How to Work Together While We're Apart (With Google's UX Community + Culture team)

Distributed teams aren't new. But for the first time, a majority of user-centric roles are working remotely.

That shift creates both challenges and opportunities—and puts a spotlight on culture, community, and collaboration.

For the past 10+ years, Margaret Lee has led, grown and aligned UX teams at Google, a worldwide organization with a largely distributed workforce.

Join Margaret and Mike Buzzard, Design Manager at Google, as they share thoughts and strategies for building cohesive teams remotely—and what opportunities today's WFH environment provides.

Margaret, Mike and Ben will share their advice and experience on:

• What it means to lead a team focused on "community and culture"
• Opportunities present in this WFH moment
• Strategies for cultivating culture and maintaining cohesion

Transcript:

Ben:
Hi folks. I do want to get started because our panelists, our guests, today, have such great things to work through. They've got a lot that they're going to be sharing, which I think will be relevant, poignant, and hopefully, helpful for you all. Before we begin, however, I have some remarks. As we begin, please allow me to recognize the concurrent with the pandemic environment. Many of our efforts and attention are also trained on battling white supremacy, identifying, and addressing our internal struggle with both racism and bias, and fighting for justice in our communities.

Ben:
For many of us, this is not a new fight. And this may be triggering to some in the audience, but certainly we are faced with grieving new wounds, and trauma, given the events of recent days. Pretending that today is business as usual, and for me, that would be just another webinar, would be inauthentic and silencing. Folks at Dscout are facing a major wake up call ourselves. I am that much more grateful that you are willing to contribute your time, labor, and insights today to be with us.

Ben:
And with that, I welcome you to our People Nerds webinar for June, Working Together While We Are Apart, featuring, I'll call them colleagues, and dare I say, friends. As usual, Mike Buzzard, and Margaret Lee, both from Google's UX Community & Culture team. So, with that, let's get to our speakers. I am the moderator, Ben. I'm the evangelist at Dscout. And I am so very pleased to introduce two of the founding members of the UX Community & Culture team at Google, Margaret Lee, the UX director, and Mike Buzzard, design manager. Welcome to you both.

Margaret Lee:
Thank you.

Mike Buzzard:
Thanks.

Ben:
So great to have you both. Folks, the format will be largely discussive. Mike, Margaret, and I have prepared, we were just joking, pages of notes. So, we have a few broad themes around which will be anchoring our conversation. And I'm hoping that we could start with the notion of UX at a place as large, both in headcount, and large in scale of work like Google. I'm hoping we could talk about defining what UX means to a place like Google, because it informs how the team was itself created, and some of its goals.

Margaret Lee:
Sure. I can start with that. UX today is pretty much full stack or comprised of a lot of different flavors of design, visual interaction, industrial motion, et cetera, research quant, qual, UX engineering, content strategy, UX writing, and program management. And that's a pretty big evolution from I'd say 10, 15 years ago when it was largely design, and research. And even then it was even narrower in each of those spectrums. So, we've grown quite a bit.

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah, I would say when I joined about eight years ago, it was a little bit confusing the terminology because having come from my own agency, UX was more synonymous at that time with like interaction design, specifically, as a discipline. And so, when I got into Google, I quickly realized that it was just this overarching umbrella of all of these different roles. And even in some cases, engineers were thinking about latency as affecting the experience, would consider themselves user experience contributors. So, it can be a muddy definition. And then over that time, I've also watched a lot of discipline focus groups self-organize into very formally operating structures. And so, it's been like maybe watching the boroughs of New York evolve and develop around me where they have their own self-governing models.

Ben:
Yeah. I like to start with that because I think that that speaks to the reasons or some of the primary functions, and motivations for creating a team like community and culture. So, I'm hoping we can first start with maybe talking a bit about what cultivating community means for such a diverse group like that. It's both a very broad charter, an important one, but you're working with a set of folks with different workflows, different interfacing. What does that mean, cultivating community, for the two of you and your team vis-a-vis that wider UX group?

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. And I think choosing the word cultivating is really key because that's what we're doing. We're not creating anything because frankly community is going to exist with or without intervention, from teams like ours. But the opportunity is to try to cultivate it so that it's a healthy culture. We cultivate the conditions so that the community can thrive because otherwise, like I said, community will exist with or without us, but with a little bit of investment, it can really thrive. So, that's how I see it.

