Designing at the Edge: How Adobe Builds for Creativity, Scale, and Trust

0:00:09.0 Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Builders Wanted, the podcast for people shaping what's next in customer engagement, technology and innovation. Today, we're diving into the world of product design, where innovation meets empathy and enterprise-grade tools are crafted to feel personal and intuitive. I'm joined by Ann Rich, Senior Director of Design at Adobe, a company that has set the standard in creative tools while expanding into AI, digital experiences, and enterprise software.

0:00:35.8 Kailey Raymond: Ann has spent her career at the intersection of design and strategy, building experiences that not only look good, but make life easier for real people doing hard work. Today, we'll explore what it means to lead design at scale, how Adobe navigates trust in the era of generative AI, and why the best design starts with listening. Let's jump in.

0:00:56.1 Producer: This podcast is brought to you by Twilio, the customer engagement platform that helps businesses turn real-time data into seamless, personalized experiences. Engage customers on their terms across SMS, voice, email, WhatsApp, and more. Power every interaction with AI, so conversations feel natural, not robotic. Adapt in real time, delivering the right message on the right channel exactly when it matters. That's the power of Twilio. More than 320,000 businesses, from startups to Fortune 500s, trust Twilio to transform customer signals into conversations, connections, and real revenue. Reimagine the way you engage with your customers. Learn more at twilio.com.

0:01:43.2 Kailey Raymond: Ann, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here today.

0:01:47.1 Ann Rich: Thank you, Kailey. I'm really excited to be here too.

0:01:49.4 Kailey Raymond: This should be really fun. You've been at Adobe for over a decade, which is obviously this powerhouse in a lot of things, but in particular design. And I just wanted to hear from you, as a design leader, what is your mission there today?

0:02:05.9 Ann Rich: It is hard to believe it's been over a decade. If you'd asked me 10 years ago how long I thought I would stay, it would not have been 10 years. It's been a great ride. So my mission there is really to deliver the best enterprise GenAI experiences, leveraging all of the suite of Adobe's applications and really bringing them together in new ways for our customers, particularly enterprise customers. But then also in my charter is supporting Adobe Unified Platforms. And so that's everything from identity to all of the commerce and paywalls, to administration and all the different growth around those. And so it's a big breadth of both deep product and enterprise product, as well as platforms that span across the company.

0:02:54.4 Kailey Raymond: 100%. You have a lot of diversity in your role and it's obviously changing incredibly fast. You mentioned GenAI right at the top, which obviously we're going to get into a little bit today. You're designing for a brand that's iconic and super widely used. I'm wondering... I was always fascinated with speaking with folks that are at these flagship brands that have these products that are known and loved by tons of folks. How do you balance that between making sure you're honoring those flagship products and then designing things that are really pushing you into the future, pushing you forward?

0:03:34.7 Ann Rich: A very interesting thing about our software today is that we have all the flagship applications and we're really thinking about deeply how to extend them as AI-driven tools with precision and control and everything expected from our base. But at the same time, working on different ways of interacting with those tools and thinking about conversational workflow, agentic interactions, but using the same power of those flagship applications. And so that requires really looking at the incredible power in a different way and through a different lens of how to allow people to have control while balancing the desire and need to do things conversationally and interact with those products differently.

0:04:24.7 Kailey Raymond: That's so interesting. So it's essentially changing the way that you might be interacting with a product that you know really well, conversing with an agent or building a workflow on top of something that makes your life a little bit easier. I feel like at Adobe, a lot of the users too, they're come from different departments. And I imagine, you also have this collaborative play when you're actually building teams as well, of making sure that those cross-functional partners are embedded into your decision-making can often change the way that you're starting to think about design. So I'm wondering, what is the role cross-functional collaboration plays in the way that you, in your design org, structure it, the way that you lead it? Anything to note there?

0:05:12.3 Ann Rich: One part is really, the first job I had at Adobe and the reason I joined Adobe was to start an internal consulting practice. That was focused on acceleration and creative problem solving. It was called the Hive. And so I had an amazing opportunity to build a capability, a team, a physical space that brought together design, strategic facilitation and management consulting into a practice that was used across the company. And so with this, I had the opportunity to change the way we built spaces, to work with senior executives, to span problem spaces across the company of things that I really sometimes didn't even know exactly how to articulate, but had to facilitate deep cross-functional collaboration. And it was all in service of moving faster in building. It was super fun and challenging. But when I look at my role today and the role of design at Adobe, I see so many of those pieces around that strategic facilitation, around focusing on the business problem while solving a user problem together as being a really incredible moment for design, especially as we start decoupling and taking our products in different directions. And so the design organization at Adobe is a centralized organization, which means that we all are connected through a single leader who is the SVP of Design, Eric Snowden.

