Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Irene Au on design leadership and experience-driven organizations
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Irene Au is a design leader with deep experience in team building. She's currently an operating partner at Coastal Ventures, where she works with startup CEOs to make their designs great.
Irene started her career at Netscape, then moved on to lead design efforts at Yahoo, Google, and Udacity. These experiences give her a unique perspective on growing UX teams, and I love how she thinks about enhancing design in different kinds of situations.
Irene: I often talk about this Trojan horse, you know, it's like for any given organization, there's got to be a Trojan horse, like something that they value that you can ride off of to get the foot in the door.
So, for example, like, at [00:01:00] Yahoo, people had never watched users use their products before, like, until, like, up until I implemented, like, our user research program. And so this was just wonderful because. Yahoo's just ate it up. They loved watching people use their product, and we could ride off of that and engage them through user testing.
And then once we got insights back from user testing, then the designers could come back and say, Okay, look, here might be a better way to design the experience. Or, you know, this might be, these might be the features that we actually want to prioritize first. So, like, at Yahoo, user research was the Trojan horse.
At Google, there was an abundance of usability testing. People kind of took it for granted, but what was really lacking was the functional prototype. Trojan horse there was like to, to prototype experiences and to make ideas tangible. And if there was ever a debate over, like, should we do it this way or that way?
Like some of the best designers would design and prototype both directions and have them both come to life. [00:02:00] And then it became immediately clear and obvious like, oh, we should go with concept A.
Amy: Irene brings a deeply humanistic approach to everything she does and integrates her passion for yoga and mindfulness into her work.
Listen in and discover how a Silicon Valley legend gets startup CEOs to embrace iterative user centered design.
Welcome to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Irene: Thank you for having me.
Amy: Thrilled that you're here. So for those who don't know you, give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you get into design and tech? And what were those pivotal moments along the way that really shaped your career?
Irene: So I was always a math and science geek and I studied electrical and computer engineering in college and I went on to graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, originally with the intention of pursuing [00:03:00] a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering.
And they had, you know, the best program in the country at that time. And so it was amazing, all the resources and the research that was happening there. And while I was there, I kind of realized that in contrast to many of my peers, whom I felt were interested in building technology for the sake of technology, I was much more interested in the relationship between technology and people.
So how do you develop and design technology to support and augment what people are trying to do and how they naturally want to behave. And then also, what is the relationship that the impact that technology has on people and society and so forth? And coincidentally. The University of Illinois happened to have some really fantastic people studying cognitive engineering and human factors, like Chris Wiggins, who was, he wrote the book on human factors and engineering psychology and Penelope Sanderson, who had a long background in cognitive engineering.
Um, and, and many [00:04:00] other professors were kind of this brain trust around this. And at that time, a lot of the research was centered around like, how do you study human behavior, perception, and cognition so that you can apply this. Understanding towards the design of airplane cockpits, for example, or, um, emergency rooms or operating rooms in the hospitals so that you minimize human error.
So, like, you minimize pilot error or doctor error. And it's exactly this kind of research in this field of study that, um. I wanted to apply and direct towards the design and development of software. So this was kind of before it was really possible to study human computer interaction. There were some people, you know, who had kind of done that.
And of course, IBM at the time already had, like, a human factors group and things like that. But I pulled together a program, a study that drew from computer science and industrial engineering and psychology to really pull together my own study of human computer interaction. [00:05:00] So that was kind of the, how I pivot that was like, the biggest pivotal moment was like, ah, this is really what I want to do University of Illinois was a really great place to do that to not only because of the amazing professors and the research there, but also, like, was there and that's the birthplace of mosaic.
It's the Internet's first web browser. And so the university was really on the forefront of. Bringing content to the web and using that to support. The university and communicating with students and things like that. So, a lot of my research projects were related to that. So I had the opportunity to think pretty deeply about web design, for example, and content design and also browser design.
Even when I was back in school, so my first job coming out of school was at Netscape and I was a designer on. Client products. So that was like the browser mail and news client page editor, things like that. Um, so it was a natural fit and really exciting because we were kind of bringing the internet to everyone, but these were the most key experiences kind of in [00:06:00] the earliest stages.
