We do ethnographic research, we do consumer insights many ways.
We empathise with what these people go through because there's always so many amazing opportunities.
And we prototype, we concept, we make a lot of junky things that end up in the trashcan.
But some things survive and then that gives us a new avenue to explore.
That's the workflow that happens here in our in -house team.
We don't need to hire agencies to do that for us.
We know how to do that really well.
So we have a saying that is to make people feel smart.
It really hits the target when we make people feel smart, we succeed.
So that this kind of thinking is what perfuses the whole organization.
So from product managers to engineers, to salespeople, we embrace that.
So idea that we take ownership of that and whatever we make needs to live up to that.
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
the systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Oliver Seale, the Vice President of Design at Belkin.
We're going to talk about how Belkin made the transformation to a design focused company and what that looks like in practice today.
But before we talk to Oliver, it's time for Dear Melissa.
This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions.
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Let's see what today's question is.
Dear Melissa, do you have guidance on how to accelerate product definition when the product manager is working closely with the UX designer?
What are ways you've seen a product team work even faster and more efficiently?
Okay, so the goal when you have a product manager and a UX designer working closely together is to make this a team approach. I'm going to assume that the alternative here is probably that somebody is doing both of it, a product manager and a designer is just one person who is coming up with the product.
And that happens in some companies, but a team approach where you have a product manager, UX designer, and a developer that works really nicely together.
So the idea here is that you want to divide and conquer, you should be agreeing on what the scope and the goals are for the product, and what you're trying to develop, what it is that you're trying to learn.
But then you also want to make sure that you're looking at who is going to go out and talk to the customers.
Are you both going to do it?
Are you going to tag team it?
And how do you get to a point where you can start to experiment around that product and figure out what it should be?
Now, product managers are usually bringing in a lot of the business view of what is their business, their understanding the users, their understanding the customer dynamics, and then how does it fit into everything else?
So they have to be very in -tune with their customers, but they're also bringing in that lens of, is it going to work for our business?
The UX designers are going to be bringing in also a customer lens and a user lens, but a design sense of how do we actually make this something that people will desire.
And then we have our developers as well, making sure that it's technically feasible, and giving input there.
Now the ideas can come from anybody, right, UX designer can have an idea of what's filled, the product manager can the developers can, or we're gathering information from the rest of the company.
But when we have UX designers and product managers working together, the best thing is to be in lockstep.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see is that the product manager will go out, write a bunch of user stories and requirements throw it over the fence to the UX designer and just be like, go design it.
That's not really how you rapidly get to a product definition.
You should be a try at, you should have the three of you working together to define what this product is.
And the UX designer can help.
They can help bring the visuals to life, right?
They should be prototyping this, they should be figuring out the workflows and they should be getting into the details of how we think this should work and what are the requirements from a design perspective to make it successful.
So they add a lot of value into it.
Now, when you are talking about efficiency and making it go faster, it's really making me think that you have stage gates here.
Like either the product manager is not letting the UX designer be involved when we're doing the definition and waiting until it's all figured out and then making it pretty.
Or that you're bringing them in too late, so then they have to over explain everything, or maybe your UX designer is just building everything out in really great detail very early.
Instead, what you wanna do is make sure that as you're figuring out product definition, you are learning from your customers, you're mocking it up in a way that people can resonate with it, and you're documenting it too, in a way that the rest of the team can see what the vision is and what might be required as you start to build it out.
So again, it's a team approach here.
There is a lot of work that we're gonna do together.
There's gonna be some divide and conquer, people will have their own responsibilities as well, but the more that we work together and the more that we're on the same page and then lockstep with it, the less handoffs there will be.
And we will have a better collaborative approach thinking through what are the risks and what's gonna make our customers happy.
So I hope that helps.
And if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Now let's go talk to Oliver.
Welcome to the show, Oliver.
Hey Melissa. Thank you for having me.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and design, what made you want to get into it?
Yeah, I'm one of those people that thought I was gonna be something completely different.
I thought I was going to be a photographer.
I thought it was going to be an architect at different phases of my life.
But had no idea that product design existed.
It's very common story, I think, for industrial design folks that this job is mysterious.
I learned about it when I realized I wasn't going to be a great architect.
