Dell's a good example of that, which means you have a mix of architectures. And the larger the company is, the less likely it is that they're shared. So how do you make sure if you can make changes quickly in one place, it's reflected across the entire end-to-end experience. One way to do that is using tools and platforms, like we have a design language system. I've been a bit big advocate of design language systems. They were called pattern libraries in the past. Design systems, I've seen them evolve. really, the way I always talk about this is we're at PayPal. we're all familiar with the omnipresent submit button. We've all seen submit buttons. And one of the engineers went through and just looked at all the code. See how many versions of those submit buttons. And we had a designer kind of go look and see how many designs. 50 versions, plus, actually, plus, I think at some point I just quit looking after. But those are not the kind of things you want your really smart and capable development teams redoing. Nobody wants to redo the submit button. Let's look at the core components we can do. We can change, we can ensure are accessible so we can make sure that anyone using assistive device, humans with disabilities, can interact with your products. So design language systems are a good way to do that. In fact, Delldesign System.com, you can take a look even outside of Dell to see examples of this. And then content management that helps ensure again rapid change, change that again has all this. Automated capability we didn't have in the past. So our CI CD type of pipelines that ensure programmatically, you know, we're using inclusive language, we're we've got it at the right reading level, and we're building rapidly, but when we get it wrong, we can change that. I think for Dell and also have done this in my last couple companies, the model of experimentation, multivariant testing or A-B testing, if you want to think of it that way, is crucial. You have these foundations. You want to test and experiment, iterate with humans, right? And that product model. So we'll put together those recipes to then test at scale, sometimes in a complete a different country to mitigate risk and learn. And then as you learn, you change those designs. Now, of course, there are a lot of companies out there that programmatically will change the design based on those outcomes. But I think that failing fast is such a powerful thing when it means you can experiment and test. And if you get it wrong, you can change it. people will sometimes claim that those are guardrails and you can't innovate, and I disagree. You know, look at the early works of Pablo Picasso. Portrait of the artist's mother actually is a great example. Classic, classic lines, you would never guess it was Picasso. Picasso had no rules to transcend the rules. And that's how I think of those foundations. great example, too. At Express Scripts, we put together a new business called Insiderx. It was a way to help. The uninsured or underinsured in the United States get access to medications at a lower cost. Express scripts at the time was this closed network, but had access to all these medications, they could offer at a lower cost. And we started out with the premise that hey, we're going to make this an app and it's going to work great on your phone, and people can use it at pharmacies. Well, when we tested it in Sutu, so when we tested it in the pharmacies with the humans, so I'm a big believer in testing with the humans.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-2: versus personas, we found that, you know, we really hadn't considered that those humans may have older phones. They may not have as much bandwidth. They may not have as much room on their phone. They weren't really interested in downloading another app. But what they said back to us was, well, I'd love this in my wallet. Like can it work as a coupon? So in the space of two weeks, huge credit to the whole team that did this. pivoted to building that wallet experience to enable them to purchase this subset of medications at a discount, which then became also opportunity to publish pet medications. And then here we are several years later, where there is an app, right? Because there is that level of business and that opportunity to offer additional savings. But to me, that is a perfect real world example of a product That saved consumers $100 million in its first year to pivot when you need to pivot to understand to listen to what they're telling you. I know everyone uses that famous Henry Ford quote: if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. I think that's unfair. And the reason is you need to give them a chance to practice and learn with the solutions. You're trying to understand their problem, and your solution may or may not work for them. And it can be an incredibly different and distinct solution. And we know sometimes that means it takes longer for them to learn. back in the day, we moved what I think of as a green screen application for Visa to a web-based application. There have been people using that green screen for years. What we did was we found the original. Print out that that green screen application was based upon. So I'm like, so the reason you don't want to move to this web base is you know how this works. Well, if you think about it, this was actually for an analog world. We took an analog world, remember that panel's this. We put it in this green screen world, which was still rather analog in terms of its organizational navigational properties, and then we moved it to virtual. Well, virtual meant from a web based perspective, we changed everything. navigation to where things were located, but we gave them so much power in terms of understanding what happened, making recommendations. And that took time. And so that's another thing I think you consider in terms of failing fast. You can fail fast, but if it is a new product, it has a significant innovation, you need to also plan for that time for for people to learn and be able to truthfully evaluate after understanding the benefit to that.
speaker-1: Great. lot of lot of interesting examples there that really brings that to life, which we appreciate. You know, Tanya, we've talked about all your experience. You've you've been at these different types of organizations, you've learned so much. You've had a role in in bringing design to life at each of these organizations. And you know, I think a lot of our listeners would like to do that as well. There's a lot of folks we talked to that want to say, how can how can I bring more of a design focus to the organization I'm a part of? And so What what advice would you give to people in those situations as they're trying to to to go down that path?
