Design Driven

Matthew Marshall is Co-founder and Head of Product at New Story – a nonprofit startup that transforms slums into sustainable communities around the world.

Matthew is a Y-Combinator graduate, World Economic Forum Global Shaper, University of Georgia alum, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.

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How can companies — especially large companies — achieve that perfect triad of collaboration between the design, business, and technology teams? It’s a perennial question that remains largely unsolved.

We’ll tell you what’s decidedly not helping. Those balanced, beautiful Venn diagrams keynote speakers present at industry conferences illustrating the ideal design, business, tech dynamic.

Behind the scenes, design teams make fun of these cliched diagrams because they know real-world working relationships are lopsided. Business or tech reign, and design is too often seen as a mere contributing cog instead of an equal leader.

Clearly, achieving cross-team balance takes more than sketching circles.

To gain respect, designers need to bolster their business IQs. In fintech, that means learning about markets, trading, rates, money movement — all to show the business team that you do get their end-game and you are contributing to their strategy.

Even with business-savvy designers in your corner, this kind of collaboration is always hard. And it requires a more modern design mindset. It might seem impossible for large, complex organizations to work together — and work quickly — like startups seem to do.

Listen as host J Cornelius and guest Jose Coronado discuss leading efficient, cross-functional teams, even within legacy fintech companies.

Topics Include

• Why your design organization should run like a business
• How to get your teams to stop arguing and complaining, and start articulating needs stakeholders can get behind
• Applying today’s design thinking to yesterday’s big bank infrastructure

About Jose Coronado

Jose Coronado is the Executive Director, Head of DesignOps at JPMorgan. He helps UX teams amplify their impact, and companies maximize the business value of investing in design.

As a design executive and management consultant, Jose’s work includes projects with organizations like McKinsey, Accenture, Aquent, Bain Capital, and AIG. Jose’s impressive career spans leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies ADP, Oracle, and AT&T, among others.

He is also the Managing Editor of Design Impact, a digital publication where he shares leadership lessons from emerging and established design leaders around the world. Jose is a sought-after international speaker and workshop facilitator.

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The design thinking process is well documented and established. In fact, our most recent podcast guest, Wayne Li, was at the famous Stanford d.school when they helped create and document design thinking in the first place.

At a high level, design thinking is when a diverse group of people with varying expertise can work harmoniously, steeped in a culture of trust, to make cool things (products, solutions, services) happen.

However, even with a solid understanding of design thinking and efficient design practices in general, many businesses still miss the mark. Why? Because they forget two related things:

1. Validation loops are essential to great product outcomes
2. Flexibility in your development process is required

By nature, design thinking is cyclical, not linear.

The goal is to find the best possible solution or product to solve a problem, right? That requires gathering your diverse thinkers and brainstorming expansively. Then, going back to the ideas raised in your brainstorming session and examining them through a critical, deductive lens.

You may need to go back and forth and round and round (hence the validation loops) to land on the best possible solution.

See how design thinking needs to be flexible to work effectively? Yes, there are prescribed phases. But ultimately, your team has to be willing to evaluate what’s in front of them at any given time, and even take a step backward before pushing on.

And therein lies the problem. It’s hard for people to work in this non-linear way. It goes against our neurological instincts.

In our latest podcast, host J Cornelius and guest Wayne Li talk more on optimizing your design processes from a human perspective.

Topics Include:

• How those in academia (which brought us design thinking) approach design challenges
• What football and improv comedy have in common — and what they tell us about how we should handle projects
• How working as a unit — not in departmental silos — leads to innovative ideas

About Wayne Li

Wayne Li is a professor of design and engineering at one of the world’s premier design schools, Georgia Tech. There, he leads joint teaching initiatives and advances interdisciplinary collaboration between mechanical engineering and industrial design.

Prior to becoming a professor at Georgia Tech, Li worked for Pottery Barn in innovation and market expansion. Impressively, he also taught for Stanford University’s design program — the same school that first ideated design thinking.

Overall, Wayne generates significant profits, expands market penetration, and drives innovation in all his roles. His strong brand management, product differentiation, and design strategy experiences are unmatched.

Learn more about Wayne Li and connect on LinkedIn.

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When was the last time you visited a physical bank branch and talked to a real live human about your account? It's probably been a while — and that’s the point.

The fintech world is becoming more digitized all the time. Eventually, there won’t even be brick-and-mortar banks.

That’s all well and good. But, as we innovate the future of banking, we need to consider how to fight fraud online. Unlike in-person banking, digital banking doesn’t allow for a teller to verify someone’s ID with his own two eyes.

In reality, it's not as scary as it sounds. Depending on how you think about it, there are more ways to detect fraud online than in person. You can track IP addresses, phone numbers, emails — and you can verify them all instantly.

One hold up to fully digital banking (and transactions in general) remains: Your social security number. Those little paper cards with that long-form number have been used for ages as our unique identifiers. But really, SSNs have been breached so many times that they’re not an ideal universal identity option anymore.

So, what’s next?

In our latest podcast episode, host J Cornelius and guest Heidi Hunter reveal the future of identity verification for fintech companies and users alike.

You’ll Also Learn:

• The importance of detecting fraud while providing a friction-free user experience.
• A three-tiered approach to innovation for customer-facing fintech companies. Hint: It involves sales, support, and biz collaboration.
• What tokenized IDs mean for the UX of transactions.

About Heidi Hunter

Heidi Hunter is the Vice President of Product Innovations at IDology. In her nine plus years with the company, she’s steadily (and impressively) moved up the ranks.

IDology is a leader in digital identity verification and authentication, and Heidi is a trusted expert on and innovator of ID and fraud prevention solutions.

Additionally, Heidi has a proven track record in client consulting, strategic partner management, and data science. She has also developed SaaS and deployed several successful, intricate client applications.

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