Jina Anne and Adekunle Oduye join host Chris Strahl in a candid conversation that explores career pathways within the evolving realm of design systems amidst the latest market conditions. They share valuable insights on how the key to thriving in uncertain times is through understanding the nuanced dance between business language and design practice. Jina, renowned for her pioneering efforts in design tokens at Salesforce, illustrates the importance of scalability and care for user experience. Adekunle, drawing from his experience as lead design engineer at Plaid, discusses the intricate balancing act of adopting new technologies while maintaining user trust and meeting business objectives.
View the transcript of this episode.
Check out our upcoming events.
Speakers
Jina (they/she) is a design systems advocate. They founded Clarity, a design systems community conference, and they maintain the Design Systems Slack. Jina co-chairs the Design Tokens Community Group. And on the Sass core team, they lead the brand and website design and development. Jina is also recognized as a Google Developers Expert (in Web Technologies [UI and Tooling]). Jina has been making websites as a hobby for about 30 years. They’ve worked professionally in the industry for 22 years (19 of those years working with design systems). They have been said to be one of the most cheerful goths.
Adekunle Oduye (Add-eh-koon-lay Oh-due-yay) is an UX Engineer born / breed / based in Brooklyn, New York. Currently he's at Plaid, where he's helping to build Threads, Plaid's official design system. Outside of work he's a coach, speaker, and co-hosts the Code and Pixels podcast. He's very passionate about design systems, prototyping, and front-end development. When he's not building software, you can probably find him reading up on Stoicism or planning my next adventure.
Host
Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn.
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 https://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 the DSPod. We'd love to hear from you.
Chris Strahl [00:00:21]:
Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Design Systems podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. All today, I'm really excited to have this conversation. I get to have Gina Ann, a design systems community advocate, among many other titles, and Atticunle Odu. He's the lead design engineer at Plaid Atticunle. Welcome, Gina. Welcome. So excited to have you both on.
Jina Anne [00:00:39]:
Thanks for having me.
Adekunle [00:00:40]:
Yeah, excited to be here.
Chris Strahl [00:00:42]:
So we're going to talk about a topic that is, I think, near and dear to the design systems community. And that's a lot about how we think about careers and design systems. And this is kind of a two part conversation because I think first we want to take it from the perspective of somebody that is seeking a career in design systems or design or has recently entered the job market. And then there's the other side of it, which is if you're building a design systems team or thinking about what modern product teams look like, how should you be thinking about structuring those? Kicking it off in terms of the job seeker side of the conversation right now, I think, is a difficult time in the market for tech companies and in particular in a place for designers. And that for a really long time, big companies have been scaling up all of their different digital product operations. Right. They have all these different companies that are taking experiences that weren't digital, making them digital in the era of COVID immediately post Covid, trying to refine a bunch of those experiences. But a lot of that has changed because of interest rates, because of the macroeconomic climate, and a lot of people find themselves looking for a job right now.
Chris Strahl [00:01:49]:
And I wanted to get your all's take on why exactly this is this moment in the industry and why it's happening right now.
Jina Anne [00:01:58]:
Yeah, definitely an interesting time. I think a lot of companies right now are trying to optimize, and I hate using words like that when I'm talking about people, but they're optimizing their workforce. And unfortunately, design systems can be kind of seen as sort of like a support based role and so I see not just design systems, but like developer relations, marketing, like all these other fields are getting hit pretty hard, even recruiting departments. So when you see these companies trying to adjust, they're kind of trying to tune towards where they see their companies going. And it feels a little like a conflict because it's like design systems are all about accelerating and increasing the speed at which you can ship. I think we're at a point in our community where we're still educating the leaders in our organization as to what it is we do and why what we do is so important adequately.
Chris Strahl [00:02:57]:
How do you think about the current market? Like, when you look out at the landscape, what do you see?
Adekunle [00:03:02]:
Yeah, so just a little bit of background about myself. I actually study economics in school, and one of the things I witnessed, especially during COVID was that there was a lot of free money going around. So people were like hiring and scaling their design system teams and DevOps teams and all these other teams, because there's free money around. They want to kind of build and have the resources to kind of build initiatives and projects and whatnot. And what kind of happened was, know, interest rates started to rise and the companies start to realize they're like, all right, we definitely overextended ourselves. What are some of the things we need to cut? And I know that design Ops is one of the things recruiting like gene mentioned, and also design systems because again, we're kind of viewed as more of a supporting role. So what's happening is that we're getting cut, but also we're getting overextended. So many people that are only focused on design systems are now working on projects and product features and whatnot.
