On today's episode of The Design Systems Podcast, Allison Shaw, Director of Design at Adobe, shares insights from her expansive journey in design systems. From her early days modernizing Yelp’s desktop experience to her pivotal roles at Zendesk and Adobe, Allison talks openly about transitioning from a designer IC role to management, the power of humility, and the importance of fostering strong mentor relationships. Check it out!
Guest
Allison helps companies mature and scale their design system practices and is passionate about inclusive, accessible design. Currently, Allison is the Director of Design for the Spectrum Design System at Adobe, leading the core design system and unified experiences across Creative Cloud and Generative AI. She previously led the Garden Design System at Zendesk, and also worked across consumer tech at places like Thumbtack, Twitter, and Yelp.
Transcript
Chris Strahl [00:00:00]:
Hi and welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. This podcast is about the place where design and development overlap. We talk with experts to get their point of view about trends in design code and how it relates to the world around us. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at Knapsack.cloud. If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or generally tell us what you think, go ahead and tweet us at thedspod. We'd love to hear from you.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Today I'm here with Allison Shaw from Adobe. Hey Alison, welcome to the program.
Allison Shaw [00:00:29]:
Hey Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Strahl [00:00:31]:
Long time coming. I'm really glad that you're on. Super excited to talk to you. We had another chat with Sean Charis from the spectrum team a couple of months back, and it was really fun to spend some time chatting with you in San Francisco a couple of months ago, talking about what you've been up to, talking about design leadership. And so rather than be necessarily a talk about Spectrum today, a lot of what we're going to talk about is like how you got to the spectrum team in the place that you're at right now. So I think a great starting point for all this is to try to understand what do you do at Adobe?
Allison Shaw [00:01:04]:
Sure. So I'm the director of design for the Spectrum core design team. I oversee the two design teams that are actually responsible for designing spectrum, and I also oversee one of our unified experience teams, the one that works directly with the creative cloud group. I also have two individual contributors who report directly to me. One of them is our senior staff content designer. She has actually been responsible for a lot of the strategy and some of the foundational elements of spectrum. And I'll also have a unified, experienced designer who's focused on our generative AI efforts.
Chris Strahl [00:01:45]:
Cool. Talk to me a little bit about spectrum. Just as a quick refresher, if somebody hasn't heard the prior podcast, get a sense of how the design system and the team and how those are kind of the same thing where you're at.
Allison Shaw [00:01:59]:
Definitely. So Spectrum is a long running design system. We've been around for over ten years now. My boss Sean, who you talked with, was one of the originators of the system, and his organization has a huge footprint within Adobe design. We've got are brand designers. So those folks are responsible for all of the in app brand moments, icons, splash screens, illustrations, stuff like that. We also have the creative engineering group. They've got prototyping as well as being responsible for some of the implementations of spectrum.
And then content strategy is also under Sean plus my group. So basically, anything that has to do with the expression of the Adobe brand inside of our products is all under the spectrum umbrella at Adobe.
Chris Strahl [00:02:51]:
Yeah, and I just can't get over how cool that is. I think that one of the really interesting things about the way that Adobe has organized itself is around this idea. That brand expression, especially as it relates to product, is its own thing. That is its distinct organizational unit that has that management of the design system. And I think a big part of why you joined up in the role that you're in is largely the opportunity to work inside of a framework like that.
Allison Shaw [00:03:20]:
Absolutely. I think it's one of the most optimal organizational structures for design systems that I've ever been a part of. And I've been working in design systems since 2013. So I have some experience. Old hat at this point, but being able to kind of have all of these groups that are so responsible for the expression of the Adobe brand together in one place, it just tears down a lot of the barriers that you sometimes see crop up, and it makes for a much more integrated expression of the Adobe brand within our products.
Chris Strahl [00:03:52]:
So talk to me a little bit about how you got here, because I think your journey is an interesting one. You know, I think that the first time I had ever really run into you, you were at Zendesk, and I don't think we actually ever met face to face or anything like that. But, like, I remember seeing your posts and talk a lot about design systems, and that was sort of where I got to have an impression of your excitement about systems, thinking about design. But there's obviously a richer backstory here. So kind of take me through how you got to this point.
Allison Shaw [00:04:23]:
Yeah, I'll start at the very beginning. Everything is kind of built on the previous step to get to where I am. I started playing around on the Internet when I was a teenager, and I got this HTML book, coding book. It was for HTML two. And I kind of as like this nerdy teenager sat in my room figuring out how to make things show up on the Internet, and I kind of fell in love with that power of like making something and then a bunch of people who you've never met before can come and interact with that. And I thought that was just so cool.
