#47 Andy Budd @Clearleft - The current state of design leadership
UX Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy Budd curates the Leading Design and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web.
In this episode, we spoke about:
the biggest learnings from the last Leading Design conference,
why and how designers should say no to their managers,
and the current state of design education.
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Transcript
Alen
Hi, my name is Alen, I'm a business designer - and welcome to the d.MBA podcast, where we learn about business to become better designers. In the 47th episode, I spoke with Andy Budd, who is a UX designer and CEO of innovation and design agency Clearleft. But Andy is probably even more known for curating a few very well known conferences in the design community, such as Leading Design, which is a huge international conference, bringing design leaders together. He also curates UX London conferences, and helped set up the Brighton digital festival.
In this episode, we spoke about the biggest learnings from the last Leading Design conference which took place in November, in London. We talked about why and how designers should say no to their managers. What do you do when you find yourself in a situation where you don't agree with the work you're doing, or the path that your company is taking? And finally, we also talked about the current state of design education.
If you're interested in design leadership, one thing that we also talked about in this episode is the lack of business literacy in the design community. And if you want to raise your business literacy, you can also sign up for our seven day free mini MBA email course. Over the next seven days, you would get seven business concepts in your inbox to learn more about the business.
Without further ado, here is a conversation with Andy. So Andy, you and your agency Clearleft, you're organizing this great design conference called Leading Design, right? So I thought it would be a great idea to maybe kick off with sharing a little bit with our listeners, what is Leading Design, how it came to be? And then we can go a little bit into the learnings or what did you learn? What were the big themes of the final, the latest conference you had in London?
Andy Budd
Excellent, it’s a lovely place to start. So Leading Design came about maybe five years ago now. And it came about almost by accident, really, I was catching up with friends in London over coffee and tea and cake as you would do. I'm British, so you know, lots of tea and cake gets consumed, and kind of catch up with my friends - a lot of my friends, because I've been doing this for a really long time, I've been in the industry for 20 years. And so a lot of my friends are designers. And they started out like me as a design practitioner. And then maybe they came a design lead, then maybe they find themselves managing three or four people. And then they became a director, they were managing 20 or 30 people. And in some cases, they became VPs, managing hundreds of people. And over the course of maybe three or four months, they probably had a dozen or so of these coffees.
And I basically found that I was having the same conversations like Groundhog Day, different people, but everyone was suffering the same challenges. For a start, you know, they've taken on jobs, because they were great designers. And the companies had kind of really decided they wanted to invest in design, which first and foremost was amazing. The previous three or four years, all of my designer friends were frustrated, because the companies I work with didn't get design, and they were fighting for resources. So now these companies have realized, well, design is a great tool for competitive advantage. And I think a lot of this came about from the fact that you know, technology has become commoditized. And actually you can get a lot less value from technology these days. And design I think is a defensible competitive advantage. It's very, very difficult to do, it's very difficult to do well. It's very difficult to replicate. And you know, you can create value through design. And so a lot of my friends' companies have realized this and came to them and said, - Look, you know, we need to scale up our design effort, we need you to go out there and hire a bunch of designers.
So that was the first problem my friends were facing, like, wow, well, this is great. But there aren't enough designers to go around. So hiring and recruitment was really challenging. Once people had managed to hire and kind of get these people on board, then they struggled to sort of get them motivated. So how can we build a great culture? How can we build a culture where designers thrive? How can we get them onboarded in a way that kind of allows them to hit the ground running.
Then the problem my friends were facing was like, how do we keep them? You know, we've got this sort of massive recruitment sort of thing going on, maybe we got an open headcount of 10 designers, but for every two designs, a hire one designer leaves, and so you're kind of two step forward, one step back. So again, a lot of things my friends were discussing is like, well, how do we retain people? You know, if you look at sort of California, quite often, sort of the Bay Area, designers are sticking around in their roles for maybe like, you know, if you're lucky 18 months or two years, if you're lucky, I see people moving around every nine months. There's lots of research that shows it takes about nine to 12 months for designers to get up to speed and start delivering value. So the point at which you start being able to deliver your value back is the point where a lot of people are moving on. And then if people did stay for a while, how could you elevate design in the organization? How could you educate your peers in product and engineering and marketing and sales so they can really understand the value that design can bring?
And then also, you know, once you've got that going, how can you look after the career progression of your designers? How can you rather than losing them, because they want to jump around from job to job to get a promotion? How can you kind of like grow a design team that kind of fits your exact needs. So these are sort of the five or six trends that just kept coming up over and over again. And often over tea and cake, I was trying to sort of give my friends advice around how you can scale, how you can sort how you can build a great employee brand. So employer brand, how you can sort of look after your team and nurture them and, and sell design into their executives. And it was just getting really tiring. So I thought, well, rather than having to do this on a one on one basis, and I'm not getting paid for this, you know, I'm not a professional coach, maybe I could get all these people together. And so yeah, that's where Leading Design came from.
