Dug Song and Sally Carson, discuss the role of design in tech. Doug is a general manager and cofounder of Duo Security, now a part of Cisco. And Sally is their head of product design and user research.
Duo Security makes it safe to log into anything from anywhere, from any device, at any time. Duo combines security expertise with a user-centered philosophy to provide simple and effective security solutions for all users today, we will explore why design matters in tech and why we need to build more inclusive environments across the tech community.
Links for Reference: Duo Security, Cisco, Elayna Spratley, w00w00, Allied Media Conference, Brian Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative, Digital Defense Playbook, Project Greenlight, Detroit Community Technology Project, Chamath Palihapitiya, Ben Adida, VotingWorks, Ban the Box, Org Design for Design Orgs
Olga: [00:00:00] I'm Olga Stella, the executive director of Design Core Detroit. Thank you for joining us for season two of the Detroit City of Design Podcast. As stewards of Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation, we aim to raise your awareness of how design can create conditions for a better quality of life and economic opportunity for all.
Designers are professional problem solvers. And in season two, we will discuss the value of design to business and society. I'm excited to be speaking with Dug Song and Sally Carson, who are here to discuss the role of design and tech. Doug is a general manager and co-founder of Duo Security, now a part of Cisco. And Sally is their head of product design and user research.
Duo Security makes it safe to log into anything from anywhere, from any device, at any time. Duo combines security expertise with a user-centered philosophy to provide simple and effective security solutions for all users today, we will explore why design matters in tech and why we need to build more inclusive environments across the tech community.
Doug and Sally, thanks so much for joining me today for the Detroit City of Design podcast.
Sally: [00:01:13] Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Olga: [00:01:15] Well, I’m excited. I know when Duo became part of Cisco in 2018, it was a huge story here in Michigan, and across the country, of course--this homegrown Ann Arbor tech company, and just the prominence that your company has achieved.
I think it's just such a really important story for our tech community in Detroit and Southeast Michigan and for our state. And I thought it would be great to talk to both of you more about the role that design has really played in helping to build Duo and to address the coming challenges, right. As we're sitting here in the middle of a pandemic with a lot of social upheaval at the same time, and to really talk to both of you about the role that design has played in the company, in your tech business, Doug, you know, you and the team have been on the leading edge of tack in many ways.
And so it'd be great to hear from you as a co-founder of Duo. What has design meant for Duo and its growth?
Dug: [00:02:12] Sure. Good. Yes, it's great to be here. And to kind of summarize quickly, I think that design, for us, was a key principle around how we thought we would try to be successful in disrupting an industry which otherwise has left its users behind. Security has never been something that, generally speaking, people want to deal with.
It's like buying insurance, you know, something might happen, right? And it might not. And so there's a lot of questionable value for folks in terms of it, and mostly what they experienced and feel is the frustration--of things getting in their way and all this kind of thing. And so far, our business design was actually the kind of crucial thesis behind how we'd actually be successful, making security better because if engineering is about kind of doing things right, and the design is really about doing the right things and to figure out what that is and security, especially the kinds of security we deal with today, where attackers smart attackers, anyway, they don't go after systems, applications, or networks alone. They go after people, and the intersection of people and technology is actually today where security largely fails. And so from the start, we really focused on trying to think about how we would approach that problem from a design perspective.
In fact, our fifth hire at Duo was a designer. That preceded Sally, but Sally was our first design leader who came after this person, but we effectively kept that ratio even as we grew, of about one designer for every five developers or so. And to be frank with you, that 15% to 20% investment for us was critical in delivering real value to the market, especially when something like 80% of the code that's written for a software product is never actually exercised. So if you look at these code coverage models and how no software actually gets used. It's not an exact proxy but definitely speaks to the fact that most software engineering is literally useless.
So design is actually how you ensure that you know, you can make things that people love, or at least not hate--and deliver real value.
Olga: [00:04:06] Sally, when you joined the company, I know you've been quoted as saying that often tech startups really focus on a robust engineering team, but don't invest much in design.
