Episode 41: Surfacing Arin Bhowmick

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Transcript

Lisa Welchman:

So Andy, this was a great conversation with Arin Bhowmick. I really enjoyed meeting him and talking to him about design leadership. I was particularly tickled by him bringing in the idea of intuition. I don't think we've had a guest talk as strongly about using intuition in the workplace and the role that it plays. So I found that really, really fun to hear. What about you?

Andy Vitale:

The intuition piece was something that was, we haven't discussed it a lot on the podcast. I was really interested in his talk about design as a team sport, how to actually model behaviors and just what he talks about as design as a verb. And I think that he touched upon a lot of interesting things that I think people are going to really get something out of.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and the evolution of design in the digital age, that was kind of fun too. Anyway, I hope everybody enjoys this episode.

Andy Vitale:

Nice. Well, welcome Arin. It's great to have you on the show. Appreciate you spending time with us today. I'm going to jump right in and ask, you're currently the chief design officer at SAP, so I'd love to hear about your current role and even more, what unique aspects of your journey have led you to this role?

Arin Bhowmick:

So at this point of time, I am the chief design officer at SAP, and it is a company-wide role, as the title suggests. So in addition to product design, I'm also looking at design as a competency, design as an ethos, and a way of working within SAP.

So for me, I'm pretty much driving the intersection of people, practice, and focus, generating human business outcomes. So whether it's within product, it's about how we work, how we solve problems, how we align on the problem to solve, whether it's on the system side, whether it's on the IT side, or whether it's on traditional user interfaces, as long as it impacts the experience, I'm somewhat in the mix.

I've been in the field of design pretty much all my life practicing design. I call myself a designer first and a design leader next because I happened to stumble into design leadership. As I was practicing the competency of design, I often found that doing the design is the easy part. Getting the design implemented, getting the negotiations on which element of design should be prioritized were the harder part.

So I realized early on that in order for me to have an impact with design, I need to get better at leading with design, by design, through design strategy and design as a verb, so to speak. So at Oracle, I got an opportunity when I started my career there, spent almost 12, 13 years.

And fortunately for me, it being a big company, I got to work on pretty much the gamut of products from products that are catering towards really hardcore techy people like DBAs and sysadmins and developers to all the way in the other end of the spectrum, self-service, walk-up-and-use for sales reps, employees. So these are the cloud applications.

And in the process went through many, many different acquisitions at the time. And there I learned that for design to have a impact, it's important to consider design as a team sport. So you have to build, rebuild, form relationships and extend your evangelism every day. So that's what led me to design leadership, as I call it.

Then joined a smaller company to see, having worked at Oracle, how does a smaller company work. I heard it's agile and things get done faster. Innovation moves at a rapid pace. Is that true? So I went in there, a company called Progress Software based out of Boston. Formed a research and design practice from the ground up, scaled it. And then there was IBM really taking part in the transformation journey.

And in that journey too, went through different phases of my career to eventually become the chief design officer for the product portfolio that IBM has around software. And finally now, SAP, similar sort of game, but a bigger scope and bigger definition of design.

Lisa Welchman:

That's cool. This is really interesting. One of the first things that you said, Arin, was this four fourfold path of product, system, IT and user interfaces. And so I've always got my governance hat on and I am with you when you say things like coming up with the solution is not the hardest part, particularly inside of a large organization, getting people lined up and in agreement and just on the same path.

But you seem to have your arms around a lot of it, and so I'm wondering if you can reflect on the difference between having this experience, I guess this leadership experience and being able to influence most of the machine. Not everything's in there, there's some things missing out of there that affect. And some of your previous experiences when maybe you were operating and designing in one of these particular silos, what's been the difference between those two things for you?

Arin Bhowmick:

I think it's an interesting question, Lisa. I want to say that as a practitioner, sometimes you, we, all of us have tunnel vision. We have a problem to solve. We're trying to solve it the best way possible. Leadership is a different game. You're having a macro view, you're looking at all the parts of the puzzle and you're trying to connect the dots. And I think that's been the biggest flip is to think broader, look beyond your swim lane, look at the horizon.

There are other softer skills I would say that comes into play. Now, leadership is not a soft skill by any means, but the fact of being able to tweak your communication to the audience is an important part. I've been in technology driven companies, and I often talk to technology leaders who are well versed in technology. And so for me to make sense to them and the business leaders, I need to be able to talk in the same language.

So I've embraced technology, I've learned it. I've taken the time to understand and geek out a little bit because I think in realizing the definition and having a common vocabulary, we can get more things done. So that's been the revelation for me in my years so far.

Andy Vitale:

The one thing that you talked about was design as a team sport, and I see you post that a lot and we talk a lot about, we've got a team here that's a large group of many different competencies, and we always say, "This work, it's a team sport." So design being collaborative by nature, truly putting that focus, that lens on team sport, how does that help drive and improve the idea, the mindset around collaboration?

