Angel Steger: Wealthfront's VP of Design on what architecture teaches you about software

23:43And so staying the course is what we advise. Related to that, though, we do also make sure that you have places to go with your questions. So we have a blog series that includes commentary about, hey, there's this war that just kicked off. How is that going to impact me? Or the macro environment is constantly moving around. It could be everything from a cold snap causes the orange crop to die, and that can impact things as well. So we focus on trying to help people take the long view. And we actually see that in the data as well, that that makes a difference. We also hear it from people. I also saw this back in my days at 23andMe where people would get the email that the results of their genetic test were ready.

24:24And it didn't matter if you had like a high risk job where you dealt with huge amounts of risk every day. When it came to seeing your own genetic data, people also had that, oh, my God, you know, am I going to see that I have the marker for Parkinson's disease? Cancer runs in my family. Am I going to have cancer? Or, you know, your sister is your mother. You know, there's a few of those.

24:46Aarron Walter:friend of mine found out he had a child he didn't know about. And they ended up becoming good friends. But, you know. Yeah. Luckily, I've heard more good stories about those discoveries than bad ones. But yeah, it is a real thing. What we would see happen is when people would get their results, they were so emotionally heightened, they would look at a list of things that were actually quite clearly expressed, you know, low risk, low risk, low risk, low risk. And people would be like, oh, my God, I have all of these diseases. And the last thing you want is for someone to suddenly have a panic attack about their health, they might make a really, really dangerous life-changing decision.

25:19And so we intentionally made it more boring and slow. When people are really emotionally heightened, you kind of need to be there with them where they are and carry them through that. And so in the case of 23andMe, we slowed people down by presenting them with a bunch of factual information that was sort of dull. And the dullness of it actually got them to a point where they could successfully read that information. At Wealthfront, we do the same thing where we really focus on helping people see the big picture, know what's available to them in terms of choices that they can make and helping understand the trade-offs.

25:57And a lot of times when we talk about design, we're talking about UI, but in our case, content is also super important. We actually have a one-to-one content designer product designer ratio. The reason for that is in finance, actually, unlike, say, social media, where you're largely building a frame for other content to be expressed, we are actually shepherding people through information. It's really important that they can take away the right things. We also want to make sure that people feel that finances aren't for other people, like finances are for you, even if you didn't grow up in the U.S.

26:30financial system, even if you are new to managing money because maybe you're the first generation that actually had savings in your family, or maybe you were in a relationship for a long time where your spouse managed the money and now you'd get divorced and you're like trying to figure it out for the first time. Like these are all things that when people feel like it's hard, they also put it off. Same thing with exercise. People want two minute abs, right? No one wants to suddenly become a constant marathoner, at least not most people. We really work hard to think about language and content that helps bridge the gap, you know, not necessarily hiding industry terms, but bridging people into industry terms, helping people understand the trade-offs between them.

27:17The choice of language is a huge piece of accessibility when it comes to finance.

27:23Aarron Walter:Angel, we were speaking earlier about the importance of the medium and how that might shape the final design, whether that's paper or clay. And Johnny Ive a while back said that he starts every project with writing. You might argue, given the result of his recent Ferrari design, that maybe he should have started more with talking to some users or customers. But let's give him that this is an interesting approach to kind of opening up the solution space for design. Are there ways that you help do that for your team? You mentioned design systems might be a bit constrictive. How do you open up space for them to pursue kind of new and interesting angles on a design?

27:58I regularly tell people to go lower fidelity, particularly as we're handling things that are really complex and you don't want to be doing exact word crafting when you don't have the choreography of the experience, right? So a lot of times it's about what's the most important problem to solve in what order. That's also relative to a learning plan too. I think creative people sometimes can start from two directions. Some people might start from writing, which is often like a more strategic starting point. And then some people really start from the sensory experience itself. And I actually think of that as kind of a dialectic where you can sort of end up in the same place from the same journey.

28:41An experiential person will get themselves to something rational and a highly rational person will get to something experiential by logic. And you can kind of find yourself in the middle. But to speed up that process, don't try to solve all of the problems, either in a creative way or in a rational way. Just figure out for yourself, which problems do we need to solve in what order? Like if we, for example, have this idea that we want to build a unicorn landing strip, first thing we need to do is figure out, are there unicorns? Second thing we need to figure out is, do they have trouble landing?