Amy: So did you. Get that Netscape job through the University of Illinois connection.
Irene: No, actually, I didn't. It was actually very hard to get their attention initially, which was super annoying. I think because I wasn't, I didn't have a design degree and I was applying for the, you know, user interface design team, or I don't know what they were looking for, but I don't have like, graphic design in my background.
And I, it's certainly not designed with a capital D, but yeah, it was pretty hard to get their attention at first. Thanks. But I managed to land an interview. My fiance at that time was also interviewing with them and they were extending him an offer as a software engineer. And so that happened to, you know, the universe just kind of aligned we were headed that way anyway.
So yeah, once I was able to have the conversations with them, what really intrigued them was the depth with which I shared my project work, the portfolio that it went beyond kind of. Static screenshots, but that I showed them, like, all [00:07:00] the different technical considerations and user considerations and bringing that together to create an experience that really.
Net user needs solved a real pain point, but was also designed in a way that, you know, could be implemented because I also wrote the software. And so I think the story that I told around that and the depth with which I demonstrated that I understood, like, all these different considerations and trade offs and constraints requirements.
They're like, okay, she's ready for the job. So that was a lot of fun.
Amy: That is really interesting. That you had that perspective that early?
Irene: Yeah, well, um, it helped that I knew how to code and that was actually how I was able to get this research assistantship with my advisor because she was looking for students to take under her wing who could code and help her develop the software that she was interested in designing.
Um, and so I kind of blended my skills to the project and she taught me what she knew. And so that was a [00:08:00] really great. Powerful combination, so that was also helpful for me because we were developing software to help students, which meant that I had to do user research for students, understand their needs, understand what they were really looking to do and then design and develop software to to meet those needs.
So, it was a really great opportunity to apply a lot of cross disciplinary skills. Towards building something tangible that people ended up using.
Amy: Wow. That is awesome. I actually had a parallel experience in grad school because I could code. I got a job at NASA Ames in the human factors department. And because of that job and all the software I built, I got a job at some microsystems.
Irene: Hey, that's a news company.
Amy: I know it's a, it's just, there's, you know, it's a tangled web we weave here in the Valley. I think that there's something very [00:09:00] full circle about what you're doing now and your journey through, you know, Yahoo and Google on this amazing journey that you've had, because what you're talking about is you actually learned user interface design the way I did, which was actually research first.
It's like, who are you designing for? Or they're here. Let's talk to them. Okay. What do you guys need? Um, that's how I learned it. I, I was coding scientific signal processing algorithms in labs for scientists and the monkeys were gonna die if like they had to collect the data. So it was like writing code and making an interface based on very tight constraints.
And I learned it the same way. And I think it's a great way to learn, but you have to have multidisciplinary skills or you work with a team who has those skills. So you started that way. Tell me, you know, not every detail, but through Netscape and then the other jobs you had, how [00:10:00] did you transform and how did you leverage these interdisciplinary skills to transform from a hands on designer to a manager and then really a company builder and leader?
And now back to working with interdisciplinary teams.
Irene: I was really lucky at Netscape to have some wonderful mentors, Hagen Rivers and Mark Stern in particular. Um, and, uh, when I went to Yahoo, um, I had a boss who really believed in me, Dave Shen. And so he gave me a lot of rope to not only Design I was the first person with a background in human computer interaction.
And so he gave me a lot of rope to help build the user experience, the human center design practice at Yahoo. So, I built our first usability labs there. Ran the first couple of research studies and started hiring user researchers and interaction designers and slowly, but surely, as the company grew, and we chose our projects very carefully.
We could show the value that we were bringing to the company as they were transforming from just being a web [00:11:00] directory to offering interactive with based applications like Yahoo Mail and my Yahoo and so on and so forth, where they really needed people with skills like ours. So that's, that's kind of, you know, we just kind of grew organically by first establishing the needs for the skills and the value that we were bringing and then creating more internal demand for that.
