Do You Dare To Care? - The Future Of Leadership In UX

Sonja Radenkovic at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/dXhRRW7-hu8

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

How is it possible that two thirds of our effort is wasted?

[00:00:01] Better, faster, cheaper, and why not also happier: that is what we all desire. And how is that possible, that two thirds of our effort does not really bring a value? I was actually shocked when I saw the website of the conference, when Microsoft Research stated that 66% of our time, of our effort and hard work, goes to waste.

[00:00:29] So how is this possible? We have our teams, development and design teams are as professional as they ever have been. We really have great people, they have a good education, they are well paid, they are motivated and highly engaged. Our offices look really amazing, they're coming from the field of Pinterest almost. And still nothing really works, 66% is a waste. So how's that possible, and most importantly, what can we do about it?

[00:01:01] I am Sonja Radenkovic, I am head of UX design at TomTom, and my job is to get millions of people around the world to their destination in a safe and efficient way. And when I say efficient I mean I really want them to spend the least time in traffic, and I would be really happy if we could eliminate traffic altogether so that our environment gets better and emissions go down.

[00:01:34] So today I will share with you what I learned from my nine years at TomTom. I had a lot of opportunity to experiment, I had a lot of opportunity to try, fail, sometimes succeed, same as TomTom. TomTom has always been about helping people to go from A to B on the wheels in a safe, fast and easy way.

TomTom's pivot, and maps for autonomous driving

[00:02:05] We became successful thanks to our navigation devices, which your parents probably used, or if you're old enough like me you also tried it. But then everything changed: mobile phones arrived, and all these single purpose devices were not needed anymore. We had our phones, we don't need other stuff. Let us take your wristwatch as an example. How many of you are still using a wristwatch, not an Apple watch? And how many of you are actually using it to check the time now? Not much.

[00:02:41] So TomTom needed to pivot and reinvent itself, and from a product company we became a software company. But we stayed close to our roots. We have a close relationship with drivers around the world, because they were our source of innovation and inspiration for innovation. We have an enormous treasure: we know drivers better than almost anyone, because we have driven a trillion kilometers together. And if you think, what is a trillion, is it too much, is it too small, I don't know what a trillion is: a trillion is the amount of kilometers you need to go to Neptune and back 40 times. It's kind of an impressive number.

[00:03:31] So today we are location technology experts and our easy-to-use navigation is part of many car brands. And together we are actually exploring and trying to make autonomous driving, the future, a reality. So I'm happy to present you Trillian[?]. This is our own autonomous car that we drive today on the streets of Berlin, and it helped us to test our high-definition maps. High-definition maps are important and necessary for autonomous driving.

[00:04:17] Actually there are two lines of thought. You have a Tesla thought, which actually says, you know, you don't need the map, it's enough to have sensors, the sensors are big enough and good enough, you will be fine. We don't really believe in that, because we think that you really need a map in order to drive safely. So TomTom is one of the three map companies in the world that are creating maps for autonomous driving. One of them is Here, one of them is Google, and TomTom.

[00:04:52] So in our opinion, the prerequisite for autonomous driving is to have high-definition 3D maps. And just to illustrate what I mean by that and why it's important, there is a small illustration, which is one of our campaigns, which actually explains that you really need a map because your sensors do not see around the corner, and that is important.

[00:05:25] So in order to get a safe and enjoyable drive, next to the maps you will need real-time services like traffic or weather, and only then can we actually really make this autonomous driving a future reality.

Care: about your people, your stars, your partners in crime

[00:05:45] So I truly believe that success is the ability to change, but truly change: to change your leadership style, to change your organization models and your processes. And you need to change all three together, otherwise it will not work. And you cannot buy or copy somebody else's success. We can learn from each other, but each of our companies are different and we need to find a way which works for us. What works for me does not necessarily work for you.

[00:06:29] So if I can condense everything I learned into only two words, which I'd like to share with you today, it will be: care, and dare.