speaker-2: So I think a great place for anyone to start is to learn more about design thinking. How do I ask these questions? How do I understand the problem statement as opposed to what I think the solution is, or jumping right to the solution? You do not have to be a designer to be a design thinker and to learn from design thinking. But I think the next step is hiring people who know design, who have done this before. who know what good looks like. You know, I find it super interesting. I think this is very true of content as well. Humans are like, I use websites all the time, I use mobile apps, I know what good looks like, but don't understand the work that has to happen to ensure consistency, beauty, delight, and all those pieces of it. And so I think you start with understanding more about design. You hire people who can help you and you integrate it into your methodology. So I've done waterfall, agile. We're now using a product model that was based on the pivotal methodology that Dell owned that became part of VMware. And that is a balanced team model. So that means there is a product, this is important, not a project, not a program. There's a product manager. There is a designer or designers, right? And there's an engineering team. And that if you want to think of it as three in the box, sometimes in the industry, it's called, but that balanced team where you're working on all elements together. You use a lot of the ceremonies of agile, the stand-ups, but you know, you really want to look at a storytelling epics. I can go into detail, but what you're really thinking about there is design is there at the beginning. And is enabling helping, but think of it this way developments there at the beginning. When you use the old waterfall methodology, engineers often didn't even know what the intended goal of the product was. It was do X, Y, and Z make this calendar widget work. Let's call it that. Make the calendar widget work. Without understanding what that goal was for the humans using the product. And when you're all in that together, even though you're going to have greater skills, a greater points of the iterative journey to contribute, everyone's on the same page and everyone's working toward those same outcomes, not output. I cannot stress that enough, whether you're using pods, what however your teams are broken up, understanding that those outcome-driven perspectives are what are incredibly powerful. And I think that's where I've seen a real significant change. Again, there's always a new flavor. And new methodology, I believe a lot of it is about how you position that feedback, that value that the customer has in connection to your own work. And when it's your own work, okay, I'm building a calendar widget, but it's gonna help this person be successful in managing this aspect of their business, it has a lot more relevance to me as say a developer. versus I've been given a task and I'm gonna do a task. I I I really just think that hopefully those days are going away because those are not either rewarding jobs or great outcomes.
speaker-0: Well, Tanya, you you have such an interesting perspective on the journey you've taken of the past. I also suspect you have a lot of insight about the future. And we always like to to wrap up our podcast asking our guests what what they see as next in design and in your case in large organizations or or just generally in in the the product leadership spaces that that you're in today.
speaker-2: So what is next as we see things evolving? I think I can speak to in a general way, you know, I wish I could predict all of this. I I really do think it is more of what we call human experience. So no one works in a linear path anymore. when you build products, you have to build them for all these contexts. I may be using a phone, I may be talking to a device. I may have notifications coming from someone in my family, someone in my business. How do you integrate this into a cohesive whole for the humans using their products is really to me the next step in evolution. So, for example, in the design language system we have today, we have a lot of motion design and data visualization design would have never had in old design systems or pattern libraries, right? So So much of this is thinking about those contexts and thinking about new ways of measuring. I know McKinsey's report talked about measure journeys, not touch points. I thought that that was a really good way to think of it. I think where in the past, you know, hey, I'm gonna have this great design. Well, design in a vacuum is not gonna help. design across that human experience that digital ecosystem, maybe a better way, is where we're headed. And that's going to have power. Whether you're using third parties, whether you're building some of it yourself, you know, we've all seen shifts in buy versus build. I really think it's it's a combination, but we also have to be willing to learn. We have to be willing to learn from places where we didn't always see this. You know, I was very interested in gaming interfaces. What do we learn about motion? What we learn about attention and how people pay attention? It's not just exploration or completion of a goal, but experience within that context. And to me, what are we building tomorrow in the context of all these other experiences? Think about it. You for folks who've grown up as digital natives, especially Gen Z, this is their world. And they Interact with it very differently. So no one's using email under the age of 25. you know, the days of sort of these slideware presentations, how we interact, I think are going to change within our industry. And I think they're being driven by a lot of the right things. However, and here is my big caveat, and one of the reasons I love being back at a global company. Everybody in the world is not created equal. So how do you build designs that have a global approach? How do you think about humans with disabilities and making sure anyone can interact and use those products and designs that you build? You know, how do you think about the environment and how we focus on environmental outcomes and footprints? I love the holistic direction we're moving. And I think it's a wonderful place for us to be. I'm hoping for a utopia, not a dystopia. I did say I started out in cyberpunk with a lot of dystopias, but I will say that I see opportunity and possibility in places that didn't exist before. And I think design is an enabler in those areas.
speaker-1: That's great. I love that vision. I love that thinking about human experience and that holistic view. So it's a great way to end just a a a fascinating, wide ranging conversation. start it out learning all sorts of new terms, like plumpset. Am I saying that
speaker-2: Last challenge.
speaker-1: palum set? We'll leave that in there because I'm I'm learning, but palimpset, and I'm gonna I've already Googled it, so I'm gonna read more about that later. but yeah, thank you so much, Toddy. We really appreciate your time and and sharing so much with with Chad and I and our audience.
speaker-2: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
speaker-1: We did as well. Thank you so much. Chad, I mean, I feel like I learned so much from that conversation with Tanya. What stood out for you?