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I think there's a lot of just being very comfortable with knowing that you know very little in this space, and being comfortable, and responsible with experimenting. So, really listening to the audience that grows and evolves really quickly, like the sub-communities I was talking about as they self-organize, and they recognize shared needs, and we need to be open to hearing, and attentive to trying to figure out ways to address those needs, and what might be replicated elsewhere. So, I think we just have to be comfortable with knowing that we don't know a lot.

Ben:
And I think that that's so useful for putting the UX as the prefix to this community and culture, user-centered thinkers, not just researchers, but designers, and engineers, and folks who work on teams that interface with UX folks are to Mike's point naturally curious. They believe advocating for the unknown makes things better. Like, well, we don't exactly know why folks click here or want that. And so, I think similarly taking that ethos to something that is ambiguous, but as important as something like culture and community is, again, speaks to that nature at Google of having inquisitions about or inquiring about various things like that. So, could we talk about ... Oh, go ahead, Margaret. I'm sorry, please.

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. I was going to say also, I think as we scaled, we really could see how much more challenging it was to actually create that. As we scaled globally, we decentralized into many different sub-teams and whatnot. And as the function itself evolved to become more full stack across all the sub-disciplines, it becomes really challenging to focus on the community part as something that can be intentionally tended to, if you don't have somebody investing in it. Right? So, what tends to happen is like the sub-communities might do pretty well, but as an overall community, it becomes harder to connect across those org lines. So, having that investment in the people part separate from like the product development process, I think was the piece that we were really interested in going after.

Ben:
And Mike, you had said something about being, again, coming to Google a bit later than Margaret, and seeing on the front lines, some of the work that designers were doing, the phrase that you had was, outward and upward. I thought that was quite striking. You were recognizing, again, in one of the subcommittees that ... Did I do it where and I caught you on a phrase that you might not remember?

Mike Buzzard:
[crosstalk 00:07:51]. Yeah.

Ben:
You had discussed how working, again, with the frontline designers thinking about both development, and evolution as a designer for oneself. And then, again, relative to these other sub-communities, maybe wanting to move to ones or support others surfaced in your mind that we might need, we, meaning Google community more broadly, might need to really be thinking about, and maybe codify what we mean by culture, togetherness, or how this set of activities informs this set of activities. I'm hoping you could talk a bit about how you started to surface, put your hand up and say, "Hey, I think we should have a team like this." Because it did'nt. It wasn't always around.

Mike Buzzard:
I appreciate you packaging it as if there was like a strategic intention to [crosstalk 00:08:35].

Ben:
Yes, take it, Mike.

Mike Buzzard:
I like to describe it as naive instigation was what I was doing. I've worked with Google for seven years before joining, and I was familiar with the culture from the outside. And once I joined, started to recognize how things worked, and where there were. What I perceived as needs just based on information that I was picking up, and carrying around from the relationships I had prior to joining. And so, then I was just poking at things, like if we're talking about designers, and this is the space we talk about them, how do we broaden that space?

Mike Buzzard:
Or how do we focus on this part over here? So, once I could change that conversation, then it was a little bit, how do we change the lens in which we're seeking out those individuals? So, that goes to recruiting, and what is the documentation we use for evaluate? So, just, again, that naive instigation and bumbling through stuff, revealing one need after the other.

Ben:
And Margaret, how did you get involved with the community and culture work either before the team self-codified or after?

Margaret Lee:
So, I've been at the point that the community culture team formed which is about four years by now. I had been at Google for about nine plus years leading the Google Maps UX team. And just through that process of building the team from like a couple people to this global UX org, you get to see a lot of the pain points, and the opportunities, just in terms of like I said, the non-product part of the job, right? Which is like the staffing, and the development of the team, and this is where Mike did a lot of work too, in the evolution of the UX discipline itself, because over the course of 10 years, a lot happens in tech, right? And it's not just engineering, needing to catch up with the technology and whatnot, and exploiting the possibilities of technology, but also like the user experience expectations grew quite a bit.

Margaret Lee:
And I know Mike was doing a lot of work in terms of like diversifying our notion of what design was, which early on was really equated with interaction design largely. And so, all that type of thing is culture. It is the culture of, what does UX look like? What do we comprise UX of? And what's our influence? You can only have good influence if you have the right people coming in, right? Contributing, and making impact. So, it was a lot of these issues that I could see over the course of building, and leading this UX team for one of the big products at Google that I could see this with my colleagues who are leading other product UX teams across the company, we shared all the same pain points.

