140 - The Significance of Listening and Empathy in Achieving Success with Jordan Diatlo

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Jordan Diallo, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of Leadoff Studios, which can be found at leadoffstudios.com. It's a design firm, industrial design firm. I interviewed you on Authority Magazine and you graciously accepted my invitation to be on the podcast today. Thanks a lot and welcome.

Thank you, Doug. Excited to be here.

So, uh, I don't know how many people know what industrial design is, um, so why don't you take a minute and just describe for us what an industrial designer does and then a little bit about your backstory?

Sure. So, uh, like you said, Leadoff Studio is an industrial design agency. Basically, businesses hire us to help them design, develop, and realize physical products that are typically innovative or problem-solving in their nature. Now, I would say industrial design is specifically physical products. At the lowest end, I describe it as architecture for everything else.

Other than—

where architects do Yeah, architects do buildings, but somebody else is designing cars, somebody else is designing furniture, somebody else is designing every product that we interact with. Those are industrial designers.

And how, and how did you get into the business?

Well, how far back do you want me to go?

I know that you started out thinking you were gonna be a graphic designer and then—

That's right.

And then while you're at Carnegie Mellon and then going to school and then I guess that's when it pretty started, wasn't it?

Yeah, so I grew up with one parent who was an entrepreneur and one parent who is an artist and art teacher. And so I was kind of always getting both of those backgrounds growing up. And like you said, I thought I would be a graphic designer because that was kind of where art and business met up in what I was exposed to. Now, when I went to Carnegie Mellon, the first year track is graphic design and industrial design together. And I started to get a real exposure for what industrial design is. And the biggest thing that I saw as the difference and what really made me tick was that industrial design is 3-dimensional problem solving. You're solving a problem for a user and understanding their needs. And typically the output is some sort of 3-dimensional object. And I just thought that was so cool. It really— connected all the different things in my brain and all the different things in my background in just the right way that made me kind of transfer from graphic design being 1,000% graphic design when I started there to having that transformation saying, you know what, I think I want to go in this direction with the rest of my life. Now, when I left Carnegie Mellon, I first got a job in footwear design. I've always been into footwear, even before sneakerheads were a thing. I was, you know, doing my best in the malls of New Jersey to get, you know, exclusive shoes, exclusive sneakers. And it was really— it's probably my dream at the time to get a job in like the Nike Innovation Kitchen where like the coolest, most futuristic sneakers are being developed. Now, being that I'm from the Northeast, I got a job in New York. And what I kind of found in the footwear industry was it's very driven by the cycles of fashion, and it wasn't very— wasn't so much innovative, but it really wasn't problem solving as much as I wanted to dedicate myself to. So after about 2 years, I kind of made the switch to industrial design. I took an unpaid internship with an industrial design agency, and, you know, that's kind of where I got the first taste of what that life meant and what problem solving in 3 dimensions really meant in the real world and kind of went from there.

And you went, you worked for a couple of different agencies until I think it was 2016, you got laid off.

Yeah. So after that first agency, really, I'd say my best experience or my most critical experience or most formative experience was with a company called Quirky. Quirky, they were around from, I think, 2009 to 2016 or '15. I worked there for the first 3 years of the company. I started when it was just 6 people in a studio apartment in the East Village, and by the time I left, it was 80+ people in 3 different offices. So I really got a chance to help define all of their products. I really got a chance to be hands-on with the manufacturing, work with engineers, work with factories. Actually sent me to China a couple of times to go and work in the factories with them. And I mean, I really got a taste for entrepreneurship there. After that, I bounced around a lot to different design studios, some big businesses like J&J for a time. And then, yeah, ultimately landed at a startup. Everybody came back from the holiday break. January 4th, they laid off most of the company. I was actually expecting my firstborn child a couple weeks later, so I felt like, wow, I don't have the time to get a full-time job. I've always wanted to run my own design studio. I think now's the time. I have to start this. Let's go.

You did it.

Yeah.

And you started out as a freelancer for a while, and then you just, as you built clients, you started building an organization.

Yeah, uh, that first year I would say was just really figuring out, can I even keep this afloat? Can I keep this lifestyle of having a newborn child and running my own business, keep that going? Um, it was pretty low stakes, low pressure though, uh, in terms of what I was putting on myself. I wasn't like, I have to make X amount of dollars. It was really just like, Can we live a happy life? You know, can I spend a lot of time with my child and can I still operate this business and start to build it and just get a little momentum? By the end of that second year, or by the end of that first year, I should say, my wife joined me full-time at the company and we started to hire interns, freelancers here and there and start to build up a little team.

