Transcript
Speaker: That was my friend's one piece of advice to me before starting a podcast was don't forget to hit record.
Speaker: Thank you for spending some time with me on Something's Brewing. I really appreciate it. And thank you for reaching out on LinkedIn so we could get connected. i told Doug that we were going to have a conversation today and he was super excited. So thanks for your time.
Speaker: no of course, as you know, Doug and I go way back and and We've known each other for almost probably 40 years at this point. So playing in a band together in college. And he's one of my favorite people and just a terrific guy. So I'm so glad he showed us some love on LinkedIn as well, too. And so happy to just start some early press and just getting out there in terms of the talk we're going to do today.
Speaker: Thank you so much. I appreciate and I'm going to give you a moment to introduce yourself. But I know that you describe yourself on LinkedIn as equal parts punk and pinstripe. And we need to dive into what that means. But you also have an incredible background. So I wanted to give you a moment to just introduce yourself.
Speaker: And then as always on Something's Brewing, if you have something that you're drinking, telling us what's in your cup. I like that. So hi everybody, Paul Stonick. I like to call my background tradigital.
Speaker: I've been in the space for about 25 years, nearly 30 at this point, starting out of web design back in the mid nineties, back when the magic was written, pivoted to UX design in 2012. I was working for the Home Depot leading online user experience for their mobile app and their websites. If you ever use that, thank you. You're welcome.
Speaker: If I helped you get to your product in the Island Bay, you can thank me for that. So really proud of that experience. I joined a startup, had a successful exit. It got laid off but about a year and a half later, joined education for a little bit, and that was terrific for two years. And then I decided to go out on my own back in October of 2024 and started a company called Kik, which is a design management firm. And That was really started out of frustration. And now I get to call my shots and be my own boss. And at a point where I'm 55 years old, salary, age, and experience have all become liabilities. So now I'm in control of my destiny to build something bigger and something better for myself and for my family. What's in my cup today is really just pure water.
Speaker: There's really not much to see in here. Nothing fancy as well. but For backstory, back 2000, I was drinking four or five Coca-Colas a day. i put on weight and I was like, what am I doing? And so one New Year's Eve resolution was to give up soda completely, get back into the gym and get back into shape.
Speaker: after being a After teaching tennis professionally for a couple of years in the early 90s and doing some triathlons, I fell out of shape and said, you know what? You need to get back to the good stuff. And that's how it's been for the last 25 years. So now I really just drink water all day long. And that's about it. Oh my God. We have so much. and i didn't know you were a tennis player too.
Speaker: That adds another angle here because that's what I grew up playing. So. Oh, okay. Excellent. Yeah. I got, you had a lefty over here who was playing five hours a day for a while. Oh, my goodness. All right. So we have a lot in comedy. I grew up on a tennis court and I got recruited to play for Drew University. I played number one in high school and I'm a righty. But yeah, I got to look out for your slice serve out to the outside.
Speaker: ah My backhand is my stroke and I, too, played number one in high school. So we'd have to we'd get on a court together. Where did you coach? Fox Chase Tennis Club in Chester, New Jersey. So i worked there for a number of years.
Speaker: ah Then I had my own place for a little while called Raritan Valley Community Country Club. And so I was working there for a little bit as well, too. And then when the Internet got its voice, as we know it, in 1995, I was like, hmm, that's interesting. How did they make those pages? That looks pretty cool. i'm going to go do that because I knew I wasn't going to teach tennis for the rest of my life.
Speaker: I was good, but I wasn't good enough to go pro pro. So I was like, you know what? I got to figure out something else at 25 years old. Interesting. And then, so is that when you went to Home Depot?
Speaker: No, I started out at MTV back in 1998. So this was the height of trl Total Overcast Live, for those who know it. So it was Backstreet Boys, it was NSYNC, it was Britney Spears, and it was Marilyn Manson. I mean, it was just absolute chaos.
Speaker: and had the opportunity really to cut my teeth and begin my career working on MTV news, MTV videos, ah MTV film. it was a really great experience, but it was ah a fun place to work at the same time. So that's where I started my career. I didn't make it to Home Depot until about 2017. So further on in my career, where they recruited me to come down from New Jersey, where I spent most of my life and and relocate to Atlanta, which is where I am now.
