Making design matter in a highly technical domain with Robin Titus

Hey, I’m Yuriy, and welcome to this bi-weekly newsletter. Here I share highlights from my conversations with product leaders on Cieden Podcast.

Recently, I had a meaningful talk with Robin Titus about the changes in the product designer role and what it takes to make a company truly focused on design.

Robin is a self-taught designer who built one of the first design teams at Capgemini 10 years ago. He started as a product manager and then ventured into design to follow his aspirations. Throughout the 25+ years of the product journey, Robin has had a varied career that includes involvement with many different companies: startups, scale-ups, and corporates. Currently, he leads the product design team at Aiven, a triple-unicorn scale-up based in Helsinki, Finland. Robin founded two startups and is an active mentor and coach of early-stage ventures in a corporate incubator based in Germany.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• What is a design-driven organization
• How to make design important in an org with 100+ developers
• The growing importance of soft skills in product design

Some takeaways:

1. Having a design director on C level doesn’t make an organization design-driven. Your company is design-driven when design is baked into the product strategy and when it leads to clear business outcomes.That means, however, that design-driven development requires everybody to be something of a designer. You're the steward of design, but that's everybody's job, for the simple reason that great products don't get made if your developers don't give a hoot about design.
2. What really matters in B2B product design is not the headcount on your team, but rather culture and mindset. Setting up a culture of product within the organization goes far beyond design and includes engineering, product management, and beyond. From initiative inception to finish, owning not only the product but a piece of the business can dramatically drive success. This is so transformative in that it allows the space to accomplish great impact. The goal will no longer be success but real impact. It means going past building outputs or launching a feature without necessarily turning it on. The focus should be on achieving meaningful outcomes for the customer, persisting until those outcomes are realized. Delivering a feature is just the beginning; delivering a desired customer outcome is all that really counts. Because just delivering a feature and turning it on – well, that doesn't really do the trick.
3. At Aiven, candidates don't get any kind of test assignment. Their craft is assessed by the portfolio they provide during the recruitment process. But most of all, part of the hiring process is an assessment of soft skills – how the person thinks while coming up with solutions and communicates their decisions towards others. Robin believes that this part will even matter more in the next few years.
4. When you have 10 times more developers than designers in your organization, you have to be loud and stress on the cross-functional collaboration towards business outcomes. You shouldn’t build the design function by books, you need to find a unique model to which all departments can relate.

That’s just some juicy parts from our conversation. Tune in for more on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and others.

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Thanks and until next time!