A replay of my sold-out keynote ‘Building an In-House Design Powerhouse’ from SXSW 2019 that looked at how companies want creativity and design like never before, but very few of their internal creative teams have been empowered to take advantage of this demand. In this episode, I share proven techniques and insights I've has gained from working alongside the world’s best in-house creative teams as InVision’s Head Design Evangelist.
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http://thecrazy1.com/episode77
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A replay of my sold-out keynote ‘Building an In-House Design Powerhouse’ from SXSW 2019 that looked at how companies want creativity and design like never before, but very few of their internal creative teams have been empowered to take advantage of this demand. In this episode, I share proven techniques and insights I've has gained from working alongside the world’s best in-house creative teams as InVision’s Head Design Evangelist.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode77
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 77th episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps to empower creative people. Now, be sure to subscribe to the show. So you get those latest episodes whenever they're released. Because we all know I don't do it on the most regular basis. But also, while you're there, take just a couple seconds on whatever your favorite podcast platform is. And do me a favor, leave a review could be just a couple stars can be just a few words, but let people know what you think about it. It helps bring more people into the show. And it actually lets me know that people are listening and getting something out of this. So this week, I want to do something a little bit different. Now I've done shows like this in the past whenever I've done the sort of big events, big keynotes, and that that's content that I sort of wanted to share back because I think the keynotes are sort of an interesting moment to be able to distill down a lot of what we explore here on the show to be able to distill down a lot of what I'm seeing in the work that I do, in this case even layering over the design maturity report that leads A Boolean Aaron Walter did for us at envision that we launched a few months ago. And because I think this sort of distillation can be really good, and I think it can sort of help us. Remember what we've talked about in the show, maybe you'll be able to see it a little bit differently. And the problem was that I asked all of you to go in and vote for this topic and so many of you did. And it was amazing because solo keynotes are the hardest thing to get at South by that's why pretty much everybody does panels panels, if you've got a decent topic, and you've got some experience, you can get pretty easily but solo keynote. So those are the ones that are much rarer and much harder to come by. So they're that much more special. And it was why I was so kind of humbled to be able to do one this year. But the problem was a bunch of you voted and then not everybody could go a whole bunch more people showed up then could get into the room. So the nice people at South by were good enough to send me an audio recording of this keynote. Now, as with most things that are free, there's a little bit of a catch. The catch being that the audio is not the greatest and I did about an hour's worth. To work to try to clean it up, it had a pretty monstrous sort of hiss that went through the whole thing. Tried to clean out that whole thing up. But like I said, I think it's in a in a pretty good spot right now. But I also want to share it because hey, this is free, and it's better than nothing. So with that, I wanted to share my keynote, building an in house design powerhouse from South by Southwest 2019. Enjoy. What we're gonna do today, this is gonna be an interesting session, this is going to be part therapy session part intervention. And what we're going to do is everybody laughs right, like this is in house, we all know. We all like you're all here for a reason. Everybody here is somehow broken, nothing is going great. We all don't want to admit it. That's what this is gonna be right. So let's just start from there. I'm going to start with everybody's absolute favorite slide. And that is that what you can do is actually download this entire presentation. You can download this presentation. It is case sensitive, so don't write me like In 24 hours saying Steve the link doesn't work. Yes it does. It's just lowercase. So put that in there so there was a PDF up there of everything I'm about to talk about because again whenever I do this stuff I want to make sure we share it out we get the information out there. So if you have no idea who I am My name is Steve gates. I am the currently the head design evangelist at envision will get into why that is not something that have an episode of Silicon Valley here shortly. A little bit about me You have no idea who I am. Why the hell am I appear to talk about this stuff. So a little bit about my background. A lot of people will talk about how they were born to be a designer, things like that. In my case, it is literally true. This is me at two years old, standing on the feed tray of the 700 pound cast iron letterpress I used to sit in my parents basement, and what we would do is that we would actually go down there and my dad and I would write my own storybooks. He would do linoleum cuts. I would actually then let her set all the type right like they would have called CPS today like children handling lead. It explains a lot It also did a fantastic job of it basically, I was like a hipster by the time I was in kindergarten because I had been self publishing for years. And was very confused about like, why other kids bought their books. So I've been that like, Judge I didn't know Brooklyn existed, right. So like I've been very judgmental right from the beginning on that stuff. So I've been a paid designer since I was 12 years old. I've worked in agencies, but I spent a lot of my time in house because I was working McCann Erickson decided I was going to leave to go in house like 15 years ago, whenever everybody just sort of wished you a good luck in trying to go kill your career. And whenever I did, that was spent nine years building the global brand design team at Starwood Hotels, so we were actually able to innovate a lot in ship, big difference ship. A lot of really innovative work things like keyless entry. We did a lot of work with Apple. We were one of the first design teams that was called into work on Apple Watch, do a lot of really cool stuff like that. So even today, I still get to work with some absolutely amazing clients not too long ago, I got to work with this group of gentlemen I got to actually sit down and Do some brain strategy with the guys in Metallica, which were absolutely like a childhood dream. So for me a lot of different experience working with a lot of different groups. But the other thing that I did was about two years ago, two and a half years ago, I launched a podcast, not because I thought the world needed another one. But because what I did is I just feel like and that's why I say this is gonna be part of intervention and part therapy. There's a lot of topics that are going on in this industry right now that we need to talk about. So this is a passion project of mine totally free about 75 episodes in. And the reason why I bring this up is not just to kind of do the shameless self promotion. But because there's gonna be a bunch of stuff that we're going to talk about here today that I'm gonna have to skim over and not go into the depth that I wish that we could, for me to go into the depth that I really wanted to, we'd be here for about three days, nobody wants that. So whenever you go to that page to download the presentation, you're gonna find a lot of episodes that are going going to go in deeper on a lot of the topics that we have here. So that's why that's up there. But about 1011 months ago, I joined envision I wanted to do something Different with my career had a really interesting conversation with the CEO whenever I've been the Global Head of design at Citibank had decided I wanted to move on. And he said, Well, look, what do you want to do? What do you feel really passionate about? What does the industry need? And what I said was, I feel like we're in this really interesting time. But I see so many teams that are struggling to break through, I see so many teams that are really trying to figure out how do they get beyond the tools to really make an impact? And he looked at me and said, that's great. Can you write a job description for it would be to go fix that. I was like, crap. So I've been there for 11 months. And that that is literally our mission is through you through coaching, through teaching through thought leadership, to go out into work with a lot of the world's best design teams to really help make a difference. And visit is also an incredibly interesting company. We are the world's largest completely remote company, which a lot of people don't know, which means we have no office, all 800 and some plus odd people actually work completely remote. And while that blows most people's minds, yes, you actually can do a tremendous amount of incredibly creative work if you don't