#68 Growing design maturity within the company
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So communication would be always the key to anything you're doing as a designer. Your pixels or your mock-ups are not as important as your communication within your team. First, try to establish the relationship with your teammates. Try to understand who they are, where they're coming from. How do they understand design discipline? What are their expectations? How did they work with design discipline in the past?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa, and today we're going to be tackling a topic that concerns us all. How can we grow the design maturity in the company we work for, or in the team, or startup, or wherever we're working as UX designers? What are some ways in which we can

contribute to raising the design maturity and improving the overall design culture. So I think it's going to be a very interesting topic for all of us. But before we start diving into it, I just want to ask Anfisa how her past week was.

Yay, welcome everybody to the next episode. My past week was actually pretty cool. Very busy, more busy than I should have done. Like I mentioned in a previous episode, I had to go to Stockholm for the hackathon we did for one of our biggest clients. It's like in the enterprise sector. So it was very cool. They have an HQ in Stockholm. So we were sitting in the hotel that was also an HQ.

them and work with the teams that were also competing for some crazy idea in the hospitality. So that was really cool. And it was, you know, cool because we've sort of assembled a team of different people from different teams. So it's not the people you usually work with, but like just different individual contributors from our side as well. And it was a good opportunity to, you know, get to know people you're working with. Yeah.

So that was fun. I was taking like two and a half days. I also had like maybe like three or four hours to walk around Strongholm, but I was there before it. So yeah, it was just like a nice lunch kind of with the team. Another thing I did, finally did the second sort of whiteboarding challenge workshop on Sunday, which was really cool, much better than the previous one, I believe, or

maybe I think so, but it was a bit more engaging and the results were better. So I was happy about that. And I'm looking forward already to the next year to start running these workshops again. So the next one probably will be in the end of January because my plan is to make them once a month every last week. And since, you know, this last week of the month, the December will be Christmas time. I'm not going to do this this month.

Other than that, I kind of spent, I guess, too much energy on, you know, traveling, hackatoning, which, you know, usually is like a sleepless kind of night when you work with your team until morning, sort of. And, you know, running this workshop that I think I came back on Thursday and I got sick immediately. And yeah, I'm still sort of recovering from that sickness, I guess. Having a little bit of a migraine, that's a bummer, but hopefully by tomorrow, by Monday, it will be all right. How about you? How was your week?

I'm sorry to hear about your migraine. I hope you're going to feel better soon.

And yeah, as per my week, I think it was a pretty good week because right here in Romania, we had three days off. So actually, there was this national holiday on Wednesday and then the national day of Romania on Thursday. So these were days off from the state. And then everybody took Friday off as well. And yeah, it was pretty intense for me personally, because my husband was away with a work trip.

And he left for one week. It was the first time I was left with our toddler for so long. Yeah, so it was a mix of bonding and connecting and then survival and then connecting again and then just simply surviving. So I had a holiday that didn't really feel like a holiday, but it was nice to get some time away at least from work. So yeah, yeah.

not much to share about that. And I have another article that came up with Hotjar. As some of you might know, I have a partnership with Hotjar. I'm writing articles for them and creating content to help educate designers and promote the capabilities of Hotjar, heat maps, click maps, recordings, and so on. And how can you be a more informed designer, right? So that also came up and I'm pretty excited about that. And I think

Yeah, that's it in a nutshell. So let's start diving into the topic of today, which is how to contribute to growing the design maturity in your company. And the question I want to start with is what has been your experience? What kind of companies have you worked with and how did you personally, but even generally speaking, how can you even assess the maturity of the company you're working with?

Wow, that's a big question, right? I don't even know where to start from. So my journey working in the companies or organization was not as long as your, for example, Ioana. So I'm definitely looking forward to hear your answer. So I worked particularly in three big companies, two enterprises, one growing startup or scale up startup and business.