And that of course, you know, all that we were bringing to the table also helped grow Yahoo into a successful company. And so it just kind of ballooned from there.
Amy: And then how is Google different?
Irene: Google, I often describe as the bizarro land of Yahoo, at least during the era when I was there and, you know, of course, during the time that I was at Yahoo, that was like being at three different companies in that eight year period.
And at Google, um, by the time I joined in 2006, it was vastly different from what Yahoo eventually became. But born out of very similar backgrounds, you know, like the founders for both companies came from Stanford and, you know, all [00:12:00] four founders really cared about user experience and latency and had a really strong point of view around what they wanted to optimize for.
But Google was famously has always been famously focused on technology first, whereas Yahoo saw itself as a media company and Google culturally was very bottom up where, you know, the managers. Can't really, they weren't really, you know, didn't really have power to tell anybody to do anything. And Yahoo had become extraordinarily top down with lots of focus on strategy and PowerPoint slides and decks, but limited ability to execute for a variety of reasons.
So yeah, they were, they were really, really different. So going over to Google was like starting all over again and, and learning all over again, how to operate in a, in a different environment.
Amy: Now I know at Google, they separated out user research from design quite a bit. At least in the early days, and I'm thinking back to the story you told me about sort of merging them tightly.
Irene: Yeah, there was a usability analyst group. That's what they were called when I joined. And then there were the UI designers. That's what they were called. Uh, they [00:13:00] all ultimately rolled up to me, but the usability analysts reported to a manager and it was very old school usability. It was like Jakob Nielsen.
You know, old school user research. It was about usability testing. And the philosophy at that time was to keep a very clean wall between design and research that they should be very separate endeavors done by different people. Because the notion was that you didn't want the people responsible for doing the research and usability testing to be biased or influenced in any way by the designers and vice versa.
But I felt like it created too much of a waterfall process, and there wasn't enough generative research being done to help inform and inspire what was being built and designed and why. And so that's when I wanted to bring research and design closer together. You know, which some people, you know, really championed and others were a little uncomfortable about it.
But I think now research is completely decentralized at Google along with the [00:14:00] design team. But research is embedded within the design teams, which just goes to show how far along they have come in really integrating research into the product development process instead of, you know, coordinating it off into a separate thing that kind of is sort of like a design QA.
Amy: Yeah, it never made sense to me, but that was just from my own experience and seeing what worked best. And I understand that it is old school and waterfall style, but it's also an evolution, you know, companies evolve and what's right at one scale isn't necessarily right at another. Now you've seen that you said Yahoo is three different companies.
So you saw. What worked at one scale and then what worked at another?
Irene: Yeah. I mean, I think in the case of Yahoo, it wasn't so much about scale, but leadership, you know, and these days you'll see CEOs who are founders and their product visionaries, you know, or I don't want to say visionaries, but you know, they're like, they, they think product first, but back then, you know, like there was the shift after Tim Kugel left and Terry Semel [00:15:00] became CEO.
There was definitely a cultural shift. And a shift in the way the company was run and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you know, they've had so many CEOs now I want to get into, but, um, you know, I, I think it was really less about the scale and more about just leadership.
Amy: And then there's Google who have actually had very stable leadership over time.
Irene: Yeah, and everything they do at Google is all about scale. You know, there is not a single decision that is made without considering scale first.
Amy: Yeah. So fast forward to today. Now you're working with. Startups at different stages, but mostly early stage, right? It's a range. Yeah. We have a huge portfolio, so it really is a range.
Okay. So even more interesting startups at a different range of their development. And you're also seeing pitches of new startups, right?
Irene: Uh, here and there, I deliberately step away from the pitches as much as I can, just because to me, it's, first of all, it's super hard work. [00:16:00] I mean, you are listening to, you know.
A hundred pitches for every one investment that you're making, if that. And, uh, sometimes it's just the hard part is saying no, and sometimes it's hard to know what's good. But for me, it's just not. As creative and generative in the way that I want to contribute. I just love working with teams and I love working with them to make stuff and to build organizations.
