[00:02:05] Mia: Yeah, building culture at Pinterest was interesting, like any startup, it's constant chaos and excitement all the time.

[00:02:12] I think I learned the hard way. That culture is not just the outcome, but it's the system that drives that outcome. So, you know, a lot of us, when we try and affect culture, we create some principles, we put up awesome posters, we inspire people with these little catchy statements of who we're going to be, but the reality is the organization has to match that. In order to drive the behavior that we wanna see, the new mindsets, the new behaviors.

[00:02:41] And so a really good example of where I failed originally and then tried to pivot is , we made a shift into a new office as a team, and we were very fortunate that we could have a design-centric space for the Pinterest creative team.

[00:02:57] But as soon as we moved in, I started to hear whispers [00:03:00] like, You know, we'll meet you in your office, we'll see you in the design space. And I was like, oh no. We did exactly what I knew we shouldn't do. We just got so excited about having our own space. So to counteract that, I started these things called studio nights.

[00:03:14] So in our collaborative, cool design space, we invited everyone else from the company to teach each other new things. And that became a shared collaborative space. We did whiskey tasting, we did beekeeping, w e did all kinds of things to, try and bring people together to teach each other in our space.

[00:03:30] So it became a shared space.

[00:03:31] Michael: What were some of the ways that, the different processes and systems that you were putting in place amongst the team evolved as you took that journey from five to 25 people?

[00:03:43] Mia: I think the key in bringing a team together that's rapidly growing and a chaotic environment is to have some sort of practice that holds it together. You know, at a startup, you rarely know what good looks like. You're trying to figure out what good looks like. So at Pinterest, one of the things that we really [00:04:00] invested in was our critique practice. So making sure that on a regular basis we came together as a team. We talked about what good looked like. We evaluated our decisions, we helped each other grow, and I think that was critical to our ability to move through the ambiguity together and still get good things out the door.

[00:04:19] Michael: What are some of the tips that you have for designers who want to effectively give and receive design critiques?

[00:04:25] Mia: I think the big thing about critique is that you know the difference between opinion and critique. It's really easy for the opinions and perspectives to sneak in, but a lot of times designers get so many of that, that they don't need yours.

[00:04:40] So I love to use a little bit like a Madlib style to get people going to answer the question. If the objective is blank, then this design decision blank, right? It's just a structure to anchor us in the objective of the project and then make sure that we're not just saying our feels, but we're [00:05:00] actually assessing the decisions.

[00:05:01] And that's some of the most useful and actionable feedback we can give folks in critique.

[00:05:06] Michael: I love that I'm going to start using that this week. Like I have crit tomorrow and I'm gonna say...

[00:05:11] Mia: lemme know how it goes..!!

[00:05:13] Michael: I will, it's such a practical piece of advice. yeah, it's great. I read that you were, one of the leaders on the commerce initiative at Pinterest, which is a pretty big deal, and I'm imagining like a lot of, of strategy and deliberation went into that.

[00:05:29] Can you give us a little bit of a glimpse into,what that process looked like, what your role was and some of the outcomes?

[00:05:36] Mia: Gosh, you're making me go back. I mean early days, commerce and building for businesses on Pinterest was complicated cuz we were primarily a consumer business, right?

[00:05:46] Like, uh, everyone thought about the Piners first and there were very few people dedicated to thinking about the businesses that are trying to reach those piners. And so our job was messy at the beginning, defining what the value proposition was , coming [00:06:00] together to figure out how we piece together an experience with minimum effort.

[00:06:04] And it was choppy and messy.

[00:06:05] And so a lot of our initial work was advocating for change, potentially on the consumer side as well, in order to create better experiences for businesses, which meant there was no massive vision, which people love to create, but it doesn't practically work.

[00:06:20] It was more of a bunch of pitches for small experiments to see if we can create great outcomes.

[00:06:27] It wasn't defining the future of commerce.

[00:06:30] It was, let's figure out how to move towards this, this being a great experience for businesses.

[00:06:36] So it's not as sexy or interesting or fantastic as I think people want the story to be. It was very practical.

[00:06:42] Can we make this better with small steps along the way?

[00:06:47] Michael: What were the different leading indicators that you were looking at to make sure that you were actually moving the right needles and were on the right track as a team.

[00:06:54] Mia: well, at the beginning it was as simple as do businesses know how to succeed on this platform? So we were looking at things like, can they [00:07:00] find the features? Do they know what features are gonna support them? Are they creating content that matters?

[00:07:06] And quite frankly, like most folks, most companies, the experience was super fragmented. There was pieces and parts, and so we had a stitch it together before we could even get to deepening engagement and impressions and all the fun metrics that businesses wanna track from a social perspective.

[00:07:24] Michael: How big was the team that was working on this?

