The evolvement of design communities - with Mindaugas Petrutis Program Director @On Deck

Welcome to a new product interview. My name is Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex, as well as a guest from Spain, Mindogus Petroutis. Before we start, as always a hint to our social media channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, as well as Twitter. So feel free to follow us and give us a thumbs up and a like in case you like the show. And you can also find all the links in the podcast description. For the case that you have questions to a specific episode or to a specific topic, you can also drop a comment on our episode pages at product-bakery.com slash episodes and interact with us as well as the speakers. Amazing. Hi, Mindogus. It's my pleasure to do the opening for you in this session. And if I have to describe you, I would probably say that you are one of the best networkers that I've met so far. I think there's very few people, especially in the design space and in the design industry that don't know your name or have at least got an email or a message somewhere in Slack channels and so on. And probably where many might know you from is from InVision because you have been writing a lot of the community there and all the customer experience programs. But before that, you actually also made quite a journey. You were working in recruiting, you were working for some years like on Canary Islands in the sun. Now you're back to Spain. The recent thing that you made was like launching a design fellowship, which is called One Deck. Maybe you just explain us a little bit like how you ended up doing this and how someone who started out as a sales decides to found a design fellowship. Yeah, cool. We're going to need to go back a little bit. This was definitely not a straightforward journey. So let's say, yeah, I spent about eight or nine years in the Canary Islands living there. The only trade is hospitality, right? It's a holiday island. And I ended up working in bars at first and restaurants and just fell in love with, I guess, the service industry, which I didn't expect to do. And started after a while having these ideas of opening my own restaurant. And I had a little experiment, I guess, an MVP of a restaurant where I was able to test out ideas where I rented out a kitchen from somebody and hired a chef, created a menu. Didn't last very long, but it confirmed that I was maybe onto something and I was maybe good at this. So then the next stage was like, okay, how do I get the money to actually open my own place? And I didn't want to take any investors. The kind of aspiration was like not take any bank loans. And I quickly realized that unlikely that I will make the money to open a restaurant while working in a restaurant. So then I decided maybe I need to go somewhere else where there's some more opportunities, maybe start something. I didn't really have any ideas, but I was thinking maybe I'll start a company, maybe I'll make some money that way. When you're younger and stupid and you have these crazy ideas. But I ended up moving to Dublin, Ireland, just with this idea of maybe I'll start something here. Ended up going back into sales and recruitment, which I did for a little while in London. I had a short stint of a couple of years in between my time in the Canary Islands. And while working in recruitment, I was hiring software engineers, kind of project managers, business analysts. And I could never, I like to go deeper to get to know the people and their work. And I could never really connect for some reason. But one day, one of my colleagues who was running the design desk, she asked me to help source a couple of designers. And I just remember looking at the CV and right, there's a link to a portfolio. And I just remember clicking that. I was just immediately blown away because I guess I'm quite a visual person, but I think what captivated me was I had no idea up to this point that there were these teams of people creating and working on these experiences of products that I knew and was using on a daily basis. So yeah, I just immediately fell in love. And then she happened to be leaving not long after that. So I asked to take over the design desk. But I think the key kind of thing of what made me end up, the reason why we're talking today is I quickly realized that in order for me to be effective at my job as a design recruiter, I would need to become a part of the design community in some way. And I had a couple of funny incidents at the time where I ended up turning those to my advantage and helped me connect with the design community in an authentic way. And they just ended up leading me on this weird path to the point where we're, you know, talking right now. That's awesome. I think spending a lot of years in the design community and probably also as a little background or also motivation to create a design fellowship. I guess you've seen probably more than anyone when it comes to challenges that designers also might face. And I remember we also met at a dinner for the design leadership forum. And there's always a lot of discussions of design leaders and the issues they might have. So what would you say are the biggest challenges in general in the design space? So I think what I've noticed, and I think it's a pretty obvious one, but the fact that design technically is still quite a young industry, design that we know today, right, and the design work that you guys do. And