sit in the same place. So, for today, I want to cover four things because I think there are four really critical things whenever I think about in house design. So like I said, I'm lucky enough to be able to travel the world, talk with the world's best design leaders talk with these teams help coach them help teach them. What I want to cover today, or what I see are the most common challenges that you may be aware of or not be aware of whenever it comes to in house design teams and actually how to do better work. Now what those are going to be is one I want to start by talking about the current state of what is actually going on in the industry because I think we need to have an honest conversation about where are we at. After that I want to talk about some of the things that most teams I see things that they need to define. From there some of the things that I feel like they need to embrace and finally some of the things that I feel like they need to start doing simple structure for sections. away we go. So we start with what is the current state of the of in house design. I've continued to argue for years that we are in a moment we're in house design has the ability to affect business in ways we have not seen since the last Industrial Revolution, we've seen incredible rise in things like Chief Creative Officer, as we see incredible rise in the importance of design. I was in the back of a taxi cab in New York City a couple weeks ago. And on that little TV screen was some ad for a conference. And it said, like design thinking on there. And I was like, okay, we've gone too far. But this is the thing, right? That we are having a moment. Design is having a moment in house is having a moment. My concern, the reason why this is gonna be part intervention is because for too many teams, I see it as they're just having a moment. Because moments come and go moments pass. If you can't find traction, if you can't break through, then that moment swings back the other way. And that's really what the thing is that we are seeing so many teams that are struggling, they can't figure out how do they really get to that business impact that they're being asked to do. So that's one of the things that I want to start by exploring and the interesting part is that we have proof. So a few weeks ago to envision what we did was we launched this it was called the new design frontier. It is the world's largest look at The current state of design maturity in the world. So I know there are other consultancies, there are other companies that have released similar studies to this ours is about 75 to 77 times bigger than what they did. This is a really deep and realistic look at what is the state of that. So this is why I'm gonna start with just a little bit of giving you an idea of just as an industry, where are we? And what this is, is, like I said, this is the largest study of not only maturity, but business impacts. One of the number one questions I get from so many teams is how do we define the impact of what we're doing? How do we define the impact of business? Well, this hopefully starts to do that. What we did is we looked at 22 different hundred 2200 different companies and 23 Industries across 77 different countries. This was truly a global look at what is going on. This was not just a North American centric study. And what we did is we asked about a lot of different things we asked about things like headcount, we asked about things like team structure, how are they organized, general things like your industry, your location, your annual revenue, and interesting things, run operations, design roles, process systems, metrics, a lot of things like this. A lot of different dimensions and to see how teams are doing. And now whenever we looked at that, we sort of use these three lenses for maturity. So envision what we feel like that every kind of organization really has three critical parts to it. There is the practices piece, the people piece and platforms, platforms, obviously, we have a bit of an opinion on which one you should use people, what is the actual culture that you build, and practices in? What are the processes and the ways that you go about doing the things that you do? So generally, those are the three lenses where we build our products through and it's the lenses that we look through this and the world through. Now from there, we also did five different levels of maturity, one being the lowest five being the highest. And let's kind of quickly walk you through what those are. So the first level we call producers, and these are the people and these are the teams that are really in just the design makes it look good. Make it pretty color in your product person's idea. These are the teams that again, for so many of them are much more just kind of like a production team, which again can be very valuable but as a creative kind of kills your soul. And I think you know, for them, these teams really focus on pixels. And there is no study out there that can be taken seriously at all if it doesn't have a spider chart. Oh, come on that was funnier than that. Seriously, you're on asleep already. But I think you'd so what you can see is that out of the total impact of these teams can make very, very small impact, right, because again, it this is much more commoditize sort of relationship with what's going on in their organization. Now, from there, we want to start to look at the next level. And these people we call connectors. And connectors are the places where the team starts to get out of the production mindset and is able to start to teach a little bit of what's going on in the organization, you're able to start doing things like workshops, you're able to start doing things like collaboration. So you're starting to work with your partners a little bit more, you're starting to have a bit more of a voice where you're not just simply receiving and making the best out of what other people want you to do. You're able to start to have a conversation. They're now the middle tier user, people We call architects and this this is where it starts to get a little bit more interesting. Now with architects, what we see is that this is where design actually starts to become scalable. And the two things that we start to see that differentiate here are the ability to build infrastructure and the ability to build operations. This is a very key moment for a lot of teams. Because what happens is, this is the moment where you will define what you need to be successful. The first two tiers or more of the make it work tier, we're just going to get whatever anybody gives us. And we're gonna try to make the best out of it. Here. As we start to get into infrastructure and design operations, the team will start to stand up for itself more, they're going to start to say this is what it is that we need to do great work. For the next one, scientists now this is where it starts to get the group gets much smaller, but the impact starts to get much, much bigger. This is where we'll start to see a realignment in the source of truth. Because in many cases, head of design too often is now sort of being defined as executive hysteria management. Meaning that an executive says something And it's your job to run around and get people to think for themselves and not just sort of be these lemmings or minions that just sort of walk around doing what everybody tells them to. And I think in this case, this is where you start to see testing and learning, you see much more consumer centricity. This is where it's a much more of a sort of builds a think iterative kind of approach to the way that you're doing design. And again, this will start to rely on the source of truth and a lot of a lot of teams. I'll give you a preview of the next couple slides, a lot of teams get stuck, going from three to four. Because this is where it becomes about more than just the design team. This is where it becomes about working with product and technology, where executives have to do this really weird thing called trusting the people that they hired such a novel concepts. But this is the part of it right is that in this case, as you start to bring this in and testing and learning, you start to rely on the source of truth from what your product team tells you from what your executives tell you into what is the consumer tell you? And it's a very different way of working that again, will scare the living daylights out of some teams. And the last level is the visionaries and these are the ones that really are able to do at all. And these are the ones where for them, this is about business strategy. They are fundamentally embedded into what is going on in their team. They're a fundamental part of making a business impact. They drive significant revenue against this. This all sounds great. But here's some of the interesting insights from this survey, right? Because I think that you'll have a lot of data, a lot of stuff to look at. There's some really interesting things that came out of this. The first one is obviously design is driving results. Like I said, we're having a moment nearly three quarters of company have improved their product quality with design. So people under like we've all watched TED Talks, we've all said enough people enough articles that people are like, okay, design, great. The other thing that we see