So tell us a little bit about your experience when you came to do what was the head of design and, and just how your work meshed with Doug's philosophy that he's just outlined.
Sally: [00:04:27] Sure. I remember these early conversations I had with Doug about Duo and about the opportunity for design, maybe coming up on five and a half years ago now.
And what struck me in those conversations was how customer-centric he was when he described the problem and how customer-centric the entire company was that he had built to that point. And there was a fairly large engineering group at that point, but the way that Doug described the problem to me was, you know, security today, yes, there's a technical component too, but it's primarily a behavioral problem.
Most breaches originate with a phishing attack where people's credentials, their login or password gets stolen after they click on a phishing email. So that's not even super technically complex, but the problem we're trying to solve for there is around behavior, and how do we make the right thing to do the easy thing to do?
And so when I heard him describe this issue around like human behavior and people being the weakest link, oftentimes, to me that presented the opportunity for design and user research. When I hear that a problem is mostly rooted in human behavior, that speaks so much to the role that design can play in solving those problems.
And so at Duo, we very much blend advanced technical innovation with a human-centric design approach. And it's the combination of those two that I think is our unique, special sauce that we bring. It's pretty unique in the space of security. Part of what I'm excited to talk about today is just the opportunity for designers in cybersecurity. It's a really dynamic exciting field, and I want to get more designers excited about this space because the impact that you have is really profound, if we do our jobs right.
Olga: [00:06:00] Most people think of tech startups from, you know, the cool apps that make some part of my life a little bit more convenient, but what you have built at Duo is really something about... it doesn't just make my life more convenient, it makes my life safe, my identity safe.
And Doug, when you were thinking about making these early investments in the company, was it hard to convince others--the other investors in the company or others, you know, as you were building the company--to maintain this ratio and to prioritize the customer in this way or not? What did that look like?
Dug: [00:06:33] No, frankly, number one, we never really went out for funding. So, you know, we were thankful that investors were inbound for us and so they didn't have much say in how we decided to lead the company, but they certainly backed a lot of our thinking.
And to be honest with you, in the wake of Steve Jobs, his success with Apple, I think a lot of businesses have thought a lot more about design in recent history, than ever before. You know, the whole experience, the customer experience Apple has provided--their Apple store, which I really consider to be that “Church” of Apple. Like, they have this glass box and everything is cleaning white, you got the high priests at the Genius bar, open the box, it’s got magnets.
The whole thing is like this magical kind of experience, but Apple wasn't the first company to build a computer, or an MP3 player or a phone. And yet they're the most profitable business seemingly out there today. You know, that Delta is design. [Olga: Right.]
What's lead to their successes has been that. And so it didn't take a lot for us to sort of seeing that success early with customers, especially in a technology space where again, the customer experiences, generally speaking, are so terrible, that doing even a little bit better led customers to us in a way that people actually felt pretty, I mean, sometimes emotionally invested. That we were actually helping to, especially for the people that run our service, the administrators and the security engineers... to literally make their lives much simpler. For a persona like that, it would present a, we call the buyer “Helen” who's, our Chief Information Security Officer’s, sort of persona.
And then we call the administrator, Gary, you know, the best thing that happens in Gary's day is that he gets no calls. Right? That's the pinnacle of his success as a service provider. And how difficult is that? Right? That if you ever get any feedback, it's always negative, in what you do. So, again, our goal here was to create really a unique experience as something that again, would make us, as Sally said, the safe thing, the right thing, the easiest thing to do. And I do think of Duo as being the kind of intersection of security and design in both security engineering.
And I think usability are about kind of the same thing, making sure the right thing happens by default. Right. And so we really focus on that as a key principle of the company from.
The start, but we continue to have to figure out how we leveled that up. And so again, under Sally's leadership, I'm very grateful for the amount of insight that she and her team have built for our entire company really around again, what a great user experience and a great customer experience really can look like. But I think these days, there are many examples that we can draw from, like, whether it be Apple or even comes like Microsoft, these days are doing a much better job than they used to.
Olga: [00:09:10] Well, and the impact of that has really paid off right. With the sale to Cisco and you don't build that kind of value in the company if you're not delivering customer value.