29:18And if so, is that a problem they're willing to pay for? And then you can get into like, should it be a rainbow? Should it be a cloud? Is glitter involved and glitter not involved? But a lot of times designers And there's a little bit like glitter, glitter, glitter question. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. We need to go upstream about understanding value first because you can deliver the most amazing thing in the world. But if the value isn't there, then you've got a big who cares. One thing that you have had a lot of success with that I know a lot of design leaders struggle with is building relationships, trusting relationships, and aligning a design team to the business's objectives.

29:56And then ultimately trying to get those goals of different teams and different cultures to match up. So you can go from, no, we don't have time or budget or energy for that to, okay, yes, this thing that is important to design is also important to the business. How do you approach that? And what were the key milestones in your career where you had an unlock moment and figured out, ah, okay, this is how I do it? I love that you started with relationships because I really do think that relationships are the foundation for everything. The amount of generosity that you will give to a friend is just so different than the amount of generosity you would give to a stranger.

30:38You know, ultimately, when we're working together, we both need a certain amount of generosity towards each other because we're human and we're imperfect and we're not always going to have good days. And so you want that grace to be given to you and you want to give it to other people. from my time at Pinterest back in the day there was this thing that we created called a knitting agreement which is this idea of when you start to work with someone rather than like having a conversation about how we should work together when trouble arises kick off your relationship by talking about what matters to you what do you care about how do you like to interact with people because a lot of times if you just sort of vaguely ask people what matters to them a lot of people are like, oh, I want respect or like, I want communication.

31:21And that is good intel. But the challenge is that how people want that manifested for them is really different. For some people, they might say like, oh, trust is really important to me. And I know that you trust me because you leave me alone. Other people would be like, trust is really important to me. I know that you trust me because you tell me everything. And we're constantly talking. Often friction arises because people are starting with different expectations about how those things are supposed to manifest and it's important to like know and then adapt your style. I've actually built off of that playbook and then when I was at Meta because I was working on a team called CrossF Experiences where Meta at the time was a very verticalized company.

32:03You've got like each app and each business unit is kind of doing their own thing. They operate like separate companies but then we have projects that cross cut them and it's sort of a different muscle. The thing that was really important to me was to start by building those relationships first. And we kind of took a lot of the things from the idea of the knitting agreement of, you know, ask people like, what should we do when we disagree? How do you like to receive praise? Because some people would rather run into a hole and hide versus receive praise in public. Other people really, really need it.

32:37Other people, when there's a problem, they cannot bear to have it addressed in a room. Other people are just like, bring it up, you know? So I kind of set that up as a way to operate across all the teams, and that was deployed across the family of apps. And as far as I know, still used today. I remember I launched it, and then a year or so later, I had a project with a different body of folks in the Reality Labs area. And people brought my tool set to me, and I was like, this is great. When it comes to individual people, it's like, well, what do they care about? And then as you start working together, really looking for a quick win that you can have together.

33:13because a quick win is a sign that you can build trust and get something done. Results matter and it's not all talk. So look for quick wins and look for pain. A lot of times the most difficult projects, it's actually not that people want different things. It's actually that they just have either a different set of information that they're working from, but they want the same thing. Sometimes there's stories that go around, but a lot of times what I end up doing is, for example, when I was at Dropbox, growth, marketing, and brand didn't really work well together. And when I joined the company, I'd meet the brand team and they're like, okay, cool.

33:54So we're brand, we get it, but growth and marketing, they don't get it. And then I talked to marketing and they're like, okay, cool. Nice to meet you. Here's these other two teams that don't get it. We get it. And growth was the same way. And the thing that I realized when I was listening to them was that each of them had domain expertise and were sort of frustrated that the other people didn't know their domain expertise, which is actually kind of unrealistic. And I think designers fall into this pitfall all the time of like, nobody gets design. So I'm mad about it. And it's like, well, who's the expert in design?

34:29You are, right? And so like, why should you be mad at another function for not being an expert at the thing that you're paid to be the expert for? That's totally fair. They need to be an expert in their thing. And, you know, the thing that you need to do is help define how these things are supposed to relate to each other. So in the case of Dropbox, I put together, actually, all of you have an important job to do. It's a different job. And here's how they're supposed to work together. I had a diagram of how these things connected and how they work together and really showcased the strengths of these different teams.

35:02And so you could see yourself. You're like, yes, that is me. That is my function. But also I have a map of how we're supposed to relate to each other. And that map wasn't actually there before. This is an architecture technique to think about relationship diagrams. Think about concept diagrams, not just UI. Because sometimes the thing that matters most is the mental model. You need to figure out the mental model before you give it a body. If you're the wrong mental model, you can't make the body work. Say somebody wants to buy a bicycle and you're like, cool, I made a bicycle that pedals face down.