I think the second company I worked at, which was enterprise, was probably the most UX mature, even though it was not like the top notch maturity. And so when I started working in the first company, I would say that the company was really not UX mature. Maybe it's not the first level, right? So let's establish the guest fundamentals first.

to start from. By NNG, we can see that there is six levels of UX maturity. I've seen other sort of scales. I think one of them was by Envision, which was also great, that had something around visionary. So like from doers to visionary designers. The UX maturity stages by NNG, I

I think they define six levels where it's basically from absent to user-driven. So whatever way you want to look at this, it's up to you. In a nutshell, I think we can still always think about it and how the company is structured, how the designers are operating, the resources they're having, and how the whole, not just design department, but the

whole company is operating. So I think there are two main components is like whether the UX design practices are being established across the whole organization. That's the first factor. And the second factor is whether the expectation from UX designer are more of a hands-on, here is the brief, go fill it, or it's more of the visionary, let's reinvent everything, let's go beyond, let's think outside the box and stuff

like that, when you're actually thinking, not just by solving that brief, but really thinking about the whole ecosystem, how people operate and really like the typical phrase when people don't want nails, they want pictures on the wall and how can we do it? Or even like the typical phrase by the Ford, right? That if we would ask our users what they want, we would build faster horses. So

that's when you kind of go beyond and start thinking visionary. So these are two main aspects in my head, at least how I position them. I'll be right now operating with UX maturity stages by an NG group. And so I think when I joined my first company, which in my opinion was really the least UX mature or UX mature ready back then,

So again, I did not have the context before. I didn't know what is UX mature company, what is not. It was 2019. It's the first time I'm joining company as an onsite designer. And the first thing I immediately noticed was that we had only three designers for the project I was assigned to. And for that project, we have around 120 developers.

So apparently the ratio designers to developers was really crazy. It was just not good in any level. In the perfect ratio, I would say you have to have one designer for five developers, smaller team. Sometimes it's one to 10, but it depends on the scale of the project and how the company structure. But when I saw that for one project, we have three designers for 120 developers, I realized

It's probably not the UX-driven environment per se, which again is related to those UX stages of maturity by NNG. And if I would try to put it in the scale from one to six, I would maximum give it A2, which was like limited. And NNG defines it as uneven, haphazard, aspirational, where you do have people in place to support that discipline, UX design. And we did have design managers and we did have, I think,

I think one UX researcher, but it was like sort of an agency model where he would be assigned on the project by the need. So it was like a shared resource. And then just two designers and one lead. So very, very small, I guess, department for the scale of the project. And so it was not one designer for 100 developers, yet it was very limiting. And you could definitely see that the company was really tech driven for a very long while. Or it was very, let's say what customers told us to do, we're doing that.

My experience there was, honestly, it was not easy one. It was starting from scratch, realizing how far beyond the typical UX process there they were. It was very operational in terms of how the PM tells you what to do, the practices they used to have, the research. It's in the

place, but very limited and not shared across multiple teams. And then when you as a designer trying to find any data, it's very hard to do. So the first thing I had to do there was to immediately establish sort of, hey, we need to start building data, understanding what do we have

What can we access? What can we do? Like, you know, start asking people around for information and slowly, slowly, slowly start engaging our developers in what's happening. I know the typical problem in that company was at least what I've heard was that developers just received the handoffs. Sort of like, here's what you have to build. Then they decide if they want to build it or not. Right. So they just say, oh, you know, that's hard for us to build. So not going to do that. I'm going to do another way. And that's actually a very typical problem in many companies, to be fair.

And the second company I have joined in beginning of 2020, the UX department was really like a separate. So we were a separate unit and we would be working on the products, but not super integrated with the products. And the whole design department was also very, I would say the team was really strong. They had best practices. They were thinking about, you know, good design process. They were following the design process. We had design critiques. We had

things, we had plannings, we had a lot of good things established, the retros. But at the same time, tech department was still much, much bigger than the design power. So we didn't have the same sort of buy-in, the same seat and the same power of the voice, even during the plannings when we all have to vote for initiatives. And apparently you have like, let's say around 14 development teams. And again, we only had like three, four designers, four

for all those teams to support. So developers eventually were the majority, the critical mass of people who were deciding what to build, not always what we designed would be built. So again, there was this bigger problem of designers not being enough integrated in the product development cycles. Even though, you know, as design department, it was pretty mature in terms of practices.

