To build a ship, one does not gather men and women and assign the tasks of cutting wood, weaving canvas, and forging nails. Rather, one awakens within those men and women a yearning for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Culture is the apex predator in the leader’s toolbox.
Culture eats everything else for lunch.
The RingCentral design team started with a small core of visual and interaction designers and grew to over 100 highly-engaged designers, researchers, content strategists, design operations leaders, interns, and more from Portland to San Diego, to the Bay Area and South Florida, and in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and France, delivering experiences that helped grow the company from $300M to over $1BN in revenue and touched the lives of millions of consumers and knowledge workers worldwide.
With essentially zero regrettable attrition over six years, the team built deep collaborative relationships within and outside UX which helped drive success and a fulfilling work experience.
The Sumo Logic UX team was another great example of how aligning Design and Development in a single organization with a shared mission can drive experimentation, innovation, and a deep focus on delivering great experiences, quickly and with reduced rework.
TIBCO User Experience (2008 - 2015)
The TIBCO UX team was launched in 2008 with myself and a single designer. We sold the idea to the executive team with sheer force of will, repetition of a clear and concise message, and several copies of Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum which had been pre-highlighted to facilitate the anticipated, low-engagement, skimming by busy executives.
Our focus at TIBCO UX was split between a traditional UX IxD/VxD team with content strategy serving the global organization, and a dedicated product team driving innovation best practices.
In five years, the TIBCO team grew to 80+ incredibly talented, hand-picked individuals on three continents with responsibilities across the entire portfolio of TIBCO products. Many of the core designers, researchers, content strategists, and others from the TIBCO team now lead their own teams at Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Charles Schwab, Google, Lumanu, Meta, MetaLab, Microsoft, MuleSoft, Nutanix, PayPal, RingCentral, SalesForce, Sonatus, VMWare, Zoom, and others..