I'm not great at math.
I realized that doing a job search and I realized there's a thing called product design.
And that just immediately captivated me.
And there were some really interesting, weird stories.
I met some really interesting people and they pointed me at ways to maybe become a designer.
And had all the things I cared about.
I had an artistic component.
I had something to do with manufacturing and making things.
It's just so fascinating.
And I got really into Italian designers.
This is back in the 80's, 90's.
And here I went to Arts of Design, first in Switzerland, later in Pasadena, where I graduated, and then I never left. And I just feel like such a privilege.
And I'm so fortunate to be able to do what I love to do still today.
So what led you to becoming the VP of design at Belkin?
After I graduated, I was working at a fantastic design firm in Westlake Village called Hauser Design, where I met some amazing people who were in the position where we had Belkin as an account.
And that led to more and more business.
And Belkin at the time had already been around for 20 or so, just about 20 years.
And they realized the value of design.
And they built their own team.
And I was very lucky to be one of the first people on that team.
And that turned into a very large group of people that became Innovation Design Group.
And we changed the way Belkin operates from the original version of Belkin, which was very much a already driven by understanding what people want, and giving them what they were looking for in the kind of computer accessories world, but then turned it into a design company.
That was a really massive change in the way Belkin felt, And we brought a whole different vibe to the organization.
And if you saw a Belkin in 1999 versus 2005, you would have been amazed.
So it's like a complete transformation of culture.
And today we are in, I think this is the fourth building that we're in as an organization here in ourselves.
We have many facets to who we are.
Belkin is one of the very few companies that is born and raised in LA, still around manufacturing and designing products.
It's a matter of great pride and such a pleasure to be part of.
So that's how I arrived at Belkin with a bunch of friends and people that are great collaborators.
This sounds like a really interesting transformation.
I think a lot of people out there know Belkin.
I probably have five Belkin things hanging around my desk right now tech accessories.
But it is really cool the innovative design pieces that you have on it.
Can you tell us maybe a little bit about what Belkin looked like when you got there and then what made what was the push to start becoming a more design -led organization?
When have you seen Office Space?
Of course, yeah. Yeah.
Oh yeah. So office space is amazing.
That is a movie, right?
But the way it was able to capture this vibe that exists in a sort of a stale office environment, a lot of that was how Belkin looked back then.
It was in a warehouse building in Compton, right off the 91 freeway here in Los Angeles, great big space, and a lot of incredibly motivated people.
And they had good office equipment.
But it was an office space with cubicles and the kind of heathered blue red carpeting.
It was very 90s and it just had this, it was mostly dark because there was only lights coming in from the windows.
And it was very much of a hustle.
People were hustling.
This was a great business.
They were super successful, they were making money, they were really succeeding.
And a lot of that business was based on Chad Pipkin, the founder of Belkin.
Just being a really astute listener and somebody who knew what people needed, because he was plugged in.
He was really plugged in to what the industry was doing, consumer electronics, computers, connecting printers to computers, connecting the first USB devices, right?
So that business was in a growth mode.
But the CEO back then realized that you need to add design to the mix.
when you add design to the mix of these products, they become unique.
There's something that other people don't have. It was a very fast paced business and there weren't that many options when it came to what things look like.
There were a few companies that exemplified good design.
You think about Apple.
You think about IBM, companies that stood out with their products because of good design.
And the Belkin team said, hey, we need to get some of that.
We need to add some of that.
Little did they know that what started as let's design some new products and let's be more creative in what we can bring to the table.
Which other businesses can we do other than cables and search protectors and USB hubs?
What happens when we bring designers in?
So they started hiring some freelance folks.
And then they ended up working with us at Hauser.
And all of a sudden they realized the value of that because nobody else was doing that.
That just wasn't the way computer accessories were made back then.
Computer accessories were secondary thoughts.
So when we started this, the realization that you can differentiate really quickly set in.
We started designing products and all of a sudden, where in the beginning people didn't know internally how to work with us very much. There was a couple of people who got it and were making some things pretty quickly.
All the product managers wanted to have things that were well -designed and so we very quickly realized we needed to do a much different organizational move.