Adekunle [00:04:02]:
And what tends to happen is that if you have a design systems issue that you want to fix versus a product feature, usually that product feature is going to have more focus and whatnot. So we're seeing a lot of where we're trying to optimize, and we're going to have less people work on design systems and we're going to start seeing less well polished user experience overall. So I think it's something unfortunate, but I think over time, this is something that we can definitely kind of pivot to. And I think that's the great thing about design systems, is that we're able to kind of adapt to the situation of not only to the company and our users, but also the actual industry and business.
Chris Strahl [00:04:39]:
As a quick follow up there, when you think about this time, there's a lot of companies that have record profitability. There's tons of people making money out there. And so what's really driving this, because if companies are making more money than they've ever made, why are they thinking about making cuts, in particular to their digital product ecosystems?
Jina Anne [00:04:59]:
From what I've read and what I've gathered, I was at one of these companies that had just reported record numbers and still did layoffs. But a lot of it is coming from pressure from shareholders who are wanting to see this optimization happen, whether or not this optimization is even necessary. And so I'm not as much of an expert in economics as Adekunley is, but it's really all about money. It's just like trying to make more money for the people at the top, just to be blunt.
Chris Strahl [00:05:29]:
And, and I mean, it's one of the things I love about Eugenia is I think that keeping in mind, look, this is a human problem, right? And trying to understand what is driving this, I do think that there's a lot of this. This is about what does shareholder profitability look like, especially in an era where, because interest rates have climbed so rapidly, there's a bunch of people that have a ton of risk exposure on the other side of their portfolios. And so when they look at how optimization is working for them, trying to optimize around earnings, even at the expense of people, is something that's happening a lot right now. So thinking about that humanization for a moment, right, this is something that affects real people with real careers, mortgages, lives, families, et cetera. And I think that's the hard part. Right. And it's very easy to get lost, especially in language that talks about resources and optimization and units of work hours and stuff like that, and ftes, at the other side of all of those metrics and terms sits a human being. And I want to acknowledge that up front inside of this podcast is like we're talking about people's lives here, and that carries weight.
Chris Strahl [00:06:37]:
And the terms that we use may feel occasionally dehumanizing because that's how companies talk about these things. But I do want to just be mindful of the fact that this affects a lot of actual persons lives. So with that in mind, thinking about the idea of a career, especially for somebody that is in this place in design or design systems or engineering or even product, staring down at a corporate economic environment that is more stacked against them than it's been in recent memory, what do you see for those job seekers that are out on the market right now? And what advice would you give them, especially if they're in a place where they have a background in design systems or interested in getting into this world.
Jina Anne [00:07:25]:
I actually see a bit of an opportunity here. I know there's a lot of doom and gloom around AI taking jobs and people are worried about the future, but I do think there's an opportunity to evolve what we do. I actually just had a conversation yesterday with someone talking about the things that we do today in design systems. And I jokingly talk about how many buttons have you designed throughout your career? Like probably over 500. Right. If that's what design systems continues to be, then yeah, of course that's going to get automated out with new tools and stuff. But if we want to get smarter about how we design UI and UI not necessarily being pixels on a phone or on a desktop, but other devices or even speaker assistants and all the new things that are out now, how do we evolve our design systems thinking to smarter things? And I used the term smart components yesterday where it was like, maybe this thing knows that I have an astigmatism and it modifies the components to what I need, because then it's less hurtful to me. But that same solution might actually not be helpful to someone else.
Jina Anne [00:08:35]:
And when I say it, I just mean the machine learning behind the scenes can understand that and serve up a modified component for them. I think a lot of people, when they talk about AI and design systems, they think about automatically generating things. But I think of it more as, like you said, the people using these things, how do we get smart about what we're building to tailor itself to the people using our products? And I think there's a huge opportunity here.
Adekunle [00:08:58]:
Yeah, I think the same. So kind of looking back in how the industrial revolution, where most of the people that were working there in their times were farmers, and they got the machines to kind of optimize the process. And by and large, a lot of those people lost their jobs, but then they basically converted into newer jobs. And I think that's going to be the same thing with design systems. I think there's going to be less on picks up perfection and which button to use to more talking about experience and driving concepts from start to finish, I do think we're going to have it where a lot of these components are smart and they're able to adapt to many different situations based on the environment to the user or to the use case. And I think if we kind of shift our mindset to that, less looking at the UI, but more like the UX, I think that's going to separate the people from the people that are kind of stuck in the past to people that are thinking about the future and all right, how can we use AI to kind of make the best product as possible? How can we use AI to push the business to newer levels or whatnot? That's kind of how I try to envision it, where it's like the obstacle is basically the way.
