We’ve designed our company in a way that allows us to focus exclusively on customers, rather than an executive’s vision or shareholders’ expectations. Design leadership at [Insert your company name here] takes the form of direct collaboration among a cross-disciplinary team of people who are all focused on the customer experience. It’s very decentralized. We optimize product design by hiring experts and enabling them to direct their own collaboration, exploration, trials, and failures; then learn and try again. And we engage customers in the conversation through playtesting, early betas, and frequent product updates, looking to customer feedback and data to inform our next steps.

Our design process really gets going once our products are in customers’ hands. We do our best work in this evolutionary way, where products take on lives of their own through continually evolving, and hopefully improving, services. This process isn’t about executing on a vision. Instead, we define goals, we test assumptions, and we’re continually surprising ourselves with where this leads us.