Vova Safonov: Leadership in Tech

Three Tails podcast Vova Safonov. Expert in design management with extensive experience. Former head of product design at Pandadoc and team lead at RIADL. Developed and taught design and management courses for over 500 designers, authored a guide on design management and conducted over 200 mentorship sessions.

Hi Vova. Happy Monday. Thanks for finding the time to join us this Monday. I know Monday since 2024 can be busy because life is a mess in 2024 and I guess it's morning where you are. So thanks for finding time on Monday morning, which is the craziest period of time. I don't know how it's in your life, but you know, for me this is most like opening emails and starting replying them. So thanks for finding the time. How was life?

Yeah, nice to meet you, Vlad. Yeah, it's not busy probably for me this morning I just missed only my sports training. Cool.

Well, lucky you are. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's a big privilege for us to have a chance to speak freely and to exchange ideas. And I know that you've been in many shoes and you tried very different type of the projects and companies and businesses and I think such stories, they inspire people on very different levels. Those who are looking, you know, how to get things started, or someone who is just looking for some source of inspiration for some practical advices. And I'm aware that, you know, you lead teams, multiple teams, you lead different teams and like I wonder like as a person with such experience that you have. So I wonder, like, what's leadership for you?

Well, probably leadership for me is mainly about making the results, you know, and that kind of explains everything and consists out of every part of the leader role. Probably sometimes it gets to kind of achieving goals and that's where the problem begin to happen. You know, when you have shitty goals, you have shitty results probably. So I think the leader main job and kind of thing that you need to spend a lot of time and efforts for is kind of understanding if the goals are right, like how to focus properly. Because like manager ideally should be a lazy person. So they could start improve the processes, improve the workflow, everything, explain the goals and people would do it themselves. So this way the focus means the most probably like doing the right thing is the biggest problem. What I see right now is doing anything.

You've worked with big brands like Riddle, like I'm a big fan using documents like no affiliate program, just the user who loves the product and proud that it was built by Ukrainian engineers. You've been part of Netpeak, PandaDoc, all these reputable names and every time, I guess when you join your team and your organization, you should establish bridges between other leaders. And I wonder what do you think makes leaders cooperate between each other? And as for the goals that you set that should be set up, are those always data driven goals? Or you know, this may be just visionary goals like you know, we want buttonless phone, fuck it. Or you know, we measured everything we see. Okay, People have an average from 9 to 2 to 10 fingers. Maybe if we remove buttons it will be better. So can we touch base these two topics? How leaders build bridges. And you know, our goals always should be data driven.

Well, talking about the making bridges, what helps me the most is meetings and one to one meetings especially and talking to people with the mouse, you know, because like if you have reports kind of five to ten and even more, then you need to spend a lot of time kind of talking with them, supporting them, explaining what they are trying to achieve, giving them context. Especially if it's creative field like we work, if it's a factory, then probably you can give processes and just give people to do some stuff. But in our field you need to support mainly the team and give everything you have in your head so they could just do their work properly. And in this case talking about the driven part, that's actually my favorite topic. One of my favorite topics, I think that there is four pillars you can choose for be driven with something that's data of course, which is hyped kind of for now it's users and kind of what they're saying and interviews and stuff. That's frameworks and it can be Scrum, Agile, I don't know what else. Like you can choose anything. Sprints, Google Sprints. There is tons of fancy names and just tools can be also connected to this part. Like we just want to use Jira and that will help us to do everything. And the last but not least is vision, which you mentioned also. And that's probably the tools you need to use all of them at once and be not driven from my perspective, but informed, you know, because like it still should be common sense in that. So you combine it depending on different, I don't know, parts of the evolution of your company, of your project. Like when it's kind of startup and it's super small, the vision what drives it, like founder created the vision and if it's quite deliberate, I don't know, it helps the team to move on. When it's an old company, it's not enough to have a vision there. You need to understand what the a user base you have. And data helps you here and frameworks help you to align the big team, you know, and that's probably the point where a lot of people just choose something, something, one part of it and they are good with it. And that's where the problem comes. Also when you transfer the ownership, you just kind of do shit. And then you say, I was data driven, I used data, Data showed me something, I just did it. So like that's data, that's not me. Same with the user driven st. Like users told me they will be able to pay, I don't know, 50 bucks for my shit and they kind of started to pay it. Or Vision Founder came and he said something and everybody's like, whatever, I don't care. Like founder said, I'm just doing it. I don't know, I don't know. Probably he knows what he's doing, I'm just getting paid. So whatever framework is the same stuff you got in LinkedIn and you read about all these fancy frameworks and you just start to use it without understanding what the problem you have or why are you trying to use it, what are you trying to fix with it.

Commenting on the previous question, like, as for the one to one meetings to set up bridges, can you suggest the healthy number of one to one meetings per week or per month or overall?