Chris Strahl [00:10:06]:
Yeah, I think that's interesting. I think that as I reflect on what you both said, the common theme is that the role of design is changing, and that role is changing based on new tools in our toolbox, like AI. It's also changing based on an environment that is no longer really conducive to going about it the way we have for a long time. And these trends have existed kind of throughout history. I remember the great Javascript revolution over in the land of engineering and code, when all of a sudden using PHP in integrated frameworks to CMS platforms was no longer the thing you wanted to do. You wanted to have decoupled architectures and everybody suddenly picked up react or vue or whatever framework de jour you were particularly interested in. And everyone was like, oh my gosh, people that build for CMS, they're totally going to lose their jobs. And that didn't actually really end up happening.
Chris Strahl [00:10:58]:
People changed and adjusted to a new way of working. I don't know if this is exactly the same moment in design, but if you had to give one piece of advice about what to learn for folks to prepare themselves for this new environment, what would that look like?
Adekunle [00:11:13]:
The first thing I would say is you have to be able to leverage these AI tools because I think they are able to save you a lot of time. So one example is that I'm creating documentation, I'll probably do like the first draft, and then I would kind of see like all right, let me put in some AI tool and see what language or how they will output. And then I read it and then I kind of humanize it because sometimes it's very cloud and stark. But that's one of the ways where you can definitely use AI to the advantage of optimizing your workflow. Overall, I think the second thing is always the case of design is being worried about the business. For me, I was one of those people where I was like, I'm not really interested in business, I'm just here to design. But a lot of what we do from design system practitioners stems from the business. So the more we understand the business, the more we understand our users, the better product we are able to come up with.
Adekunle [00:12:01]:
So I would say those are like the two things I would say would put people in the next level, especially if they're looking for another opportunity.
Jina Anne [00:12:09]:
I think one of the key things I would suggest, and I don't know how you would actually teach this, but being adaptable and part of that is because things are always changing and evolving. Tools come and go. When I started out, everything was about Photoshop, and nobody's using Photoshop, really for this type of work anymore. So you have to be ready to jump to the next thing when that happens. But a lot of the underlying skills around good ux is still going to carry through regardless of the details of what tools you're using. So that's like the first thing I would mention and then adequately touched on this with the business side. But what I've learned throughout my career is I'm not just a designer. I have to wear my business hat, I have to wear my research hat, I have to wear my psychologist hat.
Jina Anne [00:12:55]:
Obviously I'm not saying go get degrees in all these things, but in content, being a good writer, there's just so much more than the pixels. And so trying to get a good sense of those other supplementary areas is really important, because if you're a really great visual designer, I hate to say it, but it's only going to carry you so far in your career. So it's like you want to learn more about all these other things, especially around accessibility too. I want to definitely highlight that.
Chris Strahl [00:13:24]:
Definitely. I love that there was a slightly different take there between the two of you. I think that, Gina, you're right. I think it's hard to teach curiosity and passion, but at the same time, trying to figure out what that curiosity and passion unlocks is hopefully something that creates a more well rounded person and that well roundedness. Being thoughtful about what the business exists to do. I think that there's this interesting dichotomy that both of you brought up that is this idea about why is a business investing in a thing, right? And yes, as a designer, and largely as an engineer too, your job is to go and serve users. But to what end? For that business, right? And if you're myopically just thinking about like, well, what are we doing for users? What are we doing for users? What are we doing for users? You sort of ignore this idea of like, all right, well, what is the purpose of this for the business? Why am I building this stuff? And that ability to not just understand, but articulate that reason for being, that meaning of existence inside of your organization. I think that's a skill that this podcast and many others keep coming back to as something that we haven't really developed well inside of our discipline and inside of our market.
Chris Strahl [00:14:31]:
And so when we think about how we talk about this to the people that fund these initiatives, to the people that really care about the why, how dot you express that why in a way that gets heard, I think it's.
Adekunle [00:14:43]:
Probably one of the most important things to kind of convey the why. When I was a child, I would not do anything unless someone told me why. It's like, oh, brush my teeth, why? And I wouldn't say you want to treat people like kids, but I think if you're telling them like, hey, we're going to build this thing, we're going to do this thing. The center, it should be the why. Once you understand the why, everything else is easy. Like, all right, cool. I know what tools I should be using. I know how I should be doing it, and it makes things easier, not only from a company standpoint, but also if you're like cross functional and you like working with other disciplines, you all on the same level field and going the same direction.
Adekunle [00:15:20]:
So it's always a good to kind of get a good understanding of the why. And usually the why always has to stem from what are the business needs and what are the users want. I think once you start from there, things tend to get easier. When you're implementing the solutions, it's really.