35:40Okay. If you are trying to sell people this bicycle, you are going to spend all of your time and energy and marketing resources trying to convince people that bicycling face down is just as good as bicycling face up. But if you had just built a bicycle that was upright the way that people wanted, you'd be talking about what's unique about your bicycle and all of the things that you could do. And people would just be trying it. The mental model piece, it matters not just in the product work, but it matters in the organizations, too. So you start with the mental models, get people thinking about how to work together, give them clear job descriptions.

36:16We had an issue that was plaguing everybody, but it showed up in different ways for different people. And so the other thing around getting large groups of people together is that you have to establish a shared source of truth. Because otherwise everyone is operating from their own little lens, looking at their fraction of the elephant. You have to build a shared perspective and reorient everyone to the same information. And then often when you reorient people to the same information, the truth is evident. There's no persuasion needed. It becomes obvious. in the case of design respect. When I was at Pinterest, there was a engineering manager who was very influential, who was going around saying that design was a bottleneck for making progress.

37:02And how do we like get around design, which of course is going to get any designers hackles up. Sometimes I even like have physical reaction, like remembering it. It definitely like irked people in design leadership to no end. All these designers, including my manager, who I reported to were like putting together case studies of no design is better like no no and I was like okay first let's pause for a second outside of our angry feelings every right to feel angry it's not a nice way to say that but what does this person care about when they say design is a bobblingck they care about velocity it's like okay well let's just be curious then let's find out Let's use a design process to solve the velocity problem.

37:46So I got all the growth leads together in a room. And we talked about the most recent examples of moments in projects that had velocity issues. And we identified the need to hire two data scientists. And so you can focus on the problems. And that will get you more problem, right? Because you're choosing to engage in an argument where the frame is fundamentally wrong. And it's also not about the thing that actually matters. Or you can zoom out, be like, what is the thing that actually matters? How do we actually get to a thing that's about that? And then you don't have to solve the problem. The problem dissolves.

38:27The problem becomes apparent. And that thing never comes back again because it's not about an argument. It's not about I'm right, you're wrong. You don't get into people's ego because it's not about the ego. and you didn't play at that level. You played at the level of what matters.

38:41Aarron Walter:Reminds me a bit that we had on Paul Dichter, who is one of the writers for Stranger Things recently. And they'll often get notes, probably not maybe as bad as some studio notes, but they'll get notes from executives or stakeholders in their process. They're like, this is terrible. But his advice was, what's the note behind the note? Sit with the note for a minute. There's something here. How can we kind of embrace that there's something that we should address here? And he said it often makes the work better in the end. Yeah, we shouldn't expect ourselves to be perfect. We shouldn't expect other people to be perfect.

39:12I would much rather have someone tell me something in an imperfect way soon so we can just talk about it. Because if something doesn't feel right, even if the thing that we're describing as the problem isn't actually the problem, that's important intel, right? Because something's still not right. That definitely resonates.

39:30Aarron Walter:You know, a lot of our audience, it's a pretty turbulent time in the tech world and folks are maybe in the interview process or looking for their next role. You've been in a lot of different companies. What have you learned both as you went through the interview process and as you maybe interview and hire people that you might be able to share as tips and as kind of a bonus? Are there specific things that you look for when you're looking at a designer's portfolio? The thing that I'm looking for, that we look for at Wealthfront is high craft and high intentionality. Craft obviously is fit and finish, coherence, composition, flow.

40:04But also intentionality is the word I use to describe to what extent do your design decisions exactly fit the problem at hand for the client at hand. because a lot of people can generically make something look okay, but it doesn't actually fit. And I feel like in the world of like vibe coding and vibe design, I feel like I see this more and more where you're like, at first blush, it looks okay. And then you actually try to use it and you're like, I feel like I'm in some weird bad dream where instead of the floor being at the bottom of the wall, the floor is now in the middle of the wall and I have to step over this weird piece of floor or like you feel like you're moving in a room full of furniture and you hit friction, like you just bump into a piece of furniture in the dark, and then you don't really know why you're bumping into it.

40:53That ability to understand deeply what is the functional and emotional, and emotion is function to need of the client. Sometimes I describe design like an apology. The way you say you're sorry has everything to do with how it's heard. We feel it a lot in physical design, right? Where Erin, you were saying about having that emotional experience and at the cathedral, sometimes you have like a great coffee mug. It fits your hands so well. The warmth is part of a ritual. It's not an object. It's like a resonance. It's a resonance, but it's creating an environment and it's creating the space for a type of feeling and performance and mindset.

