Building A Culture of Design Culture And Design Intention

Hope everybody's having an amazing Wednesday. Today in Growth Day is Wednesday workshop. And oftentimes in Wednesday workshop always want to be able to share something with great value, with great impact. And today I want to talk about design intention. Now, over the last decade of my career, I've been really focused on building cultures of design. And like, what does that even look like in different companies? Well, you know, there's different levels of design maturity across, you know, all the, all the top tech companies in the world, you know, from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Lynda.com, from Microsoft. And I've just been blessed to work at some of these companies and learn like, well, what works and what doesn't work. I've also been blessed to be a part of a lot of the research behind the scenes when I was working at Envision, which Envision app, if you've never heard of Envision, they are a collaboration, a technology collaboration company that's really their primary tool right now is Freehand. But you know, when I was there, there they were kind of like the mecca for design tools collaboration. This was before Figma got huge and with their virtual collaboration across, like, you know, everybody doing live editing. So today what I want to do is I'm going to do a, give you a crash course in design maturity. I'm going to show you what that looks like and what it feels like, but also how you can actually do it inside your companies and organizations to drive major impact. And, and you don't have to be a designer, and that's going to be the big aha today is that you don't have to be a designer to practice these things, but they will help you grow as we go. So this is going to be an hour talk. Please feel free to use the chat, please feel free to use the notes and then I'll ask you for some feedback at the end of the talk. So I'm going to start sharing my screen. We're going to get after it. So what's up everybody? Welcome, welcome, welcome. We're talking about adopting a culture of design intention today. Design, designing. The way we all operate, learn and collectively build experiences together. So why are we here? I was talking about that a little bit just a second ago. We're here because we need to. We're actually all on a mission. And if you're here for Inside of Grote, then you're definitely on a mission. But for me, the way I like to look at this is I'm here to reduce uncertainty, to make the best possible Decisions to progress our products, our company and, and ourselves. And oftentimes we have that ability to think about, okay, well, how do I reduce uncertainty for the things that I need to do on a daily basis? We're going to talk about that and what teams do when they're building products. We're also going to talk about discovering the best techniques, practices and ways of working together. Like, we've done a ton of research on this and learning about, well, what the, what are the best teams in the world do? And it doesn't matter the size of your organization. It's actually just disciplines and maturity and the behavior of what your team does. Even if you're a team of 10, 15, 20, you don't have to have hundreds of, you know, engineers, product managers, designers, to be able to function this way. The other thing is we want to increase our intentionality. You hear probably intentionality all the time, but intentionality is what sets us up for success. To be able to scale and to be able to learn about that. The power of design inside your organization and having that inside your run through your organization is also a multiplier because then you have more people thinking about the user experience. You have more people thinking about the customer journey, you have more people thinking about the interactions and the journey between even the teams that are working together. And that's just as important as what you ship on a, you know, on a Thursday afternoon or whenever you release things. So we're talking about that today. And what's up, everybody? If you haven't yet, If I haven't been introduced to you, my name is Drew Bridewell. I'm head of product and design here at Grote. I'm also founder of Next Level UX and I'm host of Practical UX Weekly. It's a LinkedIn learning series on LinkedIn learning. And it's about discovering practical UX tips and tricks from, you know, things that I've learned from working in the deep in the product trenches, like to share, share, share, and that's what it's all about. If you want to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn or on social media, be happy to just chat with you. Always sharing content up in there and just want to be able to support you. So today to this point, I'm just showing you this map because these are all the places that I've lived in, like the last decade. We've done a lot of traveling as a family. But I think it's also important to know that when we're bringing in the Level of design, intention and culture. Like we, we learn from our history, we learn from the things that were really well and well executed from our other companies. We bring those along with us as we go and enter into new staff, new companies, new projects. But the thing is, how do we like, what do we bring that's really good and what are the things that we want to leave behind because they didn't serve us, they didn't help us level up, they didn't help just us be the best version of ourselves, right? So I think it's important to know and remember where you came from and I'm going to show you that actually really quick. So knowledge and experience. I want you to remember all the different companies that you've been at and think about what did you take, take away and what did you learn from those companies? So for me, like I can remember even from when I went to design school scad, what I learned from being amongst a bunch of different disciplines of creatives, animators, architects, sequential drawers, illustrators, like all these different types of disciplines, right? We are a melting pot of creativity. What did I learn from them? What did I learn from my company in Durango, Colorado, the Magell Network, work in the restaurant industry. The list goes on and on here. But the reason why I show you this is because we're constantly taking things that we learned from previous companies and we're adding them to what it is that we're going to do today or tomorrow or what we're going to design. As we're a new leader inside of a team, we have the power to design that and. Right, and that's the design intentionality. Also right now I am still working on growth day. I'm still running, running product and design here. And I'm also coaching and teaching about disciplines that are just to help level up the community in planning and mapping systems and also just teaching the discipline of high performance design. So why is or what is design culture like, thinking about? Like, okay, well, what's the energy look like inside of a company? What's the energy feel like when you have a new project or something new that you want to take on? The way that you show up in a meeting, the way that you show up and your team shows up, the way that they know how to collaborate, they know how to facilitate, they know how to communicate, execute the entire gamut. Right? This is a design culture. Some companies you go to, nobody's talking. Some companies you go to, everybody's talking. Maybe too many people are