Chris Strahl [00:15:35]:
Interesting you talk about it that way. So as the parent of a five year old and a three year old, I end up explaining why a lot. And one of the things that my partner Michelle oftentimes says to me is she's like, you do a really good job explaining to the kids the reasons for things, and you go far deeper than I ever would. And I think that that stems from being in a corporate environment long enough that I realized that most of the people you talk to don't have the same basis of knowledge that you're coming from. Like, yeah, some CEO or CTO or head of design at some organization probably has the equivalent of like a five year old understanding of what you do every day. And so trying to think about it in those terms, it sounds condescending, but it's really pragmatic about the way that executives probably think about your job duty because they're not going to have the context, they're not going to have the understanding, but you're asking them for money or resources or people. And all of that requires at least the ability to communicate why at that level. And I know, Gina, you've worked in lots of environments where this has been the way from a couple of really big organizations to some bigger startups as well.
Chris Strahl [00:16:49]:
When you're thinking about what that conversation looks like at that level, to get an initiative funded or to explain to an executive what you're trying to dot, what are some techniques you use to get that across?
Jina Anne [00:17:02]:
Yeah, I mean, starting out, I definitely didn't have a precedent for this, so it was a lot of finding my way. I think initially I tried to start with the how, and I learned really quickly that's not how you do it. Yeah, you have to start with why. Especially earlier in my career, my biggest focus was more on efficiency and maintainability, and those are two common goals people often have. Later in my career, the thing that I speak to is on quality. And when I talk about quality, it's like this is actually helping with customer trust because things are working and doing what they're supposed to do. And design systems are a way to enable that. At least in my last few roles now, it's been more of a focus on quality and quality, especially if you're in a company that has an actual product they're selling that involves Ui.
Jina Anne [00:17:55]:
If that quality isn't good, people aren't going to trust that product. I'm trying to avoid saying a certain company that I worked at, but there was something that used to be seen as, like, this is not good design, and then they got better at it. And now people buy those devices because the design is good now. And so if you can say like, hey, we'll sell more x being whatever the product is, because people will trust it, because it works how it's supposed to, it works well, and it looks great, it looks professional, people have a good experience with it. I feel like that makes a lot more sense than only trying to rely on, oh, yeah, we'll be faster. I mean, faster is good too. They like fast too. But that's only a piece of the puzzle.
Chris Strahl [00:18:38]:
Yeah, if you think about it. Look, my MBA might be showing here for a second. The idea of what motivates people on the corporate level, right. Is they care about three things predominantly. There's the return, the risk, and the reputation or the character. And those are the reasons why people buy. There's also reasons why people do things, and that's oftentimes to avoid pain. And so one of the interesting ideas inside of the landscape of design systems is really with design systems, you're solving for two kinds of pain.
Chris Strahl [00:19:09]:
You're solving for a people pain where I can't scale my people fast enough to meet my demands as an organization, or I'm suffering some sort of proliferation of tool pain, right? Where there's all these different sets of tools that are all bespoke at all these different levels inside an organization. And the chaos that creates is really bad. One of the things that we're really good at talking about as a community is that ROI conversation. And it's extremely relevant right now, right? Like, hey, consistency, maintainability, management of something centrally. There's also the idea of acceleration. There's also the idea of, yes, better software, but where the better conversation also kicks off that I think is really interesting is it also relates to the reputation and the risk side of it a lot. And that's where the quality argument really starts to drive a lot of points home, is when you're able to couch what you're doing and the argument of not just this will save you money, but this will build us better software in a more timely manner. You start to address a lot of the questions about risk and reputation in a way that I think is really interesting.
Chris Strahl [00:20:14]:
And I know you both have personally experienced this because I've talked to you a lot about the systems you all have helped create. But when you think about that thing that moved the needle the most in that quality metric, what did that really look like in terms of an in practice? Like, I can show this to anybody at any level inside of this company and get them to go, wow, that is awesome.
Adekunle [00:20:36]:
I've gotten this a lot, especially working in fintech, because you need to think about it. Most cases, the leadership has no idea about the product design or product process, even to a point where I was working in one company and they were like, do we really need to do user research? And it was like, oh, wow, I was like, mind blowing. But then I kind of wanted to shift my perspective from their eyes and kind of say like, well, I'm here. I am the CFO. I'm only concerned about making money and reducing costs. And one thing I learned, especially in that environment, is that you have to kind of tailor your message based on the environment you're in. So what we tried to do was we wanted to kind of show like, all right, let's say we had this idea concept of building this new feature we illustrated. Like, all right, if we have a design system in place, we can build it within a couple of months.
Adekunle [00:21:31]:
If we didn't, it will probably take years or whatnot. And then we were able to kind of say, like, all right, so if we kind of estimate the amount of resources it's needed, it will cost this much. And it's not like perfect science, but I think we were able to kind of tailor it to them. And another thing we also did was like, we did a lot of proof of concepts, so we were like, all right, cool. Someone had this idea. We were able to kind of create a prototype within two, three weeks and show it to them, and they were able to use it. And that would kind of help sell the idea of not only our design system as a product, but also the process and why are we doing this and how this is going to help not only us as a company, but going to increase revenue by getting more users and making sure that we have a good representation. Because especially with fintech, a lot of these people, the tools are like super old and legacy.
