Bob Baxley: belief

Transcript context

…That was a very illuminating clarification. Something else that I heard you believe that I haven't heard before is that design share report to engineering. So I'll say that every company culture is different and different organizations work in different ways. In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process, rather than a by product or a part of the product process. What I've seen happen over and over in my experience, a ThoughtSpot, Pinterest, other places when you're working directly with product, it's easy to leave engineering out of the loop and product and design can go cook up stuff that doesn't quite make sense technically or is really hard to implement or is just a bridge too far. And I think that engineering doesn't feel like they're a part of it, so you bring them at the end and they haven't really been brought along so they don't quite understand how to extrapolate from the specs you make into what should really ship. Maybe they don't bring the same level of enthusiasm to it, because they haven't been brought along. So I think there's something about having the design and engineering team very tightly connected and kind of living together. And it's not that you have to do that structurally from an organization point of view, but it's hard-pressed if you don't. I also think you can just account for timelines and costs and things better when design's part of engineering. And many of my design friends will push back on this and they'll say design should be its own thing and it should be an independent group and we should have three co-equal branches of government, and that's a solid argument as well, and there's some places where that works beautifully. My experiences at design rarely has a budget or an army, and so it's very hard for them to really hold their own in that sort of a setting. Also, although you'll see people argue with me on LinkedIn about how design needs to be measured and we need to have metrics and be held accountable for a number, I don't really believe that in my heart. I've just never seen a number that you could apply to design that we could reliably affect. So I think it's very hard to hold design as an organization accountable for a particular outcome the way that most of the other C-level roles are held accountable. Sales has a number, engineering has very specific expectations, product has very specific expectations. And although I know this will frustrate some of my friends, I just haven't been able to figure out how that works for design. And again, it can vary from culture to culture. Certainly there's very successful chief design officers and we could go through the list. I just think in many companies it's a stretch, it's just hard. What I see work, and I'm curious to get your take is just product, engineering, design have exactly the same goal and the more everyone... And their performance as an employee is tied to the same thing essentially because then everyone is pushing in the same direction versus like, oh, I have my engineering goal, I have my design goal, I have my PM goal, and just creates all kinds of weird incentives.…

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