Jesse James Garrett

In my coaching practice, I meet a lot of design leaders who yearn for the authority to drive user-centered practices not just for their own teams, but across their cross-functional partners. With that kind of power, a leader could truly empower design to deliver on its potential, right?

But what does it actually take to create that? This was one of the big themes in our recent conversation with Todd Wilkens on Finding Our Way, the design leadership podcast I co-host with Peter Merholz. Todd was a key part of our leadership team when Peter and I were running Adaptive Path together, as manager and business lead of our Austin studio. As Todd describes in the episode, that experience led him on a journey away from design and deeper into business leadership.

But moving beyond design as a function for Todd did not mean moving beyond design as a mindset. As he’s moved into a series of C-level roles with comprehensive oversight of design, product, and engineering groups, he’s continued to think like a designer, even though he’s no longer solving ‘design problems.’

“Almost everything I do every day is completely influenced by my experience as a designer,” Todd says. “It’s a very human science kind of attempt to understand and then articulate what we’ve learned and what the major parts, major levers are that we can work with to accomplish a goal.”

Having identified the major levers, though, Todd then wants to get his hands on them. “I do my best work as a leader when I’m making things… I find that that helps me stay grounded. It’s like the difference between when someone says they’ve read about something versus they’ve done it.”

Balancing attention to the craft work with attention to the strategic big picture enables Todd to build a different level of trust with his cross-functional teams. “I’ve tried to get the team to fall back in love with making good stuff, because that goes a long way,” he says. “If I can get the engineers, the designers, the product managers to fall back in love with making good stuff, then they’re ready for us to figure out what the strategy is.”

Todd highlights that the holistic mindset he’s drawn upon to successfully align design, product, and technology is really just part of how designers have solved problems all along. “What I think should be next for design is that people with design skills and experience are able to really step into roles of leadership and companies that may or may not have the word ‘design’ on them,” he says.

Thanks Todd and Peter for a great conversation! Find the whole episode and transcript on your favorite podcast service, or right here on our website.