My family calls me Brian, but my friends call me BMC.

Design Leadership

A design leader is a human leader and functional expert who gives the business a competitive advantage by design.

A good leader has a clarity of purpose and the ability to rally others toward that cause. I believe it is a privilege to lead because it means other people are investing themselves in your purpose.

Team Leader

I find most of my design inspiration in lessons from nature, science, and history. The way I show up for my team is informed by Leadership Models in Nature that demonstrate mentorship, servant leadership, and distributed decision-making.

Functional Leader

As a functional expert I try to support these three pillars to create a healthy design practice:

Culture

I believe culture can be designed by rewarding behavior that reinforces our values, intentional hiring, and clear performance management.

Supporting Elements

• Team Mission
• Values
• Hiring Process
• Performance Management
• Routines

Craft

Making things that meet high quality standards requires learned skills applied in a repeatable process.

Supporting Elements

• Quality Standards
• Career Guides
• education & mentorship
• Design Processes
• Skills: Motion, Content, Systems
• Design Systems

Commerce

Design is a business function built on creativity. The acts of research, ideation, and delivery are used to make an impact.

Supporting Elements

• Design Strategy
• Evidence & Insights
• Product Vision
• Program management
• Budgeting

Design Principles

Principles help guide consistent high-quality decisions. These are mantras that people have heard me say most often over the last couple of decades.

• Ask, don't assume.

  Our perception of the world is a rich sensory hallucination inferred from assumptions and previous experiences. The human brain uses perceptual completion to construct narratives that fill in gaps in data. We can reduce ambiguity in Product Design in two ways. We collect evidence - qualitative and quantitative research - to fill gaps in our understanding. We use repeated, iterative, communication, to build alignment up, down, and across work streams.
• "Directing is 90% Casting."

  This adage comes from film & theater producers. Hiring and developing talent is a leader’s #1 priority. Period. Who we hire is the biggest factor on team culture and quality outcomes. Through my years of hiring, including some hard lessons, I’ve developed a robust hiring framework. Effective hiring builds on objective career guides, DEI policy, and strategic goals.
• "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

  Few things are more hazardous to healthy teams than the myth of the lone genius creator. Building and shipping products at scale is a team sport depending on collaboration from experts with diverse skills. Designers are uniquely poised to level up large teams thanks to creative skills that make abstract conversations tactile.
• Momentum is more valuable than analysis.

  It's so much easier to pivot or accelerate if you're already in motion. A sealion balances a ball on its nose by intentionally moving the ball where it wants to go. Designers can shape our future by always learning more about the problem they're working on.

The Design Process Is Storytelling

Good product design is good storytelling. I believe in using story structure as a rubric for evaluating design work. There is a classic story writing tool called the Story Spine that can be very useful to designers:

Once upon a time there was  ,
Every day  ,
One day  ,
Because of that  ,
Because of that  ,
Until finally  ,
And ever since that day  .

An effective design depends on character development, conflict, and resolution; just like a compelling story. We need to understand our users (characters), frame their problems with evidence (development), ideate broadly on solutions (resolve conflict), and prove those solutions through testing (resolution).

Once upon a time there was User,
Every day User Story,
One day Problem Discovery,
Because of that JTBD,
Because of that Solutions,
Until finally Solution Validation,
And ever since that day Outcomes.

The true value of the Story Spine is unlocked when you use it in tandem with other design processes. There are many wonderful design frameworks to guide the design process such as the Double Diamond, Honeycomb, or The Loop™. These frameworks help designers navigate from ambiguity to clarity through a prescribed sequence of activities. There are more similarities than differences between them.

Many musicians will tell you that the loudest note in music is the rest note. Fine artists step back and squint their eyes. Athletes build recovery into their training. These moments of inaction provide intentional contrast to their respective processes. I've always thought design frameworks could assist designers more with the critical thinking that happens at junctures between each phase. The Story Spine provides a rubric for evaluating the continuity and efficacy of the work at each of these steps.

As a design leader, I focus on bringing together the right people at these inflection points to collaborate on making sure the narrative of the design makes sense. If the story makes sense, the design invariably follows.