Adekunle [00:22:17]:
Some of them people have been using it for like 30 years. So just for them to kind of switch over to a newer product, we need to kind of blow them out the water. And that's the whole reason why I think investing in design systems is so important.
Chris Strahl [00:22:30]:
Yes. You have to show them that magic that represents the willingness to bear that switching cost from some 30 year old tool that might still work to something that's new and obviously dramatically better.
Adekunle [00:22:41]:
Yeah, exactly. Another thing to add, it was like, even though the user experience might be better, they're just so used to doing it the manual way that they're like, I invested 30 years into this process. I don't want to change it. And you have to give them a clear reason why to do that. And a lot of times you kind of have to walk them through the process. But I think over time, they see the benefit of switching over to a neural tool that has a better experience in UI.
Chris Strahl [00:23:05]:
Yeah, speaking about that switchover, Gina, I think that one of the more famous things that you've accomplished is the genesis of design tokens. And it's not that it was like, necessarily a completely brand new concept, but the way that you approached it and you got some of the biggest corporations in the world to buy into it, I think that that's the kind of special magic where you basically took the way that people applied design and brand for more or less the history of digital products and shifted it. And so when you think about that shift, what was instrumental in getting people to believe that that way could be better?
Jina Anne [00:23:45]:
When I saw the community rallying around design tokens, it actually surprised me, because at the time I was like, this is so Salesforce centric, why are people doing this too? But for us, it came out of a real need because we had our flagship products, but then Salesforce was also acquiring products and we also had products that started a little bit scrappier. And so everybody's on all sorts of different tech stacks. Some are using CSS preprocessors, some are not, some are Android, some are iOS. It was just all over the place. And when we were trying to scale this modernized new UI across a suite of products, it was necessary for us to figure out a way to do this in a way that was scalable and agnostic. And so we kind of did it. And even the name design tokens came from the way we were doing it in the proprietary framework that they have for the production code. They didn't have a CSS preprocessor like SAS, so they were using literal tokens in the code to inject styles.
Jina Anne [00:24:45]:
And so that's where design tokens came from. It's like if you ever had a localized content, you put in a placeholder thing and it gets injected. That's called a token. That's where it came from. It's kind of like that whole show don't tell adage, we always hear, it's like we were able to roll out, at least for flagship products really quickly, this new look and feel that was coming much quicker than we would have without. And yeah, when people saw that, then it kind of just spread throughout the organization where it's like, okay, we're going to use tokens, we're going to use tokens. Honestly, I feel like a lot of the community that are trying to figure out the same problems saw that too and adopted it. It puzzled me at first when I saw small companies that just had like a marketing website.
Jina Anne [00:25:26]:
It's like, why are they using tokens? I didn't get it at first, but it does come with side benefits like theming and stuff. You can do dark mode really easily with it. And so I was like, yeah, this really can work for a lot of different things.
Chris Strahl [00:25:40]:
Not everybody has to go for necessarily like industry changing impact. Right. But I think that the message is clear, right. When you are able to show value and articulate that value in really clear ways through examples, through proofs of concept, through the metrics that are spoken at the top of the organization, that's what gets investment and that's what gets not just like people engaged and excited about it, but actually gets funding and resources and headcount and all those other things that we've been talking about. And so that necessary skill of being able to realize that the conversation is made so much better by the ability to actually show your work and show the value, but then also speak with the right kind of words. Kind of. To your point, Gina, don't tell people how because people don't really care how most of the time. Why do we do user research? Well, that's how we build product.
Chris Strahl [00:26:30]:
Well, they're not going to care about that, right? It's the why does this all matter? And why is this better? Or why does this provide more value? And if you're able to say, like, look, pathway a is without a design system and it looks like multiple years and a whole lot of headache and whole lot of time spent in testing and qa and auditing versus pathway b being like, hey, this is relatively turnkey, I can implement it in a couple of weeks. And the software quality is better and consistent and we know it is because we improve it across all this different products in this ecosystem b sounds a lot better than a. And I think that the ability to articulate that business case is an absent skill in our market. And I think that there's ways to train yourself on that. And the ways to train yourself on that are to talk to the more senior people inside of your organization. I think maybe take a business class here and there. I think that that's helpful. Just like I think how designers maybe learning a coding class is probably a decent idea.
Chris Strahl [00:27:23]:
You don't have to necessarily know how to code, but at least knowing how it looks and how it works. What else do you guys think that we should have our design teams learn.
Adekunle [00:27:30]:
More about understanding business is very important because back in my day, I was like, I want to use all these tools. I want to try these new things out.
Chris Strahl [00:27:41]:
Back in my day, I love that. Here we are, old linens talking together on the front porch.