talking. You can't get Anything done. There's a lot of things around this. We're talking about that today, too. But we also are going to talk about design intention. And design intention is this thing about knowing and preparing and thinking about what is absolutely going to move the needle for your projects, for your relationships, for your team, your team culture, your community, elevating each other, becoming a better leader. There's so many different things. And whether you are designer, product manager, engineer, you know, customer support, rep, whatever it is, you have the ability to put a little bit more design intention into your days. And we're going to talk about how to do that because it means a lot of. A lot of things, right? It can mean the environment where we work. It can mean the values and the principles we share and embody, like how we show up. It could be the behaviors and the rituals we perform. It could also be a universal understanding of, like, what design thinking even is and how to participate. Right? It's not about designers having all the answers, not about engineering, know how to build everything. It's about working cohesively together and building an environment that is safe, fun and exciting to work in so that everyone can participate in that journey, can participate in elevating the experiences and the next versions of this tech experience that's going to help empower the people that are using it, but also bring a ton of value to the business. So that's what we're going to do today. It's going to be fun. But you know what? Building a better design culture takes time and practice, right? It's not like you can just walk in and be like, let's wave this magic wand after we know what all these things are and just it's going to happen. We have to practice it, we have to model it, we have to be in that zone. But is it worth your time? Is it worth your time? It's absolutely worth your time because you don't want to have these wrestling matches with your team, the your customers, the business stakeholders. You want to be able to have cohesion so that you can have better meetings, but faster execution, reducing churn, not only for your customers, but for your team. Right? We want to keep people happy, but we also want to keep them challenged and motivated. And in a sense, we want them to be high performers because that's what's going to move the needle for the business. We want to be a part of purposeful work. We want to be in healthy debates, we want to be collaborative, all these things, right? Drive the needle from what it is that we're trying to do. But what does good look like? Well, good looks like an idea can come from everywhere. Anybody, anybody in this room doesn't mean it's a designer. It can come from anywhere. A respectful and inclusive environment where you can challenge ideas, solutions without any backlash. It's a multi team, collaborative working environment. It feels supportive, yet challenging and it's infectious. So you actually like doing the work with the other people you work with. It's also a culture of feedback, right? Being able to share feedback immediately when something happens, but also having the courage and influence to do it, to actually give the feedback. It's also a degree of understanding of what the design process is in your organization, having debates and conversations about how to make it better. And also it's about removing those barriers of collaboration and innovation. Because like, you know, and I even wrote over here on the left and you might have read that while I was going through these. The truth is like, you might not have a design title, but everybody can leverage design thinking and increase their intentionality, right? We can all do this together. It's gonna help us. So, right? We wanna be able to create this collaborative, fulfilling, fun, relevant, supportive, authentic, insightful, adaptive, candid in a live environment, right? Super important, super fun. We also have to think about the team's environment. So if you put the layers of the team right, we have the psychologically safe environment environment. Google did the biggest research study around psychological safety and was learning what increases performance and well being also inside of the workplace. And psychological safety was really important. So making sure that you can speak up, you can feel like yourself in these environments and work towards that. There's also the dependability of your team, like the ability to just depend on your team to get things done and to do it. Excellent level. Having awareness, like, oh, sounds like you had a, you know, this is like around like empathy, right? You had a, you had a tough day. Oh, you had something happening in your life, like how can I support you? What, what's going on? It's like being aware of your environment. Beyond just the work that you're doing, there's also the clarity of knowing what it is you need to do and why it's important. Like this is about knowing your priorities and trust, you know, knowing that yes, you have that trust and dependability. Dependability is like, you know, somebody's going to show up, but trust is you. You have the confidence that they're going to actually do a great job and you can let them run their role and do their thing and it ties back into a team of really understanding your purpose. Right, we want to understand that purpose. That's also an incredibly important part of all this. So let's keep this show going. So what I wanted to talk to you now about is, so we've set up like, well, what good looks like? What do the. What do the best teams in the world do? And what does this look like? So Envision surveyed 2,200 teams or companies and was looking at this practice in the business performance like, how's the business doing? And as actually design maturity, if it increases, is it actually going to move the needle for the business? So there's five levels of maturity that we're going to go through today. The first one is just to know that design maturity actually does correlate with, with business benefits. So the more mature an organization is in the product design and how it functions, the more the business benefits. Right. The research is there and I'm gonna talk about that today. So the first thing to note is that the design, the size of the team does not correlate with design maturity. So the average size of the team, you know, here, across the board from a producer, these are just kind of the archetypes that were discovered during the research. Producer connector architects, a scientist and a visionary. We'll talk about each of these things really quickly. So don't get too married to the actual titles. But the thing about maturity is it's tied to the practices and the behaviors of people versus like, you know, just having a huge team. So these four categories over to the right. User research, strategy, experimentation and UI design. You can start to see the colors of like, okay, well, level one, the producers, they might be doing a little bit of this, but they're not really doing all of these things over here on the right. And it might be kind of small on your screen. So I'll quickly read through it. You know, constant for user research, monitoring the user behavior and satisfaction mechanisms to recruit customers for research, guerrilla UX research. So like actually just going and talking to customers on a regular basis and doing on a weekly recurring basis is something we did at