is that you know, it is actually starting to transcend borders, about two thirds of companies. So that design was really integrated into the decision making and the evolution of what was going on at their company. So again, it's breaking out beyond just the simple design piece of it. But here's where it gets interesting is that design maturity absolutely does not correlate to the size of your team. Because here's a really interesting thing that we saw is that one of the interesting parts is right there in the middle. Because remember, whenever I said how those teams get stuck on that bridge between three and four, what most companies do whenever they get stuck, they throw people at the problem. So this is why you'll see from a level two to to even a level four, where it's about 12 to 13 people on either side of it, it spikes up to nearly 55 people. So there are massive investments in the team. But the problem is they aren't getting the breakthrough there. And this is problematic, because when you're carrying that many average people, you're carrying a massive budget that better start showing some real results. Or you're gonna start to have to explain things right? Like this is the social media Gold Rush all over again. We need to learn. We all did this, right? Like all of our marketing people ran around whenever Facebook and Twitter and Instagram came out. We're all like the value of like, we need the value of like, let's go get all these likes spent millions of dollars get all these likes, and then we spent like three years trying to define what's the value of like, what do we do with it? Nobody knows. I've heard anywhere from like a quarter of a cent to $169 is that The value of like, Okay, what does that mean? But I think this is the thing we're just simply throwing people at the problem is not going to get you to that, because you can see a lot of the most mature teams actually run with extremely small and lean teams. But here's the good part is that design maturity absolutely correlates to massive business impact. So we compare a high maturity team with a low maturity team on the revenue that they're able to generate, it's about four times higher. If you look at things like the cost savings that they're able to bring, have, actually how quickly and cheaply Can you bring the work to market about five times. If you look at the time to market, how fast this stuff go out the door six times. Here's the one that everybody should photograph and take back to your executive, if you're having this conversation with them, is that whenever you actually look at the valuation of that company, it is usually on average, I love how the phones go up for this 126 times higher. And again, these studies have been done for quite a while. Whenever I was At the team at Starwood, we were part of a 10 year study that went on where they looked at what they felt like were design centric companies over a 10 year period. Over that 10 year period, companies that invested in design, on average perform about 212% better than the s&p 500. So design is a business mover. This is not a nice to have, this is not a make it pretty. This is a fundamental way of actually shifting business. The problem is how do we translate that into impact so that people understand that? Okay, but here's the thing. We've got all of these great numbers, we're seeing this amazing opportunity. But here's the concerning part for me and why I think we're having a moment. Whenever you look at how these levels spread out percentage wise. 83% of the world's global companies are stuck in the middle to the bottom of design maturity 83% only 5% of global design teams are actually reaching that highest maturity. So this is why I'm concerned and like I said, we're having a bit of an intervention, loving intervention but an intervention about how do we need to To fix this, because it's up to the people that are in this room to figure out how do we start having a bigger impact, because if that number continues, design is going to have a moment. And at some point, the funding and the interest is going to shift to something else. And we have to make sure that this again stays as a fundamental part of what it is that we're doing. And if you want to, you can download, it's about a 50 page report, just go to design better calm, there's a lot more data in there. Like I said, this was literally just skimming over the surface of it. But this is something that I would encourage you to download, to read to really study because there's a lot of information in there for a few different things. One is that if you want to validate the victories that you've had, the things that you've done, there's data in there that can help you do it. If you want to help validate the roadmap ahead of what are the next steps you should be taking, that's in there too. So again, go to design better comm and you can download the full report. But let's start getting into what do we do about this? Great, we're having a moment great. We've got a challenge. If this is the creative brief, how do we start to make it Difference against this. So what I want to do is I want to start by talking about what are the critical things that we actually need to start to define. Because so many teams whenever I go in and work with them, there are some really, really basic things that they get wrong about why they're not getting a bigger valuation, why they're not breaking through. The first one is super, super simple. But it's super confusing for a lot of people. Because here's the problem is a lot of the cases we're talking about what we're doing. This is stuff that was never taught in art school. This is stuff that again, you can read a lot of magazines and get a lot of information, figuring out how to apply it to your team is incredibly difficult. But your team's value is really a fairly basic proposition because it's the relationship between two fairly simple things. It's the relationship between your design team, and it's the relationship between your company which falls into one of four different relationships fairly simple. The first one is as an external resource. This is the ad agency model, where the design team is outsourced where you have a culture where external thinking is usually prioritized as better Which is a war that I've been fighting for about 15 years now that I don't understand why we're living with a problem seven days a week, 365 days a year. Why are we not better qualified to be able to do some of these things? And this is not an either or I think you need both. I'm not on a soapbox. But I think that this is one of those things, we need to think about this. And then a lot of cases for the organizations I've worked with, it's like design is part of the organization. Like the executive leadership is sort of aware that it's there. Maybe they know who the person is. But you know, whenever they need something like a T shirt or something like that, that's where they go to. You all just thought of a project, didn't you? Everybody here it was like there's some stress ball, some t shirts, some again, executive design, hysteria, LGB therapy. But this is what happens, right? It's like it's part of it. And we'll just sort of go out and use it as a resource whenever we need it. And then you get a transition where it starts to become core to the organization. This is something where the principles the beliefs, the way that you work actually starts to permeate beyond just simply the design, too. And then finally, you get the design native companies. These are the ones where it's integral to the organization. These are the ones where everything we do design has to be in the room. We don't know how to function without it that because here's the thing is like, as designers, we have a really interesting skill set. We are comfortable being uncomfortable. Because if you look at the adoption of things like design thinking and design sprints, agile methodologies, things like that, that requires you to take a leap of faith and not know what the answer is. We are only incredibly comfortable doing that we jump off the cliff, build our wings on the way down and hope and pray that we're not going to like wily coyote into the bottom of the canyon whenever we get there. Because that is something that we do, but a lot of other people are very, very uncomfortable with that. So this is the place where you're able to guide them to teach them to make them okay with what that is. But here's why understanding where you are in this chart, these four things, like think about if you had to put where your team was, think about which one of these four you think you are, and here's the reason why I said that. This is important. is because the two that are on the left if you're external are part of the organization are often viewed as service providers. These are have names like Creative Services or things like that. But you on the right are much more of a strategic partner. And to put a little bit of a finer and a harder point on why this is important is because the two on the left are viewed as a commodity in your organization. No matter how much they like you, no matter how much they tell you how good it is, whenever you're a commodity, that's where you struggle to get funding, you struggle to get headcount, you struggle to grow your team, you struggle to get value. So a lot of what it is we need to do is to figure out how do we move teams from those left to, to the right to because the rights you are the ones where you're seeing very, very differently at an organization. Those are the ones where you're seen as a real asset, those are the ones where you transcend just simply to make it pretty. So again, sounds good. But let's put a little bit of a finer point on that. Because what I want to do is actually to talk about and this became become a little bit of a philosophical or fine point on this debate, but just talk about your team's real product is because I will argue you're the real product of your team. It's not pixels, it's not designs. It's not words. It's not wireframes it's not anything like that, right? The real product of your team comes down to one of two things. design or creativity. And I know a lot of you will be saying to yourself like Steve, these are the same thing. What the hell is this chart about? And honestly, at this point, why do you like circles so much?
