Designing for Impact: Leadership, Capability Uplift & Scaling Experience Teams

In this episode of The Tech Trajectory Podcast, host Chris Davies sits down with Amir Ansari to explore what it takes to build resilient design practices that scale. Through stories, frameworks, and some personal philosophy, Amir talks about aligning with executive stakeholders, balancing design literacy with capability uplift, and adapting leadership styles to suit context. 

1. Building design leadership like a Lego set

[02:04] Amir likens his leadership journey to receiving a surprise Lego set—thrown into leadership before he felt ready, but discovering joy in experimentation and adaptation.

2. What makes a strong design practice?

[05:28] Buy-in from executives is essential. Without it, designers risk being underutilised and misunderstood. Success depends on assessing appetite, leadership culture, and adapting the playbook accordingly.

3. Reframing design for business impact

[12:50] Many organisations still view design as a cost centre. Amir urges teams to “talk design without using the word design”—using business language like engagement, risk reduction, and evidence-based decision-making.

4. Uplifting capability vs. uplifting literacy

[20:18] Start with uplifting literacy across all teams before diving into design capability. This top-down approach ensures buy-in, sets expectations, and uncovers budget realities.

5. Internal advocacy and selling design

[30:00] Leaders must become internal salespeople—showcasing wins, tapping stakeholders, and building internal networks to create pull for design.

6. Democratising design

[40:41] Amir shares a model for enabling non-designers to take on basic HCD tasks—spreading capability across teams and creating internal evangelists.

7. Structuring design teams at scale

[52:15] From centralised to decentralised to hybrid models, Amir breaks down the pros and cons. The hybrid approach—with clear reporting lines and shared tooling—is his go-to for maintaining cohesion and autonomy.

8. Mentorship, values, and staying human

[01:06:33] Amir advocates for mentorship, honest conversations, and leading from a place of empathy. Supporting individual strengths helps create lasting team culture.

Where to find Amir Ansari

• LinkedIn: Amir Ansari
• Website: amiransari.com.au

Amir also offers mentoring and coaching for emerging design leaders.

Follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Transcript

Chris Davies: 0:00

Welcome to the tech trajectory podcast, where we explore the human side of leadership, growth and transformation. I'm Chris Davies, and today we're diving into what it takes to scale experienced design teams, uplift capability, and embed design as a strategic function within organizations. Our guest today has spent the last 25 years building and leading design teams across startups and enterprises. He's worked with companies like Iris transpire, as well as DiUS, and now as chief experience officer at Academy Xi, he's focused on helping organizations embed Human Centered Design and grow their design capability at scale. Amir Ansari, welcome to the podcast.

Amir Ansari: 0:39

Oh, thanks, Chris. Such a such a smooth and welcoming intro? Can I? Can I cut that out and put it onto my LinkedIn profile?

Chris Davies: 0:45

Well, yeah. I mean, it is my third time doing this. Yeah, I'm a pro. So today, we're going to explore what it means to lead design teams, build a culture of continuous learning and create meaningful experiences that go beyond esthetics on a personal level, Amir, you've had a huge impact on my understanding of things like XD innovation and even the world of tech consulting. I've been privileged enough to witness firsthand just how adept you are, not only building design practices, but also having a company wide impact on culture and ways of working. We've also played soccer together a fair bit. But who do you think was teaching her on the pitch?

Amir Ansari: 1:23

Clearly, you were the magician. Thank you. Trying to convince you to play a game was like trying to get messy to join the team. Unfortunately, we couldn't quite meet your financial expectations.

Chris Davies: 1:35

It was more of a scheduling issue. Of course, more of a scheduling but today, yeah, it's all about building design practices, and our prop we're going to use is Lego. So we'll see how we go. But we thought maybe there's some parallels between building the right foundations, flexibility to experiment and the resilience to break things down and build them back up stronger. So first question, Amir, if your career in design leadership was a Lego build, what would it look like?

Amir Ansari: 2:05

Yeah, good question. I had to think about this one. I would have said my first Lego build would have been a gift by someone, as if I'd never seen Legos before, and I'd open it up and experimented with it and sort of figure out on the fly, how do I work with this piece of toy in these pieces? And the analogy that the connection is, you know, I was thrown into leadership teams and leadership positions by, you know, my first manager, and I hadn't even thought that that, you know, I would be ready and I will be enjoying the whole notion of falling into that leadership role. But obviously he saw something in me that I hadn't. So yeah, my build would have been a gift. Okay, here you go. Amir, open up the box. Oh, never seen this before. I better give it a go, and then just winging it from there, really.