Wow.

And so, so tell us about Leadoff Studios today.

Yeah, so I'll say today we are 4 people, all industrial designers. My wife has stepped away from the business, you know, as a lot of people kind of shuffled their lives around during COVID I think that was a big period for us in kind of reevaluating things. But it's myself and 3 other industrial designers. We work primarily with health and wellness companies. Not exclusively, but I think that we've found a lot of success there. And I think that it also gives myself and our team a real chance to help people with the products that we design. And I think that helps drive us all. You know, we have a lot of clients that are startups that we take them from, you know, the very start, the seed of an idea, help them develop that into what is the actual design and then actually help them get it made. We even do branding and packaging design for a lot of those clients as well. And then we have some corporate clients, bigger companies like Walmart, Nike, Lululemon, where maybe we'll come in and help them do just one part of the product, or we'll help them, you know, maybe do some internal-facing tools. Just things that are a little outside of their normal wheelhouse that they need an outside firm to come in and help with.

So you've been doing this for a while now. What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning, gets you really excited?

You know, I think the number one thing that I enjoy is the people, you know, building the team here and helping everybody grow and achieve their personal goals. And aligning those with Leadoff Studio's goals. That always keeps me very interested. How do I help people while also building this organization? On the other side of that, our clients are the other people that I get to interact with the most. And that, that's something I kind of identified in that first year. What I really liked about doing it was meeting all these interesting people. I mean, they're, our clients are typically experts in their field. They've identified a business opportunity within their field and they need a physical product to realize that opportunity, but they don't have the physical product design and development expertise. So while they might be an expert in, you know, mobility or sexual wellness or, you know, children's dentistry, we've had all different types of experts. They don't have that physical product piece. And we come in and together our expertise build something really special together.

So as you think about it, what do you think is unique about you that is making Lido Studios successful?

So I like to— there's one anecdote that one of our clients shared with me, and I really like this because Well, to jump, to jump to the end, one of our core values here is positivity. I think that's a really different thing in the design industry where a lot of design is figuring out what's wrong with something, right? But we look at it, how do we make it better? So this client, they had reached out to me about a year ago to start a new project, but they were also interviewing other firms and they, they were upfront with me about that from the start. Ultimately, they ended up picking us though, because, you know, they interviewed 5 other firms and they said, every time we talked to those firms, they told us all of the difficult things that were going to happen along this path. And they kind of made us feel nervous after every single call because of how difficult they were making it sound. But every time that we talked with Leadoff Studio, you guys focused on how how exciting this product can be, what this product could turn into, how big it could get, or how creative we could be with it. All the positive things. So I really like to come at it from that positive angle. I mean, I get excited about all these different clients that come to us. So for me, like, yeah, I know product design and development, it is really difficult, but the clients are coming to us so we can do the difficult stuff. You know, we're, we're going to do that. For my clients, I wanna make it a fun and positive experience for them. So I, I always kind of go back to that as what sets us apart.

That's, that, that's really cool. I hadn't thought about that. I don't know anything about the industrial design business other than it exists, but the idea that you're trying to make something better rather than to fix a problem strikes me as being a really good value to hold in the business. So this show is called Listing with Leaders. I already know that listing is probably the most important skill you develop as an— other than your technical skills. But tell me about— tell me about the importance of listing in the industrial design business.

Yeah, I mean, I always say the number one skill you need to have as an industrial designer is empathy. If you're just designing for yourself, you're not really an industrial designer. Industrial designer, I mean, the term industrial design is designing for industry. You're typically doing mass manufactured products, not always, but you're usually designing for an outside user, somebody who's not yourself. So if you're going to solve other people's problems and do it on such a massive scale, you really have to understand the end user and having that empathy, not just to look at a set of data and say, okay, let's make it this big or or let's make it this color or what, but really talk to people, listen to them, and hear the emotion that's underlying in everything. I mean, if you can get somebody to be emotionally tied to their product, I mean, that's absolute victory. I always say that we don't want to design products that somebody throws out in a year. We don't want to contribute to the landfill problem that we have here. We want to create lasting products that people really love and people tell their friends about and tell their friends, hey, you got to get this too. So listening to those people, understanding not just what they're saying with their words, but what are they saying through their experience, through their emotion. I think that's a huge part of it.

How did you learn how to do that? Wow.

That is tough.

Because I teach, I teach people how to listen. The reason I ask is I teach people how to listen to emotions. And I'm just curious about how you, how you came across the skill because it's obvious that you did.