Chris Strahl [00:04:58]:
Did you have a site counter? Cause I totally had a site counter.
Allison Shaw [00:05:00]:
Oh, hell yeah, I had a site counter. Yeah, for sure. The original metric.
Chris Strahl [00:05:04]:
That was funny. I remember showing my mom like, hey, like, 80 people have been to my website, and I think that she probably just, like, refreshed the page 80 times.
Allison Shaw [00:05:13]:
Could have been. Could have been. So I got my start there. And when I came time for going to college, I originally was part of this, like, multimedia major, which was teaching us flash and, you know, how to use Photoshop and all of this stuff. And ultimately, I kind of went in a different direction because I knew that that academic program was not keeping up with the technology. And so I got this foundational design education in just, like, straight up print graphic design. So, you know, learning colors, learning typography, learning layout, and really making sure that I had the foundations for a strong design aesthetic and wound my way from initially working in print design back to web design. And, you know, it was kind of 2008, 2009, it was the great recession.
I got laid off, and the phone, the Apple iPhone had come out. And I, of course, was an early adopter of that and was just again, like, enamored of this, like, new piece of technology that was enabling people to connect faster and better. And so I decided that I was going to go to graduate school for interaction design. And I attended the program at School of Visual Arts with Liz Danzigo, the interaction design MFA there, and from there, ended up working at Yelp. As my first job, Yelp hired me and one other designer at the time, my counterpart, was in charge of the mobile apps, and I was in charge of the desktop web experience. And at that time, the mobile apps were really where a lot of the growth was happening. But people were still coming to the website, and they just looked like completely different products. So I was in charge of starting to modernize that and starting to bring some of that new visual language from the mobile apps over into desktop.
Chris Strahl [00:07:09]:
Well, and that was such a weird time to be in the land of design, right? Because that was in the heart of the consumerization of enterprise experience, right? So the iPhone comes out. All of a sudden, everybody has a pretty shiny new app, and then all of a sudden, everybody at work and in every other part of their lives wants that shiny app experience. And I think a lot of us, myself included, had come from a very different idea of what the web was. And even with your background in print and physical media, right, that's one of the habits I always talk about needing to break as a part of understanding systems is that while there are systems in that kind of design, it's very different than in the world of digital. And so you have this, like, crazy environment that you're thrust into. It's your first job. It's funny, I was living in Seattle at the time, and I thought Seattle was the center of the universe, but obviously San Francisco, Washington. And so you're there.
You get this cool job at Yelp, and you're building this experience in a world when people were putting mobile dot in front of everything and calling it a mobile app experience. So talk to me about what that actually looked like in terms of your day to day work.
Allison Shaw [00:08:16]:
My first big project was to actually redesign the business page. So if you're on your desktop and you're searching and you click Yelp link, that's where you're headed to. It's the restaurants page or the plumber's page or whatever it is. And that assignment was crazy because it's where Yelp made all of its money. It's where a huge part of the ad revenue came from. It's where a huge part of the actual consumer discovery of Yelp would come from as well. So there was a lot of kind of responsibility bound up in that and translating an app experience which is very focused into a desktop web experience, which there's just a bigger canvas to play with and a different kind of visual vernacular at the time. Right? Like, the mobile apps were very skeuomorphic.
They were very shiny. Everything was still. It was still aqua. Right? Like, everything was still. Everything was sweating. It had a sheen to it. Right.
Chris Strahl [00:09:15]:
This is like the most memory lane conversation I've had in a while.
Allison Shaw [00:09:19]:
There's, you know, there was something to be said for it. So trying to come up with the visual language there to bridge this gap between what the mobile phones were and the desktop experience was a big part of the initial work around the business page. But the funny thing was that design work for the business page happened fairly quickly. It was the build out of the business page that we spent the bulk of our time in. And that was where we were starting to reckon with what my boss Eric called the Plumber in Eugene problem, which is that you want to be able and you build your initial designs off of some of the most famous restaurants in San Francisco in the world. And they've got beautiful photos and they've got professional menu pictures and stuff like that. And then there's the plumber in Eugene, Oregon, who has no reviews, has no photos, is probably an unclaimed business, and you have to make something that's going to work for these two extremes and everything in the middle.
Chris Strahl [00:10:21]:
Right? So how do you have the french laundry next to, like, the plumber and have that experience be one experience that works for that gigantic diversity.
