GOOD morning 👋 

What a beautiful day in London. Well, let’s brighten your morning up with an interview with Ian Sands, a design executive, who has worked with some of the biggest names in business including Bill Gates on design projects.

In this mail:

• Q&A: with Ian Sands on the state of design in 2023

• Insight: What “no start-up experience” means + how to solve it

Q&A
Conversation with Ian Sands

Ian Sands is a design and innovation leader who has spent the last couple of decades leading efforts to define what comes next for digital experiences. 

1 - Intro to Ian Who are you? Why design? What has been your journey to where you are today?

Overall, I am drawn to problem-solving in ways that are meaningful to people and valuable to business. To me, design is the tool to achieve solutions that matter.

Growing up I had a pretty early sense that design would be my path. Looking back I think my journey might have been written in my DNA. My father is an architect and comes from a family of designers and artists and my mother’s side of the family has a history of entrepreneurship and innovation. At age 14, I read an article in Architectural Digest about the Art Center College of Design and decided that was my goal. I began my university studies at the University of California, Davis in the design program to build my portfolio. 2 years later I applied and was accepted into the Product Design program at Art Center.

During my last year of studies, I wanted to take what I had been learning about human factors and direct it towards digital product and interaction design. This discipline didn’t exist yet as a major at Art Center, so I created my own curriculum and series of classes that became a sort of template for a degree program to follow. One of the final projects was sponsored by Samsung and perfectly aligned with the exploration of interactive experiences for what was to become streaming media. I concentrated on building additional skills in 3D modeling, animation, motion graphics, prototyping, scripting, typography, and graphic design.

Shortly after graduation, I accepted a position at Microsoft working on a team in Research exploring applications for broadband media and “interactive TV”. That was a great launch point and a great time to be at Microsoft. Opportunities to help pioneer the future of internet and web-based solutions were there to be seized. In short order, I was able to play key roles in the design and launch of web properties like Slate and MSN and head up the design and launch of MSNBC digital.

Fast forward through other influential opportunities building teams and designing v1.0 solutions, including the first ever Microsoft retail store in San Francisco, to a return to my R&D roots where I founded the Envisioning team to help conceive and articulate the longer-term potential of emerging technologies. This effort dovetailed with Office Labs and a leadership role alongside an amazing group of people to help build the Labs organization, process, and culture for product concept development and innovation.

From there, I stepped outside Microsoft to co-found a company whose first project was with the private office of Bill Gates to imagine and build a forward-looking education solution called the Big History Project. This provided an outstanding opportunity to help lead a multi-year effort to imagine, define, and build a brand and product from the ground up. Fast forward a bit further to Pilot Lab, which I co-founded to deliver a lab-based design approach for strategic projects with innovative companies across the globe. Deep client partnerships led to highly rewarding projects like helping Spotify conceive and prototype multi-year strategies for concepts that spawned Discover Weekly and Live Events, working on Bill Gates ‘Next Epidemic’ TED talk in 2015, charting the future of hospitality with Hilton Hotels, a complete brand overhaul for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and many more.

2 - What is the current state of design leadership in 2023?

Design leadership in tech continues to wend its way. When I joined Microsoft coming out of university in 1995, design leadership was much more recognized as a strategic pillar in other industries like automotive, fashion, entertainment, and industrial design. In the software and technology industry, engineering called the shots, and design was often considered a ‘service’ discipline, brought in to ‘pretty things up’ when it was too late to have a broader effect. A service, leveraged by engineers and product managers to assist with production-level tasks, as needed.

In some organizations, it’s been a slow process while in others things evolved more quickly.  But I do feel that overall, we’ve seen a lot of positive movement since I started out. In those early days, design leadership roles tapped out at a director level at most tech companies and it really wasn’t until after 2010 that we started seeing VP roles for design becoming more commonplace. It’s certainly a discipline that has taken a much longer road to the C-suite than others.

I think the confluence of more industries understanding the value of design and more designers understanding the value of business will continue to open more doors for design leadership.

3 - There’s a lot of talk about design needing a seat at the table. What are your thoughts on how design should work with the C-Suite?