Sally, it'd be great just to hear a little bit more from you about what your approach has been. I know you lead with user research and that has a lot of--that's feels very longterm, and so how does that work within the company when business cycles can be short and there's a need for turnaround on products and that kind of thing. So maybe tell us a little bit more about the approach you've brought to Duo.
Sally: [00:09:44] Sure. Yeah. And you're right. I think the first or second hire I made at Duo was a user researcher, Mark Thompson Kohler. He's been with us for five years now, and we did need to deliver some quick wins to the business, just to demonstrate the kind of value that research can bring.
I think the explicit ask from Duo was, come and build out product design, but I said, okay, you're going to get user research too. I'm going to throw that in too, because it is so key to framing up the problems that we're looking to solve. And ultimately, my goal was to get to a point that we're at now, where there is this more expansive long-term generative research that attacks much broader questions: What are security behaviors for the everyday technology users and what leads them to be inconsistent, even if they're security minded with their practices and how can we kind of find some unmet needs through the product?
So the playbook that I used was starting with usability testing and because we were so engineering-centric, when I joined, you know, we were shipping iterations to the product every two weeks and usability testing is just like a really straightforward way to start to add value immediately for industry org.
But the way we did it was kind of unique: we took over a meeting room. I just booked it nine to five, Monday through Friday, for like a year. Like, I just kind of like guerrilla style and took over in particular, the meeting room that had one wall that was all windows that faced a pretty busy hallway. So that's where we conducted our usability testing sessions and we would have customers dial in remotely.
We still do that. So that they're actually using their own workspace. I think that's kind of important for us. They need to be at their own workstation, we need to be observing them in their real context of use. So oftentimes the IT administrator might get pulled off our usability call because he needs to handle an emergency.
And that's real. And that's a research insight, you know, we take note of that really helps to build empathy for the reality of this person in their world, and the stakes that they're living under. Yeah. And so I remember, you know, Doug, we kind of walked down the hallway and we were all on mute in there watching a customer, I'd say, Hey, come in here, check it out, we're user testing this new thing, you know, check it out. And just the way that you can make research visible and participatory, like we really encourage the engineers working on a feature, the product managers working on a feature. We want them in that room with us and usability testing is again, it's like a beachhead for more robust user research.
But that was the foot in the door to kind of demonstrate value immediately. And then from there we built out more ambitious research programs. And it's exciting to me now, like, it still tickles me to hear Doug talk about Gary and Helen, our personas. Like we have that kind of adoption and culture all throughout the org where people in our sales organization will refer to our personas by name, and they have a pretty rich understanding of who they are and what their behavioral needs are.
Olga: [00:12:21] And they're the personas, primarily the users within your company clients, or are they also kind of users at large like, single mom, you know, juggling two kids, trying to figure out how to use two factor authentication to get into her bank account?
Sally: [00:12:35] It's interesting you say that because we do have a more recent emergent persona that's not exactly a customer, it's just come to us via looking through our app store reviews. And one of my researchers did an exhaustive survey of like, when we get a negative app store review, what's actually happening there, read through all of the qualitative data and sort of synthesized it into some key findings, and what we found was a emergent persona that's not necessarily a customer, it is like, a person who's just, you know, downloaded Duo to protect their Facebook account, let's say. And because there's no IT administrator that's deploying it for them. If they get stuck, if they have any kind of hiccup, who do they appeal to?
The only person they can appeal to is Duo. So we are also noticing through a more quantitative analysis that it was driving support cases. So we had this twofold goal, then, of how do we improve that user experience for that customer? Because we do want to support that use case. And also how do we reduce the support burden for Duo?
And it was this beautiful marriage of qualitative and quantitative research and working across the organization. And I think that's design at its best. The philosophy behind our team is very much like, we want to be co-creators, we want to be facilitators of cross-functional initiatives. We don't want to go into a black box and appear with something really pretty and present it, you know, to engineers to build, we want to co-create alongside our partners. And those activities within Duo are starting to look a lot more like what in the design world we might call “service design,” just a lot of bringing in stakeholders from across the business, co-creating, doing workshops together... Elayna Spratley's our amazing Design Thinking Program Lead at Duo, who's trained people all across our organization and she's trained people to become design thinking facilitators. And we have folks from QA to site reliability engineering, to customer success who are now adopting that methodology and it's changing the way that they operate within their own teams, so that's just been an amazing place to get to.