Chris Davies: 2:54

So I think, yeah, as we go, we'll try and build some cars, and then at the end, we'll, we'll race them down this track. So, yeah, feel free to crack on. So I think that the first kind of thing we're going to explore is, yeah, leadership and experience design. So you've built and scaled design teams across various industries. What would you say are the key ingredients of a strong design practice?

Amir Ansari: 3:21

First and foremost is that buy in. So if you're working for an organization, and then they don't understand human centered design, or they don't even appreciate the need for, you know, designing your customers in mind, then you're there's no point. There's no point joining that organization, or you're going to have a quite an uphill battle. So getting that founder, exec buying, I think, is a must, and then thinking about the appetite within the organization, right? So I wouldn't be following the same playbook every single time. And I learned that early on, when I moved from one company to the next, and I thought to myself, Oh, great, I can just take this and repeat it. And obviously certain things work and certain things don't. So I think getting a good understanding of where the organization's at, what's the appetite, how much room do you have? What's your executive or leadership teams like? Are they going to support you? Are they going to get in your way? I think they're the sort of things that I will be sort of thinking about and asking before I sort of commit that leadership role moving to that organization.

Chris Davies: 4:24

Gotcha. So is the, is the buy in one of the biggest challenges in embedding design as like a strategic function, or are there kind of other factors in play that that kind of get in the way of it, having a seat at the table?

Amir Ansari: 4:38

Yeah, the whole seat at the table thing is really interesting, right? Just before, just jumping onto that, I think I've learned over my years that people's understanding of design is very different. And again, I've got a gripe with the word design is such a loaded term, right? And I've been a designer all my career. I've studied design, and I do my best to not try. I use that language because, you know it. And I remember one organization that I worked for, they had a bunch of, you know, user experience designers, but they thought they were all visual designers, so they would be given a very low level, tactical work to do. And so when I came in and I realized that you've got an amazing team, they're sitting there bored out of their brains, I think it was an opportunity to go, okay, you know what? I need to do some educating. I need to educate from the top down. The fact that they've already hired me was a already a signal that you know what they want to do this. They just don't know what this looks like. So then, you know, there's a first, you know, the 3060, 90 day plan of do a bit of assessment with the executive team, the sales team, or people who are going to be needing to be your allies marketing and understand where they're at, and then, based on that, decide what that playbook looks like. Again, for a couple of organizations, I spend the first probably 12 months just internal training, going to sales pitches, winning the work, but just working internally on the organization, not even in the design team, because I knew I needed to lift that foundation up, build that appetite before I could then go right now, now that you understand what this is, we need this, and that includes people practice, etc.

Chris Davies: 6:16

Yeah, yeah, because I was going to ask, is this a the case at organizations where they're kind of new to design, or is it just a level of kind of maturity in that space? And yeah, how that kind of balances between business goals and user experience priorities?

Amir Ansari: 6:35

Yeah. So the challenge is, design is still seen as a cost center in many organizations, right? It hasn't fully realized its ROI in even big organizations, the whole concept of the ROI question still comes up, and what is discussing us? What's the value that we're adding? So I think one of the biggest challenges we're going to continue to have as design leaders, is talking design without talking design, right? So, you know, I often, again, I tell my teams don't use the word design in your lexicon, talk, talk to the business at their level. You know, custom adoption, customer engagement, retention, all the buzz words you know, de risk, collect evidence, build confidence. You know, those sort of languages. And regardless of the maturity organization, you know, if you're working for a bank, you're still going to be at some point coming across a stakeholder who doesn't really appreciate what we do, or if you go and work for a startup, maybe they've been told what they need, but they don't really know what they want. You know, across my across my career, I've worked with an organization who had a taste of a design leader but didn't quite work out well. So they were quite apprehensive to going in again with another one. As I said, they they thought, you know, user experience and product designers were visual designers, and with another organization, the ratio of design to engineering and product management was way out of whack. But you could argue, every one of them appreciated the notion of design because they had brought someone like me, me in to do something, but didn't quite know what that thing was. So I think it sort of varies in Australia. We we are starting to build up a little maturing and appreciation of design, but it's probably not as good as I would like it to be. But I guess that's an opportunity, right? That's an opportunity for myself and others.