lynda. It was just a very, you know, but you got to build in this maturity, right? You just don't start and be able to do all of these items at day one of your company, especially if you're just starting up. But what you get to do is you get to level up over time. You get to level up and be able to do this in a way that you're building the disciplines and it's Building it into the DNA of the team versus saying you have to do all these things and nobody really understands why we're doing them or they don't actually understand the need behind them. So you have to slowly work your way up to these things. From a strategy perspective, we're talking about trend setting and foresight of the research, like actually knowing where you want to take the research, designing specific measures established at the start. So like these are the outcomes that we're really shooting for. How are we actually designing the product and experience to make sure that we're really focused in on hitting those okrs or hitting those measures of success? Unifying like cross platform strategy. If you've been inside the Growth Day app right now, you'll notice that it's really, it's, it's a simple framework of the things that you actually need to do every day are on the left and that on the left sidebar. So if you look at the journal, if you look at the life scores, if you look at the plan, if you look at the challenges, if you look at learning, that's exactly what we want people to do inside the product, because it is. Those embody the growth loop. Those are the things that are absolutely the most critical thing to putting in a growth cycle. Planning, reflecting learning and training or taking action. So if we're able to do that, then we're able to grow more. So the whole app is designed around those, you know, those four or five steps. So if you're like wondering, well, what do I do in this app to learn and grow and how, how does actually design even connect to all that? It's, it was designed to be able to support you in doing that so you can dive deep into each of those individual categories. Strategy and frameworks. The other thing when we talk about is like experimentation, like the mature teams actually know how to experiment. They're measuring and reporting the design outcomes. So as you build and ship things, you're actually measuring it. So you have okrs or just benchmarks so you know how good it is and how good it's getting. Like even the first level one all to level three, they're not even doing any experimentation. They're just getting requirements and things from their, their, their business, but they're actually not measuring any of those things. Right. So if you're already doing this inside your company, then you're already up to, you know, parts of, you know, the level four and level five, which is great from a maturity perspective because you're already doing the things so you could Go through this and spend countless time. I'll send you the link so you can actually go and download this report so you can check it out later. But it's just so important to know that you're always going to have different levels of maturity. But it's like doing the things that actually move the needle and impact your business is the initial start of where you want to go. Other really important things to know around this design focus, you know, on the product. The producer teams, they're really focused just on pixel, moving pixels and doing things. Level two is like they're getting better at collaboration, but they're actually still, you know, not doing all the things that they need to be doing. Architecting teams, they're really involved in operations, infrastructure, daily standups, prioritization, written documentation, the scientific teams, testing and learning. There's their concept testing, their AB testing, they're looking at analytics. And then the visionary teams are really tied into the business strategy. They're trend spotting, they're finding, they're, they're having like these vision artifacts and doing big pitches, they're helping guide the direction of the company and they have cross platform strategies. So they're looking at how all things are connected. So I guess you could look at this and be like, well, where would my team sit? Are they doing any of these things down at the very bottom? They might be, they might not be, but these are the things that you want to build up. You want to build over time. You don't want to just stress out about, well, my team's not doing that right now. Well, we could slowly build a plan to be able to work on individual these things that will help build up our maturity across our team. So let's keep going. So there's also, it's also good to know that high design maturity delivers like outsize ROI. So revenue is up by 4x, cost savings is up by 5x. Time to market, 6x valuation, 26x. This is incredible statistics to think about like, wow, like being a little bit more intentional about doing the things that really make up high performing teams is actually moving the needle. Revenue, needle cost savings, needle time to market and valuation. But you know what, it takes a village. It's not something that just the design team can do. They have to work with engineering, they have to work with product management, they have to work with customer support, marketing and it's a whole ecosystem that we're trying to build and that's the sweet spot of what we're trying to get to. But you got to know that These actually move the needle in order to start moving yourself towards these directions. So we talked about the producer teams really quick. My trigger. Producer teams. We talked about. Oh, my trigger is happy here. Super fast. Okay. Slowly. I'm just gonna use that keyboard. Oh, it's jumping. So anyway, you have all these different things. I'm going to go back because it's moving whenever I click on my level two. So level three, we talked about architect teams, different things that they're doing. Over here on the right, you can look at the design activities and the actual business benefits. So for example, if you're seeing wire framing, design comps, interactive prototypes, workshops, rapid sketching, daily standups, right, you're in this, like level three. Level four, you add in another layer where, okay, now you're testing, you're validating, you're looking at metrics, you're looking at how you can cost save. You're actually just being a lot more intentional about other things that affect the business. Right. You're getting into operations. A lot of teams that don't have this sort of maturity yet, they haven't maybe hired a design operations specialist or they haven't had somebody join the team that has been a part of those disciplines in the past. So they might not know what. They don't even know that these things can actually move the needle. And you actually should be aware of how these things move the needle. And the last thing with the visionary teams, this is like the strategic teams. And again, they're spotting trends, they're looking at the artifacts, they're helping guide and direct the vision and the direction of the company. And this is where most teams want to be. And like, imagine that they're going to be, but they actually don't do the work to actually get to this point where they have the influence of the team. They also have the, the, the camaraderie to be able to make these things happen. So they isolate themselves. And that's also what ends up really hurting teams and helping, you know, not