Olga: [00:14:24] It sounds like the methodology of design around really the problems, and getting the problem statement right, and then figuring out how to iterate in developing and iterating solutions, it's become ingrained in the company culture.
Sally: [00:14:37] Yeah. It's like asking the five Why's. You know, a customer will kind of present maybe a superficial ask for a feature they might want, but if you can spend the time to really probe that and get to the underlying need, it can really impact product strategy and you can deliver more value to that customer that they wouldn't have known to ask for.
Olga: [00:14:52] We're in interesting times, as they say, you know, we're in the middle of a global pandemic, which at least in the United States is not really subsiding at this point, we're recording this in July and then there's, you know, thankfully I think a real spotlight on the need for greater social equity, more racial justice that the events in June around police brutality have really helped cast the spotlight on.
And just in talking to the two of you today, I'd love to hear your thoughts about adaptability and the role that tech might and should be playing in some of these issues. Maybe, you know, first starting with just COVID-19 and you know, the rapid switch that we've all made to working from home. What has that meant for the business and for the products that you're offering your customers?
Sally: [00:15:41] I can speak to the remote work piece. This is kind of neat because this is what Duo was built for from day one. So again, going back to my early conversations with Doug five and a half years ago, he was explaining to me just the state of security, and I think this is important for designers to understand. 20 years ago, when I started my career, I got a badge and I was issued a, not even a laptop or workstation at a cubicle. And I would badge into the building of my employer. And once I was in, I was presumed a safe party that can access all the internal stuff. You know, I can touch the Wiki or whatever else we had.
But now, you see just in the last 10 or so years, the prevalence of people using their own devices, a personal iPad or personal iPhone to touch company stuff, company assets, and then working from anywhere, maybe using Starbucks, wifi, or, pre-pandemic, on a flight using just public wifi. So how do you keep an organization secure when people are logging in from anywhere and everywhere using any device? It's not company issued, they're not within the building. And that's the core problem that Duo looks to solve from the outset.
And so we're so grateful to be in this position where we can help enable this worldwide workforce suddenly going to a distributed workforce. So it was really baked into the underlying assumptions behind the product, and it speaks to this new phase of security and what it means to create a modern security product you're designing for those problems.
Olga: [00:17:07] Well, it sounds like you're also just, you’re facilitating, even once we're past the pandemic, the ability for people who have many different things going on in their lives to be able to continue remote working, if they need to, or just the kind of flexibility that allows more people to participate in the workforce.
Sally: [00:17:23] Yeah. And it comes back to like, ease of use again. The fact that we are able to support customers suddenly going remote with very little notice, easy, quickly, efficiently with very little overhead, it does speak to the emphasis that we put on the customer experience and around ease of use.
You sometimes hear insecurity, like, the enemy of security is complexity. Or we might say security is only effective if it's easy. We really doubled down on that ease of use and it meant that we could help all these organizations go remote, seemingly with the flip of a switch.
Olga: [00:17:53] That's awesome. You know, Doug, in your role as a leader in the tech world, as you reflect on these times, what are you either seeing for Duo as a way forward, or for other tech companies, when we start to think about the kinds of responses we need in the world from tech businesses?
Dug: [00:18:09] Yeah. I think there are a lot of places where, to be honest with you, tech has a responsibility to help feed here. And again, while we're all socially distancing, one thing that I think companies can't do is sort of morally distance themselves from the work at hand.
And so there is a need and an opportunity for design to really help drive and steer, I think a lot of what the tech’s response can and should be. Because at the end of the day, you know, for instance, you look at like Cisco's new mission statement. So they came up with a new mission statement, a new purpose for the company after Duo had joined, and it's to empower a more inclusive future for all, which is a pretty big statement.