[00:06:44] Care about your people. It's obvious but it's really important. So know their passions, know their fears, find a way to support them and build them and develop them over time. But it is not enough. You need to be around them. And some of you at the end of your career will sometimes get the opportunity to get one of those executive offices, which are really great, but say no to them. That is what I did, say no to them, because just glass doors and open doors will not make you approachable.

[00:07:23] And there are two reasons why you should say no to this nice executive office. One is more obvious: of course you will be in the middle of the group, you will be able to quickly check, steer and guide, exchange knowledge, exchange ideas, build friendship, and you don't need to book a one-hour meeting every time for such a thing. But the other one, a little bit less obvious, very important for your success, is that you will have a longer career. There will not be many people hunting you down just because they want your office. So say no to the office.

[00:08:03] Another one is: assume you'll get great people, you did your best to hire them, but you need to choose a couple of them that you can actually rely on, because you know your product depends on them, but also your career. So you really need to trust them, and you need to bet on them and not look back. And so how do you choose your stars? When I became a manager for the first time, I asked my more experienced colleague, who was my manager at the time, a software senior VP of products, asking, okay, how do I choose who to develop, how do I choose who to promote, who do I dare to put my career in the hands of?

[00:08:53] And he answered with a question, and I really remember it and it actually guided me all the way from that day, and I want to share it with you. His question was: if your life would depend on it, who would you invite on a boat together with you? And believe me, it's in your guts, you really know who you want on that boat. And these are your stars, these are your people that you can trust your career with and your product with.

[00:09:22] And partners in crime. That applies not only to your team members, in my case that would be designers, but that does not bring a product out. Your partners in crime are your developers, your product managers, your product owners, your marketeers, everyone in that group. And for them to feel like they're partners in crime, they need to share the same vision as you, they need to see the same goal, and then the magic will happen. And especially in the times where things are rough, where it's difficult, those people will just go ahead if they feel like they're partners in crime.

[00:10:06] So to summarize: care. Care about your people, develop them, stay around them, have fun with them. That is a very important aspect. Don't just do the job and have all hands once a month. Try to organize breakfast, try to go for lunch, these fun moments, or have cooking classes, whatever works for you, drinks. These moments do matter. Identify your stars: these are the people who will be examples for everyone else and that will actually make things happen. And treat everyone on the product team as your partners in crime.

Dare: adaptive leadership

[00:10:52] And dare. Dare to consciously challenge your leadership style and change it. And what is the right leadership style, you would ask? We know that it definitely is not command and control, we left all that behind us. We are all now supporting people, we're giving them autonomy, and we know the autonomy is needed in order to get mastery, to flourish. But not all teams are actually equally fitted to be autonomous. Autonomy needs to be deserved. So some of your people will be totally paralyzed if we give them 100 percent autonomy: if they are young, if they are new on the projects, if they're forming as a team, they will need a little bit more guidance. So the right leadership style is actually an adaptive leadership style. Lead, show the way, or just get out of the way, depending on what your team needs.

Dare: radical openness, and a failure of mine

[00:11:51] Sometimes it doesn't matter how much effort, passion, hours of work you put into something, it just does not work. And when that happens it's time for radical measures. And one of the radical measures I have in mind is kind of admitting that you don't know it all, that you need help, allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

[00:12:24] So I will share one of my failures with you today. I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. That is where TomTom was transforming from being a consumer product company to a software company, and I was really supportive of this. I kind of saw the light, I knew that that is what we need to do, and I was working really hard to make the transition happen. And somehow my team really didn't buy it. There were all kinds of people not really motivated going around, leaving the company, having the chats around the coffee machine. And then we have the yearly, I don't know if you guys have it, but we have a yearly poll where you ask people how happy they are and how engaged they are, and my team scored worst ever. We were really at the bottom of the happiness ladder of TomTom.