And then I've joined this other scale-up company where I'm working at the moment, and it has other problems. Surprise, surprise, in terms of UX maturity. So for me, the big learning from my previous experiences was that as a designer, I do want to be integrated in the product teams. Of course, we all need design department and operations and support for the designers. But at the same time, I wanted to be a part of the decision-making process in the product squads. And that was one of the deciding factors for me. So when I joined, I joined a

product tribe, I guess, or product family, if you wish, where I was one designer with around a team of eight people. And we had one PM, one tech lead, around five developers, and he was a designer. And we would operate in the product trios, meaning that me as a design power, the PM as somebody who is like facilitating the whole process.

And then the tech lead who's decided on how can we build it in the best way. And, you know, we would have a much better communication in this trio. We would all have an equal stake. And as a designer, I would be able to shout out and say what we need to build and kind of have a stake in the decision-making process. Yet we do still have problems with

UX maturity, it's never perfect. So I guess today I would be trying to put it into, again, back to the energy scale. Probably it's on the stage four structured, but not as integrated in the whole company level. And we do still have problems with UX maturity, for example, in terms of

how company used to operate because the company went through, you know, the hospitality through the pandemic. They had a huge hit and there was not enough people. The processes they have established during this crisis period were not the best. Not enough hands, sometimes just

jumping on projects, sometimes being PM operated, not all the design would have a stake. And today we still have, I guess, a big gap to bridge and UX depth to face. And at the moment in the company, we're in limbo between being super operational and solving the problem by specific customer and actually building UX maturity, vision of the project and

being again, visionary, being able to reinvent everything and not just being able to build whatever we can in a given time. Sorry for a long story again. I'm always like taking my time to kind of give the context. But yeah, my story was not that I was working in a UX mature companies yet. The most I would say I've got to is this level four out of six when the best I could get is that we do have, I guess, designed, acknowledged

We actually have a pretty good design team. We have design directors from really great companies like Booking and PayPal and now from Apple. And then we have UX writers and we have a research team and we have design ops and we have design system teams. So we have resources in place.

But at the moment, it's still in a not very well-structured place and we're still building our best practices and trying to establish, I guess, the common ground on how we work together because it was all assembled only this year. So I'm going to stop here and I'll kind of pass the mic to you because I want to hear how it was for you specifically in the two companies you've worked with.

Yeah, thanks for sharing your story. I actually resonate with it quite a lot. And I think it's very insightful to simply reference the NNG maturity model. And like you said, there are other maturity models. But I think that these are actually, let's say, frameworks or instruments by which we are able to at least reflect

on where our company is at and then understand what might be the tools by which we could help improve the culture, the situation, the processes and so on. So, well, we're going to dive deeper into that. What can you do as a UX designer to contribute to making your company

operate in a better way design wise. But just to briefly go through my experience with the two big companies I worked for. So I just want to take a quick side road to say that in startups in general, the culture is pretty low. That's one thing that might be exciting. It's a place where you can make a lot of impact, but we're not going to discuss startups too much because it's kind of implicit that

They're not the best. So as long as they're in the early stage, don't have a lot of resources, don't have a big team, don't have a good number of roles, don't have, like you said, design ops, UX writing roles and so on. We can't speak about a high maturity. So in startups, it's more like survival design culture. But I'm going to talk about my two full time role experiences. The first one was within ING Bank.

And I was with them for 10 years. I didn't do design for 10 years. It was just for the last couple of years that I did this role. It was really interesting because we had a very, let's say, autonomous or completely disconnected design team locally here in Bucharest. But there was also the ING group team of UX design. So I

As opposed to my current role where the design team is very global and we all work together. I work closely with a researcher that's based in Seattle. It's a 10 hour time zone difference. I also have another designer working with me on the project that's also in Seattle. So the team is really distributed right now and we make it work. And that's actually an opportunity to learn from each other, to collaborate, to like do focused work when we're not meeting regularly.

in the overlapping time slots and so on. But in my first job in ING Bank, we weren't communicating too much with the group design team. We were actually doing things quite independently here in Bucharest. So that meant that even if the global design team had a higher level of design maturity, we weren't leveraging it too much.

So in a way, we started building from scratch the design culture, advocating design within the company, establishing processes, started building a design system on our own. So we were a team of four or five designers here in Bucharest, and we were setting up the design culture for ING Romania. I think that at some point we reached out to the folks in Amsterdam and tried to understand how we might

reuse some of the things that they did for their design system. The thing is that was that our product was also completely independent, right? So it was not a completely different visual language because we were all applying the same brand guide, but it was a different product, which wasn't defined in their design system. We had to build it on our own.

