Episode 13: Mindfulness, Agile and Design with Thye Chuan Tan, Lead UX Designer at additiv
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Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

A very good evening to all of you here. Thank you for joining us. We have a very special guest speaker who's a dear friend and someone I've known for several years and someone who has been practicing in the field of user experience design. Just to introduce Tai over here, Tai Chuan embraces and shares an ardent curiosity in infusing the concepts of self-awareness and agility.

And as a UX designer, he has worked with digital teams of all sizes, ranging from fintech startups to large organizations as SP Group. So SP is Singapore Power. It's one of the leading organizations in providing electricity and water to the households in Singapore.

As a Scrum Master practitioner, he has also facilitated various agile transformation initiatives in organizations. So I think we're going to have a very interesting conversation about agile today, as well as him being a mindfulness practitioner. We're going to speak a little bit about that. Ty is also someone who's worked both freelance and in-house.

So we're going to get a chance and opportunity to ask him about that as well. So welcome to the program, Ty.

Thank you for welcoming me. You're welcome. So yeah, what's keeping you busy these days? As I understand you're working freelance from before. Actually today, as of this moment, I'm actually in a company. I'm working in Additive right now. It's a fintech firm. And what they do is that they're actually a Swiss company, but they have a small product team in Singapore. And over here, I'm working as the lead UX designer.

And what the company does is that they work on wealth solutions for financial institutions. So it could be a bank, it could be an insurance firm, any partner that wants to develop financial wealth management solutions. So I'm working now there as the lead UX designer over there. Anything else I'm busy with currently?

What I'm also working on is a side project and it's something quite personal. I'm working on a mobile app and this mobile app is meant to be a dashboard and it's supposed to be very open. So you're supposed to be able to use it to collect any data. So example, now I'm using it to collect data on my rate on a daily basis. And it's supposed to be very flexible in a way how I can collect information, how I can measure habits and correlate that as well. It's called GoodApp.

It's currently out there, by the way, but I'm still working out some things to just make sure that all the logins and everything is working quite well, especially for Android. Is it out on iOS as well?

Yes, both on iOS and Android right now. But just to let you know, I don't feel ready to actually say, please download the application and use it now, especially for Android because I'm still working on some issues on that for some logins. Yes. Okay. Well, this is interesting about the app that you're building. It sounds like something very closely related to personal development. What got you to work on it? Well, for me, it was quite simple because, okay,

Okay, basically I had a weight loss journey. Probably not known to all of you here, but I'm not sure if Daylan has seen your photos. I've seen your photos. The bigger one version of me. But yes, I was generally quite a lot of fats around me and a lot of weight. I was up to 96.8 kilograms before. That was my heaviest weight.

And with enough patience and enough knowledge and enough practice, I managed to lose quite a lot. I lost like, I went down as low as 70 kilos. I mean, until today, I'm still learning a lot about health and also weight. But basically, my understanding is that being underweight is not a good thing as well, which is why I'm also now working on gaining more muscle.

But basically that journey of me measuring my weight every day. And back then I didn't have mobile apps to actually like automate and sync up all this information. And what I did is what I recorded the numbers every day on Excel sheet. And the question that I asked myself is, could there be a more convenient way to do this? Which is why I started working on the mobile app.

Thanks for sharing. And, you know, how is this related to what we're going to talk about, which is mindfulness? Is there anything that's related to your mindfulness journey and your weight loss journey? Hmm.

I think the biggest thing is just to always be aware about what's happening around you. I'm not sure if I would use the term mindfulness. I actually use the word self-awareness most of the time, at least for myself. And the purpose of me measuring my weight every day in the first place is to gain awareness of what's happening to at least today on a daily basis.

to my body weight and same goes for a lot of other things technically like the things that you see around you they are what they are and some of them may be information so in in the case of my weight it's a number on the weighing scale right but it still represents something it still represents a meaning and to me like i'm a big fan of numbers so i'd rather use numbers to actually measure things

So to a certain extent, yes. The awareness is being aware about my weight, for example, my number, and also being aware about what happened if it turned out very different or it turned out not the way I wanted for a particular day or for a particular week or even after months of progress. If something happened, I need to be aware of it. And a lot of times to me, the best way to be aware of it is just making it extremely visible in front of you.

which is, I guess that's how it relates to the app that I'm doing. Yeah. As they say, what cannot be measured cannot be improved. So I think that's an excellent app that you've built over there for yourself, but also for other people who might be on a similar journey as you are. And if we're to...