Olga: [00:18:43] That is a huge statement! [Laughter]
Dug: [00:18:48] Yeah. But for a company that basically did build the internet, you know, the routers and switches that comprise, you know, the backbone, like the physical backbone of the network that we all enjoy today. And as a history of connecting, you know, organizations, networks, and people to do so safely. And to do so in ways that are increasingly equitable, I think is really a noble and important next step.
I do think of technology as being sort of the great equalizer in a bunch of ways, because no matter who you are or what you do, your life probably has been touched by technology in some way. And these days, you know, there’s an opportunity to participate in an economy and at a level where you don't need all the things that it used to take to make money where, you know, you don't need machines, you don't need land, you don't need family connections, so forth. You mostly just needed a computer with an internet connection.
It is a huge opportunity to provide a level of opportunity. I think that, you know, that has otherwise been unmet. And so when I think about this, you know, I think in my own personal journey, like I was part of a hacking crew back in the day called w00w00, where, you know, very often our path to learning about computers was to basically steal time on other peoples, to kinda joy ride on other people's computers. We don't need to do that anymore, because everyone has access. But some of those folks did go on to start companies like Napster, Facebook, WhatsApp, et cetera.
You know, I think the turn there was, you know, I think every developer, open-source hacker, what have you, starts by scratching your own itch until you're exposed to enough problems or maybe develop empathy to really try to solve for others. And I think that's the difference that design makes, right, which is to be able to, as Sally says, help solve with others.
And so the opportunity, I think in this turn, is for design to help bridge tech, to communities and people versus just developing technology for its own sake or making money, which frankly was never really the goal of duo so much as you know, the mission we had to serve for protection and trusting for the money would follow.
But you know, some things even locally, actually, not even locally, but I am proud that they're, they're based in Detroit, but the Allied Media Conference that's coming up here this month, July 23rd-26th, which will be virtual this year. But it's an interesting opportunity, I think, for folks to get closer to some of these problems.
Cause it's Brian Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative likes to say, you know, you have to get proximate to the problems in order to understand much less solve them. And projects that have come out of that group. You know, the Allied Media Projects have been things like the Digital Defense Playbook, right?
A critique of surveillance technology, like Project Greenlight, for instance, the Detroit Motorola Balkan calls a problem of ethical design. This challenge of, if you're not buying the product, you are the product right from these companies that are otherwise, as he says, people farming, or like the Detroit Community Technology Project, it's working to close the gap on the digital divide by really enabling technology to empower versus oppress communities.
As a designer, you have an opportunity to identify those organizations whose missions really aligned with your values and vision of what the future should be, and they don't have to all be companies, you know, although I'm, I'm sort of free by bias state, I've come up with Chamath Palihapitiya, a Facebooker, who's now a massive billionaire, but as he says, if you can go get the money, do it, or someone else will.
Olga: [00:22:01] Right [laughter] We want more Detroiters to go get the money.
Dug: [00:22:03] But they can all do nonprofits. And there are some really outstanding nonprofits out there that are working on all kinds of missing problems like Ben Adida’s VotingWorks, working to solve some of the challenges of voter suppression and election fraud or any number of different groups out there that are really contributing in a meaningful way.
So that's where I think there's a tremendous opportunity for folks as either individuals or as organizations to really lean in here. And it's something that Duo and Cisco are doing with, you know, free offers, different bundles of our service. We've always had a free edition of our product and we always will--free forever for the smallest of our customers, because if you think it's the right thing to do.
Olga: [00:22:38] And it makes a big difference. I mean, think about the work that some of those nonprofits do really is about helping to support people who might otherwise be vulnerable in a lot of ways. And so they need identity theft protection, just as much as anybody else, they need to, they want to make sure that they're logging into their banking app and it's safe and secure, you know, because maybe a smaller amount than someone else's bank account, but it means the world. Right?
And I think sometimes we think of the solutions in the tech world as being kind of bougie, you know, solutions, but really they're, they're almost more important to people who are in under-invested communities because the need is so much more. I love the fact that you brought up the Allied Media Projects, Dug, because they're one of our longtime partners and just though kind of the grassroots work that they do to really connect community and tech in an authentic way. It's just, I think it's a real national model of just what's possible.