[00:07:26] Mia: I think the team was maybe like 15 at max when I was there. Yeah. I'm sure it's significantly larger now, but it was a small, scrappy group of people trying to figure out how to improve what we already had.

[00:07:40] Michael: Amazing. What were some of the main ways that you personally grew as a leader while you were at Pinterest?

[00:07:46] Mia: I think one of the big things that I learned at Pinterest as a creative leader is how to be comfortable with ambiguity.

[00:07:55] You would think I would've learned that in my previous startup at Square, but it is a lifelong practice to be [00:08:00] comfortable with ambiguity and then to create a space where people feel safe with ambiguity.

[00:08:06] I learned a lot about holding that for myself and others. I learned a lot about navigating executive teams. It was really my first executive role in being on an executive team and understanding what it means to be a business leader first. We all traditionally grow up in our discipline and wanna advocate for our discipline and fight for our discipline. But at the end of the day, I was trying to help solve business problems that were maybe inclusive of design, but not always.

[00:08:33] And that was a big shift for me in my career, really being able to solve problems first from that perspective.

[00:08:39] What else?

[00:08:40] I think one of the biggest challenges I had to overcome and start up life as a creative leader is figuring out how to hire people really fast as an introvert.

[00:08:47] I'm an extreme introvert despite what I do, people don't believe me.

[00:08:51] Michael: You hide it very well.

[00:08:52] Mia: I hide it very well. I can turn it on, but then after I talk to people, I go and pass out, you know, like I need a break from humans.[00:09:00]

[00:09:00] But as a leader, my job was to be connected, to talk to a lot of people, to sell the potential of the role, to be excited about the mission, and that's a lot of conversations.

[00:09:10] And so as an introvert, that was incredibly challenging, figuring out how do I build relationships with people while still maintaining the energy I needed to just succeed in my day-to-day management responsibilities.

[00:09:23] Do you have any advice for other introverts that feel similarly? What were some of the things that you did that work?

[00:09:29] As an introvert, thinking about the recruiting side of things, it was trying to connect genuinely and at scale. So whenever I could, put a perspective out there or do a talk or something like that, that was a more scalable way of reaching audiences.

[00:09:44] Even though I hate it, I hate being on stage, but it was an effective strategy. And then I tried to just build genuine relationships, not always live, so if I could connect with people over email or follow up with them on Twitter, I would use the tools to stay connected[00:10:00] but it's hard cuz it does require a lot of energy.

[00:10:02] I think the other part was as an introvert and a leader in a company with a lot of people that were not introverts, I had to figure out how to show up in those meetings and preserve my energy, but still appear to be a leader. So getting comfortable with saying, "you know what? I'm not gonna make a decision in this meeting"

[00:10:19] I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna ask questions, but I'll follow up with you all later on my decision. And that's hard cuz that's not the norm in tech companies.

[00:10:28] Michael: Yeah.

[00:10:28] Mia: But really getting comfortable with saying, I'm gonna operate slightly differently because I need to be able to process information. I need to be able to make sure I give you a good decision and not just react in the moment.

[00:10:39] Michael: On that topic, you talk about this idea of a unlocking your authentic leadership style. Can you explain what that means a little bit?

[00:10:47] Mia: I think I learned the hard way that being an authentic leader is really about being in alignment with my values as much as possible or finding the threshold at which I need to be aligned with my values. And it's not necessarily [00:11:00] transparency.

[00:11:00] The hard thing about being a leader is that you feel like you have to tell everyone everything, or that there's a desire for information, but that's not real.

[00:11:08] You can't, there's certain HR and legal things that you just cannot reveal, so you have to show up authentically despite that.

[00:11:16] And the way that I tried to do that is just be genuinely curious about any of the situations.

[00:11:22] So for instance, if there was a big change, I may not be able to reveal all the information in that moment about the change, but I could show up authentically and say, "well, I'm genuinely curious what this is going to do for us, or how we're gonna learn and grow from this experience"

[00:11:37] and that's hard, that's a practice. And then I think the second thing about being authentic as a leader is just knowing your values and knowing when you're stretching too far.

[00:11:48] So when I stretched too far in other people's values and what they thought good leadership looked like, it was not sustainable for me.

[00:11:54] I ran out of energy and I didn't wanna lead anymore.

[00:11:58] Does that answer your question?

[00:11:59] Michael: Yeah, [00:12:00] totally. I think that's a very insightful way of looking at it and it's also something that not a lot of people talk about. And I think that's one of my favorite elements of who you are. And even just like some of the writing that you have online where you are quick to talk about things that I just don't see coming up in many conversations.

[00:12:15] And that's a really powerful thing.

[00:12:16] Mia: I'm glad. I wanna create content and conversations that genuinely help folks. And I think there are so many things that we don't talk about in terms of what it means to show up, what it means to succeed, so I wanna cut through the BS and get to the real stuff.

