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On our second episode of Executive Function, Rippling’s VP of Design, Ryan Lucas, discusses how to build a fast, demanding, supportive place for designers to do their best work. “Figma is not the source of truth. It’s a bunch of rectangles in a vector drawing program,” says Ryan Lucas, VP of Design at Rippling. “The source of truth is the thing that customers experience.” This exemplifies Lucas’s approach to building products, teams and cultures — utility above all else. In conversation with First Round partner Brett Berson, Lucas explores why you can’t scale taste, how his background as an industrial designer shaped his thinking and how to create a demanding yet supportive environment as a manager. Here are a few of our favorite moments from the conversation: - A holistic framework for how designers should think about their jobs: “Useful, usable and desirable are the three things we need to deliver. People often forget about the last bit. Dreyfuss said the designer’s job is not done if the product doesn’t sell — you need to know a balance sheet, be able to write copy, talk to customers. The idea behind it is you basically can’t deliver a well-formed product unless you have an understanding of all those things.”
- Creating a demanding yet supportive environment: “People can’t do great work unless you push them. You have to put people in a position of being somewhat uncomfortable. And I want it to be backed up by feeling like the feedback I’m giving them is really substantive. The supportive piece is that good creative work of any kind doesn’t come from fear. It’s hard to balance pushing people and keeping them out of that fight-or-flight zone.”
- If scaling judgement is possible: “How do you as a design leader scale quality and do it in a way that’s repeatable? You can define quality and get specific about it. But at some point, it’s still a little intangible. I think there’s a lot you can do to spread the ability to build better products across an org. But to get to the highest point on the mountain, you probably need the opinionated, tasteful, benevolent dictator.”
We’ve got a lot more interviews lined up in the coming weeks. Here are some of the incredible execs you’ll be able to learn from: - David Singleton, former CTO at Stripe
- Chris Degnan, former COO at DoorDash
- Stevie Case, CRO at Vanta
- Katie Burke, COO at Harvey
- Sheila Joglekar Vashee, CMO at Figma
Whether you’re a senior IC who wants to know what it takes to get to the top, or a founder building out your C-suite, we hope you’ll walk away from these conversations with a new model for what executive excellence looks like.
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