what that means is that the leaders right now who have been doing it for 10 or 15 years, they had no one before them, right? There wasn't a generation before them who, where you could borrow the processes and the frameworks and the thinking and how to hire people and how to communicate with your CEOs and all of those. So there's this gap. And I think that's where the challenges are coming from. I'm sure that dinner that you're talking about in Munich, I've been to many of those dinners. I've hosted many of those. And the most common comment that you hear from a design leader who's been around for a while is it's a lonely place to be. They often feel they don't have anyone in their organization to lean on. And actually, that hasn't really changed. And the interviews I've been doing the last couple of weeks with the people who are applying for the fellowship, it is the younger generation, the newer generation who are coming to this. It's the same thing. One of the common comments I've heard was like, I'm the only design either lead or design manager or head of design in my company. Sure, there's like someone in product or engineering, but their challenges aren't the same as mine. And we just don't kind of have those conversations where I'm able to resolve some of the things that I'm working through. So yeah, that's like the biggest thing I've noticed. It's design leadership or, you know, just design in general can be quite a lonely place to be. Yeah, and I've been there and I can totally relate to it. But at the same time, I wonder, do you think it's something, a problem that designers mainly have? Or do you also think like product managers would be there and say, oh my God, or maybe Christian as a product owner and product manager, you can relate to it a little bit more. Did you also feel lonely in your position? I was actually about to ask a similar question like you, Alex, because I would love to know, is it really a design problem or is it the problem that product itself is not, let's say, appreciated enough at the moment? Yeah, that's a, that's an interesting question to think about. A lot of the conversations I've been part of, no matter what the topic might be set, say for we're hosting one of these dinners, I've noticed that the conversation often defaults back to this engineers don't know how to work with us, or we don't know how to work with engineers. And I just wonder if the problem itself is, are the silos that seem to exist in a lot of organizations, right? Because if someone is feeling like lonely at their job, but yet, let's say they're a VP of design, but there's a VP of product or VP of engineering, I often wonder, sure, there are some specific maybe things, right? That are not the same, but in terms of having that peer support, why doesn't that happen? Or why doesn't it exist? I don't know. Maybe it's because those silos are put in and exist in these organizations. That's my thinking around it. On the other hand, I'm also asking myself if having a peer is the solution to the problem, right? Because at some point it's nice to have someone, but I also see a leader in the responsibility to break through the silos and making the step towards the people you believe who are eventually not willing to collaborate with you or. where you realize that collaborating can be improved. Yeah, that's a good point. And actually, when I, before launching the fellowship, I did quite a lot of research with the design community and asked if this type of program existed, like what's currently missing in terms of like skills or topics that you want to dive deeper on? And collaboration was like in the top three, even though you look kind of online and the articles that are being, content that's being posted out there, it's all about collaboration. And that just makes me wonder like what's happening, why we're all, we all seem to be talking about it, but yet the problem still persists. So yeah, that's the questions that I've been thinking about a lot. And I guess that's why the fellowship exists and we're gonna be diving deeper into those kinds of discussions. Nice, yeah. We started a little bit like from the same point when we launched this podcast, when we talked about this, there are these silos in place. And I think what I've seen also in the past is that in theory, the goals and also the things that we do in our day-to-day jobs are not too different from each other, but still everyone feels separated. And it's definitely still one of the biggest challenge and challenges. And I don't know if it's somehow related to goals and agendas and how everyone gets measured differently and how everyone still needs to push for their own things. But you just mentioned that also like in the fellowship that this is a big part of it, right? How are you tackling this issue? One of the things that I'm doing is there was, I think I mentioned earlier, but there was, I was at a dinner, one of these leadership dinners a couple of years ago in Amsterdam, I think it was. And it was a room full of design leaders. We had set a topic, but pretty quickly, the topic just went to this is communication, right? And this inability to collaborate effectively between the different departments. And somebody at my table just stood up and said, it's great that we're having these conversations, but why are the product people not in the room? Why are the engineers not in the room? Why are the CEOs not in the room? We're here, we're talking about