Hi everyone, I'm Jenny Arden.
So I'm currently at Airbnb.
Give you a little rundown, quick rundown on my history.
I have been working for 16 years as a, 16-17 years as a design leader running very small
teams and very very large teams.
I've seen the entire gamut.
I previously worked at Google, ran mobile search team.
I worked at YouTube.
Worked on the self-driving car which was a wild ride, literally, no pun intended.
And then I switched over to Airbnb.
And that is a really fascinating company because it's completely design led.
The CEO, Brian Chesky he is a designer.
We went to the Rhode Island School of Design together so we have a very similar mind-set
and when you are designing a company constantly it has some really interesting effects, and
I'm going to walk you through some of that.
So today I'm going to really talk about how to design a design team.
This is incredibly practical.
I want for you today to have some absolute takeaways on how to move forward in building
a great team and some products.
So I'm basically gifting you my playbook.
This is what I do all day and I advise CEOs all the time with this exact same advice I'm
going to give you today.
And you'll also find a trend, actually it's been going on for a couple of years now in
Silicon Valley, a lot of VCs are hiring designers to provide the exact same information I'm
about to give you today to their portfolio companies because they understand that building
a great design team is actually at the core of the success of that company.
So we're seeing more and more of this being core competency and less of sort of the extra,
the and of the sentence.
It's the actual core.
So when I meet with you know founders in particular, especially young founders, I get the same
questions over and over and over again and it boils down to four questions and I'm
going to walk you through what my answers are.
I'm going to hop around quite a bit but hopefully you have some takeaways for today.
So to make sure we're all starting with the same base understanding, I mean this is
a design conference, hopefully I don't need to explain this too much but I'm going to
walk you through my rationale for why you should hire designers.
So number one, designers will make your product something people want to use.
A lot of times we mistake designers for making things beautiful and functional.
They do those things but ultimately design thinking is about making something that people
want to buy.
They are the heart, they understand the heart of your customer and they translate it into
the product.
So it's the connective tissue between the two.
Two, this is really important for CEOs to understand.
Designers help visualise your vision.
You can talk about it all day, you can explain it, you can spreadsheet it, you can show the
numbers, you can show the market opportunity but if people don't actually understand
what you mean, if they're not connecting to it, it doesn't matter.
And that means internally and it means for your customers as well.
So what designers do, and I love this quote from a colleague of mine, she's a VP of
design at Facebook.
What designers' super power is is to translate exactly like what's in your head into something
tangible.
It's something visual, something that people can feel and they can, it sort of resonates
with them.
And that's a really important thing.
In fact with my team I'm constantly telling them okay enough decks.
I don't want any more strategy decks.
I get what your strategy is, show me what you're talking about.
Stop talking about, show it.
So number three, why hire a designer?
Designers see the entire experience.
A lot of times in organisations, especially as you get bigger and bigger and bigger we're
put into these product teams and you have a focus, you have a very specific focus and
you know you have a growth team or you have a team that's launching a brand new feature
or a new business unit.
A great designer completely transcends all of that and knows what the actual consumer
experience is going to be.
Yes they're delivering on their specific area, their specific project, but in the back
of their mind their constantly thinking about the end experience.
Because customers do not think about business units, they do not think about that feature
that was launched by that particular team.
All they see is what the entire product is at the end of the day and a great design team
sees that as well.
So now let's get into question two.
Agency or in-house, and this has come up already today and I want to give you sort of my flavour
of this and how to answer this question.
So especially when you're a bit of a smaller company you're wondering okay am I, do I
bring on a designer?
What do I do with them?
Or do I hire an agency, and maybe even pay a lot of money to do so.
Let me give you the rationale of why you would go for one versus the other.
So if you hire an agency my recommendation, the number one reason why should you do that
is if you need a creative jolt of energy.
So prior to Google I worked at IDEO and one of the things that people were really paying
for was that sort of amped up we're stuck in a rut and we just need some creative juices
here to get people moving forward.
That's what these innovation companies, these consulting companies are really providing
and they have a really like an impeccable process around that in order to provide that
level of energy.