I kind of took a hunch that there would be enough design leaders in the UK in Europe to support a conference like this. And it was a big hunch, because I was really scared that nobody would turn up. But I put the event on, we booked a date, we've got some amazing people from around the world, people who have grown and scaled, you know, big design teams. And people showed up. And actually people showed up en masse. Our last conference in New York, we had over 1000 people on the waitlist, it was crazy. Like we were blown away by the demand of this conference. And so the conference has been running for a few years now. For the first three or four years, we were just running in London. And then we sort of branched out. Last year, we did New York, in a couple of months time again in San Francisco. And again, the feedback we've been getting has been really, really fantastic. It feels like we've really hit a nerve, it feels like a lot of people are suffering, you know, they thought that by becoming a leader, all their problems will be solved somehow a job title and a budget and a seat at the table with somehow unlock this sort of, you know, troll trove of kind of possibilities. But actually, what really has happened is it just created a whole bunch more. It's a whole bunch of more challenges for my friends and for design leaders.
And so yeah, that's really the sort of the gap we're trying to fill is how can we help design as an industry blossom? How can we help designers that have got the seat at the table that they've been longing for? Deliver the value that we know and believe and have experience with, but design can bring into the hands of as many people as possible. But one of the lovely things, one of the sort of the surprising sort of outcomes of leaving design in general, was actually the conference has become a really, really safe space for a lot of people to kind of discuss their fears. You know, I think, you know, a lot of junior designers when they go and speak at conferences, they you know, there's a bit of a bravado and they're sort of, you know, they're untouchable, they're amazing, everything they do, you know, turns to gold. And I've been really humbled by how you can have people that are running, designing some of the world's biggest companies just talking about all of their screw ups, talk about how they were terrible designers, or terrible managers, you know, talk about how they did terrible one on ones or made mistakes recruiting or, you know, found themselves in teams that weren't as diverse as they should have been, and how they kind of went around to solving those problems. So I've also been really, really impressed with the sort of humility that a lot of design leaders have, and the willingness to help pay forward and help other design leaders coming up behind them to avoid the mistakes that they made. So it's been wonderful so far, we're really, really enjoying it. And I'm looking forward to looking more to San Francisco and getting stuck in with crafting the narrative around London. In September, I think, oh, November, yeah, November,
Alen
November, I think. Yeah. Take us back to the first conference. Take us back to the moment, even before the conference came to be like, you had this idea. What was the next step you took?
Andy Budd
Well, I have a slight problem. And that slight problem is creating conferences. So I think if I was still a practicing designer, and technologist, I would probably be spending my evenings and weekends hacking on some kind of cool, you know, tech startup. Um, but you might, you know, you wouldn't want me building anything these days or designing anything, but what I can do is I can send a bloody good email, and I've got a really good connection with people. So, you know, I ran the UK first digital design conference called Deconstruct which ran for 10-11 years. And actually, ironically, we're bringing that back for like a one off kind of one shot this September, which I'm really, really excited about. It's kind of more of a TED talk in an inspiring kind of digital tech and culture conference.
I've run UX London for 10-11 years, which is the longest running UX conference in Europe. We run other events as well. So running events is pretty straightforward. You know, I guess the two things are, you know, finding people who are willing to come and speak. And like I say, because I've got quite a good network, reaching out to friends of mine that I've got into those positions is relatively straightforward. And because we've got a history of running really, really high quality events, when I said, I'm doing this conference, and this is what's going on, most of the people I reached out to were like, - yeah, that sounds amazing, I'm down.
So one hand, you know, building up a program, and then the other hand, finding a venue, putting it on, and then hoping that you've got enough network to kind of pull people in. So yeah, finding a venue. So a lot of it was like running around London to different venues, see what the vibe was, to see whether we can afford it. I'm an experienced designer, so making sure that the physical space works, making sure that the food is great, making sure that it's central, it's easy to get to, or all kinds of important transferable skills. And so once you've got the venue, then it's just a case of, like, you know, putting out there, taking upon, you know, any entrepreneur has to at some stage put their money where their mouth is, take a risk. And the risk was that if people didn't show up, we would have lost a ton of money. But you have to have faith in your community, you have to have faith in your ability to feel signals, and sense check, and see whether the signals that you're feeling are the signals that other people are feeling, to the left of a law degree that there will be a market there. And we put it out there. And we sold out. The first one went down so well, that immediately afterwards, everyone's like, we want to have another one.
And so you know, every conference, every product, every app, every feature is just a one off. And two people love it. And then they want more. And so we had our market validation, we saw that there was demand there. And then I guess, two or three years on, we noticed that we had lots of people coming from the US. Now normally, that's actually quite unusual. Normally, you see in conference land, lots of Europeans going to America, very few Americans coming to the UK and Europe. I think that's partly because, unfortunately, American people only get a very small amount of holiday time. And you know, you might have to take holiday time off to come to the conference. Some of it is just around the size of America, the number of events. But we just started seeing lots of people coming from all over the world, not just America, we have people from Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Southeast Asia. And people kept telling us like, this is the only event of its kind, you know, I'm a design leader in Singapore. I'm a design leader in South America in Mexico. I want to get better at my craft. And this is the only place I can come to do that. And so yeah, so we were really chuffed. And so we took the punt, and we thought, well, if this worked in London, I reckon there is a pretty good chance that it will work in New York, particularly, because the US tends to be a couple of years ahead in terms of scale. So we thought, well, if people are having these growing problems in London, I sure as hell gonna have them in New York and San Francisco. And yeah, again, we doubled down. We bet the farm on one of these events, and again, we were lucky that it panned out. And yeah, we've been really impressed with, like I say, the outpouring of love and support we've had from the design leadership community.