the fact that we're unable to collaborate in our day-to-day. We're gonna go back tomorrow. We're gonna do the same thing. We're not gonna change anything. And maybe the change needs to come from the fact that we as a collective, we come together and start changing the narrative and changing the conversation and what we do at work. That comment really stuck with me. So one of the things I'm doing while we are, the fellowship is around up-leveling on leadership skills. I am bringing in short designers as guest speakers and to run different sessions or workshops, but I am also bringing in those other departments that are maybe usually not part of the conversation in these types of things. I'm bringing in sales leaders and engineers and marketing and founders and CEO, chief operating officers, just to maybe start having these conversations. And it's not for it to be like for them to say, here's how designers should work with me. But my goal is that this becomes a two-way street and a two-way conversation. And I think it's also very important to remind each other and to remind yourself on a regular basis why you are doing what you're doing. Because we had a while ago a conversation with Alex. He works at Riot Games, working on the computer game League of Legend. And he explained us how the whole development flow works across the whole company. And you have gazillions of people and teams involved in, for example, designing just one simple champion. And we asked him, what is the secret to make it work and why is it not working in other companies? And he explained it in a very nice sentence that I will never forget because he said, we all use the product, we all believe in the product, and we're all pulling into the same direction. And I think this is also something that I see very often that as Alex already mentioned, that there are sometimes maybe agendas, special interests that are higher above the goal than working towards the product goal or the company vision. We mentioned also a couple of times now the fellowship. So for the people who don't know you, maybe you can explain a little bit what you are doing exactly and what it's about. Sure. So for the last few years, I've been deep involved in the design community in various ways. Most recently at Envision, where I've been able to be part of these conversations across all kinds of levels of designers. And while I'm also part of a bunch of communities, I've seen what people get out of different things like that. One thing that I've been thinking about for a couple of years was this idea that even, I've been to a lot of events and conferences and you often may feel like you wanna follow a specific track, right? Maybe you're coming in with some specific goals to a conference or an event, but often the sessions, the workshops, they clash with each other and you're not able to follow that specific track. So I had this idea of what would it look like if you were to break up what it means to say, be a design manager or design leader, what are the skills involved? And what if you took a hundred people who all wanted to up-level on those things and you took them through this specific track, but all together, they didn't have to choose anything. They all went through this together. And originally I thought maybe in a couple of days, but when I discovered Undeck a few months ago, they were, they've been running the founders program for a couple of years and very successfully. And they were, I don't think they were looking for someone to launch design specifically, but I just applied and I said, hey, I've been thinking about this for a couple of years. I think there's a need for it. What do you think? And we ended up reaching out. So the design fellowship is essentially, I'm bringing together about a hundred or 120 designers who all have some specific goals. You're either already a design manager or like a head of design and maybe feeling you want to be better at what you do, or you're a kind of senior lead or principal level designer who's thinking about what's next for me, right? How do I break into that design management role or the leadership role and what's involved instead of just ending up in that promotion meeting where we get all excited because it's a better title, it's a little bit more money, but you don't really know what you signed up for. Oddly enough, as I was working on my narrative for the program, who's it for and what we're going to try and accomplish here, I ordered a book from Julie Zhou, who was the VP of design at Facebook before. And she wrote about how she became a design manager. And it was literally that moment where it was a promotion meeting. She got all excited and got herself once. And then the kind of the reality set in that you all of a sudden are doing a million new things that you've never done before. Nobody trained you how to do. And you're also now responsible for somebody else's career, not just your own. Creating a space where people can explore and learn like what it all means. And that will help them prepare, be more confident in going for that meeting, right? That promotion, that was a goal. And the idea for it. Got it. Yeah, it's so true. I talked myself into the position back in the days that I was like, oh yeah, we need leadership. I can do it. But obviously like I had no real clue. The most that I did before was like working with some interns. And suddenly I had a team and then we acquired a company and the team was even