So I'd much rather be on the operating side instead of the investing side. Much rather work with companies once we've decided to invest in them.
Amy: Got it. So you've said generative a few times, and I have a sense for what generative research means. What does generative research and just generative work mean to you?
And then how do you actually apply that? If you could tell us some stories, not necessarily with details, but just how you do that, where it gets interesting and powerful.
Irene: Yeah. So, you know, I think of it as You know, kind of the difference between formative and summative, you know, generative is [00:17:00] like you're creating stuff.
So it's all the activities directed towards the making of something. So that's, that's how I think of it. Depending on what stage of the company is at, different startups need different things. So the earliest stage startups and the conversation often starts with like, do you know somebody I can hire? The market is just really hot right now for designers and everybody wants to do the right thing by hiring designers, but it's incredibly difficult, especially for startups, because they don't necessarily have the brand or the network, you know, or the ability to pay, uh, what they need.
So. Even though the conversation often starts there, uh, it often can veer off into a variety of other activities. There are different categories ways in which I work with the startups. Sometimes in the most tactical direct way would be helping them build design capabilities. Whatever that means.
Sometimes the right answer is to get them to outsource design, even though they want to hire somebody in house. Sometimes the right answer [00:18:00] is to get them to build a team. Sometimes it's to get them to up level the team that they have. So there's a whole host of activities around connecting them with the right kinds of resources and skills that they need to be successful.
And then to go deeper into that, and of course, this depends on what stage of companies that is that, but, like, the early stage companies, sometimes they have technology that's looking for a purpose. You know, they, they, they have something interesting, they put it out there and there seems to be some traction.
So now it's, you know, okay, they have more funding and now they have to turn it into a business. So what does that look like? So, figuring out, like, what is the right intersection between what they have to offer and what the world needs is, you know, one area. Where there's an opportunity, and that's like product market fit and things like that.
Then further down the line, you know, there's just the active, you know, how do we make? How do we design? How do we build a culture to inside a company to allow design to be successful [00:19:00] in there? It's really about, like, establishing, like. User research as a key part of what they do, and then using that to inspire and inform whatever it is that they're making and building and then prototyping and then testing it out and then iterating.
So, all of that, which is really the essence of design thinking, building that in as a practice is essential. And then, you know, like as a company grows and becomes more successful, inevitably, there are going to be questions around scale and consistency and coherency, and how do we keep up with engineering, but some of the more interesting companies will really want to engage in how do we create an entire company culture that focuses on the customer and what are the right questions to ask upfront before we execute on anything, you know, and that really gets the core of.
What it means to be design centered. It's not about how many designers you have or what skills you have. It's really about the way the company thinks and [00:20:00] operates. Eager to get there and ask good questions to get to the right place. And, you know, others are really struggling just to make the technology work.
And so, you know, it's kind of the right thing for what the companies need in the right moment, that it can be a full spectrum.
Amy: Well, it takes a lot of contextual skill to figure out. What somebody needs in the right moment. And, uh, you have that rare set of experiences having worked with startups and then through growth and then into struggling with growth.
Yeah. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to really exercise your skills in this range of ways.
Irene: I love it. I think it's super fun.
Amy: So I'm really interested in the thread that goes through everything you've Which is focusing on people rather than technology. You know, that was the part of the Genesis story of how you got into this or the people's relationship to [00:21:00] technology.
So what are some of the most common mistakes that you see really smart entrepreneurs and really well intentioned teams make in the early stages when they're testing their idea? You know, you go through, like you, I really, um, embrace the, you know, the very iterative prototyping and testing process of developing ideas and actually testing them.
What are the really common mistakes, the teams that you work with make that you then help them overcome?
Irene: I would say if I had to pick one thing, it really comes down to some disconnect that they have between the company and people like the, who, who they're, who they're developing for. Maybe it's. It's like difference in understanding between what they think people want to do and what people actually want to do.