Alen
What makes a great conference, I assume that as a designer, you spend a lot of time actively thinking how you can design the best design experience, or sorry, conference experience for the attendees. Right. So you know, what makes a good? What separates a good conference from your average one or a bad one?
Andy Budd
Well, I mean, it's sort of similar to what makes a really great movie, you can go in a bunch of different directions. A lot of people that are organizing conferences focus on production value: big stage, you've got all those high tech sort of equipment, they've got beautiful lights and sort of signage, you've got the best food, you’ve got all this stuff. That when you go there, if they haven't put effort into curating the content, it can feel quite hollow.
I think a lot of conferences focus more on the sort of whiz bang, kind of visceral kind of design experience. And also, quite often they focus on the brands of the speakers. So I've been to dozens of conferences where there's a lineup of really, really impressive looking companies, but actually the content is hollow, shallow, it's poor.
So my focus is completely opposite. I'm more like an art house sort of director, you know, we tend not to do these big flashy performances, you know, our competitions are quite small, our budgets are quite frugal, we put all of our effort on curating speakers. You'd be surprised at the number of conference organizers that won't pay their speakers, they won't pay for them to fly over, put them up in hotels, but we'll pay for a really, really impressive video graphic on the stage. For me it's completely opposite, our production values are very low. But people come back time and time again, because we're providing them with content that they want. And content, in the form of genuine human stories that they connect to, that they can see themselves in the situations that our speakers explain. The speakers aren't going up there and saying, you know, we're perfect, and all you people in the audience are idiots. Our speakers are getting up there and saying, - you are us, you know, you could be on this stage. We've experienced all the kinds of problems that you've experienced. And here are some of our ways of dealing with it. And so you sit next to some of the audience members, and they're just filling up notebooks full of notes and recommendations, which is amazing. And they're feeling seen, they're feeling heard. And so if the content is good, all the other things sort of fade into insignificance. But that doesn't mean that we don't try and find great venues. And we try and make sure that we've got a great coffee company that we work with, that makes amazing coffee, we give coffee beans to our speakers in the goodie bags, and the coffee company will grind them their life. So you've got the freshest coffee. We have juice bars, and kombucha bars and stuff to try and make the experience as pleasant as possible.
But really, a lot of that is in service of allowing our speakers and attendees to connect. We want people to stay in the room, you'll be able to have genuine conversations that genuine human connections. And so that's the reason why we kind of said do these sort of peripheral things, we've worked really hard on our carbon footprint as well, we've done a lot of work on finding the right receptacles for water, we need to give people water so they can drink but it turns out tins are more environmentally friendly than bottles or plastics. Giving people feasible reusable cups in a goodie bag is much better than people over the course of three or four days burning through loads of recycled cups. Making sure the signage is recyclable and low impact, making sure anything we give out to our users is recyclable, reusable, something that they want, rather than something that's going to end up on a trash heap. It's a challenge for conferences, because quite often they are flying people in. And so there is a big carbon footprint there. But on the other stage, I would rather have five speakers from the US come to London, than have 50 people from London fly to a conference in the US to be able to see the same speakers. So thinking on the whole, we try to minimize our footprint. And that's been really, really fun. And we'll carry on finding out ways to do that. But yeah, you know, the content really is the thing that draws people in and keeps them coming back.
Alen
And how do you make sure, so if this is the focus point for you, right, if your team is focusing on getting the best people and getting the best speakers, how do you actually make that happen? What is the process behind finding the best people, because most conferences, I guess, just focus, as you said, on big brands, that person works there. So we can mention whatever the name of the company is, and then this is going to draw in a lot of people. But if you invite people who are not that famous, or you know, don't work for the big companies, you may have a marketing problem. How you make sure these people are not so famous, they're good when they come and speak.
Andy Budd
Absolutely. I mean, you're right. I think the reason why a lot of people focus on the brand of the speaker, rather than the content is a marketing thing. It's kind of like we have Google and Facebook and Airbnb and all these people at an event, it helps us sell. Now, we have a lot of those people at our event as well. But we're not leading with, you know, this is the person from this company, we're leading with, this is a person who's got a fantastic story to tell. So the reason we do that isn't because these big companies have got interesting challenges that they're facing, and that's a reason why we have them rather than marketing. In terms of how we do it. I mean, I'm fortunate as a speaker, I speak at a lot of conferences, maybe less so now, but these days, I probably speak at, you know, 10 conferences a year. There are eight or 10 conferences a year. I used to speak a lot more. So I get to go to lots of conferences and see lots of speakers. In the course of the year, I probably watch well over 200-300 conference talks, videos. So I get to see a lot of content. And, you know, over 200 talks, I see 10 might have the quality and have the style and have the content that I think is a good fit.