speaker-0: There there just really great moments in Tanya's story. I I loved hearing about her experience at the University of Texas when she petitioned the university for her s her language requirement to be around coding and using computer programming to count towards those two languages required for her doctorate. That just speaks to Tanya knew what she wanted to do very early on in her life and she's dedicated her life to to being a an innovative product designer. I really appreciate what she shared in terms of learning from working at startups and wearing many hats, which taught her the nature of failing fast, being flexible, questioning and having conversations around collaboration and testing things at the ground level for what she called the feedback type mentality and really focusing on the human. Lastly, I just you know, the failing fast term, which is maybe arguably overused. A lot of companies say it, but not many of them do that well. And I really like like what Tanya had to say about that. that failing fast is a powerful thing, when it means that you can experiment and test and if you get it wrong, you can change it.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So much so much to think about there in terms of, you know, you don't just fail fast, but you you need to prepare for it. You need to be structured in order to fail fast successfully. and I, you know, I loved how she talked about something we don't often talk about, which is funding and how important that is to design projects and and related to that, understanding the measures. that the company you work for uses to really talk about the success of the organization and and making sure that you're building that value into your own plan and just always tying everything you do from a design perspective into the outcomes that drive success for the company. Yeah she said it's something you know we oftentimes some people don't want to talk about, but if you're gonna be successful, you have to talk about it. So a lot to take away from that conversation and I I really enjoyed it. And to make sure our new episodes are delivered to you every two weeks and of course sometimes three weeks, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-0: And we're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or contact us directly at podcast at castinhoe dot com.
speaker-1: Thanks everyone, and we'll speak with you soon.
speaker-1: Welcome to episode 22 of Designing Next, achieving growth through transformation and innovation. I'm your host, Steve Koch, and with me as always is Chad Ruff. And Chad, believe it or not, it's November already. Here we are, we're getting ready for the holidays. We're getting ready for cold, colder weather, and of course, we're planning for 2022. How are you processing all of this?
speaker-0: Steve, I think about you this time of year and known you now for several years. And I remember two years ago being down with you in the beautiful Arizona desert when we first talked about this podcast. And
speaker-1: That's right.
speaker-0: we've been doing this for two years now, and I remember that very year coming home to the cold, snowy Omaha weather for Halloween. so I just am reflective on All the guests that we've had when we first talked about this two years ago, when I visited you and the amazing things we've learned, the great people who've been willing to share their story. You and I two years ago were hoping to create a community of people around design and innovation that we could draw upon and connect in what we do. And today we've got somebody who I think will really speak to that with our guest, Tanya Browning.
speaker-1: Yeah, it is it is interesting to reflect two years ago what we envisioned and it's been quite a ride. We've had a a lot of amazing guests, and I'm sure we're gonna have many more. And we're gonna start with today absolutely an amazing guest. as you mentioned, Tanya Browning is joining us. She is with Dell Digital, and she's actually the first vice president of design in Dell's IT organization, which is called Dell Digital. And her mission there is to Build a modern design practice as the organization transforms and adopts modern methodologies as well as new technologies. And as we'll hear in our conversation, she has quite a bit of expertise and she's incredibly passionate about design, about software engineering, about usability, about content, and especially about accessibility. You know, she has so many varied experiences that that she can draw upon to share. Her knowledge with us. You know, she's implemented enterprise level applications and digital experiences for so many organizations, including PayPal, Express Scripts, Cigna, Magento, Visa, as well as a number of startups, including one she founded. So as you can imagine, there's going to be so much to talk about with Tanya. She has a really interesting perspective across all of these different subjects. So, Chad, what can our listeners look forward to learning?
speaker-0: You know, Steve I think people are sometimes affectionately called a unicorn because they've just got some really unique skills and experiences. And Tanya is is one of those people and where she draws inspiration from with her background and I think our our audience will enjoy hearing from her. I look forward to Tanya talking about the key waypoints that she uses around design leadership at large companies and also just being able to speak from her experiences working at small startups. to large enterprise organizations like Dell and how she has learned over the course of her career around failing fast and the importance of doing that from a design perspective and when it works and when it doesn't. Tanya has a lot to share, a lot of experiences that she's drawn f from, whether it be her academic background, some of her interests and in the things that she's done professionally.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. A lot to hear from when it comes to design and feeling fast and and I think it's gonna be a really great conversation and we're gonna get to it right after the break. Hi, this is Jonathan Patheis, Director of Experience Design at Cast and Hue. Cast and Hue is an experienced design consultancy and a sponsor of Designing Next. Today I'm with one of our strategists, Taylor Hughes. Taylor, what's your preferred method of qualitative research?
speaker-2: There are a lot of options out there. Most of our research is centered around needs and decision making drivers. Our process is to establish empathy, walk through the journey, and then probe deep on insights to get at the core of a thought or idea. We use discussion guides as guardrails for an interview, but we really like to have flexibility to dig deeper if we hear something interesting. Because of this, we prefer one-on-one interviews to something like focus groups.
speaker-1: Why do you avoid focus groups?
speaker-2: Focus groups create an artificial scenario compared to a one-on-one conversation. It's also been proven that people are more likely to show biases or adjust answers depending on others in the room. And there's always the risk of one strong voice dominating the conversation. We're interested in a wider range of unbiased answers.