Allison Shaw [00:10:30]:
Exactly. And the other really interesting thing about Yelp was that they were in the middle of a huge international expansion. So we weren't only dealing with English as the display language. We were moving into Europe. We were also moving into Japan at the time. So all of these different languages with their different average characters per word and trying to design for these different consumer experiences and different cultures around the web. And so, so much of that build out work was me as a designer, learning and then reckoning with all of these different use cases. And how do you build a system that's going to work for every single piece of this and at every extreme end, the middle of that continuum as well? So it was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of trial and error. And the other thing that was interesting was, like, throughout all of this work, we're kind of incrementally shipping features, so we're not flipping a switch, and we're going to switch the entire visual language of yelp.com in one go. And so we're learning about how are we going to do this? And then there's a bunch of other areas of Yelp that I'm not specifically focused on who are like, hey, we really want to use this stuff. It looks so much better than what we've been able to do before. We want to be able to put this new kind of button on our page. And I'm only one person for this whole product organization and trying to figure out, okay, well, how am I going to actually scale myself so that other people can use this at the same time? And that's really where design systems came into the picture.
Chris Strahl [00:12:13]:
So that's a crazy thing if you think about what time that was, right? Like the timeframe there is the very, very earliest days, I would say, what was that, like, 2013?
Allison Shaw [00:12:25]:
Yeah. I think my front end partner and I actually went to work in between Christmas and new year's. I think it was 2013, and really put together, like, a prototype of the first thing that eventually became what we were calling at the time, the Yelp style guide. And that style guide terminology that was rooted in my traditional design background, like building brands and building brand books.
Chris Strahl [00:12:51]:
Well, I mean, that's what we called them when we first started building these things, right? Was like digital style guides or, like, styling rules or, you know, when components finally came around. That was actually much later than when we were first starting to assemble these things together because it used to be like, you go and you hire an agency, or you'd get a bunch of designers, and they would make like a giant PDF of a thing and that giant PDF of a thing. And I'm not just saying that cause it's adobe. They were literally always, PDF's where they like it land in front of you, and, like, somebody would print that thing, right? And here's 140 pages, like, spiral bound of, like, this is the brand. And I remember thinking about the adaptation and the experience of those in the web and being like, how does anybody ever actually make that work? And the reality is, none of us ever did. You'd implement some percent of it, and you'd eventually be like, all right, cool, close enough. But the first time that we ever started really trying to be systematic about this stuff, it was taking what was a giant PDF that somebody would print and actually trying to figure out how to make that work in some basis in code.
Allison Shaw [00:13:56]:
That was definitely part of it. And I remember also talking with the brand designers at Yelp and asking them what they were doing for their style guide, and was there anything that I could take out of that or translate for the web for them? And it was all kind of muddied back then. It was everything back then.
Chris Strahl [00:14:14]:
So you go from this place where you get this design background, you have this interesting introduction to the world of design at this big company that at the time was a really hot tech brand. Then youre now in this place where youve built all this stuff. What ends up being your next move?
Allison Shaw [00:14:30]:
After Yelp, I went to a series of really consumer oriented companies. I went to Twitter, and I spent a year there working on their growth team. You cant take, I think once youre a systems person, you cant really ever remove yourself from that entirely. I was always really interested in trying to contribute. They were making the transition from Photoshop to sketch at that time, and so trying to get to a place where we were able to create some sort of systemization within sketch. I remember helping to teach designers how to make some of that transition. After Twitter, I went to thumbtack, which is a business aimed at consumers, helping them find local professional services. So if you need a landscaper, you need a wedding photographer, you would search on thumbtack, and they would put you in touch.
Chris Strahl [00:15:21]:
Shockingly similar to Yelp.
Allison Shaw [00:15:23]:
Yeah. Yes, it was. It turned out that, like, Yelp helped me understand that I actually really love helping small businesses kind of flourish. My dad was a small business owner, and so it was kind of a cool area to be in. But in any event, I worked on the consumer product there, so, you know, working on messaging and scheduling and stuff like that. And they were also in the middle of putting together their design system, which was called thumbprint. And I tried to contribute that whenever my work would allow me to do that as well. And around that time, like, around 2017, I was starting to feel, I think, like a lot of people in tech go through this, right? There was a period of burnout and really trying to figure out what the next move was going to be and what was going to make me happy with my career and stuff like that.
Chris Strahl [00:16:15]:
I mean, I think everybody got to the point where we all seriously considered, like, quitting our jobs and starting a bar or, like, farming or something. I still think about farming, honestly. Like, I think I might do that someday.