We built a studio in Hollywood, built out a really great looking space on the corner of Santa Monica and Vine, where we took an old building, a red brick building, turned it into a really cool office space, put some really beautiful Herman Miller furniture in there and attracted designers and brand people and engineers from all over the place.
We did that very planfully.
We realized they're not going to attract a bunch of creative people to a company that people frankly didn't know, by having an office space in Compton that just isn't something people would leave their jobs at IDO for, or you name the design firm.
So we started to making some changes, we built a space, and what happened very quickly is people from the office in Compton would come up, and we would go down there and would just start infusing the organization with this idea that you can have a better environment at work, you can have a more creative environment, and people really thrived.
It was a really amazing time, and so the early 2000s, we were the only people who were doing this, there was just nobody else who did this.
We built a team of over a hundred designers, engineers, branding people, marketing people in that space up in Hollywood, and then we consolidated everybody in Playa Vista, we've moved to a really great space there in Silicon Beach, in Playa Vista, and now we're here in El Segundo in a new space that we've in for a couple of years, and it just keeps evolving from here.
But it's just changed the culture completely because people realized you don't need to be a designer to want to have a better, better -lit environment.
You want to feel more at home where you work.
You want to have a friendlier aesthetic around you, and then you do better work, and that's what happened.
What's interesting is I feel like as you're telling the story, some of that cultural change came from the environment of putting people in well -designed areas themselves and not just from worrying about the design of the products.
Can you explain a little bit about, this is where I think people get this wrong.
Like when you want to make a mindset shift to we're going to be a design company, right, or well -designed like, what are all those pieces that come into it and why is that environment so important?
You need support from all the way up the food chain.
So without the CEOs attention to it, without the realization that we needed chief design officer.
Leadership that was at the very top, that wouldn't have happened.
And it was very much of the moment.
That was the right move at the time.
It was tremendously beneficial to make Belkin into a brand that people would recognize.
But it requires full buy -in, right?
So that you couldn't have an insular design team in Hollywood without celebrating that internally.
And that's really what happened.
And there was an openness and a desire to change the culture of the organization for the better, to be a place people would want to work at and would want to do great work in.
It was very much a realization that went all the way up.
And yeah, we had a chief design officer back then who really started this cultural change and is very much responsible for that.
And the CEO back then at the time and then handed that off to folks like me to foster and to nurture and today, this is my 25th year at Belkin, is we're cooking on all cylinders.
It keeps evolving. And the culture of the organization is so different today than it was.
If you had asked people back then what is user experience and how does it affect the ability to have products that people want or consumer insights, there would have been a very different answer today.
We're all very versed at that as part of our culture.
ingrained in us, there's a respect for that, whether that's good engineering or good design or consumer insights, user experience, all of those disciplines are just part of our company's DNA now on top of our ability to work well with customers and to be good partners to people and to be welcoming as an organization.
So as a company that very much centers around design, how does that affect the way that you develop products?
What does it look like to from going from idea all the way through execution and how does design get baked in there?
Everything we make has a component of intention in it.
Not everything that comes out of a company like Belkin is going to be innovative or particularly design centric because that's inappropriate.
This doesn't need to be like that way.
But everything we make has an aspect of has a desire to make you glad that you bought that.
You always say, you wanna make things that are a joy to use and a pleasure to own.
So, we wanna make things that never disappoint.
That's number one. We also wanna make sure that the insights we have about how people live with technology translate into the full portfolio.
So, we have a big portfolio.
We make thousands of things and it can be from very simple cables to very complicated network devices for secret service people.
There's a lot of different aspects to it.
But where we really thrive is when we understand that we can lean onto the user experience and we understand that this object will make somebody's life a little bit better.
So we have a saying that I love very much, and that is, make people feel smart.
It's such a simple set of words, but it really hits the target.
And we've been saying that to each other for many years.
When we make people feel smart, we succeed.
What does that mean?
We don't want you to feel stupid because you didn't figure out how to use the thing, how to open the box, how to set it up.
That makes you feel bad, and that's our fault when that happens as designers.
So this kind of thinking is what perfuses the whole organization.
so from product managers to engineers to salespeople, we embrace that.
This idea that we take ownership of that and whatever we make needs to live up to that.
And so, we pour a lot of energy into consumer insights.