So it's somewhat like you know they're providing a brand new perspective, their objective.
They're not in the game, they're extracted on purpose.
And they kind of give you an outside view into a problem that maybe you're a little
too close to and they can help you solve.
But if you want to take it in-house I'll tell you the number one why you should do
this.
It really affects your culture.
You know most of you know about design, thinking you understand it.
It's the what of design, the designers are the who, design thinking is the what, it's
what they actually do.
But hiring designers will actually change how you solve problems at your company and
the number one thing is that you're kind of making a conscious decision that you're
going to change your culture.
I want to dive into that just a little bit deeper because it's a really important aspect
when you start hiring, especially more than one designer.
If you get to five, ten it changes the construct of your company.
So Brian Chesky at Airbnb he has this famous quote that he repeats over and over every
single year.
I'm not going to use his language but he says, whatever you do don't mess up the
culture.
And what he is really talking about is when the culture is strong you can trust everyone
is doing the right thing.
What he means is if you have sort of a, like a contract, a social contract among all the
people in your company of how you work then you don't need to actually have a lot of
process.
You don't have to have a lot of rules.
And when you add designers into that mix it's basically augmenting that social contract
just a little bit.
Now you have to care about the customers because, and the users because you hired people who
care about the users.
So you're kind of shifting the entire culture in that direction and hopefully that's for
the positive but you have to get everyone to accept it and be on board for it.
Ahem, excuse me.
Another way to explain this.
I have a colleague, her name's Mia Bloom.
We worked together at IDEO and she describes culture as less of creating architecture and
more of tending to a garden.
It's constantly changing, it's constantly morphing.
And she uses this analogy, she wrote a beautiful blog post on this and her analogy is that
there's this flock of birds, these starlings and they've been studied by biologists for
years and they can't quite figure out how they move, how this formation happens.
And one thing that they've sort of discovered is when one bird shifts its neighbour shifts,
and then all its neighbours shift.
And then suddenly it's this wave effect, all of them are moving.
Company cultures are a lot like this.
You have one neighbour who's kind of thinking a little bit different and it's infectious
and suddenly it's constantly shifting and constantly changing.
And the most successful companies I'm seeing today, and this is certainly like you know
how to keep up is you know it's changing and you agree to shift and you don't just
like let it happen but at the same time you're conscious that it does.
So you're kind of constantly designing your culture and also allowing it to shift as you
grow especially.
So the third question to answer here.
Do you hire a doer or do you hire a leader?
I hear this question all the time especially from new founders who are going for that first
hire.
They're looking to fill the box.
They're like okay I need a design team.
I hired my engineering team to get to a product, you know get a product out there in the world
and now I know I'm supposed to have a designer.
And they may or may not understand why but they understand that design is the next step.
So you're trying to fill that box and chances are you're trying to have a box of one.
You're trying to hire your first designer and you're figuring out is this person,
should this person be a leader or should they be a doer.
Well first off regardless of either one, the thing that you need to do, if you're only
going to have a designer of one, a team of one, they have to have passion and drive.
And what I mean by that is they have to have passion for your product.
They have to care a lot about your particular company and they have to be driven to create
amazing work because a designer, design team of one is one of the most lonely places I
can absolutely name.
No one thinks like you, no one acts like you, you're constantly fighting for that user
and you're hoping someone cares.
And if you don't have passion and drive you're going to give up and that person's
going to leave.
Absolutely.
But if they connect to your product and they connect to your company they'll stick around
for it, they'll kind of you know ride that wave, get through that storm and then suddenly
you're building a team and everyone is on board for having design as a major leadership
role in the company.
Another thing that's obvious but I want to explain a little bit more about this, they
have to have amazing collaboration skills.
If you have a design team of one that person has to know how to work with engineers, how
to work with product managers.
They're working with everyone but design so you have to have collaboration skills.
So when I'm interviewing people I'm constantly trying to figure out how do you work with
people who don't think like you.
That's sort of the litmus test for a designer of one.