Dug: [00:23:35] Yeah.
Olga: [00:23:35] Dug, I really appreciate the fact that Cisco has really rethought its mission statement around building a more inclusive future for all. I think that's something that we've really been thinking a lot about at Design Core, as part of that, a trade city design initiative, how can design play a role in a more equitable and sustainable future, and really allow most people, you know, as many people as possible, hopefully, everyone to really participate.
And in some of the prior episodes of the podcast, we've talked to a variety of people around. Developing really calling out and identifying the groups that maybe can't participate and putting them at the center of the problem-solving. And if you're able to talk a little bit about the way that Cisco's thinking about it, from its own platforms, and from its role as a multinational global company, I think that would be just so interesting to our audience.
Dug: [00:24:28] Yeah, sure. So I mean, there's\ stuff we've done as Duo. We started with the mission of democratizing security, really helping the other 99% come to unite safely online. And again, we always did so by working to build a diverse team, to solve problems from multiple angles, having a design program that would allow us to ensure that that really led to creativity, not conflict, but with most of our hires coming from outside the industry and carrying with them, their own experiences as technology users, both positive and negative, I think we created this for the fodder for a very different sort of solution set. And how we might think about that. And so, you know, do, at the end of the day, when we last, we're an independent company, you know, we were about 40% women and underrepresented minority, or I should say non-cis male, and I do think that had a lot of impact on how we thought about some of these, these issues or concerns.
And so for instance, you know, some of our early work that I know Sally really helped lead us through as opportunity for us as a business was around accessibility, making sure that our logging experience was, uh, justice, uh, easy and effective for blind and visually impaired users as it was for anyone else.
This ended up opening up a really significant market for us. You know, our first customer was actually a public broadcaster overseas in Europe, but it wasn't just the market that opened up geographically, but also in sectors like higher education, government, et cetera, who similarly have a mission to serve the widest audience possible.
And so we've always thought of accessibility and democratizing security as being our ability, being gated by our ability to get to the widest number of users, and serving their needs authentically well. In order for us to do that as an independent company, a lot of that came down to, as Sally says, kind of the culture of the organization, because the culture of a company ultimately determines who flourishes, how people behave, who'd you, when's your team, how those teams interact and whether a company ultimately, in my opinion, will succeed.
But for a huge multinational, like Cisco, it kind of maybe goes even kind of further, you know, Cisco has a very. Well established CSR--corporate social responsibility--program, where they have a stated goal. In addition to our mission to empower a more inclusive future for all, there is a goal to benefit a billion people around the world by 2025, and not necessarily related to our business.
And so it's something that we actually do track and measure something that's powered by, you know, service hours and giving, and a bunch of philanthropy that Cisco itself does. You know, during the COVID epidemic, the company has basically put forward two and a quarter billion toward basically financial relief for our customers, or direct no investment in some of the relief efforts.
So it's been interesting to see what's Cisco's done in terms of its response. And to be honest, it's one of the reasons we brought Duo to Cisco, because we saw the opportunity to leverage a tech platform doing that kind of work at that kind of scale that would take us another seven, 10 years to get to. [Olga: Right.]
So, yeah, there are lots of things, I think, that companies like Cisco are starting to do, that we hope to accelerate. One of these examples, for instance, that I'm trying to figure out how we make work locally is creating more pathways to success into security, but also tech. Right? So Cisco has this global prison outreach program where they have trained tens of thousands of returning citizens in technology to get their Cisco CCIE or CCNA certifications or Cisco internet engineering or networking certifications.
And it, the prisons which they've done this, in Europe, in the UK, Italy, for instance...Italy has like seven prisons that they've done this with. They've taken the citizen rate for those returning citizens from like 60% to zero. [Olga: Wow.] Because when you do come out of prison with a Cisco advanced certification, you're going to get a six-figure job somewhere.
