Hustle: The Art of Letting Others Have It Your Way (feat. Ryan Rumsey)

08/31/15 • 32 min

So, you’re a great designer - but do you know how to listen, drive a conversation, and build consensus with your clients, company, or teams? Ryan Rumsey, the Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT, hops in the Funsize studio to share his knowledge and experiences in persuasion and building consensus with stakeholders in the enterprise world.

1:00
Ryan discussing his role as Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT and his expertise in Enterprise User Experience Design. He also gives us an overview of some of the things he did in his previous role at Apple.

3:15
Apple’s hush hush culture. It’s easy designing software for Apple employees because everyone at Apple only uses Apple products.

5:40
Rick talks about his experience working on enterprise design projects. Ryan discusses some of the dynamics of working in an enterprise environment and the art of selling your design work to your internal stakeholders.

7:00
We discuss Ryan’s new article “Influence and Design Success - The art of letting others have your way”. As a design leader, it’s rare to be able to take credit for the pixel level work. Your job is to motivate and inspire your team to push the envelope and produce great outcomes. Sometimes when you know you have the right answer you just can’t push it. You have to be the muse and let other believe the idea was theirs. Ryan gives us an example about a project where he struggled with the stakeholder. It’s hard to tell a client no or that they are wrong, especially when there’s data to support it.

9:10
Ryan teaches us an old improv technique from his former life as a professional actor called “Yes, and?”. The scenario is that you accept what anyone said and simply add to it so you can help drive a conversation. When a stakeholder provides a comment in the heat of the moment that you don’t agree with or know is wrong, it’s always best to let them know that you heard them and that you will take some time to consider it. When you come back to the table, remind them of the conversation they brought up and elaborate on how it inspired you to think about the problem deeper and in devising the solution to meet the need. “With your inspiration I was able to create this!”

12:00
It’s not a design exercise, it’s about understanding your team or stakeholders personality or character so you can can build consensus and get designs approved.

14:30
We aren’t using these tactics for bad or for personal best interests. It’s for the good of helping our clients and stakeholders achieve desired business outcomes and ultimately success with products people love.

“Knowing the users and having empathy for them isn’t always going to
resonate with them.”

16:00
Defending your work properly. Many of the people that tell you “no” or that you're wrong are highly successful individuals that get shit done. If you can help them get a win, then all of a sudden they will become a massive advocate. Your gut reaction is many times right but don’t just react or build. Take time to process. Learn to shut up and let things go. Let people know you heard and listened and that you’ll consider it. Instead of design lingo learn to use persuasive business words that business people understand.

18:30
How design teams can leverage these principles to build vision, consensus, plans, and designs that everyone can believe in. Use design thinking practices! Use principles and values to ensure you’re on the same page. If you don’t have any structure or framework it can be hard to know where to apply your creativity, and that makes for very dispersed shotgun approaches - and can end up focusing on things that actually might not need creativity. Hence, design language and UI frameworks. Creativity lives within structure. When things stop working, it’s time to look at your principles.

“Principles are uncovered, not necessarily developed.”

23:00
Rick and Anthony discuss how we onboard new clients to introduce our new Client Partners to Funsize, our principles, process, and our company culture.

28:00
We couldn’t find that Staind video so please tweet us if you find it!

29:00
A sidebar conversation reminiscing about a punk rock era.

31:00
Hustle Podcast Season 1 conclusion and announcement of Season 2.

Links

3:15
Apple’s hush hush culture. It’s easy designing software for Apple employees because everyone at Apple only uses Apple products.

12:00
It’s not a design exercise, it’s about understanding your team or stakeholders personality or character so you can can build consensus and get designs approved.

“Knowing the users and having empathy for them isn’t always going to
resonate with them.”

“Principles are uncovered, not necessarily developed.”

23:00
Rick and Anthony discuss how we onboard new clients to introduce our new Client Partners to Funsize, our principles, process, and our company culture.

28:00
We couldn’t find that Staind video so please tweet us if you find it!

29:00
A sidebar conversation reminiscing about a punk rock era.

31:00
Hustle Podcast Season 1 conclusion and announcement of Season 2.