Margaret Lee:
It wasn't like it was unique to a product. It was specific to UX as a discipline, evolving and maturing at the company. So, when I was ready to move on, I was like, "Hmm, what do I want to do next? How have I been spending my 20% of time?" Maybe that's a hint for what I'm passionate about. And so, I wrote this one pager just proposing the germ of what UX CC is now, but we've since expanded way beyond that initial one pager in terms of scope and whatnot, and proposed it. And Mike and I shared a manager at that point. And he put us together as like, "Yeah, you two have some complimentary ambitions." Right? And tendency.

Margaret Lee:
And then we brought in a third teammate, Kristin, who had been focusing on, how to get design excellence as a shared vernacular across Google, by figuring out like, how do you define it? What's the shared vocabulary? And how we value what comprises excellence and whatnot. So, the three of us came together, and we became UX CC, and we defined the program, and set it ... I was going to say set sail, but I almost said set it on fire, but you could take your pick.

Ben:
Yes, certainly. And I want the audience to know that during our practice session last week, Mike and Margaret said that in the time since UX CC has formed, the UX Community has doubled in terms of, again, the diversity, and opinions, and perspectives, and workflows, and leveling, and one-on-ones, the nexus of things that they are thinking about has doubled in that time. And Mike, you had mentioned the importance of legitimacy. And there's a leadership council that's associated with UX CC. Could you talk about the importance of getting leadership, their buy-in, and their involvement at the start of something like UX CC?

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I want to back up a little bit too because we have different perspectives on how that came to be, but very similar at the same time. Margaret was always a sounding board for me, as I was doing a lot of this instigating around the company. I'd come back to her, and I'd be charged with like, "This thing is not working. And we can make this better." And she would call me, and guide me, and she'd been putting a lot of structure in place up until that point. And she could fill me in, and give me the bigger picture, stuff like that. So, we have been working together in this community-focused, cultural influence capacity.

Mike Buzzard:
It was just very casual and informal. So, when I think, Bobby, when he recognized you're doing similar things, you're complementary in what you raised the opportunity, that's how he came to ask Margaret to put the proposal together to build the team. What was the other question again? Sorry, I wanted to [crosstalk 00:14:12]-

Margaret Lee:
Oh, actually, the formation of you UX. I'll say, if you want, I can talk-

Ben:
Yeah.

Mike Buzzard:
Right. So, [crosstalk 00:14:16]. Yeah, so-

Ben:
How you made that goal legitimate-

Mike Buzzard:
In the same way legitimizing the work that I would do, I would go to some of the more senior directors around the company, and Margaret was one of those to figure out like, "I'm working on the right thing, is this the right problem to solve?" That sort of thing. And so, when we created the team, Margaret, then formed ... There were already these over time, like natural circles of conversation amongst UX leadership to make decisions, but it wasn't a formal body. And so, they created what is like a board of directors, a very well-defined operating agreement, and how it functions, and things like that.

Mike Buzzard:
What the rules and responsibilities are, to look holistically across UX, beyond their business unit, UX team needs, or cross-functional needs, but across the whole company. And what does the community and the culture need now and tomorrow? And it's also important to recognize that there isn't a single head of UX or design at Google. So, it was necessary that we have one source to go to for validating or confirming some of the opportunities that we thought should be prioritized.

Margaret Lee:
And it's-

Ben:
And how lar ... Please.

Margaret Lee:
I was going to say, well, there's nine people on this, it's called UX Leadership Council. And I was on it for the first tenure, which was like three years. And it's since rotated as we had agreed upon operating roles and whatnot. So, it was a very interesting commitment because it was very serious, and formal. And it wasn't just a 20% thing as 20% things can sometimes feel like, which, it's your free will to participate, right? This feels above and beyond that to me, because the leaders that sit on it, take this so seriously. And are really committed to creating the right kind of change, and to address the most important problems that span Google, that UX can have an impact on.

Margaret Lee:
And so, it's actually gone above and beyond what we had imagined it would be, which initially, we were just like, "We'd be really grateful for a guiding board that can do what Mike said, like help provide that leadership guidance across the company, but also, the air cover, and all that." But this group has been so invested that there's work streams that come out of it. And we've been able to provide that operational arm, that UX Community Culture team to support that. And so, it's almost like it's doubled our workload in some ways, and our team has expanded because of it.

Margaret Lee:
But just like I said, it's gone so much above and beyond that initial one pager in terms of what we thought we would possibly do with this. So, it really spoke to, like, there was such a need that once we opened up the involvement, right? The engagement with the right folks, it just mushroomed.

Mike Buzzard:
I saw part of an interesting question that came up, what were the objectives or priorities of ... Oh, I didn't fully read it though. Was it of the council, or was it of our team at the time?