Speaker: Interesting. Okay. And then when you did a lot of the user experience, that's something that interests me too. How much of it was user driven versus data you had collected ah elsewhere? Yeah, it was a combination of both really. So it was data driven, both quantitative and qualitative.
Speaker: So not only did we work closely with our consumer insights and our data platform, but we also worked very closely with our users. And so I had a team of 50 people that included user researchers, content strategists, information architects, designers.
Speaker: And like I said, we worked on the mobile app and web design. and it was an amazing experience because we grew that from 7 billion to 10 billion terms of e-commerce growth like we grew the app from 200 million to 3 billion it was really crazy just in terms of how much business we created with home depot and so the thing about user experience that people have to remember is that user experience emotional when people say it's the the satisfaction between a product and experience. Yes, that's true.
Speaker: Right. But it's also about creating emotional connections and having this connection to brand. And that's what people, that's what really resonates with people. So when I think about UX, I think more about a feeling and an emotional connection than anything else.
Speaker: I love that. And that's something that interests me. And I, I know that there is, Something I always battle with is we're not a democracy and we can't take everybody's piece of feedback, but we can take feedback and start to prioritize it. And what is the biggest bang for our buck?
Speaker: So I'm always curious as to how you measure that. So if somebody comes in and says, well, I want this, right? Is it how many people say they want this or the impact of what this is or both in a measurement?
Speaker: Yeah, as with any company, it's highly political and you had everybody wanting their particular feature to go live and working with the other directors, it was almost like a shark tank where the product managers had to come in, present their feature, but it was really about us being a governance in terms of, well, what's the value?
Speaker: There has to be business value behind it. It has to be qualitative value. How does it actually improve the experience for the user? And it's not just a vanity piece that we're putting up that really doesn't do anything. So it has to have some sort of measurement. It has to connect to some KPI.
Speaker: some strategy, some OKR to say, you know what, it actually affects this part of the bigger strategy. Because once you start doing things in a vacuum, that's where things go fall on deaf ears. So yeah, it has to be mapped back to some sort of of strategy and it has to be measured in some way to actually prove that's worth building.
Speaker: That's what I was going to ask. So how do you measure once you implement something? What's the measurement of the impact of that new thing? Yeah, KPIs can run quantitative and qualitative, as you know, from UX side.
Speaker: yeah We would look at CSAT, NPS likely to use again, referrals, testimonials, things like that. And then from quantitative, course, it would be lift, conversion, you know, those types of typical e-commerce, adding to cart, removing from cart, et cetera.
Speaker: Those typical types of KPIs, we would measure to make sure that there weren't a wasn't any sort of drop in the journey or friction in the journey as well. All the background stuff no one thinks about when they're just clicking through an app trying to find what they want, but there's so much behind it.
Speaker: That's exactly right. And when it comes to experience, it just needs to be invisible and logical. The best your user experiences are the ones you don't see. So anytime a company or somebody comes out they have to explain their user experience or they have to tell you what to do in terms of how to get from A to b the user experience probably sucks. our User experience is like a bad joke. If you have to explain your joke, your joke probably sucks too.
Speaker: That's true. That is true. I'm not a good joke teller, so I don't usually go down that path. But okay, so you went from Home Depot and then walk me through where kind of your journey took you before because we'll get into a launching kick and what the origin story there is too.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So after several years at the Home Depot, I had an opportunity to join a startup. I had never been in that world. I had always been part of Fortune 500 and sort of like the stability and the the regular, let's say, cadence of what we were doing.
Speaker: Although there was no guarantee several times in my career as well, too, with two layoffs. ah So yeah you you you recover from that. But yeah there was something about stability in those types of large companies and just moving up the corporate ladder.
Speaker: So moving into this e-commerce startup, it was automotive based out of California. I had an opportunity to come in as VP of design and product management where leading the teams in terms of providing an e-commerce solution where you can not only buy your used car, we're talking right in the middle of COVID where it was really hard to get a car as well, but also get your lending and your financing and your insurance. And it's basically a one-stop shop.
Speaker: to buy your car end to end. And ah company called Shift, which was like Carvana and Vroom, one of the big three, liked our experience so much that they ended up acquiring us. So not only the technology, but the talent. So I went with it.