bigger. And I think even beyond not having, not being trained as a manager and not like really having, knowing what to do. I think there is also this big, let's say gap of expectations, what you as a design leader should do like from the company. So you at one point have to manage down like your direct reports. And at the same time, you also have to do a lot of the advocating and explaining how does the design team work? How do designers work? What's the mindset of designers and so on. And I think, yeah, it's definitely a bumpy road if you just jump into that cold water, you have to go for it. That's also why I'm such a big fan of this fellowship. Because we all were at some point thrown into the cold water, as we say in Germany, but we never had, at least I ever had someone to talk to on the same level outside of my organization and bringing people together from the different sorts of companies and industries and areas helps so much to exchange and also realize, hey, as tough as the situation might be, I'm not alone. Everyone goes through this. Becoming a leader is never easy and there's never the right time in my opinion. Yeah. Happy to hear your thoughts. No, 100%. And I think as well, like there's interestingly, there was a few big reasons why I wanted this to exist. And that was because we often hear about just two tracks in design. I see, or the only, the other option is going into management or leadership, individual contributor. So you work all the way up to like a lead designer but there's other options. And I wanted to create a space where people can also explore what that means. One of the big ones that a few, quite a few people are applying and they're looking to explore is, sure, they want to up-level on some of these leadership skills. And those skills, I call them leadership skills. I haven't found a better word for it because maybe soft skills, but I don't really know if I like that name either. But things like strategic thinking. making, understanding business, communication, they're going to serve you regardless of what path you choose. But the paths that kind of exist and people want to explore is staff designer is one that is I think exists in some companies, but no one really know what it means. There's also... My title is currently staff designer. Oh, really? For me, trying like even just within the company to establish what staff designer means. And it's crazy because some non-designers or outside industry people, especially in Europe, because I think it's a very American term where in Silicon Valley, you would find it a lot. I had people who were like, oh, but what is staff? Is it like some sort of like intern or you design stuff for the staff, like the slides or something like that. It's yeah, there's a lot of... You're working for the chief of staff. Yeah, it's confusing. And so yeah, let's explore and maybe if that's the route you want to go, we might be able to equip you to have those better conversations internally and sell that, sell or communicate or explain that position. And founding designers have like high growth companies, right? There's people, one of the speakers that's joining us. He's been doing that successfully and repeatedly. Like he loves that way of being a designer where he joins these early companies as the first designer. So sure, there's a lot of IC work at the beginning, but also he's experienced enough to start setting up the processes, the culture for the designers that are going to be eventually hired into the company so they can thrive and be successful. And once he's established that, he moves on to the next company and does it all over again. And people are talking about this more and are interested in what does it mean and what does it take? What kind of skills do I need to have to be able to do that? And then there's designers becoming founders, right? We all talk about the Airbnb story, whatever, but there's a lot more of them out there. And what does it mean? Like how does your mindset need to shift to be able to do that? Again, as well as up-leveling on these leadership skills, if you want to call them. There's another kind of group of designers that want to come in and explore these other options. So you bring together people who are successful and established in the market and can share a lot of experience and people who aspire to get there. Yeah, so the typical levels that are joining the program are senior lead, principal, and then already existing design managers, a few heads of design. And I have a few design directors as well who've been applying, who are feeling like they don't know everything. That's the kind of the beauty of it is being able to admit to yourself like that. I don't, sure, I might be a director of design, but I don't really know everything. And I want to come into this and learn from others and just benchmark myself nearly. A few people have specifically mentioned, I've said that I want to benchmark myself against others and the industry. And am I doing a good enough job or should I learn a few more things? That's the makeup of the group where there's enough experience between everybody that they can share between each other. And obviously we're bringing in folks from the outside who have been doing it for a while. I have met, I will say, a couple of quite junior designers who I am going to accept into the program because they just completely blew me away in terms of being able to, how they're thinking about their