building good culture. So what does bad look like? So I talked about all the good things and all the things that a team can do. But let's just talk about, like, what bad things happen, some bad tendencies that happen. So this, if you don't have a collaborative environment and a culture of where this is welcome, you end up having like a low morale about the work that's being done. Like, you know that this work is coming to you, but you don't actually know why it's. It's important. And if you don't know why it's important, then you're not as motivated to actually do an excellent job at that work. And it's just like research shows it, and it just happens over and over. And you can get into, you know, I see it all the time with teams that they, they, they get this work, but they don't actually. They aren't excited about it. So they're not really showing up and making sure that the, the quality is there. Designers being perceived as decorators. Right. A lot of times, too, like, designers are not just there to make it look pretty. They're there to help bring organization to structure and facilitate those moments. And I think that goes for, you know, if you look at engineers, Engineers aren't just builders. They're also thinkers and they're also strategic with how they're doing things. Product managers aren't just making PRDs. They're helping bring clarity and organization into a project like no other. And there's just different roles and responsibilities. And that's why it's good to think about it holistically about your team and knowing that every role that you have is an important role and every person that you have on your team is a valued team member. And, and learning what the strengths are for each of your teams and how they can contribute to the project is good. And we want to continually working towards those things. We don't want to have rushed solutions or chasing solutions and chasing things that, you know, where you have, like, a loss of credibility. We want to reduce the misunderstandings of roles and responsibilities, like who's responsible for this and who's responsible for that, and making sure it's super clear to the team misunderstandings of what problem you're trying to solve. I think this is another one. When you get so big, you don't actually. You forget about the actual problem you're solving for the customer. And I think that can also kind of tend people to go in the wrong direction as far as, you know, working on something that just doesn't have any impact and then to solve and that leads to solving the wrong problems. So let's keep going. What that does. Also, it creates a lot of these emotions when it's a bad culture. Like the things I was just talking about, talking about, like, you got lonely team, you got confused team, you got cold, toxic, empty, purposeless, restricting. It doesn't feel good. So why is this important now, y'? All? It's always been important, like design maturity, design intention, helping teams collaborate better. It's always been an important thing Just the, the best companies in the world, like the most profitable companies in the world, are doing these things because they know that having design and product and engineering awareness really is going to help move the needle, increase the roi. Like the chart I was showing earlier, like the Forex increase in revenue, the, you know, the 20, the massive percent of valuation impact that this has when you have this engine inside your company that can actually really move the needle. And doing that is so important. So what we've learned is like, open, honest and inclusive and collaborative environments are better for business, right? Pretty obvious thing like, okay, yeah, I want to be open, I want to be honest, I want to be inclusive. Got it. So let's look at this opportunity that we have, right? We want to find the opportunities to make design thinking a part of every business challenge. So you have something that's going on, that's a problem inside your team. You have something that's going on, a problem inside your, you know, maybe it's collaboration, it's communication. That's a design thinking opportunity. Because you can start breaking down that problem into opportunities and turn those opportunities into new strategies that you can take on and propose to your team so that you can iterate just 1% every day to get it a little bit better. And I'm going to talk about a little bit of that, but that's really what we're trying to do. There's a lot of problems in every company, but how do we look at those problems and reframe those problems into opportunities that the team can take on as design challenges? Right. It changes the game for how you approach these sorts of problems. The benefits of adopting a culture of design intention is it reduces the time and cost to deliver things, right? When you can collaborate more cohesively and you reduce those silos and you can really champion the team and empower the team once they know what they need to do, you can improve the initial output and overall product and service quality. You can identify opportunities for your teams to learn new skills, grow the team and business, Right? So identifying where these gaps are, like those opportunities, and reframing those, those challenges into those opportunities. You know what, you can pick because there's always going to be things that we can do to make these things better. So, but it's, it's about organizing that chaos might feel like chaos sometimes. Organizing it and just looking at it up against the wall, like, hey, there's five issues here. Which one should we work on first? Let's get a little bit better every single week. And we'll get, we'll get a little bit better at this. The other thing that we can do is we can reduce. This also reduces employee churn and burnout because they feel supported, they feel listened to, they feel heard. This also attracts new talent coming into the organization because they're like, I want to work on that team because I'm going to be heard, I'm going to be listen, like respected. I'm also going to be empowered to do what it is that I love to do. And I want to. And I want to be at my best. If I'm going to be doing this role. I want to be at my best. I want to build technology, I want to elevate, elevate whatever your mission is inside your company. Like it's going to help you do that when you can work cohesively together. Also want to connect you back to humanity. Like, we're people, we get to work together, we get to do these things together. I think sometimes when you're so caught up in the outcome, what you're trying to achieve or the feature that you're trying to build, you lose connection with actually the purpose and the why. And that's why it's so important as a leader to establish those purpose of what it is that you're building and why. It actually affects not just the customer, but it affects the team and it affects the business. Right. So important. We also want to bring out the best in people. Like, let's go. Like, this is so important to bring out the best in each other because we get to build together and that's super important. So why doesn't everybody do this, y'? All? Well, there's challenges. There's lots of challenges we face in adopting culture. Like we have to make incremental improvements, but sometimes we don't always feel like we're making progress. Right. These little things. You might not have the visibility from a 10,000 foot view because you're just like in the weeds