So even though we had this opportunity for like jumping steps and becoming more mature, we did everything on our own and that in a way slowed us down. But in another way for me personally, it was a great opportunity to learn. How do you build a design process? How do you build a design infrastructure, right, in your company? So it was a great learning opportunity. And I'm not sure where ING would map on the maturity level.

I'm sure somewhere in the middle. So we were in one of the most mature design teams, but we were working heavily towards that, right? And we were doing a lot of work advocating design in business and going at the people who were used to, let's say, pre-design jobs.

kind of mental model of working. And we were trying to change that and convince them that embedding design and everything they do is going to improve the overall outcome of our products, of our work in general. So we were doing a lot of evangelizing. So that was my first experience. And now in the company I work with, UiPath, what's amazing is that

because it's a scale up. So essentially, when I joined, it just grew in the past year before I joined from 100 employees to 800 employees, or maybe from 800 to 3000. I don't even remember like what point of the journey I joined in, but it grew immensely and very fast. And that's why I was able to witness a spectacular evolution and

and growth in the design culture and maturity. Because when I joined, there wasn't too much design maturity. There were some designers scattered. There was one designer in the US, maybe two, three. And then there was like someone in Bucharest and a couple of designers on one of the main products. And then some products didn't even have design. And then I joined a marketing team where design was just being created as a function. And so things felt very mature and we weren't communicating much.

among ourselves too much. And things were pretty disconnected and independent and yeah, in a way fragmented, if you want. I think it's the best abstraction to think of. And then in like three, four years, we're at a point where we have this

principal program manager who's organizing our work. And we have this very robust Confluence documentation for designers, which everyone in the company can access and understand how we work. We have clearly articulated ways of working. We have a very...

synced way of working together and collaboration is much closer than it was when I joined. It's really interesting to witness how fast, like you said, you had a lot of talent, right? Right now, people who came from big companies, they understand how to do it. Probably they've done it before. For us, it was also important that we have leadership based in Seattle that came from Amazon and Microsoft and other very design mature companies or companies

Companies that have an established design practice for a long time, right? And so they came and they sort of infused the way we work with this maturity. And we grew very, very quickly, which is very exciting to witness and to be a part of.

And now I would move the conversation into a more tangible area where we could like tell people how we contribute to raising the design culture. What are some ways that maybe we haven't explored, but we know of to play your part in building a more design mature company and so on. So what are some tips, activities or tools that we might use as designers?

I'm going to start by maybe like trying to establish how I look at this, particularly what are maybe the pillars or important factors for me that may be quite limited just yet are helping to establish a better UX mature company and how you as the IC, individual contributor, could help your company. Because apparently it's very frustrating when you're working in a company where design discipline is not acknowledged, is not recognized, doesn't have a seat at the suit level table and stuff like that.

So for me, from the IC perspective, there are a couple of keys I believe are important to do or to work on from day one when you are in the company. And I would say that the umbrella above those factors or pillars is the communication. So communication would be always the key to anything you're doing as a designer. And we have talked a lot about it in our previous episodes, how communication is one of the core soft skills of the designer.

how sometimes your pixels or your mock-ups are not as important as your communication within your team. So the communication sort of embraces a couple of things. And I would say it always should start from the trust. When you're joining the team, my recommendation or what I was trying to do all the time was to try to build the trust, trying to really first try to establish the relationship with your teammates, try to understand who they are, where they're coming from, how do they understand design disciplines.

what are their expectations? How did they work with design discipline in the past? Maybe their problems, that's something you can also discuss. So really trying to understand who they are, how they work, how they think, build the connection with them, like really having those little parties, team building activities, whatever it is, would really, really help, especially if you could kind of be in the office or fly over whenever it's your office to kind of really start from a good ground and understand each other better. So trust is the fundamental for

thing for me. The second thing that comes out of your activities is something that I would define as like sharing and involvement. As soon as you're joining the company and you kind of build the

basically good relationship with your team, for me, then it would be very important to not stay passive and like say, oh, you know what? I'm just here, throw anything design related on me. But really to be as proactive as possible, especially on first three months, maybe, because this is when you are kind of building your reputation within your company, within your team, showing how you usually operate as a designer, your values,