41:31And so I look for that in the designs. We look pretty carefully also for the degree of care for clients. Motivation, why you're doing design is really important for us at Wealthfront because we are here to help people grow their wealth in a way that unlocks things for them. And if that's not why you're doing this work, if this is about showing off your friends or if it's about WYSIWYGs, fancy technology, yeah, we care about technology. Our whole thing is about technology, but it's about technology in service. And so you have to be passionate about the service. You actually have to be fairly adept at delivering that service.

42:14So that's the portfolio piece. And we specifically look for people who have consumer experience because our clients are consumers and they love feeling like the place where they go to manage their finances is just as good as the top consumer experience they could have somewhere else. And a lot of our clients are tech people. And so they like feeling like we're using an app that's built by people like us. It has that sort of a weird community feeling as well. And then when it comes to interviewing, I know that it is not the nicest environment to be looking for a job right now. And so if you are looking for a job, I say this with empathy, knowing how hard it can be to get yourself together when you've interviewed at so many places and applied to so many places and heard so many no's.

43:07And that can push you into a mindset, sometimes because of lifestyle pressures as well, right? You've got maybe a family or just yourself to take care of, that you can want a win so bad. And you have to be able to clear yourself of that once you get to an interview. There's a few reasons for that. One is, if you've ever been out on a date with someone who is just so desperate not to be single anymore, and it is like, oh, you're like, run. Because it's not about you, right? Like it's not about you connecting. You're coming out a little strong. It's about them just wanting something and you being the first thing that can fill that gap.

43:45And no employer wants to be that either. And honestly, it's not a good fit for you either if that's the reason. It's not about playing it cool or something, but it's really about it being about the role in the company rather than being about all the other noise that can color the way that you come across. The second thing is to talk about the things that you love. Don't try to fit the type of work that they're doing necessarily. I know people would be like, oh, try to make your portfolio relevant. I don't agree. I think you should show the work that lights you up because people are also evaluating a co-worker.

44:25The things that light you up are great signal about whether or not the things that you're going to be working on together in the job will light you up because the best role for you is one where you get to do stuff that you are excited about and meaningful. You're going to get the most career growth. You're going to do the best job. The hurdles that you run into, you will overcome because you are motivated to do that. If you don't have that, it will be like eating your broccoli that has been boiled too much every day. And nobody wants to work with the boiled broccoli person. You ultimately don't want to be the boiled broccoli person.

44:57It's a slog. Forget winning and be yourself because that energy is infectious. When you are excited, everyone just wants to pay attention. I was interviewing at Wealthfront. my portfolio was discussed the Dropbox website transformation, which was about organizational transformation, even though I had already done my intel and the organization that I would be entering into at Wealthfront was a very healthy, very steady state, didn't have those issues. But it was something that brought me a lot of joy to just tackle a hard problem and to do it with people. That's the thing that makes me happy. And so that was one thing I presented.

45:37And the work that I did on the metaverse, which was a series of drawings. And most people would be like, oh, fintech company, that's not relevant. And the reason why I chose that was just because I love doing the thing that no one has figured out how to do it yet. Like I was tasked with coming up with a communication strategy for the metaverse. And so we brought folks from the family of apps, from the different wearables together, and built a library of use cases of where would we have brand permission to play in the metaverse? What would play to our strengths? I hate when people do skunk work projects and then dump it on a feature team and they just have a bunch of high fidelity mock-ups that are like, okay, cool.

46:24We did the fun vision stuff, go build it. And then the team usually inevitably figures out there's a huge amount of problem with the vision work and it's not actually buildable. There's no creative ownership. And then those other people have just like flown off to their next, you know, exciting, dazzling vision project. And so I said, no, we're not going to do UI design. We're just going to storyboard how this lives in people's lives. If it's a lifestyle vignette that you are excited about that moves you, then we've won. And if you want these vignettes to be possible, here is the underlying infrastructure that we have to build to do it.

46:56And so we intentionally went to the lo-fi and got into Procreate and did little sketches. And the nice thing about that was that what you had was a description of value rather than a description of UI, because value is something that people can expansively think about. The point of that was to showcase intentionality around how you do those kinds of things with large groups of people. But it was also just fun to talk about. And I also just perversely wanted to see how a bunch of executives would react to some random drawings.