Allison Shaw [00:16:26]:
Yeah, I mean, I think maybe, like, a bakery could be a really fun thing to do for the rest of my life. So I went through this, and I was thinking back, like, when was I having the most fun in my career? What were the things I was really naturally drawn to? And I just kept thinking back to shipping this yelp design system, the style guide. How fun it was to be so directly working with engineering and really fine tuning little details and making sure that things were coming across in such a way that was really joyful for whoever was going to use the product. And in 2017 is when there actually started to be full time roles posted for design systems. So I interviewed at Zendesk and got myself a job there. I was their first full time design systems designer, hired specifically for the design system. My first boss there, Jonathan Semple, who I'm still in touch with, he and I are good buddies. He created this, like, really great working environment where we were able to form this really fantastic creative partnership.
And that kind of has set the stage for everything that came after Zendesk and enabled me to move into this position at Adobe as well.
Chris Strahl [00:17:39]:
So when you think about that transition, you went from a place where you're predominantly doing product design, but you always had this fascination with the systems and the ways of working that were a part of that. And as you kind of got more and more experience in the space, that led to this ever sort of escalating focus on how do I get more into systems? How do I get more into this place that you found that you were really stoked to be in, and that led you ultimately to have management responsibilities, director responsibilities, and now you're leading a major effort at, I would say, one of the biggest design companies that's ever existed. If somebody were to look at that objectively, that's a really cool kind of way of progressing towards a passion about both design and also the very specific part of all of this, which was largely about how do I get other people, developers, designers, whomever, all on the same page about how we implement these big systems. Do you feel like that's just luck? Is that intention, like, how did you get there? And was this something that you, like, designed and followed a pathway for, or is this just like the way the universe blew you?
Allison Shaw [00:18:59]:
It's both, right? Certainly in 2017, there was that very intentional transition. I'm gonna focus on this now. And I actually, like, took a little weekend seminar with a coach in the San Francisco area that was all about getting really specific about your purpose and defining what the work of your life was going to be. And it was kind of heady, you know, it was a little hippie.
Chris Strahl [00:19:24]:
Yeah. I'm the CEO of a tech startup. Like, people are like, come to my sweat lodge. I'm always like, I don't know.
Allison Shaw [00:19:29]:
Yeah. And I was a little bit skeptical going into it, but it actually did create this space for me to sit down and be like, actually like this focus that I've had on small business and helping people. In small business, it's really about helping people do the work that they want to do. And as a designer myself, I know where my frustration pieces are. And I see all of this inefficiency in the product development lifecycle where people just redesign things over and over and over again. And it just drove me crazy, because every time someone does that, there's new DNA that gets inserted. And so suddenly, you know, something that could have been very simple suddenly becomes very complicated, and it doesn't have to be that way. So I did kind of decide to make this focus, but I think for me, the thing that's been interesting is, like, the transition to leadership and the transition to management was something that was a little bit more like, well, in order to be able to achieve this thing for the design system at Zendesk for Garden, I need to now hire somebody because there's too much work.
Okay, cool, I'll manage. And I was interested in managing. I was interested in helping the careers of other people. Then it ended up being, well, we've hired the one person. It turns out we actually should have hired three. So I'll hire three more people. Right. And you kind of go through this whole thing where you're like, oh, and now I see this other problem.
So now the issue is, like, we need to help people adopt this design system. Well, I guess I better go out and do a roadshow and get in front of people and start, like, educating people. Okay, so now that's part of my job. And so it was this kind of just like, kind of like, series of stepping up and meeting the moment that kind of led me to where I ended up at Zendesk, which I was the director of design systems for the design side of the house.
Chris Strahl [00:21:18]:
Thats an incredible story. Largely because I think about back on my own experience to the first time I ever had to manage somebody, and I was objectively terrified of it. Right. That person, they probably thought they smelled bad because im like, I dont know how to even talk about this, right. Because one of the things that we're frankly, like, pretty terrible at as an industry is preparing people for the idea of, like, what actually being responsible for the success of someone else is kind of all about. Like you said, that meeting in the moment is fascinating because I can imagine that it was with no small amount of anxiety that you took that series of steps. And it also seemed like it happened pretty quickly. Like, there was a couple of years there where it sounds like that comfort zone was probably pushed frequently.
And so talk to me about how you overcome that, because I think there's this interesting idea of, like, someone following their passion, putting themselves in a position where they can be successful, and then rising to meet that challenge at the exact moment that it was necessary to do so. How did you get the courage for that?