your process, your best practices, I guess, your challenges to other schools and stuff like that. So if you will be just sitting and waiting for design activities or design projects to come in your way, that would become more of a, I guess, pattern and then it will be very hard to break through it. So sharing and involvement from your side, as for me, is a very important part of contributing to building the UX mature company. And new people is always new and fresh blood, new perspective, new way or new chance to change the habits and

how people are operating. And I think many, many directors, at least in my company today, think about it this way. When we're bringing new people, new talent, we always try to look for people with strong energy and strong voice and an ability to build the argument and build the case and sort of have a voice. So it's not going to be just, oh, okay, we cannot build it. So, okay, I'm going to take it. As a designer, it would be very important to build your voice internally. And for that,

I think it's very important to be proactive, always involve your partners and share whatever you're doing. Involving meaning for me, talking about the specific activities or tactical activities would be always talking about the workshops. So starting from the common ground, be it a kickoff workshop where you're just trying to establish the problem, understand the gaps of the project, the objectives, the priorities, maybe the roles and who's doing what and

maybe the timeline and stuff like that. So starting from the same page is very important. And then having some sort of cycle of the project, how you're going through this, having recurring meetings with your product team or whoever's working or key stakeholders in that project. So maybe weekly, bi-weekly, check-ups, check-ins, when you're sharing the progress, when you're involving them in other workshop activities, such as, for example, you have collected the research insights and now you all together want to prioritize them. So maybe that would

be a prioritization workshop. Maybe then after you have prioritized something and started ideating, you have put together a couple of concepts. Maybe then it will be some sort of voting workshop where again, you will be involved in your stakeholders and the decision-making process. But again, always driven from the design perspectives.

from the research, what the best approach would be and kind of offering the options, but always thinking about the best perspective for the user, as well as sharing, meaning that even if you're not having those recurring meetings or cycles of check-ins, at least use Slack or Loom or whatever available tool you have to always share the progress. Like here is the research we did. Here are the insights. My take is always like just

really recording the loom, taking through the, here is the research we did. Here are the metrics. Here are the results. Look, that's great. Or here is the problem we'll have to work on. Again, so this way your team is always involved in what's happening and not you're just sitting back there and doing what nobody knows what.

And the third most important component for me would be, I guess, sit at the table. So ability to be able to prioritize together, to say your words, right? Every time you're making a decision, the designer should be as equal as the PM, as the tech lead. So it should be a common decision. And you always have your word heard and needs of the user prioritized as much as possible. Of course, it's going to be a conversation. Sometimes there will be a battle sometimes.

But if you don't have a seat at the table, you're basically excluded from the equation. It's very, very hard then to be able to build UX maturity of the company or build good decisions or good products for your users. Few activities I'd like to mention based on those pillars, which are, again, trust, sharing and involvement and seat at the table. I would say besides of the workshops and just sharing occasionally in the Slack channel or whatever channels you're using.

Some other activities we did or we are doing at the moment in my company are things such as Lunch and Learn. So this is like common practice across the whole company, which I really love. I would definitely promote this anywhere I go and maybe other companies or to my students that Lunch and Learn is a great activities across the company if they could support it, which are basically almost every other big day. Any department can suggest a topic.

which would be educational or sharing about our products or resources or maybe, you know, project milestones, whatever, whatever. But sharing what's happening in your team, sharing what is your team. For example, our UX writer team, when they joined, they established maybe like a series of three or four lunch and learns where they would

talk about what do we do? We are not copywriters. Here is how we operate. Here is a typical project. Here is the impact of our results. And here's when you should reach out to us. They would really try to establish who we are and what we do. Other than that, for example, our research team also likes to do some sort of lunch and learn hours when they would talk about different interesting points about the psychology and the research, how, for example, to make a more effective

presentation or how to do the research on your own and the best practices around that. So really like whatever is the best way to establish UX maturity across your whole company and anybody could join, that would be really, really helpful. And by the way, our company also pays for the lunch for that hour. So if you participate there, you get a free lunch and that's a great incentive for the whole team. And

other things that I like to do, and I don't do this often anymore, but I think I should start doing this, is calling it sort of a playful UX. This is something I used to do when it was more of the offline setup, when I could sit with my team in the same room, and I would kind of put together a real sort of game when I would give a UX challenge to my team and ask them to complete it. For example, recently what I did here was I put

together sort of a game when you should guess when specifically the settings we were working on are located in the information architecture. And it was like a very long and clunky process how to get there. It was like, I think, four or five steps.