Also, I rely heavily on my network of people. I have speakers that have come in the past who will say, Oh, you know, there's an amazing person you should meet, they're really, really good. And often I'll reach out to them and try and get a handle of, if they've not spoken before, if they don't have video online, they might share with me some of their ideas, they might share a Medium post they've written etc, etc. We try as best as we can to find diverse voices. A lot of our speakers have spoken before, I mean, particularly Leading Design, because the people that are in leadership roles tend to be quite senior. And often they have spoken before, but they were always sort of people that are kind of experienced leaders that don't have that sort of craving of the limelight. So you work hard to find new voices. And every time we went to a conference, it's usually two or three people there that we haven't seen speak before, that might not have spoken before. Or if they have, they're spoken at a small local networking event, and are sort of exposed to the world. And it's really, really brilliant. When you find a speaker that you're like, Well, I think this person is gonna be amazing, but I'm not sure, you take upon, and they turn out to be one of the best speakers of the whole conference. And we've had that plenty of times, we've been blown away by speakers in the past, where we're like, Well, you know, this was a bit of a risk, but this person is really, really paid off. So it's fun. It's fun seeing that.
And I think for me, again, one of the weird things I find about a lot of conferences, is they haven't really paid any sort of attention to the story arc. You'll see speakers and you're like, well, that person is talking, let's say this is a general UX conference or design conference, there'll be a person, first talking about design systems. And then three talks later, they'll be somebody else talking about design systems, and you're like, Well, why did you put those two other random non related talks in the middle? Why didn't you join them up? Why didn't you create some kind of arc or flow? And I'm always amazed that conference organizers do so little of that. And so we try to tell a story throughout our conferences.
So you saw Leading Design, generally, on the first day, it's a personal stories. On the second day, it's stories about the team and the organization. The first day usually starts with personal development skills; to be a great leader, these are the skills you need to develop. But then we usually sort of veer more into well, you know, now you've developed the skills, here are some individual challenges you're faced, maybe you're faced bias in the workplace, maybe you've had to deal with burnout, maybe you've had to fire people that's been a really, really traumatic experience. Looking at kind of self care and looking at the leader as a whole. And on the second day, once we dealt with the individual, once the leader is strong enough, then they can look after their team. So how do you find people? How do you grow them? How do you develop them? How do you share design around this sort of organization? And so each of our competences has this really lovely story arc that starts quite deep and personal, but then ends with practical, useful information that people can take away and start using tomorrow. And if we've crafted it the other way around, then it would be a different experience, but then people would end up with quite an emotionally intense day. And yeah, that could be quite challenging for people. So starting emotional, and then and then leading to practical means that you peak endwall, you get a beautiful high on the first day, but then you get real, relevant, practical output on the second day. A lot of our events, you know, we sort of craft interesting narratives for the day.
So the challenge we face is finding speakers, often it's not just about the case of like, people who can really give a good talk, but finding people who can fit in with the story you're trying to tell. So I’m almost like a casting agent or casting director for a movie. You might have a great lead, but you might want to find another actor that fits in her husband's role. And so you might have two or three amazing main actors, but if they don't fit chemistry-wise, you can't picture these two people together in a relationship or business context, whatever. There's no point having them. So this is also one of the challenges when people say, Well, I'd love to speak at your conference. They might be great, but they don't fit the narrative arc, the story we're telling this year, but they might fit next year. And so you know, invariably, when we meet people, it might be two or three years before they're the perfect fit for the story we're trying to tell that year.
Alen
That's really interesting. I mean, just hearing you explain the whole thinking behind this process, just explains why this conference is so successful. And you know, how you bring people to the emotional stage and then to the rational stage. That's really cool. So now let's maybe have a look more in detail at the latest conference you had in London. What were the big themes? What are the big takeaways? What were the learnings? If you could share with us what was important? What was the narrative maybe first, and then what came out of the conference?
Andy Budd
Well, like I said, I sort of the narrative that we had in London was the one I described earlier. So I won't sort of repeat the pattern of a couple of days. But I think there were a couple of really interesting outcomes. And I think this is one topic that has been bubbling away for a while. I think it's something that's probably close to your heart as well, which is a realization - well, a couple of things.
First of all, I think designers are wonderful emotive creative people, but quite often, because they are also quite unique in the companies they work in, they often have low resourcing and engineering, they usually have lower status than product or finance, or what have you, they often othered, and because of that, they often other the rest of the organization. So you see a lot of the time designers bitching about product or marketing or the business. And I think that one of the first realizations, and I think it's really important to keep iterating this, and this is something that came out at the conference is, you are not other from the business, you are part of the business. And if you take yourself out of that, you are not being, you know, as good a partner as you can be. So first is realizing that you are the business.
And secondly, if you are the business, you have to have a much better understanding of how the business works. And I think one of the reasons that designers get really frustrated is because they struggle to explain the value that they can deliver in a way that is meaningful to the people that need to be taught. And the design leaders that I meet, they're successful. Some of them are successful, because they're super creative. And anyone goes, oh, wow, you're a crazy creative person, will do whatever you want. But more often than not, it's because they have learned to navigate the political sort of systems of business, and know the right people to talk to to get a budget, know the right people to talk to you to unlock resources, and know the right way of communicating what they do. So that it resonates from a business perspective, not just, - we're doing the right thing, we're caring about users.
And so being better qualified to talk the language of business in a way that you are perceived as a equal, I think it's really important, I kind of sometimes joke that, that designers have got a seat at the table, but it's a highchair and they're sat in the corner playing with their crayons, while all the sort of the business people actually making the decisions. And then every time you know, every now and again, the designer will show their picture and everyone will go, - that's lovely, dear, and then go back to work. And so we can't be sitting at the table but being in a highchair. We need to be an active participant in that conversation. And that also requires us to have a position on things that aren't design related.