Kind of zoom in on agile, right? And we just spoke about mindfulness. We just spoke about self-awareness. How does mindfulness and agile connect? As I also understand you were a scrum master before. To me, being agile is, at least if I'm speaking from its original principles, the principle of agile is actually about adapting to change.

And what this means is that to be put simply, if somebody were to come and tell you today, I want the team to be more agile and I want, or for example, I want you to be a scrum master and I want you to do things this way and it has to be done this way and be extremely fixed about how things should be done. If you ask me, that's going a little anti-agile in a way, going against the principles of adapting to change in the first place.

And to me, being agile is also a process of transformation. So you can't expect everything to be perfect from day one. That's one. To me, that's the first thing. That means it's never going to be perfect, especially the first few times you see it.

or even meet through the journey of you trying to change or trying to try and get your team to be better, try and get your life to be better, it's never going to be perfect. Even through the journey, you may feel that it's imperfect. The other part of it is, at least what happened to me recently as well, is that something really shocking actually happened in my life recently. It was really, really unexpected. I did not foresee this happening whatsoever. And

Yeah, so having a sort of like the feeling of the rug being pulled under your feet or something like that. I think we can relate to that, can we not? The fact that COVID hit us all and hit us really hard.

Yeah. So I hope it's nothing too dire, but I was just wondering, you spoke about change and agile and you've been an agile specialist. You've been a freelance UX designer before you settled on this role. You've been a product owner before. How does all these additional skills or experiences that you're learning add value to what you're doing today? If you ask me, two things come into mind.

Number one, it is about you and the team. What you can do with your capabilities today. In a way, if you want something done, you want something different, you want a project to get done, you want to get your, maybe as a UX designer, you want to get your first draft of UI design. Sometimes it is really about what you think you can do today.

So when I say you and the team, you need to be motivated to commit to it, to making a change, to actually to make a difference, like to start something even. And when I mentioned the team, it's a lot about alignment, being aligned with your team, and also making sure you know your team, building a relationship with the people that you're working with. The second part that I mean, like what I saw

was that getting towards an outcome most of the time it's always not just what you can do or it's not always just reliant on one factor and based on what data is sharing right if i done some product work before if i done some scrum master before and if i done some ux work before i realized that if for example you want a successful product out there

If you think that, for example, design is going to make everything happen, I think that would be a very risky assumption to make. Because a successful product, a successful company doesn't just rely 100% on design. It relies on multiple factors. It relies on the business model. It can also rely on the person leading the company. And it also relies on how developers, the people executing the application that you're creating, how much they care about the craft.

and how much they communicate with you. So when I look at it as a whole, it made me think that it's really not just about design, it's about everything as well. Well, thank you for sharing. And I was just wondering if you have stories to share, as I understand you work for many different companies. Is there one company or one project that was particularly memorable as you're working as a freelance UX designer?

If you don't mind me sharing my experience, I'll actually mention something smaller. The experience that I had was actually with the mobile app that I was working on. And please don't get me wrong, I'm not self-promoting about the mobile app event. I'm not going to mention the app event for now. But basically, the way the application was being worked on, I basically had very limited time to actually commit to that project. And what happened was that I managed to get someone I know to deal the application with me.

And basically, we started off meeting maybe once in three weeks. And every three weeks, we would sync up in terms of progress and we would see how things worked out. And we will work on action plans to follow up on what is to be done. And what I personally noticed was that we were moving too slowly and not necessarily because no one could do the work. It's not like I didn't have time. It's not like he didn't have time.

but it's just the lack of communication. And the solution that I proposed was that we would meet weekly, same time, same day. And we will meet weekly to just discuss progress and see how things will turn out after that.

The team was really small, it's just me and the developer, most of the time actually in fact. And there was tremendous progress after that because the visibility of issues became a lot more obvious. And when we communicated like every week, for example, he would show me progress with the application and he would send me a test bill. I would test it myself and I'll give him direct feedback.