Speaker: So I was absorbed into Shift and I was there for about several months. And then I got laid off a couple months later and we're all kind of looking at at each other like, who moved my cheese? and said, wait a minute, you can't you can't do that. you just hired the talent. And so it was a part of an $80 million dollars restructure and the writing was on the wall and there were redundancies and we had to go. And so at that point, it got laid off in the summer of 2022, which coincided with the great tech layoff that started around that time. So not only did you have COVID and that craziness, but then you had all the tech layoffs, which are still going on today, three plus years later. So the design market has really taken a hit.
Speaker: especially for people like me at a senior level where those jobs start to get more narrow and really don't come up all that often. Yeah. And that brings up dealing with layoffs and dealing with COVID and mental anguish or anything that really happened around that time. i mean, some people, I see it all over LinkedIn these days of people who can't get jobs and the emotional toll that it takes on people. And can you give a little bit of background of what that looked like for you and how you handled that?
Speaker: Sure, it's a great question. During COVID, we went remote with the Home Depot. So that's when it just started to to really happen. This was early 2020. The good news is that we actually were very, very productive and we hired a feature called curbside pickup, fully remote.
Speaker: And launching curbside pickup at the Home Depot is not an easy task. However, it was one of those rare instances where leadership actually got out of the way and said, go do your thing because we're actually caught flat footed because there was a whole slice of leadership that believed curbside pickup wasn't ah an on brand thing. And we're all looking at each other like this is the new normal. We need to launch to this right now. So we were able to get it into seven stores within a week.
Speaker: Then we went to 50 stores, then 100, and then we went to all 2,000 plus stores. And we just ate our own dog food in terms of testing, learning. It wasn't pretty. It sucked in the beginning. But we had to get something into market because that was the normal. The good news is that we didn't let great get in the way of good.
Speaker: And so managing that was was terrific. The downside of this was that a lot of people ended up burning out. And I'm the perfect case around that. So after working from home for three plus years between Home Depot And the startup I mentioned, my wife, she heard me one day downstairs and I was on a Zoom call and she came up after the call and she said, I can hear your soul being sucked out of you And this was January 2022. And this is when I knew I completely burnt out.
Speaker: So if I had loneliness, mental anguish, ah anxiety, all these things I had never really experienced in my life really started to creep up on me. Having COVID three times as well didn't help, so I'm sure that had a factor in it. But and it started to affect a lot of my team members that I've worked with. They were experiencing the same thing.
Speaker: The silver lining in all this is that I got to know my teams in a much different way through COVID, through remote. And it was an opportunity to really flip the script in how you lead. And I think that's why leading with empathy is the skill of the 21st century. You have to give a shit and care about your people. And I've always cared about my people. I've always led with empathy, but it was really turning it up to 11 during COVID where you really said, people, go dark. Come on when you need to come on. Take care of your family. Take care of your health. Take care of your kids. Go out and do what you need to do.
Speaker: as long as the work gets done, we have to build it on trust. And I'm talking practical trust and emotional trust. I'm saying practical trust, I know you're going to show up and get stuff done. Emotional trust is that, hey, you know what? I've got your back. I'm going to go to the mat for you.
Speaker: And look, we're going to get things done. Let's just make sure we stick together and treat each other as humans. That was the turning point, I think, in a lot of things when it came to managing teams was COVID, because I actually got to know my teams a lot better and a lot deeper and got to know things I probably would never have known about them through a remote type of environment, whether it was their significant other or things they like to collect or things they like to eat or a painting on their wall or whatever it is.
Speaker: You really got to know your teams in a much different way. ah However, when I did go back into office in fall of 2022, it was actually the relief for my mental anguish as well. It was like, I need to be back in office. This actually feels pretty good.
Speaker: Yeah. And I love that you said that because I think so many leaders, they get caught in the same cycle that everybody gets caught in, which is just perform, perform, perform and burnout, burnout, burnout. So if you had not experienced what you had experienced, would you think that you would approach it in a similar way?
Speaker: I've always led the same way. So for it wasn't really a big change. I think the big change was this, was not just having those hallway water cooler conversations, going out to lunch, jumping into a conference room and spitballing on stuff. That was the stuff I generally missed as well, too. But you just had to do it in a different way. But it was mentally exhausting because then you're on Zooms from nine until six.