And so anyway, we've been trying to figure out again how to work through the Michigan Department of Corrections. MDOC has a vocational village where you can learn how to fix a car. You can learn how to build a house, but as of yet, you can't learn how to create a network or secure it. And we think that's a big gap and we think there's a huge opportunity for us to do something more there, opportunity.
So those are areas in which I think, you know, we're going to try to help try to get Cisco more involved here locally, but again, ways in which I think technology can help equalize some of the inequity that we're seeing in society today.
Olga: [00:28:37] So great to hear about that. Cause I think about the Ban the Box Initiative, and if you can marry those two initiatives up, we could really start to see real wealth building in a lot of underserved communities, not just in Detroit, but across our state. People coming home and actually being able to really chart a completely different path for their future.
Well, I'm so happy to have been able to talk to both of you, Sally and Doug, and to learn more about duo and its journey, how design permeates the whole company. And, you know, it's not just a siloed function, right, you know, the design department that makes things look pretty, but really about framing the right problems to solve and working with engineering to create the products that make it easy for your customers to solve their problems. It's just been such a wonderful conversation.
I think, as we close here, it would be great to hear from each of you, if you're giving advice to a tech startup in this day and age, you know, around the role of design and, and how to make these investments, you know, what would you say to that founder?
Sally: [00:29:39] I certainly have my own bias, but I think. You'll get a richer ROI if you can invest in design early, because like we said, designers really help uncover the actual problem, the underlying problem that you're looking to solve, and they can frame it up in a way to make sure that your entire organization is pointed in the right direction.
We're professional problem solvers, we're systems thinkers. We love working on wicked problems and deconstructing problems into their constituent parts and reconfiguring them towards a better solution, so designers can certainly work on the prettier user interface, but that's probably just the tip of the iceberg for what we can offer an organization.
So, if you need great problem solvers that are systems thinkers, invest in design from day one.
Sally: [00:30:05] Dug, what about you?
Dug: [00:30:21] Yeah. Well, I'd say read everything at Sally's ever, ever posted online. [Laughter] So there'd been a number of great interviews she's done, and I strongly encourage you for those of you who are seriously thinking about again, how, how to go about integrating design, to give it to start there.
But really the point is that, as Sally says, the design is more than UI, usability or accessibility or any of those things. And we have any sort of “ilities” and, you know, product and engineering and delivery from usability and scalability to reliability, quality, security compliance. So what design really helps to do is produce an integrated approach so all these things benefit the customer in a way that really sees us derive real value. It sees them derive real value from our efforts.
I would encourage folks to think about that early, as Sally says, Actually, Sally gave me a book early, which I thought was really helpful in helping wrap my head around this. It was an Irani title called “Org Design for Design Orgs,” which I know is [laughter]
Olga: [00:31:14] Oh, wow.
Dug: [00:31:15] That was a really good one. That was very, very influential in helping us think through the kind of investment we want to make and, and the journey that we'd be on together. Find a leader like Sally. Cause again, design to be frank with you, it's still something... I don’t want to say of a black art, but it still... feels very much in flux.
Right? The technology is constantly changing. Design is continually progressing. You know, people's relationship to technology keeps changing. So I do think you have to stay current with it, but you have to invest in leadership to find the right partner who can help you think through all this and Sally’s been that for Duo.
Olga: [00:31:47] I've really enjoyed talking to both of you today and eight. Thank you. We were thinking about, you know, how can we talk about design and tech Just really. It's just so high on the list because the company is really living and breathing the values that you're espousing and is really living and breathing the kind of values that we hope more companies are espousing.
So thank you both for your time today and for your insights. And I hope to see you both soon.
Sally: [00:32:12] Thank you, Olga. This was fun.
Dug: [00:32:14] Thank you.
Olga: [00:32:14] This has been the Detroit City of Design Podcast. If you like what you just heard, please share this episode on social media, via email or by any other means. For more information on Design Core Detroit, visit designcore.org, or search the hashtag: design core D T, that's D E S I G N C O R E D E T.
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Special. Thanks to Jessica Maloof of Design Core Detroit. This podcast is a product of Design Dore Detroit, part of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.