Well, I see it the handle in the car, the speed handle, where you can choose the right cadence. And that depends highly on the person which you have a meeting with and your collaboration. I mean if it's developers meeting, from what I see it usually should be something more formal because sometimes like most of the true developers, they are not very social guys and you need to have some schedule, some agenda and you can kind of use it as a framework to ramp up the conversation. And for kind of designers, for me it works like an hour a week, works for me the best. Why one hour? Because half an hour is usually you can just discuss the work stuff and kind of just get to this close communication and the second half we usually start to talk like real shit, you know, like what's going on, what happens to me, like what I feel, what I think about all this situation. And that's why an hour usually works for me the best. Like sometimes people like less communicative. So you can switch it to bi weekly, but I would recommend with reports to have an hour, one hour. That's because like in half an hour there is not enough time to Talk quite deep enough with leaders from your horizontally, your peers, leaders, that depends. Probably I had, I don't know, half an hour a week, half an hour and two weeks. Usually leaders are more expressive, you know, so half an hour should be fine for that. And they also don't have a lot of time as me, of course, and that's why half an hour works best. It can be also one month if it's makes sense and you have time to kind of discuss everything. And that also deeply depends on how well your async communication built. Like how freely you feel to talk in the chats and stuff. Like so we need to keep this human to human connection. But in this way you will be able to communicate effectively asynchronously. Because all these messages, I don't know, chats and stuff can be understood differently with different context. It could be understood like toxic stuff, but you didn't mean anything toxic, that's only why you lost the connection. That's why everything went kinda bad.

Interesting. It's just, you know, I measure a lot of things and I automatically measured my time in Google Calendar and at some point there was like a month where I spent more time with like my marketing team and like market managers than you know, I spent with my wife. And it was like, wow. Like seems like, you know, we're talking too much of marketing. But I guess no one can underestimate marketing. You worked with different size of businesses, with unicorns, like PandaDoc, with smaller startups and in different organizations, I guess different sorts of leading is required and specifically in product evolution. So like have you noticed any very polar approaches in doing something in large companies, corporates versus in startups in terms of like product design or leading people?

Yeah, definitely. There is an interesting part when startups, they want the cool processes of fancy enterprise, you know, and enterprise want the chaos of the startup because startup probably can create stuff and they just do things, you know, like in the months you can do a lot of things and enterprise, you have all the fancy processes and everything works fine, but you forgot how to make innovations. You have a lot of stakeholders, you need to satisfy them all. And that's interesting stuff. And when I have, I have a lot of mentorship, like a big mentorship practice with design managers and probably most bigger part of them comes with something like I want better processes and I like asking them, but why, why do you need processes if it works? What do you mean by processes? I don't know. Something that big companies, they have those fancy processes, it will fix all My problems. But that could be probably added to the part with the frameworks and stuff. When you try to move your responsibility to something like processes, like I should have good processes, shitty processes. I don't give.

Yeah. Rely too much on system of actions so that it can guarantee the success instead of you experimenting. Do you feel that the market is way different from what it used to be like in 2018 versus 2020, both in it and overall? Because I think that. Do you feel there is a different approach in tackling talent market? Is it easy to find a job now?

You mean the perspective of the company or of the individual person?

I think from the individual person because most of the people they are exploring now, you know, the world trying to understand, you know, if it's still. If things have worked the way that used to work, if talent is still in demand or something else. Like. So, yeah, from the perspective of just, you know, a seeker of opportunity.

Well, that's complicated and probably should anyway. Tackle the boss parts. Like from the standpoint of the company, they became kind of more cautious with hiring people because like in 2018, especially when Covid started, like that comes to something like, let's double the headcount and do some project stuff. We have tons of money, we just need to do something. And they started to hire fucking everyone, you know, and from the standpoint of people, it became complicated because it's not enough to be an average person, you know, like previously it was like we just need a designer and designers, like we are the designers, hire us, you know, and now you should kind of think about yourself. Well, probably it was relevant in any time, but for now it becomes more important, like to tackle yourself as a product. Like how I work with my personal marketing, how I define myself as a product. The salary can be thought about as a subscription for you. And in this case you need to give something specific to the company. Some specific skills, some unique, I don't know, skills you have or like other people don't have or something like that.

What may be like the top three red flags or like top three recommendations for like whoever may be looking for job opportunity in the like technology business or whatever. Like which resume may end up appearing in front of the hiring manager. Like, you know, what scenes. And I'm sure that this 500 profiles, it won't even you or even the hiring manager who reviews. I guess, you know, there is some tool that glances them and there are some red flags. So can you share maybe, you know, any insights or findings on like what may be like initial Showstopper of not moving further with the exploration of the profile of the candidate or any hints what is nice to add in the profile that will say okay, seems like you know, I would like to learn more about this person.