Allison Shaw [00:22:21]:
One of the things that you learn how to do when you tell your professional story is kind of like, skip over the parts that weren't so great. And truthfully, like, there have been moments in this, like, professional arc where I was not a good employee. I was not meeting the expectations of my managers, and kind of learning from that and trying to peel apart, like, okay, like, sometimes you just don't get along with a person, right? You just kind of have to figure out how to deal with that, but you're always part of whatever interaction is happening. And so I really stepped back and did a lot of reflection on, like, where had I made my missteps? What mistakes was I making that had allowed me to get into a place where I wasn't meeting expectations? And what I kind of came back to is, like, you always have to be your own advocate. You always have to speak up when you're not getting something that you need. You always have to be willing to step up to the plate and sell your work as being valuable. You have to learn how to speak the language of the business so that they understand why you're spending time doing something that might not seem like it connects directly to an OKR or a particular metric. And when I had that bit of clarity, that's kind of allowed me to.
To have the courage every time when I need to, to step up and say, like, I think this needs to happen. This is what I would do here, and this is what you would get out of it if you let me do this thing. And that has helped tremendously, I would.
Chris Strahl [00:24:08]:
Say, well, I love how you frame that. Right? Because, first of all, self reflection is incredibly hard, and we all probably could do more of it. But the ability to really self examine and say, like, hey, look, I have a responsibility for these parts of my life. Sometimes that doesn't get met, and here's why. And then the ability to take that and then make it actionable through the things you said. And I think it's wonderful. It reminded me of when we had PJ on, and he was talking about the idea of, like, how do you speak the language of your company to be able to sell a design system? You've echoed that before when you basically said, like, hey, you know, if you can't sell yourself and sell your work, it makes it a lot harder to really have any clout to get to things done that you want to get done. But that advocacy sense and the ability to speak out, I think that's where a lot of people really struggle, because there's these vulnerable moments and these moments of anxiety that are a part of it.
And I think that really embracing that has been something that, like, has worked out okay for me. Maybe. I don't know. Like, it's still a startup. Who knows?
Allison Shaw [00:25:14]:
It's doing good.
Chris Strahl [00:25:15]:
Yeah, you know, hey, things are great. I had a great day. I was talking with you before the show about, like, how excited I am to see eight times the number of users this year as there was last year. But the idea of how do you step out in that moment? I want to ask you one more thing about that. Was there ever a time where you really had that sense of crippling self doubt about, like, oh, man, did I really blow this by putting myself out there in this moment for this thing?
Allison Shaw [00:25:42]:
Definitely. I don't know too much about other people's experiences, like, with design systems, but I think one of the things that design systems tend to do, or at least in my experience, is that design systems tends to hold a mirror up to an organization and say, do you really want to be working this way. Do you really believe this is the best way for your organization to run? And when you do that in front of powerful people, that is scary as heck.
Chris Strahl [00:26:12]:
It's often not well received. Right. People are like, gross. Yeah. Like, oh, man.
Allison Shaw [00:26:17]:
Yeah. And I think when I've faced those things, first of all, I've absolutely had moments where I've been like, well, that was bad. I guess I'm going to have to, like, dig myself out of that one.
Chris Strahl [00:26:28]:
Better go polish the old resume.
Allison Shaw [00:26:31]:
Okay. Good luck to me. But I have had to learn how to communicate in ways, to be able to hold those mirrors up in ways that are not threatening and in ways that really let the design system and me show up as a partner for change and a champion for the goals of the business, for the goals of the organization, and letting people come into that. I'm not someone who's going to go and claim credit for things. I'm going to let my team take credit for things. I'm going to let the teams that actually did the work of implementing the design system in their product take credit for that. I'm building a tool. The tool gets used.
That's all I care about. The way that you make it successful is for you and your team. That's what I want you to be able to feel good about, and that's what I want to enable for you.
Chris Strahl [00:27:22]:
Yeah, I think that's also, like, an interesting skill to develop. Right. Because there's a humility that comes along with that that is really challenging. Right? Like, when you work really hard on something and you're instrumental to the success of it, giving away the credit sometimes doesn't feel good. And you watch a lot of people get busted by ego where like, hey, I did this thing or I did this thing or this was my project or my team or something like that, right? And that sort of possessive idea of the work or the success, it trips a lot of people because you should be proud of the work you've done. Anyone should be. But the ability to say, like, how do I show humility in that moment and really highlight the other people that help make that possible? Nobody succeeds in technology alone. All of the stuff that we work on is far too complex.