and you're like, I'm working on bugs all day long. I don't feel like I'm making any improvement. That's why you got to b. You got to balance those things out. And there's just definitely ways to do that. But you want to reduce these silo teams. Hoarding insights. This is something we learned too in a lot of the research is like somebody's holding on somebody or some team is holding on to all these insights and information and not sharing them out frequently with the team so that they can make more better informed decisions. This is A problem. And it actually can hurt culture also. It can hurt culture is like short and quick win thinking like, oh, let's get this quick thing in. Let's get this quick thing in. And then it's not thinking about the big picture of how it affects everybody on the organization and team. Right? You could decide, oh, I really want to get that in. But if you're not looking holistically about how it affects everybody else that's going to deliver that feature, that project, it can be challenging, and it cannot feel so good. The fear of change. Oftentimes as companies, we go through new leadership, we go through org transitions or reorgs, and when that happens, that fear of change can feel so intense. I remember when I was at Linda and we got. We woke up that day and we're like, reading the news, LinkedIn bought Linda. I'm like, oh, my gosh, what is this going to do? This is cool. This is exciting. This is scary. All these emotions, the fear of change, right? And then we got in there and they, you know, took care of us, did all such great things, and then we're like, oh, wow, what's this going to do the Linda brand and what's that going to feel like now that it's going to end up turning into five, six years later, LinkedIn learning, and then Linda's gonna go away. Oh, that fear of change is so hard. But you know what? Life is about change. How do we adapt and evolve with that change is gonna really make or break us and how we decide to live through these changes. And I think it's, you know, knowing that change is gonna come, but having a team environment that's supportive, it's gonna make these things not feel so intense. Scaling your team in business is also a challenge that we constantly have. We need to hire new people. How do we onboard those people? How do they learn our behaviors, our processes, the things that we value and care about, our principles and values? And then also, how do we make sure that we're not in the state where we're just constantly misunderstanding the priorities, your roles, and your responsibilities? Like, it's just constant practice. Constant practice is so important. What do I mean by practice? Well, we have this process that we typically go through right from preparation. We. Any new thing that we have to do, we have to prepare for. How are we setting it up for success? What are we going to do about it? How are we going to understand and collect information? How are we going to focus? How are we going to generate ideas for it? What are we going to decide to do? How are we going to prototype and build this? How are we going to test and validate it? What are we going to learn from what we test and validate? What are we learning so that we know to move things forward in a very insightful and intelligent way? How are we going to iterate and improve on it? How are we going to prepare it for what we're going to build? How are we going to support, verify, and then work towards those outcomes? We all go through this all the time, but really the reality is there's ideas. Teams forming plan. New team members join, team members leave. There's two challenges. Oh, this is going to be hard. Oh, there's some storming happening, there's some norming happening with your teams. There's conflicts. We're working on those resolutions. There's new insights that come in. People are on vacations, they get sick. There's support. There's bugs. Oh, no, there's bugs. And then there's outcomes. Like, there's these constant things. But the thing is, if we can share the depth of what we do with each other, and we know that, like, hey, we're at the beginning phase of this project. We have context, we know what we're where we're at, we know where it is in a life cycle, we know who's doing what and what we need to do. We consistently and can practically elevate our maturity as we grow as a team. Right. We can do this together, but we need to be aware of these workflows. We need to be aware of these types of things that need to happen. For all the projects we go through, we're going to go through these phases. If we're building technology, if you're in a different discipline and you have a different, completely different workflow of how you get things done, break it down, map it out, figure out what the problems are in that flow, and then identify some opportunities for you to improve one of those sections and then slowly work on your entire map. The other thing to consider is, like, in a company environment, when we're trying to build a culture of design impact or culture of design intention, we have to think about the different layers of the organization. So there's like a leadership vertical, there's a horizontal vertical. So if, like, we're an individual contributor, we need to level up our leadership so they know what's going on at the ground level because they're not always in the weeds of everything that's going on. So we need to vertically share with our leadership team, what's going on and how can we help them become better leaders? There's a horizontal, like an organizational exposure. So like you and your team know what's going on. You're leveling up your leaders so they know what's going on. But you also have a horizontal exposure of what you're doing. This is where you share things with the overall company. You have all hands and you share information with in your all hands. You create and facilitate those moments of knowledge sharing. And it's not just like up or down, but it's horizontal with other disciplines in your company and organization. There's also the last one here is social and customer exposure. So your customer also needs to be exposed to the new things that are coming out. They also, if you're hiring, you need to be able to level up your culture so that people actually want to come join your company and want to be a part of what you're trying to do. There's different levels of this exposure. So I think it's important to have the context of, in your role and what you're doing. How are you vertically sharing, how are you horizontal sharing and how are you socially sharing a lot of different things. But this also increases that awareness to build a better culture of design. So we got to create the space. And creating the space is another really important of building a culture. And I know that we're all in a remote environment. So I'm going to show you about seven or eight different ways to look at this. Because if you're in the office or if you're traveling like some. I'll share that. I'm traveling quite a bit. You have to create the environment and the space to create, to make, to collaborate, to facilitate, to get things done in a way that makes you feel like you're part of a maker, a maker team. And that's like, you know, that's going to help you also increase all the design maturity across all the things that we were just talking about. So here's the first little quick example. So this was my old kind of studio space. My desk, my chair there to the left