And we will sit next to each other for it as well because if you ask me the way mobile apps work, it's very hard to really document a particular issue of a mobile app that you're experiencing to share it with a developer, to share it with anyone in fact. So what I learned from that was that constant communication and presence really makes a difference in terms of how you want to build something.

and how much outcome or output you want to see from that. And of course, at the same time, if I wasn't checking with him or if I wasn't checking with myself, if there was anything that I could change or actually improve, for example, how often I met him to actually come up with a different outcome, I don't think things would have changed at all. And why I'm talking about the progress for this mobile application is because it's so small and it's just two people.

But if I were to be honest, it's one of the most agile things I've ever done.

If I got to talk about a project that really represented Agile, I mean, this is, to me, one of the best. And because of that, I have no regrets. Yeah. And are you still improving the app? Is that what's happening? Yes. As I said, the Android still has some login issues, but it's been reported and it's going to be worked on. And basically, I have some future features that we are still working on

and I know what are different product paths that you could take for the next feature that I want to build to actually improve the application. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. And I have some students here and some of them are ex-students, some of them are current students. I was just wondering

you have this experience of working side by side with a developer. What have you learned from that experience that you would share with your juniors who may not have this experience working with a developer on such an intimate basis? Again, I can think of two things. Number one,

Sometimes the people you speak to or communicate to, for example, if it's a person from another field, so for example, maybe a developer can get quite technical. And sometimes what happens is that they can't explain something very well to you because it is too technical for you to even pick up or understand. And to me, those situations happen before with him as well. And two parts to it is one,

you could listen and try to ask him to explain something and also be patient about it because he may have to like the developer at least i'm using him because he's a team and he may need time to actually think through what's the best way to explain a particular issue to me and so like the patience in that communication is key and even if say for example something may not be completely understood

And if you can't understand it, you can't comprehend it. The other part is to actually trust the person that he knows what to do to solve it. Yeah. Yeah, I think trust is such an important thing. And there is a saying where we are all moving at the speed of trust and how much we trust our team members and our teammates then is a factor of how fast we move as a team. Do you agree or disagree with that statement?

I completely agree about this. And trust is also extremely tricky. Let me give you an example. A person could do something that instilled trust 99 times, but at the 100th time, something could have went the other way around.

Yeah, that's fair. Has that happened to you before? With developers, no, but with people, yes. Thankfully, not within a developer or a product team. That happens, right? And you can't predict it. And it happens. What you do when that happens as well is also going to be important because sometimes it totally breaks things completely or you could actually continue to build that trust and actually have an understanding about what happened

If someone were to explain a particular issue, a particular incident to you, what might have caused this, how deep or far are you willing to go to actually listen or understand this person? Or are you just going to say, screw this, I'm not going to care. I don't trust you anymore. That could happen as well. Yeah, that could also happen. I think we met about 10 years ago and you were quite a different person than you were also a more junior UX designer. So over the years, you've gone through...

a lot yourself. You mentioned you lost a lot of weight. You mentioned that you had the opportunity to become a Scrum Master and Agile Specialist at Singapore Power. You mentioned you had been journeying both as a freelancer and also as a full-time employee. So I'm just wondering what has changed in your practice of doing UX design because you've been practicing for as long as I've known you for the last 10 years or more.

Okay, I guess if something comes into mind is that as a professional, for example, as a UX designer, you are technically exposed to systems and tools. For example, design thinking is a particular framework or system to actually execute design. And if I'm going to look at, for example, tools and empathy map is a tool.

right and if you're getting into agile if getting into scrum scrum is a framework as well that you actually use and if you're gonna get into kanban for example it's also another tool that we use so like the exposure that i received over the years i guess it really opened my eyes to ideas of how all these different systems and all these different tools these frameworks they exist around us

And we're technically using them a lot for work. And what I realized is that most of the time, we only think about how we could use it for work, but we don't always think about how we can use it for ourselves. They don't exactly need to get a feel from the audience here, but basically it has

Have any one of you attended anything on personal development? Personal development, some people call it life coaching, some people call it life transformation. Has anyone attended anything before? Yes, I mean, we have one in the audience who's been through coaching and we have another person who's been through self-development. And personally, I do work with a coach as well and have gone through self-development work. Thanks for sharing. Why I wanted to ask is that if you notice something

If someone's trying to coach you on something, right? If it's a one-to-one coaching, what tends to happen is that it's a lot more personal. So maybe there's a lot of communication. Left, right, left, right, come back. You always keep switching, right? And it's a very guided process. But if someone wants to, for example, coach you to build a particular habit or to eventually change so that you can see results for yourself, what really needs to be passed down eventually is actually a system or a framework.

they need to give you a particular set of steps, a particular set of way of seeing something, how it's going to potentially repeat itself.

