If you’re at a company where the next step up the ladder means managing people more than managing the quality of the design the company is producing, get the hell out of there. There’s way too much design to be done to be losing good people to idiotic corporate structures that take our best designers out of commission.

– Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

Those are some harsh words from Mike. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I’ve now spent about an equal number of years at small companies as I have at big companies. And I’ve come up with a theory that I probably shouldn’t even write about yet, because I might be wrong. But in the spirit of thinking out loud, here goes — as long as you know I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

My theory is that as soon as a company grows to a size where the people who make the strategic decisions aren’t the same people who actively work on making the product, it becomes very hard for that company to continue to serve the needs of its customers. Not impossible, just much harder. We recently did some work with a startup where the founders are also the people who write all the code for their product. They were passionate, engaged, ego-less, and interested in only one thing: how to make their product better for customers.

But in bigger companies, what often happens is that once you enter the management career path, priorities start to change. You need to learn how to play the game so that you don’t become irrelevant. You need to watch your back. You need to figure out how HR works so that you can get to the next step on the ladder. Directors need to know how to become VPs. VPs need to know how to becomes Senior VPs. Senior VPs need to know if there is any growth left for them. And sooner or later, you spend so much time caught up in the politics of the organization that there is simply no room left to worry about customers.

I am not saying that all managers are like this — I have been in these situations myself, and I know how difficult it can be to stay sane, and I know many people who are managing the pressures extremely well. But it doesn’t help that we tend to measure business success by the size of a company, and personal success by the seniority of people’s roles within that company. In his much-praised post Startup = Growth, Paul Graham said the following:

Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company.

Mark Suster responds to this particular idea in a very interesting post called Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?:

Some entrepreneurs can make a dent in a smaller world. […] It’s ok to build a company that stays small, has a few million dollars in revenue and builds careers, bank accounts and enriches client experiences.

A poster child for this kind of startup is 37signals, whose CEO Jason Fried has repeatedly stated that they deliberately stay small. From an interview with Fast Company:

I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. […] There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to — our revenues and profits support that — but I think we’d be worse off.

My point is that each of us needs to think carefully about the kind of career we want to have. If the title at a big company is what you’re after, that’s great, but make sure it’s because that’s what you want, not what the system makes you think you want.

But if you find that a company focus on growth is making it harder to make customers happy, or that you’re no longer able to do the things that you love so much that you decided to make a career out of it, it might be time to consider working at a company where the decision-makers and the doers are the same people. You might make less money, but you’ll also be happier.

Cliff Kuang has a great article in Fast Company called Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment. He tells a bunch of stories about companies who realized that good design is good for business, and he also covers some of the organizational challenges:

When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else — figuring out what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none.

That last sentence reminds me of the old Seth Godin quote: “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.”

Scott Adams in Rewarding Work:

Whenever you see the x-factor in someone’s output — that little extra something that turns the good into the awesome — it’s a marker for intrinsic motivation. Monetary motivation plateaus at the point you think your work equals your pay. For most people, that happens when the product is good but not awesome. To get to awesome you need to think you might be changing the world, saving lives, redeeming your reputation, attracting the mate of your dreams, or something else that is emotionally large.

Angela Baldonero in Just Say No:

We’ve all seen the all-important and all-knowing executive team. The team that has all the answers and yet isn’t able to execute. I’ve seen too many executive teams where personal relationships and politics are the real business drivers behind-the-scenes. Business is done over cocktails, after hours and not in broad daylight. Personal agendas trump team goals. People smile and nod politely in meetings, then leave the meeting and corner the CEO to say what they “really think.”

Two articles on company culture caught my eye last week, both about what it’s like to work in organizations with no formal structure and communication. First, from the always excellent Design Staff, Design at Valve: collaborating and innovating in a flat organization is an interview with one of the designers at Valve:

It’s everyon’s job at Valve to recruit peers to help ship an idea. If I’m unable to recruit an engineer to help me ship an idea, it probably means either the idea isn’t solving an important problem, or it’s just not timely given our current priorities and ongoing projects. As individual contributors, w’re each constantly asking ourselves “Where is my time best spent?” The answer changes as projects ship and as new opportunities emerge.

For these self-selecting project teams to work, it’s important that we keep up on the various efforts happening around the company. Ther’s no top-down communication, so this typically happens by chatting with one another over lunch, or checking in with people to learn what’s happening.

Second, Brandon Keepers wrote about what it’s like to work at GitHub, and it struck me as remarkably similar to Valve’s culture:

Anarchy works wonderfully in a small group of individuals with a high level of trust. Everyone at GitHub has full access and permission to do whatever they want. Do great things and you earn respect. Abuse that freedom and you violate everyon’s trust.

Each person at GitHub has the responsibility to sell their ideas to the rest of the company. I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company. You can still work on it, but you will likely be working alone.

Both posts are worth reading, because they also explore some of the challenges of working in such environments. The teams seem well aware of the downsides of the cultures they’ve created, and they’re working hard to address those because the upsides vastly overshadow the downsides for them. And I guess that’s the key phrase — for them. I don’t think this type of environment will work in every company, but it’s encouraging to see how systems based solely on trust and self-governance can create productive environments and (extremely) happy employees.

For both companies, the measure of success is the quality and value of the products they ship to customers. That is fantastic, and could be the beginnings of a new era of true user-centered organizations. We need more experimentation that does away with conventional hierarchies and corporate structures so that we can find new ways to create value for our users.

In The Great Big Opportunity Matt Salisbury talks about subsidiarity — the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect:

There has been a lot of talk about the advent of the “information age.” For the first time since the industrial revolution, we have experienced a real disruptive change in business context. The age of communication is now, but if you pay too much attention to the technology, you’ll miss what’s really happening.