Links

Previous Episode

Hustle: The Client-Agency Relationship (feat.Brandon Breitenbach)

Brandon Breitenbach is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pare Booking, a kick ass digital product that’s changing the way musicians and artists book shows and get paid. Recently, Brandon stopped by the studio while visiting Funsize to discuss the history of our working relationship, how we made decisions, the process and tools we used and what the ideal client and design agency relationship can look and feel like.

2:00
Introduction to the Pare Booking's product and user experience. Pare Booking modernizes the process for musicians and artists to book shows, manage contracts, and get paid.

4:00
Brandon’s share's his music and music booking industry background.

4:47
How Funsize met Pare Booking. Brandon and Anthony talk about the history of how Pare Booking and Funsize found each other and how quickly we were able to get started.

6:25
Why Pare Booking chose to work with Funsize. Brandon talks about what it feels like to hire a design and development vendors. Joel Beukelman recommended they work with Funsize and Brandon trusted his friend and moved forward. You can usually tell at the first conversation if there’s a match between a client and an agency. You gotta follow your gut!

8:20
Phi talks about how awesome it is to be held accountable but also to have the breathing room and trust to move forward in making design decisions.

9:00
Brandon discusses his experience working relationship with Funsize. Phi shares how we used Sketch and Marvel, two completely new tools on this project, to maximize our effort and time, and how we crafted a unique design process to be able to design the MVP app in a very short period of time.

10:50
Clients are subject matter experts. Sometimes designers don’t always know “what’s best”.

11:40
A dream client is one that that has good taste.

12:30
We discuss conceptual design, atomic design, and how they were applied in the Pare Booking project. For Pare Booking, Funsize presented multiple concepts as screen designs supplemented with mood boards/style tiles to expand on the concepts voice, feel, and visual language. This is a good way to explore and create the personality of the brand or product, outside of just focusing on what it can look like. For Pare, this lets them see the scope of the “why” behind each concept.

15:19
“We didn’t have a brand or identity when we started this project...”

16:09
Brandon mentioned that 3 concepts was just the right amount. If we had delivered any more it would have been overwhelming for him. Brandon was playing golf (and left at the 16th hole!) when he reviewed our concepts for the first time.

17:10
Brandon and Anthony talk about what’s it’s like working together in an agile design engagement. What worked was the amount of communication and transparency Pare and Funsize had throughout the project. This resulted in a high amount of trust. Both companies did their part in getting each other what the other needed to be successful.

19:45
How Funsize uses [Pivotal Tracker to manage design sprints and transparency with our team, clients, and stakeholders. Keeping your team's best interest in mind while estimating design sprint stories will help create the best work possible. Pare has now adopted Pivotal Tracker as their internal product management tool. We recall [Hustle Season 1, Episode 7: "Death to Time Tracking", where we talked about how Funsize stopped time tracking and how Pivotal Tracker has been critical in allowing the client and agency relationship to flourish.

22:50
Pare Booking was the first project in which Funsize used Sketch 100% through the duration of the project from wireframes to finished design. Phi talks about the advantages of Sketch and how it helped meet our project objectives and save time.

25:00
Whether you use Photoshop or Sketch, having a system in place to dynamically design empowers the designer to make a change in the overall design without having to worry about accumulating unnecessary design debt.

26:19
“I will use Funsize as long as I possibly can.”

26:30
Pare’s iPhone app is launching in the Apple App store between August and September 2015. If you’re a touring musician, artist, or speaker, please check out www.parebooking.com and sign up for early access!

27:00
Check out Funsize's Pare Booking Dribble Collection to see what the Pare Booking design will look like. Also feel free to demo the Pare Marvel Prototype for a hands-on experience with the app's design and user experience.

27:40
Rick announce...

Next Episode

Hustle: Epicurrence, Adobe MAX, Rdio, Snapchat

Hustle is back with season 2. Anthony recaps his experience at Epicurrence, Rick shares about speaking at Adobe MAX. Online streaming music services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music are compared in light of Rdio's recent announcement that they are shutting their service down after being acquired by Pandora.

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