career already, even though being so young, but also just articulating, articulating their goals and which way they want to take. As a designer, I was just, yeah, completely blown away by a few that I think they should get the opportunity. And I think they'll accelerate their careers in a very positive way. When we look at all the people you are talking to, it seems like that there is a big, strong community behind it. I was just curious when you just started introducing yourself, did you manage to gather and gain your networking experiences from working in hospitality? Somebody asked me this question a couple of weeks ago, a colleague, and she asked me something like, when's your earliest memory of connecting people? And I really had to think about this. And it was, I think, that came from moving to different places from a very young age on my own and landing in a spot, not knowing anybody and having to quickly get set up. And that usually means, or at least how I did it, was just meeting, building relationships quickly with a lot of people. But one of the things I've always done is I'm quite introverted and I don't like small talk. So where people get to know each other that way, my way would be to quickly provide you with some value. And usually I would do that by listening to a problem you might be having. And even kind of many years ago, I would hear somebody say, well, I have a challenge with this. I know somebody that can help you with that. Do you want me to introduce you? So I was doing that for years and years. And I started thinking like, can that be a job? Can I get paid somehow doing this? Because I do it all the time and I really enjoy it. Yeah. And yeah, that kind of led me to opening up my mind to then understanding what community is. And then once I got into the design community, that became my thing. I had trained that way of kind of building relationships for many years beforehand without receiving anything in return. And then this way it became, you know, you do a favor for somebody, you introduce them to something, to someone, it might pay you back one day. Right. So I think it was me and you, Alex, were talking about, somebody said to me, this was like an overnight success launching this thing when they saw the people that are joining and the kind of the launch. And I was like, no, this was six years of building value and building relationships. And then I guess you could call it, I started cashing it in where you built up some great friends. And when you said at the beginning, I barely had much context that I was giving people. I just said, hey, I'm doing this thing. Are you in? And people were like, yeah, sure. What do you need? Let's dig a little bit deeper into that, because we just recently have had a couple of discussions regarding community building and the importance of communities for companies. So although these two things can be looked at separate, I would like to know how you approach this whole community building topic to, for example, launch such a program as you did. Yeah, I think community is such a hot word right now. It's so, yeah, I think the remote, the remote, I really noticed the pandemic, I think, accelerating the need for communities and people needing those connections or craving those connections. What's really interesting is when I first feel like I truly started doing communities probably about six years ago and even up until a year ago when I would look through, I do this personal exercise maybe once a year where I run through if I needed to look for a job tomorrow, where would I go? And then I just map out the things at the time I'm interested in. I feel like I'm good at, right, at the industries. And I remember doing this exercise at the start of 2020. And honestly, with it being I want to stay remote, I had four options. And then once the pandemic kicked in, I would say like June or July, just there was an explosion in conversation about the importance of community. All of a sudden, everybody started hiring community people. And I was like, where was this six months ago when I was thinking through it was nothing, right? There's now even chief community officers at companies, which is like a very new term. So I think, sure, having a community for a company can be extremely valuable and important. But I always say you need to first answer why you're thinking about building one and what's the value exchange? Because I think people are getting, it's the same with the remote work. I'm not afraid in saying this, that when the pandemic hit, all of a sudden people who have never been remotely were remote work experts and they were writing books and articles. And it's easy, I think, to get lost for people in who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't. I'm seeing that right now with community, where it's just an explosion in conversation and advice. But yeah, I think what's the value exchange that you are going to create for your members, for your community and what you might be taking back? Because I think people are just thinking, well, let's create another channel where we can just heavily market some crap that we're trying to sell them. And that's not a community and that's not a community that's going to survive. So that's marketing. Yeah. You have to have some good intentions, but also first think, what's the value you're going to be able to deliver them? Why will anybody care if you build this or try to build this community? One question