The Natural Evolution for Design Leadership

As the last king of Rome lay siege to Ardea, his sons grew weary of the inaction on the battlefield and left for a surprise visit to their home.

At The Beginning Of The End

As the last king of Rome lay siege to Ardea, his sons grew weary of the inaction on the battlefield and left for a surprise visit to their home. On their way home, they stopped in Collatia received by the hospitable Lucretia, wife of Collatinus. Lucretia’s beauty sparked a lust in Sextus Tarquinius (the king’s youngest son), eye he returned to claim in the middle of night, sword drawn, coercing her to yield to his sexual demands. Lucretia soon took her own life soon thereafter, after confessing to what transpired in a written message to her husband and her father.

A revolt followed which brought an end to the kingship of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus and marked the beginning of the Roman Republic.

The Senate was not granted power to transform Rome into a republic, it was taken. The Senate abolished kingship forcing Tarquin into exile, transferring most of the kings responsibilities to two consuls who were elected to one-year terms in office. Brutus and Collatinus, Rome’s first consuls had equal veto powers that acted as a check on his colleague. If a consul abused the powers of his office, he could be prosecuted after his term expired.

Magistrates were civil officers that carried out the law for a geographic region appointed by the Senate. Magistrates power came from the people of Rome and had certain constitutional powers, including the authority to command a military force — mostly as a means to maintain diplomacy and the judicial system. Collega was a check on the magistrate’s power — which meant each magesterial office would be concurrently held by at least two people. Provocatio — an early form of due process was another check on the office, protecting all citizens from coercion.

The Roman Senate is celebrated as one of the most enduring institutions in Roman history — surviving barbarian rule, the Roman monarchy and even the fall of the Roman Republic spanning across multiple centuries. For all the merits of the Roman Senate — it had a serious flaw. The influx of slavery that enriched the aristocracy at the detriment of the peasantry. This drove civil unrest which led to a class warfare that sparked a series of civil wars.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser (Act 2, Scene 1) Brutus regale as he reflects on his ancestor’s role in overthrowing Tarquin’s father and the Roman monarchy.

There have been a series of significant changes to the workplace culture and even our expectations from work from the late 90s to the present. The way we define power has shifted from titles to capability. We’re moving from traditional hierarchical models to flat organizations that foster partnership.

The executive era is over and the end user era is in full swing. In this era, the end user is in the driver’s seat. Users expect consumer grade experiences, especially from enterprise software. Design is driving strategic value — and the design maturity of an organization, is now a litmus test of how well the organization can adapt and react to the needs of their users.

Donny’s Three Legged Stool

You’ve probably seen a rendition of the three legged stool at some point. You know, the one that consists of design, product, and engineering each designated as a leg.

Don Norman first visualized “the three legs of human centered product development”: technology, marketing and user experience (Fig. A) in his book The Invisible Computer. The irony is the human is no where to be found in this so called ‘human centered’ approach .

Along the way, several thoughtful renditions as well as utter bastardizations of Don’s three legged stool came and went. Alex Schleifer, the VP of Design at AirBnB coined the EPD stool which illustrated the value of each table leg being equal in length (Fig B.). In Alex’s version — he advocates the value of collaboration and equal empowerment of roles amongst engineering, product, and design with a council of cross functional leadership team. This is a major step in the right direction — and no surprise it’s coming from a design lead organization like AirBnB but there’s still one major problem remains unaddressed.

The reality is (Fig. C), that stools are meant for sitting — which made a seat, ripe for picking by an authoritative figurehead. In most cases, this is a PM who is titled as the ‘owner’ of the product by sitting on the stool — is literally sitting on the product and the cross-functional team.

How did we get here? How did the spirit of something so democratic turn autocratic? The cross-functional consuls of experts in tech, marketing and user experience have been usurped by a figurehead that’s assumed control of them, the product and the customers.

How Marty Created A Mess

Marty Cagan’s infamous book for product managers called Inspired (spoiler alert: actually not that inspiring) is considered essential reading for product managers. Marty’s book is fantastic rallying cry for product leaders to better understand their role, the function of a product team and get inspired to become great leaders.

The book however, is also riddled with contradictions almost as if to intentionally display a conflict of conviction throughout the book. On one hand, Marty defines a product team as “a set of highly skilled people who come together for an extended period of time to solve hard business problems.” (Cagan, 86) And on the other, he encourages product managers to operate as a mini-CEOs of product teams made of empowered missionaries that include a product manager, a designer (optional), and an army of engineers.

Marty makes it explicitly clear that product owners do not have any people management authority over their teams. Yet, his language assumes ownership over designers by using possessive pronouns. For example, “Do whatever you need to do to have your designer sit next to you.” (Cagan, 129)

Marty defines the role as a product manager as “the sole individual responsible for evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built and delivered to customers (Cagan, 100)… The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. If the product manager doesn’t have the technology sophistication, doesn’t have the business savvy, doesn’t have the credibility with the key executives, doesn’t have the deep customer knowledge, doesn’t have the passion for the product, or doesn’t have the respect of their product team, then it’s a sure recipe for failure.” (Cagan, 86) Later he writes, “not one of the impressive product managers I feature in this book has an MBA — or that you need to have all these skills yourself. You must simply have a broad understanding of how a product can affect a business and work with people from your team and across your company to cover everything that’s important.” (Cagan, 113)

Is it realistic for every company that hires product managers to aspire and meet all these virtues? And what happens if they don’t meet that standard? Are they all doomed to then fail? The product role has become a single, critical point of failure for many companies — when they can’t hire product managers to meet a high standard and without a formal educational track it’s hard to understand what sort of product leader you’re getting until it’s already too late.