This conversation has been around for a while and I do think it can come across as a bit presumptuous. No one deserves at seat at the table. You have to earn your seat. Designers have had to work hard to prove themselves, often times alone within their discipline’s, surrounded by people who don’t understand what they do. I could see how this could make designers feel they need to speak louder about their craft, putting energy into defending the tools of their trade so that other disciplines will realize the value.

But really this is not the way to do it. It’s not how a discipline earns a seat at the table. I think designers can achieve great heights in an organization but the pathway to those opportunities involves finding common ground with peer leaders and realizing mutual goals such as business value, user and engineering efficiency, strategic advantage, customer satisfaction, revenue, and profits.

Design can add huge value to these shared goals in areas like researching competitive solutions, listening to customers, developing customer journeys, introducing fresh ideas, streamlining workflows, and building proofs-of-concept. Ensure that shared business goals guide your design principles and align design processes to achieve business outcomes.

4 - Why do you believe a lot of companies are killing off design leadership roles? What effect will this have long term?

It’s not just design leadership roles, we’ve seen a culling of leadership roles in general. We’ve seen this before, oftentimes sold as a remedy to trim costs and load up the responsibilities on lower-level employees. In some cases, this can work out fine but in very flat organizations you will struggle.

Overall, there will be a need for great design leaders, and long term, we’ll see the value of the discipline continue to rise. Though, to my points about design deserving a seat at the table, I do think design leaders (and all leaders) are always going to be tested to add cross-organizational value and should always remain adaptive, finding ways to both influence and align with the goals of the business.

5 - What traits do the most effective design executives have?

Design executives need to be nimble at finding the balance between encouraging common-ground solutions and driving disruption. Listen and treat all feedback, especially from non-designers, as valued input that might provide new insights, new constraints and new opportunities to produce greatness.

Design executives need to bring this mentality to bear when ‘managing up’ and working with their peers, but also when working within their design organizations. Lead with empathy, and encourage a growth mindset while maintaining an expectation of excellence and a safe place for radical ideas and pushback.

All the while, embracing friction is essential. Great things can come from some level of friction and the energy it produces.

6 - You’ve worked with a lot of non-design c-suite. What has been your experience working with them? How do they view design?

In my experience with non-design executives and the c-suite, it is not always advantageous to lead with design. If you are presenting concepts or solutions, lead with the business case, competitive differentiation, customer value, and how your solutions elegantly and inspiringly meet the challenge. Allow them to comment on aesthetics, layout, functionality, or ‘how great it looks’.

Great feedback from non-design executives on great designs almost never begins with commentary on the details of the design craft. Remember, creating ‘value’ is your common ground. Lead with sound processes that demonstrate data-driven and innovative pathways to create value. Design is your secret weapon. Let them be the discoverers of your secret.

If you find you are compelled to sell them on the craftwork, you have missed the mark. They may be very opinionated about something in the weeds of your design decision-making (e.g. font and color choices). These may have strong design principles to back them up but try to begin with data-driven logic, trends, usability, etc. to defend those design decisions before resorting to anything that gets close to subjective reasoning when at all possible.

Be prepared to ‘take the feedback’ and inspire your team to work with any new constraints. Choose your battles wisely.

INSIGHT
“No start-up experience”

This is a common rejection founders use.

I see a lean towards designers who:

- Can demonstrate 0-1 experience.
- Can show strong product design work.
- Have worked in a well known design led org.
- Have scaled teams throughout funding rounds.

Working with a lot of founders I’ve found they need to emotionally connect and big part of that is to get excited about your work.

Unlike big corporates, every hire is pivotal, especially early-stage. There’s no time to waste.

“How can I leave the corporate design world and work for start-ups?”

People are bored of being middle management in a big cog, you didn’t study design for years to have 0 impact within a company.

A few ideas to appeal to more founders:

- Start advising founders. You need a “portfolio”
- Reach out to VCs about if they need advisory
- Start thinking about all the other things you bring

If your portfolio is not exciting, talk about building teams, consider product roles, product development, your teams work etc.

To be blunt, some founders will not fully understand the ins and outs of design (to be expected) so showing quality work is an absolute MUST.