if we talk about the communities would also be, especially as I see a lot of product companies also building communities, where do you see how important is actually the community versus the product itself that the company is building? I think the mix of both is extremely powerful. You have to think about what type of community you're building. If you're building a community where it's very clear from the beginning that your users or your customers will be able to provide you with feedback, that's more like a user-focused community. That can be huge. That's a completely different relationship versus if you're not doing that, because that's also quite a big undertaking. You need to invest quite a lot of resource. Somebody needs to capture all that feedback and make sure that people or your customers or users feel like they're involved and that they're heard versus if you build, let's say, you just think, let's gather our potential customers or existing customers together and maybe extract some insights from them that might help us close deals and all those kinds of things. That's a completely different type of community. You need to be prepared to deliver them a lot of value without getting much in return and also not mentioning your product in any way, because people smell sales very quickly. If they feel like they've been gathered together and they're going to be sold to, they're not coming back. I think the Design Leadership Forum community at InVision was a really great example of that. We were very clear, even all the way up until I left, and it's true now, that InVision is a sponsor of that community. They don't own it in the sense that we're not selling you anything. But understandably, having that group together, you get a lot of insights in terms of what are design leaders talking about? What do they care about? What are their challenges? What helps you help them in certain ways that still ties back to the brand, but not necessarily selling you anything? And I do think we had those conversations about communities with Monica in this podcast a couple of weeks or months ago. And I think one theme that I hear or see also of what you just said is that a community can really be a good way for, let's say, having a user-centric approach, like also to product development, because I think the insights that you gain and the knowledge can help you prioritize features, can help you and so on. But yeah, I guess it's a little bit around finding the right balance to offer something to the community and then leverage the knowledge that you get out of it. Yeah. I think it goes also hand-in-hand with what Rindogu said at the beginning, right? Because when you started doing the whole networking, the payoff came much later and you never asked for something in return. And I think the first thing you should do, no matter if it's a user-centric community or a community to gather insights or to bring people together, the first goal should be always to make sure that people get something out of that. So if I'm going to join this community, if I start contributing, what will be my value? To whom can I talk to? And not, what do I need to give back? A community member will never ask himself or herself the question, what can I give back in first place? So I think it's very important also for our audience and people who are thinking about building up a community to make the people the key of this community and not your own product and your own interests. Yeah, for sure. And that's a big, there's a big point and easy to get wrong. And it's something I, whenever I advise someone, if someone comes to me saying, Hey, like we're thinking about building a community, I always say, just take a big pause and answer a few questions first, right? Like kind of what you were talking about. Why will anybody care? What value are they going to get? How are you going to deliver that value? And a bunch of other things. And you need to go through the exercise first to actually answer for yourself. Do you need to build one? Should you build one? Maybe there's some other ways, but yeah, it's a big kind of step to take. And what we say makes a community successful, because obviously there are so many parts that play into it. There is like this aspect of whoever provides the space, whoever is a member, like whoever, who wants to share. And to me, it almost sounds like also a little bit of a chicken and egg thing. If I would want to create a community, how do I get the people in the room? How do I get the people to talk? How do I get to the people? And I think, of course, one side of the thing is six years of networking and being in the community, like speaking about your success. But what would you say are the building blocks that make a community successful? Start small. Start with a small group of your kind of early fans and research. I always say do plenty of research at the beginning. I think I used this example somewhere not long ago, where if you're going to build a community for lawyers, let's say, go and speak to those lawyers. Ask them where do they hang out and what's important to them? Because what if you just decide to pick Slack as your community space? And what if lawyers work in a highly restricted environment and they cannot access Slack? Just go and do those basic things. And then start with a small group of people. I'm in. What do you need? I'm excited. Bring them in. Bring 20 people in. And as the community grows, start distributing