Or maybe it's like, there's like a whole swath of different kinds of people that they could be building for, but they just haven't chosen these are the people whose [00:22:00] problems really inspire us. And this is how we want to direct our technology to solving their problems. And sometimes it's just like, you know, they've, they've got really great instincts, but there's still a little bit off because they've just never watched people use their products.
Yeah. So those are just a few examples in which, you know, I can, I've seen people be a little bit disconnected from their users. And that seems to be 1 of the biggest pitfalls.
Amy: You recently wrote a report on designers in VC firms, and we will link that in the show notes. And I think in that report. You said many design partners find it challenging to get entrepreneurs to embrace user research and rapid iterative prototyping.
Is this what we're talking about here? Did you also hear the same thing hitting the same roadblock with some of the other design partners you talked to?
Irene: Yeah, I think everybody sees the same challenge. And part of it is, um, you know, some, some entrepreneurs just. Don't even know that this is even possible [00:23:00] like that.
You could actually, you know, implement this in a very methodical and organized way. And then how do you incorporate that back into everything the company does? Then I think others have a misconception that user research is about asking users what they want, which is absolutely untrue. It's about observation.
And understanding people, which is different than asking people what they want, because as you and I both know, like, what people say they want, uh, or what they say they do can often be different than what they actually need or what they actually do.
Amy: Yeah, and it's tricky. Yeah, because. It is about observation.
So one of the things that I've developed are what I call five magic research questions that are not asking them what they want, but are revealing of what they do. Cause what you're right, it's what people do and you can get it at different ways. But they are revealed through their [00:24:00] actions. Yeah. I think that's the, that's the punchline.
Irene: Yeah.
Amy: And no, just because they say they want the big green button doesn't mean you build the big green button, right?
Irene: Well, often also like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So like, if you're just optimizing for one particular metric or one for particular action, like I can design a webpage to get people to press.
Some button, you know, by making it really big and red and blinking and, you know, things like that. But, um, that's going to be at the expense of other things. And so user research, I think is also kind of like this way of being able to see the whole and, and keep things in balance too. It gives you perspective.
Amy: So do you have any ninja tricks for user research, or maybe even like a frame of mind that you use and that you help people you're working with use for getting into the right mindset?
Irene: I don't know if these are ninja tricks. Like it's really about, um, doing whatever it takes to, you know, to get, to engage the companies and they have to want it also, but I often talk about this Trojan horse, you [00:25:00] know, it's like for any given organization, there's gotta be a Trojan horse, like something that they value that you can ride off of to get the foot in the door.
So for example, like at Yahoo, people had never watched users use their products before, like until like, uh, up until I. Implemented like our user research program. And so this was just wonderful because Yahoo's just ate it up. They love watching people use their product and we could ride off of that and engage them through user testing.
And then once we got insights back from user testing, then the designers could come back and say, okay, look, here might be a better way to design the experience. Or, you know, this might be these might be the features that we actually want to prioritize. First, so like at Yahoo user research was the Trojan horse at Google.
There was an abundance of usability testing. People kind of took it for granted, but what was really lacking was the functional prototype. Trojan horse there was like to, to prototype experiences and to make ideas tangible. And if there [00:26:00] was ever a debate over like, should we do it this way or that way?
Like, some of the best designers would design and prototype both directions and have them both come to life. And then it became immediately clear and obvious, like, oh, we should go with concept a and so. I've carried that over in my own work here at coastal ventures. Just looking at what's gonna be the hook that draws them in.
So, for example, there's one startup that I was working with where they had a redesign planned and they contacted me because they want me to weigh in and give feedback on the new design. And it's like, okay, well, you know, I'm not necessarily. So, the target user and I can give feedback based on my own experience and knowledge around human computer interaction.
But what would be much more effective is to run this in front of users before they took the big plunge of spending 3 months to build this thing and then launch it. So they didn't have any user research. Um, I actually. Flew to their city where they were located and I personally ran a couple of sessions just to show them like it [00:27:00] can be done and you can be very gorilla about it and you get so much amazing insights coming out of it.