0:06:34.7 Ann Rich: And we have an amazing visibility and responsibility that spans across the unit. And now this gives us great visibility, but also a huge responsibility to drive cross-team thinking, cross-Adobe thinking, cross-business unit thinking. And it can be a really tough challenge to find a common purpose while also facing the immediate needs of a single product team. And so that's really what I think of as the role of design. And when I look back 10 years ago, that was what I was doing, but in a smaller scale and this is at a larger scale. And then the organization I lead, because it is a cross-Adobe product and platform team, my designers have to be able to work with not just cross-functional leaders, but also cross-product and cross-company. And so we have a really interesting purview, but also it is really our responsibility to drive a lot of that cross-functional collaboration and to look out and across, and then also to look out and across the industry because if you're driving that without context of what's happening outside, you actually lose the ability to have the right level of conversation. So it's a pretty unique vantage point for both design at Adobe as well as within my team.

0:07:45.8 Kailey Raymond: Totally. And one of the things you just mentioned towards the tail end of that was external factors. And mentioned it right at the top, generative AI as this overlay across a lot of the things that you're doing. I'm going to bring it back in. So it's obviously reshaping how people are creating. Adobe is right in the center of that action. And one of the big things that, I speak to a lot of leaders about when it comes to GenAI, the obvious thing is trust. How do you make sure that you're designing in mind, building products in mind, with chain of trust at the center? So wondering your thought around that, how does that factor into your design process today?

0:08:29.3 Ann Rich: Building trust has been critical across our work and it comes first in how Adobe approached model generation and in creating the first commercially safe model that respected artists and creators and the work used to train it. And I think that was a very unique position in the market and really something that many enterprise customers still look to us as having a commercially safe model. They know, one, their IP is safe, but two, that what they're generating is safe to use. But today it goes even further than that. It's how we communicate where AI is used in our products. It's where we show how media is generated and the origin of it in GenAI creation through content authenticity. And that's now available as tags on social networks and used in enterprise use cases. And this allows people creating, but also people consuming to have trust that this is coming from.

0:09:21.0 Ann Rich: And it's something that it's not being provided to serve Adobe, it's being provided to serve the community and to build trust on what is being created, build trust that you can trust media that you're seeing. And then with enterprise customers, things like creating custom models and Adobe Foundry is giving enterprise customers even more control to define and build their own models to use inside their company. And knowing that Adobe is committed to protecting their data and how they use it, but also it's being able to tag it and say what parts were generated using GenAI, what parts were brought in from somewhere else, what was the origin of that content. And that really drives a whole different conversation and accountability across the whole industry and across how we look at media and consume media.

0:10:09.2 Kailey Raymond: That is so, so interesting because... Sora comes out and ships out a bunch of celebrity faces and you're like, "Where's this IP coming from? Did they have?" With Gen AI, the possibilities seem endless, and you obviously serve enterprises as well as individual professional creators, spans a big gamut around the protections you need to put in place. And when you have an enterprise mindset, having things like tags of this is where the content came from gives that assurance to folks that you are doing the right thing. And it is within brand guidelines and you're not stealing something from somebody and in all of these kind of things. So, so interesting that you're doing that. And I wanted to learn a little bit more about that gamut of users that you service. So, across the board from individual creators to a lot of enterprise folks obviously use Adobe. How do you think about building different experiences and variations with the same foundation for, I would imagine, different types of users, different guidelines that they would need?

0:11:13.0 Ann Rich: So I think what's interesting about the team I lead is that, part of my team is deeply embedded with everything from free users in Express and Acrobat all the way to paid users and creators, professionals, and then the largest enterprise companies. And so that's all the platform work that's being done. And so that team really has to understand how users are using our products, how they're interacting with commerce experiences, what they need from their account, how they're consuming generative credits. And that is going back to the trust, all about creating trust in the system that the entire platform and the company shows up how you need it, where you need it, when you need it. And so that is a really important part and that's less product design and much more like the infrastructure. I always joke that no one, when you say what's a great sign-on experience, it's actually that you didn't even realize you were signing on, so it's actually an invisibility experience. And so that team really has to think about how do they actually go as much to the background while still imbuing trust and all of that.