is where I was sitting. So when I was at LinkedIn, I had this whole back studio space. Yes, there's a six pack of Fat Tire there. I'm not a big drinker anymore, but we had all these whiteboards. It's awesome. You know, we're on the fifth floor in downtown San Francisco and you got to create the space. Right. We didn't have this space in the get go, but we pitched for it. We asked for it and then they designed it for us so we could have little space to do some side work. We could have people that are traveling in, they had places to work when they traveled in. We had little like breakout rooms where we had our designs printed out and we could talk about these things. You got to create that space. You got to make it. You got to make it happen. The other example was at Facebook. They had the Analog lab. And the Analog lab was a place to actually go and get outside of your work, get creative, go print something, go make something. And like, even it was like, like little pens or little paintings, they had little workshops that you could do to create something really fun and inspiring. Like, we gotta make space for creating to create that environment of like, new things happen, culture is happening. And this is something that LinkedIn and Facebook did really, really well for their staff. So the staff felt inspired and wanting to actually, like, contribute to something greater. Let's keep going. Let me come back in. Here's another example. When I started, when I, when we were traveling after Covid, we ended up putting all of our stuff in storage and we're like, let's go travel across the country, explore a couple other areas in the United States. So in one of the Airbnbs, they had this really cool garage, but it was unfinished, but it was a workout area. And I'm like, I'm going to turn this workout area into a maker space. I brought, you know, I brought all my gear over here on the left and then they had like pull up bars, bench bar. It was so much fun to create and work in here. But it was like, you know, the intention to bring my studio on the road and to still be able to create and make things was an important thing. You have to create the space to make. You can't just like, you know, you can't be. You have to, you have to create your environments the same thing with your teams. Here's another, like, close up of all the different little things that, you know, I store with me, I put in boxes and I take it with me. It happens every time. In another example, when we actually got to North Carolina in our travels, this Airbnb had a standing desk. You can see my cat down the bottom, right? But I took all my gear, all my whiteboards and my pens and stuff that I needed to do to facilitate, to work and to create these things. Come with me. And then includes the little dumbbells, right? So you gotta imagine the environments that you want to create for your teams, whether you're in office or whether you're in your home space or whether you're in, you know, wherever you decide to work and collaborate, you got to create those environments. And right now, this was a shot I actually took this morning right before this talk, and, like, coming in and thinking about, well, wow, okay, now I'm in an rv, my RV studio, where I travel, and I think about, like, wow, I never really thought I would be, you know, in 2023, working from my RV studio. As we get ready for another adventure at the end of the month to go back to the. To the west coast, and it's like thinking about, you know, you can create from anywhere and you can help support your team to create anywhere. You know, using tools like Growth Day, using your environments, and building a supportive environment for your teams. These things can happen from anywhere. And. But you have to bring in that intention and that awareness to be able to do those things at scale. And I think it's just going to, like, really inspire you and encourage you. Here's another look of, like, another studio space when we were in. In Fairview, North Carolina. Like, these things might look like kind of like a wild, wild adventure, but these are the things that, you know, if you're creating, you're making things, you have to have some fun with what you're doing and brings a little bit of joy into it. And here, let me keep going. Like, even, like, see, the studio can change in different locations. They can go. This was in another place. And it's just like, the last things that I want to kind of give you as the last 20 minutes of this talk is like, you got to encourage culture champions, and you also have to encourage an environment of growth in an environment of empowerment, in an environment where people feel supported to do the best work of their lives. You got to bring in a little bit more of that encouragement. The other thing that we got to do is we got to really establish a sense of urgency and purpose. Like, we don't want to go through our days and not really know why it is we're doing. We are running businesses, and we're running technology companies. We do need to have a sense of urgency, but not a sense of chaos, not a sense of stress. A sense of urgency is like, if you've played sports, it's like knowing you just hit a single. You need to get to the first base. Oh, somebody's trying to steal on you. On second base, you got to throw that person out. There's a sense of urgency. You know, you're you know, I think in practice, typically, like, you know, are you going to walk to the drill or are you going to jog to the drill? Are you going to run to the drill? You know, if you're training and practicing your sprints, are you going to jog when nobody's looking or are you going to sprint? Are you going to sprint to the area that you know you're going to train your body to be able to sprint? I think all these things, all these things are super matter, but I don't want you to think that sense of urgency means like sense of chaos. Like it's, it's controlled, it's controlled energy. And you got to be able to establish that in your role and know like, well, what is the velocity of the team and what they're operating at and where am I currently at and how can I help elevate that velocity or how can I help encourage my team to support me or me support my team so they can move a little bit faster in a certain area? Because that what we were talking about earlier, it's like time is money. But also being able to perform collectively, cohesively and inclusively in as a team is going to help you really increase your ROI for all the things that you do inside your company when you're building products. So some things that you can do to help with that in your company is you can restate your life purpose. So if you had a mission or a, you know, a purpose statement and a mission can go a long way. So if you haven't heard that in your all hands recently, you know, ask your HR pro or ask your, ask your lead, what are the values and principles in your organization? Get those written down. Look at those on a regular basis. Share those with your team. If you're a leader, share those with your team. If you're not hearing it much in your, in your all hands, you could recommend it to your leadership team to share it in the all hands so you can get a line. You also can know like, well, what does success look like for this meeting if you haven't yet mapped out your meetings? I talk a lot about this with design productivity and design energy in one of my trainings where we look at thinking about how do you define what