Yeah. So I think, how did I get that? I know at Carnegie Mellon, they did actually really focus on the idea of research before designing. Now, I don't— the emotional aspect, I feel like I picked up throughout my career where, you know, even early in my career, we're, you know, I was able to design some products that had a little success, but I think the really successful ones, I mean, the first product that I had that was very, very successful, it's called Pivot Power. It was a rotating power strip. Like that kind of went like this, uh, like a 6-outlet power strip that we designed for Quirky. I think the reason that it hit so well is because people had this emotive reaction to it. So understanding that products can elicit that kind of response to people and then knowing to go and look for that. And most people, when you're talking to them, not everybody's going to be emotionally transparent. People will tell you what's on their mind, but they're not even always— I mean, you know from the start not everybody's going to be transparent, but also people aren't always in touch with their exact emotions.

Correct.

They might, they might know that there's a problem, but they don't even necessarily know what that problem is or where it's coming from or how they're feeling it. So a lot of it comes back to just talking and listening. Like you said, listening with a bit of empathy. So trying to put yourself in their shoes and kind of understand that emotional experience. Why are they saying these things? Let's peel it back even further and just get back to that emotion.

I'm curious, when you're in this mode and you're listening to your clients, are you reflecting back their emotional experience to them? Or are you just trying to figure out what it is that they're experiencing?

I'd say that it's more trying to figure out what they're experiencing, um, especially because a lot of that listening with clients goes on at the beginning of a project, right? I don't want them to think that they're sitting down with a therapist, uh, you know, who's trying to— or somebody who's trying to diagnose them, right? Um, I think with clients where it really comes out is that we're trying to figure out, you know, a client will come to us with a huge list of features that they want. Every client wants their product to do everything. Yes, but the truth of the matter is your customer doesn't want a product that can do everything. Your customer wants a product that can do one thing really, really well. So when we listen to our client, we really try to figure out, okay, what is the in that list of things that they gave us, what is the thing that really had that emotional response? Or what is the thing that made them tick? What is the thing that, you know, they actually got really excited about and we know is going to have that magical moment in the product? And we try to latch on to that. Now, of course, we try to make everything else happen, but we, you know, in the hierarchy of the importance of all these features, we try to elevate something to the top and show the client that a little bit of clarity, you know, how I'm really, you got me curious now, how do you take, I mean, I completely agree with you that emotions drive everything.

And when people have emotional experiences with a product, you know, they become very attached to that product and loyal to it. And that's a key to success. How do you design? What's the thought process or to build a product so that it has that kind of emotional resonance with it?

So in our process, usually we start out by showing our clients a lot of concepts. We will typically show somewhere from 10 to 15 sketched out concepts, and we do sketches by hand because That in itself has a little bit of a more emotional response than a rendering, but it also is pretty unfinished compared to a rendering. So it allows us to spread out and show a lot of different things. When we show those, usually the client gives an emotional response to some of those. Now, usually if there's 15 ideas, by the way, we're swinging and missing on a lot of those.

Of course you are.

But here's the thing, when the client gives us that laundry list of features they want, they haven't realized yet that they don't need all those things. So we elevate different features to the top and show them different options. When we show them those options, usually we get some sort of emotional response that says, oh, I like what you're doing here, or these are the couple that get it. I mean, we had one client once, we showed her 12 ideas for a really innovative product. And I always tell our clients, please pick 3, because even if we go down the road with one, we might not get it. And she told me, you can't date around when you're in love. And I love this concept. I'm only picking one. And, you know, to her credit, she knows her customer. She picked the right concept for sure. Yeah.

Wow. So then you take the concept and then how do you move that concept into a reality that still retains its emotional connection.

Yeah. So after we have those sketches, we like to, like I said, we ask our clients to typically pick 3. Now it could be more, it could be less. From there, we'll start actually bringing them off of the page and into real life. We'll start out by just doing cardboard models of things, something that's really cheap and fast, efficient modeling is what we like to do. And we'll also bring it into 3D CAD so we can start to do renderings and applying real-world dimensions, real-world materials to them, and creating a visual for something that looks a little better than the cardboard model. Yeah.

So you said it's a slow refining process.

Yeah. In order to get the products right, in order to have a really incredible product, I would say it's a, yeah, it's a slower refining process where, you know, part of design thinking and the design methodology is testing all of these options. So in that first phase when we're showing sketches, we're testing 10 to 15 options, but it's at a really low fidelity. Take it to slightly higher fidelity now where it's cardboard and, sorry, and 3D renderings, but we're doing 3 models. So they're not fully refined. I mean, it's in cardboard, right? Right. In the next step, we'll get much, much more detailed. We're going into every single detail there, and now we're probably 3D printing or doing a more refined prototype. And from there, we're going on to the internals, developing all the mechanical engineering aspects up until everything is fully, fully detailed. And then we go into manufacturing and help our clients manufacture.