Chris Davies: 8:38

Yeah, definitely. And I think from my perspective, it feels it's just yeah, that level of understanding. You know, I'm all ones for trying to use the right terminology, but sometimes Yeah, words like design or when we talk about transformation and innovation, they're the best terms we have. We just have to make sure that yeah, we're approaching these things in the right way. And I remember, yeah, when I first met you, and it was my first gig in technology consulting, you know, meet Amir. He's head of design, I was like, Oh, cool. So he does all the, you know, the pretty stuff. But then you introduce me to things like product, market fit, value prop canvases. And I was like, Oh, this isn't, this is more than just design. She's been was that? Chris, yeah, I'm proud. Yeah, and that really, that was just kind of yeah education. It's more than Yeah, you know, user interfaces and everything. It's much deeper than that. And even to this day, you know, we try and look at engagements with DVF framework, right? And that's something that, yeah, is embedded in me from those early days. I think hopefully it's just a case of doing that other organizations. So that kind of leads us nicely onto a. Um strategies for increasing design maturity within an organization, uplifting capability. So what does it take to uplift capability and embed design thinking across teams?

Amir Ansari: 10:12

Yeah, so going back to my whole you can't play the same playbook every single time. It's just coming in and assessing, right, just going, where is the organization at, from product development to marketing to sales to the C level, what is every key stakeholders appreciate an understanding of what design thinking, human centered design, whatever the lingo we want to use, right? I think that's the first piece. And then the back of that, putting together a program of work around capability, literacy uplift, not capability uplift. Literacy uplift first, so everybody's thinking from the same song sheet, and then with that in mind, then moving down to, I guess, the team, the existing capability, or maybe the lack of but I often work the top down to begin with, right? Because if I need to get funding, if I need to get buy in, there's no point me doing an assessment of the the existing team, and go right, another 10 and going up the chain and go, Well, I'm not going to give you, I don't know, a million bucks. Whereas, if I can go top down, set some expectation, understand where they're at. And it's, it's a slow, sometimes a slow game. You know, I always thought I wasn't a patient person. But I think over the years, I've realized, no, I realized that sometimes it's you gotta play the, you know, the long play. So, yeah, working with that exec level, see where they're at. Set some plant some seeds, set some expectations. Gage where they're at their level of interest, and based on that, I'll go right now. I know where their head's at. I know how much I can ask. Then come down to the team and then assess where the team's at, both from a capability perspective, mindset, maturity, tooling, design and research ops, just do the entire assessment of that, and then I'll bring it all together. And I go, Okay, well, this is the maximum ask I can have, or this is where the executive leadership, leadership mindset is at. This is where the team's at, crap. There's a little bit of disparity between the two, right? Like, you know, I'm just going to use a random like dollar figures. I need $2 million to uplift the team, but the, you know, the execs are giving me 500k or that's where their head's at, and it's a compromise, like the word that I've put into my notes is a constant compromise. We're not lucky, or many of us probably are not going to ever get a chance to work with the Canva of the world, or the last seasons of the world, or even the top banks in Australia at the moment who are investing in design, right? Most of us work for tier two. Tier three run through to startups. So this notion, and I remember a story, I think Atlassian, 10 years ago, I think they were struggling to find good practitioners in Australia, so they did a random World Tour. They hired a couple of Van, camper vans that turned into a thing that went around to Europe and everywhere else in the world, looking for talent, and I remember it, yeah, right. Many people weren't. Many leaders won't be in a position to be able to do that. So it's a constant Compromise of, Okay, what does good look like? What does average look like? How long will it take me to get from good to better to best, and then setting the expectation for me, more importantly, setting the expectation with the team. Hey, team, I know this is what you're thinking. I know you want more. I know we've discussed it. You're, you know, you're working off a, you know, smelly oily rag. I you know, we need three time, three years. You know, this is what the execs are. So you just got to persevere. Let's do some things really badly. Let's do something really average, but let's do the really important stuff really well. And let's the, let's sing and dance about those wins, right? Let's, let's, as I use the word, let's pimp the crap out of the amazing the work that you've done through myself and through yourselves, to then show and highlight the value to the organization. So then others will come and go, oh, I want, can I have some of that? I want some of that. What does that look like in me? How is that? How much is that going to cost me? Or what do you call that thing? And again, you continue to build up advocacy, and, you know, allies within the organization. And it becomes this flywheel over time again, you start to, we know, human centered design, and design and then experience adds value. It just takes time.

