Design To Be Conversation

After 65 episodes, today’s show is the last episode of our podcast, Design To Be Conversation. There are big shifts happening behind the scenes with Design To Be and closing the chapter on our podcast will allow us to take the proper next steps to what’s ahead. Thank you all for listening. Now, for our final episode!Jehad Affoneh is a design and product leader who's led design, product, and engineering teams most recently at VMware and Splunk. He is currently Chief Design Officer at Toast, leading the product, customer, and end-to-end experience that empowers tens of thousands of restaurants to delight their guests, do what they love, and thrive. He lives with his wife in Redwood City, California.We chat about why designers struggle to build end-to-end experiences, why many organizations ship their org structure, the ways to avoid this,  and ways you can think this through.

Andy Vitale is a design executive, educator, speaker, and co-host of the Surfacing Podcast. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Design at Rocket Companies, where he leads a team focused on transforming the lending and finance industry, through a human-centered approach, to provide the best experience for millions of people. Throughout his career, he has built, scaled, and led teams that elevate the role of Design as an organizational competence and a competitive advantage.We dive into how his career evolved over time, how you create a space to scale a team and grow their capabilities, how he values teaching online, mentoring often, and how interns have been valuable to the Rocket design team.

Amy Thibodeau is the Chief Design Officer at Gusto, where she empowers designers, researchers, and content strategists who are working on products that connect companies with their employees in a more meaningful way. Previously, Amy was a senior director of UX at Shopify where she led a cross-functional team of over 130 people working on core business products. During her time at Shopify, she also led the launch of the Polaris design system, built the Platform UX team and founded the Design Ops practice. In earlier iterations of her life, she was one of the first members of Facebook’s now gigantic content strategy team, renovated an old house in the south of France, worked in art museums, and traveled around the world for a year. Amy lives in Canada with her husband Dan and small but mighty dogs, Gus and Ella.We dive into the difference between the tension between speed and quality, the importance of creating shared language and goals, as well as the conditions for quality and velocity, and much much more.

Renato Valdés Olmos is an executive, angel investor, and advisor with over two decades of experience serving millions of customers worldwide. He's built products, brands, and organizations in various industries, including artificial intelligence, transportation, healthcare, and productivity tools. Most recently, he served as VP of Product at Pitch, and Head of Design at Grammarly and is currently focusing on being a Dad and investor.We dive into the most important lessons he’s learned throughout his career, how his career has evolved from a designer to an executive, to being involved in the investment space, and even the most transformational experience of his life.

Bob Baxley is a design executive, advisor, mentor, and advocate who has built, managed and led UX teams at some of Silicon Valley’s most respected companies. With a career spanning three decades, Bob's work at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo!, and elsewhere has touched hundreds of millions of users around the world. Currently, Bob serves as the Senior Vice-President of Design at ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence, and data analytics platform. Committed to recruiting and inspiring the next generation of designers Bob also mentors individuals and advises organizations working to improve the profession and practice of digital product design. We dive into his motivation to continue designing, how he’s adapted throughout his career, what’s going on with the design industry, and why he’s inspired for what’s next. 

Over the last 25 years, Parameswaran Venkataraman has been in design and innovation leadership roles across companies like IDEO, Tata Digital, Fractal.ai, Dr. Reddy’s and Sapient. Over the last decade, he has been instrumental in setting up and establishing strategic design capabilities & culture in several organizations. Some of the work Param has led at Studio 5B at Dr. Reddy's is now a featured case study in IDEO U’s course on Designing for ChangeParam is passionate about mindfulness and the ‘art of stillness’. At the end of each year, he publishes a toolkit for applying Mindfulness and Design Thinking principles for personal reflections on the year that went past, and to create a vision for the year ahead.We dive into how the more you progress in your career, the more inward you need to look, how coaching and therapy have helped him as a designer, how to think about career milestones, and much much more. ,

Jesse James Garrett has been one of the most prominent voices in digital product design for more than 20 years. His career highlights include co-founding the groundbreaking UX consultancy, Adaptive Path; writing the foundational book The Elements of User Experience, whose iconic five-plane model has become a staple of the field; and defining Ajax, the dynamic interaction model that transformed web technology and design in the Web 2.0 era. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages and he is a frequent keynote speaker on making designers and organizations more human-centered in their work.We dive into leadership through relationships, how most struggles of unhealthy design teams can be traced back to unhealthy relationship dynamics, paired with leading with authenticity, and how too many designers feel they have to shed some part of who they are in order to fit the mold of leadership. But leadership has no mold and comes in every shape imaginable. 

Tim Allen is the Global Head of Design at Instacart. He leads the global product design, research, content and operations, centered on food access and inclusivity. His focus on fueling human potential is key to building products and cultures that inspire people to do their best work. As an additional outlet for his passion for design thinking, Tim was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business for 2017.  Tim speaks and instructs at schools and events around the country.Prior to Instacart, Tim led Airbnb's global Product Design team, Microsoft's Experiences & Devices design practice and Amazon's Product Design Studio as Executive Creative Director leading the experience design for Echo, FireTV, and Kindle products. Tim also shaped the vision for one of the largest Experience Design teams in the United States at R/GA, whose Nike+ work established the future of connected experiences for brands. Through innovative work with Adobe, Red Hat, and IBM, Tim holds seven patents related to software design, ranging from chat interface modeling to mobile device synchronization.We dive into how throughout his career, Tim continued to make the ceiling his floor. We chat about what that means, how his upbringing impacted him as a designer, and how the skills that got you to where you are today won’t necessarily get you to what’s next.

Noah Levin is a Senior Product Design Director at Figma. His job includes a variety of things, like attracting and retaining talented designers, setting and sharing context, providing actionable feedback, and helping facilitate a healthy environment for design in the company. Before Figma, he led design teams at ClassPass and Google, taught designers to code as an advisor at Framer, and built a cuff-mounted digital assistant for astronauts at NASA. He studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and is originally from Pittsburgh.We dive into how he and the team at Figma continue to innovate stale practices, how he goes about learning from others, who he actively learns from, and much more. 

Sameera Kapila is a designer, educator, manager, and writer who works as a senior product designer at Netlify. Born in India, raised on the Dutch island of Curaçao, and living in Austin, TX, Sameera has held roles in agencies, educational institutions, and consultancies ranging from individual contributor to executive leadership, student to educator, and everything in between. She writes and speaks about web and product design, diversity, inclusion and equity, tech education, and design research and process. She’s written regularly forThe Pastry Box Project and net Magazine and spoken at events such as Creative Mornings, SXSW’s HBCU track, Design/Content, and Clarity. We dive into how she develops new skills through learning by doing and chat about inclusive design communities, how to foster them, and much more. We even get a little preview into her new book that just came out, Inclusive Design Communities. You can check it out on abookapart.com.