Gianni James Favaretto, Design Leadership in tech-savvy organisations

002

My Role

Head of Experience Design

Reporting to the Chief Product Officer

Re-engineered, coached, and led a team of Product and Service Designers to be of value in the organisation.
Identified and initiated team initiatives associated with Design Thinking, and other design-related practices to boost craftsmanship, creativity and collaboration.
Defined and executed the user experience and design vision, strategy and tactics.
Liaised with designers, developers, product managers, and business stakeholders to implement new conceptual ideas while developing and scaling a Design System.
Collaborated with the brand team to help ensure a consistent tone of voice and appropriate design across all digital customer channels.
Enriched an emerging technology and finance-based culture by injecting a more user-centred and problem-solving mindset and process through Design Thinking.

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Needs

I was Zopa's first UX and Product Design leader in their fifteen years of business. There wasn't a specific need besides the grandeur role of transforming Zopa into a great and friendly bank. It was my impression that no stakeholder leader in Zopa really had an idea of what to expect from me and especially on how to measure my impact.

The CPO had high expectations, and he was extremely eager to see design deliver business value.

How to trasform an organisation with no experience with design
to an organisation that embraces design as a business device successfully?

How can design help the business not in a year, nor in six months, but now?

Didier Baclin

Chief Product Officer

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Challenges

1
Zopa had no experience in dealing with design leadership; design wasn't really a Zopa's thing.
2
The designers were discontent and concerned about their future at Zopa.
3
Design was overall poorly executed, from branding to product design.

After talking to several stakeholders, I felt the need to define and explain the meaning of design at Zopa, from a philosophical to a practical perspective.

The plan

Clarify the meaning and purpose of design at Zopa.
Use design as a device to connect people of different domains.
Invite and include everyone to be part of the design transformation.
Don't only tell, show what good design looks like.
Re-build the design team for the long term.

The obstacles opportunities

Sometimes, challenges can become opportunities.

No design background at the leadership level. Sometimes a clean slate is all you need.
A couple of senior designers abandoned the ship ahead of my arrival. I can refresh the team with new selective personalities and skillsets.
Tight timelines for the bank launch. At least we know how much time we have at our disposal.

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Solutions

Luckily, the people at Zopa were exceptionally good to work with, and that indeed facilitated my job.

How might I facilitate conversations about design and get support from the leadership group?

What is Design?

When you ask what design is to your co-workers, you will surely get a variety of definitions. The majority of those definitions will regard the visual appearance, how something looks and [maybe] feels. To properly deliver good design efficiently and collaboratively, all parties need to have [internally] a common understanding of the meaning of design.

I defined design to be a device to connect with people, thus to ideate and deliver meaningful solutions while considering people's diverse cognitive and physical ability. A device that is fed by care for people's needs, a user-centric design process and strong craftsmanship.

Design Thinking

As part of my strategy to talk about design, I planned and facilitated several "Intro to Design Thinking" workshops across several business' areas—including HR— both in the London and the Barcelona office.

That was also a very successful way to introduce designers in those business areas and become acquainted with colleagues that you would not interact with regularly. To engage with all participants, I used a format that makes these workshops fun, interactive and comprehensible for all. Proudly, it's not the typical jargon-overloaded workshop that you might have encountered or heard about.

How might I inspire and excite designers about their future at Zopa?

A team for the long run.

When I joined Zopa, I found most designers to be contractors; there was only one permanent employee. They were all favourable, supportive and collaborative. I was genuinely excited to work with them. However, as I said, most of them were freelancers, and unfortunately for them, my goal was to build a team that was adequately integrated into the business and for the long run. To achieve that goal, I needed to have permanent individuals that could care and grow at Zopa.

I wanted to convert all contractors into permanent employees, and for that to happen, I needed to show them what the future will look like for them at Zopa. All but one accepted the offer to become a Zopian. Even though I was sad to see one freelancer go, I felt ecstatic knowing that everybody else accepted to stay for the vision. In the meantime, we were able to welcome new designers into the team. Luckily, we were able to complete the team set up just before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

How might I help to raise the quality bar of design?

The design journey.

If there is something I learned in my experience is that design is an organisation's effort. I could be a fantastic talented designer and still fail to deliver decent work. Think about it. What gets prioritised, the methodology, the timeline, the code performance, and how we measure success will shape the outcome of any design work, and most of the time they are led by a diverse group of individuals that might not understand or even appreciate design.

As a design leader, it's my responsibility to gauge the capacity of an organisation to deliver design, thus to plan the best strategy to facilitate delivery while raising the quality bar.

PS: To tackle such a task, I take advantage of an iterative framework that I developed over the years.

At Zopa, regardless of the designers' skillset, design was poorly executed. In most cases, you need to have the authority and responsibility to influence and deliver change. Because of the tight timeframe at my disposal, I had to act quickly. That meant asserting clearly my intentions publicly and act steadily and fast; and of course, I had to apologise when I had to take radical shortcuts.

Some influential business stakeholder believed that the old/current design was good enough. And they were right. It's critical to understand that whenever we weigh something, we are comparing what we see with something we are familiar with, consciously or not. The current outcome might be acceptable but compared to what exactly? Hence to facilitate such an argument and comparison, I had to show them an alternative. Call it an A/B test.

That worked well. Side by side, I compared my new principles-led outcome with the old Zopa design. That clarified and made everyone believe that we were capable of delivering better products.

That was phase one, the beginning of a journey to raise design and products' standards.

To succeed, I needed everybody's support, so, instead of aiming too high, I focused on fulfilling a level of design that could be delivered speedily and without too much hassle. After succeeding with phase one, we would work towards phase two, and so on.

Phase one was all about setting up the stage with:

A set of requisite design values and principles
A new simplified, branded and scalable UI language
A new set of human-driven interactive UX patterns
The introduction and injection of Service Design
The clarification of individuals' responsibility [especially within the Design System large group of contributors]

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Results

Six months into the job, the design team was finally formed; at least for the year. With our processes and design toolkit ready, we were well-equipped and prepared to assist the business in the transaction of becoming a bank and scale the design to a new level.

All the new UI (in the Atomic Design way) was created to simplify product ideation and scaling, brand awareness, agile development and delivery.
The design vision and processes to build better products faster was shared and accepted.
In no time, Service Design undeniably proved its business value.
The Design team, in its members and dynamics, was well-established.

Then, like in any good story, we had to face an adversary, the Covid-19 pandemic. Being forced to work from home added anxiety on top a bit of process disruption. How much the lockdown will affect the business? Are our jobs secure? Business results weren't encouraging, and concerns started surging.

Finale

The day with more bad news arrived.

I was told that a cut on the Design workforce was necessary to help the business pass-through these hard times.

I was sure that the design work done so fas would satisfy Zopa for some good time. I was confident that my team could deliver the expected. I was aware of the danger of having half of my team still in probation. Hence, I decided to volunteer to go on furlough hoping that my move would have been enough to avoid any other sacrifice in the team.

I knew then that that was the end of my experience in Zopa. Zopa never had high expectations from design, and inevitably some believed that it was a luxury that now they couldn't afford.

A month later ...

The team went on to receive high praise throughout the business and won Zopa’s team of the week award after helping to redesign our website and app in time for our bank launch.