Chris Davies: 14:23

Yeah, awesome. I think that's some really amazing pointers in there. And I think obviously you want to get that exec level pie in from the get go. And you talked about some of those things on a more kind of granular or practical level. Is there anything you can demonstrate to Yeah, exec level, or even, you know, teams who are in parallel, product managers, okay, this is what we do. This is the value we bring. What? What kind of activities, or even, like workshops, would you bring them into?

Amir Ansari: 14:53

Yeah? So the first, the first thing that comes to mind is this whole notion of showcases, right? Any opportunity to do a showcase. And then bring stakeholders, other people outside of that initiative, that project, that team, that squad, to observe, I think, is really important. And then I think the other role of a leader, agnostic of design, could be any practice. In effect, you're a salesperson, so taking the good work that a team has done, and going, right, who can I pitch this at? Who can I sell this to? You know, almost like you could call it an internal marketing role, and then go and tap individuals on the shoulder and go, Hey, it's been a while. Let's have a catch up. And my team's been working on this thing and other they'll get excited, or you'll know within the first five minutes, not only interested, like I remember, and with that, comes building networking connections early and often. So when I started at Iris, I think it was lockdown number three in Melbourne, I literally picked up my laptop and Daniel Andrews said, Right, we're locking the streets. So I think I was five minutes late getting out of my car. So I started fully in lockdown. I was across five or six different time zones, and I remember I set myself a goal that in the first 30 days, I'm going to meet as many executives, leaders in the business across all functions, from legal to marketing to sales to solutions to product, to engineering, so forth. And I remember, I met, I think, 60 plus within the first 20 days. Zoom calls, you know, team calls and whatever. Just go, Hey, I'm here. This is what I can do for you. I'd like to know who you are, what you do, what are your pain points? Oh, I can help you with that. Or I don't say anything, because I may not be able to help them, because I still don't know where they sit within the organization, right? So building those networks and then going back to those showcases, go, hey, it's been three months. Let's have another catch up. This is what I've been doing. This is what the team has been doing. And just sell and sell and sell. Bit of a humble bragging if we need to do it, to really get them to go, Okay, this is, this is, in fact, one of my teams need this, or my Sydney product managers or GMs are struggling with this thing and just just selling the work.

Chris Davies: 17:08

Yeah, right. And I think I remember you did a talk on democratizing design as well, and that plays into that, right?

Amir Ansari: 17:17

Yeah. So, like, that's a that's been one of my, I guess, principles since day dot. I was lucky enough to fall into design very early on, right? This is 25 years ago, and before universities had courses, before there was Academy xi and general assembly and swimming online, all that sort of stuff. So I was lucky to sort of get my runs on the board. But many organizations, let's truly, let's let's be honest, don't have a good enough ratio to design to product and development, right? So what do you do with that? So I've been on a mission to, yeah, democratize the practice so that everybody else within the organization could do at least some form of HCD, experience, design research and so forth. Just at least they can do something. And again, my argument is, if I've got, let's say if I've got 10 teams and I've got two designers, either I can spread those two designers across the 10 so really they're doing 20% each of good work so every team in effect is suffering, or I get those two designers at least to focus their energy on two of the most important teams, and then do some teaching, mentoring, coaching of the remaining eight, so they can still do some form of customer Insights, discovery and research, so that at least two initiatives get lots of love, and the other eight are still sort of knocking the can or kicking the can forward. And like the biggest, proudest moments I've had is when I've had bas quality assurance engineers product managers who are using, you know, the toolkits that my team could build and playbooks more than my team themselves. Or I've had internet Iris, remember, a handful of people can say, Emir, is there room in your team? Can I I want to I want to change careers. I want to become a, you know, human centered designer or design thinker. Can I do that? And for me, that's a really proud moment, because it shows that a, they understand the value B, it's not rocket science, but it does take practice and see again. That's becomes a really positive story, because then they can go and infiltrate, quote, unquote, the teams that they're working with and become evangelists, and, you know, sell this practice. And hopefully more and more people get to do it, and they don't need to become experts, but they become your, I guess that your promotion engine internally,

Chris Davies: 19:43

Yeah, amazing. I think it's such a good model, and hopefully one that that others can look to. I think, yeah, we're gonna talk about, yeah, how to structure and scale design teams as well. But I think these Lego models are like a bit, you know, they could need some attention