Arin Bhowmick:

Andy, the truth in life is designers can design all they want. In reality, at the end of the day, can the design manifest into products and services that customers and users can use? And the path to get there involves a lot of cross-functional competencies, product managers, marketeers, engineers, service, even sales.

So when I say design is a team sport, I'm going to acknowledge the first thing is that first of all, everyone has an opinion on design. Taking that out of context, I do think that everyone has some ideas on how a problem could be solved. And sometimes it is at the intersection of our differences we get those brilliant ideas.

And as I reflect on my career so far, when I say design is a team sport, even at SAP, it's a global company, by definition the problem we solve has to be scaled. So having a very nuanced solution to it coming out from just a design team doesn't cut it.

So we bring in people from customer-facing folks, both product strategy, product management, as well as even sales. We're trying to figure out how can they add value to either aligning on the problem to solve or providing suggestions on how the problem could be solved. And we often act as the glue, the facilitators, the ones who connect the dots between those ideas.

And I've seen that at the end of the day, it's never going to be a designer versus any other competency. It's really at the end of the day, everyone should be proud of what goes out of the door. And whether it's sales or engineering, they want the best product out there.

And I think that if we can get the passion to ignite and we resolve on a problem to solve together and figure out what value we add to the problem, eventually we get breakthrough ideas, not good ideas, breakthrough ideas. I've, in my career, have had probably two of those examples. But for me it's always been that in order for us to design to have an impact, we have to bring along the entire set of stakeholders and partners in the journey.

Lisa Welchman:

That's fabulous. I mean, you're definitely singing my song, Arin. Andy knows, we're always talking about this particular topic. You already mentioned a soft skill and that leading isn't a soft skill, but thinking about some other skills, what are some seemingly unrelated skills, competencies that you have and expertise that you have that helps you succeed at your job, but isn't directly design related? Are there things about you that are, I guess, your secret sauce or superpowers that you might have?

Arin Bhowmick:

Let's see, secret sauce and superpowers. I think storytelling is an important aspect. We as humans love stories and being connected to that. So I'm not sure how good of a storyteller I am, but that's an area of focus that I tend to use.

The other one I would say is intuition. Designers have really good intuition on how they could approach certain problems. So if we apply that on real business problems and even relationships and communication, we go a long way. So intuition would be the other one.

And the third thing I would say is definitely not a soft skill, it is a core competency in the field of design, is user research. My background, I started off in my career as a user researcher and part of a user researcher job is to understand the user and their pain points and their mental model, et cetera.

And I try to apply those similar protocols and methods to every communication I have. So netting out the core issue becomes an important part of a design executive to solve the problem. So those would be two or three skills that I try to push forward.

Lisa Welchman:

I mean, I'm really honing in on this intuition because I have a blog called Mindful Web where I'm trying to talk about the intersection of mindfulness and also team management. And one of the things that I've noticed for myself in my own practice of mindfulness is that how often I subvert my own intuition. I don't give it primacy. That sort of-

Arin Bhowmick:

Right.

Lisa Welchman:

And it doesn't mean you should just fly off the handle and do whatever your mind thinks, but oftentimes you know. You get a gut idea about the direction to go or someone throws something at you and you don't really honor that as well. So it's really great to hear you talk about that from a leadership perspective and also with balance. So I think the user research balances out the intuition.

Arin Bhowmick:

That's correct.

Lisa Welchman:

So you can have an intuition about maybe what might work, but then you're actually balancing it out by actually finding out whether or not it works, instead of just going, "This is how I think it should work," and dragging the whole team down the block, which you can't do when you lead a group of the size that you ... You can't drag someone down your intuitive idea. It's a lot of waste and it could be in the wrong direction. So that's really great to hear.

Arin Bhowmick:

Tying it, the intuition to essentially every design is a hypothesis until it solves a problem. And intuition is often thought about as a gut feeling. It's not necessarily a gut feeling. It's somewhat deep in your head that's connecting some information to bring together a foresight. So well said, Lisa. I think intuition backed with a little validation through user research and investigations often tends to help out.

Andy Vitale:

And I also wanted to touch on intuition a little bit because as a leader with the experience that you have, that intuition is there, but how do you create that space to develop the next level of leaders and people on your team to actually start to trust their intuition and what they can do to help really grow that ability to be intuitive?

Arin Bhowmick:

Andy, I would say that before I think about the next generation of leaders, I would say that for me specifically, people, practice, and focus, they generate the outcomes. People is the first piece. If you can get their mind, spirit and passion aligned, everything else flows.