47:29So choose the portfolio pieces that are going to help you do the work that you want to do. If you hate making icons, for example, do not show a portfolio piece of icons because people remember is like, oh, she had really good icons. Let's get her for that. They might not remember that you said you didn't like icons. So show the kind of weird random work that you like doing and be yourself. Because ultimately, it's about the right fit. Thought about winning. That's great advice. Angel, what are you watching, reading, listening to that is exciting and maybe giving you inspiration or new perspective?

48:04Aside from design better? Well played. Well played. So I'm one of those people who's like perennially dissatisfied. I think every designer is like this, where you go around the world and you scrutinize it and you're like, why is this chair this way? It could be better. I would redesign it this way. then your house is full of unfinished things that you are going to build yourself the right way. But on the strategy side, I love Lenny's podcast because it's really practical. I don't trust anyone who doesn't give practical advice. I think a lot of case studies are total BS, mostly because I've been around long enough to read all these business books and they're often written by B-school professors who talk to CEOs and CEOs spin stories the way that they want them to be spun.

48:48And if you actually know people on those teams, you're like, that's not how that went down at all. But right now I'm reading books on hospitality. And I am really excited about this concept, unreasonable hospitality, and setting the table. What I like about hospitality is, so we've been recently working on our voice and tone, because our design team has grown a lot to go from like internal knowledge that people know, because they've been here for a while, and they get well front to how do we say what is ours and express what is ours. And I'm finding that the typical brand book voice and tone stuff like just doesn't quite perform the way that we need it to in a lot of different contexts, because our product suite is quite different, right?

49:37We do everything from handling investing to savings to lending, home lending, borrowing, the mental states of things like that, things like money movement, super, super different. I like hospitality because it actually articulates a relationship between the client and the service in a more specific way, especially for us, because we're out to build a long-term relationship with our clients. It's not about those nickel and diming kind of things, which fortunately, we're not the kind of company that works that way anyway. I feel very lucky to be at a place where we will actually trade off near-term revenue because we believe it's a better experience for our clients.

50:20And then our clients reward us with the long-term relationship that's allowed us to grow to$99 billion in assets. And so I'm thinking about how we start to evolve the way that we work from the lens of thinking about it as hospitality. And I'm really excited about that because I just think whenever you throw a different angle on it, on the same problem, you see something different. It's translation again. If we translate this to a different kind of relationship, if our brand was a person, what would we be wearing? What would we be doing? Things like that are really important to get at the unarticulated assumptions that we're often operating from and just to make sure that we actually believe in those things.

51:06There's a lot of things that can seem obvious, but then they might actually be holding us back. And I don't know what those are, but I'm excited to look into it. The other thing that I've been enjoying, and this is more not like design inspiration, but I've been reading about the history of San Francisco. And this is more me just like reflecting as a person who has lived in a lot of places, but until I became a homeowner, I'd never put down roots. I think it's crazy that we build all of these frameworks for online culture and living to happen, but we don't know enough about the history of the places that we live in.

51:45I don't think we contribute enough back to our physical communities. And I think that that has a real cost if we don't pay attention. So I'm also very interested in physical community, the built environment, and understanding how we got to where we are, in addition to consuming all of the wonderful things that we have in places like the Bay Area. Where can people learn more about you and the work that you're doing? Certainly, please visit Wealthfront.com. You can see the work that our team is doing all the time. I am not an exciting out there person. So most of the time we're deep into the work and thinking about what we can do for our clients.

52:21And then we are working on getting our Wealthfront design blog up and running currently in last little bits of Fit and Finish. So we're excited to be debuting that soon and really just using that as a place for us to share back with the community in terms of things that we find helpful. I tend to think in our teams, I encourage people whenever we learn something to tell a story about it because like you often don't know what you've learned until you teach it to somebody else. And so, you know, we do that internally all the time, but I do want to make sure that that also becomes a regular practice of sharing with the broader community.

53:00We are very, very fortunate to work at a company where design is critical to the business success. And so we have a lot of flexibility and opportunity and advocacy that doesn't come from just design. and so I think there's a lot that we can do in terms of showcasing the work that we do and also how you get to that kind of happy state and then just appreciate each other too. Talking about design always reconnects us to the things that we love about design outside of the day-to-day so as a gratitude practice it's also just important for us. Angel Steger thank you so much for being on the podcast.

53:42Thanks for having me.

54:10TheHeadPodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

54:29Aarron Walter:I didn't like what you said, Odin pauses, about the future. This is the love story of real hinge couple Odin and Edward, written and read by me, Curtis Garner. Listen to the free audiobook now.