speaker-1: Sounds great. And where can people learn more?
speaker-2: You can learn more at cast and hew.com slash interviews or visit the link in the show notes.
speaker-1: Welcome, Tanya. Thank you so much for joining us today.
speaker-2: Thank you for having me.
speaker-1: Absolutely. We're really looking forward to the conversation. And you know, over the past couple of seasons of the podcast, we've found that our guests have really so many unique pathways into innovation, human-centered design, and design thinking careers. And so we'd like to start out talking about your journey and knowing a bit about your background. we'd love to hear about your approach to education. We know you've made it really a priority to learn from a lot of different perspectives. Can you share a bit about that?
speaker-2: Certainly. So in my own background, I have a number of different types of degrees as well as experience across startups and large corporations. I think that this matters in the way that you approach the work. So for me, I started out as an English major. I I love content, I love copy, but I was also very obsessed with computers. And so what I was looking for. in my graduate work was an opportunity to learn more about design and specifically multimedia design and how that aligned with humanities. So the even the literature side for me, I was incredibly interested in cyberpunk. So I was really interested in the combination of science, biology, humanity, and where that was taking us. So all these things were connected. And I was able at the University of Texas at Austin to shift into more of that interdisciplinary type of role. So for example, I received my doctorate from the University of Texas and I petitioned the university to allow me to take computer programming courses as part of the stipulation for having two languages for your dissertation, right? So I was the first one. Allowed to do so. And it was incredibly meaningful. I took the entire undergraduate curriculum in computer science and it really gave me the toolkit for design and content and the work I do today. My dissertation was about multimedia and the humanities, and really how I looked at it was what I called the virtual palimcest. So I don't know if you know what a palimcest is. But when paper was super expensive, people would take things like animal skins, treat them with like a citric acid, scrape them, and reuse them again. And so palimps us have all this embedded meaning beneath them. And I really think of the computer in that same way. a computer has how we're interacting now, maybe it's audio, maybe you're doing video underneath that. Is the operating system underneath that is the context and constraints for that communication. Maybe you're using physical artifacts like a microphone. Maybe you're looking at motion design. Maybe you're using an assisted device because you can't visually see to interact with the same content. So we work within Palent Cess today. They're just virtual. And I was really interested to see how. We moved from manuscript to book. And if we were going to move from book to virtual, the interface in the same type of way. So the way to think about that is books did not just emerge, right? Books were not just, you know, you didn't come with pagination, you didn't have colophons, you didn't have any of the sort of architecture artifacts for books structurally and navigationally. We didn't have that for computers either. So, where we started with computers was really more from a skeworphic perspective. We started imitating things we already knew. So when you see a save icon today and it looks like a floppy disk, be aware your kids have no idea what that is. They think that's that just means, okay, I'm gonna save. Or you know what? It should be saving in the background. So I think that this is really important for people to hear that to have those types of academic experiences across. I took courses in architecture, computer science, yes, mathematics, you know, humanities, that all mattered because I was, you know, really learning at a time when the internet was growing and evolving. And I think that that becomes very much a part of how we grow and evolve in our own careers. And so what I learned there was that you had to learn the foundations. I don't have to be the greatest visual designer in the world, but I have to understand basic color theory. I have to know from a content or generative content perspective, what are the best rules and foundations. And so from there, I thought, you know, I would become this professor at some small liberal arts college. And instead, I went to my first startup. So I worked. during my career at four different startups, along with some pretty large companies. But I think it's really important for all of you guys to kind of hear that journey, that even as we're evolving our own practices, you know, be aware that there is a lot of malleability in the way that our own technologies work. And the thing I loved about the book, so when you would moved from the manuscript to the book, you moved into the democratization of technology. And what Gutenberg did for us. And there is a Gutenberg at the University of Texas, I've actually touched with gloves, with gloves, whoever's listening. But think about it the same way in terms of our technology, of access, of ability to learn, to have that as a tool. So when you say education, I think of this really deeply because I think we're still growing in the way we use our tools, the way we understand our tools, and the way we evolve them. And then how does that enable that democratization approach? So it's probably way more than you wanted to know, Steve, but I could go on and on forever.
speaker-1: So fascinating, yeah.
speaker-0: I'd say not at all. I I think it's fascinating to hear about manuscript, the book, and the computer, that history, and and how you see how that evolves with the malleability of our technologies. Tanya, you that background you just spoke of has enabled you to work at startups and large organizations. Can you talk about your career path and how it's it spans those different sizes of it organs or of organizations and and how design is approached differently? from your experiences.