Really, it was very hard and people realized there is a problem there. We definitely need to work on information architecture there. Or even like just given a challenge like, hey, can you guess where on this page you should proceed to the next page or something? And then they're guessing, guessing, guessing, and then you're given an answer or this is what you think and this is what the user thinks.

So whatever playful way for you to involve your team and stakeholders, this is something else that I can suggest. I call it playful access. Maybe there's a better word for this. The last thing I could also mention is that it's really all about the workshops and trying to run them as

frequently as possible. I don't do this as often as I wish. Maybe this is something for me to do the next year, but really like trying to engage your team, asking about their problems, asking better questions. So whatever helps the team to challenge the status quo and understand the problem and build the empathy together. Again, workshops usually really help with framing the better questions. Even whiteboarding sessions together, that is something that I really, really want to do next year in a way to improve the UX maturity of the company.

Okay, I'm going to stop here. How about your best practices, Ioana? I think I'm going to try to revisit everything I did and worked and then what I've learned from others that might work. So for once, I think that if you want to contribute to raising the design maturity, you have to start from... This is my favorite thing in the world, actually. Starting with reflecting on what's wrong. So...

I would say what I've always tried to do is understand what's causing the lack of maturity. Is it just people being resistant to change? Is it developers or product managers who felt threatened by design? Is it because it's something new and people simply don't know what UX is and what we're supposed to do? Is it just lack of knowledge? Is it ego problem that we need to address? So what's stopping people?

the growth, what's slowing down the growth of the design maturity. And then I would map out what are the problems in the organization and reflect on that first. Because if you start with that step, understanding what's not working, it's clear what you need to do to fix it. And then you would do things that are more intentional.

right? So that's the number one thing I would say is important, just understanding why. Maybe it's just because the team is very new. Like we just hired our first two designers three months ago, and that's natural. So what does it mean? It means that we need to start talking about processes and understanding how we're going to build this design infrastructure, if it makes sense. So and then

some very practical things that work. In my experience, just talking to people one-on-one has helped me a lot. So I've always tried to reach out to the folks that I'm supposed to work with or to the people who I see have some sort of reluctancy or they don't really seem to trust the design process and the designer in their role. And I would schedule one-on-one meetings and talk to them and just listen and understand what's going on in there, why they might fear the designer or

why they might not respect the designer's work. Maybe they had a bad experience in the past. Maybe something, I don't know. It's just like they have a preconception around that. So I would have one-on-one conversations as much as possible to set me up for success in whatever activity I'm trying to accomplish or tool I'm trying to promote.

And then there are some ways in which you could socialize design in your company. And one of them is like those immersive things that you were also mentioning, like workshops and involving people and just being in the same room and thinking about design is very powerful just in itself. I would use these tools for socializing design. Maybe sometimes it's, I wouldn't say as silly as a persona, but maybe it's just you use these kinds of representations of

of the user's interest, right? Maybe you want to use an empathy map that you circulate with everyone, you present them, you show them, here's the person we're designing for, like in this archetypal view. And that's another thing that you could do, just socialize your work. Not just socializing your work, what I'm trying to always do is like to be very transparent about

all the time. Make sure that everybody can see your Figma file if they choose so. Make sure that you document your process somewhere that's visible and people can go and understand what's this person working on right now? What are they going to work on next? What have they been doing and to what result? So

Make sure to be transparent in your work and to even encourage other designers, maybe designers who are less senior than you. So just open up the practice is what I'm trying to convey here. It really helps. And sometimes I like to just schedule a meeting where I walk through

the things that I've been doing for the past couple of weeks or months are just having these checkpoints, these formalized checkpoints where we discuss what has been done from a design standpoint. It's like a sort of retrospective that developers have, but for designers. Critique sessions are also a very important

key part of building a design culture because again you're bringing all the designers at the same table you're looking at the same design problems you're collaborating you're ideating together you're eliciting feedback from other designers it's a conversation so I think an important point of being a

design mature company is to have this ongoing design conversation in as many places as possible in the company. So fostering processes and frameworks and ways of working that facilitate this design conversation continuously is a key aspect of growing your design culture. And then a very, very important and more political point, the last one I want to make, is that you really have to have leadership buy-in.