Amir Ansari: 19:59

a bit. Only, yeah, I'm thinking an analogy of, how do I link up my career with the analogy of Lego? So obviously, there's a bunch of the bunch of pieces, let's call them toolkits. Never used them before. So a bit of experimentation and trying it, realizing that doesn't work, or that color doesn't work, or that doesn't sit on that, and pulling it out. But nothing's nothing's new, right? Leadership's been around for a very long time. Tools, toolkits, they exist. It's bad just realizing which ones to use and in what context, as opposed to thinking you're all alone. You got to invent this from scratch. You got to do it by yourself. And hopefully that gives confidence to I'm going on a rant here that gives confidence to anybody who's go, oh, I don't think I've got the leadership chops to get well, you know what? Just have a go, yeah, and talk to someone internally. Get some coaching and mentoring. But there's a bunch of stuff. Have a crack at it. Do it in a safe, safe environment, learn from it, and then, based on that, either look at the piece and go, Okay, that was rubbish. I'm going to change it. Or, you know what this thing's doing, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to write the wave. I don't know where I'm building now. It's just a very

Chris Davies: 21:14

Neither do I mind. Yeah, awful. But maybe we'll use the opportunity to just go back to mentorship. Because, yeah, we had a friend of the podcast, Alex Young talk about mentorship and leadership. What role would you say that can play in, yeah, helping, you know, the design leaders of the future find the find their path.

Amir Ansari: 21:40

Look, I'm a, I'm a huge proponent and advocate of any mentoring coaching, right? So I already mentor juniors, mid seniors and even startup founders, right? Trying to give as much time as possible. But obviously, there's only a limited time in a week, but often, actually, I learn more from them. You know, it's when they share their stories go, well, that's another good story. I can add that to my story list. So I think it benefits me as well. And then the whole idea of, you know, giving them some advice and guidance and but then getting them to come back and then go, Hey, Mia, that didn't really work. That fell on its ass. Again, it's another, another use case, another potential scenario that I can go, okay, maybe that doesn't work in that environment, but it is really important, and I think this is probably the current times, is that, because of the economy, many, many organizations are ditching juniors and mids and even leadership levels and keeping their seniors and ask them to do, do, to do a lot, yeah, to do become full stack. Had this chat at a recent breakfast. The challenge with that is, at some point they're going to run out of, I guess, run out of wind and or go, Well, you know what? The reason I want to my next career step is to mentor and lead people, but there's nobody else, and so they'll, you know, they'll go and they won't necessarily have the practice of becoming the next leader. So we're at a really funny times now where it may have some implications based on what organizations do in terms of cost cutting, but again, it's the economy, right? You've got to do what you've got to do. But I'll be interested to see how that plays out, because I do also find or feel a lot of seniors or leaders with that title or leads or principles don't necessarily have the qualifications or the runs on the board to have that title. Yeah, sure. You know people with two to three years of experience calling themselves seniors. I remember minimum five years with two occasions where you had to come to me groveling with your tail between your legs, go. I think I've totally screwed up, but the client was an absolute nightmare to work with to get those scars, whereas now, after one or two years, they just get the title of senior. But I don't think their duty or responsibility changes as much at all.

Chris Davies: 23:50

So, right. Interesting. Yeah, cool. So I think, yeah, going back to the structuring and scaling design team's question, you know, how would you kind of structure a team to scale effectively? I know that, yeah, you talk about the models of different teams you have.

