Starting a new leadership position

Welcome to the Product Bakery. My name is Christian and I'm here today with my co-host Alex. Hi Christian. Hallo Alex. You know, I like mentioning at the beginning of our podcast that we have our beautiful social media channels. We are intensively using these days and I would like to tell everyone who is interested to just look by and drop a comment, give us a like or even press the follow button. Additionally, you can also visit us on our website product-bakery.com slash episodes and drop a comment on our speaker pages to interact with them and ask them questions in case you have some. Good, that was my pitch at the beginning. Can we just record it for the future or reuse it for the future? But it always makes fun to say it by yourself. Yeah, that's true. Okay, for today Alex, a topic that I was curious about to hear from you because you just started a new challenge in a new company. What are the things to look at as a leader when you just started a new position as head of design? So you mean the first things when I join or the first things even before joining? You tell me. I'm asking because I think the time before actually joining is probably the most interesting. I'm not saying like the notice period while you're wrapping up your old job and starting a new one. But at least something that's super crucial for me is the interview process, right? And understanding the company where I want to start. Because I think there are so many different employee types and personality types in employees. And the same thing applies for companies. And it's very easy that there is no match. And I think it's the employee's task also to do a little bit like the due diligence and to also properly understand how the company works. And if that's something you can stand behind. Is it like on a mission or vision standpoint? Is it like on a team perspective, the people that work there? Is it on processes, how they work? Because especially when you join us like in a leadership position, there is a room to change things, but you won't change the fundamentals. I can speak about my last experiences, but I always try to have a lot of conversations with also executive leadership. And I think this applies not only for leadership roles, like even if you're joining as an intern or junior designer, try to really be curious. Show that you want to talk to different people. I saw that's maybe not the best example, but I think in terms of curiosity and due diligence, a great example, a friend that we both have in common, actually, he was interviewing for a company to join as a VP product. And one of the, I think she was a designer, right? On the team or a product manager, you know who I'm talking about. Anyway, designer or product manager, Christian is shaking his head. He doesn't remember, but what she did was she knew he's maybe joining as a VP product and he started to call former colleagues of him. Was she a designer or product manager? She was a designer before, but she became a product manager. To do some background checks on him. And I think this is a little bit the mindset that you have. You really want to understand who are the people that I'm going to work with? What drives them? How do they work? And so on, because that's make it or break it, right? Otherwise you'd join a company and you figure it out in the first couple of weeks. And then you're either unhappy for the next couple of years, or you probably will leave the organization before the end of your probation period. When I switched jobs, I was always looking for the why. So why do I want to join a company instead of just looking at the numbers they're offering or checking how strong they are against the competition. So you really want to have a purpose when you join a new challenge. If you start now a new job as a leader in your case, or when you have started a job as a leader, let's say like that, what do you think is more important at the beginning? And if you would have to choose, should you rather focus on getting to know the executive team or first of all your stuff? I could show you my calendar. I spent the last couple of weeks, like literally only in meetings back to back, because I think by now I met probably everyone in the organization down to the individual interns. What is more important? I think there is not talk to the executives or talk to your team. I think you need to have both sides of the thing. You need to assess stakeholders, their expectations, leadership, and the team members. You need to get the different views. You need to hear where do people see the current challenges and where do people see the biggest opportunities. And at the end, obviously what we talked with Andrea, for example, I mean, they obviously do it to a lab, to a very, let's say, sophisticated and scientific level where they try to assess the culture of a company. But that's the sense. Yeah. Yeah. At Asia 42, one of our previous episodes, if you want to listen, and we can also link it in, but that's a little bit like what you need to get a sense of, like the culture, who might be happy or unhappy with someone. We talked about how decisions are being made. And I think these kinds of things are important to get a full picture. And at the same time, at whatever level you enter also a company, I think the first couple of weeks are also crucial in terms of framing yourself, in terms of also getting the foot in the door, making people understand how you work, what's important to you, where you want to be involved and so on. So it's, I would almost say it's like blind dating and quote, it's been a long time ago that I've been blind dating for everyone. Okay. Fair point. But you mentioned earlier that when you join a new position as a leader, you can make a change definitely, but you will not change the fundamentals, at least not within the first, let's say 90 days. So when it comes to the strategic work, what are the first thing you look at as a VP design? What are the first things you're trying to understand and eventually to tackle? Generally, first thing and most important thing is understanding what is the current strategy. And when you talk about what is the current strategy, understanding why is the current strategy the way it is, because that allows you to then figure out, okay, does it make sense? Where's room for improvement? Where can I try to understand things? And especially one