I know quite a few of my design leader friends that have embarked on MBAs in order to give them a certain level of legitimacy or a certain level of fluency. I know many more people who are participating in various online courses. I hear there's some good ones out there in order to increase their fluency in this kind of stuff. And, I think that was a really big theme of last year. And I think last year, a lot of our speakers were saying, you know, we had four or five speakers that were saying, - hey, you need to understand business better. And so I think, this year or next year, we probably take some of that and go, - well, that's great. Who can we bring in, that can help teach our design leaders to be a little bit more fluid in this stuff. So that was kind of one big topic and takeaway.
Another obvious theme is one of diversity and making sure that when we are hiring teams, we are hiring the groups of people that have a broad collective sort of background of experience, and not just the hiring homogenous teams that look the same, or are the same that come from the same background. But also that can be quite tough if you are the first African American person on a team, if you're the first Indian designer on a team, if you're the only woman. Regularly in a meeting of 10 people, you can feel quite left out. And so a lot of the people that spoke shared their own personal experiences of the challenges that they're faced with. And I think that was a really, really good opportunity for other design leaders to reflect on this, and make sure that when they are hiring, when they are recruiting, when they are assembling teams, they do so in a sort of considered way.
I think a lot of that also is reflecting on some of the anxiety that we've been facing in technology over the last three or four years around us, you know, maybe creating designs that had unintended consequences. There's a lot of ethical conversations happening at the moment. And I suspect some of the challenges we're facing, we might not have faced if we had designed teams that are more representative of the users. And if we had design teams that were thinking more around how products can be used, abused, misused, etc. So that was another big thread.
And I think maybe a third thread, which is always ever present is the challenge of burnout. Design leaders are often finding themselves in quite tricky situations, they have increasing demands from the design team, particularly younger, millennial Gen Z designers have very, very high expectations of what their job should be and what their career path should be, often, quite rightly so. But that puts a higher level of burden on design leaders, many of whom have never had any formal training. They've never learned how to do a great one on one or a great delivery of difficult feedback, or explain to somebody why just because they're 18 months out of a General Assembly course, they're not ready to meet the rector yet. This can be quite challenging. And a lot of the stories were stories of burnout of people, burning the candle at both ends, running too fast and smashing into brick walls. And so I think in order to be a good leader, you do need to be able to take care of yourself. And I think one of the challenging things for designers is because designers tend to be quite empathetic. They also tend to particularly and we learn a lot about servant leadership, often designers are understandably, putting their staff, their team and their needs above one's own needs. And that's incredibly laudable. And it's a great way of managing and it's the right way of doing it. But you also have to look after yourself. So self care, and getting that balance was another big theme of the event.
Alen
Have you ever had a burnout experience?
Andy Budd 33:31
I don't believe I have. But I think that's partly because I mean, I'm in a very fortunate position that as an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship is tough. But at the same time, you get to define how you run your own business. You get to hopefully define the culture, hopefully define the values, hopefully find what you will and won't do for money. And while it's hard, you do end up taking on a lot of responsibility. What you don't find yourself in is this weird cognitive dissonance a lot of design leaders find themselves in whereby they know what is not working, and have the power of agency to fix it. And if we don’t have the power of agency to fix something that can be incredibly stressful. If you have the power of agency to fix things and you don't fix things - well, you know, it's just not doing your job as well as you could. Which sucks, but I think you're much less likely to get these high levels of stress than when you have, you know, sort of a situation where you are fighting for what you believe is right, but you don't actually have the mechanisms to change.
I think the other thing is to be completely honest, Clearleft has always been a slow growing business. We're a small 30 person design agency in Brighton that has more work then we generally can satisfy deliberately. Because that means that we're not always chasing the next project, it means that we can be a little bit selective about the work that we do. And that gives us a little bit of freedom to choose. Whereas if you're working in a fast moving startup, where the head of product says, we need you to go out and hire 20 developers, or 20, designers tomorrow, you have no control over that you're just being thrown work.
I think the other thing that happens with a lot of designers is we just want to help people, we want to please people. One of the speakers at one of our Leading Design events basically said, like, the best thing you can do as a design leader is learn how to say no. Developers are great at it. Developers, often their default position is no. Can you do this? No. Can you deliver this? No. And then they might come back to you in a week's time and go, well, actually, we can. And here's how, what ends up happening is design leaders are just so pleased that someone’s talking to them. So pleased that the Head of Product and ask them to do something, or the Head of Marketing has asked them to do something, they'll be like, sure, I can do that. And then they fit it into their lunch hour, and they fit it in at the weekends in the evenings. And suddenly, they find they're doing the job of two or three people. And that's when you burn out when you can't say no.
And you burn out because you're doing a job that you love, you know, a lot of people end up not burning out, because they can say no, partly because they don't like their job. And they're not engaged, designers are often too engaged for their own good. So learning to say no, learning to push back, learn to say or at least not no - just say not yet, you know. We can do that thing for you, but we have to let this other thing drop. Or, - we can do this thing for you, but in three months time. Or,- we can do this thing for you that you need to sign off budget so I can go out and hire two freelancers. And we're just too nice and too willing to help that we don't have those conversations. And yeah, and then burnout happens. So it's not something that I've had.