We want to make sure we understand what people actually need, what issues they have in their day -to -day lives with technology.
Keeps changing, right?
Whether they're individuals that are commuting somewhere in a car or you're living with six other people with smartphones in a household, Those are things that we can grasp onto and see, can we solve something a little bit better, make it either more efficient or more beautiful to live with.
Those are things that just keep circulating around when we make product value propositions and design solutions.
Do you have like your teams going out and doing ethnographic research and like watching people use stuff and what does that kind of look like?
Yeah and again, I think it varies greatly depending on what category we're talking about, But you can only innovate if you really understand the people that are using the technology that we're working with.
And there's two, sort of two rubrics.
One rubric is technology innovation and things get faster and more attainable and smaller and lighter, more powerful.
That's really not innovation in the sense of what we call innovation design group at Belkin, right?
innovation is how group is about understanding how technology advances in people's lives and to see if there are new problems we can solve.
People didn't always have a smartphone, a smart watch and AirPods, but now that so many people do we need devices that can clean up your nightstand, right?
Those are these obvious, now obvious, right, wasn't always obvious and so this is the stuff that we really thrive on we just grasp onto these ideas we have hypotheses and say hey let's investigate this kind of lifestyle what is somebody who owns an electric vehicle go through on a daily, like living with an EV, how does that, what opportunities does that give to Belkin to maybe make a product that makes living with an EV more useful, can you tap into the power that thing has in a giant battery in some way that could be useful.
Do we look into how people go hotels and what lifestyle do you have when you're going to Disneyland and you're staying at a hotel?
What kind of opportunities does that entail?
So, those are just some quick examples of spaces that then the Innovation Design Group team goes after.
We do ethnographic research, we do consumer insights in many ways.
You get really smart about that to empathize with what these people go through because there's always so many amazing opportunities.
And we prototype and we concept, and we make a lot of junky things that end up in the trashcan.
But some things survive and then that gives us a new avenue to explore.
That's the workflow that happens here in our in -house team.
We don't need to hire agencies to do that for us.
We know how to do that really well.
And that's why I'm still here.
That's why our team is very tenured people who have lots of experience.
They don't want to go anywhere else, I hope.
I don't. With things that are manufactured like a lot of the products that you're doing, I always hear some pushback from people when they say we can't be as experimental as software, or we can't do things as rapidly that way.
How do you embrace like experimentation and learning from your customers before you commit to building these things that have to be shipped off to plants and figuring out if they're right?
What do you do to lower that risk and make sure that you are.
You're kind of testing things and understanding if they're going to work with your customers.
that is really difficult.
It is a really difficult conundrum because the cost and the time required is always going to be at odds with what the business wants, right?
The business wants immediate payoff.
That's really difficult to do.
And of course, depending on your business environment that's going to be an easy or a very difficult conversation.
Of course, the ideal textbook process is you beta test everything and you prototype everything.
That is practically not possible.
with most things that companies like Belkin and in our space have to operate within because the opportunity window is always quite short.
You have to be there at launch with the next iPhone, or the next Samsung phone, for example, in order to benefit from that wave of attention.
So those are real challenges.
But of course, the best way to do it is to do a lot of prototyping.
And so the prototyping we do goes to vary...
on what products we're talking about, goes to a certain stage in which we say, okay, it doesn't need to be more refined than this.
Now, let's go ahead and test that with a bunch of people.
So we do a lot of in -house beta testing that way.
We have a lot of international team members, thankfully, that are able to give us other perspectives.
But that is one way we do it.
And of course, the other way to do it is to just seek investment and find ways to encourage people to invest in ideas early.
And that happens always behind closed doors.
But it's definitely a fact that in our industry, it's really difficult to do like a long -term visioning unless you have really solid financial backing.
So that's why you see a lot of products in this space, in this industry that live for a couple of years, and then they just get There's a lot of churn like that but I think what our role is as designers is to keep feeding the ideas.
We don't wait for the sales team to bring us an idea.
That's not the way we work.
Our ideas can come from anyone and we are big, open feelers to our space.
We have had so many interesting things come in from so many different spaces that they always are just a little germ that germinates.
It's incredibly rare that a fully formed idea comes in from somewhere that leads to something great, right?