And what we discovered on the other side of it was like, wow, the company was missing out on all these conversion opportunities because people couldn't figure out. How to add a particular item to the cart and it was obvious to them, but it was really not obvious to the to the people who are using the product.
Um, and so this just kind of shown a big flashlight on this area of opportunity that needed improvement. And so that's just 1 very obvious. Example of something that came to light because of this very simple thing that we did together.
Amy: So how did you find the research subjects?
Irene: Well, this is a consumer facing products.
It was very easy to do that.
Amy: So it wasn't like real early stage.
Irene: And that's a good point because for enterprise companies it's a, it's a, the struggle is real finding, recruit, finding participants to, to be involved in that. But it's still possible.
Amy: It is, it's interesting, you know, in my own work. Finding the right five [00:28:00] to seven people to test something on turns out to be this really high leverage thing.
Do you find that?
Irene: Yeah. And I think the, the companies that are the most successful are the ones that are, they, they want it the most, like they're just really motivated and they care a lot about their users and they'll do whatever it takes to connect with them. And they, and some of them have gotten really creative in doing so.
Amy: You've got a lot of creative energy and you've also got a lot of sort of. synthesis energy where you take your experiences as a designer and as a manager and as a technologist and you synthesize them. How do you express creativity outside of work? What are your creative outlets?
Irene: Most of my creative energy has gone towards the design and construction of my new residence, which should be done anytime now.
That's exciting. Yeah, this is the second house that I've designed and built. Uh, they say the first house you design and build is really not for yourself because it's [00:29:00] just a test run. You're, you're learning along the way. So I've taken all the learning. And you know, lessons learned from the first experience and apply it towards the 2nd experience.
So that's been a ton of fun. Let's see. I also teach yoga. So that's another outlet for creative energy and I'm getting sucked into increasingly by the day getting sucked into volunteer various volunteer efforts related to my daughter's school outside of. My commitments to coastal ventures and the startups that I work with.
Um, I do have a lot of outlets for energy and creativity. I've also been writing and speaking a lot. So that's, that's always fun connecting with different audiences.
Amy: Wow. You have a deep well. But I think it's generative. It sounds like it actually is the thing that gives you energy. Yeah, it's fun. So a couple other things.
What do you like most about working with startup teams?
Irene: You know, I, I love working with the CEOs. They are so [00:30:00] curious and eager to learn and quick to implement. And, um, I just see the impact and the results. For me personally, it goes a lot further a lot faster by working directly with CEOs than by working as an operator inside a large company, you know, trying to change design culture from the inside, which I've done and, you know, that's a job that needs to be done as well.
But, you know, in terms of, like, working with the CEOs, that is 1 of the most rewarding things and then I also really love mentoring and advising the people in my orbit, whether it's the CEOs. Or the executives within the company or individual designers, uh, sometimes students who will reach out to me. So it's really rewarding to see that and to have that connection with people.
I feel like I spent so much of the earlier years in my career at Netscape Yahoo and Google working at scale. Everything I did was to think about how do we build this for the millions of people out there [00:31:00] and the opportunity to work directly with individuals, whether it's Through my work at Coastal Ventures or in teaching yoga, it's a very different kind of experience because I'm connecting with people one on one as individuals.
And so it's nice, you know, it's not like one's better than the other, but it's a, it's a nice compliment.
Amy: So, what do you see that's new and exciting in design and tech these days? What trends, long or short term, but preferably long term, what are you following? Where's your attention?
Irene: You know, I, I, like for a while it was internet of things.
And even that I think is starting to kind of play out. What's getting more interesting now is artificial intelligence. machine learning, computer vision, the development of new technologies, or as technology advances, that creates new opportunities for new design and new kinds of human experiences. So I think that's especially intriguing and interesting.
Amy: Cool. So [00:32:00] what do you see as your superpower? What is it that really lights you up?
Irene: It's so funny that you asked me that because that is one interview question. I always ask candidates and I'm not really. Yeah. Why do you ask it? I think it's a really interesting question to ask people because it reflects how people see themselves and how deeply they've thought about themselves, you know?