Also the other thing, I'm quite lucky, I get to travel around a lot, I have lots of holidays, I live in the UK, we've got good social benefits because of health care, and all that kind of stuff. If I was working in the US where we had two weeks holiday a year, and you could be fired at a moment's notice for not even doing anything wrong. Again, that would be quite a stressful situation. So it's not something I've experienced personally, but I know a lot of people that have, and yeah, it sucks.
Alen
Let's go a bit deeper here. I think that saying no is super important. And I'll give you an extreme case or extreme situation, and let's break it down and see what your advice for this designer will be. So let's say you are a junior designer, right, and you just joined in the last six months, and you get to work on something that you feel is just not the right thing to work on. How do you say no, in these situations where you just join a company or you're being seen as just a junior person who should just do whatever the other people tell him or her to do? How do you react in that situation?
Andy Budd
Yeah, I mean, that's a really tough question. And the answer is really that I don't know. I think the perspective I was coming from earlier, was from the perspective of somebody who has been hired in a leadership role to guide a part of an organization forward. And in that situation, you have more authority to say no, if you are a junior, it can be really tough.
First start, like I said, a lot of designers often can come across as a little bit kind of difficult to work with, because we have this ivory tower view of design. And I think as a junior designer, on your first job you’ve got to be careful about not branding yourself as difficult. As a junior designer, whether you think the thing that you've been asked to do is right or wrong, you probably don't have enough context at the moment to really, really know, you didn't have enough influence to necessarily change the decision. And you haven't built up enough capital equity for people to trust your judgment.
I think as a designer, as a younger designer, what you need to do is first of all, demonstrate your value. So even if you're not sure that the thing is right. If you can come up with another way that will make that will be even better, it is definitely worth having that conversation. Go to your boss and say, - look, I don't think this is the best way possible. I think there's another way forward and that conversation might play out. I think choosing not to do the thing that you've been told to do and doing something else could be quite challenging because there might be a whole bunch of reasons, there might be some kind of business deal going on that is a requirement of. And you might be there going, well, I don't think any users will want this. And you haven't been told that actually, or someone's just spent a million pounds on this, and we need to get it over the line quickly. So you've got to be careful there. I think if you think there's a better way, do the thing that you've been asked to do. But then prototype the better way. And at least, you can then show some variations, like one of the things that designers are great at doing is the whole kind of double diamond, they're going broad, and the going narrow. A lot of executives and a lot of bosses quite often jump to the first most obvious solution for things. So it's possible that what you've been asked to do is just the first most obvious solution. And that's the one you should work on initially. But it's perfectly within your right, if you've got some time and space to go and explore a couple of other options. And it might turn out that those are better, it might turn out that those are not. But again, you know, as a good designer, you should at least explore the edges, then come back and explain why you think your idea is better than the others.
But also if they say, well, no, this is definitely what we want, go ahead and do it. The other tool that I think designers have in their toolbox is research. That might be user research in the sense of, well, that's great, we'll prototype this thing. I'll do it, we'll put it out there. But let's just sense check. If we feel that this thing might work, let's just do some testing. And it doesn't have to be hiring a lab for a week and expensive testers, it could just be some cafe testing around the corner. Buying people coffee and asking them to look at your thing. And then at least if you can go back and provide evidence for why the thing that you've been asked to do, you didn't think it was right. And so well actually look, I tested these two variations. And the thing you asked me to do was okay, but throughout the five people really struggle with this area here. So again, evidence based pushback rather than kind of like, I'm a designer, you should trust me, believe what I say, like an ego driven pushback.
But yeah, like you're saying, sometimes you might have to pick your battles. And you might have to let a few smaller things go, to demonstrate value, to show and build trust, so that when something comes across your desk that you think is really important, you have the credibility to say, well, actually, I think this is a really, really bad idea. And here's why. But this is the problem. I think designers generally don't go in with the evidence they go with “this is a terrible idea”. And here is an example of this in the wild, here's some usability testing results. Here is an article from Jared Spool about why this is a good idea, bring some evidence rather than just opinion.
Alen
Yeah. So another topic that's pretty much related to what we discuss right now with juniors saying no, but also with one of the topics you mentioned, or one of the learnings you mentioned from the conference, which is this lack of business literacy in design education. So as somebody who has so much experience with hiring designers, and also running design conferences, I wanted to pick your brain on this topic. So what is your opinion of the current state of design education? Let's begin broad.
Andy Budd
Yes, no, I mean, again, design education is an area that I'm fascinated with and frustrated with in equal measure. So I would say that, globally, there are probably a dozen or two dozen institutions that have courses that operate at a very high level. In the US, I've met some amazing graduates from the SVA course MFA on Interaction Design, and they consistently push out really, really amazing graduates. The university in the north of Denmark, whose name escapes me now that's really terrible. It will come back to me in a second. There's a really, really great education institution in the north of Denmark - CIID. Also, they've got an amazing group of lecturers, many, many visiting lecturers that come from the industry, you might even do stuff that you yourself I didn't know. And they push out a really, really high level of quality. So if you are a younger person, or not even younger person, if you are somebody that wants to break into design, getting on one of these courses will set you up really, really strongly, because you will learn really, really good techniques that are practical. You will be taught by industry experts, they will have connections and when you go into the workplace people will see that you've worked, you've studied in these places, and there'll be a reasonable level of respect.