And they're going to have to pass on rules to you as well. I'll give you a very simple example. I want to lose weight. The best way is to pass me a weighing scale. That's one of the ways because that's a tool I use so that I can see what's happening so that I can eventually achieve my results. So there's a framework as well. And when people want to teach you something, to educate you on something, and they want to help create results for you, what they will have to do is that they have to share with you a framework.

So in short, what I'm seeing is that in UX and Agile, these are actually frameworks out there that we're using for our professional fields and also in organizational development and also team development and also product development. But we don't use it for ourselves. But we can. We actually can. I gather that you say the weighing scale is the equivalent of a two. So what's the equivalent for a process in terms of losing weight?

I would say, I would combine it is a definition of understanding why, for example. By the way, I have been working on a project to create a framework of change. And one part of it is actually in the awareness, developing the awareness and actually understanding why something is happening and also figuring out a particular root cause. If you're a designer, you're probably aware of the five whys process at least.

And if you notice when we are doing user research as well, we are actually asking questions and we typically don't just accept a first answer. We ask why, we ask what happened, right? We understand particular event better and we try to connect the dots from there and we don't make assumptions. We test the assumptions. And so a part of it is basically being aware of, for example, if it's weight loss, why am I the way I am today? What did I eat?

and the things that I'm putting into my body, what is the chemical reactions it may be causing to my hormones that's causing me to potentially either gain weight or have difficulty losing weight. And there's no real shortcut around this of course, like you could just have someone tell you for example stop eating rice or stop drinking sodas and stuff like that. But if

There's another way of seeing or understanding this and to me it is about like gaining knowledge and getting insights about something. So like in the past when I wanted to lose weight, I just looked at the number. It wasn't sustainable by the way. Sometimes I just gained weight, my bones back and stuff like that. But today I'm a lot more aware. I think I'm starting to become a health freak but to a certain extent, I've went through enough studies to understand that there are certain things that we are eating today or even certain things that

people are promoting as health today that may not be what they see and the awareness part of it is very important because I have to study I have to understand it fully before I make a judgment that this is something that is or isn't

That's definitely the first step in that whole framework of change in that system. Okay, thanks a lot for sharing. It sounds like the process is not like following a diet or anything like that. It sounds more like really understanding the motivation, really understanding your why and how is your relationship between food and nutrition.

If you were to kind of bring this back to work, for example, in terms of UX itself, how do we bring this level of awareness or how do we bring this level of thoughtfulness to the designs that we do or the work that we do as UX designers? I think to a certain extent, in the UX industry, there's certain standards or there are certain thought processes or standards that

have been set and because they've been there like that for a long time sometimes people don't question them right and let me try to give you an example i come from a very visual background i'm a visual person and if you're going to look at most of the applications that you use today if you say for example there is a particular link button for example to terms and conditions right typically this this text in modern apps today

They are colored to be different colors so that they look like you can tap on it. But they are not, but it may not be obvious. Sometimes it's not obvious, that's one. Especially if the colors are very similar. If for example you're using like maybe a dark gray and using dark blue text, it may not be too obvious. And what happened lately is that I work with a junior designer and she basically raised this to me. She said it's not obvious.

And basically, I don't consider her... One way to see is that, like, you're a junior, why should I listen to you? But actually, I listened to her, and her perspective was that this is about accessibility. And it just so happens as well that the team that we're working on in this project, one of the team members is actually colourblind. And therefore, the thoughts and the conclusion that we had from there is that, especially if there's no other way to represent that, this may be a link. Maybe they should be underlined. Yeah.

Even though in most modern applications today, I would say this, you usually don't see an underline. It's quite rare. Most people just for aesthetics point, they wouldn't do it. And to me, that's it. I mean, like really...

understanding the convention that you see. Maybe I could show you multiple applications, say I have this application that didn't use an underline and these didn't use it too. But if you really take a step back and listen to what a particular team member has to say and what they're trying to bring up and try to study it further and understand it further, you could change your mind after that.