Our aspiration is to be that place where the idea can grow.
As the design team of the innovation design group.
I think there's probably like a lot of designers who are listening to this out there, especially in our software spaces, by our new spaces going.
How do I advocate for my ideas?
I think in some of, our world, that I know they do because they, they tell me this, they feel sometimes like they're second -class citizens compared to the product managers, right?
They're like, oh, the product managers get to decide what we invest in and go forward with but I, they won't listen to me or I have these ideas and I see all of this area out there.
And I'm always advocating for product managers to listen to everybody.
What's your advice for these designers out there who are looking at what's next and seeing what's around corners to actually be able to sell their idea or bring their idea to other people and make sure that they listen.
First of all, I want to give some kudos to good product managers.
A really good product manager will always be smart and listen.
I think the answer to your question is highly dependent on the organization that you're in.
In an organization like Belkin, I know everybody because the organization is a mid -sized organization.
It's not a hundred thousand people.
it's really difficult if you have massive organizational strata that you don't know how to navigate beyond.
That would be very difficult.
That's not our space.
So I would say prototyping is critical.
But also for a product manager, if you're a designer you're struggling with the product manager not listening, that product manager probably sucks.
Because I think a great product manager is a good listener, and a great product manager is going to listen to your idea, and if I love your idea I'm going to see if I can do something with it and if I then I'm going to help you make something else out of it." Right?
I think you should always be courageous and share your idea with somebody but you need to make sure that your idea is visualized in the communication part of your ideas, sorted out.
So if you are in an organization where there's a lot of barriers between your and the higher management, you got to get your ducks in a row.
You just got to make a really strong presentation so that your idea isn't too loosey goosey but as designers we have a unique skill set hopefully and that is to be able to use our visual skills or our manual skills to make things that help communicate an idea and that's the way to test it.
And if you're working somewhere and you've got a great idea and nobody wants to listen to take that idea and make something out of it yeah it's good advice so when you are like a and you're trying to get that story type, what are the elements of a critical story?
Right, let's say that we have designers out there who actually have fantastic ideas but they're just not communicating it correctly or just not getting through, right?
But it is a valid idea.
What should they be concentrating on when they're bringing it to other people?
What is the narrative that they should focus on?
I think you gotta prototype.
Life is a design project, right?
Like in life as in business, you gotta prototype things sometimes, right?
And if you just barrage into a conversation about an idea with somebody and you don't haven't taken the chance to prototype it beforehand then that's on you prepare just be prepared but also just make sure that you understand an empathy have some empathy for that other person just like any good designer would you have to understand who you're talking to what are their motivations what makes them succeed what makes them feel smart and so prepare for that conversation don't assume that they will on your side right away.
You may need to convince them because the thing that goes to their mind is how long is I gonna take?
How's they gonna derail my other things?
How is I gonna make money?
I've seen this before.
Nobody's gonna want this.
My mom's not gonna like that.
Those are things that will go through people's minds.
So, prototype your idea.
Present it to somebody and you may need a couple of iterations of that.
And just think like a business person as well.
Just because you love the idea doesn't mean anybody else does.
And seek out people who have lot of experience but are still willing to give you the freedom of trying to be not so biased." And somebody said, and maybe you know who said that, but real innovation requires real ignorance too.
I don't know who said that but that's a great quote, I love that.
Sometimes we know too much so we get biased and then we turn things down because we just don't have that kind of freedom but sometimes that knowledge is also incredibly important to prevent you from a train wreck happening.
I love that quote. I have never heard that quote, but I think it's so important.
Yeah, I like that. So I do see that sometimes we're like the experts on whatever we're building and go, oh, that would never work, or this would never work.
And I see that a lot, especially in many companies I work that are highly compliant or people have been in the industry for a very long time, right?
They're like, this is just the way it should be.
How do you help? What would you suggest for these people and for these industries, but also how do you help your team think outside the box?
Right? Not just get stuck into, this is how it's always been, a cord looks like this, right?
Or this looks like that.
What do you do to help people just see beyond the bounds?
Well, we like to play.
We can't always play.
We have jobs to do and it's very taxing and there's a lot of expectations for everybody who works there.