Designers are very extroverted. In a lot of cases, designers are very extroverted. They are always sharing their opinions. But what often tends to happen is in technical spaces, in corporate environments, your voice sometimes gets a little low or quiet.

And so my goal as I've gone through the journey is to figure out a way to at least ... I can't create a culture, I can probably influence it a little bit by modeling some of the behaviors. So I tend to invite the designers to speak up and speak up not in a general way, but if you have an opinion, you need to register that, but you have to disagree and commit. I think that's the two ends of the spectrum here is it's not about expressing yourself, it's also about being humble enough to know what is working, what's not working.

But culture is also driven by, in a design community, I feel, recognition. Recognition of their work, of their effort is a very important part of how a team moves forward. And that's been one of my focus as well.

And the final thing is I think we are designers for a reason, and the underlying reason I would like to hope is we create, build, make things, services that helps someone, a user. So help people's lives. So inherently, if you can trigger those intrinsic motivation in a culture that helps promote those ideas, we get in a better space.

I would say for leadership, we've got a different spectrum of leaders, some young leaders who have just stepped into leadership, some who have transitioned from other industries. So each one has its own maturity curve. But for me, I truly stand by the point that I completely believe in experimentation. So if you as a leader want to try something, go ahead, try it. If it fails, it's understandable, we'll work through different ways of dealing with the problem. But for me, the trick about creating next generation leaders is to give them the space to experiment, to learn and hopefully get better at what they do.

And I often have the job of a coach, an enabler behind the scenes sometimes to see what advice I can give to help the leader think through. They're already in that phase, they're a leader already. So my job isn't to help them do their job, but it is really about how can I unlock their potential.

So for me, leadership is about trust, it's also about communication, and those are the two things that I try to build over time. It takes time. Trust takes a lot of time, but that seems to be the number one thing on what unlocks a leader, is the empowerment and trust they get to do what they're here to do.

Lisa Welchman:

I love that you're making space for failure on your team and letting it have a place so that it can be managed through. A lot of times I'm working with teams and there are failures all over the place, and all of this energy and effort is spent trying to act like they're not failures or not wanting to recognize them.

And actually, some things you just need to move them off the board. It didn't work, let's move it off the board and let's learn from it as opposed to trying to make something that doesn't work, work. So that's really great to hear.

Arin Bhowmick:

I would also say, Lisa, that we are living in interesting times, as in if you look at the progression of technology out there, whether it's AI, whether it's cloud, whether it's AR, VR, you can keep naming, metaverse, so on and so forth, each one is bringing a different take at how the world evolves. So experimentation has to be part of how we move forward, and it's illogical and not pragmatic of me to expect that every experiment is a success. So that's a given fact.

So again, that's one of the reasons when I say failure, yeah, this is the reason why. Not every project we're going to work on is going to be a success. And as long as we can understand and learn from it and move on, I think we'll be in a better space.

So it's really about, as a leader, do I have the foresight to think it through and try something to help improve? And if you can, then if it doesn't work this time, enterprise software, which is a space I am in, is all about patience

Lisa Welchman:

That's for sure.

Arin Bhowmick:

It hasn't worked today, can it work tomorrow? It hasn't worked tomorrow, can it work day after tomorrow? So it's really a long game, and the idea about leadership in an enterprise company at scale is really to keep trying.

Andy Vitale:

That's a perfect segue into our next question. So in the enterprise software space, you talked about modeling behavior. You've led design at really large organizations, you talked about Oracle, we know IBM before this and now at SAP. With all of the challenges that are happening with digital experience right now, what can someone in your position do to help shift some of the more negative dynamics and really amplify the positive ones?

Arin Bhowmick:

I think the main thing that design leaders like, not just me, any sort of level of design leadership that has executive relationships can do is to remove the myth of what design is and what design does and the impact of design. So tying it back to business is going to be a really important part.

Tying it back to humans is what comes naturally to us as designers and creatives. We know that. We've got to do better at evangelizing it. Of course, we can't assume that everyone understands why we are in it.

But the part that we need to grow on is the business side, is do we understand the business? Do we understand how the decisions we can or we are going to take is going to impact the top line and the bottom line? So for me, I think as you move towards the next level of maturity is design leaders becoming business leaders and in fact influencing the arc of the business going forward.

Andy Vitale:

So where my brain goes with that is when you talk about design leaders becoming business leaders, there's a level of maturity that comes with the business as well and understanding that as we promote leaders, they start to look at things adjacent to their space, and then eventually they can make decisions that impact the entire company.

So what advice would you give for somebody that's in this space of, I'm leading design and I want a little bit more, and the company still sees me as a design leader. How do I start to educate or really get seen in that light as an actual business leader?