Adekunle [00:27:51]:
So initially when I wanted to get into design was like, oh, I don't want to have to think about money, finance, all that stuff. I was like, I'm just going to design 8 hours a day and go Home and live my life. And I've encountered multiple issues where I'm kind of thinking about it solely purely on the design aspect or like, oh, I want to use this tool. This tool is like $50,000 or like, hey, we got the money, we should be fine. Not thinking that annual revenue and the, the cost of doing business and all this other stuff. As a business owner, you're constantly thinking about and you have to really understand, all right, you know that in particular cases, design is probably going to be uninfunded. So you have to really understand, all right, how can I be more valuable to the company so that they could provide me more resources? The only reason I know this is because my sister went to business school and I always asked. I was LIKE, what are you learning in business school? And she took theory and understanding about even accounting, which I had no idea how hard it was.
Adekunle [00:28:45]:
But I think the basic understanding will take you a long way because again, you'll start to communicate to leadership and other people using the same business language. And then obviously you can kind of communicate the why about design and why it's important and tail it to the business. Because again, that's how you're going to get able to persuade people to kind of invest and get interested and excited about certain ideas. I know we said that in the early in the podcast, but I think having a good sense of business is super important.
Jina Anne [00:29:16]:
Understanding business and also how to speak business to leadership is definitely key. In the last few jobs I've had, the biggest part of my job isn't even designing the component. It's justifying why my role exists, or in my last few jobs, justifying why my team exists. So really being able to speak to that is probably the ultimate thing you can do to succeed.
Adekunle [00:29:43]:
Yeah.
Chris Strahl [00:29:43]:
And I mean, I think you have to constantly rejustify too. That's not a one and done sort of process. It's this ongoing conversation.
Jina Anne [00:29:50]:
It is.
Chris Strahl [00:29:51]:
So when you think about if you're a designer and engineer looking around in this market, where do you go for resources? Where do you go for help? Where do you go to look for that next career move?
Jina Anne [00:30:00]:
If I can plug something of my own. I love the design system. Slack is so valuable and there's so many people in there. You can build up such a huge network just on the job searching level. Like there's so many jobs being posted every day. But then even as you're trying to learn and grow and develop, there's tons of people there willing to give you their own take based on their own experience. And so I find that to be my biggest go to resource.
Adekunle [00:30:28]:
Yeah. So I think the best thing to do, basically put yourself out there. So kind of like the idea what Gina said, where you want to be very visible on Slack. I would say, like the last couple of positions I've gotten was through conferences and meetups. I got a couple of roles actually attending clarity. I know a lot of people are struggling right now. So I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially for free conferences. And I think meetups are also the best way because you're able to kind of talk to people within your city.
Adekunle [00:30:56]:
And I feel like 80% of the time, when you're doing local meetups, someone's hiring over there. So if I was going to look for a job tomorrow, I think that's the first thing I do, is just kind of making sure that I'm out there talking to people, shaking hands. I kind of feel like I'm talking about a politician, but sometimes you got to play that game.
Chris Strahl [00:31:16]:
Go kiss a few babies, get a job. I love it. So thinking about the other side for a second. So if you're on the other side of the hiring divide and you're a manager thinking about structuring their team or thinking about what to look for in a person that you would hire. Let's talk about that for a second. So I know that both of you have been on both sides of this before. You've been a job seeker, and you've been somebody that's looking to hire somebody into a new role. When you think about that hiring process and when you're defining what your team should look like, what considerations come to mind?
Jina Anne [00:31:51]:
I really believe in cross functional teams, and sometimes that could be people on the team or hybrids, or it could be having people with their various skill sets and then together they create that. One thing I will say is sometimes I've been in a position where I'm only looking for designers, but then if they have that coding sensibility, that does stand out to me. It tells me that that person can really collaborate really well with the engineering side of things. So that is something that I personally like to see. It's not necessarily a deal breaker, but it definitely stands out. I do get worried when I see teams get really siloed, like visual design and over here and front end over here, because let's say something happens and those people are no longer around, you're kind of strapped now. And so it's like you want to be able to have an understanding and sharing as much as possible. And so even if you are in a situation where you have teams together, I would still try to get those people talking to each other and collaborating together as much as possible.
Jina Anne [00:32:54]:
I also look into things like, does this person actually care about the user, or are they building for dribble, stuff like that?
Chris Strahl [00:33:04]:
Yeah, I think everybody's met one of those people from time to time. When you think about the titling and the roles for stuff like that. You talked a lot about people that innately are cross functional. There's all these new titles that are kind of cropping up everywhere, like design systems engineer, design systems designer technologists. Yeah. All these different things that are coming up. One of the really hard parts about these titles, I think, for a lot of managers is they don't know how to level them, they don't know how to salary benchmark them. And so you're in this situation where as an industry, we're facing this change and this upheaval.