Well probably the main problem the system is corrupt itself, you know, corrupted itself because when you, when companies create the job description they just copy paste someone description and just add some shitty stuff. And you don't make this preparation work that should be done here. Like you need to pick three main kind of skills you need for the person like and three main tasks that they are will be doing and probably two, three additional one that would be nice to have but whatever we'll see and usually just have a list of 15, 20 from someone's description and you're like let's check what's going on. But that's probably for the like that influence the whole process and for the person who is applying that's a problem to go through these 700 people, you know, because I don't know like which System picks those CVs and how the recruiter helps me to make this number less. But like like my particular recruiter we work the last time with, she sent me like 30 CVs and portfolios after the process. So somehow she cut 5, 600 of people like I don't know how but I very appreciate her efforts. And after that it takes quite a little amount of time to figure out do I want to talk with this person or not. And that's usually I don't know the CV I'm trying to figure out does this person able to have the experience I need. Not even it's briefly described or something but I don't know what was the products the person worked with and could this experience could be relevant. For example, I was looking for the gross designers and the gross design. And I know in general the gross part of the product management is kind of rare one because for that you need to have a major product which has a product market fit, you know, and they can work with a gross part. And designers don't understand what we're talking about. And I was trying to find the major companies in the CDs. Then you're kind of spend I don't know, 30 seconds checking the portfolio and usually I'm trying to find a well aligned. At least everything is on the right place. There is no kind of messy stuff text jumping or something because I don't have time to work with inaccuracy or something like that. That's a vital part for the designer and from my experience, takes a lot of time to fix. So after that we can talk and then I am trying to understand what the real process and experience of the person is because. Because most of the people are falling to describing the process they have read in articles and how the ideal process should look like. But that's really rare occasion when you have something looking like a proper process.

In this case and imagine the world in a few years later on or maybe even looking into the future. Like, do you think the future of work will look the same way as it looks now where the person has a job offer, the person works eight hours a day, the person has a vacation and career and stuff. Do you think the whole concept of work will remain the same with all the AI and stuff and analysis of own performances? Because, you know, when I think of this, I have like sometimes like a vision or a guess that we may end up having the regular jobs and we will be just like units with an hourly performance and we may like, you know, work two hours a dj, two hours a product manager, two hours a gardener. Another time we just spend, you know, playing with skits or like smoking dope. Will there be still space for a talent, creative talent, instead of just, you know, prompting the design of products for the designers particularly?

I think the demand kind of, and the things you need to know and skills you need to have is growing and it's. It becomes harder to get them, you know, because like it's very hard to find a job right now as a junior designer, especially trainee. Like you need to be kind of, from what I think business usually looks for the person who will solve the problem, whatever. It's designer, developer. You just want the person who will solve your fucking stuff or even find this stuff to solve. So that's why, from my perspective, why the position of product manager becomes so highly demanded last year. There is a wide range of product managers. They can be driven by any stuff we mentioned before. They can have different experience from micromanaging the team or I don't know, given the context, like whatever, there is tons of combinations. And still you look for the person who will solve the product stuff, something with developers, something with designers, something with go to market and they will tackle all these conversations and I don't know what particularly they will do, but kind of let them fix it. And the same comes to the designers. You just need to. And the AI stuff, the AI stuff can create anything. And with time it will be able to create even more. But I mean, you still need to Understand what to solve and that's where most of the people fail. So from what I see, the entrepreneurship mindset will be in high demand still, as usual. And when you don't have it at all and you just want to do the stuff that you anyone told you to do, that will be a problem and the salary will be going lower and there will be less places to kind of work with and the government will need to kind of give this, these people to do something. I don't know, probably gaming is the best part that comes to my mind. So you can just spend time in the games and have this basic income like, like just paying for being a citizen and. But that's not the best life probably.

But so we're talking about universal like income that Mr. Musk is so teaching the whole thing. And yeah, like mindset is something that is very tricky and for me it's, it is yet not clear how this can be developed into the entrepreneurial ship mindset of the personality. What type of experiences create mindset? Is it something that can be gained as a skill like entrepreneurship? Is it a soft skill, a hard skill or just doom because you keep creating stuff.

Or a talent.

Or a talent. Yeah, so. Or a talent. And yeah, speaking about the talent, I know that you have your own design management course and you mentor people. You seed this seeds of future talents. Like you know, first, like why do you do this? This is a very cool activity that I'm sure requires a lot of time and inner energy as I may guess. And on the other side, you know people when they come to you for your design courses, are they looking for like leadership or mentorship or coaching and you know, what is the differences in your mind was this three substances?