I have a colleague, her name's Katie Dell, she's now the VP of design at Lyft which
is another ride sharing app, competitor to Uber.
And she just started that gig in November and I was having coffee with her, asking her
okay so you just started in this new job, you know let's talk about collaboration.
Like how are you making this work?
And she said it's really interesting.
When I started at this company the previous design lead was from Apple and he created
literally an ivory tower for design.
He created this very white space with a door and only designers had the key, and only designers
could enter this room.
And it like literally separate the design team from the rest of the company.
And she's like the first thing I did was I ripped out the door and the entire company
cheered.
Very very practical, very very straight up stuff but that's you know an important part
about collaboration.
It's not just how you work with people but how you present your team to the rest of the
company and to say you know, we're here to help you.
We're here to be a part of the product team and to build great work together.
Another thing to remember is collaboration keeps us accountable to designing something
for others instead of ourselves.
The reason why it's so important to find collaborative skills is that if you're finding
someone that's constantly saying I think, I think, they're designing it for themselves.
They're designing it because they believe they have the answer.
But especially if you think about companies like Airbnb where we're in countless countries
all over the world, it's not about what you think.
It's about what your customers think because they're not like you.
They're completely different.
Global companies have to observe that you're nothing like you're actual customers.
And especially in Silicon Valley we're kind of trapped in this little bubble, this really
small area where you have a high concentration of technologists who kind of drink the same
coffee, go to the same gyms.
They all have the same lifestyle and yet they're designing for people that they literally have
never interacted with.
So it's really important to think that when you're collaborating well with a diverse
team you're actually supporting your customers more and the collaboration is sort of like
keeping yourself in check and making sure you do that.
So I want to also explain a little bit, thinking about leaders and doers, a lot of people translate
that into junior versus senior.
I want to sort of explain when I think about building design team, the real difference
in levels because titles are really confusing in the design world.
You have people who are design directors with only three years' experience.
My title's a UX manager, I've been doing it for 16, it's just like it's completely
nonsensical.
So let me just talk to you about what really happens as you go up the pyramid.
Junior designers are not necessarily worse designers than design directors.
In fact in many cases junior designers execute far better than design directors.
So what's, why is there separation between the two?
As you go up this pyramid the skill that is really honed, and why they're promoted,
is storytelling.
They know how to sell an idea.
Design directors are impeccable storytellers, they know how to get everyone on board.
They know how to move teams forward because they can really articulate what the problem
is, what you're solving for, and get everyone else just moving.
So leaders, especially design leaders, they're strategic thinkers, they're thinking across
the board.
In fact with my team I have an interesting leadership team.
We have a lot of functions.
I mean Airbnb is a fairly complex business.
I have a product manager, an eng lead, a research lead, a data science lead, a policy guy.
Like we have a ton, a lawyer.
These are all my peers.
But what's really interesting when we get together is we're all strategic thinkers
and we're Venn diagrams of each other.
So rather than just saying I'm only in charge of design, we're really actually all in
charge of the strategy and that's the best way to think about a leadership team.
Design leaders are also your source of inspiration.
Number one thing that any great design leader needs to do is rev up that team, get them
very excited about what they're building.
That's going to affect your retention, it's going to affect the output.
The speed in which people work.
Everything stems from inspiration.
If you think about all the people that you have, and I have a lens of tech so I know
it's not exactly translating to every single business but in my industry if the CTO is
in charge of building it, the feasibility, the PM is there, the product manager is there
to make sure it gets launched.
The designer better make sure that everyone is very excited about this project because
that's their job, that's what they're there to do.
Storytelling, we already talked about that as being a primary function, and then systems
thinking.
So again thinking about how everything is going to work together.
These are the key attributes if you're interviewing for a leader these are the four things that
you should absolutely be interviewing for and making sure that they have.
But a doer, again one is not necessarily better than the other.
It depends on what you need in your company.
A doer loves creative exploration.
If you put them in a little tiny box, they're going to suffocate.
They need time to explore.
But they can't just be in designer la la land forever right?