So if the CEO or the chief product person or I don't know, whoever is leading design isn't convinced by the value of design, then you're always going to have a problem. There needs to be this leadership trust, the leadership buy-in. So this is more, let's say, of a political fight sometimes. Otherwise, it's just translating all your design work into business metrics, into the business vocabulary, being able to articulate how design is designed.

growing the numbers for the company or whatever other KPIs or metrics or goals or vision the company has. But you have to speak that language as well. And you have to have support from leadership. If that's not there, then growing the culture of design will be very, very difficult because there will always be this glass ceiling that you'll hit and you won't be able to move beyond that. Or you will move with a lot of difficulty and a lot of energy spent in the wrong place.

So those are my top tips. Some of them are very actionable. Others are pretty abstract, I think. But I would say, is there anything you want to add to that? Or do we want to jump into the top three things? Oh, I really loved it, actually. I really like how you always bring back the,

psychological aspect of things and trying to say establish what's the problem first try to evaluate the situation this is something I keep forgetting sometimes and it's inspiring for me to always hear it back from you and kind of remind myself what to do better so thank you and I think to me it brought a point of always to understand what is the problems and then if you are joining even the company sometimes it happens like

was me, right? When I've joined the first time company and it appeared to be not a very ex-mature place just yet, being able to assess the situation you're in, trying to understand it, like you said, with communication, with asking questions, with having one-on-ones, whatever, coffee meetings with your stakeholders, and then understand what's the key, what's the problem there. Then maybe the best thing for you to do, even if you don't have, let's say, design leadership support just yet, is to start articulating it.

through whatever tactical things we have discussed today, like from workshops to playful UX activities to involvement and stuff like that. When you're showing the problem, when you're pointing to it, when you're again doing a lot of communication work to show people that there is the problem. And honestly, yes, it's not going to be easy. It's really, really, really challenging task to do. And most of the times I have seen designers just giving up on this because honestly, it's just not a fair game from the beginning.

But if you can see there is a perspective and people are open-minded and let's say, have you have a good relationship with your manager, design manager, whoever is managing you, then you can bring it to us and build a case and get sort of alliances around this topic and kind of see that people are actually caring about

building a better UX maturity in the company. You can build a case and honestly, people will be immensely grateful for this in the future. And I have seen this actually in my first company when one of the designers who have been advocating for bringing to other designers with that huge project that I was working on, that designer, she was a design lead and she was really, really acknowledged after that. She kind of was, I could see that she was a very valuable person in that team. And till now, she's very, very valuable. Nobody wants to let her go because

She was the one who was bringing up the lack of maturity in the company and built the case and did the presentations and articulated it well. And eventually they got more resources and we started working on a project that was becoming a bit more UX mature than it was originally. So yes, sometimes you can fight it. Sometimes it's unfortunately not an even game, but starting from understanding and articulating the problem would be a really great, I guess, takeaway from today. And this is maybe a good venue to our takeaways. What do you think?

Would you like to start this time first? Sure. I think that the first point I want to make is that if anybody's asking whether I should join a design mature company or a design immature company, or where do I go? Is this company sufficiently design mature for my growth? I think that that's a good question to ask even when you're joining a company. But I want everybody to know that things can rapidly evolve.

And you might find yourself in a company that in one year has grown from a very low design maturity to a surprisingly good design maturity. And that can happen if you attract the right kind of talent and you have the right mentality and you're open enough and so on. So things may change rapidly.

Rapidly, I mean, not in two weeks, but rapidly in the bigger picture. And then another finding that I want to make is that we can all make an impact. We can all contribute. Each and every designer out there can put our own contribution to the foundation of the design culture in their company. And all you have to do is

think globally at the things that you're doing locally, right? So if you think about the pixels you're pushing and I'm not making an impact and whatever, then you're not going to be able to communicate that. You're not going to be able to socialize your work and evangelize design. But if you think about how the pixels you're pushing and moving around are having an impact on the experience of

the final outcome, right, of your work, then that's an extremely powerful story that you are able to share and build a narrative around and communicate to everyone and then do your piece of work when it comes to building a more design mature company. And then the third point I want to make is that I would always reflect on what

What are the problems that we're dealing with? Recently, I wrote an article for Hojar and I made this reference to Anna Karenina that has this opening line around how happy families are happy in the same way, but unhappy families each have their own story and specific set of unhappiness facts.