speaker-2: certainly again. So I started out after my graduate work at a small woman-owned multimedia company. And still the only place other than my own startup that I've ever worked that was owned by women. And we worked on a lot of educational multimedia software. And it was a really wonderful learning ground for me. It was a company called Top Drawer that's no longer around. But what I learned was one how to design motion and multimedia using tools like Macromedia's director at the time. Also the programming languages that accompanied it. Early in my career at another startup such as Globeset, I've always had a foot in both the design and front-end engineering part of the world. So I was able to write in the appropriate code base. I was able to design, and of course, I really loved the copy and content part of it because of the real start of my career. And at that time, really I found what was so interesting at startups is that no one cared I had a PhD. In fact, in fact, you had to prove yourself, I think, even more. In my whole career, I think I've really only mentioned or talked about having a PhD once. And that's because I was at a company that had MDs. So it was important that they talked About who was a doctor. But what I loved about the startup culture and smaller companies is that you could do it all. I was like, hey, I've never done that. Let me raise my hand. let me learn more. And I really learned about the nature of failing fast, being flexible, questioning and having conversations and collaborating. that really became the testing ground for what I think of as a feedback type mentality and really focusing on the human. But I have tremendous respect for people working in those environments because you wear many hats. And wearing many hats means you get a lot of experience. What I did not understand till I moved to a larger company was actually scale and scope. So when my startup imploded, half of the company went to American Express and the other half of us, myself included, went to Visa. And Visa taught me scale and scope and managing both engineering and design teams as I have done in my entire career. Now, again, my sweet spot is more front end, but I've always had content developers, behavioral scientists, designers on my team. But I have a deep love for really understanding what we started out with, the context of the palimpsess and constraints. I can design anything in sketch and Figma and Photoshop. If you're a developer, you may not have a chance in heck of actually implementing it. You know, part of it is kind of understanding the rules so you know how to break them, how you know how to transcend them. I I really think that those two things go hand in hand. So going to a place like Visa, which just had a tremendous amount of investment and strength. And being reliable. The five nines of what we think about it in terms of reliability to a company like PayPal, where I took what I learned about scope and scale to invest in a company that I thought was really interesting in terms of again, democratization and approach to enabling anyone with access to payments, to financial support. I I love the egalitarian nature of it because think about it. Prior to PayPal and solutions like PayPal, you had to go to a bank. You had to work with a bank. If you had problems with your financial history, maybe you had personal problems, maybe you're an ex con. You know, it doesn't mean that now you're not able to perform and be successful. And I loved PayPal gave so many entrepreneurs then and today opportunity to work outside traditional. structures. So again, kind of evolving. I worked at a company called Magento, which is now part of Adobe, that was all open source e-commerce. So instead of closed networks like a visa, you know, able to think about Magento and how we looked at open source, open source commerce, ways to provide information, data, ways to make choices. And then there was this really robust developer community contributing. To that core offering. And this is making me at the risk of making me sound a million years old. You know, going from there to healthcare, I was really interested in working at Express scripts who are going through a transformation in technology. They're now part of Cigna. But, you know, again, so much of this comes out of our personal experience. You know, I watched what had happened in the United States was that a lot of people who have been relying on general practitioners to help them understand their journey from my own, it had disappeared. And so seeing my own parents struggle with I have five specialists and none of these medications work together. And I was really interested in digital transformation there. And today, being in a company like Dell Technologies, which is not the hardware company of old, with EMC and the acquisition in 2016. Yes, we just hit five years. I really love the notion of connected commerce. We are a full infrastructure company. So we have software, services, cloud. And it's very egalitarian. We have an environment that allows you to buy a $400 computer or a million-dollar piece of equipment for your data center. And there's a real power to that. So my professional journey. has been led quite a bit by good partners, people I've worked with in the past, but also my own interests and learning more about these different areas to which design could be brought in to really empower the experience.
speaker-1: Yeah. I love your perspective on your experience too, in terms of what you learned at each at each time in your career as well as what you were looking for in that next step. It it was thank you for taking us on that journey. And and so you've learned so much over the years, right? And and in fact you you just wrote recently wrote a piece on medium, on design leadership at large companies. And I thought that piece was really great. And
speaker-0: Mm.
speaker-1: We think a lot. And you identified in the piece three waypoints that you learned along the way. So I'd love it if you could share with our audience those waypoints and and why they are so important.