Inspired advocates for virtues such as lean product development approach, deep customer knowledge and creating empowered teams. Unfortunately, the due to its’ hypocritical nature, the book is also prone to poor translation by aspiring product leaders. For example, a product leader recently told me “PM’s should be authoritative.” This isn’t the first or the last time I’ve heard this from a product leader.

The Rise Of Design Driven Organizations

A while ago, I asked a question out loud as a thought experiment. What happened next, went beyond my imagination and was eye opening. In the thread you will find everything from product managers who experienced the tweet as a personal slight, to designers concerned they would become as miserable as a PM, to death by workshops and empathy!

‍And then something unexpected happened! Marty Cagan chimed in with his take on the thread!

The interaction on this thread really inspired me to go deeper into this thought exercise. I started looking for examples of design lead organizations.

Harley Earl, was a renowned automotive designer at General Motors in its’ heyday where he was designated Head of Design and then later Vice President. Harley is credited as one of the first designers to be appointed an executive position at a major corporation in America.

Joe Gebbia, co-founder and chief product officer of AirBnB was trained in industrial design, a graduate from RISD.

I then stumbled upon this tweet..

and discovered more examples of design-led organizations, not just in the consumer space ( AirBnB, Pinterest) but enterprise too (Linear, Quill and Envoy to name a few)!

Design is the natural foundational knowledge for product leadership. The pandemic only accelerated an already declining demand for positions requiring an MBA. This is primarily happening because alternative educational programs are providing industry focused degrees such as CCA’s design strategy MBA. Whether it’s engineering, data science or design — all of the alternatives teach a specific trade alongside business, product and financial knowledge.

The argument I am making is perhaps it’s easier for design leaders to step into product leadership roles than the other way around because of the foundational knowledge of design in this Era of End User.

Kim’s tweet isn’t just sublime, it’s an example of how designers have a better understanding of a product manager’s job than some product managers do.

Concurrently, the role of the traditional product manager seems to be of increasingly diminishing in value as products become more complex requiring more specific knowledge to make. Notice how late the first product manager is hired at some of the most prominent startups.

The first hires at a startup are the most important and all bring specific knowledge that provides a unique capability to help the startup unlock high growth. That’s not all, I’ll go one step further.

Data Science, Behavioral Science, Psychology, Experience Design, Engineering, Anthropology, Growth Marketing & Sales, User Research, and Financial Modeling are some examples of the specific knowledge it takes to make some of the best experiences today. The collaboration of these specific skills creates a successful business.

I took some creative liberty to visualize what that model might look like — keeping consistency with our furniture based analogies.

Growth

Growth marketing and sales is a combination of sales, marketing and data science skills that uses experimentation to drive towards a specific business goal. Growth starts with a deep understanding of product value for customers.

Research

User research focuses on identifying and making sense of user behaviors, needs and motivations in order to design meaningful products and services. Research is a profession, not just an activity for a product manager to lead with a broad understanding. It goes far beyond conducting customer interviews to validate your ideas.

Finance

Naturally, a pillar of any business organization is how they make money (revenue model), scale operations and invest in the business to grow. I purposefully put a lot of the ‘business’ responsibilities into this capability so it’s more specific.

Engineering

Whether it’s software, electrical or mechanical engineering, this is the core function that’s focused on the craft of making a product or service. This grouping includes data science, and business intelligence amongst other roles.

Design

In this analogy, design is the table top — joining all four core pillars of growth, research, finance and engineering to collaborate in equal partnership and empowerment to make a product or service that is meaningful for people.

I purposefully left out product from this model for a few reasons:

1. I believe product management is better suited as an activity leaders from growth, research, finance, engineering and engineering practice together with more collaboration, creativity and diversity in thought than could ever come from one individual.

2. Like the Roman consuls, this model has checks and balances built in to save the organization from the whims and errors of one product leader.

3. Reward people with specific knowledge to be empowered and have skin in the game for the company.

4. Design is not the new leader or the figurehead, but rather the steward of the cross-functional group because design doesn’t work for the man — it inherently works for the end user.

Authority isn’t given, and though it can be taken -it’s empty and short lived. True authority is earned through knowledge, experience and effort in the form of trust.

Design is built for navigating uncharted territories, which is precisely where our economy currently finds itself. Design focuses on learning from failure — which most organizations self report being quite low on. Design is self interested in constant change and the lens of this quarantine will only accelerate cross-functional collaboration necessary to compete in today’s market. Design alone will never solve everything, but it does encourage a better framework for collaboration than product leadership ever will.

If you’re a designer, I encourage you to stand in front of the room and aspire to foster cross-functional empowerment for your teams.

If you’re a product manager, I encourage you to gain specific knowledge and make space for distributed ownership of the product.

If you’re the CEO or founder of a company, please consider putting off creating a product organization altogether, for as long as possible. You don’t need it. Instead, hire people with specific knowledge, empower them to collaborate cross-functionally and distribute the ownership of the product amongst leaders that exhibit skin in the game.

Viva la revolución.

A special thanks to the leaders of the design industry that have encouraged me to find my own voice, use my own creativity to share what I observe and critically think. It’s nice to know you’re there and that you care!