Ben:
I guess, if we could move to either the, how you are carrying out that charter of developing, cultivating, and expanding the community and culture of UX, we might ask or answer Alex's question. It's a great one, Alex. Thank you for asking it. So, if we could move to some of the day in and day out-

Margaret Lee:
[crosstalk 00:17:53], didn't see the question.

Mike Buzzard:
How did it start? Again, when I was doing the work that I was doing, I was the first time in my life removed from making and deliverables. So, I had to put a framework and a structure to how I talk about my work. And so, it started with talent was in your [inaudible 00:18:07] thing that I did, which could be followed by community where you needed to engage talent. I talked about culture as being in like the hiring committee, and the hiring program and process stuff. And then had this idea that Google is an engineering company, and engineers read docs, so, if we rewrite the docs, we could change the culture.

Mike Buzzard:
So, it drove in that regard, and then a lot of partnerships at that time, as we were building the team, we were working with agencies, [inaudible 00:18:31]. So, I needed this framework. And then as we formed the team, we took an audit of everything we were already doing to try to figure out like how does this fit in the bigger picture? That's my perspective of how we got it up and going. I don't know, Margaret, what's your-

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. I think what you referred to as talent, so some of that is like, "How do we attract the right folks? And what's our hiring process for getting people in? And once they're in, what's the plan for developing them so that they have a fruitful career at Google and whatnot?" So, there's a lot of early, I guess, you could call them low hanging fruit. They weren't really low hanging fruit. They were just the more obvious things that we could lean into, and work with because there was just such an obvious need. Right? But, so yes, I think the talent stuff. And then, like you said, it just naturally went into community because we need so many volunteers to help us do things like help with recruiting, help with interviewing, help with hiring committees, et cetera.

Margaret Lee:
So, that we needed to have a better relationship with the community, and to cultivate that sense amongst the community, so that they understood like the importance of it, because basically what we're trying to do is cultivate the community that we would want through people. Right? So, I think that that was a natural thing. And then the other, I think, obvious area that we early weighed into was just like helping with knowledge sharing across all the different organizations or silos as I often can see them because sometimes it's like, there's so much wealth of information within the product areas, but it's harder to get that cross-pollination across.

Margaret Lee:
So, that was another area where we invested heavily in building frameworks. And we are not in the business of creating all the best practices because the best practices exists out there amongst the community. It was more, how do we enable the community to best share, and connect their best practices with one another?

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah, those are part of our early pillars were community talent, and knowledge, and culture was the derivative of all of that work, or how we could influence that work. But then we also early on had engagement models or ways we thought about engaging teams, whether we were supporting something or hoping to scale something that already existed, or investing in something that was trying to get off the ground, or whether it was something that we were fully owning and driving and took a heavier lift.

Mike Buzzard:
So, early on, I think it was important to recognize we couldn't do all of the things that were needed. And how do we think about the work that we feel is important? And how we can, or should invest in it in different ways to help it find success. So, a lot of learning, a lot of experimentation.

Ben:
Yeah, I was struck by how you had these twin foresight, that's right, foresight. I seem to get it in every webinar. You both wanted to empower and cultivate culture through programming, whether those are events, meet and greets, lunch and learns. And then y'all talked a lot about doing so in a non-governing way, to tap into some of the self-organizing groups that were already happening naturally, absent maybe even these folks knowing about the UX CC.

Ben:
Could you talk a bit about how you're both developing programming at a UX Mac Pro level for lots of different folks, like I'm thinking UXU, for example, and then how you're also working with these self-organizing groups to, again, tap their localized expertise to then say, "Oh, well, this group is saying they really would benefit from this. And so, how can we go about helping empower them to do that?"

Margaret Lee:
I think one thing that we recognized early on, the ratio of whatever size our team is relative to the community that we serving is always really extreme, right? So, it's really important for us to recognize how we can have impact, because we can have impact in trying to govern other people's purviews, right? Whatever they may be, like on the product side. So, that's why we deliberately really stay away from specific product things. And where we can help is connecting all these sub-communities who naturally form because, again, community is going to exist with or without us. And our job is just to nudge it into the healthy direction. And the way to do that actually is to connect the people that need to be connected in order to have that amplifying effect.

Margaret Lee:
I don't know if that sounds too vague, but honestly that's often how I see it is like our job is to be the connectors, because at a company the size of Google, it's really hard to see all the possible connections and networks when your day job is also to go deep into a product. But since we're not going deep into a product, we can spend our time and investment really identifying the connections, specifically, so that people can come together. So, these self-organized sub-committees of the UXRs have a steering committee, same with like UX engineers, the writers have one, et cetera, the program managers. And then, they can go deep into the needs of their functions, and their sub-communities, and surface it.