speaker-2: Course, and thank you for taking the time to read that. I was really excited to use a meme. So there's a Lord of the Rings meme in there as well. but I really thought of it in the context of the things that I've learned. You know, I didn't really talk about as much of my startup experience, but I had my own company, my own startup. I learned that I was terrible at sales. I learned quite a bit about myself. in that experience. And I really wanted this to sort of inform others. So, from a design leadership perspective, but I think it's fairly relevant in any kind of technology leadership kind of role, building allies and champions, especially because design had not always been institutionalized in companies when I joined. There is a period of time you really have to spend time building those allies, making sure that those folks are funding those efforts, are working with you, are seeing outcomes driven by that. My dream is always for those champions. So those are the advocates for design, design thinking, customer sentiment measures. So those champions are saying, why isn't design at the table? How are we thinking about our customers, the humans using these products. I think what we've really seen shift in the last 10 years. It's not, hey, I have a great product and everyone's going to love it. And I'm an expert and I know this area and I'm going to build this. It's, you know, what questions are we asking, answering? What problems are we solving for these customers, for these humans? and I think champions get that. It's not about Hey, I know everything. I know everything about infrastructure and I can tell you exactly how this is going to work too. I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to enable the people using these tools every day to be the best they can be. And then how you do that? Funding, funding, funding. This is probably the least comfortable part of it for me personally. Nobody likes asking for money. Having champions who advocate who set aside money, but we this is really how everyone deals with thinking about planning and strategy. You know, are you a quarterly company? There's a big difference between a publicly and privately held company. I've been at both, right? Are you measuring things in terms of your quarterly outcomes? Are you looking from a longevity perspective? I also think. There are a lot of different ways. I've been in models where we were, I thought of it as a tithing model. You know, 10% goes to design of the 100% of the allocation. Sometimes it's a ratio. What I have found is that understanding the measures that the company uses to really talk about success and value have to be integrated into your own plan. So as a design leader, we all know. Customer sentiment measures. We can all talk about ease of use scores or CES, customer effort scores. You can talk about MPS, net promoter score, CSAC, customer satisfaction. You can talk about all of those time to interact. You can talk about all those different things that we measure to understand that experience, but they have got to be tied to outcomes that drive the company. So if it's revenue. if it's a brand measure. And then further up in the chain, you've also got to tie it to your larger strategies. So if your company is using like KPIs, key performance indicators, or they're using OKRs, objectives and key results. Or in our case, we use OGMs, OGSMs quite a bit, objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. So you have to tie these things together to show that value. And that is what helps drive those font funding conversations. Now there have been times when I've led teams with a PL. I could manage with that money, but you're still having the larger conversation about how much do you need to be successful. I always find it interesting when people are like, well, there's lean UX. You you guys can handle that. Lean UX means you don't need all these people. Like, that's not what lean UX means. It's about being iterate rapidly and Understanding your customer, but it doesn't mean that we come in at the last minute and make something look good. It should never be about what it looks like. It should be about what those experience outcomes are. And in fact, for almost all the teams I've worked with and worked on, we always have examples that have no visual components. Here's where we went in and optimized the workflow. Here's how we saved five seconds per agent, and that translated into X number of dollars. Those are the kind of things that matter to a company and you've got to learn that language. And then finally, transparency. I think being transparent with both your team and your customers is incredibly important. It speaks to your integrity. It also speaks to the way you communicate things like lifetime value, right? And all those loyalty measures. But transparency is even greater from a team. Perspective, which I talk about, which is what what are your job descriptions? What is your career trajectory? What is your opportunity? And from a customer sentiment measure, all of our dashboards are available to anyone at the company who's a full-time employee. We are not here to hide data. We are here to share data and drive the larger outcomes. So that was the quick and dirty version. If you want to learn about my obsession with Lord of the Rings and a lot of Writers from a cyberpunk perspective. Feel free to read more.
speaker-1: Yeah, we'll definitely link to that in the show notes.
speaker-2: Yes.
speaker-0: I'm tanya, you know, Steve said to you early, it's really awesome to listen to you, you know, talk about your journey and how you draw meaning from all the different steps in that journey. You you talk about failing fast. And I love what you said in the early days when you got started, you know, with technology, changes couldn't be made quickly. And when the race was over, you kind of got what you had, you know, you it you were finished. And nowadays everybody talks about failing fast, and you talk about What works and what doesn't in terms of cultures who who seek out to fail fast. what what are some of the the things that you believe have to exist inside an organization to do that well?
speaker-2: Failing fast is a term a lot of people say and a lot of companies say, but not many of them do well. And we're very fortunate in this era of technology in that we have modern architectures that can help us fail fast and make changes quickly. I think to have those foundations matter. So the way I think of it is a modern data platform. Your data has to be reliable. And it has to be reliable on and offline. You know, the prices you tell people need to be the same, right? The medical information you provide to doctors and the humans using it and nurses and people helping them, those that data reliability, those modern data platforms are critical. Then you have to have the flexible architecture to enable rapid change. So obviously there are companies, technology companies that have grown organically. Dell's a good example of that, which means you have a mix of architectures. And the larger the company is, the less likely it is that they're shared. So how do you make sure if you can make changes quickly in one place, it's reflected across the entire end-to-end experience. One way to do that is using tools and platforms, like we have a design language system. I've been a bit big advocate of design language systems. They were called pattern libraries in the past. Design systems, I've seen them evolve. really, the way I always talk about this is we're at PayPal. we're all familiar with the omnipresent submit button. We've all seen submit buttons. And one of the engineers went through and just looked at all the code. See how many versions of those submit buttons. And we had a designer kind of go look and see how many designs. 