success looks like for your schedule? So if you haven't mapped out your schedule, go from like Monday to Sunday, write down everything that you do on a recurring basis, start there and then start working through, well, what is the purpose of that meeting and does it need to happen and what are the top two or three things you can do to anticipate and prepare for that session. And then how can you start making that session even better? Another thing is like invest in teaching everyone your design story and also the story of the company and the story of what it is you're trying to do. Like tell stories together. Teach each other things. Knowledge share. Describe your background skills and techniques with your new peers so new people are joining. Don't just assume they know everything about you. Talk about their past projects. Share your past projects. Share things that you've learned from working at your company. Share things that you would love, help on or support on. Like, get more comfortable sharing things. I remember there was a product manager that I was working with at LinkedIn and when we first got together, we both had big personalities and we both wanted to like make LinkedIn learning. Just absolutely incredible. We had different opinions on certain things. So what we did, because we were first like, you know, storming together, we ended up meeting every single week and we had weekly one on ones to talk about things that we were doing, things that we really valued and cared about. And we just kept meeting until we got all these things out on the table and then we became like best friends from it. Like, but we, we took that initial step because at first it was like, whoa, strong personalities coming together. Like, how can we work these things out? And I really learned a lot from that about, like not not being so well, just being a lot more open about difficult, some of these difficult conversations that might need to happen. You know, you need to share your backgrounds and it helps reinforce your credibility. It also, you know, helps your partners understand where they can support you and where you can support them. So, you know, I mean, I look at it so much differently now, but it's these little things that we can do to make things better. Sharing physical and digital digital locations with your cross functionality partners. Like, like, here's the thing, we're working remote now, so we have to take an extra step to reaching out, sharing information, posting information that's valuable so we can keep building those that company culture. Also, like what I would recommend is like doing company hack days where you can have about four of these a year and it's about two to three days to do like hackathons. And these hackathons are really great for culture building because you get to innovate, create new things, bring people together and get them to work on something completely different. This usually takes a lot of buy in from executive leadership. It also takes a lot of buy in from Just the founders, because it costs money to do these things, but it's a really good sentiment for the company culture. LinkedIn, they called it end days. So if you had an end day, you could actually spend that day and do whatever you want. But obviously, like, LinkedIn is very profitable business and, you know, they're working. You know, a lot of companies are not in that position. But as you build up and you increase your maturity and design maturity across your organization, you can start building these things in and designing them and having really fun, really fun moments. And it's just like something you work towards. I want to remind you to share your stories. For example, I want to share with you that growth day right now that you're inside the tool. But, like, in the first year and a half of growth day, we built so many tools and so much functionality that really brought in the whole entire product ecosystem bringing it together, right? You can do journaling, you can do planning, you can do challenges, social learning, you can do benchmarking with life scores. You can learn and do. You get timestamp notes and really develop yourself. You can also listen to a daily motivational speech from Brendon every single day. And it's all inside this one app, right? This took a lot of coordination, a lot of planning, and you got to be able to share the story of how these things came to be. And actually, as you grow and as you learn, think about, like, how you're contributing to that story. And these are also available in the app stores. But, like, this was a big story, and I can't wait to actually share more about this journey that we've been on with Growth Day and just how it's impacting people's lives all over the world. So beautiful. So I want you to think about this as we kind of come down to the very end of this is like, even if you're on a high performance team, that doesn't mean you got to stop practicing. So a lot of the times, too, we get on a better team and we're like, oh, I don't need to practice this. I don't need to go training on here. You want to. That's where you got to double down on practicing. You got to double down on the new skills. Because every year there's going to be a different level of performance for you. And every year you're going to be like, you'll want to take on new responsibilities and new things. So how are you going to show up for those things? It doesn't mean you got to stop Practicing. So you know, where can you. Where. Where you accept the status quo and stop questioning and is the current reality is a. Is a good. As good as it can be. Like these. These things right over here on the right. Like losing sight of quality standards. Don't lose sight of quality. Raise the quality bar. Don't lose visibility in. Into like what the. Like with what the rest of company is doing. You want to maintain visibility into that. I know I kind of wrote it. In a sense. It's like ego overtakes new possible expirations. We tried that before. As you grow your company and as you grow maturity, you're going to hear that we tried that before. Why don't we go and try it again? You know, when you go through like four or five different iterations of something, you want to be able to share the insights and learnings and things that you've taken on. Don't let ego overtake you. Start disconnecting from what made you love building product in the first place. A lot of teams also, they get into this cogwheel of performance and they forget about why they love product, why they love design, why they love building. Don't lose track of the essence of why you do what you do. And you know, when people come in and build a team, you know, you're building a culture of creativity and a culture of just new things. You're building new things. So remembering why you do it and why you love showing up every day is going to be really impactful to support you for the long term. Insufficient feedback from external, trusted sources. Right. We also have to continuously get feedback about the things that we're doing. And these are just things that we have to continue practicing. We have to continue practicing and it's not going to stop. So I want you to also think about how you share your wins. Right. We talked about a lot of these things. We want to be able to share our wins. Like we do this on Friday with our team at Growth Day where we share like a shout out of something we thought was just awesome that our team had done. I want you to