So the best way for them to not be in that space is to find someone that works fast.
So if you can find someone that can you know bang out like 30 ideas in two days you've
found someone good, you've found an excellent doer and that's really sort of the crux
of the success of sort of a individual contributor team is finding those really prolific doers
that just can't wait to keep exploring and they can't wait to flex their creativity
skills.
Obviously their craft and execution is amazing.
Again leaders might not have that but doers absolutely have that and have a beautiful
portfolio and lastly a learner mind-set.
Doers are constantly changing their skillset and moving on and trying new things.
They're constantly trying to hone their craft.
And I also want to make it really clear that I and my team have doers that are at the top
of our sort of level system and leaders, managers who are on that same level system.
So you know if you think about your org structure, you have like you know junior designers, well
call them like L1s all the way up to our like executives.
We have doers who are all the way up to the executive level for a very good reason.
It's all about making sure execution is paired with leadership all the way up to the
top.
So another really important thing about doers, if you didn't know this already, is they're
not all the same.
We constantly talk about headcount as just like butts in seats.
It's not true, it's completely not true and it's the same for most functions.
There's a huge gamut of what kind of designer you may want to hire and it really flexes
according to what kind of company you have.
So you may, if you're in tech you're definitely going to hire what we call product designers.
You're going to have some digital designers, like people who kind of like front end engineers.
Whereas if you have a physical product that you're selling like socks you're going
to have a lot more brand and identity design.
So just really be aware that in your job rec it's really like there's a huge gamut
here and many people actually do flex and cross between these disciplines.
But it's hard because it's so complex and there's so many different kinds.
So make sure you're getting sort of the right tool for the job and that you really
understand what you're trying to solve for by hiring that doer.
So let's say though you're really sort of not sure.
Leader or doer, leader or doer, what do I do?
The first question I would ask you is do you expect rapid growth?
This is really important.
I see over and over again these small start-up companies where there's like ten people,
they hire this amazing doer but they're growing so fast that by the end of the year
they've outgrown the doer.
And what I mean by that is I meet with you know this designer and they're like you
know I came to make things, I'm a creator and now they're expecting me to manage a
team because they hired four or five people and I don't like management and I lost my
trade, I'm not designing anything.
It's because you hired the wrong person into that role.
Yes you need people that are going to like pump out the work but if you're going to
grow really really fast you should probably hire a leader that knows how to build the
team.
So anticipate, know exactly where this whole business is going to go and hire the person
that you need six months and 12 months from now.
And then sort of lastly in sort of leader versus doer, another thing to really consider
is looking at your team that you have in place right now.
If you're a smaller company and everyone you've hired was like an ex-founder, they
have like multiple degrees, they're clearly leaders and you throw in a junior designer
into that mix chances are they're going to be steamrolled over and they're not going
to have any voice whatsoever.
So really think about dynamics within the team and the group.
If you have a bunch of leaders maybe you should hire a leader as well, just consider that.
Again it's you know every single business situation is different but it's something
to definitely consider.
Now when you do decide to hire a leader, some of the things I look for that's I think
is really really important and making sure that you hire someone that other designers
are going to admire.
Now you don't need a famous graphic designer to achieve that but you do need someone that
holds the bar really really high.
Someone that is constantly going to push people for better pixels and better work.
We often look for people who have tons and tons of experience but we never, like it's
very rare that I hear in interviews or when people are talking about who they're hiring
you know how, when are they going to say no to shipping.
That's a tough call, that's a really really tough skill to have.
When are you going to say it's not good enough, we haven't actually met the mark.
And when are they going to let go and say you know what we just need to ship.
These are the nuances of being a design leader that's really important to look for.
So if you're going to hire a leader here are the three things that you need to do to
set them up for success.
Number one, report to the CEO.
This is a really interesting trend that's happening in Silicon Valley right now.
Of the room, if you're a CEO do you have a designer reporting to you?
Please raise your hand.
There's one, two, there's a few.
If you ask this question now in Silicon Valley a lot of hands are going up and a lot of design
leaders are actually forcing it.