Speaker: And that was that was draining. It was absolutely draining. And I think that was part of the reason why so many of us had burnt out. And now, especially post-pandemic, that's what people care about. People want trust, empowerment, and recognition when it comes to leadership.
Speaker: And culture, right Because culture is a feeling. yeah It's how your stomach feels on a Sunday night before you go back to work. Frankly, people don't give a shit about kombucha, ping pong, cool furniture, dog beds in your office. That stuff doesn't matter anymore. That was something with Fangs 10, 15 years ago to have all those great perks.
Speaker: Right now, especially with Gen Z too, they want that authenticity. They want to know that they have something to believe in that aligns to the mission. yeah Those are the main things when it comes to culture right now. I agree. And I had this conversation before and I presented the same question, which was, do you think that it starts from top down or do you think it could also start from bottom up in terms of people speaking up for what they need or leaderships having to lay the foundation or both?
Speaker: It should be both. I think it should be grassroots organic because everybody's a leader at the end of the day, no matter where you sit. The way I describe leadership is that leadership is the choice and it's not a title.
Speaker: doesn't matter where you are in the organization, everybody needs great leaders, you just lead from where you are. So once that's a bottoms up and you have a secret society, a group of people, you become punks as well too, terms of pushing back on the obstructionism, then it's also nice when you got to top down.
Speaker: And it had, the benefit of having a few leaders like that. I've also had a few toxic leaders that I quit, but I've had a few leaders that create that type of culture because then you start creating an experience where people will run through a brick wall for you.
Speaker: And you got that connection. And the best teams I've ever managed, the best teams I've ever led have been this blend of missionary and mercenary. Missionary, they're working towards the greater mission of the organization and what that looks like and the values on the wall actually mean something.
Speaker: And the first letter actually spells another word as well, too, for bonus points. And then mercenaries are the ones that roll up their sleeves and and actually get shit done. ah So are the best teams. When I have missionary mercenary, you've got people on fire in terms of their their commitment to work.
Speaker: Absolutely. I also had another conversation where there's a lot of stigma that somebody presented around speaking up for your needs or sharing that you're struggling. How would leaders portray that psychological trust and what's important for them to really embody so that they know that people can express, hey, I'm struggling in this moment or I'm burned out simply.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's ah it's incumbent upon leaders to create a safe psychological space. And so when you're a leader, it's a very interesting role because 80 to 90% of the time it's behavioral stuff that you're dealing with.
Speaker: And you have to be able to, when you say open door policy, it better mean open door because it could be about work, it could be something personal, they can confide in you. It's part interventionist, part therapist, part leader, part coach.
Speaker: So you just got to know which hat to wear. And then you also have to customize that talk to the person because one size is not going to fit all. So you really have to tailor your feedback to that particular person. And really one of the best leadership qualities that anybody can have is just listening.
Speaker: And so active listening as well, too, to make sure you're engaged and you understand what that person is saying and show the empathy I was talking about earlier. That's how you create a safe psychological space for to come in where they can trust you in terms of their struggles or what they're dealing with.
Speaker: Also making sure you're working closely with HR so that they have that support as well too. you None of that stuff should be done in a vacuum. That type of stuff needs to be documented, have live conversations, know that HR there support and know what the benefits are. Sometimes people don't don't know what their benefits are in terms of things that they can get from work to help them, which I've leveraged itself myself as well for therapy and psychological support, especially when I was burning out several years ago, I took advantage of what my company had to offer. and I'm not afraid to say it.
Speaker: Thank you. It's the strength that you just said that. And I think so many people do suffer in silence and that's where people get caught. And I think it it is a fear upon people that it's going to reflect negatively upon them as an employee. And that's where it becomes this employee wellness versus human wellness and how there are the same, but in an organization, there's seemingly two different things. and And think we have an opportunity in front of us to hopefully try to bridge that gap where, especially being remote, you're now at home seeing people's personal you know lives a little bit more.