But keeping a close mind that, for example, things should stick to conventions because it is technically applied like this out there already and we should just keep to this standard. I think that's something we should question. Yeah, that makes sense. And it does show a level of empathy and care by putting yourself in your users shoes. Yeah, so thanks for sharing. And I know you work on another side project as well. It's called UXGuide.sg.

Do you want to share a little bit like what's your motivation behind starting this? Honestly, it's a little bit of a spin-off. The idea that I started off with before UX Guide was actually another guide called GreenGuide.sg. And what I wanted to create back then was that I wanted to create more awareness in terms of like, if I want to fight for sustainability, what are the things that I could do?

And I created a guide basically if, did you know, for example, there are particular shops in Singapore where you could experience a discount if you were to bring your own containers. And most of the time, there's no real way to know about this unless you actually visit the shop or sometimes even until you ask a particular cashier, that offer is actually available in the first place.

And so I created that guide. What happened was that I actually got involved in General Assembly for a while to actually do some mock interviews with them, the graduates. And I did notice them asking a lot of questions to me. And the thought process was that

I wouldn't be free to answer all these questions all the time. And so the next thing was why not just create a spin-off on the same guide, especially if it's not going to be as difficult to maintain as Green Guide, which is a lot bigger by the way, because there's a lot more things going around sustainability in Singapore. US Guide was a lot more minimal, a lot more simple. I could do it by myself and I could have a little assistance here and there. And therefore that's why I created US Guide.

How has the project been going so far? What's the response from the community or from people that you talk to? Well, so far people appreciate the effort, right? And especially for the people I know that's working on stuff, for example,

Dalen's working on Curious Core, obviously. And also I have another contact in Singapore. His name is Kai Seng. He owns a UX company called Studio Dojo. And he runs his own workshops as well. And I think they're very happy for the support and the

and the exposure that I'm creating as well because you could come to one website and you could see basically everything that's happening around UX in Singapore. And most of the time, at least from my end, I would focus a lot on talks and workshops. And this creates promotion and this helps them to spread awareness about at least within the kind of activities and efforts that they're making. So I see that appreciation going around for the organizers and I see people who use the tool appreciating as well.

I think it's a wonderful initiative, especially considering that there's been a void for the longest time in the UX community, especially in Singapore. I think COVID has been tough on everyone and it's just like people started being more

reflective and to themselves and there hasn't been a lot of community initiatives and activities so that's also part of the reason why we started this webinar series so it's great that you are contributing to it and will continue to maintain it we have a question from the crowd from joshua and he's asking on working in the field of transformation how do you introduce agile to people who have

traditionally been used to the waterfall setup do you have any stories to share in this instance yeah how do you change people who are a little bit more traditional or introduce agile to them i think a little further context could be useful so joshua if you could share a little bit more do share but i can also start answering anyway but the question i will ask for you joshua is that like

what's the setup for their waterfall right now? If they're traditionally waterfall, what's their current setup? If you don't mind sharing, I think that would be useful because basically traditionally waterfall is, it's quite a generic term. I don't know how to answer to that. I guess Joshua wants to speak. So I'll give Joshua the opportunity. Yeah. All right. Thank you. So we are working with this company that is trying to

incorporate design because traditionally what they do is they would sub out their digital product creation. Like they want to make a new app or they need a new website, they will sub it out to an agency. But what they are trying to do is they are trying to bring it in-house. So they're trying to bring the design conversation in-house. But there are already a lot of, how to put it, so even within the organization itself, there are different groups of people like core IT, marketing, and they don't really have a design environment. Like they don't really measure

their conversions on your website. They don't really measure the inputs for the applications or rather the measurement framework is not very robust. So they're trying to bring it in-house. I think the struggle is a lot of the conversations that we are having internally, people are very careful. People are also very reluctant in change and very skeptical about the whole agile situation.

Is there any tips or any stories regarding introducing something like an iterative approach to a traditional organization? And do you mind if I ask one more question on top of that? What did you or the other party consider to be agile? What are the efforts that you are trying to do for this agile transformation? What have you tried? What do you try and didn't work out so well so far?