[00:13:29] So that was really time for radical measures. I thought, what should I be doing now? Okay, so I asked one external coach, a woman, Glorian[?]. I asked her, what should I be doing now, really? I cannot put in more hours, I cannot put in more energy, why are they not seeing it? And she proposed a little bit of an unorthodox model. She said, you know, let's try this: let's ask everyone, everyone literally, face to face, to rate you and all your managers on the scale from one to ten. And not just now rate you and just get away with that, they also kind of need to do a little bit of homework and think about the things that you can do better and the things that you do already well, so you don't forget about those also.

[00:14:23] So it's a little bit unorthodox, a method, and there were a couple of things that could go wrong with this. So one of them is I could just lose my job, because we also promised them, you know, it will be totally transparent, so we will tell everyone what the scores are, and you don't need to fear because it will be a hundred percent, we will not share with anybody who said what, so it will be anonymous, you can totally say what you want.

[00:14:51] So this is what we did, and I'm going to follow that promise, so I said we are going to show results to everyone. So without further ado, these are my results. Is it good, is it bad? I don't know, because what I heard is that other people maybe don't do such a thing, and even if they do they don't really share it, so you don't know what is the normal score for a manager, when you are a good manager, when you are a kind of bad manager.

[00:15:32] But there are a couple of things that I could learn and that I learned from this. So if you can see, like, the middle part, the majority think, okay, so-so, she can do something but I'm not sure if it's really great. There are a couple of people, or actually a big group, which realized, okay, she's actually really trying her best and some things are really good, so they are acknowledging that effort. And a couple of people were just saying, like, she doesn't know what she's doing.

[00:16:00] So your first instinct is to actually go and fix the red ones, because we don't want red, huh? So just go attack these two people and finally, you know, what you can do and what you can change to make them suddenly see the light. Which is totally wrong, because the amount of effort you will need to put in to move these two people from the left to the right is huge, and you're probably never going to make it anyway, they've made up their mind. But the amount of effort you need to put in to get people in the middle from the middle to the right is actually minor. As far as you get good feedback, you'll find a new action, and it is probably going to happen.

[00:16:41] So what we did: this radical openness was rewarded. It wasn't that they were not able to share their opinions before, it's not about that, but just being vulnerable and daring to expose yourself was appreciated. So what we did, we collected all the input, all things which bothered us, made a long list, prioritized it, and then asked everybody: if you feel like... it's clear that the list is long, there is no way that your manager can fix it for you, so if you feel like it and you have passion about any of those topics, just pick it, pick it up and make it happen.

[00:17:23] And that is what they did, so they really started running with it. Whoever wanted to volunteer did it, whoever didn't want to wasn't pushed. But what happened is that the majority of people actually volunteered. And what is happening today is that the list is still long, we fixed a lot of things and we still have a long way to go, and the list will probably never get empty because the second we fix something, something else comes up. But there is this shared ownership and we are all making it together, and that is really important.

Dare: change your organizational design

[00:17:59] And the last thing I believe you should dare to do is to change, choose or adapt your organizational design model. The company structure has a bigger influence on your design and product than you think. Where you are in the food chain really influences how much you know and what you can do. And having the right organizational model which works for your team and your organization is important.

[00:18:35] So Ben Horowitz wrote that the first rule of organizational design is that all organizational designs are bad. And that is true, because you're just optimizing for one aspect and you then mitigate for the other. So today I hear a lot that we optimize for speed, which is great, but we optimize for speed, sometimes we optimize for speed only. And optimizing for speed is great because we can get these things out, like our designs or our products, to the hands of the users, they can try it, we can learn, we can test, we can give it back, we can improve it. So getting it done fast is great, but the problem is that it seems like 66% of the thing is kind of not bringing value, so we are getting the wrong thing out fast.

[00:19:32] So we have a choice. If we must choose one, then we need to choose between optimizing for value or optimizing for delivery. And optimizing for value means basically proving hypotheses, so that is where design thinking or user centered design play a role. So you think before you jump. Optimizing for speed we already talked about. The problem with optimizing for speed also is you can recognize it when your designers start to feel like they're servants to the development teams, or your user stories are broken into such small chunks, which is fine by default, but if nobody sees the bigger picture then you just really optimize for the wrong things and the user experience suffers. So in my opinion it's not about value versus delivery, it's value and delivery. So we need to optimize for both value and delivery, and in this way we'll maybe get the right thing fast.