Speaker: And that blend is happening a lot more where, hopefully people feel that if they're struggling, they can say it without it reflecting on their performance or their ability to perform. And I think that's the fear that so many people have.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. And at the end of the day the data will set you free. And that's why those conversations need to happen all the time. A performance review should not happen twice a year. You should be talking about your goals weekly, biweekly. How are you tracking? And I always see goals as a living, breathing document as well, because Something can get shelved, something get deprioritized, and you shouldn't necessarily be dinged for that. You should just be in conversation with your leader in terms of, hey, how am I tracking? How am I doing? And what is the feedback to make sure that, hey, I'm actually performing in the right way. Nothing should be a surprise for that particular person.
Speaker: Now, if a person is not performing, it's affecting their work. Those are different types of conversations as well that we need to have. And we have to make sure we have the right people on the bus. ah But we do it with care. We do it humanely. We do it with empathy.
Speaker: But you still have a business to run. So you really have to make sure that you've got the right people that are that missionary mercenary and are ready to perform. Absolutely. So now we talk about so how did you build back from some mental anguish?
Speaker: How did you build back from that? And then we'll kind of go into launching kick and the origin story there. Yeah, there were a few things that I did, both mental and physical. The first one was creating boundaries. And ah right around the time that I got laid off and had COVID three times, there was a death in the family and somebody that was very close to me, not related by blood, but somebody that was like an aunt, grandmother, ah doctor, well, she was a doctor, and Yoda, kind of all wrapped up into one, right? So I've known her and known her for 50 years when she passed away. So that took me That hit me hard. And so I struggle with that. And then there was also ah fallout from that, having to go
Speaker: buying the mausoleum and coffin shopping and will and becoming the executor. Cause none of this stuff was really planned. I had to take all that on. And between that and the amount of phone calls and inundation I was getting from family and job and everything else, it was like, I really just fell apart.
Speaker: So that's where I took it upon myself to go speak to someone neutral outside of the family, just to help unload and make sure that I was taking care of myself and talking through things and just organizing and shutting off my phone to make sure that I was not being interrupted because I just couldn't take the amount of hits I was getting.
Speaker: It's like, i can I need to focus on this thing and do this thing unless I'm going to lose my mind. So there was therapy, there was boundaries. And then the other thing I started doing was was really just boundaries included time in terms of taking time back, which is probably our greatest currency right now, was making sure I got back and taking care of my physical health.
Speaker: saying, I need to go into the gym, I need to go find an outlet, I need to go burn off whatever the stress is, and reduce some of this anxiety, because it was all on top of me. so between between the boundaries, finding more time getting back into the gym,
Speaker: And really dedicating what I wanted to do what ah really thinking about what I wanted to do next in my life. Those are the things that really helped me build back in terms of strength. And I have to say, founding KICK in we act in October of 2024, which was a terrible time to start a business, because you're going into the holidays, you're going into an election cycle, everything's a 2025 problem.
Speaker: That's what KICK is. And a lot of that mental anguish that I came out of was liberation. And that's what rock and roll is at the end of the day. Rock and roll is liberation. That's what kick is built on. It's built upon liberation.
Speaker: And for 30 years in Fortune 500s, gritty startups, the political scars to show it on my back, I said, I'm going to go out and do my solo album and it's going to be the best fricking solo album. iza I love that.
Speaker: Even your whole like persona change when you started talking about it, I'm just smiling and your energy. And so I love that. And thank you for sharing, number one, because those strategies are so important for so many people.
Speaker: There's no shame in needing help. It's actually strength and it builds you back stronger. And that's exactly what you saw. And so congratulations on that. And also now tell us a little bit about Kik origin story mission.
Speaker: What is Kik, Paul? Yeah. So Kik is a design agency that specializes in design strategy. So that could be creative brand UX, marketing. We have fractional leadership at a CXO, CDO or CCO level.
Speaker: And for 30 years, I have sat where many people are sitting right now and I can come in and tell you what works and what doesn't work and what falls flat in types of these organizations, not only from an executional standpoint, but from a political standpoint.
Speaker: So I can help come in and untangle all that but a lot of that spaghetti. And then we come in from an AI literacy point as well, too. And that's really the next gold rush in terms of upskilling teams, where we come in as educators and teach people how to use AI in their workflow.