Well, I came to this part after university. I started to talk a lot in university, got my kind of diploma. Then I got a PhD for I don't know, some reason. And I spent three years lecturing in the university. And that was a good start for me from, from what I see here. Like it helps me to kind of think about my experience and put it in the like theory and experience together. They help you to understand better what you are doing and kind of feeling consciously in the points of making decisions or figuring out what's going on. So also I like to have an impact for the products, creating interesting stuff, interesting things. And I started when I switched to design. I started with simple courses in design, then I switched to more complex ones with mobile design, UX design and then I came to the design management because that helps Me as a leader to influence the product better, you know, like as a designer I can't do much. Well, I can, but that depends highly on the environment. And as a leader, as a manager, I can influence people, influence designers and create something really valuable. The same with the courses. When I just teach designers to design, that's kind of, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 designers that will go to design something. And now I am teaching design managers and they will go, they have their own teams, you know, and they influence their products. And that's much bigger impact for me personally. And usually they come with questions of yeah, of course the mentorship part is a big one because like my courses, they all have the part not only of the like with the information and cases, but also these one to ones that I love, absolutely love when we can talk their particular cases and discuss their situation and the plan, what to do with it. And the problem with design management, I see that that's a lack of information. There is a lack of information for product management itself. I mean the real product management, not the courses when you can become a product manager and do some work. But for design managers it's even less. Usually you have a lot of information of a general management. But what to do with the designers, what particular instruments should they learn and understand how to work with the designers. And business usually struggles to work with the designers because it's hard to kind of make this dialogue, you know, like business wants earn money or save money from the design management and design management and design part. They just want to do designs, we just need to do designs. We just need to talk to people. We have a lot of stuff to do, you know, like who cares about this money? And that's an interesting part. And I think that's also a problem of maybe the use of the field. Like it's not so young, but still development, it usually has like 50 people developers. And what you want it or not, you need to figure out like you have a lot of money, you have a big budget for the year, you have a P and L, you have a lot of people, you need to handle their own stuff. So that's kind of more about real management. And design is usually smaller and they just don't have these problems yet or they think they don't have these problems with budget and thinking about the company goals.

Foreign, what's your expectations on 2050? How do you think world will be better?

I hope to be alive, you know, by the time let's imagine this is.

A done deal just like Stay hydrated. Like, drink water and no, you'll be like, what about the world?

I don't know. I don't have any idea actually. Probably we will be able to spend the time how we want to do it, you know, and there will be much more interesting things to do. Like it changed through the last 30 years. And like probably the next 30 years, the entertainment part will be more interesting. There will be time to live our lives, I don't know, to retire.

The recent product designers will still have like work in 2015. Like, will this be still a job and a demand?

Well, I'm not sure, like the product design is a part of it. I mean, the design itself is something where you create a vision of something that you're trying to look into the future with the design. It's faster and easier to design something than to develop something. So the main function of the design usually is to kind of forecast the future and to look into it. So probably it will still be a case, you know, but the tools will be more complex, the things you will be able to create will be more complex. So you'll be trying to kind of designing the future for the humanity or something like that, you know, like how the. Not the building or flat will look like, but the whole city or something kind of more complicated because the challenges will be bigger, there will be more people, there will be more, I don't know, shittier atmosphere, probably ecology stuff. And you will need to figure out how to work in this environment. And you will still need to be, you still need to design it because innovations is like, it's become easier and faster to develop. Website, for example. But still the innovations, they take insane amount of time from the engineering standpoint. And there is a lot of stuff you can't handle right now or it's too expensive to handle. For example, I'm working in an AI startup and we have a big AI team and a lot of specialists and we kind of. I shared with them the meme where the girl mentioned that she wants to create art and someone to tackle her home stuff and not opposite, like AI creating art. And I'm kind of tackling my home stuff. And they mentioned that one of the biggest problem that was in kind of new stuff for me is folding clothes that it's very complicated to create and a machine that will be folding the different clauses because there are a lot of options, a lot of different clause and stuff like, and there is still a lot of things that we need to do at home that takes insane amount of time. And it doesn't make sense to solve them from the engineering standpoint. And that's a big field you know, you need to tackle, right?

I mean, yeah, hopefully we'll see the future bright and clear and atmosphere hopefully will be better and the world will still exist. Would be curious to compare it with our guesses. But Bo, I appreciate a lot your time on this Monday morning. I know you can do like many other many more things, but I think this discussion would bring some interesting insights for those who are exploring opportunities and particularly in redesigning product design. Because for me personally I got discovered this domain as broad as is like a year or a few years ago. Before that it was more like, you know, a pretty walk and not clear essence. But even now it is still unclear in some spaces. But I at least now see the horizon of uncleanness and this makes me think about all the perspectives and power of this skill and instrument.

Yeah. Thank you for inviting me as you could understand, I guess that I like to talk. That's why I have all these courses, mentorship, whatever else. So yeah, thank you, that was very interesting.

Thanks.

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