However, I would say, 90% of everything is shit. The vast majority of university courses are not like this. The vast majority of university courses, I think, are still massively out of date. They're often run by people that haven't been in industry for 5-6-7-8-9-10 years, if they've been in industry at all. Often, they are run by graphic design departments that don't really get technology, or they're run by engineering departments that don’t really get design. Or they're run by business departments that don't get either. And they are often just filling a gap. And I still to this day, speak to lots of recent graduates that have gone through these courses and felt cheated, basically. They felt that they spent very, very large amounts of money to get a substandard education, that they would have been better off learning on the job.
And so, you know, I am not the world's biggest fan of General Assembly. And again, I think for General Assembly and organizations like this, quality varies dramatically, geographically, depending on who is leading the course. But I have seen a lot of people come out of the London General Assembly course with their 10 or 12 week Interaction Design Intensive, who I believe have come out after 12 weeks having the same or better quality of output. I can't attest to the quality of education. But if I look at a portfolio of a General Assembly graduate in London, I could probably not tell the difference between that and some of those who spent three years on a bachelor's degree. And actually, often, they're much better, because often the General Assembly courses are really, really focused around producing portfolios that are employable. When you look at the majority of bachelor's degrees, and you'll have like one shonky web project, you'll have some really awful services on project, you'll have one really bad art installation digital product, and it's fun, but you're producing graduates that then basically just have no, no value or employability in the workplace.
And I think if you are going to spend three years on a bachelor's degree, you may, in order to get into the industry, you might be better off in many instances, just doing a 10 week, General Assembly course, and then going straight into industry. If you are wanting to really know your career, a Master's course, one of the one of the bigger universities that I mentioned might be worthwhile. I was speaking to a young designer yesterday who decided that rather than going to university and end up in there, he would spend a year being a intern, and loved it, and then got a second job and a third job and a fourth job, and is now worked on some of the biggest, most interesting design teams in the UK on some of the biggest interesting startup projects, and hasn't looked back. And rather than ending up with 30,000-40,000 pounds worth of debt, he's ended up with an amazing portfolio of work, great work experience. And so yeah, for a lot of younger designers, I actually think, you know, it might be right to skip degrees all together, and go straight into the workplace. Now, that requires a little bit of, you know, kind of self starter attitude. But one of the great things about design is the barrier to entry is quite low, you can get a copy of some design software, you can design a website or product or service for yourself or a friend or just explore and play. And you can probably learn as much self directed as you can in many three year courses. So that's my position.
Alen
For example my wife, she did the same. She took a course at CareerFoundry for six months, and now she has a job. So she's been working as a UX designer for two years. And it definitely catapulted her path and career into design. One thing you mentioned in there was an employable portfolio. What is an employable portfolio?
Andy Budd
Okay, so, as somebody who is hiring designers, I want to see examples in their portfolio that are similar to the kind of problems I want them to solve. So as an agency we might work with an airline, we might work with an app company, we might work with an e-commerce Store. Having a portfolio that demonstrates to me that you have worked in the spaces or if you thought about these spaces, is really useful. And these might be real life jobs, if you're a little bit more progressed in your career, they might just be college courses. Your college lecturer or your General Assembly guide might have said, Okay, well, today, I want you to redesign the in-flight entertainment system of an airline. And that's great if you're a service design company that wants to hire those kinds of people.
Then this gets into a question around, is education around making your job ready, or is education around immersing you in a field of study a field of practice? For many people, they go to university, because they want to become job ready. And if that is your focus, then coming out with a set of portfolio pieces that look like the kind of thing you could be hired to do, I think is really useful. If you come out of a university course, and like I say, you've got a portfolio piece is a photography project. One is an interactive LED light exhibit, one of them is a service design project for getting needles to Sub Saharan Africa. And you're going to a design agency, or you're going to a fast moving tech start up that is focused on building apps and that kind of stuff. They probably look at your portfolio and say, - well, that's pretty interesting. But how does this interactive light exhibit? And how does this service design project in Africa relate to us shipping the next version of our banking app? And it's a really tough call, and these people might be super talented. But if they can't demonstrate relevant skills and somebody else can, then they're going to be a disadvantage.
And so I think that's one angle. I think the other angle just around portfolios is that a lot of people focus purely on the output of a portfolio. So you will see many people that their portfolio is just here's the end product. And as a hiring person, the end product is useful. It's pretty, it's nice, but the process is important. When I was at school, my math teacher said,- you get 50% of the points for knowing the right answer, and 50% of the work points for showing the workings, because the answer demonstrates you got it right. But you don't know if you manage to get there accidentally, the workings demonstrate that you really understood what you were doing. And it's exactly the same way in design, you could be just a really lucky, talented, creative person that spends a lot of time on dribble, and can mimic trends. And on the surface, it looks really pretty. But did it solve the problem you're setting out to solve? Did you have a repeatable process? So if I gave you a different problem, could you follow that process in order to solve a different kind of problem? Do you know what worked? And what didn't? Can you look at this point and say, well, actually, I diverged here. And this is why I went down this cul de sac, and it didn't work.