Speaker: As you know, every single CEO right now has AI in their strategy or their big rockets. When it gets down to the line level that you have this record scratch moment of, oh, what the hell are we going to do with it? And so I'm working with two educators to come in and teach the course because it lends validity and credibility that you have two educators working in higher education that have been teaching AI for a couple of years and not some Joe Schmo coming off the street say, I'm an expert in ai right i have a I have a point of view on it. i have a leadership point of view on it.
Speaker: However, coming in with educators to help prove that I think helps. So that's what KIC is. And um The way I like to think about Kik, our mission is about daring your creativity to stand out.
Speaker: I think we've got some great X factors as well too that makes us stand out is that we don't believe in the ordinary and boring. We have sat where other people have sat, so I come in with that knowledge. And then we believe in relationships. Everything that Kik is built on is built upon relationships. We know that good business it happens because of good relationships as well.
Speaker: And then going back to what i was saying earlier, everything we do starts with empathy. And that is understanding the problem to be solved, using that approach, being human centered and not coming with a solution to be vetted, but a problem to be solved.
Speaker: That's what Kik is. It's a boutique design management firm here to help you to dare your creativity to stand out. Dare your creativity to stand out. That's so interesting. So what's the first step in daring somebody's creativity to stand out?
Speaker: The pushback on people that say, I'm not creative. I don't have a creative bone in my body. I can't draw. And so that's okay. I'm not asking you to draw. Stick fingers are fine. What I'm asking you to do is use your problem solving and critical critical thinking techniques. Everybody's creative. Most people just forgot.
Speaker: And whether that's just through education or where we went to school or socioeconomic or whatever the the reasons are. We all have creativity inside of us. I use that as a starting point, bringing the right people together in a room to help break through that with different types of exercises.
Speaker: You just have to really be open to it and think about coming in from a human centered approach. Then we go through a discovery phase, understand, well, what is the problem you're trying to solve? And so that's going to be different for every company and that could be specific.
Speaker: So I'm not here to build your website. I'm not here to create a logo or make t-shirts for you. you can go to Vistaprint. I'm here for you to help use design as a catalyst for change. I want to talk to your senior leadership about policy, change making, and coming in where we use design as a behavioral change to solve. And that was one of the greatest things I did in my career at Home Depot was taking design thinking to a strategic level with my ELT, where I'm facilitating the room with my C-suite, no pressure, right? But yeah, and my my CFO, Richard McPhail, is looking at and he's like, we should be working like this all the time.
Speaker: And I said, I know, you know, so taking it from a very grassroots level all the way up to your LT, that's how you change behaviors. That's how you change solving problems. That's where you start making strategic youtube changes and how a company behaves and operates.
Speaker: That's the type of work we do at Kik as well, using design as the catalyst. Interesting. And do you see that it spills over into other departments as well? Like a whole organization, I can imagine that just creativity and using that part of the brain can just exponentially shift trajectory of different teams and how they're most effectively working.
Speaker: Yeah, I saw that a number of times, especially at ah the Home Depot. So you had a starting within IX, was the interconnected experience. and and other groups started to catch wind of what we were doing because we were launching product in the market a lot faster using design thinking and design sprints.
Speaker: ye So there we started actually a design thinking 101 and 102 that we partnered with our Home Depot University to do. And there were people signing up like, i don't even know what organization or group that is in Home Depot. What do they even do over there? It's like, I didn't even recognize any of the titles or any of the people. It's a huge organization.
Speaker: But we were doing something right because people started coming to us to say, show us the way, show us the light. What are you doing? And so that's how you spread across an organization. That's where you started influencing and making change where people are coming to you to show us, teach us.
Speaker: And that's where creative gets to be very unique because now you're going inside the organization and teaching people how to be creative again. It's interesting to me because what I'm hearing from you is just it makes it more fun.
Speaker: right It gives a level of fun back to ah work environment where people can come and probably leverage a different skill set than they've been leveraging if they're just doing the grunt work or whatever their day-to-day is. And now you're asking them again to use a different part of their brain that allows them to think outside the box and come up with ideas that they haven't been encouraged to come up with before.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we made we made brainstorming fun again. yeah And nobody should be brainstorming for four hours straight. Nobody should be brainstorming for more than an hour. you ever gone through a brainstorming, sat there for an hour, you're just exhausted afterward? yeah So we created into bite-sized formats, great exercises, but they're highly collaborative.
