Jesse James Garrett

The Season 4 premiere of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way has arrived! This season, Peter Merholz and I are talking to a whole new group of design leaders nominated by our listeners. Our first conversation is with Rajat Shail of Vivint, a traditionally trained industrial designer whose career has put him at the intersection of hardware and software.

Over the years, many people have fallen in love with the vision of design as a truly holistic business function, imagining a future in which an executive-led design function informs every aspect of the business, just as much as functions like HR and finance do. But it’s a really hard vision to make real.

Rajat’s experience shows that authority on paper and a broad mandate aren’t enough to deliver on that promise. He emphasizes the necessity of investing in relationships and earning trust from your cross-functional partners to help people not just go along with the idea of a holistic design function, but believe in it.