And I always correlate that quote from Anna Karenina with how companies work. So strong design culture pretty much looks the same wherever you look in different companies. A design mature company does pretty much the same things, maybe in different ways, but they're similar. But unhappy companies, so immature companies, each of them is battling their own set of

problems, their own set of ego issues or whatever legacy they have being very engineering driven or not having good results from the design work they've been doing. And so it's just a combination of factors all the time that's very specific to your company. So I would stop and reflect on what specifically about my company is preventing it from growing. And those are my top three findings. Well,

Awesome. It's very interesting how you're involving those references from elsewhere or from the actual world. I love it. And I guess my three points would be backing up your story with doing your research. I think as a designer, it's always important to remember to be

be the best designer you can and it doesn't need to be just design projects but also any anywhere you're joining so doing your research before you're joining apparently during the interviews but also after you're joining to establish the the situation understand which context you are working in and which problems and trust me there will be problems all the times

but like which problems you should be focusing on or keeping in mind or being aware of because there will be always problems it's just a question of how do you approach them do you approach them with the right strategy and are you solving the right problem remember this is something you do as a designer on the daily basis

applying the same design thinking in your company as well. And so, yes, like Ivana said, trying to understand what's happening, doing interviews, trying to establish what do you think is happening, mapping it on the UX maturity scales by energy or envision, whatever we talk about today, would help you understand which problems you might be facing and what you should be keeping in mind all the time.

And like Ioana said, I also like the fact that don't forget that companies evolve in quick, especially if you're joining one of the startups slash scale-ups where things are changing really hectically and rapidly and a lot. Like when I joined my current company, it was nine months ago. It was a completely different place. It was growing from a startup to a scale-up in a matter of months. And literally in like three or four months, it became a different place. And it is still a different place because we're still hiring and building the design team

From, I think it was less than five people. Now it's like 20 something people. And it's keep growing, meaning that we have more and more opportunities to change the way we work together. But there will be this turbulence period when it will be important for you to be proactive.

Which brings me to a second point, which is, again, be proactive from day one, build a reputation. If you're sitting and waiting for things to come in your way, you're showing a passive position and people will be using it and using you as a resource rather than a strategic partner in the company who knows what are we building, why are we building, what problems we're facing, understanding the context well enough, operating with data and stuff like that. So yeah, I think it's not going to be easy joining any company, but

Being proactive from day one is a very important part for me to always keep in mind. And what would be my third takeaway? Let me think. I guess I'll just reflect back on what I already said, that communication is the key, which again is tied in back to the second point. But communication

communication will be a very big part of what you're doing, starting from building the trust within your team, maybe then building the trust within the bigger scale in terms of your company, be it more of the managerial level or be it even other product departments or product roles and stuff like that. So again, building the trust, building the involvement. And yeah, I guess sharing is very important. Articulating, sharing all along.

the lines of the communication, which you should try to never forget. I understand it's always challenging, especially if you're this kind of designer who likes to just be a doer and build stuff, but it's always important to balance. It's not going to be easy to build your stuff and it's just going to be sitting in the shelf if you're not able to build a case for it, communicate it, involve people. And really, the bigger the

company, the harder it gets, the more communication you'll have to do. And you'll probably be able to see this, especially if you're joining an enterprise company with like a lot of people in it. But communication is going to be a big, big skill, no matter which context you're in. And that's important to remember for UX maturity growth. And I guess that's it from my side. Shall we wrap it up for today, Ioana? Yes, let's do that. And thank you everyone for tuning in. I hope this episode was valuable.

And make sure to check the other episodes. Follow us on Instagram, Honest UX Talks. Make sure to send us your ideas for future episodes. We really want to answer questions that are relevant and important to you. It would really help us if you would just give us a nice rating on Spotify to support our talks. Yeah, we only have two more ratings left until we get to hundreds of ratings. That would be really awesome if you could contribute, guys.

Yeah, and that's it, I guess. Thank you so much again. We're looking forward to your questions. Other than that, have a great beginning of December. See you in the next episodes. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.