Speaker: The secret sauce is getting the right people in the room because great ideas come from anywhere. So when we're doing a design thinking exercise, it's not just not design sitting over in a corner wearing a beret and making a spirit animal. It's like, that's not the work we're doing. It's like we pull we pull in engineering and product and marketing, operation, supply chain, even legal can be in the room as well too, because great ideas come from anywhere. just how we get there is what really people took hold of. So that's how we work.
Speaker: It's making it fun, but you're also getting to solve the problem in the right way through collaboration. So what have you noticed that's kind of broken in how companies treat design leaders today? And how do we fix that?
Speaker: I think design had its moment a few years ago, right before COVID. So in the heyday of Steve Jobs and Apple, where design really meant something and design was at the highest levels of organization. And we know who those companies still are. As you think about Apple, Airbnb, Nike to an extent, Starbucks, et cetera, they're doing it right. And so where design is now, five years later, post pandemic,
Speaker: In lot of ways, it's actually taken a back seat. We know AI is the beauty pageant right now, and all eyes are on ai And AI and creativity are certainly important, two things we need to consider. However, I think design is taking a back seat.
Speaker: That's usually the first team to go and lay off. So you usually have your design team go. Ironically, your recruiting team goes right after that. And it's just been horrific in terms of the bloodshed of how many designers and talent is on the street, including myself when I got laid off.
Speaker: So they've also seen a deflation in salary. So salaries have dropped for designers as well, where i was handing out six figure salaries back in 2021, 22, that would blow your mind in terms of design and product management as well. So a lot of that has deflated. and I think design taken a bit of a backseat.
Speaker: And now i'm seeing a lot more reporting of design into product or worse reporting into engineering. So design's got to be at the same. Exactly. So it's got to be at the same level as product engineering. There needs to be a chief design officer, a chief experience officer. That's where it should be living within the organization.
Speaker: It shouldn't be siloed. I feel like we're going back to those dark days right now where design is about making it pretty. and we make logos and t-shirts. Once you become a beauty contest, you're done. That's why design has to fight and show the the business value of design every single time they present to leadership. Here's the feature.
Speaker: Here's why we built it. Because leadership doesn't give a shit about your pixel perfect mockup. They care about how how it affects their P&L. So that's what the that's the secret sauce for designers right now is that they have to be able to show the math.
Speaker: Now, how did how did you get there with AI? And AI and creativity is a whole separate subject, right? That's what going to say, yeah. that yeah That's where we're headed next. Like how are AI and design coming together in terms of effectiveness, speed, efficiency, taking out redundancy, but also creating something that's new, that's got taste and discernment because that's where AI falls down in creativity. yeah A lot of the work is mediocre. a lot of the work is just crap. A lot of it is just deep dive generative garbage that's yeah okay and and people tinkering and there are no standards right now.
Speaker: So you still need a human in the loop like myself or an art director or a creative director to say, you know what, that's actually on brand or that's off brand because we still have a taste level and years of experience to say that's actually good and you know what, that actually sucks.
Speaker: That begs the question for me of just what would somebody look at, say you're presenting a leadership and you see dips and declines in some of the metrics and whatever, what would make somebody point to knowing that creativity has fallen?
Speaker: Let's look at the data, right? So you'll you'll know from a data perspective where things are dropping, whether we didn't do research, we didn't do any testing, we just rushed it into market, right? So there's always going to be a backstory, like some feature that made it through the tunnels quickly and didn't go through any sort of validation.
Speaker: Or if someone's using AI more, right? If someone's using ai more than just pure human design, you might see drop off in some of those metrics. And I'm sure that's what you are or will be seeing. And then the convincing of this is where we need human beings again.
Speaker: Absolutely. So they might be taking shortcuts and that's where you still need that human in the loop. And sure, yeah you can have agents running and doing their thing automatically, but you still need a human loop to orchestrate all that and making sure that we validate and that there is some sort of governance on top of AI. And I think that's the big missing piece right now is that the standard is are there is no standards. And so companies are are scrambling to figure out, well, what is our governance framework?