[00:12:31] The real talk. Yeah.

[00:12:33] Michael: One of those topics that I've seen you touch on here and there is this idea of burnout and what to do when we feel the onset of that, or maybe how to avoid it in the first place. And I'm wondering if you have any strategies or advice for people who are either currently dealing with burnout or maybe just want to hedge against, just making sure that they don't end up in that place.

[00:12:55] Mia: Yeah, burnout's rough. It's affecting a lot of leaders and teams right now, and I think the [00:13:00] key thing is that the pressure is on the individual to be resilient in systems that are not resilient. What that means is that we as individuals in our role have to figure out how to build a sustainable practice despite it all, right?

[00:13:13] Like the way meetings work, the way teams work generally, they are not designed to optimize for resilience as a team. All the onus is on the individual. My goal is to help individuals figure out what their practice is.

[00:13:25] How do they maintain boundaries around their time management?

[00:13:28] How do they make sure they have enough time to think?

[00:13:31] How do they think about their energy that they're exerting and how do they balance that through their work?

[00:13:36] How do they talk about priorities and negotiate a certain amount of work moving forward? It's all tools that help them balance so that they can sustain. Because if you sprint and crash, sprint and crash, you're still gonna end up in burnout anyways.

[00:13:52] So the goal is to build a much more sustainable practice over time.

[00:13:57] Michael: One of the elements of the [00:14:00] within mission is you talk about this idea of challenging the status quo in design. And I'm wondering what are some of the ways that you see yourself doing that right now?

[00:14:11] Mia: When I decided to start Design Department and Within, I wanted to start them to create a conversation or an environment for learning that allowed people to talk about the truth of design and to help design have the impact We all believe it can have. And there's a lot of crap out there about what good design is, and we as a community are terrible at getting to succinct answers about what we do and how we do it.

[00:14:37] We waste a bunch of time debating those things rather than actually having impact. And I genuinely believe like we will live in a better world if we have designers at the top of organizations and having impact in all the industries we wanna see it in. But we're getting in our own way.

[00:14:55] And so what I'm doing and what I'm encouraging my team to do is to talk about those [00:15:00] things, to challenge the status quo, to challenge what good looks like as designers so that we can get to better outcomes together.

[00:15:08] Because if we don't, design is just going to stay in a place that it currently is, and that would be pretty darn sad. I think for most of us. We don't wanna be just makers. I think we wanna genuinely have impact, but if we keep doing the things we're doing now, we're not gonna get there.

[00:15:22] So I don't know if that answers your question.

[00:15:25] Michael: It does. I'd like to keep going though. What are some of the things that you think that we're doing now or some of the misconceptions that we have as designers that are holding us back?

[00:15:33] Mia: I think one of the big things that holds designers back right now is our identity and association with craft.

[00:15:40] Now, don't get me wrong, I love craft. I fell in love with design through bookmaking, so it is core to my heart as well. But if we wanna have impact, we have to be a part of the business ecosystem. And I think a lot of times creatives just don't wanna engage in it.

[00:15:56] And I get it. It's not always fun.

[00:15:58] It's different language, [00:16:00] there's spreadsheets, like all kinds of things that aren't part of our craft and our core identity. But if we don't engage in that effectively, we're not gonna have the impact we want and we're not gonna be able to do the work we want to do.

[00:16:11] So that's a huge one that we're focused on right now is trying to help designers figure out how to have impact on the business without losing their creative identity and their soul, you know?

[00:16:21] And that's some hard talk to get people to realize, you can't just hang out and make cool things, like that's not enough. We can do more than that. So let's figure out how to do that together.

[00:16:31] Michael: What are some of the common advice that you give designers? Because I think a lot of us are coming from either more of an art background or more of a technical background, and maybe we don't have a lot of exposure to the business side of things.

[00:16:42] How do you help people take those steps towards real impact?

[00:16:47] Mia: That's a great question. I think the first step designers can take in having more impact on the business is just understanding the business ecosystem. I think most folks understand their product or the service that they're building, [00:17:00] but do they really understand the system that makes that thing run?

[00:17:04] What are all the different pieces and parts? If there's partners, if there's multiple users, how do we engage and what's the value exchange? Because you can't design the business if you don't know the system that drives the business.

[00:17:16] So that's a good first place.

[00:17:17] Ask lots of questions and visualize the system.

[00:17:21] Michael: What are some of the other ways that. Designers can grow the amount of influence that they have on their team and on product strategy and the roadmap and things like that.

[00:17:32] Mia: One way designers can grow to influence their team and have more impact, is one that I think they really don't like but I think it's really important and that is to stop talking about quality.

[00:17:44] Quality means everything and nothing all at the same time.

[00:17:48] I can get 30 designers in a room and ask them what quality is and I'm gonna get 30 different answers.