What’s “really happening” is that we now have the chance to work like humans instead of machines.  Communication and information’s advance is restoring subsidiarity to our brave new world.

I like his conclusion:

Ultimately, the information age is not about the information. It’s about human dignity and happiness informing how, where, and why we work.

Sobering words from the one OMGPOP employee who didn’t go to Zynga when they were bought out. From Turning down Zynga:

It’s not easy to pass up a lucrative salary and solid benefits, of course. But I realized that ultimately I was letting myself be guided by simple inertia. I was part of a herd, and that herd was all going in one direction (and doing so with great urgency). I would really only be doing it for the sake of going with the flow, and responding to pressure to either conform to corporate expectations, or be left behind.

These are not good reasons to join a company whose values are the opposite of your own, or to compromise your ideals, or to give up control of something you rightfully own.

See also: Want to build great software? Get your culture right first.

As part of the inaugural “Great IxDA Debate” at Interaction 12, Jeff Gothelf was asked to defend the position “Interaction design is not a respected design discipline”. He made the following point in his opening remarks:

Most of our employers still see us as wireframe monkeys and pixel pushers. They see us as annotators and documenters ”“ not as problem-solvers and product designers. They evaluate us based on our portfolios of decontextualized wireframes asking not how we solved the problem or what the outcome was but instead wondering what tool we used to create the straight lines in our wireframe decks.

I agree with Jeff that there are some major barriers to getting User Experience fully embedded specifically in large organizations. I think the core problem is that most large companies still don’t see Product (the site or app) as a “profitability lever” that can be pulled. Instead, they focus on two things that have stood the test of time through years and years of MBA classes: Marketing and Pricing. These levers usually result in immediate returns, and they are easy to quantify and measure over time.

For Marketing (including SEO and PPC) the equation usually looks this: More money invested = More traffic = Increased revenue.

For Pricing, it looks like this: Lower prices = Increased sales = Increased revenue (albeit at lower margins).

But Product lacks the immediacy and simple quantifiability that make the other levers so enticing. One version of the Product equation could look like this: Investment in UX = Increased conversion and/or better experiences = Long-term effect on loyalty, trust, and profitability. That doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way “MO’ MONEY, MO’ TRAFFIC!” does.

The consequence of UX not being seen as an essential profitability lever is that it’s rarely adequately represented in the upper echelons of large organizations. It’s mostly seen as an auxiliary function down in the trenches as opposed to a core foundation of the business.

I also agree with Jeff that we are partly to blame for this situation:

The fact that those within the profession struggle to unify around a name for our profession hurts our credibility.

Yup. I’ve never seen an industry so intent on undefining itself (like here, here, and here). But I digress…

The fact that our leaders cannot identify in concise and consistent terminologies what it is that we do, hinders our progress into the mainstream of the corporate world. The fact that we, as practitioners, fail to consistently and convincingly describe what we do and the impact we have on our teams, products and companies, speaks volumes towards the progress we still have to make to get the respect we deserve and that is afforded to all these other professions.

So how do we begin to solve this problem? We do it by ensuring the work we do is credible, consumable, and relevant:

• Credible: Use solid methodologies, accurate measurement, and success metrics that are clearly defined and agreed upon upfront.
• Consumable: Tell the story really well to business stakeholders, using plain language to explain our process and its benefits, as well as the business results.
• Relevant: Forget about squirrel projects for a while, and focus on things that are important to the business, like Checkout or Landing page optimization.

We should apply UX principles to our internal clients too. We know that organizational leaders are measured by (and therefore focused on) business results. So we need to not only design our Products to accomplish that, but we also need to design our deliverables in a way that shows the value of UX in clear and irrefutable ways. That’s how we get more CPO’s and CXO’s in large organizations.

And for the love of all that is holy, can we please just pick a name for ourselves and stick with it? I know there’s plenty wrong with the term User Experience Designer, but it’s the most recognizable thing we’ve got. It’s akin to attempts to replace the save icon - yes, it might not be appropriate any more, but why break users’ mental models about something that is so instantly recognizable?

Dave DeRuchie makes a strong case that we need to put down our phones and get rid of distractions in meetings:

When you accept a meeting invitation, accept that your attention and focus for that time is also blocked. Avoid distractions that take your focus from the subject matter at hand. Be more connected to what you are doing by being less connected.

There’s another way to look at this. See, we’re distracted in meetings because we don’t find them that valuable, so we try to fill the time with multitasking activities that we feel do add value. So if this becomes a thing - if we agree and communicate that a meeting blocks out not just our time but also 100% of our attention and focus - well, that places a huge burden of responsibility on the meeting organizer. If you’re going to arrange a meeting, and you expect everyone to pay attention without distraction, you’d better make sure that it’s a meeting worth having - agenda, solid outcomes, everyone contributing, etc. Otherwise we’ll come after you and demand our attention back.

I’ve written about Dhanji R. Prasanna excellent post on Google Wave and working at big companies before, but I wanted to come back to something he said that I just can’t get out of my head. In one section he talks about a topic I care about very much - what motivates people to do great work. I really like his perspective on the importance of incremental progress:

[As] a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.

I like the analogy of these small wins as Deus Ex Machina:

[It means] “God out of the machine”; a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

It’s so important for large teams to celebrate those wins with the people they work with every day - and to call out the “characters” responsible for accomplishing Deus Ex Machina. It is hard to get that right in large organizations because the invisibility of individual team members and the pressures to move on to The Next Thing aren’t naturally conducive to this type of behavior. But it’s possible if you work at it.

Whether you keep some champagne in a fridge, send out company-wide emails thanking people personally, or ring a bell every time code gets deployed (ok, that last one is lame, sorry), being in a large organization isn’t an excuse for acting like a faceless corporation.