They're saying I would love to join your company but only if I report to you.
And there's a good reason for this.
If you really think about a product team as a coming of minds where you're all putting
each other in balance, meaning the product manager is there to launch great work as quickly
as possible.
The technologist is there to build something that's not buggy, that's stable, feasible,
it works well.
You know in our business we have policy people to make sure it's legal.
We have all sorts of lenses looking at the product.
If you don't have an equal voice at the design level that's advocating for the user
it creates an imbalance and that's a really important thing that people are starting to
learn, that it's all about influence.
So when you have someone directly reporting to the CEO it means that designer has equal
influence as the other functions.
It also tells the rest of the company that you value the creative perspective.
So when you have a designer reporting to the CEO suddenly people listen and suddenly again
back to that culture of switch the birds start shifting and other people start listening.
But if they're reporting to product often it takes a longer time for the flock to move.
So that's sort of the mentality and the things that have been happening.
I've seen this trend over the last six months in particular.
And lastly here, please integrate them into the team.
Do not create an ivory tower, do not lock them behind a door.
This is really really vital for the success of your team, it's not just for the design
team it's for your entire product.
They need to be integrated, sitting next to everyone else in the company.
All right, so last one.
How do I find a designer?
Oh man, this is tough because just in my own recruiting team I needed, I need a new lead.
They told me it's going to take three to six months to find someone which is insane,
I mean that's a really, but in tech that's an eternity to get someone in that role.
So I have some advice on how to handle this.
Number one, we have to look at other pools.
And what I kind of tell my team and recruiters all the time is like find the misfits.
I see the same resumes over and over and over again.
I know who the people are, it's a small world.
The design world in particular it's a small cohort.
We need to find the people that we're not typically looking for and one of the things
to keep in mind, this is kind of near and dear to my heart these days, is that 29 percent
of creative directors right now are women.
Just some context, that's all creative directors.
In tech it's 11 percent.
The top of funnel started in creative directors in well let's start with tech, was 35 percent.
So already it's like shot way down to you know almost single digits.
We're getting really really low for female leadership in particular and what we're
discovering is just you know women are leaving at rapid rates.
It's a total leaky bucket.
Just last week I had a direct report, she was one of my top performers, she made the
decision to leave work and to stay at home with her one year old.
Totally she did the right thing, she did exactly what she should have done for herself.
Guarantee you in three years I'm calling her because she's amazing and I know she's
going to want a job.
But these mothers are really really afraid that they're going to be completely obsolete,
that no one is going to hire them when they come back.
There's no chance I'm not hiring her, I know what good quality she is and I know
what kind of work that she can produce but she has that fear.
So we need to start thinking about the long game.
You know if you have someone that exits, call them up in a couple of years they're going
to want a job and you know what they're capable of.
This is one of the things I think tech in particular can solve.
If they stop looking at the short term, who's available right now all the time and start
keeping track of the long term and keeping track of long term careers.
Another thing to remember is that 82 percent of creative say a diverse team produces the
best work.
So if you are really thinking about a global company, you're thinking about designing
things for massive amounts of people with so many different cultures.
Everyone agrees a diverse team is necessary but we continue again to regurgitate the same
resumes and the same people.
You know especially at Google, I love that company to death but I also worked with people
at that company that also worked at Apple and Facebook and all the big guys.
They're all kind of hopping around.
We need to pull people in from different pools.
One of the sort of recruiting exercises that Airbnb had done that I loved was we went to
second, what we call second tier cities.
They're not really second tier, they're just not our primary markets like New York
and San Francisco.
So we actually went to Philadelphia and we did an artist speaking series on graffiti.
Had nothing to do with technology whatsoever but it was super inspiring and I met a lot
of kind of budding artists who were doing user experience kind of on the fly, completely
untrained and there's some raw talent in there and more importantly there's some
super fresh ideas going on in those sort of markets.
So you kind of have to be a little bit more creative and look at areas where people aren't
constantly recruiting and tapping into.