some responsibilities to those that raised the hand at the beginning and were extremely passionate. Because doing it on your own, depending on the context, whether you're doing it for a company or you're just doing it for yourself because you're passionate about a specific topic, you're going to run out of steam quickly if you're doing it on your own. And you think you're going to scale this to a few hundred people. And what makes it successful is that you bring such a passionate group of people together that the community becomes self-sustaining. You just need to maybe moderate it. But the conversations and the growth is happening organically. The people, you don't need to be prompting them and posting a question or checking in with people. It's just it's happening. People are there because they're excited about something and they want to keep the conversation going themselves and help each other out. Awesome. And speaking about research, you also mentioned that you did research before going into or starting with OneDeck. What was the research that you did for OneDeck or how did you then decide to start it? I had it in my head for a couple of years that this kind of thing should exist just from listening to designers and being in the room and hearing those challenges. And once I knew I was getting the job and this was a real thing I was going to build, I then went back out into the community to confirm or deny some of my assumptions that I had that I'd been collecting over the years. I just had to put it down on paper and I did in a form of a survey but then also a ton of one-to-one conversations like user research interviews if you will. And then it was just luckily I had someone in the team who runs the experience who could then dissect and sift through all that information and pull out some key themes, key trends where we could define who this was for, who it wasn't for, what kind of what was the narrative. And then that helped with having a successful launch. Nice. One final question from my side with all the conversations that you had and hearing you also talking about research. How much of a designer do you think you are by now after all these years in the design space? Yeah, I'm very much a designer at this point. Honestly, things that wouldn't bother me or I wouldn't care about maybe six or seven years ago, I don't know, like say going into a bathroom in a cafe and how the tap works. If it's badly designed, I'll start cursing the tap out and I wouldn't catch myself saying things like this or even noticing a few years ago. But being around designers and just learning enough about design has definitely, you know, everything I do, even like launching like this, the fellowship, I treat it in a similar way as to launching a product. But you have to validate if the thing that you're about to launch, will anyone care? I'm doing a bit of research and refining the narrative so the language is right. So it speaks to the right people when it launches. It's the same thing. Now, the other thing is, I think visually as well, I've started to understand some things. So if I'm like building my own personal site, for example, I care very much about typography now and things like that. I don't even correct people when they... assume that I'm a designer. So many people at OnDeck, at my company, think I'm a designer, which is hilarious. But yeah, I don't correct people anymore. I can absolutely relate to that, I have to say, because I was doing my whole career, always redesigned projects. And at some point, you just start developing DI for certain things, for spaces, typography, and much more. I think the biggest learnings and the biggest development also comes from learning from failures and so on. And therefore, like with having all these conversations, I think you are in a space where you're so much closer to knowing how to tackle whatever design problem it would be, because you heard all of the stories, right? It's the best school. Yeah, oh, for sure. It's a free one, too, which is incredible. At the beginning of the podcast, Alex asked you about the main challenges in design. I think it would be great to close today's podcast with the question, what are the top trends that you see emerging at the moment in the design area? I think one, honestly, I can only think of one, just because it's something that I've been talking about for kind of a while. And it's this design is becoming more prominent in terms of how we think about when a company exists. I think it used to be, it still is, unfortunately, but it used to be very much just like an afterthought or, yeah, but I'm seeing a couple of things. I'm seeing one, it becoming obviously more prominent in the conversations and where, let's call it like the sea at the table, if you want. But the other thing is a few years ago, the younger generation, I think, did not view going into management or leadership as something to aspire to, where now that conversation has changed. And again, one of the reasons I was thinking about this program, the fellowship, was I could start seeing more and more people, younger designers, like mid-level, four to five years experience, openly saying, hey, I want to know what it means to go into management or leadership. And it became an okay thing to think about and aspire to. So I think we're going to start seeing more and more. It's not for everyone, right? I definitely do not think that's the track or the path you should only think about, but I think it's pretty cool that it's a thing and more people are exploring it because great leaders and managers can make or break a team, which also has a massive impact on the quality of the stuff that's being shipped. The more great leaders and managers we have, the better the outcomes for everybody. Absolutely. For a better world. Yeah. Windogos, thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you. Of course. Really good chatting to you about the hour flew by. Awesome. Then nothing left than saying thanks a lot for your time. Thanks a lot for the insights and the knowledge and enjoy the rest of the evening. Yeah, you too. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. And we came again back to the topic of communities. Alex, one more time, what were your key takeaways today? It just shows, Windogos also said it, it's just like such a hyped and trendy topic at the moment. And I think, yeah, it's an important one. I think if done properly, it can help you to launch a product, build a product right, market a product right, everything, and most importantly, create value because that's the key. But I think the one thing that stuck with me is definitely the fact that I think by talking so much to other people in the industry, by having all these conversations, you just learn so many things. And I can totally see him being like a great designer without having studied it, right? So I think I would generally just say, go out and talk to peers, go out and talk to other people. Is it like in a community? Is it outside of a community? Is it like by doing like offline proper networking? And of course, with Corona, it's a bit harder than it used to be in the past. Is it? Would be my question. Yeah, of course. You don't have any meetups. You cannot like literally, you cannot just go out and meet peers from other companies. But yeah, I mean, you can just go on LinkedIn and just click and directly contact whoever you like. Yeah. I mean, for whoever does that, I don't know. I think to me, it's usually awkward. I have this barrier of I'm an introvert when it comes to bothering people online that I don't know. I bother always. Yeah, I know. That's how we get most of our guests. It's true. But this is exactly the point. I really like it. And I cannot emphasize enough to do really networking. And it's so important and valuable. And my dad always said, the only contacts that hurt you are the ones that you don't have. That's true. No, I mean, fair. And I have to say, I am always jealous of everyone who is great at networking and who has these massive networks and knows this one person for everything. And I think salespeople are usually very good for that. Like all my sales friends are awesome. A friend of mine just recently, he built a house and I visited him for the inauguration party of the house. And I do love architecture and stuff. So I was walking around in the house and I was like, oh, nice kitchen. I see you really got the fancy stove from Brand X. And so he was like, oh, yeah, because I know a friend who works there and he made me a good price. I was like, oh, that's a pretty damn cool wood floor. And he was like, oh, yeah, it was like from the other friend's company when they built it was left over. So he gave it to me for free. And literally like everything like that. And this simply because he has this massive network. I wouldn't know who to ask for, but also because my brain has holes and I forget everything. Okay, that's a separate topic, Alex. I can absolutely understand what you mean. I know people working in e-commerce and they get literally on every online shop on the planet discounts and stuff for free. But yeah, coming back to our today's conversation, one thing that really stuck with me and that I just want to pick up in our debrief today is the fact that community building is something to share value in the first place. And as much as it's hyped right now, I just want to emphasize again to not underestimate that you do this for other people and not for people to do something for you in the first place. It is a side effect. It's a positive side effect. It's a payoff that you get at some point. However, you should focus on helping people and delivering value. And you know, a sales guy once told me, Christian, for every contact that you refer and for every connection that you made, you will get two back. So you should be open to helping people and to make sure that you connect them rather than expecting to get something back or to get sales or I don't know, feedback on your product, etc. But it was something that I just wanted to share one more time because I see many people trying to push it with the result that they're just horribly failing because people smell that very fast when you try to just sell them something. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Cool. Another episode is on the tape. Can't wait to start talking to our next guests. Absolutely. There is a lot of cool stuff coming. So keep your eyes and ears peeled. Not sure if I can say that even, but this time. Awesome. And final reminder, we love everyone who's listening to this podcast. So feel free to share the love, drop us a line, let us know what you think, share your feedback, and we would appreciate every single share or word of mouth that you pass on to grow also our listeners community, despite where we are in our official community. All right. Thank you very much and have a good night, Alex. Bye-bye.