Speaker: We're having ai What are we using? What are we not using? i envision that living in a design system where you have a particular tools and you can do this and you can't do that. And this is how it affects the brand. At the end of the day, still needs to wrap back into brand. Because once you dilute the brand, once you take something out of the brand bank, it's much harder to put something back in. So companies have to be very, very careful in terms of how the brand is affected because as you know brand is about perception that's the first thing you think of and so if it starts to dilute and we saw that in some backlash with different companies putting AI ads out that really sucked during this during the the holidays that's where you know you have to really take a beat and say is this really good and that's from an ethical perspective as a leader as a design leader what is the definition of good
Speaker: And so that's a rhetorical question. We don't know that yet. It is. And it kind of goes right back to your idea of just brand being emotional, right? If you take some of that out of it, then people's resonance with it starts to decline. And then you'll see it again in the numbers. But a lot of this is also self-awareness of leadership and leaders to ask those questions and kind of get to what is good and what are we after? And is it an emotional ethos that we have to keep up, right? That where our numbers are high or is it sacrificing and seeing the hit on those things?
Speaker: Yeah, agreed. And yeah with AI leadership, your role really is in the code models at this point. Like I said, I'm not coding models. I'm not building LLMs. I'm not doing any of that work. There's people way smarter than me doing that.
Speaker: It's really about driving AI adoption and governance, like I said, and making sure that we're doing it ethically. I think of AI as a companion species right now that really complements the work we're doing. It's the assistant behind the screen.
Speaker: And if companies don't catch up right now, as we know, they're gonna evaporate. We know a lot of the companies that are not here anymore. And so of those 74% of CEOs are gonna get fired over the next two years, so they don't show gains in ai That's Business Insider, that's Forbes, it's just not me coming up with a number out of the blue.
Speaker: They need to invest in their companies when it comes to training their people, how is AI gonna affect their workflow and their bottom line. So we've talked a lot about design, leadership, creativity, emotional resonance with people.
Speaker: I think a lot of this has kind of boiled down to innovation. And what do you feel are kind of essential ingredients for innovation in a corporate setting? Yeah, so when i think about innovation, yeah that's probably one of the most abused words in the corporate lexicon right now.
Speaker: It's like an innovation, like I said earlier, with AI and creativity can't be done in a vacuum. Innovation has to map back to some sort of strategy or KPI And we have seen all these accelerators and things close because they were done in the vacuum and nobody knew about it And all sudden this thing came out and it didn't work. Well, it doesn't map to anything.
Speaker: So innovation is rarely authorized in a large organization. And I'm quoting a good friend of mine, Greg Larkin, who wrote a book called This Might Get Me Fired. And yeah, it's a good point because you really need a team of rebels that have to come in and break the rules and challenge the authority and create something actually new.
Speaker: And so being part of this group with Greg called Punks and Pinstripes, it's finding people like you that are really ready to go out there and take a risk. Nobody risks anything when they say no to ah an idea.
Speaker: And yeah i think that was part of my issue and some of my companies as well, too, that I probably ended up pissing off too many people because if you're not pissing people off, you're not innovating. right That's what change is. Innovation at the end of the day is not taking it to the press or to the board.
Speaker: Innovation is the aha, eyes light up moment of a user when they say, oh, that helps solve my problems. Oh, they have this realization that they can get to A to B. this That's innovation. So when you see the user light up, then you made a change. Then you've done something actually good and you haven't done it in a vacuum.
Speaker: A lot to think about. It's so interesting to me because I've always been fascinated by user experience and mostly because I've been fascinated by human behavior and psychology. And that's really, at the end of the day, what we're working with here and seeing the data as a result of somebody's behavior. So thank you for sharing all of that.
Speaker: In terms of Kik itself, anything else that you could share with the audience? What would you like to share and how they can find you to continue any sort of conversation? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having me today. So if you want to learn more about Kik, you can go to kickconsultancy.co.
Speaker: You can find me on Instagram at Paul Stonick. You can find me on LinkedIn, which is where I spend most of my time in socials. So happy to connect and meeting new people there. And then you can follow my speakeasy tour. So I'm doing a lot of talks between podcasts and in person as well.
Speaker: So check out my appearances coming up to a city near you. so that's how you can find me. Yeah. Awesome. I love that. Thank you, Paul, so much for your time today. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Yeah, no, thank you, Laura. This was fun and i'm looking forward to the final product coming out.
Speaker: There we go. Soon.