And, um, yeah. So, you know, I, I don't know. I think I always learn something when I ask people that question. And I think it's just a, it's just going a little bit deeper, you know, with somebody it's like, who are you? But the funny, but ironically. I'm not even sure if I can describe that for myself right now.
It's like, Oh, how can I sum that up? You know?
Amy: Well, I'll tell you something. Can I try summing up how I see your superpower? Sure. I don't know you all that well, but you know, we've been friendly for a while and listening to you is, [00:33:00] it's fascinating because there's threads that run throughout your whole career.
And to me, you are a synthesizer and You're also a mentor and coach like person, you know, and as a manager, that's a big part of your role. You're, you know, you also built entire departments, you know, a new, which is really impressive, but I keep seeing you synthesizing these, these different threads and you have to have been great at communicating with engineers to succeed at Google.
Irene: I'm pretty nerdy myself.
Amy: You seem like somebody who can speak these different languages and synthesize them into something that's large enough that other people can get into it and understand it and get behind it.
Irene: Well, thank you. That is very nice of you to say that I. Think of it as kind of integrated, you know, left brain and right brain.
Although, you know, it's not as simple as that, but, um, there's the nerdy technologist in me, and then [00:34:00] there's also the humane humanist in me. I mean, this is why I teach yoga as much as I work in technology. I think that we have to stay connected to ourselves and each other and, um, understand the human spirit and what drives us.
As much as we need to understand technology and develop it and, you know, serve humanity. Um, but what, you know, what good is the technology if not to serve people and not have it be the other way around? And I'd say, like, I spent a lot of my time trying to help companies design technology so that it's in service of people rather than the other way around.
Amy: Totally full circle with. What you started with at the first place. So that's beautiful. So is there anything coming up that you would like to let us know about.
Irene: You know, I, I'm kind of at a point now where like, I just see what happens and see what the universe like brings to me and where my interest and curiosity takes me.
I've been contemplating a lot [00:35:00] about the relationship between the human spirit and. Design and what we make. I wrote an essay and it was actually my talk for UX week a couple of weeks ago and I posted the essay on medium and it sort of went viral. It's called design and the self. It's really crystallizing all these ideas that have been floating around in my mind for the past couple of years.
If you've read previous blog posts, I gave a talk at the coastal venture CEO summit a couple of years ago called Design is explaining at a high level to CEOs, like, what you need to know about design. And the punchline there really is that whether you recognize it or not, everything you create is designed it may or may not be intentionally designed, but there is a design there.
So I wanted to raise people's consciousness around the fact that there is a design and that it's better to create with intention. Then not and then there was another blog post I wrote about us as a canary in a coal mine, which kind of describes how what [00:36:00] everything that a company is and does, whether it's the talent or the priorities or the principles or ability to execute.
Everything that the company is and does manifest itself in the design, and that's why looking at the morale of the design team is such an indicator of where the company is going, because it's a leading indicator because the designers see all of that happening first before everybody else does, because it all reaches a nexus point in the design.
So, if you look at the arc of, like, what I've been writing and what I've been thinking, it's really about this connection between who people are. And how clearly they envision what their intention is and make that come to life. It manifests itself in what is created. And then that in turn is shared with the people who are consuming whatever is made.
And so my hope is that, Whatever people make is directed towards wholesome action and that people are consciously thinking about what are they making [00:37:00] and why. So I don't know exactly where this is going to go, but this is kind of the message that I'm spreading now. So that's, that's kind of my focus now influencing or designing how people make.
Amy: I love it. It's simple and profound. And it has a lot of ripples.
Irene: Yeah, I hope so.
Amy: All right. And where can people find your essays?
Irene: They're posted on Medium, and I put everything under a publication called Design Your Life. It's all interconnected. Design, life lessons. The act of creation. So it's all there.
Amy: All right. We will also put links to that in the show notes. Irene, thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspective and lessons learned and insights with us. It's, um, just sort of making my heart explode.
Irene: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Amy: Great. I'll talk to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for [00:38:00] listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.
Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.