Unknown Speaker :It's okay, it happens. I weird things happen to me all the time.
Stephen Gates :I can't tell you how many tourists in New York City come up and want to take a photo with me and I thought my podcast was killing it for a while. And then about the third person that did it said okay, great. Thanks, Drew Carey. Okay on it. But there is actually I would say in this case, like, oh, contraire, there is absolutely a difference here between designing creativity. Because the thing is, is that creativity is about problem solving. Creativity is about the ability to do something different to take the unknown and to shape it into something new. Design is then the visual expression of that That solution. And the reason why I think this is important, the reason why I think it's important to think about what your output here is, is that everyone, everyone is creative. They just forgot. Right? Because our education system, our jobs, our society, right, because everybody in here we're the kids that survived. Right? Were the were the key were the creatives that made it through. Like one of the clients that I work with is Fisher Price, you go into Fisher Price and you go into their play lab every single day. They've got kids who come in, to take out their toys to be able to do things like that. You will watch boys. If one is a superhero, one is a plumber. One is Wonder Woman, one isn't a boy in heels, right? Like there is not that self consciousness. There is a real embrace of creativity for what that is. Over time. We forgot. And so for us, it's about how do we help people get back to that? How do we remind them to that? I will argue till the end of my time. Creative is not a department. It is not a title is the ability to be a guide to be able to help a lot of people Who just simply forgot, but this is the thing is it Everyone is creative, very few people are designers. A lot of them want to play that role. Like, you know, God forbid they come in with like, you know, something they locked up in like PowerPoint or somehow like they talk somebody in it to give him like a license of sketch. Again, you all just thought of somebody. Okay, so I said circle of trust Fokker, we're here. It's okay. But this is the thing is that beyond that, every company sees the value in creativity. They see the value in problem solving. They see the value in customer centricity, if you able to talk about it in those terms. Design very, very few companies legitimately see the value in that because to them, it's just again, it's the expression you can argue about it for for forever. How many people in here have had arguments over like button color? Okay, a lot of you were lying. There was like 10 hands that went up. I know it was way more than that. But that's the thing. Like there's these sort of things that you have these arguments over that are just sort of so ridiculous because that's the problem design is debatable. Creativity, research strategy. These are things that do not make it debatable. And so again, that's why this stuff is important. But like I said, Here, again, going back to this, creativity is a critical asset for companies designed as a commodity. The companies that and the teams that base their value and design, these are the ones Unfortunately, they get laid off, they get overlooked, they don't get new headcount. They don't grow, they can't figure out why don't I have a seat at the leadership table? These are the real challenges that they're up against. So again, I think that's why for me, this is an important distinction. And again, to think about that, but the other thing is to think about, sort of how do you bring this to life? Right? It's all sounds theoretical, very interesting. How do you actually bring it to life? And so for me, like these are sort of the two critical parts of any design team, especially an in house design team, right? Because when you think about if you're an agency in your design team, you were the heart of the house, you were the reason for being everybody loves what you Do like it is and it is undisputed that that's what we're all here for, again, for designing companies, not so much. Sometimes it is sometimes it's not. But it's this relationship between process and culture and the balance between the two. Because here's what happens. In most cases, if companies and teams get super process heavy, you get people that go through the motions, they check the boxes. But that's the thing is that there is no feeling of connection to the mission. I'm doing it because someone is telling me to do it. I don't believe in it. There's a lot of this sort of stuff of these big cumbersome processes that stifle creativity. That's why in so many cases, I often will sort of laugh with a lot of the companies I work with, I think they're more afraid of changing their process than they are actually having their business disrupted. Because here's, here's the interesting part with a lot of this stuff, right because human nature definitely plays into this. Comfort is the enemy of greatness. People will do what they have done because they know it and understand it being uncomfortable. You makes them really scared. And so for us, again, the ability to be able to sort of disrupt these long standing things, we're like, that's the thing. People are like, why do you do this? We've done it forever. How is that an answer? Or they'll say like, Oh, you know, somebody in some Department said we can't do it, or the other really big ones legal or compliance told us we couldn't do it. All the people who just went here's an interesting question to ask them. Is that an opinion or a fact? Go and ask them. They say, oh, legal said we can't do it. Great. Let's get them on the phone. Show me the law. Right? Because a lot of times, what you're gonna find is they're going to show you apathy. They're going to show you that their willingness because there are companies that I work with, and it's so funny, like, you can tell they read some book and they're really into what they're doing. And they they'll kind of come back with this thing. And they'll have a question like, tell us what our superpower is. Nope, you don't you don't want me to do that. Like No, no, seriously, we can take it like tell us tell us what's our superpower. Oh, God. Like, like, please, you don't you don't want my honest answer like no, you see all these teams what is I see what are your superpower is your superpower is rationalizing mediocrity turns into a real interesting room after that. But sometimes you've got to break them to build them back up, right. But that's the thing is that there are some times with a lot of these kind of things. We have to be able to step back and look at what's actually going on. We have to be able to have these honest conversations. And if what we're doing because process here, what we're valuing is internal battle. We're valuing being right. We'll talk about that more in a minute, right? But that's what that's what we're really prioritizing is who internally is winning a political power struggle, that and that's the thing I'll argue until the end of my days, the work is the truth. I can tell by looking at your product by looking at your app by looking at your website, how functional your culture is, like it's one of those things I do it all the time. big secret, go back and try it on yourself. Look at your org chart, look at your app. In your website navigation, if the to match, you have a really dysfunctional team. Because silos win over consumer experience, I can tell you 100% of the time that if you are shipping the org, then again, you have a disjointed experience. But then we have the opposite of this, right? If you go to culture heavy, you get a lot of people very empowered, a lot of people really engage in what's going on. And a lot of people really running around making a mess, because there's no structure. And that's why this is important is because what you need to think about this is an equal measure. process gives me structure process gives me a repeatable way of doing things. Process lets me adhere to timeframes and everything else. Culture then gives me connection to it. Because the culture piece is really important because I go to so many companies, and they have these values and like there's Bonus points if the first letter of all