And to follow up with that point, 90 percent of creatives have a degree in a very wide
range of disciplines.
Meaning that chances that someone has a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and
you're going to find them and you're going to hire them is really really small.
People major in like architecture and communications and English and all sorts of degrees and then
become designers along the path.
If you just go to the top schools and only recruit from that pool you are missing out
from the non-traditional pool of individuals who are highly highly talented.
On my team alone I have four people who never went to college.
They have high school diplomas but they never went to college and they are severely talented.
So you kind of have to like think outside the box, know that design is a discipline
of taste and thoughtfulness and not necessarily academic rigour in the same way that we think
about it.
Data science it would be completely different situation.
At Airbnb we have PhDs of data science all over the place, they're the smartest individuals
I've ever met.
They're absolutely qualified to do that job.
Design is a different world, it's all about experiences and knowing the customer.
It's not as analytical, it's a little bit more subjective and certainly the empathy
skills is primary there.
So big takeaways for today, some things that I want to give you like actionable steps here
that might be new for you in case you're struggling with this.
So please stop searching by titles, it's not going to help you.
If you only look for head of design and VP of design for your company you're missing
out on a diverse pool, you're basically inundating the same people who get a million
LinkedIn requests and they're not going to respond to you.
So if you only search by title for these individuals you're not going to get anywhere, you have
to be more creative than that.
This is something that I've observed and I want to explain this, look for loyalty but
no movement.
It is very very rare for a good designer, sorry it's very very rare for a bad designer
to stick to one company.
Meaning if they're not effective they get shuffled around quite a bit, or they just
get fired.
People who are good, stay.
And people want them to stay and actually I've seen engineers beg designers please
don't leave, I love working with you.
And they're the ones that are like advocating for them the most.
What I see is in the ranks these really effective collaborative designers are sticking around
but they're not always getting promoted for many different reasons.
Maybe they're slightly introverted, maybe they have a different leadership style than
the company is supporting.
There's always something that's like slightly like off culturally between that designer
and the company but the team loves them because they have those core skills that I already
listed from before.
Look for those people who've been there maybe three, four years and they're probably
itching for a leadership opportunity but they haven't been given it.
I've recruited this way many many times.
I highly recommend just trying it, just talking to a few people.
And lastly ask the doers.
The people who are doing the work are at an elevation level where they understand who
the real leaders are.
You have people who are given the title but the real leaders are, that's a skill not
a title.
So the real leaders are actually you know flexing that muscle and the doers see it and
they know it.
And so, you know I do a lot of skip level and one-on-ones so rather than just talk to
my direct reports, I talk to the level below that to see kind of what's going on in the
trenches and the doers tell me who's actually excelling and who's actually kind of moving
things forward.
And at the end of the day sort of the main takeaway here is I really want you to look
for those dark horses.
What I mean by dark horses is these are the people who haven't quite been given the
chance.
They have impeccable ability.
If you know performance equals potential minus interference these are the people that have
so much interference that their performance has not truly been met.
Their potential is there but the performance hasn't truly reached the level that they're
capable of.
Dark horses are hungry, they want the next opportunity and if you want a really really
great design team you have to look for those individuals, not the typical.
So now that you've hired that designer, design team of one, you've filled that box,
you've figured out if you're going to have a leader or a doer, you're going to
expand then you probably will think about hiring a researcher next.
That's usually what I recommend is the next discipline.
A lot of people say, let's just hire more designers because we have a huge backlog.
The thing is without a researcher kind of stepping in very very early on you miss a
lot of the customer insights and a lot of the process that's needed in order for that
designer to do great work.
And then you start really kind of stretching out creating a well-rounded team.
You add quantum strategists, visual designers.
At Airbnb right now we have 17 different roles under the design team and they all do something
different.
So you kind of you know you start to understand that this is a really complex team, it's
not just a design team.
It's a bunch of flavours all put together and eventually you have a design org that
looks like this.
This is Airbnb's, we have a ton of designers building really amazing products.
All you know, pushing for diversity, pushing for really forward thinking product design
and we're constantly growing, we went from 300 people to over 200 in just the time I've
been there.