How UX is organized at TomTom

[00:20:40] So I will share the organizational model that we have in TomTom when it comes to the user experience. It's centralized partnership. It's one of the three models you probably know. You have the centralized UX[?], which is old-fashioned, everybody left it behind. You have embedded, which a lot of people do have, and that does work in small teams. Again, it depends what works for you. But the larger and bigger the organization is, the more embedded your designers are, the more your coherent product experience will suffer, because there are dependencies. So for this user centered design to flourish, we keep our designers close to each other, they collaborate as much as they can, and then they also collaborate vertically with the development team. So wherever they can they sit next to them, but not all the time, so they are flexible, they go in and out, whatever works for them in whatever stage of the design that works.

[00:21:52] So this is my team. I have 40 designers. For some companies that is a lot, for some companies it's peanuts, I know that Google has 200. And we are, I would say, very rich, because we have 22 nationalities in the team, which means that actually every second person has a different nationality. And we are based in 8 locations, but more importantly we are based on four continents, which makes it really difficult to create a coherent user experience, because there is not an hour in a day that everybody is awake or can work together or is in the office.

[00:22:35] So how do we compromise that, how do we work to mitigate it? So we have focus teams, we divided them into eight, they are known as painters[?], and the level of autonomy varies between those teams. Some of them are totally autonomous and some of them have a dependency between them because they're working on the same products, so they work more collaboratively.

[00:23:00] And again we have a couple of mechanisms to safeguard the holistic user experience, because we all know the devil is in the details. So, a couple of them, there are three here. We have design critique. It's one of the methods, which happens only within the group, so each group individually, without managers, without CPOs[?], who actually manage to have this conversation. They come two times a week, they look at each other's designs, they comment on them, they try to help each other, they help junior designers to grow, they help new people to get the knowledge they need to know about the space they are working with. And they're just doing their best to move away the most obvious problems that each design potentially could have. So they're there to make the designers stronger and improve the design.

[00:24:09] Then the second one is design review. Design review happens only with the smaller groups per product, so we just invite people who are working on the product. But next to the designers directly responsible for that part, we also invite the head of UX design, which is me in this case, and the chief product officer. And he really dedicates his time, he spends every Monday all day in those meetings, when one after the other we go through those products. And we invite product managers, because that is the moment where we can look, is the ambition at the level we wanted it to be? We trust the designs will be fine and they're probably achievable, because the designers worked in the meantime together with developers and product owners and engineering and architects to figure out what they can make within a given time. But we challenge the ambition. And then we see that all these different products sometimes are not aligned, actually often are not aligned, so at least we can pinpoint that.

[00:25:17] And the third one, which happens only when needed, but is really the one which is important, is the one we call hot topics. And we invite there, wherever there is a misalignment, a difference in opinion, which you could imagine happens sometimes, we invite people who are part of that product. That could be anyone: that could be a product marketing manager, could be a product manager, designer, architect, developer, all the people who are making that particular thing happen. And then what is the purpose of that meeting? It is at least to understand what are the trade-offs that we are making, and to understand each other. Hopefully sometimes we actually make some decisions, but the main purpose is really to understand all parts of the whole game so that we can act upon it.

Summary

[00:26:06] So to summarize: dare. Dare to change your leadership style: lead, guide, or just get out of the way. Dare to be radically open, vulnerable, and say that you don't know anything, and people will help you. And take care about your organizational design, because how you organize does influence your product and it does matter.

[00:26:39] So if you optimize for both value and speed, this will be the path, hopefully the path. I cannot promise you that we will have zero percent of waste, but I'm sure it's not going to be two thirds. So I'm eager to hear what are your stories and what does work for you in your company, so please share, and let's keep in touch. Thank you very much.