Margaret Lee:
And we can make the connections across them. Like what are the themes that we're hearing that are UX, and not specific to a sub-community? And assist with that. And often, there's a lot of overlap, and there's a lot of complimentary opportunities to support one another. And-

Mike Buzzard:
[crosstalk 00:24:31] even four years in, it's still a learning exercise, right? Like in the beginning we were like, "Oh, this group is self-organized, and seemingly high functioning, and motivated. And how do we get involved? Listen to them, give our input, and thoughts, and ideas? And then we learn back from them. And as another group starts to emerge a year or two later, maybe it's visual designers, we have a little bit of a foundation of knowledge there already, but they might have very different, unique ideas. So, it's like always being open to, "Here's where we think you are, and how you could get to where you want to go. But keep us close so we can also learn from it as well."

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. And we've been talking about sub-communities in the context of function, but there's also regional ones, right? Geographic ones. So, there's different dimensions to it.

Ben:
Yeah. I think it's instructive to me hearing how the team works, how non-prescriptive your team wanted to be, again, to try to operationalize what culture means. I mean, Google certainly has values on which they are, I'm sure, trying to mirror the work of the group, but to go into a subcommittee, and say, "Here's how culture should be developed, do these three things." That won't be practical, useful, and you'll likely get push back. So, it's struck me how much of this is, again, to Mike's point, frameworks, talking about outcomes, and then trying to give folks templates and ways that they can begin to self-organize or empowering those who are.

Ben:
I'm hoping we could move now to, Margaret, what you've just referenced, which is, before a global pandemic forces 99% of the workforce to be remote, Google itself was already a very distributed team. And so, as you, Mike, and your teammates were forming UX CC, you were thinking about a team that was located in some physical co-presence but you did have your eye on distributed teams working and contributing. How has the present moment of vastly more distributed work shifted or evolved your team's thinking? What are some of the things that you're working on?

Margaret Lee:
Well, yeah, I mean, we clearly had to do a lot of quick pivots because one of our biggest events that we're known for called UXU, or UX University is an in-person event. Right?

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Margaret Lee:
And it takes place over the course of a week, and couple thousand people come to it every year. I mean, it's huge. Clearly, we weren't going to do that. And we had many smaller variations of that type of event as well all around the world. And we really had to think about number one, what does the community need now? So, separate from anything that we might have done. So, that was really important. And to think about, what were the things that these other events provided? What value did it provide that we might be able to still provide in a virtual asynchronous context?

Margaret Lee:
And so, we started thinking about that. It was really important for us to not think about how do we just second-class citizen an in-person event as a virtual one? We didn't want to just like brick for brick type approach, but really look at a new, like, what is the need now? Because clearly this was ... Sure, it can be about opportunity now, but in the beginning, like back in March, it really felt like a need. There was a sense of urgency around what could we provide now? And what we found was what usually happens with the community, anyway, is that a lot of people self-organize, a lot of people have ideas. They want to put them out there.

Margaret Lee:
And the same was happening during this time, everybody started generously offering, suggested resources, anything from like, if you're looking for a chair that's beyond your dining room chair to sit in eight hours a day, there's some research I've done to like, "Hey parents, I know you're juggling a lot, here's some resources I've found." Or whatever. So, just like a whole host. And what we were able to do was basically to curate, and to create a more easily accessible repository on our intranet. And so, we were just trying to see what can we do in a really timely manner that might be different than what we used to do, which was these like very polished events, right? It's not about the polish right now. It's about helping people. But, Mike, I don't know if you have thoughts to add on to that.

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I mean, chaos was the beginning of it. We have some general guiding principles of connecting people to share knowledge and inspire. And the result of that is advancing the people, the process, the product within Google. And so, those things are still true, even though they're a little more large and abstract, they provide guidance. And so, we actually have this training by [inaudible 00:29:35] our team is talking about this concept of chaos. And there was a scene from the movie, was it Apollo 13? Can't remember which one, with Tom Hanks-

Margaret Lee:
Yeah.

Mike Buzzard:
Where like all of a sudden they're figuring out this is a scenario they hadn't planned for, and they just dump all this stuff on the table. And they're like, "Okay, this is what we have to construct from this stuff." It felt a little like that. Like we had things that were working in the past. We knew the purpose of those things, and how they delivered value. And to Margaret's point, you can't just move them on to Meet or something, and expect everything to be normal. So, I think we are in a place having listened, and asked questions, and gain some insight both on what's going on externally, and a lot of our internal community. And again, back to being just observant and looking for needs, figured out what we think are some good approaches. And we've started out with some small experiments. We're building on that.