thing that I really like when you join a company is that you have the benefits of being new. So you can afford to ask some blunt or stupid questions and that will really help you understand, okay, why are things the way they are? Because I think the more time you spend in a company, the easier it is that you get blind because you are like, oh yeah, this is the strategy. This is the goal, or this is the Northstar KPI that we are usually working with. But the fact that you're new allows you to look at things like from all different angles and that helps you uncover opportunities. And then it comes down on like really also doing your homework on understanding if those opportunities make sense and then bringing in again into some conversations. And this is a little bit my personal kind of approach. I would never go in and be like, oh yeah, so here I am and this is some of my ideas. So I think also here it's working with the people. Ideally, you get them to the point where they think they came up with something new or they figured something out instead of you being the one telling them. I think your work just gets much easier if you don't try to get credits for these kinds of things. This is more or less also my model as a coach, right? Helping people to find the answers by giving them the feeling they have done it by themselves. No, I'm just kidding for sure. It's a process where you need to guide the people through and where you help them growing as well. So I fully understand that. What I also learned as a coach is sometimes you come into a company and you see the structure, the strategy and what they are doing, and you're like, what the hell, why? But then once you started talking to them, you realize, okay, there is more than just a plain strategy behind it. There are many reasons and factors that have led the company, the strategy that they decided on. Totally fair. One last question that is coming to my mind when it comes to a new challenge. We talked about design ops and tooling a lot. So what is your stake when it comes to the whole technical infrastructures a design team is using? Go in and change all the tools that they have in place. Figma for the win. Okay. If a design team wouldn't use Figma, I would probably try and advocate for Figma. Alex has a contract and he gets 10% of every sign up from our affiliate link in the description. Figma. No, the thing is I'm generally never religious. I say it a lot. I say it a lot also at work. I'm not religious about process. I'm not religious about tools. I never feel like I'm in love with something too much that I would force it on someone. I'm happy to use everything. I think there are so many tools that all work and that all do pretty much the same things. If we just take the last 10 seconds you have mentioned and you would share it with your girlfriend, I think you would be in trouble. What did I say? Oh, good. Continue. I'll reach out to you. There are some things that you obviously love more than everything in your life. It's not tools though and not processes. And so I think it's important that it does the job for the purpose. If there's a team and they work like super well, for example, documenting things in Notion, sure, let's use Notion. If there's a team that loves like working with Sketch, sure, let's use Sketch. I'm super happy to use these things. If there's someone happy with Adobe XD, let's go for it. I think where I'm a little bit allergic to is when people or teams fall into this trap of, okay, all the new tools are super fancy. And then there's new tools introduced every other week. And there's 30 different tools in place in a company to solve the same problem. Because then you have super inconsistent data. You have documentation that's impossible to find. You have things all over the place. And that's a little bit something that I usually try to solve, getting people to pick and stick something until you can actually also bring arguments that you should change it or that you should add a different tool to the stack. And the best example is I love Notion. I think Notion is great compared with tools, for example. The best example is Confluence. I didn't want to mention it like this. But yeah, and we had this conversation some time ago where the whole organization was using Confluence and my lovely team was using Notion. And I can understand why they were using Notion, but it didn't make any sense in the context of the organization. We were paying different licenses. We had information stored in two different places. Information wasn't accessible for the rest of the team. So I think Confluence does a good enough job or a very similar job with maybe not user experience that is as seamless as the one of Notion. But Notion also has the benefit of being a very focused product while, for example, Atlassian is offering. And I'm always trying to find the reasons why things are the way they are. So it didn't make sense to use Notion. And we took more benefit out of having one solution in the whole organization. And this is a little bit like how I would take the decisions. Yeah. And I'm also happy that you're doing this because I was always pissed when I worked in organizations where you had many tools. And for an engineering team, it sucks as well. So you have then, I don't know, Photoshop where you get your files from. Then you have Zeppelin where you find all the attributes and SVGs and whatever. And then there's the next tool where you find, I don't know, the sizes. It doesn't make sense if it's messed up. And I think it's also a good thing to get started with to make sure that you clean up those from leadership perspective. I'm not saying top down, but someone needs to own that and also emphasize people on making the right decisions on tooling. It doesn't necessarily have to be the leader. It can also be a design ops, product ops, research ops person. You can also initiate such initiatives as a leader. Oh yeah. Cool. Alex, it was a great chat. So I think there were a couple of key learnings to take away, especially when you get started and what to look at in case you are in a situation that you are making a change or you starting a new challenge because you got promoted or you found a new job. Alex and I would love to hear your story. Feel free to drop us a mail at hello at product-bakery.com. All right, then that's a wrap. Enjoy the evening. Oh, and Christian. Obviously. I love you.