I think I stay in the midst of trying and I think it's introducing them the idea of a sprint where with the measurement framework in place to constantly be improving on their website and application versus going in for a full redesign every one or two years. You know how some larger organizations what they do is after a year they would

redesign the whole website again another year. And we are trying to move them away from that and more into a situation where we want them to set up a team internally to really, more than just building them a measurement framework, we want somebody to be able to maintain the conversation after we leave. So like moving forward, if you find that signups is problematic, maybe we will use the sprint style thing to really get them to run a few tests in the signup portion.

But we are at a stage of trying to get buy-in from management. We are trying to get them to see value in moving to something like this versus having somebody else build their applications and websites. I can see that it's really challenging for you so far because so far it seems as though, or at least the general mode of the organization right now, people are actually very skeptical. And they're also very used to their current ways. Is that right? By the way, whatever that I'm saying.

You're skeptical about agile? Yes. The reason why we're even in this conversation is because somebody, a new CEO stepped in and she was very interested in changing the direction of the company to a more digital way.

I guess that's why we are a bit invited to come in to kind of share a bit about digital transformation and like the design process. So I'm just wondering if you had any stories with regards to, were there any things that worked when you were introducing Agile to different organizations or anything design related? I can't necessarily respond with a particular story or experience that event true, but I can, don't mind if I share some advice with you instead. Is that possible? Is that okay for you? Yes, please. Thank you.

Okay. By the way, what I just did was I asked for permission before I did something. And I guarantee you, we don't do it often enough at work. And most people will respect, appreciate you a lot better if you ask for permission first.

But basically my understanding so far of what you're sharing is that you have some encouragement from the CEO in terms of like how much change this CEO actually wants to see the company. So that's actually a good starting point in terms of who you speak to, to actually at least start an agile effort because at least one person's in right? Better than zero person, than zero people. The CEO, I mean, is this your only contact point in the organization? Because assuming that the CEO is the only contact point of conversation in the organization,

to ask this CEO, is there anyone in this company, she for CEO, for example, has connected with so far that is interested in agile transformation or changing something or frustrated about something. And is actually interested to participate in this process. Because it's going to be impossible for you to suddenly say, let's all be agile. I think everyone's going to like

I think you might have messy people who are quitting all of a sudden and that's the last thing you ever want to happen to an organization. But start asking the CEO if there's anyone who actually you can start having a conversation about agile or about things that could be frustrating that they want to change.

Because you need to have those conversations with people who sees room for improvement first, or has the initiative to want to speak to you. And you need to start from there. You need to start with people who want to do it, who want to talk to you about it first. And you probably need to connect with these people on a more personal level. I'm not saying, for example, like be the best friend or anything like that, but have a

have a meal with them, connect to them as a person, as individuals. And when you do that, actually people tend to be a lot more comfortable with you and they're a lot more comfortable sharing a lot more problems with you. And that's when you really get to see the entire scope or at least a particular scope of an issue, right? How it is within that person's point of view. And you start from there. And the best case scenario is that this person

is going to be able to own something in that company. That means if they can own that change, own a particular responsibility,

that they want to improve. If it's someone who's typically just executing the work or just a yes man, it's going to lead to some issues because you might offend the manager, you might offend someone's boss out there. That's the last thing that you want to do as well because you're going to trigger a lot of people and you're going to make a lot of hoo-haas in the company. So preferably someone who owns a particular part of a product or project in the company. And you say, for example, you're going to talk about websites, right?

websites have multiple angles, right? It could be lead generation, it could be product conversion, it could be purchases, right? It could be revenue. Why don't you start with one particular aspect? If the person owns just that one aspect, it's really more than good enough. Say for example, if it's just like the traffic coming in from your website through maybe AdWords, for example, that's a good start. And you start from there. Start small and they're going to be skeptical at first, obviously, right? So why don't you start small first?

to see if you can improve that one area first through agile first and produce results, work on it. It's going to take time. Maybe you'll get lucky. You'll see results immediately. Maybe you'll get unlucky, no results. And I got to try again. I got to adapt. I got to try something else. I got to learn from this through a retrospective, right? Basically go through that and create one success story so that you know that you can potentially have more buy-ins after that because you may have proven that

Scrum works. But I think if you ask for my personal opinion as well, is that not every industry or not every problem is meant to be solved with Agile or Scrum. Not every industry actually needs this or benefits from this. Some industries lose more money from this and it's simply because of context, like people do different things.

Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And Joshua, hopefully we answered your question. I think just echoing on what Ty said, it's also the power of starting small. And Joshua is just wondering, like, are you an internal...

stakeholder in this company or are you actually a consultant i think that also would change your approach i am from the design practice that's helping out with the design transformation so i think internal yeah yeah we are not internal we are kind of

Yes. Okay, you're consultants. So I think the benefit of being a consultant is sometimes people see your time and your expertise as being more valuable, but the flip side of it, it's also a little trickier where you might not have as much time as

as someone internal. Yeah, do you have any thoughts about that, Ty? Like you've operated both as a consultant and also an internal person before. From your experience, Ty, what would you suggest? The truth is that if you're an external person, you have an external point of view. And if you have a particular point of view, you could share that point of view. And that point of view could either be appreciated or it could be completely unappreciated.

And sometimes, as a third party point of view as well, we may not have spent enough time on a particular problem or issue. Like I said, sometimes we get lucky. We solve the problem like, "Whoo!" We get to have our victory signs and we get to say, "Bitch you to it." We could do that, but basically sometimes we get lucky. And sometimes we get buy-in because sometimes as a third party, people see you for the first time, they're a lot more impressed. Maybe you're from a very big or well-known company and people go like, "Whoa, yeah."

You said it right. You said the right thing. My answer to that is try to understand their point of view as well. And if possible, listen to their actual problems first before you propose a solution. If that's really, really possible at all. Sometimes people come to consultants and say, just give me a solution. I have no time to give you any insights or I have no time for you to speak to anybody. But if possible, go through that process. Because these people, as I said, they've worked on a particular problem or issue for a long time.

they have the expertise, they know what happened, they have history, they may have learnings to share with you. But if you don't start that conversation first, then that can't happen. So it's best to talk to somebody first, enquire. Yeah, that's really wonderful. Thank you, Tai. And we're almost towards the end of this conversation. And Tai, it's going to be 2022 in a couple of days.

the year has moved us very quickly. I was just wondering what would you suggest, what other practices we can do or anything that you might be doing in this new year to bring more mindfulness to the way you live your life or the way you practice user experience design? If there's anything I can think of

I believe most of you are actually, at least the general audience probably know what a sprint is. So it is typically in two weeks for scrum, right? My suggestion is try to practice this for yourself. And if you want, you can pick up the habit to practice it for yourself. And you can set up a one-week sprint for yourself. And depending on whatever that you want to improve about yourself or work on yourself, start a one-week sprint for yourself and review yourself every one week.

Yeah, I thought maybe give us an example, right? Like maybe we could go back to the weight loss example or any other example. Like what would a one week sprint for ourselves look like? So for myself right now, especially like entering the new year, I'm looking into two particular areas with my partner right now. One of them is actually finance, right? Because

because we are working on saving money and number two we are also working on basically i'm trying to just make sure for example she can find a job because she recently quit her job and she needs to look for a job right and basically yeah those two particular areas

And what I do with her now every week is that I proposed it and I said, basically, can we meet every Saturday? Can we talk about these two things every Saturday? So that at least we have a review about what's happening with these things and what we'll do or what even I do. I mean, like, I can't just preach, right? I need to actually...

be the change that I want to happen. I think some would say that definitely. Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the change you want to see in the world. Yes, that's right. Basically, what I do as well is that what we do to review it every week, I share, I open up all my applications for my banking and my finance and I share all the numbers.

yeah and we do it together every week so that we have awareness about what's happening in those particular areas and i will also ask her in terms of occupation for example like uh how is your job search coming along i will ask her i will touch base with her very often to see how things are and like any areas that i could provide support i would and i tell her what's happening on my set on my side as well for example like this week i know i'm very

busy with a particular project and i'm very stressed i would tell her yes i'm really super stressed about this and if things have lightened up as well i would also tell her i will tell her that it's a lot better now you are not as bad as last week right and touch base with each other like on a weekly basis we do that and if you ask me sometimes it can get uncomfortable

to do this because not everyone's like open to sharing things all the time right sometimes certain things that you share even with a life partner could be very personal very private but so far doing this i think it has improved visibility that's one on issues and i definitely know where i could come in to help if i can and i definitely know that i can't

if I don't. Yeah, I really like how you bring this practice of agile

to a romantic relationship and your life. I think that's such a wonderful example. And the fact that I'm hearing this, it's like, oh, wow, that makes a lot of sense because you have this cadence where you're checking in weekly. And this is something you agree with your life partner. In Agile, one of the principles I learned is over communicating. So this fact that you're communicating how you feel,

whether you're up or whether you're down, it's great because like then you're giving a choice to your partner to respond instead of taking away that choice from them, which usually we don't share, right? So, and it's such a wonderful practice. I think I'm pretty inspired by this. So,