Arin Bhowmick:

I would say that don't wait for the opportunity. Try to grab and lead a particular project or initiative that doesn't fall directly in your design swim lane. For example, just some examples here, as designers and design leaders, we often talk about users of our product. On the company side, we're talking about customers at different levels. How close are we to the customers and how do we manifest some of the ideas and thoughts they have that affect the product roadmap or the business strategy?

What if you went and actively sponsored a few customers to be part of this journey and learned from them and replayed it back to the business? What if you look at the product portfolio and looked at some innovations that probably can bring in that expands this segment in the market? Or let's say you look at things like support. Support costs are pretty big for companies. What if you took a look and figured out what's causing the burnout of support and how can you help?

So these are some examples, but the basic point is don't wait to be invited to the party. If you see a problem, even if it's unknown, go lead it, try it. Again, the worst that can happen is you're going to fail, but you're going to learn something out of it.

Lisa Welchman:

We do have one last question for you.

Arin Bhowmick:

Sure.

Lisa Welchman:

And I think we're going to get some interesting answers because you've already talked about some of them a little bit. And that is, what are a few things that you wish someone had told you early on in your professional journey, things that you know now? So older self talking to younger self, what do you think about that?

Arin Bhowmick:

Many things. These are all about lessons you learn over time. I would say the first one that pops to my mind is don't assume good intent will generate good outcomes. Don't assume that.

Lisa Welchman:

Interesting.

Arin Bhowmick:

You have to make it happen. You have to work hard for it. You have to still do the due diligence. So that is one.

Second is it's taught me a lot of patience. Coming up, I want to say any burning designer, design leader has a lot of things they want to do, a bucket full of ideas and you want to execute it really, really fast, and often you'd run into roadblocks and your energy dissipates. I wish someone would've told me that, hey, you're in it for the long game, so watch your pace. Try it again. Try it in a different format. Reframe the problem if you need to, but that's the way to move forward.

And the third thing I would say is this is a young practitioner, the fact about the design as a team sport, back to Andy's question, I wish someone would've told me that early on, as in not just, hey, we should work as a team. That's a given. But each competency has a point of view on design, whether it's support or HR or finance or you take any.

And it would've been nice as a young leader to start interfacing with those functions, getting to know what it means to be a well-rounded design professional. Because often as design leaders, we learn on the job, we are learning as we're going. So that would probably accelerate a little bit of our effectiveness and efficiency, if I had an advice like that, I guess.

Lisa Welchman:

I mean two things are coming up with me for that, and I'm curious, do you think that this perspective on design by others in the organization, do you think that that's been changed or mutated because of digital spaces? I mean, design existed prior to digital spaces, and I think it got to, to a certain extent, maybe not industrial design, but when I'm just thinking about inside of an enterprise, it maybe got to do a little bit more of its own thing because there wasn't all of this interdisciplinary nature of things that got touched based on this design. So do you think that's been shifting and do you think that's going to continue to shift, if you agree with that?

Arin Bhowmick:

Yeah. I think, first of all, a couple of things, the awareness of what design is as a competency, as a verb has progressed in the industry and in general. So that's one part. But I think with this whole digital experiences, a digital way of working, it has given us access to tools and services that we could then use to expose or bring to light some of our ideas, which is basically the act of design, thinking through the problem and coming up with solutions and innovations.

So that has democratized a lot of our thinking. So I feel like, to you, what you rightly said, not just the digitization, but the fact that the tooling is available to be able to express yourself is a great thing. I mean, my son, I'm just going to give you an example, my son, he just turned 12.

Lisa Welchman:

Oh, the fun years are beginning.

Arin Bhowmick:

Yes. And he is a curious one, and he is always burning with ideas. And I often see him create designs and I'm shocked. He's 12 years old, how can you create those? And often then he comes and tells me how he does it.

So I think what has happened is we are at a point where the tooling is not the best testament of your expression. Designers used to be, in the days when I started, "Do you know Photoshop?" Oh, okay, that's the tool, so if you knew Photoshop, you must be a great designer. So the tooling part is out now. It's really about the craft, honing into the craft on how you express yourself. And with that comes the fact that everyone has access to the tools, so everyone can be a designer. And that's really, really true.

Lisa Welchman:

That's a great one. That's a great one. Well, thanks a lot. This has been an amazing conversation and it's been lovely to meet you. So thanks for joining us.

Arin Bhowmick:

Thank you, Lisa.

Andy Vitale:

Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. So-

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, thanks so much, Arin.

Arin Bhowmick:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

What are some ways that people could reach out to you if they're interested in talking to you some more?

Arin Bhowmick:

I think the usual, social media. I'm pretty active, like Andy is. I would say LinkedIn and Twitter would be the best format. I try to respond to most interactions. So that would be the best potentially.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, lovely. We'll put those handles in our show notes so folks can get in touch with you.