But then there's also time to not operate by too stringent timelines, but just to give people the ability to play.
So what we've built here is a place where we have all the tools, all the materials, everything is here that anybody could need to express themselves playfully and to explore something.
And it's funny, right?
Because we, prototyping has to be cheap and fast and unprecious and those are this kind of mantras that we all live by, but that's That's what we try to do here.
We have a team of people who share some of their role is to explore unexplored things, and then we spend time on that, and we just make things and we just play, and some things don't make it at all.
They're terrible, and some things are great, and we celebrate it all equally.
There are some great innovative thinking strategies, design thinking strategies that challenge you to come up with the worst possible idea first. Like what is the worst possible way to solve this problem, and that is silly, but at the same time, it'll kick off another thought.
That's so much about what happens when we just do playful things.
You got to get out of the constraint of knowing too much and relieve yourself of that.
And just allow yourself to play.
And then things will happen that you didn't expect.
And you watch somebody else do something, and that again, that sort of pollinates the chain of creation.
We love that. And as an innovation design group, we have people, there's people who are great at that.
There's also people that are adjacent that are incredibly great subject matter experts that are not great at that.
Everybody has a role to play.
So we pick the people that are really good at this kind of freedom that don't get stifled by knowing too much. The worst is, oh, this is going to cost too much. It's like, it's like a trope.
We've all heard it.
Yeah. it may be true but when you say it you're negatively affecting that, the creativity so we try to exercise as much as we can we have regular sprints with that kind of borrow that from the software world like we do a lot of sprints that's pretty organized we brainstorm we go away and do some homework and come back and create, and that's only going to grow here at this organization.
This is where the more technology surrounds us the more commodity surrounds us the important it is to be creative and just come up with ideas that break out of what people expect to happen and sometimes the best answer is also to open new doors to completely new business and that can only come from that creative exploration like where can you be valuable where can you add something that is interesting and desirable and where can we add value I think a lot of businesses are warring with what you're talking about right now which is that how do I balance like people thinking about the long term or things
that may not be on the road map right now versus things that have to get done tomorrow or this quarter.
How do you think about just like company structure or team structure that kind of bakes that in?
Is it like a cadence thing, is it a different team thing?
Do you think about, how do you think about giving people space organizational wide to just do that?
If you don't, then you're gonna go away.
Yeah, you don't innovate.
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I think, I don't know if you're a cyclist that specialize, very cool company, I love specialized.
I'm a cyclist, innovate or die, right?
You know, I think they literally print that on things.
I think that's the right way to go.
You innovate or you die.
Because you may be able to extend your life for a long time but you're not going to thrive.
So it is an incredibly difficult conundrum.
If your money dries up, if you don't have financial support to let people do this kind of thing, that's really dangerous.
And that's happened to so many companies.
So many companies struggle with that, right?
They get buoyed for a while, they spend their money, and all of a sudden the floor falls out because the financial windfall of old days goes away.
You have to build new pathways.
You have to look forward. And that's critical.
That's not always possible.
And that's why I'm very fortunate that we have the structure that we have, the credibility that we've built.
So where we can build on our heritage here like the uniqueness of our position as an American brand in the space.
It's unique. There's not, not a lot of companies that are doing things the way we do.
The dedication to innovate and patents.
We have 700 patents.
We have. We, we innovate every day in big things and small things.
Right. Even if it's not in the first thing you notice it's maybe the innovation is inside.
It's okay. This thing has 90 % post -consumer recycle plastics, and you don't even, you don't to know that.
Because we're doing that because that's the right thing to do, not because we want to sell you an eco story.
This packaging has no plastic.
You may not ever realize that, but those are things that come from an organization that truly takes all the right intentions.
And Belkin is pursuing that.
Like, it's really, we're putting our money where our mouth is.
We are imbuing this team with the support and the tools and the means to actually do this work well.
As a leader, how do you set that tone for the company, right, and for your team, right?
Do you get them with principles?
What's the way to make sure that they are following that mission and that path?
First of all, you hire people who share this drive, and you know how product people are like this, right?
Who are like irrationally in love with doing this.
This is like making something that you can show your relatives, you know, hey, I worked on this, look at this, is such a joy, right?