Amir Ansari: 24:09

Yeah, and I, I'm sure most of the people who are listening to probably across this. So, you know, you've got this, what they call centralized model. And, you know, one of the biggest telcos many years ago, had this centralized model. So the idea is, you have a you have a function dedicated to design. They all sit there. They will work closely together, and the rest of the business, if they wanted to, let's say, procure the services of this team, almost like an internal agency, they'll come, hey, I've got this need. I need to do a research, and it'll be often, right? Well, stay in line, or take a ticket, or we'll get to you in three months, or Sure, we'll put it on the backlog. The pros and cons of I guess, the centralized model is, yeah, you have more cohesion because the team, there's more knowledge transfer happening. But. You potentially become a bottleneck. You're becoming a service based and potentially you're not allowing that little bit of that democratization that I talked about. Then you have on the other side of the fence, you go fully decentralized. So designers are fully embedded within teams, functional teams, cross functional teams. I think that works really well. But if they're now then reporting through to, let's say, product managers or gyms of product with no design leadership, and there's risk. The risk of the decentralized is now teams are working in parallel, potentially building the same thing, repeating things, building two to three design systems, or building the same functionality within the same product, without cross pollinating and knowledge sharing, because then, in effect, little mini silos, right? You don't know what your x design is. In fact, you don't even know if there's another designer in another team, somewhere in the organization. Great, from a P and L perspective, because now you can fully report on that function, but from an experience perspective, you're potentially duplicating work. So I'm not a big fan of that. The biggest you know, the way I've tend to work is sort of, I call it the hybrid model, so you still have some design leadership and design function, including sort of research ops and design ops. So there's a central function that administers, brings a team together, and ways of working methodology and things like that. But on a day to day, you've got these designers, then within their cross functional teams, building building capability, building features, doing research. But there is that connection back to that, I guess, central team. So we can come together and go, right, oh, you're doing this. Well, you shouldn't do that, because he or she is doing that over there. So they're the sort of three models I tend to lean on the that sort of hybrid model. But there's a caveat, right? Depending on the size of the organization, how the organization's broken up, if you're really small startup versus your, you know, John, almost enterprise, you'd probably have to make some tweaks to that. But for me, the hybrid, I think it's a really good balance of the two.

Chris Davies: 26:55

Yeah, nice and any kind of words of wisdom, you know, mistakes to avoid, or ways to set up those kind of models for success?

Amir Ansari: 27:05

Yeah, interesting from a probably, from a hybrid perspective, I would say, ensuring that you got your direct line management, which should be to a design leader and a sort of dotted line management to your, let's say, head of product or product function. So there's that dual, I guess, reporting line to to the practitioners and making it very clear to them, you know, who's responsible for your growth and capability and who's responsible for your day to day, which means a bit of alignment, and the design leader speaking to the heads of product to go, Hey, listen, it's a bit of a parent, husband and wife or partner, partnership here. We need to make this work. So I think just having clear alignment and communications is really important. As I said, the function doesn't always work everywhere. I can totally understand. And we're going back to that thing about cost centers, right? The total decentralized model works because now you can go, right, I know this business unit or value stream that banks tend to call that, you know, at the moment, this is how much it's going to cost me. That's great, so I get it. But given that, I don't think that sort of decentralized model works, and we're going to go hybrid, finding ways to go, right? How can I still make it easy for the CFOs of the world or other people responsible for the numbers to go, Hey, this is how much, this is how much my team costs, but this is how much it costs for product A, Product B or product C. So again, as design leaders mean to have a bit of commercial acumen to be able to cross those, you know, cross this t's and dot the i's, because otherwise it will come down to, I don't understand how much you cost. I don't understand how much value you you're driving, so you're on the chopping block, yeah, which often happens, right?

Chris Davies: 28:56

Yeah, cool. And I think there's one thing that I wanted to pick up on there where you set about the commercial acumen that design leaders need. And yeah, talking about design leadership in general. Are there any, you know, lessons that have shaped the way that you lead and support your teams?

Amir Ansari: 29:14

Yeah, so I often get told by, you know, my past, past designers and heads off that what they really appreciated was when I could sort of pull my sleeve up and jump in and help. Right, either when they're sort of knee deep or in the deep end of the pool, or they're struggling, or they literally just just do not have capacity, and they turn to me, and instead of me going, well, you need to find a way to solve it. Go, okay, all right, let me just move a couple of meetings, or move a couple of workshops and roll my sleeve up and help I think just for me, that that level of you know what I'm equal to you. I'm not above you. You know, I don't do user research, because I've done that many years in my life. So, you know, it's below me. I think that's a lot of bollocks. I think good leaders are the ones who lead from the front, leave from behind you. Yeah, but work at the same level, I think, I guess that's been my philosophy throughout the years. Benefit is you get your hands dirty, keep sort of relevant. And you know, hands, you know, you get your on the tools a little bit, so you don't forget the craft. And what's current be just supporting other humans, right? And and again, I remember when a team said, Oh crap, Amir, I've got five years of testings or five interviews, but something's happened at home. I can't do them. I go all right, where's your discussion guide? Have you booked? Have you recruited? Great. Where do I need to be? And then just do it, you know. And you know, if you're a leader, I'm assuming you've got the years of practice, so hopefully you shouldn't be going crap. I've never done this before, maybe, but ideally, at least, you should have the confidence of your capabilities. So just jumping in and helping out, I think it's been one of my I guess, I guess, biggest philosophical I guess, you know, playbooks and has a long, lasting impact.