the values makes a word that is sort of like here's your corporate like mantra or something, right. Again, I love everybody laughs has one of those. But that's the thing that for me, it's it's this this area in the middle It's behaviors. Because whenever you want to start changing this stuff with so many teams, this is what I'll start with them actually doing is to work on behaviors. Because behaviors give you a really accessible way to start holding people accountable for how are you going to create? How are you going to work? Because so often what you'll see is that tension comes because there's a misalignment in behavior process and expectation between tech at product and design. There's a misalignment between team members about what is the standard that we really want to adhere to. And whenever that happens, you're left with two options. Either one uses except it slowly growing more resentful of what those people are really sort of frustrated about what's going on. or two, you get to be the asshole who just comes in and tells everybody why they're wrong. Neither are good options. Right? So the simple behavior ones are to just define three to five behaviors, aspirational things that really come in with creativity, things that you can hold a lot of people accountable to something just as simple as we divide. We invite diverse perspectives to the table on every project. The important part with that is that now the team can hold each other accountable to it. Because the real difference is what happens is the way the team acts when leadership isn't in the room. That's where where it makes the rubber meets the road, right? Like greatness does not come out with some leader standing on the stage and making some big speech saying, this is what we're gonna do. Everybody goes, Yeah, and then goes back and does what they've done all along. If you want to make change, you have to do something very fundamental, used to change thinking, not behavior. So many companies, whenever they go into stuff, they just change behavior. behavior is the expression of thinking. you adopt some new buzzwords, you do a few different things, but the underlying thinking is the same, the problem is still the same, which is why then manifests itself in a different way, a few months later. And that's why time and time again, management change, management, change, culture change. After culture change, we keep running into the same problems, because our thinking is not getting any different. The other version of this with you if you want to dive into this a little bit more, a little bit more of an advanced team is to be able to look at much more nuanced and deeper ones where you have multiple categories with multiple behaviors. This is one that I've actually done with one of my teams. So we had the five things that we prioritized on our team, learning in the fact that we always need to continue to do it. We were never experts, we are never done. Collaborate, creativity is a team sport we have to do with a lot of other people. ideate because again, the creativity is the true product that what we do. So that's what we need to focus on is that ideation, craft, the way you execute things matters. And so again, the ability to pay attention to every detail and finally leadership, because that's the thing unless everybody carries the message. It doesn't work. You don't know the real secret sauce behind Nike and Apple and Google and like all these companies that everybody loves, their employees are actually empowered and truly believe the message that they are carrying, they're all leaders and are empowered to make decisions. And so a couple examples for this one out of learning, be the customer we immerse ourselves in our customers worlds, we can create thoughtful, human and elegant experiences that affect everyone. So again, the ability to set this standard around collaboration everyone Is his creative creativity is an equal is equality is a quality everyone possesses. It's not something that is found in just a title or a team. So we help bring it out in everyone. This is getting rid of that elitist mentality that like as a designer, I need to go off and have my own process and do a big presentation. And like wherever a doing a watercolor, my spirit animal in the corner to come back and do a big reveal. We all on the inside want to be that person, we can admit it. But this is where it's different. And finally, things around leadership. This is a big one for me. If you've ever worked with me, you know this is definitely true, respectful and confident but not delicate. Creative breakthroughs happen when we take risks, trust our instincts speak our mind in good passionate discussions about an idea, not when we spend weeks tiptoeing around each other. It is a cultural expectation that we are honest, if you don't, if you don't bring it up, you've lost your voice on that. So again, these are the sort of behaviors who really get in and define how do we act? How do we behave? What do we do? Why is this important? So from there, let's start to talk a little bit about what do we need to embrace because I think this is another thing that gets sort of interesting. I think part of what it is, is to not be afraid to embrace and to define what you need to be successful. I see so many teams, like I said before, they just simply accept what they're given. They just simply accept what you know. And they because here's the problem, right? Is that too many times we make the best of it. I was probably my last job. I spent two years trying to get envision into my company, two years, two years. Everybody in financial services was like, how did you do it that fast? Yeah, but what it came down to is my willingness to honestly risk my job because I realized that by making it work, I was part of the problem. We're doing on personal accounts, we're doing all this other stuff, and I was making it work. So I sort of Accidentally on Purpose leaked to the fact that we're using personal accounts to legal next day legal loses their mind. They say no more personal accounts. I go to my CEO He gets really upset about where's my prototype? I said, Well, I've been trying to get this tool for two years I've been making it work, there was no incentive for us to actually get the tools that we needed. The moment I stopped making it work, look at that, a week later, we got the tools. So there's some times where even sort of being a good soldier can play back against you. But this is where you need to embrace what you need to be successful. And I know a lot of this right? Crap, not process. Nobody went to school for this. Nobody think this is sexy. But this is the sort of thing that I'll tell you is that a lot of cases, a lot of teams, I work with processes where you need to start because it's the shield that you can use. It's the way that you can define what you need to do. But when it comes to process, I just have one thought on this, we're not going to spend a ton of time on this. whenever it comes to process, most teams will actually be really defeated and undone before the project even starts for one very simple reason. And what that is, is that you need to start with a problem to be solved not a solution to be vetted. The solution if you've had it, oh, the solution to be vetted. Whenever somebody comes to you and says, This is the idea we want, this is the execution, we want to prove why it's right. No, that's not the way this works, right like that. That's the way to get to really meet really weak, really mediocre, a lot of incremental sort of battles against a lot of other companies, you're not finding brand differentiation, because that's the thing like great, you had one idea, kudos for you, the other 35 that you missed, were the better ones, because your first idea is never your best. But that's why this is really important is to look at your process and say, how often do they come to me with a problem versus a solution to come up with a solution? Say, great, this is a really good idea. Let's back this up into what's the problem? What do we do about this? Where do we go from here? How do we make this work? I think the other big part of it for me, is around imposter syndrome. This is one of the number one things I get asked about all the time. And it's sort of interesting, right? Because I think in any especially what we do this there's this sort of tug of war between art and commerce. Art is what we love. Art is what brings us into this industry. It's The cruel irony that the longer you in this industry, the further it pulls you away from what you came in here to do. And in many cases, you'll see, designers want art, they don't want commerce. They want to be able to design their own interfaces. They don't like design systems because design systems makes it feel too programmatic, too systematic. But here's why this is important. I think that there's a there's an evolution is going on in this industry and not not enough people are necessarily aware of it over the last couple years, we've gone from visual design to product design, especially in digital. The problem that we have is that most executives still treat us like visual design. But product design involves our ability to do a lot of really important things like to be inclusive in our design in the fact that we need to work with other teams with tech with