It absolutely exceeds any one individual in pretty much every case I've ever seen. But the ability to give that up, man, that can feel really weird sometimes.
Allison Shaw [00:28:23]:
It can. And I think for me, that's where having a really great relationship with my boss, my executives, so that they are able to see that kind of in the background is also important, right? Because in order to become ever more senior in your career and make ever larger impacts, you also do have to have mentors and you have to have advocates who are going to be pitching the design system. Even if you're not in the room advocating for someone to get a promotion, especially because they're not going to be in the room at that time. And at the same time, like, providing them with the information that they need in order to actually be able to make those cases compellingly is really important. That's why for me, having those managers, having those mentors, having those really great relationships with the executive team has really been an important part of my own career trajectory, for sure. And I think also the success of the design systems that I've been on.
Chris Strahl [00:29:24]:
You've talked a lot about this pathway to where you're at now. Let me focus on where you're at now again for a minute. The interesting thing that happened, I think, somewhere in the past couple of years for you is you went from that place where you were making the thing to the place where you were managing the people that make the thing and that transitions weird and awkward and hard because your skill set and how you've self identified for so long is somebody that is really good at product design. And now all of a sudden, it's like your schedule changes, your work changes, the focus changes. I remember when I first started managing people, I was like, God, how does anybody get anything done with so many meetings? But you realize that, like, your meetings are your productivity. All these different things that happen, that shift in that mindset from, like, I build this to, I manage a team that builds this. Talk to me a little bit about that transition.
Allison Shaw [00:30:20]:
Yeah, I think, like many designers, I had that hard transition of like. But I still want to be in the work and I still want to be able to, you know, feel my own impact on pixels. And first of all, I'm not a perfect manager. I absolutely have made tons of mistakes, and I've learned from all of them as I tried to do. But one of the things that really shifted my perspective on what my role was as a manager was this shift in the thinking about what my own design product was. So when I was a product designer, when I was a systems designer, there's something that you can see that you can make. And I took some courses with design department and Mia Bloom, and her core philosophy about management and design management is that you're still a designer now. You're a designer of teams.
You're a designer of processes. You're a designer of culture. And once I was able to make that shift in my brain, it became a lot easier for me to understand exactly what I needed to do to manage people. And ultimately, like, you want to be managing folks because you want to be like, just, I hate to say the tech thing, but like, you want to ten x your impact, right? Like, you know, like you do, you want to be able to.
Chris Strahl [00:31:36]:
That's the most uncomfortable moment of this conversation was you didn't want to say that. I could tell.
Allison Shaw [00:31:42]:
I, it's one of those like, tech isms where I'm like, okay, really, guys? But yeah, you do want to be able to expand your impact, and you want to be able to give other designers, the people that are reporting to you the same ability that you had to make such a deep impact on the work or the company or whatever it is. Right. That mind shift was really important for me. And the biggest jump with Adobe. Right? Like at Zendesk, I was overseeing the design system and I was also overseeing content design. So starting to get to a similar model where you're talking about directing the team that's responsible for how the company shows up inside its own software. Adobe has been a really interesting transition for me because the company is literally a full exponent, larger than what I was working with at Zendesk. And so the level of complexity and the number of relationships that have to be formed and the different expertise that you have to build up over who's talking about what tech stack and how can I make the right connections and all of that stuff, it's just so much more.
Allison Shaw [00:32:48]:
And that's been, I think, for me, my challenge of the last seven months that I've been in Adobe is really ramping up on that level of complexity and how much more coverage area there is within this organization.
Chris Strahl [00:33:01]:
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable to me the journey that you've taken where you think about wanting to work at that very small scale, but ultimately working at a very big scale to accomplish that, it's kind of cool.
Allison Shaw [00:33:14]:
Yeah, it's been interesting. It's been good.
Chris Strahl [00:33:16]:
Well, Allison, thank you so much for joining me today, telling your story, sharing those moments of vulnerability and anxiety. And I just want to say I really appreciate you. This was awesome.
Allison Shaw [00:33:27]:
Thanks, Chris. I had a great time.
Chris Strahl [00:33:29]:
All right, well, hey, this has been the Design System Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Have a great day, everyone.
That's all for today. This has been another episode of the Design Systems Podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like to know more about, find us on Twitter at thedspod. We'd love to hear from you with show ideas, recommendations, questions or comments. As always, this pod is brought to you by knapsack. You can check us out at Knapsack.cloud. Have a great day.