Mike Buzzard:
And it's getting to what I think is the fun part now, which is in answering all that stuff. So, let's run it, see what we did wrong or different. How do we fine tune that? And then how we share that back. So, it was chaos for a while, but I think knowing both, I guess, intrinsic and extrinsic purpose for the work that we're doing helped guide us through the problem solving aspects there.

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. And, I mean, we've recently had chaos on top of chaos. So, being adaptable is something that is so important right now. And however, we can also pass that capability on to the community I think it's also like the way that we can be helpful. One of our teammates, Kai, she runs the Sprint Master Academy within Google. And a lot of it was reliant on in-person engagement. And she and her team quickly pivoted to create like a remote design kit that people could automatically, and very quickly leverage. And she's been iterating on that since.

Margaret Lee:
That's what we just need to do is just be really quick. I think before pre-pandemic, right? We might've focused a little bit more on polish on some of these events, and now it's like, "Yeah, I think it's okay. We can change how we do things, because this is a completely different context." Now, that we've been doing this for a few months, we're also seeing that a lot of what we do probably will have lasting value. It's not like we're just doing this bandaid thing that will service for whatever length of time. Like remote collaboration will always be important. Asynchronous communication around the globe, always important. I think this is just part of the evolution of what we have to do. Yeah.

Ben:
And each of you spoke about experimentation several times, trying different things, not knowing exactly what will work. I'm also struck by the breadth of things that you've had to think about. Margaret, you mentioned in our practice session that it's been the micro level, like, "Well, how do we help folks whiteboard if they can't be at a whiteboard? Do we ship them whiteboards? Do we empower them with whiteboards software?" All the way up to, as you referenced, like, "Well, now, we have a bunch of folks who are either parents, or guardians, or stewards of other lives that are disrupted. How do we also focus on that community?"

Ben:
And so, y'all have been juggling both ends of those, empower and uplift folks to do, and help forward Google's mission. And so, your teams had to, again, turn the box that will be like, "Okay, are we shipping people whiteboards and pens? And how do we make the parents not so crazy?" And you're doing it in a week. That's what you're doing this week is to empower these large groups. And I think it's important for our audience to know that you work with HR, you're working with the people teams, you all are interfacing with lots of other teams who then might not be charged with, but take the baton, and work on some of these other things.

Ben:
It's not all being generated. I mean, you're the nexus of some of the ideas, and you're certainly the feedback collectors, but you also work a lot with the people team, and HR, and staffing, and the like to help, and Google will respond.

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. I mean, it's the same concept of being the connector as I was talking about, like, even with all the volunteer steering committees and whatnot within UX, it's the people whose actual day jobs it is to focus on hiring or whatnot for across the company. And, again, sometimes they just see our role as being the antidote to the tyranny of structural silos. Right? Honestly, I don't even think it's just a big company problem because I think small companies often have this, it's just easy to have the mentality of like, "Here's my backyard. This is my purview. That's your backyard, that's your purview." And people just often don't look over the fence often enough. Right?

Margaret Lee:
So, I think that that's our job is just to be the drone over the community, and figure out where the gaps are, and how to bring it together. I don't claim that we're the experts in remote collaboration, parenting, blah, blah, blah. All of that. Because all that expertise is out there. We just have to bring them together so that the effect is greater.

Mike Buzzard:
Can we change that to be our mission statement, to be the antidote to [inaudible 00:35:11] organizational silos?

Margaret Lee:
It's a [crosstalk 00:35:14] structural silo [crosstalk 00:35:15]-

Ben:
Grown. And we are the Google [crosstalk 00:35:17]. I like that. I think it's perfect. We're having some questions from folks about specific tools, or approaches that you're using to interface more broadly with the community. I'm guessing that there's a lot of G Suite use, but have you found something that's been working in this time of a distributed workforce, a way that folks are more and more likely to respond? Is there something synchronous or asynchronous you're using that you've been liking?

Mike Buzzard:
If anything, I feel like it's gone, and for me, in many ways more analog, or less everything being centered around like purpose, and project. So, that always is going on and independent spaces where you can find heads down time, never before in many ways. I think the things that were most noticeable to me, and I'm still reconciling is like being a connector, a lot of that is not over-structured conversation. A lot of it is, but a lot of it isn't, and growing your network, and picking up information, and bring it down. So, the hallway moments, the water cooler, the micro-kitchen, all of that, to me, is really the valuable intangibles, or less like defined instructor tables.