product with executives who have the confidence to bring them in to be a part of this process, which while can be terrifying, can be incredibly empowering things like metrics and KPIs. So many companies I see go data blind, it's the overreaction to design. Because what happens is we can say, well, the data told us to do something, the data, it was the data, the data, right like if something goes wrong, it was The data wasn't me it was the data. Okay, great. Somebody go fire the data. I don't know what I don't want to say, like it. But that's the problem because it's just easier. No one is accountable. No one is responsible, let them off the hook, they can save the data told us to do it. The problem is most data is really wrong. We did things like customer research and insights, business strategy, we were being asked in product design to do a lot of these other things to work with a lot of these other teams. The interesting inverse of this is that it's come with a hell of a lot of self doubt. Right? If we're being truly honest here, there's a lot of people here who are just faking it to make it on a lot of this stuff. It's why we come to these conferences is why we do a lot of this stuff. It's why we find out this information is because that self doubt around this is going crazy. And the reason why I see a lot of these teams actually have struggles is because they stop themselves. Because where that leaves is that's what design imposter syndrome is. And so I just quickly want to sort of go through this there are five types of design imposter syndrome. What I can tell you is that you are working Or more of all of them. If you go through this list, and you say, That's not me, here you are. I'll show you at the end, I'm actually three. I'm a hot mess. But this is the part of it right? We need to have to start with these more of these conversations. The first was the perfectionist, perfectionist, a really interesting perfectionist. These are people that set these incredibly high goals and feel like you know, if they don't measure up to that, that then somehow they're a failure. Here's a great question, a test question to see if you're one of these people, if you've difficulty delegating, and then feel frustrated and disappointed in the results, right? This is the poster child from going from execution to leadership in design. Because all of a sudden, it's like, oh, crap, this would just be so much easier if I did it myself. Why is the kerning look like that? Right, because the real creative process that most of us go through is we get a brief we do a whole bunch of ideas, we come to the one that we kind of hate the least, which we work on until the client will usually tell us that we run out have time budget or political capital or patience, which we then sort of move on until everybody about how great it is. But we always look at our portfolio and really know all the things that are still wrong with it. This is the problem with a lot of this right is it is a perfectionist way of looking at things. So this is a big one for a lot of people, the Superwoman or the Superman. These are people that feel like they are phonemes that are working alongside real talent and they feel being exposed to push themselves harder and harder to measure up. A real simple indication of this is whenever you leave the office at night, who are the people that stay late at the office and the rest of their team, even whenever their work for the day is done? Like a lot of people are starting to shift in their seat a little bit. They're like, Oh, crap, that's me. But there's a lot of that where I'm going to prove I'm going to prove it right, like I'm gonna stay, I'm gonna work harder, I'm gonna be that person. The genius, the genius is a little bit the opposite, because these are people that feel like success is based on their ability rather than their effort. So this is something where they feel like they don't get it right the first time. They must be a failure. And so here again, the way to look at this is if you hate the Actually the idea of having a mentor because you can handle things on your own, right? I'm smart enough, I can do this, I can go research it, I can do this. This is a big one too for again, for a lot of people, the individualist, the individualist, these are people that feel like if they ask for help, it's going to reveal that there there really is really imposters and that, you know, asking for assistance is somehow gonna make them less valuable. A real easy way to look at this is if you frame request in terms of a requirement, rather than your need as a person. Because then again, that makes it something that again, I have a real hard time seeing what I need, what I need to do, it's about the team. It's about everybody else. It's not about me. I'm great. I'm perfect. I'm fantastic. I'm not the expert. I think the expert is then somebody who whenever you see this sort of thing, you know for them, they really feel like they've almost like tricked their employer into kind of doing these things because they're really experienced and knowledgeable. And they constantly seek out this training because they think that they need to improve their skills. South By May The the greatest laboratory for design imposter syndrome ever. Because what do you do? Especially if you're a speaker, man, it'll crush you. Because you're standing up here and what do people do? They vote with their feet. You don't like the session like everybody in the island, everybody in the back either you showed up late or you're sort of hedging your bets on like, if I suck, you're gone. No, I know the deal. I've done this before. But what you watch, I've watched major heads of design just crack this week under design imposter syndrome. Because what they did was there's like that one or two people that leave and your ego jumps up and screw them. They're missing out. They don't know what they're doing. But then if the content is less than compelling, people more people leave a lot more people, all of a sudden, their voice starts to shake all of a sudden, that ego gets a bit smaller, all of a sudden that design imposter syndrome gets a lot bigger to the point where you know about halfway through your talk, you just sort of feel like there's a bull elephant With the words you suck spray painted on it sitting on the top of your chest. And you've I've seen it twice this week. Really senior people just absolutely lose it in front of everybody. Because here's the thing is that creativity is personal. If you ask me, you give me a blank piece of paper, a blank screen, you ask me to make a mark to write a word to do something on it. The mark that I make, the words that I write are personal, they come from my experience, the creative process is unique for everyone, we need to embrace that we need to understand why this is important. There are companies again, some of the best companies like Atlassian, in your first two weeks of onboarding, this is actually discussed and identified as a part of your onboarding, for which imposter, are you so that there can be an embrace and a discussion around it because it's a natural part of creativity. And that's a lot of where we really struggle with some of this stuff. That's why I said you need to go through and identify what are your imposters and I'll be totally transparent with this because here's the other part of it. For me. Is it social meet like here's here's something I'd love for us to do. If everybody in here perhaps In Windows, the people they pretended to be on social media. That would be awesome. Uncomfortable laughter uncomfortable laughter. But that's the problem, right is that for all of us, we're doing words propagating the problem because what we're doing is we're putting out this image that isn't true. And as a result, as creators, what we're doing is we're comparing our insides to everybody else's outsides is a comparison you will lose every single time. It is driving this problem in the industry, because what do we do? We love the beginning. In the end, we love the two guys in the garage and we love the stuff you can post on Pinterest and dribble the 95% in the middle. Nobody wants to talk about that was all great. It was all wonderful. No, it wasn't. And so that's why I said these are mine. This means nobody totally transparent. The Superman and Superwoman is a big part of mine, right? I don't just Kimberly, I don't feel like I'm that creative. I feel like I'll work a hell of a lot harder than everybody else. But I feel like my gift is sort of in combining things, the perfectionist and definitely that he could have been better if I did it. And then a little bit of the genius mixed in so I'm actually all three of those whenever I sit down and actually talk about that, again, you talk about that. So on stage didn't die raised off here, right like this is a part of what actually is going on. I think the other part of is, is that if I think about how we are working, because for me, there's this sort of what I'll describe as a build to think mentality, whenever you look at these are essentially the two axis that go on for whenever you do any creative work, you have the fidelity of your work low to high. And then you have the conceptual work of creating, thinking. Now, the trick for a lot of this stuff, and I think for a lot of the best