Chris Davies: 31:03

Yeah, nice and so in terms of your team and the individuals, what are you doing to make them feel empowered and have a sense of purpose in their work?

Amir Ansari: 31:14

Yeah, first of all, just connecting at a human level. I remember one of the advices I got was, if you're a manager or leader, you can't be you can't be their friend. I disagree with that early on, I thought, yeah, that's a good point, because now if I need to fire them or find it to put them through a performance improvement plan, oh, it's going to be harder to do. So I think as you get older and wiser, you realize now that the two are not mutually exclusive. You can connect to people at a human level. You can have dinner with them. You can go out for a beer. You can learn about their dogs and cats and kids and so forth. And if you're honest and transparent enough, and you build enough respect, then you can have that difficult conversation. So for me, it's getting to know the individuals having those stories, and then getting to a point where, you know what, gets them up in the morning, and they don't necessarily know themselves. Sometimes you can observe this thing is ticking that person off, but they haven't come and told me they don't want to do it, because they feel like if they tell me that, then I like to go, Well, you're not cut out for this job. Yeah. So starting to identify understanding, or, you know what, this person is clearly struggling in this context. But, man, they thrive in this context. Well, put them in the put them in that bucket that they really thrive at, right? They're going to get up in the morning. They're going to enjoy it and sure tell them, hey, listen, you need to, you need to work on this. But let's not necessarily work on your failures. Let's work on your your superpowers, and let's use that to your advantage. So just understanding what ticks people, what gets a problem in the morning, and then use that to just just fuel their fire and energy, right? And it could be at different levels, like, you know, many, some people work in organizations where their product or platform is really boring. So my advice is to them, is that's okay, we can either leave or look for opportunities in other ways to grow. Maybe you find new ways of doing a piece of practice. The product hasn't changed, but the way you're doing it and you're experimenting changes where you're building connections with people in other areas of the business. The product hasn't changed. Your Practice hasn't changed, but you're now connecting with new people. Just find other things, people, product, practice, environment that you can constantly change to keep yourself, I guess, motivated and excited, or laws are two feet, get up and go and find the next gig.

Chris Davies: 33:34

Yeah, no. Great advice, I think, yeah, I've heard you say that one before, and even with, yeah, the design team that was around when we were working together. I'm sure if I was to go into your to your whatsapp and look at your recent messages, I'm sure some of them would be in there. Because, yeah, the relationships you seem to have with people, even after, you know, you finish working with them, just as strong as when you were with working with them. So yeah, so if you're a design, a designer, you've just landed your first leadership gig, and you're worried about, you know, what's my team going to be? How am I going to empower, motivate them? What are some, like, really practical pieces of advice that you could give?

Amir Ansari: 34:16

Okay, so I've just landed a design gig as my first road show, first first leadership gig, first leadership gig. And what would I do? I'm just casting my mind back. What did I do? Fake it till you make it. Yeah, right. Either if the leadership people are the people above you are open and honest enough to go, Hey, listen, I need a bit of hand here, or if you've done a bit of a white light to get yourself that first gig, then continue to, you know, put the face on, and then reach out to people outside of your network and those amazing design leaders in our local and international community who are willing to give their time go, Hey, I've just landed my first gig. I'm knee deep. I'm in the deep end, what do I do? And again, that's often the sort of the questions that I get asked when I'm doing these mentoring, hey, Mia, I'm just letting this gig of these three designers go to startup founder who doesn't have a clue. What should I do next? And it's like having a conversation. And again, I guess first thing is buy us some some time to say, Listen, I need to assess where this organization is at before I give you a strategy, so that gives you a bit of breathing space. You can go and do some research and get some mentoring, and then start some talk, start some conversations, you know, again, sales, marketing, internal capability and so forth. And then, if you're a, I guess leader, who's a first time leader, but you've been a practitioner, you slowly. This is user research, right? You're doing your discovery. You soon realize, okay, I'm starting to get some insights here. There's a pattern here, and then go through the whole design toolkit playbook, okay, there's a bunch of categories here. We're going to group those together. Okay, I can solve this this way. I can solve that that way. Chuck into a deck presented upwards, and you'd be surprised. People go, oh, wow, this makes a lot of sense. You talk to people, you've got some evidence. It's not just you picking up your playbook and playing again, but you've, you know, you've, you've engaged and consulted. So why wouldn't I accept this? Because you've done the talking, not me. So that would be my advice. Is buy some some time if you need to fake it till you make it. By all means, do but reach out to the community. You know, they're more than happy to to most of them anyway, give you sort of their war stories, because this worked for me. This didn't work for me. Watch out for this. Definitely do this.