encourage you to do this a little bit more. Whether it's with your family, whether your kid just did something and spectacular. You'll find times to celebrate your wins and integrate that into your weekly rituals. Right. Do it on a weekly basis. We also want to raise the visibility of the things that we do because not everybody knows what you're doing behind the scenes. And if they don't know what you're doing behind the scenes, that means you need to articulate, share it. Remember, knowledge sharing is super important. So I want you to continually do that. And I want you to start with trying to build a better shared understanding of why things matter and why you're doing what you're doing. Like, if you're. If you have a new initiative in product, a new initiative in engineering, a new initiative in design, a new initiative in customer support, whatever it is, really help build the context of why it is that you're doing. Set the context when you communicate these things with each other. I also want to remind you to practice committing those shared behaviors and new rituals as you go through and you find those opportunities and those workflows and those opportunities. When you're building new systems and new environments, you gotta really practice them. Like right now, we're going through a growth phase at growth day. Growth phase, Growth day. And we're learning new practices to work together as a team. And because we're growing so fast and we have a lot of things that we want to do, but that means that everybody is having to step up. Everybody's having to know where their role is. And there's new rituals are forming. And when these new rituals and routines are forming, we have to take even more care of each other, to take even more responsibility for each other and support each other along that journey. So commit to that. Practice is. It's a practice. It's not. It's not, you know, it's just like, we're showing up to practice. We're gonna get better every single time we show up. We also want to remove that uncertainty and misunderstandings about the people on our teams and don't assume things. We want to inquire about things. We also want to, you know, create a thriving environment. Right? We want to work together. But let's look at some practice examples. Just really quick here. So practice examples is like doing design sprints around culture and values. So this could be like, okay, you have a team. You could be in a growth group, for example, and you could talk about, like, what. How do you look at leadership? How do you look at pushing back on things? What do you. What do you think about when you do career? What do you think about when you're trying to be flexible in something? What kind of things do you look at? And what kind of things would you wish were better? You can go through and create these facilitated workshops, which are essentially growth groups, and you can come through and have an agenda. And we actually have 10 of these inside the Growth Day app right now, where you have 10 agendas, and you can go through. And go through those with your team, or you can go through those with, you know, complete strangers. Inside of the Growth Day app, you can do any of those things, but the idea is that you have facilitated discussions about things you care about, and that's something important to do with the team so you don't be complacent with, you know, how you're growing as a team. You want to grow together. Another example is doing surveys. You could do surveys after events, surveys after, you know, all hands, surveys after a lot of things where you can understand what worked, what didn't work, and what could be improved, like, constant surveys. You can also do that with, like, retrospectives, which are things you can do after, like, a typical Sprint or a certain project is over. Make sure you take the time to do a survey and get feedback around how things work. You can uncover really interesting insights from those things. Also, here's just a look of, like. Remember that, like, culture is everywhere, y'. All. Like, we got to create that environment together. We got to make those magical moments happen. We got to go and show up together and, you know, just have a ball. Teaching, sharing, evolving, become more proactive versus reactive. We got to be open versus closed. We want to educate verse, ignore certain scenarios, and we got to invest in the people, the rituals, and the feelings that surround us. Like, what do we want to. How do we want to invest in those relationships and those people, you know, and it can change the way you see and behave in this world. It can also increase, like, an absolute. It can make it just incredible environment for you. So I just wanted to, like, thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this. If you're interested in, like, continuing in sharing any feedback about this talk, take a screenshot of this with your phone. Just open up your phone and take a quick little snapshot of this. And you can, yeah, just leave this up for, like, 10 more seconds. Grab your phone and take a quick little screenshot of this or a little photo of this and give me some feedback. You can message me directly on, on LinkedIn messenger and be like, hey, this is what I took away from this. This is what I. You know, you can share any. Any type of feedback. Just keep it super simple. All right, so we got that. And then, y', all, let's go and enjoy some more design culture, some more intentionality. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out and share. I know there's just so many things that we can do as a. As a crew. And as a group and as a, as, as a culture, to be more inclusive, to be more supportive, to get better at knowledge sharing. And I think it's just a matter of like just practicing it, getting a little bit better at it and knowing where you can play. To be a little bit more proactive, less reactive, you know, a little bit more intentional. I think it's all about just bringing in a little bit more intention. And I think since you're here in the Grote app, you can, you can immediately go journal about what you learned today. You can go life score and how you're feeling today. You can go do a plan on how you're going to be a little bit more proactive about how you show up for your team this coming, this coming half. And again, just as a reminder, if you haven't yet, if you haven't yet, I'm going to put in the chat real quick the link to the design maturity model that we did while I was at Envision. This is a really great, just visualization of all this, all the research I showed today so you can check that out and how in the research of how it actually moves the needle for the business. Really great stuff. Design intention, design maturity. And then the other thing is like, it's like the second, it's almost, I mean, we're almost out of the first quarter here soon. So I want to encourage you to write your goals for this half and think about like, what big projects are you taking on this year and how can you align some of your personal goals with your project goals and how can you align even your passion goals with those as well? So the things that you're learning, the things that you're growing in that way you can align some of those big, giant ambitions with not only what you're doing, but with what the company's doing. And I think that will also serve you. So go write some goals if you have any questions. But thanks again. I'll see you all in the next one later.