The joy of the creativity and actually being permitted to be part of making something that is then manufactured and can be found in other places is so fun, right?
That you definitely need to hire people who share that vision, you just gotta have that.
And then those people also need to have a little bit of the sort of intellectual capability to look beyond that immediate gratification and have the empathy.
Like you have to have empathy as a designer I have always said you have to be a bit of a psychologist, somebody's really interested in this asking questions and getting behind things and getting out of your own circumstances your own bubble to understand who we're making something for and what drives those people and so we have to hire the right people and you have to put their face in it.
Sometimes people can't do that.
Maybe they want to.
It's not that easy, right?
You just really have to do that.
So there's a constant repetition and there's a...Also we're permitting our team, we've always permitted our design team to feel a little bit like we are like a team of our own.
It's a bit of a we're not better than other people, but we are with each other.
It's not us against others but it's us here for the rest of the organization.
We feel like we have an inordinate amount of passion for the company to do well because we're proud of what we've made right so we want to keep that going.
So we have to lead by passion and everyone's are doing a job right at the end of the day it's all jobs but none of the people on the design team would tell you that they would tell you I love what I do because it's hopefully it's rewarding and I get to play it's tough and sometimes I have to do difficult things and if to stay up late and talk to people in China and who are making tools or whatever yeah but it's a mission we're like on our mission and that's the kind of cultural maybe that's how I think I lead.
I don't put that in my flag but I don't know if anybody's ever asked me this before but I think that's it.
It sounds like a very passionate way to lead too.
Super passionate love this, love it.
With your team too you mentioned a little bit, you've got an international presence as well.
You're making these products that touch so many different types of consumers, right?
All these individuals out there in the world.
What does that mean for the way that your team looks like diversity wise, background wise and how does that affect your design process?
Yeah, one of the greatest joys is to have a team that's just a bunch of different backgrounds, right?
you got to really lean into that.
So there are probably design organizations where it's more top down, driven, and people just execute on an expectation.
And I would imagine that is pretty common. We are international in that we have multiple locations in which we do work.
Our team here is, we're here in the US, in California, Los Angeles.
We have several different nationalities here and even in our team, But we also interact with a design team in Asia that is part of our organization that is tightly matched with ours.
So we have people from multiple continents collaborating and that matches with a super international team here at Belkin, right?
If you're a designer and you don't seek inclusivity, you make a big mistake.
And I think we all know that, right?
I think the sort of plurality of backgrounds and interests and just like passions that we all have makes us just so much richer and working, especially also working with a team of people overseas has been super rewarding.
Like just that this idea that we educate each other, we help each other understand better is incredibly important.
So just like the rest of Belkin, we are very proud to be very multifaceted.
And so we are seeking that we need more women in the design team.
If I can put out a passion and plea, we need more industrial designers.
Please run down our doors.
Female designers are harder to come by in my experience.
But we have, of course, we have women as well on that team and we equally matched as like, the quality of work that comes from everyone on the team.
This fantastic and, from so many different backgrounds.
Yeah. For design leaders who are out there trying to maybe build a more inclusive team or a more diverse team, what's your advice for how to get started with that and to attract the right talent?
You got to look at a lot of portfolios.
And I love my connection with my Arts Center College of Design past, like having that connection that goes back to the school and the amazing people that are running that organization.
we have a similar relationship with Long Beach State University, just being close to people that bring new faces into the world that's very important you got to stay connected to that community and to ensure that you don't end up just being in your bubble forever.
Reach out to make connections to universities I think that's very important and then even doing what I'm doing right now speaking to you hopefully makes more people aware of the fact that this work is happening here so the interest hopefully will be as an interest generated and maybe working for with a company like us.
So I think when it's very difficult I think to go out there and say I'm gonna need to find this particular type of person I'm gonna need to find this other person sometimes you just have to you gotta look at the portfolio you got to look at the life experience and you got to look at the passion that person has and you got to try to predict their ability to learn and work with you.
So I don't know if there's a recipe.
I really don't. I think you just have to be, you have to apply an open mind to the portfolios.
Sometimes there's diamonds in the rough, but I know there's so many circumstances.
Sometimes you're not entirely free to make choices.
You have budget constraints, you have timing constraints.
You have all kinds of constraints.