We're probably going to add another 100 but you know one of my big mandates here is
to make sure if we're going to add 100 make sure those people understand the global customer
and not just the customer in Silicon Valley.
Great, thank you.
Interviewer: Thanks so much Jenny.
So a strong theme was about design being linked to kind of user experience.
So I've worked with designers before, if I kind of reflect back, who would have been
very, who are actually very good kind of technically at their skill but sometimes people are more
interested in what they think about the product or the jacket or the experience than what
customers are.
Is that a function of the team, the organisation, or of the designer?
Jenny: Yeah so it can be a little bit of both.
So if you kind of when I was getting to the end there that you have to have a researcher
in there, that person helps get the designer from thinking about I into we.
You want to get your team as quickly out of the I statements into the we.
And so if you have someone whose job is to listen to the user, having those two leaders
sit side by side alleviates that problem.
And I definitely do see people say well you know I have great intuition, I think I know
the answer, I've great experience, I've been working in this space for a long long
time.
If you don't have a researcher to sort of gut check that all the time, and even better
if you have a data insights team that can also give you some gut check, you will get
into those traps.
Interviewer: So at a company like Airbnb, if researching customer insight sit within
design, what does marketing do?
And what's the kind of relationship between the two?
Jenny: Yeah so really this is a fascinating question.
A lot of creative directors, those who are reporting to the CEO, those leaders would
say there's no difference anymore.
Then marketing is product, product is marketing.
And so those leaders actually have the marketing team, the product marketing team and the product
team all reporting to them because they see such a connection between the two.
You know a lot of time, especially with these apps the app is marketing, it is the face
of the company.
It's the only face of the company that they have and so there's, it's so so blurry
that you can't really make that distinction anymore.
Interviewer: And when you're thinking about strategy, when you're thinking about, can
you talk a little bit about the distinction between company strategy and design strategy
and what sort of framework you find useful verse too short or too far to be helpful?
Jenny: Yeah so it's kind of unfair with Airbnb because of the same thing.
You know Brian Chesky thinks like a designer so the company strategy is our design strategy.
In fact it's really funny, we had these design reviews, they're so not design reviews.
They're completely strategy reviews and business reviews.
But again designers their super-power is articulating the vision through like the screens, the pixels.
Something that's super super visual.
We at least at Airbnb we need those to express what the business is going to do so there's
really no distinction between the two.
Other companies I worked at certainly there was a difference.
It had a much more process heavy way of thinking about design.
There was like a moment in time when design was supposed to enter and then exit the scene
once they're done with their work.
I do think that that's changing as we're getting more design leaders who understand
business.
And the real success for design leaders in this space is that you know we have to, we
have to like talk that talk.
When I'm talking to Brian or I'm talking to any one of our business leaders, I have
to know what the growth numbers are.
I have to know all the supply, I have to know all the demand.
I have to know what our actual markets are doing in order for me to even be a part of
that conversation.
So if you're looking for a design leader you also have to make sure that person can
sort of play ball with everyone else on the team otherwise what's the point?
You're not actually having a conversation, you're still doing sort of like over the
fence chucking work over.
Interviewer: So it sound like design has changed a lot.
It's kind of becoming more morphic yet more specialised right?
There were 16 different disciplines I think you were pointing at.
Jenny: Yeah so again that pyramid, when you get to the top you get leaders that are closer
to the other functional leaders.
Again they're a Venn diagram of each other.
But then as you get to the bottom of the pyramid you have that slew of role, like you know
17 different roles that you can hire for.
So that's why the pyramid is even like that shape because you have so many people needing
to fill different sort of disciplines in different buckets.
Interviewer: In your view can you have a great design leader who hasn't been a designer?
Jenny: Ooh that's a really good question.
Huh.
Well -
Interviewer: Jenny's a great planner and she goes can you please tell me what questions
you're going to ask me before the thing.
I go, no.
[Audience laughs]
Jenny: I know.
I'm like, I like being, I like being prepared.