50 versions, plus, actually, plus, I think at some point I just quit looking after. But those are not the kind of things you want your really smart and capable development teams redoing. Nobody wants to redo the submit button. Let's look at the core components we can do. We can change, we can ensure are accessible so we can make sure that anyone using assistive device, humans with disabilities, can interact with your products. So design language systems are a good way to do that. In fact, Delldesign System.com, you can take a look even outside of Dell to see examples of this. And then content management that helps ensure again rapid change, change that again has all this. Automated capability we didn't have in the past. So our CI CD type of pipelines that ensure programmatically, you know, we're using inclusive language, we're we've got it at the right reading level, and we're building rapidly, but when we get it wrong, we can change that. I think for Dell and also have done this in my last couple companies, the model of experimentation, multivariant testing or A-B testing, if you want to think of it that way, is crucial. You have these foundations. You want to test and experiment, iterate with humans, right? And that product model. So we'll put together those recipes to then test at scale, sometimes in a complete a different country to mitigate risk and learn. And then as you learn, you change those designs. Now, of course, there are a lot of companies out there that programmatically will change the design based on those outcomes. But I think that failing fast is such a powerful thing when it means you can experiment and test. And if you get it wrong, you can change it. people will sometimes claim that those are guardrails and you can't innovate, and I disagree. You know, look at the early works of Pablo Picasso. Portrait of the artist's mother actually is a great example. Classic, classic lines, you would never guess it was Picasso. Picasso had no rules to transcend the rules. And that's how I think of those foundations. great example, too. At Express Scripts, we put together a new business called Insiderx. It was a way to help. The uninsured or underinsured in the United States get access to medications at a lower cost. Express scripts at the time was this closed network, but had access to all these medications, they could offer at a lower cost. And we started out with the premise that hey, we're going to make this an app and it's going to work great on your phone, and people can use it at pharmacies. Well, when we tested it in Sutu, so when we tested it in the pharmacies with the humans, so I'm a big believer in testing with the humans.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-2: versus personas, we found that, you know, we really hadn't considered that those humans may have older phones. They may not have as much bandwidth. They may not have as much room on their phone. They weren't really interested in downloading another app. But what they said back to us was, well, I'd love this in my wallet. Like can it work as a coupon? So in the space of two weeks, huge credit to the whole team that did this. pivoted to building that wallet experience to enable them to purchase this subset of medications at a discount, which then became also opportunity to publish pet medications. And then here we are several years later, where there is an app, right? Because there is that level of business and that opportunity to offer additional savings. But to me, that is a perfect real world example of a product That saved consumers $100 million in its first year to pivot when you need to pivot to understand to listen to what they're telling you. I know everyone uses that famous Henry Ford quote: if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. I think that's unfair. And the reason is you need to give them a chance to practice and learn with the solutions. You're trying to understand their problem, and your solution may or may not work for them. And it can be an incredibly different and distinct solution. And we know sometimes that means it takes longer for them to learn. back in the day, we moved what I think of as a green screen application for Visa to a web-based application. There have been people using that green screen for years. What we did was we found the original. Print out that that green screen application was based upon. So I'm like, so the reason you don't want to move to this web base is you know how this works. Well, if you think about it, this was actually for an analog world. We took an analog world, remember that panel's this. We put it in this green screen world, which was still rather analog in terms of its organizational navigational properties, and then we moved it to virtual. Well, virtual meant from a web based perspective, we changed everything. navigation to where things were located, but we gave them so much power in terms of understanding what happened, making recommendations. And that took time. And so that's another thing I think you consider in terms of failing fast. You can fail fast, but if it is a new product, it has a significant innovation, you need to also plan for that time for for people to learn and be able to truthfully evaluate after understanding the benefit to that.
speaker-1: Great. lot of lot of interesting examples there that really brings that to life, which we appreciate. You know, Tanya, we've talked about all your experience. You've you've been at these different types of organizations, you've learned so much. You've had a role in in bringing design to life at each of these organizations. And you know, I think a lot of our listeners would like to do that as well. There's a lot of folks we talked to that want to say, how can how can I bring more of a design focus to the organization I'm a part of? And so What what advice would you give to people in those situations as they're trying to to to go down that path?
speaker-2: So I think a great place for anyone to start is to learn more about design thinking. How do I ask these questions? How do I understand the problem statement as opposed to what I think the solution is, or jumping right to the solution? You do not have to be a designer to be a design thinker and to learn from design thinking. But I think the next step is hiring people who know design, who have done this before. who know what good looks like. You know, I find it super interesting. I think this is very true of content as well. Humans are like, I use websites all the time, I use mobile apps, I know what good looks like, but don't understand the work that has to happen to ensure consistency, beauty, delight, and all those pieces of it. And so I think you start with understanding more about design. You hire people who can help you and you integrate it into your methodology. So I've done waterfall, agile. We're now using a product model that was based on the pivotal methodology that Dell owned that became part of VMware. And that is a balanced team model. So that means there is a product, this is important, not a project, not a program. There's a product manager. There is a designer or designers, right? And there's an engineering team. And that if you want to think of it as three in the box, sometimes in the industry, it's called, but that balanced team where you're working on all elements together. You use a lot of the ceremonies of agile, the stand-ups, but you know, you really want to look at a storytelling epics. I can go into detail, but what you're really thinking about there is design is there at the beginning. And is enabling helping, but think of it this way developments there at the beginning. When you use the old waterfall methodology, engineers often didn't even know what the intended goal of the product was. It was do X, Y, and Z make this calendar widget work. Let's call it that. Make the calendar widget work. Without understanding what that goal was for the humans using the product. And when you're all in that together, even though you're going to have greater skills, a greater points of the iterative journey to contribute, everyone's on the same page and everyone's working toward those same outcomes, not output. I cannot stress that enough, whether you're using pods, what however your teams are broken up, understanding that those outcome-driven perspectives are what are incredibly powerful. And I think that's where I've seen a real significant change. Again, there's always a new flavor. And new methodology, I believe a lot of it is about how you position that feedback, that value that the customer has in connection to your own work. And when it's your own work, okay, I'm building a calendar widget, but it's gonna help this person be successful in managing this aspect of their business, it has a lot more relevance to me as say a developer. versus I've been given a task and I'm gonna do a task. I I I really just think that hopefully those days are going away because those are not either rewarding jobs or great outcomes.