The other thing is, a lot of designers on their CV or their LinkedIn profile, have a big list of things they can claim to do. Some of them have a little pie chart or a little bar graph: I'm 80% good at prototyping, I'm 100% good at design thinking. It’s great, but give me evidence. If you're saying that you're 80% amazing doing a user journey map, I want to see a user journey map, I want to see five years agenda maps, I want to see high fidelity, obviously low fidelity, I want to see one that you've just done in an afternoon with sticky notes. I want to see one that solves a complex problem. I see one that's always a simple problem. Evidence this, because otherwise, what I assume is by saying that you've got 80% experience of journey mapping is you've probably read a Medium post and went oh, I kind of know what a journey map is. I reckon if I get asked to make a journey map, I can have a crack at it. That's very different from saying, well, here's five journey maps I've done. And this is why I chose this approach. On this one. This one chose approaching this one. And this journey map. I was just using it to think through a problem. This journey map was a deliverable in order to solve a strategic problem that I pitched to the board at this company in order to sort of facilitate this change. And so yeah, I want to see your workings. I want to see photos of you doing staff. I want to see you leading teams, I want to see you sketching, see you prototyping and see you doing this across a bunch of mediums. A lot of people find crutches, a lot of designers, particularly product designers will be like, - you know I'm brilliant at using Figma but maybe you’re going to a company Figma isn't their thing. Maybe they're using something else. So I want you to be able to demonstrate to me that you're not just using one tool as a crutch. If I say to you, okay, well, I'm sorry, but you got to use Adobe XD on this project, you're not going to be like, Oh, I don't know how to do that. Because it's not a piece of software that you have learned. It's a process that you've learned. And you can apply that process to a whole range of tools and outputs and outcomes.
Alen
Amazing, great advice. I think we covered a lot of topics and you shared the current state of the design community with us. So when is the next conference that we could come and immerse ourselves in the experience?
Andy Budd
I believe that we probably have about 30 tickets left for Leading Design, San Francisco. And Leading Design in San Francisco is the beginning of March, 4th to 6th. So that'll be really, really good fun. I'm so excited about some of the speakers we've got there, particularly Judy Chu. Judy Chu is an amazing design leader. Her books and her writing are just outstanding. I mean, obviously, there's tons of other amazing people speaking, but we got Judy a little bit last minute. I've been trying to get her to speak at the design for a while. And we managed to nail that down quite recently. And so she's gonna be amazing, as is everybody else. We are just starting to plan Leading Design London, which will be in November, fourth to sixths. And yeah, and so those two Leading Design events are coming up, and they should be really good fun.
Alen
Amazing. And you also have some smaller meetups right? Is that just in London or in San Francisco? Or do you also plan to do them elsewhere?
Andy Budd
Yeah, we really want to do them elsewhere. After Leading Design in San Francisco, I'm gonna be heading over to South by Southwest. And I mean, just FYI, for about three, four years, I love Austin. I've been through kind of a bit of a roller coaster with South by Southwest, I used to love it, then I hated it. And now I quite like it again. But I'm going to be in Austin, um, you know, end of March. So there's, I think sort of like 18th or 17th of March, I'm probably gonna be organizing a little design leadership get-together there. I'm speaking at a ward conference, in a couple of weeks time in Amsterdam, I'm probably going to be organizing a little design leadership get together there. We're doing bigger leadership meetups in London, we're probably going to start doing them in New York. And yeah, if there are local groups, the ones that sort of put design leadership's events on there, please do come and give us a shout, we want designers to have a local community that they can draw upon. We run this design leadership Slack channel, Leading Design, Slack channel, we've got about 1300 members, and a lot of the members on there will do little events, it might just be a dinner for six people here or like a meet up for 20 people there. Communities grow and networks form and movements happen. So yeah, design, like I said, is finally got a seat at the table. And we all need to help each other out to embed that and help design hit the levels that we know it can.
Alen
So if somebody has an idea to host a meet up in their city, how can they reach out to you to make it happen?
Andy Budd
Well, if you're a member of the Leading Design Slack channel, hit me up on that. If you're not a member of the lean Design channel, and you'd like to join, you can reach out to me on Twitter, or go to LeadingDesign.com. Or drop me an email at andy@clearleft.com. The Leading Design Slack channel is really aimed at more senior design leaders. So it's people that are managing teams, rather than design leads with three or four designers. We've got people on there that on average are probably leading teams of like, 20 to 50 people. So it's kind of senior level. But if you fit in that sort of a category and you want to join a hook me up, or the other thing is just to organize one and then email me afterwards say, - hey, Andy, we ran a design dinner, and it was great. And here's some pictures. And it's always nice to see people doing stuff independently.
Alen
Cool. And well, thanks again for sharing experience, taking the time to talk to me.
Andy Budd
It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. And yeah, I'd love to do this again in a couple of years time.
Alen
So that's everything in today's episode. If you have any comments about this episode, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or just send me an email at alen@d.mba. And again, if you want to learn more about business to become a better design leader, you can sign up for a seven day mini MBA course which is completely free.