teams that we see is that they actually prototype through this entire process, the days of just saying that this is the idea, and this is what we want to do. And now let's go prove how it works is not the right way of doing this. So what you'll actually see is the best teams will break this up into four different parts. You have think learn, refine, and launch, we'll talk about what each one of these means. builds a thing is how do you just do concept testing? How do I understand the edges of an idea? How do I start prototyping really early there? You know, a simple question like, would you sign in with your social media account into your bank account? We all know the answer is no. But then that way you can define the edge of what that is. From there you go to build to learn, this is how to actually then test out that hypothesis. If I say, Okay, look, this is the aha moment this is the insight, this is the area of unmet need. How do I start to diagnose that and bring that together into a place where then I can understand how can I conceptually start to tackle this build to refine this is where we start looking at functionality. So many people will push you to go to the execution to get to high fidelity, actual designs, the secret that we all know but we all still do it is if it is something looks like a design like object, people will treat it like design. You cannot discuss functionality whenever it actually looks like a finished product. People can't see past it, their brain will break in too many cases. So again, the ability to actually look at interaction patterns product fit in the market to actually figure this out. And then finally build to launch and this is what just most companies do. This is the high fidelity we're about to launch it in the market. This is what we want to go do with the other part and they're the reason why this is important is because this gives you a ladder that you can go up if at any point You talk to an executive as at any point, you talk to another product team, and you say, hey, this isn't working, we show it to a customer and they say, Hey, I don't like this, you don't have to go back to zero, you know that your concept is right. If your functionality is right, then maybe it's just the execution. So it gives you the ability to actually move through this in a way that really works. Now, finally, what are some of the things we need to start doing? I think the first one for me is that there is and this is gonna be a lot of really obvious stuff that I think enough companies don't necessarily pay attention to. The first one for me is that most in house design teams have a fairly significant thought trap. And it's in the way that they approach their work. Most teams that I will see what they do is they just think and innovate as far as the project in front of them. They say this is our scope. This is how far we can go. This is how far we are allowed to think. The problem is that at the end of the day, nobody understands why is the experience Why is the design Why is the thinking or the brand. This sort of like happenstance, Frankenstein sort of thing is I'll continue to argue Frankenstein was alive but nobody wanted to date him. Most designs have That same problem, because it's a lot of stuff that's been patched together over a lot of time. So you need to get out of this trap, and it came out in the Samsung trial so I can talk about it without getting sued into absolute oblivion. Like whenever you walk into Johnny Ives design studio in Cupertino, you'll see those sort of like big wooden desks that are laid out in there. And what you'll find is that they're the next five generations of every device in there. It doesn't mean that the iPhone 15 max Excel with cheese or whatever drunk naming they have now on the phone, that's what it's gonna be. But what it does mean is that they're thinking about it, they have a longer view of what they're actually trying to accomplish, and that most companies get very myopic, and very close in on a lot of this stuff. And the ability to take a longer view makes a massive, massive difference. You need to start taking on cultural pink elephants because most of the problems and most of the things that are holding you back are sitting right in front of you. I guarantee you, every single person in here every single company has a phrase like this. Because what it is, is you'll be in a meeting, you'll be talking about something something will be different. I love how people already laughing cuz they Know where this is going. because there'll be so many will be getting difficult. It's hard to be able to do something we're not sure we can do it. And at some point, someone will throw up their hands, shrug their shoulders and say, Hey, welcome to work in here. There used to be a jar that sat on my desk, you'll be 20 bucks if you said those words in my presence, because I was not going to allow that sort of BS cultural apathy to exist on my team. We were not going to make it okay to say that mediocrity was culturally acceptable, we were not going to make it okay. anymore that that sort of answer was okay. And every company has these things. Every company has these places where you stop yourself. The problem is most of the time people don't take the step back to look at it. I work with so many teams, another big indicator, if you actually refer to the people you work with by title and not by name. Whenever you do your brainstorms, be deliberate in how you work, leave your titles at the door. Make sure that everybody comes in on the equal playing field you're not coming in and just saying that whoever has the biggest title, I'm gonna listen to their opinion and then suddenly rationalize why I think they're dumb ideas. A good one. Again, everybody just thought of something. Other things I think we talked about this before, like, have a clear source of truth for your work, because this is what I see for so many teams design tech product client. Great, what it really looks like is this. Who's right? Right, whose opinion is right? I've been with my wife for 19 years, the reason why we've been able to pull off that magic trick is because of the fact that it's not about who's right. Because if somebody is right, somebody is wrong. And if this is the battle that matters in your work, the people who suffer your customers, because they're the ones who should be right. And if you're prioritizing the internal battles, of which one of these groups is actually getting things right, then the work loses. Like I said, the work is the truth. You need to realign this into the opinion that matters should be your customer. And that again, this is not about if design is facilitating it that we are right. It's about how do we take an honest look at what is actually going on out there. This is like I said before, this is where you rationalize mediocrity because you do this sort of thing. Great big idea which are really delicate All of a sudden as it goes through the process, we strip it down, we make it smaller, we make it safer, make it easier. And then at the end of it, we basically just have a business as usual with new buttons, right? And then we can't figure out why the work isn't getting any better. So align on the source of truth use data use research, use real consumers use multiple points of data. The biggest point of failure is a single point of data. Because that can be manipulated. It can be bent in a lot of different ways. Start thinking about the words that you use to this is a real war that I'm on right now. This I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in presentations this week. light bulbs drive me crazy. Because what is this, this is a lie. This is telling the executives This is telling the people that we work with that what we do is easy, which it is not. You don't say those words, but you imply it every time you use this. That's why I'm on this this war for this. If you have In your deck, you use it your company, you take it out of that deck. There are other words that I hate, like failure fail fast once. Like you walked into all these different startups, there's like that Facebook poster. It's like, move fast and break things. You know what everybody missed was out two weeks later, the poster that went on top of that said, slow down and fix your shit. But that's the thing, right? It's true. There are these sort of things that are words that we use every day, and we don't even think about it, we are propagating stereotypes that are not true. A light bulb is a moment of inspiration. It is not a moment of creativity. Creativity is a blue collar profession. It is a hell of a lot of work. It is a grind. And so I said before, it's about getting a lot of ideas you don't like on the way the one that you can sort of stand with think about these sorts of things. Think about the words that you use internally, train your teams on this stuff. Because you want to make a change. You want to do something about every interaction, every conversation. Every one of these little details makes different prints and how you break through everything I'm going to tell you to start getting some support. I talked to so many leaders, when we start to talk about that. So we will break down in tears, who described leadership as lonely, who describe it as they don't understand what is actually going on, and