Chris Davies: 36:34

Yeah? Awesome. Great advice. And I feel like, yeah, of all the communities around tech, the design, one super strong. Even with the, you know, events and meetups that happen, they're just really good and easy places to meet people to have these kind of conversations. Now we're approaching the end. What's your what's your Lego model looking like?

Amir Ansari: 36:57

So it's a bit of a Mondrian piece. It's four wheels with lots of colors and shapes. You're an industrial designer? Yeah, I am. So I've gone for an EC tech look. It's, it's trying to be a rocket. Yeah, it's clearly front wheel drive because the smaller wheels are at the front.

Chris Davies: 37:16

I've gone the same shorter wheel base. Yeah, that's gonna.

Amir Ansari: 37:21

Mine's a long wheelbase, because I'm going to go around the corners really quick, so I need to have a, you know, good spread and load. Um, I'm not sure how many people can sit on it. I think maybe it's a standing it's a standing only, yeah, vehicle, yeah.

Chris Davies: 37:32

I haven't, I haven't accommodated seats. There's a passenger seat in the back, but, yeah, there's no driver's seat, alright. Well, should we give them a race? We've got a little we've got a ramp here. Let's go. Here.

Amir Ansari: 37:43

I have a feeling mine's gonna win, because mine's gonna be heavier exactly, from a gravity, okay.

Unknown: 37:47

Ready, set go.

Amir Ansari: 37:50

Ah, yours. Did have a ghost? Let's try again. Okay, one more time. Okay,

Chris Davies: 37:55

okay. Ready, set go, Okay, we could call it. We can call it one a piece. It's even so, yeah, just kind of wrapping up on today's major themes, obviously great design leadership, all about building the right foundations and empowering teams. As we said in our last talking point, we talked about capability uplift, and what was the other term you used? I forget now, with uplift, you said it wasn't so much capability uplift as

Amir Ansari: 38:29

maturity, sentiment, literacy

Chris Davies: 38:33

uplift, literacy, uplift. That was the right one. Also about scaling, design teams, those different models, all about parts and structure and flexibility, but also mentorship and leadership and how you know, if you're not sure, there's a big design community out there, lean on others, hear their war stories, and yeah, that should stand you in good stead. So Amir, thanks for your time. Where can people follow your work and stay connected?

Amir Ansari: 39:00

Well, definitely not at the Lego store. I don't think I'll be let in now. They can find me on LinkedIn or Emir and sorry.com.au, they can get in contact with me. As I said, I do still do some mentoring and coaching on the side. So if anybody's looking to get some advice or hear some war stories, because I don't necessarily have all the answers, by all means, reach out. And I love to connect.

Chris Davies: 39:21

Yeah, beautiful and any kind of final words of wisdom.

Amir Ansari: 39:27

Yeah, I would say, find people that align with your principles and values and mimic, mimic them until you find your own story and but I think I look back at, you know, my as I said, I got my first gift as a leader because somebody said they're me. I think you make a good manager. Can you go and manage this team? I didn't. My head wasn't even that. That's fine, something that was the biggest gift I got given. So, yeah, mimic. Stay close to the people that you really appreciate and value, that can support you, and you'd be surprised how far that'll get you. Yeah. Yeah,

Chris Davies: 40:00

Great. And one, one final question, if you had to name the next big build in your Lego set of leadership, what would it be?

Amir Ansari: 40:08

So if you asked me that two years ago, I would have said I would have been, I would have loved to have taken on a Chief Design Officer role within sort of small and medium businesses. I don't know what that would look like from a Lego piece perspective, but given the current market and a level of maturity, I'm actually sort of taking stock and looking at everything we've talked about. How can I become, I guess, a better mentor and representative of our craft to the wider community. So what that would look like as a Lego piece would be, I don't know, lots of little pieces of Amir spread across the table, which could be a trip hazard, but also can be, Oh, I wonder that piece, and I'll take a bit of that piece.

Chris Davies: 40:50

So yeah, now as you were that works, that's good enough for us. Yeah. Well, thanks again, Amir. It's been a pleasure, and if you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to the tech trajectory podcast for more conversations with leaders shaping the future of design, product and technology. Thanks, Chris, thank you, mate. You.