This is so intriguing to me. So, so in terms of, of going from design to manufacturing, how much knowledge do you have to have, for example, about materials science? And you, you mentioned mechanical engineering. I mean, it sounds like this is all a multidisciplinary process, and the client presents you with something you've never seen before or thought of before, with materials you've never worked with before. How do you figure all that out?

Yeah, so I think industrial designers, especially at an industrial design agency, just by nature, you're kind of— I hesitate to say jack of all trades. You're not a jack of all trades, but you have to have really far-reaching knowledge. It just doesn't have to be super duper deep knowledge. I wouldn't call us material scientists. I would say that we're very familiar with different types of plastics and metals and woods and bioplastics or other recyclable materials. But we're not the scientists. If we need to go on a chemical or molecular level and really understand something, we reach out to the experts. But we know enough to navigate the world of product development where we can guide our clients, and we can guide them enough and then know when to step in and get an expert. So for example, mentioned mechanical engineering, we're all industrial designers. We can design mechanisms to an extent. I would say if something gets very, very complicated, let's bring in an external partner. And we have a lot of partner vendors or firms that we work with, Mechanical Engineering being one of them, that we'll reach out to when something gets particularly complex.

Interesting.

Wow.

Huh. You know, this sounds like a job and a career that if you are a people person and really creative, it's almost a perfect— and you like to work in 3D stuff, this is the perfect job, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, it's a good fit for me. I think the first piece that you said, being a people person, to work with clients, you really need to be a people person. I think that's kind of one thing that I see throughout my career, or as I've navigated the career of industrial design, people start to diverge at a certain point, maybe, you know, between 5 and 10 years into their career, people start to figure out, well, where do I fit in now? And for me personally, enjoying that interaction with entrepreneurs and enjoying entrepreneurship in general, being in an industrial design firm and running my own firm, that really made sense. But I, I wouldn't say that's necessarily the case for everybody.

So, um, I've heard you use the term design leadership, and it sounds to me like being a leader of designers is— might require a little bit different skill set than your ordinary run-of-the-mill leader. What do you think about that?

I think it does, because I think design, there is such a creative undercurrent to the whole thing. I mean, I think that's what drives all of us who are in the design field, that need to be creative, that need to build something. So how do I— I often think like, how do I feed my team that creative energy? How do I bring it into the room? And then how do I also cultivate it so they can elevate that creative energy in the room. You know, I've seen it work the opposite way in some offices where the creative energy gets sapped and the whole room kind of, you know, deflates and it doesn't really work. And it was particularly tough during COVID I would say we're fully in person and have been for a while, but, you know, during the height of COVID especially here in New York, it was tough. Everything for our business slowed down because that creative energy was— it's just impossible to replicate over Zoom versus when you're in the room together.

So, so where do you see Leadoff Studios in 5 or 10 years?

Well, I hope to really do a lot more in the health and wellness industry. And like I said at the beginning of this interview, I really like our work in that field. It's a far-reaching field, and I think that it's, it's also kind of penetrating lots of other fields, uh, like even in the world of technology, they're thinking about their, the wellness of their customers, which is great. I would really like for us to become a leader in that space, uh, and then I think just being more of a full-service firm where we do industrial design today, and I think we're, you know, a top firm in New York City already, how can we become a top firm globally? And how can we add branding and other design services more and more into our, into our mix?

Good for you. Huh, thanks. One more question. What's something about yourself, Jordan, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Um, sure. So I think I'll give you two, I'll give you two things. One, I'm really, really into plants. So you would know this if you came to my house and you saw how many plants there are. Although I think because of some stereotypes, people often think it's my wife. No, it's me. And then the other thing I always like to say is like a fun fact is that I'm a PADI certified scuba diver.

Really?

But yeah, but I would say because I have, I have two little kids, so I don't get to do too many scuba excursions these days.

I know, right? Maybe you'll get, maybe you'll get your kids into the water when they get a little older.

That's right. That's sort of, that's really what I'm hoping.

Oh, good.

Exactly.

Well, Jordan, thank you so much for your time. It was a wonderful interview and I really enjoyed getting to know you better.

Likewise. I really enjoyed it, Doug.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my your team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.