speaker-0: Well, Tanya, you you have such an interesting perspective on the journey you've taken of the past. I also suspect you have a lot of insight about the future. And we always like to to wrap up our podcast asking our guests what what they see as next in design and in your case in large organizations or or just generally in in the the product leadership spaces that that you're in today.
speaker-2: So what is next as we see things evolving? I think I can speak to in a general way, you know, I wish I could predict all of this. I I really do think it is more of what we call human experience. So no one works in a linear path anymore. when you build products, you have to build them for all these contexts. I may be using a phone, I may be talking to a device. I may have notifications coming from someone in my family, someone in my business. How do you integrate this into a cohesive whole for the humans using their products is really to me the next step in evolution. So, for example, in the design language system we have today, we have a lot of motion design and data visualization design would have never had in old design systems or pattern libraries, right? So So much of this is thinking about those contexts and thinking about new ways of measuring. I know McKinsey's report talked about measure journeys, not touch points. I thought that that was a really good way to think of it. I think where in the past, you know, hey, I'm gonna have this great design. Well, design in a vacuum is not gonna help. design across that human experience that digital ecosystem, maybe a better way, is where we're headed. And that's going to have power. Whether you're using third parties, whether you're building some of it yourself, you know, we've all seen shifts in buy versus build. I really think it's it's a combination, but we also have to be willing to learn. We have to be willing to learn from places where we didn't always see this. You know, I was very interested in gaming interfaces. What do we learn about motion? What we learn about attention and how people pay attention? It's not just exploration or completion of a goal, but experience within that context. And to me, what are we building tomorrow in the context of all these other experiences? Think about it. You for folks who've grown up as digital natives, especially Gen Z, this is their world. And they Interact with it very differently. So no one's using email under the age of 25. you know, the days of sort of these slideware presentations, how we interact, I think are going to change within our industry. And I think they're being driven by a lot of the right things. However, and here is my big caveat, and one of the reasons I love being back at a global company. Everybody in the world is not created equal. So how do you build designs that have a global approach? How do you think about humans with disabilities and making sure anyone can interact and use those products and designs that you build? You know, how do you think about the environment and how we focus on environmental outcomes and footprints? I love the holistic direction we're moving. And I think it's a wonderful place for us to be. I'm hoping for a utopia, not a dystopia. I did say I started out in cyberpunk with a lot of dystopias, but I will say that I see opportunity and possibility in places that didn't exist before. And I think design is an enabler in those areas.
speaker-1: That's great. I love that vision. I love that thinking about human experience and that holistic view. So it's a great way to end just a a a fascinating, wide ranging conversation. start it out learning all sorts of new terms, like plumpset. Am I saying that
speaker-2: Last challenge.
speaker-1: palum set? We'll leave that in there because I'm I'm learning, but palimpset, and I'm gonna I've already Googled it, so I'm gonna read more about that later. but yeah, thank you so much, Toddy. We really appreciate your time and and sharing so much with with Chad and I and our audience.
speaker-2: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.
speaker-1: We did as well. Thank you so much. Chad, I mean, I feel like I learned so much from that conversation with Tanya. What stood out for you?
speaker-0: There there just really great moments in Tanya's story. I I loved hearing about her experience at the University of Texas when she petitioned the university for her s her language requirement to be around coding and using computer programming to count towards those two languages required for her doctorate. That just speaks to Tanya knew what she wanted to do very early on in her life and she's dedicated her life to to being a an innovative product designer. I really appreciate what she shared in terms of learning from working at startups and wearing many hats, which taught her the nature of failing fast, being flexible, questioning and having conversations around collaboration and testing things at the ground level for what she called the feedback type mentality and really focusing on the human. Lastly, I just you know, the failing fast term, which is maybe arguably overused. A lot of companies say it, but not many of them do that well. And I really like like what Tanya had to say about that. that failing fast is a powerful thing, when it means that you can experiment and test and if you get it wrong, you can change it.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So much so much to think about there in terms of, you know, you don't just fail fast, but you you need to prepare for it. You need to be structured in order to fail fast successfully. and I, you know, I loved how she talked about something we don't often talk about, which is funding and how important that is to design projects and and related to that, understanding the measures. that the company you work for uses to really talk about the success of the organization and and making sure that you're building that value into your own plan and just always tying everything you do from a design perspective into the outcomes that drive success for the company. Yeah she said it's something you know we oftentimes some people don't want to talk about, but if you're gonna be successful, you have to talk about it. So a lot to take away from that conversation and I I really enjoyed it. And to make sure our new episodes are delivered to you every two weeks and of course sometimes three weeks, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-0: And we're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, or contact us directly at podcast at castinhoe dot com.
speaker-1: Thanks everyone, and we'll speak with you soon.