[00:17:53] So if we don't know what quality is, how do we expect our cross-functional partners to know what quality is?

[00:17:59] Instead, [00:18:00] we encourage designers to translate the value of their work through investments.

[00:18:04] So instead of saying, let's improve the quality of the onboarding experience, say, let's invest in clarifying the value proposition to drive more conversions, we're gonna do the same work, but the way we talk about the value is radically different.

[00:18:19] And then we're much more likely to do that work rather than just trying to convince people of quality. And they're like, that's not important Mia.

[00:18:27] So we have to change the way we talk about the value of our work.

[00:18:31] Michael: Yeah. Latching on to invest as a keyword makes a ton of sense. It's so practical and it really does reframe how we are making a case for what to spend our time on. I love that.

[00:18:42] Mia: Yeah. And it helps talk about short term, long term, all the things that naturally come with that metaphor.

[00:18:47] Michael: What advice would you give to a designer who feels trapped further down the pipeline of actually making these investment decisions where they feel like they are really just being given a fleshed [00:19:00] out set of problem definitions and they're more in this execution step and they're trying to work their way further upstream to actually be a part of these discussions and where these investments actually take place.

[00:19:15] Mia: If you wanna move further up in the value chain and the value process, you have to illustrate that you can. So for most creatives, that starts with what we were just talking about in terms of communicating the value of your work through investments?

[00:19:29] So while you may be receiving a lot of requests, you can start to inquire, propose, and talk about ideas at the investment that the business cares about. So be able to translate those ideas into those languages into the business language so that people understand that you can engage at that level, illustrate that you can, that's where it starts.

[00:19:50] And then you're more likely to get invited to those meetings and those conversations because they understand that you speak the same language.

[00:19:57] If you keep talking about quality, you're not gonna move up [00:20:00] that value chain.

[00:20:01] Michael: One of the ways that I think we move up that value change and really speak the language of the business owners is by talking in terms of numbers and quantifying the potential for impact. I'm wondering how did you grow as a data driven designer, especially like earlier in your career and making sure that you're not like, reliant on other people to surface the metrics that matter. What advice do you have for people that want to become. More data driven and grow that muscle as a designer.

[00:20:32] Mia: Just to be clear, I don't consider myself a data driven designer, like that's not part of my identity. But as a leader, I knew it was important to understand the business problem. So yes, we're good at understanding consumer needs and people's needs, but if you don't understand the business problem, then you don't understand the system you're designing within.

[00:20:50] So I got better at that by asking really good questions and becoming good friends with my PMs. Frankly, you know, that gave me, the [00:21:00] context, the conversations, the support system that allowed me to ask the right questions at the right time to understand what's important to the business right now and why.

[00:21:09] And so as I learned that through partnership with my PMs and other folks, that gave me more confidence to frame my ideas through that lens and to test it with them, "hey, what if we do this and how would that impact the business?" That practice is what set me up to be able to talk about the business at a higher level.

[00:21:28] Again, data helps, that's one way, but a lot of business decisions are not made on data as much as we would like to think that they were. But it's about understanding the system, the market, the value propositions, the positioning, all of those things to explain why we should do that as a business now and why us at all?

[00:21:47] Michael: Can you give more strategies or examples for what it looks like for designers to invest in relationships with different PMs at the company?

[00:21:55] Mia: Yeah, I know. It's such a controversial thing, designers and PMs getting along.

[00:21:59] [00:22:00] Heaven forbid.

[00:22:00] Yeah, I know. Um, let's see.

[00:22:06] I think designers could have better relationships with PMs and that would actually help them grow as business leaders because PMs, most of them at least already understand what the business is trying to achieve, and their goal is to try and bring a team together and move it forward. So I think. The key is sitting down with those PMs and understanding, "Hey, we're in a partnership together. I'm gonna help you and you're gonna help me" and you can ask explicitly, "can you help me learn the business acumen and talk about what that might mean?"

[00:22:36] Maybe you sit in and listen in on certain conversations, you walk through documents with them. They hold time for you to ask questions, but it's really about holding space to learn from them.

[00:22:48] And most of the PMs I've worked with were very willing to share that knowledge because ultimately that was going to serve them too, to have a designer on their team that could actually speak business objectives.

[00:22:58] what are some other techniques?

[00:22:59] [00:23:00] One other thing I saw on my team is some of my design leads would actually asked their PMs to co-present, and that meant that a lot of conversations had to take place before to make sure that they were aligned on the why and the how and the language was aligned with the business.

[00:23:16] So that's a great way to practice and elevate design inside of the company.

[00:23:22] Michael: I love that. I'd like to transition a little bit and talk about. Different hiring strategies because obviously you looked at a lot of portfolios and candidates while you were growing the team at Pinterest rather quickly, and so I'm wondering what are some of the elements that really make a portfolio stand out for you?