they feel so broken and so alone in this stuff. There needs to be more places for us to have these conversations. This is a mildly shameless promotion. Because these are two programs that envision does that I wildly wildly believe in. The first is the design Leadership Forum, please again, go to our site, you can apply to this. These are dinners that happen very regularly all over the world with design leaders to talk about issues that matter to be able to share expertise, because the conversations that we need to have to be able to make this change are so rare and hard to come by. The other one is our design exchange program where you again, you can apply for this and we send designers all over the world to go experience other cultures. You go to Sydney, you can go to Asia, you can go to all these different places all over the world, to be able to really go out and do something different and to be able to experience different parts of it. But these abilities to have regular check ins To be able to do this is really important. And if this isn't for you create your own, I have my own. This is what it's called. We meet once a month, the membership is completely anonymous, there is no way to get into it unless one of us decides to bring you in. It is the design leaders at very, very major companies. And every month we get together, everybody brings their one biggest problem, and the group can have a discussion to try to help them with that. We need to find support, we need to be more open and honest about what is actually going on. We need to stop propagating this bs about how everything we're doing is so great and so wonderful. It's not saying it's the end of the world, but it is saying this is hard. It is saying that there are no regular solutions for this. Again, this is why my team and my job were creative is the ability to take on stuff like this. And I think the other part of it for me is like whenever you're doing this work, demand originality, because with so much of this work, I don't understand why everybody else keeps trying to stand out by being the same. So many ideas like oh, this is gonna be our version of Another brands product or this is gonna be our version of something that somebody else was doing right? It just doesn't work. And you know, for this it really comes down to this line for me, right? Like a cover band never changed the world. Nobody was ever like, hey, those guys that that's what I want to do, right? Too many of us are falling into the cover band, too many of us are falling into these repeatable ideas. This is not going to change overnight. This is not something you go back to work on Monday and all of a sudden, everything is different, but it is work that you need to start to really get in and invest in. I'm gonna leave you a couple final thoughts on try and take some questions. If you want to make change, it's hard. Not about just big speeches. It's not about coming here and taking a bunch of notes. It's not about doing stuff like that. Again, I reference my wife a lot just because I think she is what supports and keeps me going on what has been absolutely insane adventure that has been my career. But the thing with this is like you want to make change, it's about a lot of little things that add up to something big. I can't tell you the moment I fell in love with my wife. I can tell it was a lot of fun. Little things that added up to something that absolutely changed my life. Changing your team and changing what you do is no different. It's about the decisions you make every day. It's about the things that you do. It's about every single conversation in every single meeting and getting your team to understand that it takes time. It takes patience to make these changes, but everybody has to be dedicated to it. It's not just where we say we're going to be different, right? Like, this is where the movies lied to us. like nobody's gonna carry on your shoulders. Channing, Rudy, right. Like, if that's not the way this goes. I think the Like I said before, this isn't gonna be easy. But it's up to us in this room, right? Because I think I was I was interviewed for this book that Greg Larkin did, that was called this might get me fired. And we had a discussion on this that I really think also comes down to what I think is the mentality A lot of us need to have especially for in house. It may be a little bit controversial, but it's one that I truly believe it's one I've experienced in my career. The change in the innovation your company needs will probably not be authorized. The work that I did on Apple, watch the work Because like my work has been in 10, Apple keynotes, what led to that was me going off and doing something crazy on my own that led to that work. I'm after time, it was about my ability to go against what was commonly accepted my ability to not just simply accept cultural apathy, my ability to not accept the work that was being done my ideas to find ways. And let me be clear, there is a difference between crazy and stupid, right? But your ability to go out into willing to be willing to make a change. Because I see that in so many times I do these talks and people come up to me and they're so excited. They still want to go back and make this change. I see him a year later at the same event, they try and sneak out the back door. You go and catch them. You're like, yeah, I tried to do it. It was hard. This is up to us, right? We're the ones that need to make this difference. We're the ones that need to step up and do this. We need to start supporting each other having these conversations we need to start doing a lot of this stuff. We need to teach we need to partner we need to lead if we're going to start getting this designed to really break through right it's is not going to be a simple thing. I think so many people just think I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna give one speech, it's all gonna be different. Creativity is too complex and it's too nuanced. But I think it's also the reason why I joined envision was because this is the mission that we want to take on. Right? I think we have a ton of resources from design better. The blog is constantly written by people who are some of the best in the industry. The design Genome Project is an amazing body of work that Aaron Walter and Leah Bewley lead. It really is a an honest look at what goes inside of the world's best companies, what are their designer to engineer ratio, a lot of these sorts of things that become really, really important. Things like Leadership Forum, design forward, fun design Leadership Camp, we just did this in Santa Fe a couple weeks ago. There's so much that we're doing to try to be able to help this in the community. And I like I said, I'd love for anybody to be a part of that. If you have any interests, my podcast is something like I said, it's been out there for quite a while. 75 episodes covers a lot of what goes on there, the page that I put up there, a lot of the things that are on there, go into these subjects in much more depth. It's a lot and like I said, is a passion project. For me that will always remain free to be able to go out and truly share what are the things that I think we need to talk about. And so with that in the time we have left, if anybody has any questions, I'm happy to stay afterwards. But if anybody's feeling brave and wants to stand up and ask one, I'd be happy to take some questions. Well, that was it. My keynote from South by Southwest this year, I had a ton of fun, it was incredibly humbling to get the votes and to see that many people turn up so I fully intend to take a run at doing it again next year. I think hopefully, get a good topic get some more votes get in there. Again, I think look, if there's if there's a subject you think would be really really good at South by there's something that you've been wanting to hear about, reach out, let me know and I'll definitely take it into consideration for making that a part of my submission for next year but hopefully liked it, hopefully got a little bit something out of it. Maybe there's some good reminders in there. And some things we've talked about, that you just sort of forgot about. But like I said, If you like it, take just a couple seconds. Do me a favor, leave a review for the show. It's always incredibly helpful. And remember, subscribe because I'm busy traveling all the time. I try to put out the shows as often as I can. But man, they're just not as regular as I wish they would. As always, you can find out more about the podcast related articles, get the show notes, do all that sort of stuff, head over to the crazy one calm. It's crazy. And the number one.com follow me on social media. You can like the show on Facebook. I'm always posting articles, you can ask me questions, reach out on anything like that. I'll get back to you just as soon as I can on any of that. As always, everybody down in legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or former employers. These are just my own opinions. And in this case, just my keynote, but as always, I said every time because I mean it every time but thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury any of us have. I was incredibly humbled, you want to spend any of it with me. So until next time, when we'll be back into the regular show format. Hey, stay crazy.