Chris Strahl [00:33:40]:
Is that something that we should feel like we can embrace? And what parts of it should we embrace versus what parts of it should we say, hey, this doesn't sound quite right.
Adekunle [00:33:48]:
It's something that's going to keep on happening, and I think it's something we shouldn't embrace. I do think there should be some sort of benchmark in the foundation. Especially, like, if you're going to hire a design technologist or a design engineer, you want to make sure that there's a clear understanding of their leveling. Because a lot of the things when you come up with a job is like they want to know where they at and maybe they have a future. They want to be like a staff engineer. You need to have a clear guideline of how that's going to happen. Because I've been part of situations where it's like, oh, yeah, we don't really have that, and we're going to think about that next year. And that's not very comforting for someone that's starting a role, but also has been in a role for a while.
Adekunle [00:34:31]:
So I think it's a good thing. I also think sometimes people get too hung up on the title. I've been a product designer, I've been a design technologist, I've been a front end developer. I've been all that. Every title, I definitely had it. And usually, sometimes it would be like a couple of things that are slightly different and whatnot. So I always tell people I was, like, understanding the role, but I think the biggest thing is you want to be able to adapt. The only reason why I was able to do those roles was like, all right, no one's here.
Adekunle [00:35:01]:
I'm just going to try to do it myself. And I think especially when you're looking for a job or you're hiring someone, that ability to be curious and be able to adapt to a situation is super important because it's never going to be a case where every time you work is going to be sunshine and rainbows, there's going to be rainy days. You might have to work in the mud. You just kind of have to be able to adapt to that situation.
Chris Strahl [00:35:21]:
Getting kind of back to the employer side of things. If you're thinking about what does a scalable team look like for a design systems and say you have something that's already tacitly in place, right? Hey, we have a design system with components, the software that organizes stuff, hopefully running on Knapsack. But then when you are in a place where you're ready to say, like, all right, how do I scale this? How do I make this actually work for the entire organization? What does that team look like?
Jina Anne [00:35:46]:
I've been in various different structures for teams. Like, I have been a team of one, I've been a team of a few, and I've been in a team of teams. And so a lot of that did have to deal with what the scale was. And I think when it's a small, scrappy team, you definitely want to make sure you have good CSS skills, good design skills, have those skills represented with the people on that team. And then as you grow into the team of teams, you might see that become a little bit more specialized. A thing some people think that I don't agree with is that a mature team is like one of these large team of team situations. But I've actually seen where a team grows to that size too quickly and it's not behaving like a mature team. And sometimes that's when you see them start to call back of headcounts and things.
Jina Anne [00:36:39]:
I think it's really important to look at what's coming in your roadmap. What are the things that are planned? And obviously that's driven from what is in the product or service that your company offers, what systems are needed to support that, and then use that as your guideline versus, oh, well, I want to show that we're successful, so we're going to hire more designers. We're going to hire more. Like, that's arbitrary. It's not really a good number. It's really more about mapping it to how many people do we really need to achieve this thing that we need to do by the end of the year?
Chris Strahl [00:37:10]:
Josh Clark actually has this really interesting quote about that where he talks about the idea that all high performing teams have a design system. But having a design system doesn't necessarily make you a high performing team. And I think that I've seen that true time and time again where Jeannie you kind of brought up the idea of maturity, where you have a very immature team that tries to go to a very mature level of design system implementation, and it doesn't work. And it creates a lot of conflict inside of that organization. And ultimately usually means that that team isn't going to be around for very long because they don't perform well. And so I think that there is a part of this that is about not just the idea of like, hey, we're establishing a design system that's going to have a team, and that team is going to be resourced, but can we actually effectively make that team a part of a greater whole? And that, to me, is definitely what you were talking about of, like, look at your organization and decide what the right size is for the organization before you go and invest in a big team that may or may not work at a Kunle. I was kind of thinking about something you brought up in the early part of the show, this idea of ratios, right? So when you think about the construction of a design system team, when you think about product team ratios, you always have this idea of like, yeah, we have 510 developers for every designer. We have some number of content people.
Chris Strahl [00:38:25]:
We have a product person for every dozen or so headcount all these somewhat arbitrary stakes in the ground that have been proven out across different product teams. And depending on what your individual philosophy is, you tend to think in your mind it's about this ratio of people. I think that there's some fundamental math that breaks down inside of the design system ideas, because it doesn't abide by the same traditional product metrics as a product that faces actual consumers and users would. So when you think about the construction of that team, how does that differ from your typical product team?