So I don't know if there's a recipe.
But yeah, if I had unlimited budgets, I would just build a completely international team of all shapes and sizes.
That would be amazing.
And I hope that more of those teams exist. Me too.
Well, one of the questions I have to ask you, because this is the hot topic of, I feel like the last two years, is AI.
How have you been looking at AI when it comes to design?
Like, how do you think it's going to be shaping the future of design?
What's going to be good about it?
What should we watch out for?
Yeah that's a lot of people very scared, right?
And some parts of our industry are affected by that.
That's undeniable. There's tools out there that do today simpler things superfast, super cheap, right?
That's amazing. For people like me, that's not amazing if you're doing, I would say, maybe more basic computer work, basic creative work, basic copywriting.
Things like that, right?
The way we look at it is tools.
They're tools and they make us fast. We have just been faster and faster that we've immediately jumped on all these tools, anything and everything that we could possibly get our hands on we were just using it, right?
It's fantastic for prototyping and anyone who makes any prototypes knows that you want to get that prototype immediately and if you need to spend time on Photoshopping something that the AI can do for you well enough, great.
Copywriting, iconography, image compositions, marketing collateral, things like that.
And just formulating thoughts in an efficient way are some things that come to mind.
Another thing is I think that's just nascent is just take research data and synthesize it.
If you've ever done qualitative research and synthesized 17 hours of footage, you don't you need to do that.
If you have a transcript, you can do that very quickly.
And then you can go back and ask a bunch of questions.
That is fantastic. That doesn't do the job of the decision -making.
So it puts more emphasis on the intellectual side of our work, like the understanding what will actually function well in the marketplace.
And we're in a commercial space.
We're not here to have just fun.
That's not what we're doing.
We're here to learn because we have a commercial interest and that's why we're doing it right.
It's a tool. It's a creativity enhancement tool and it does not replace people.
Like in our experience it will replace some people somewhere, it's not replacing people here in the innovation design group it's just not the business where it's fantastic what you can do right it's just so incredible.
And for us the The goal is to just stay really plugged into it completely.
So all of us designers, everyone on the innovation design group has a requirement is to know all the tools that we can get our hands on and we prototype it and we try things out all the time.
That's cool. Are there any of that that are your favorite right now?
Yeah. So we, I'm not going to tell you exactly what we're doing, but even the most ChatGPT 4 .0 can do incredible things if you know how to wield it, but there's image creation tools that we're using a variety of.
Nice, that's awesome.
Oliver, my last question for you is a little bit reflecting on your career.
When you look back, what advice would you give your younger self?
My younger self, ah, that's such a deep question.
It's funny when I was young, I think it was great that I was naive about the future of my career.
Like I just went for it.
I don't know if I needed more advice about that.
I think I was very lucky that way and I have been very thankful for that.
But I probably would have paid more attention in high school because I love science, today.
I love physics and things like that.
I didn't pay attention in high school, so I didn't benefit from some of that.
I think if I had been a better high school student and less of a skateboarding musician, I maybe would have learned something else, but I think it's just keep an open mind.
Keep an open mind and learn as much as you can consciously.
I think that's something that not everybody, I certainly didn't develop that until I was an adult.
So, I meet people, I don't want to go on too far of a tangent, but one of the things we do at Belkomist, we have a very close relationship with schools.
So we actually have a campus literally inside of our building for high school students that are spending part of their week here.
And just before I came to speak to you, I had a meeting with my mentee.
And just to see a 16 year old who's already so much mentally advanced compared to what I was when I was 16 was super inspiring.
So consciousness in learning sounds very academic and there's probably much better ways to say it, is amazing and there's just such an unbelievable wealth of insights and information to be had today.
We talked about the fact that any book she wants to read, she can just read it like two minutes from now.
That's amazing and most people aren't really that conscious about it.
The sooner you develop a consciousness, find somebody who can mentor you that way, that would be amazing.
Find a mentor, that's what I Fantastic advice.
Thank you so much Oliver for being with us.
If people want to learn more about you and Belkan, where can they go?
Belkan .com and all our socials, of course.
Yeah. Great, we will put the links for all of that in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast .com.
Thanks for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any product questions for me, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
We'll see you next time.