Mike Buzzard:
So, I'm trying to keep that in mind to the point I keep showing this, it feels like a prop now, but like I have print out of our team that sits in front of me, so I can try to keep them insight and in mind, because [inaudible 00:36:50]. So, it's less than tools designed for productivity and connectivity, which naturally just adapt for the moment or the environment, but more of the, how do we create those other moments that's so much valuable information exchange version?

Ben:
I'm wondering-

Mike Buzzard:
Margaret has a secret weapon tool though.

Ben:
Yes. Margaret, why don't you go ahead and just put a pin in an answer? Well, here's what we use.

Margaret Lee:
Well, so in terms of an actual tool, or best practice, I think the community is experimenting with a lot of different tools right now. And I know that because we have a very active email list amongst all the UXers around the globe. And again, there are also like sub-lists, right? For different interests within UX. So, there's a lot of sharing there going on right now, actively. I mean, in somewhat typical Google fashion, there isn't like one tool that the entire company uses. And I think that that's fine. I mean, at the scale that we're at, it seems like they usually are a few different ones. So, I don't know what the top ranking one right now is, but in terms of like our own ability to, I don't know, share, that's something that we've been talking about a lot is the quality of our interactions is really important.

Margaret Lee:
And I think as we're working from home, it's really tempting to treat each video meeting as just like, I don't know, a meeting, and I think it's really important to just set aside a little time for just being humans. The water cooler moments when you're not in the meeting room, it's between meeting, whatnot. We can't overestimate the importance of just connecting as humans every single day, multiple times a day, while we're in this for the long haul. Like it'll become very old very quickly if we don't intentionally make time for that.

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I think the re-purposing of tools is exciting too. It's like when there's a drastic change where somebody comes up with an idea to use something in a way that wasn't intended is always fun. And we're seeing some of that with simple internal tools, just tools to ask questions, and vote those questions for group discussions are all hands. We're starting to see those people sharing. Like there might be the food list, and people are voting recipes. So, it's like the little things like that that create the fabric of the community. And just by repurposing tools, I am changing the functionality, just making use of them in different ways.

Ben:
That's great. I'm hoping we can conclude our conversation with what I'm sure is on a lot of folks' minds, and that is, "Well, how do I get started with something like this at an org if mine isn't as large, or have 20% projects?" Mike, in particular, you had talked about the pain and passion duality as something to look for in your coworkers, teammates, and folks. Don't you just love the [inaudible 00:39:56] that face of like, "Dammit, Ben, another one of these ... I mean, yes, I said that."

Mike Buzzard:
[crosstalk 00:40:00].

Ben:
I'm like, Mike, on the call last week, do you remember when you said ... You know?

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah, all my flippant phraseology is coming back to haunt me.

Ben:
I thought it was usable. If somebody is out there like, "Okay, but these are Google folks. And they have lots of time, they're bumping into people left and right." Like, what if you're in a smaller org, and you want to start thinking about and work on in that culture? What might they do?

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I think the idea stemmed from, so Nicholas [Jakafi 00:40:29] used to be at Google. He tagged me free radical ones, and I looked that up, and the scientific definition wasn't super flattering, but the founder of 99U had written a nice manifesto, which resonated. And at some point, all through my change age, and instigation stuff, people would say, "You need to figure out how to scale yourself." I still hear it today. Everybody says it all the time. And I started to think about like, what is the thing that I do that instigates change, that I might be able to communicate to others? And that's where the pain and the passion model came from. And there's many examples, but the concept is like, if you find somebody that has the pain, this shared need, then they have motivation.

Mike Buzzard:
And if you find people that are motivated, so they have this pain, but they're also passionate about it, meaning that they have ideas, and they have an enthusiasm of how to fix it, you got to look for those two things. And it seems obvious, but there's a lot of folks who are just like, "Yeah, this sucks. It bothers me, but somebody else will fix it, or I hope somebody else does." But eventually once in a while you find people that have both that pain and that passion. And when you do, you just give them a lot of encouragement, like, "Okay, let's do it. I like that idea. And clearly, this is something we can fix."

Mike Buzzard:
And so, you drive them through it. And I don't know how long it'll take, and deep it'll get, but it's like once you find that, you got to hook it and pull it along. At least that was the case when I was, again, doing this individually. I think, Margaret, you might have a more elegant way of thinking about how that translates into the way we look at our communities today.