Adekunle [00:38:59]:
I think it differs multiple reasons, because in a sense of, like, a product team, usually it's like, well structured as, like, a product manager has a design lead and has all these people that's kind of like they know their role. Within design system team, it's very different. I've never worked on design system team that had, like, a product owner. It's usually the case of either the design manager or the tech lead is kind of being that product manager and just figuring out what to work on. So you kind of have to be very adaptable in that situation. You want to have a good ratio between the design engineer, because most often what's happening is designers will be working on three different projects, and sometimes one project is very complex, and that will require an engineer to kind of be 100% focused on that. And I always kind of lean to the one to three ratio. It's been pretty good, but you could kind of shift it, especially if you're makeup of a lot of hybrids within a design system, if someone is able to kind of do a little bit of growth, because that can help you push out features much more quickly and whatnot.
Adekunle [00:39:58]:
I wouldn't say it's always a science, but I think it's always the makeup of the team. I would also agree with what Gina said where it's like you want to be cautious of scaling too fast quickly because what tends to happen, and I've seen it before, there's always clash between designers about preference. And I think that's often in the case of scaling too quickly because oftentimes you want to have good foundations of like, all right, I'm not going to build for me, I'm going to build based on the company and the guidelines we already have established in pace. And I think some cases you might get those dribble designers that are like, oh, I want to use hot pink for a background color. And it's like, well, that's not accessible. Again, these are stuff that I've seen personally. I think you always want to make sure that you have proper principles in place because that's going to be a good foundation for building not only scalable, but accessible Ui.
Chris Strahl [00:40:48]:
Some designer from the Barbie movie is going to have a bone to pick with you.
Jina Anne [00:40:52]:
I would love to add to that. My take on it is design systems are definitely a different beast when it comes to team models. I think so. I worked in an organization where they very much abided by one designer to at least six developers. And I say at least. And that was kind of how they treated all the teams, including design systems. And I didn't really feel that that was right because I was like, okay, if you're in a handoff situation, maybe that makes sense. But I really enjoyed a talk adequately gave where he used the word handshake instead of hand off.
Jina Anne [00:41:27]:
If you're working closely together, I'm a big fan of pairing with a developer, and so you have, like, a designer and developer pairing together, then I feel like that ratio really needs to be more evenly balanced and it would be better to be a small team, but balanced than a big team and ratioed weirdly. And the justification I received was that they didn't want designers to get so far ahead of developers that developers were like, it'd be a while before those designs would actually get built. I was like, but the stuff that we're doing on design systems, we're building together, so that's not even, like, a thing.
Chris Strahl [00:42:02]:
Well, it sounds like you all know a lot about this, and, Gina, I happen to know a little bit about what your plans are for this, but tell me how you all are planning on communicating this wisdom with the world writ large.
Jina Anne [00:42:16]:
Yeah, I really feel like there's no better time than now to do this because there's so many people, as you mentioned at the beginning, that are looking for jobs. I'm one of those people not just looking for jobs, but growing and developing a really successful career long term and so adequately. And I were at a conference recently and just talking about this, and then we both kind of looked at each other. We're like, we should do a book. So that's going to come at some point soon.
Chris Strahl [00:42:48]:
Well, congratulations. I think you are great folks to jump in and talk about this in a lot of detail through a book. Can't wait to read it. And really excited for you all to build this thing.
Adekunle [00:43:00]:
Yeah. From my perspective, I've been part of many different types of interviews. I've done case studies, I've done code challenges. I've done eight hour interviews where they're asking me why I want to work at this company during lunchtime. So I'm constantly getting asked these questions, like, all right, what should I be prepared for? And it's kind of weird because there's no book we could reference or a resource that we could reference that's going to go into the depth. So I think that's why we're creating this book. It's like, hey, if you want to get into design systems, this is all the stuff you want to look out for. If you're a hiring manager, this is what you want to look for in a candidate.
Adekunle [00:43:36]:
And I think it'll be a good book. Not that's going to work for people today, but also when the market gets better and there's more jobs, I think it's going to be a rapid tool for any organization. So I'm super excited that me and Gina are kind of working on this book that's going to hopefully bring a lot of value to people right now.
Chris Strahl [00:43:56]:
Awesome. Well, I can't wait to have you all back on when we got a book to talk about. Best of luck. And in the meantime, I look forward to seeing you all around the community. Thanks so much for being on today.
Jina Anne [00:44:06]:
Yeah, thank you again for having us.
Adekunle [00:44:09]:
Yeah, thank you.
Chris Strahl [00:44:10]:
This has been the design systems podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Have a great day, everybody. That's all for today.
Chris Strahl [00:44:15]:
This has been another episode of the Design Systems podcast.
Chris Strahl [00:44:18]:
Thanks for listening.
Chris Strahl [00:44:18]:
If you have any questions or a topic you'd like to know more about, find us on Twitter at the Dspod. 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 https://knapsack.cloud. Have a great day.