Yes but with caveats.
So you can definitely have someone that's really great at like for example at Airbnb
our creative director, Alex Schleifer, he is an engineer by trade but he understands
design really really well and more importantly he inspires the team.
And that's the real kind of tell-tale of a great design leader and I have definitely
seen like researchers who are great design leaders.
They're not opening up Photoshop and Sketch all day but they know what the team needs
in order to move forward.
So you can have people who are you know not designers but they have to know how to lead
and inspire a design team.
Interviewer: And thinking about user experience and e-commerce and one of the key things is
conversion, there's arguably two ways of approaching that.
There are established consumeristics about how people are using online platforms, yet
if you want cutthroat you can't do with something fresh and different.
What's your view on do you swim with the fish or do you try and create different heuristics
that are distinct from kind of established patterns.
Because ten years there were no established patterns right?
Jenny: Yeah so I talk about this with my teams all the time, you have to do both.
So a really clear example, this is usually your typical growth team.
They are, you know growth team means like top of funnel conversion.
They're doing ads and marketing campaigns, Facebook ads or just getting more users.
They are constantly banging out work on a weekly basis.
Like short term, short term, short term but in order for them to actually make any major
movements they need to have some long term bets simultaneously.
So when I'm planning with my leads, I always say we need to have at least three one-year
bets in this like giant list of short-term bets.
And if you don't the team is constantly going like this.
All these short-term bets are sort of like pulling in this way and then pulling in that
way.
There's no anchor to where they're actually headed and so it helps the entire team understand
where it's all going.
Interviewer: And do you still do kind of multiple prototypes against solving for one area and
test or what sort of process, how do you know when you've come up with the right product?
Or how do you know when it's time to ship as you say.
Jenny: So in tech most designers now prototype with engineers.
In fact sometimes they even like deliver the final code to engineers to use.
I have some people who are that good at coding who are on the design team.
Prototyping is essential for really fine-tuning what the customer needs.
So you know without prototyping when you make that first design generally you get 70 percent
of the way there.
To be a great, I mean that's launchable sort of.
Hopefully it's not super-buggy.
It's enough for you to, it's enough for you to sort of get a taste.
Is this working?
But a great product that's going to stay and get your customers to stay gets to that
98, 99 percent accuracy and that's what prototyping is for.
It's getting from 70 to like 99 percent accurate and the more you do it, the more
revs you put in there the more you inch closer and closer and closer.
And sometimes it can be infuriating.
I mean I worked on a design with my team.
There was a portion of the app that was a, it's a calendar view for a host.
So hosts are the people who list their properties on Airbnb and it's actually really complex.
The calendar is how they manage their entire company.
Thinking of hosts as like small entrepreneurs and small business owners, we think of them
as having companies.
We had to go through 40 or 50 prototypes to get that right and each one we put it in front
of users and constantly talked to our users and so in that particular project we actually,
the internal narrative is that we designed it with our customers not for our customers
and prototyping helped us do that.
Interviewer: And just a final question about consumer behaviour across different cultures.
So you're in Silicon Valley in that ecosystem yet some of your users live in Tokyo, some
of your businesses, your homes live in Tokyo or in you know Innsbrook.
Does the same stuff work, do you adapt for the Japanese view of hosting or how do you
become, do you localise?
Jenny: So the answer's no, it does not always work.
In fact most of the time it doesn't.
Our Chinese app is completely different.
I don't know if any of you have had to use it, it's great.
We have an entire design team in China designing a brand new app.
It has its own code base and it's completely different than the American version because
that's a very different company.
We couldn't tweak it enough to fit the need of that audience, we had to build something
brand new for them and with that we actually launched a brand new logo and a whole, there
is a whole brand around it because we recognise that this is a totally different ball game
and in tech no one has done China right.
So many people enter and then they have to get out of there because they didn't really
actually look at how different it is to work in China and so that's a really great example
where we're just like okay, let's start from scratch for this audience because this
is not going to work.
Interviewer: Jenny thank you so much.
Jenny: Thank you.
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