Margaret Lee:
Yeah. I think even at a small scale, some of the challenges that we constantly are trying to make better are the same, you know what I mean? It's that free flow of information, I think can be a problem in the smallest of organizations. Like I said, I think, maybe it's human nature to want to own things, but when you're at a company, everyone owns everything really, right? So, if you can take that approach, who has the common ... I mean, maybe that is the pain and passion model.

Margaret Lee:
Like, where's the overlap for what you're doing that somehow isn't getting done? And who has the other side of that overlap? And just figuring out that connection. And can you solve it together? Because it's really hard to do this on your own, right? Because community takes more than one person. So, you have to find who in your community is going to care about the same things?

Mike Buzzard:
I feel like our team is overflowing with the passion for this stuff. And what we've gotten good at is sourcing and prioritizing the pain, or that's the leadership council. We source, and go to them, and with recommended prioritization of the pain. And they help us reshape that a little bit. But then it comes back on the passion of us in the community to deliver on that. And so, we're trying to channel that passion to address those pains.

Margaret Lee:
And again, communities are out there. They exist, and it's identifying them, right? And recognizing that there are people that are naturally connected somehow. And then figuring out how do you scale that by connecting to communities together.

Ben:
And is that how you think organizations will be shifting and changing as they approach the new normal of work? I'm asking you to predict the future of how companies might or ought to think about distributed workforce as if like Dscout, we were all based in Chicago, and now we're all in Chicago. And so, we of course are thinking about how we can continue to ground one another in the ethos, and the spirit of what we're doing.

Ben:
I'm wondering if you have any advice for a leader out there who is facing a team that is now distributed that wasn't before. Things that they could be thinking about as they're wandering to bring folks back, health aside, but just the spirit of cultivating [crosstalk 00:44:31].

Margaret Lee:
Sure. Yeah. I'll go back to recognize that we're humans first, and we need humanity. We need that connection. And if every connection that we have as we're working from home is cold, and informal, and structured, it's going to be really hard. Right? Like I really believe that we have to just be so much more intentional about creating really quality connections because it's just harder right now. I mean, there's just no two ways about it. We just don't have the advantage of serendipitous interactions. So, we have to think about this differently, you know?

Mike Buzzard:
Yeah. I would say like if [inaudible 00:45:18] look for and recognize the people who naturally have that need to connect folks and ideas, because you can only see so much. And if you find those people, and you listen to them, encourage them, then it just broadens your view of the world around you. So, you can then going to start to recognize the opportunities and the needs, and find the ways to address them. But, yeah, if you don't support those people in doing what they're naturally doing to surface that opportunity, then it's hard to see it.

Mike Buzzard:
And especially, harder today, because a lot about Margaret is saying, a lot of that exchange is just less structured, and formalized. It's not agenda-driven. It's just something that happens organically in an organization. So, we're forced to disconnect right now. So, you've got to encourage it proactively.

Margaret Lee:
And it's especially acute now because we're under incredibly stressful conditions, but what we invest in now, understanding how people like to connect, and how they possibly can connect again, it's not going to be something that's only good for this period of time. It'll have lasting benefit. Like we'll still use those techniques or whatever, and recognize the needs of each other. And, I mean, I don't know if there is a bright side to what we're going through in 2020, but I do think that it's helped us largely recognize like, I don't know, just let our guard down a little bit.

Margaret Lee:
And I hope that because we're all here in our homes every single day, with our families, and pets, and whatnot, and people with different levels of ability to be productive. And I hope we have a lot of empathy for one another, and that it's not a temporary condition, you know? Because that's what's going to make a really strong culture, and a more bonded community.

Ben:
Yeah. It has been really instructive for me when the trend to offices trying to feel more like home, I think is a way to help us empathize with one another in these private spaces, but it can be clinical and sterile. I mean, they need to be clean now more than ever. I love seeing my colleagues in their homes because they're not putting on any airs. They woke up, and they're working on problems with me on things.

Ben:
And so, it is very much, for me, an empathizing moment to have the visual cue of like, "Oh right, you just ate because I see something on your face, but I'm glad you're here at the meeting." Well, Mike, Margaret, it was so wonderful to spend a little bit of time with you. Thank you so very much. Thanks again, Mike and Margaret. It was wonderful to see you, and be well.

Mike Buzzard:
Thank you.

Margaret Lee:
Thanks for having us.

Ben:
Of course. Thank you People Nerds.

Mike Buzzard:
Thanks everybody for tuning in.

Ben:
Of course.