We have people here who are trying to transition into the UX design industry. I know they've been doing freelance and things like that. So I'm just wondering, do you have any advice for people, whether they're doing freelance UX design or trying to get a full-time job in the UX industry, especially in their initial years? If I have any advice, get interested if possible, if it applies to you at all, because some people don't care.

get into frameworks of how other people are doing something. We have our design processes, we have our design tools, we have our way of working, we have our principles, they have their tools.

try to understand those as well. Because if you're going to work as a designer, just as a designer, no problem. You can stick to your silo and that's perfectly fine. But if possible, get yourself exposed to what's happening around you, the different teams around you. And if you're working in a tech startup, you can always start with the developers. Get to know what they're doing, get to know how they do things, get to know how they think,

And I think that would give you a lot more exposure in terms of how we can potentially work with them. Because the best case scenario to me in terms of product development is that everyone works together.

and not everyone works in a different process here and there and everywhere. And that's currently what's happening in companies even doing digital transformation, that's actually happening. Design teams doing my design thing, my own design processes, my own user research, my own design sprints, right? But actually to me, it should be in one sprint together in a product team if it's really possible at all. And that even for me, that's a challenge today and that's what I'm also working on for my career.

That would be my advice. That is such wonderful advice. I really like the idea of leading with curiosity and the fact that you're interested in not just your own domain expertise, but also the experiences and domain expertise of others. And I think that's this saying in self-development, people don't care how much you know. They want to know how much you care, right? And people are only as interested as you are interested in them. And the fact that you're showing interest to

in their work and their domain and their experiences are really helpful. So as a final question, I have a special request, Tai. Someone is asking you a question about your career choice. Why did you choose to be a design lead when you have product management experience and agile experience? You could easily be a product manager. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah, this will be the final question for this evening. So for me, I actually had

When it does have product management experience, it's currently just for the products that I'm building myself right now. Right? That means like, I own my own company right now. It's called GoodWork. I build my own products that they're not like the most gigantic or revenue building applications right now or products and services. But I am the one who's making sure that these get out in the first place. And actually not everything has like analytics set up yet, but I'm working on those as well. But basically,

I have product management experience on that end. And right now, most of my previous experience has been in doing design, mostly, until today. And honestly, I'm getting a little bit bored of it.

Not too broad, I hope, so that I can still apply and still coach others. The other part was actually being involved in facilitation and agile transformation as well. So I've seen the product cycle. I've met product owners as well. And just to share, I have actually resigned from my current position in my company and I'm moving on to the next company. And in that next company, it will be a product and a UX role combined together. Yeah.

So interesting. Yes, it's happening. And through the winding journey of like different roles, being a freelancer and an in-house person. Yeah. Like we don't know where that leads to. I definitely wish you all the best in your new journey and your new, new role. I think this could be really interesting. I've also had a friend who has been on and off. So,

switching between product management and design because he felt product management was a little bit too much like herding cats. He wanted to do more work in design. So I think it's maybe the season of someone's life to decide about what to do. But it's also good to know that people can transition in and out of this, that they have the right skills involved. Yeah.

Great stuff. Thanks so much, Ty, for spending your time and this evening with us and sharing your experiences. I think you have had a very inspiring journey. And as someone who's been watching you at the sidelines, I've seen you definitely got a lot fitter and lost weight. So I think you are a testament to testament and a product of change and your practices that you incorporate. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining us this evening and

Also asking your wonderful questions. And Rhiannon was mentioning that it's lovely to see mindful designers and not just designers who want to make money. It's wonderful. So thank you. And we'll see you again next month with another guest speaker and a practitioner. Happy holidays to everyone else. See you all around. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.