0:12:23.0 Ann Rich: And then for the product teams designing Gen Studio and Firefly Enterprise, we're really focused on new AI products for enterprise customers. And in that world we have to think about the complexity of these end-to-end workflows and different roles across teams and the ability to get it right there has to focus less on the roles and more on the use cases, the goal, the output. And because we're looking at brand new ways of working and interacting with software, you have to look at those goals and the patterns rather than actually the work today. And so that has been a really different way of thinking about these roles and the people across them and more thinking about what is the goal and then what are the pieces or the building blocks needed to make that goal successful. And that has really changed, I think, the way my team has really had to think and many of our partners have had to think about creative professionals and creators and marketers as we start looking at different use cases and ways of working.

0:13:36.0 Kailey Raymond: That's really interesting. We take a, and a lot of companies do, they take a use case approach to kind of understanding how people are interacting with their products. I'm wondering how you get there. Is it like interviews with folks? Are you looking at product data? Are you talking to the sales team? Is it a combination of all of these things? Sometimes it can be hard to decipher somebody's end use case and you just put them in a marketer bucket and you're like, "I'm just going to design for marketers," but maybe they have a product background and they have the ability to do something differently. So I'm wondering how you think about that, how you get that information?

0:14:19.9 Ann Rich: Honestly, I have never had more data sources. And looking at people and conversations, before it was design research and that was kind of the answer that you looked for. And now, especially in enterprise, it's, yes, of course, foundational research. It's also validation. It's also job to be done frameworks of workflows. It's customer advisory boards. It's sales. It's feedback about your product. It's also we have really shifted into customer co-innovation and for deployed engineering to think about how do we actually build the future with customers who are also forward leaning so that we're getting real time build together because we also aren't in the world of being able to do a longitudinal study and come back with jobs to be done. By the time you do that, you've actually missed a core thing. And so in Gen Studio, as we started getting into discovery and starting to talk to marketers and what role they were in and trying to bucket them, it became really clear that the roles were changing, extending, contracting.

0:15:29.5 Ann Rich: And that frankly, not all marketers wanted to take on a new role and particularly not the creative role. That was a role that was outsourced. And so in that world, it meant that we had to start thinking about what it meant to create content and what was the most time consuming part of it. And we really had to shift our mindset from, yes, content is expensive and yes, it is time consuming. And there's never enough of it. And that's a pain point you'll hear from marketers time and time again. But any solution actually needed to be as simple as sending an email. The speed and simplicity of sending an email, because that is what we were competing against. It wasn't all the other needs because those weren't their needs in that role. And so this really changed the way I thought about our product, but also how I thought about looking into the ecosystem and really looking for those patterns and signals that show the difference in the products and in what you're building. And so those pieces where the roles are changing so quickly and the technology is changing so quickly, what's the simplest thing that you can get to alignment on so that you can push forward through that and really design for the need, not for a role or a current job to be done.

0:16:46.7 Kailey Raymond: Yeah. This is like a really fascinating conversation too, because one of the things that I want to learn from you about is you also span across cultures and industries and skill levels and it's global, it's all these things. So when you're thinking about approaching inclusive design, especially in the world where we're talking about AI and we're building trust, how do you approach that? What are some tidbits and lessons that we can learn here?

0:17:19.9 Ann Rich: A really core part is having accessibility at the core. And one thing that Gen Studio allowed us to do is we brought in a bunch of services from across the company. And that meant that we had the opportunity to actually think about accessibility and inclusivity beyond the bounds of our product because we were bringing in different micro front ends and different services. And so as a team, really putting that at the core rather than something you do at the end, putting it at the beginning of building a product rather than something that you do a check at the end is incredibly important. Also thinking about the simplest way of presenting things where you have the opportunity to not add in layers, to not add in additional buttons and pieces of technology, and really just getting to what is the simplest way to do this, but really putting that at the core.

0:18:22.1 Ann Rich: But I really think not trying to, at the end make it inclusive but actually doing it from the beginning and really thinking about neurodivergence and about different skill levels coming in, thinking about culturally how do you do things in a way that is very clear. And icons can mean different things and colors can mean different things. And how do you do this in a different way. And then it goes all the way into, it's not translating an asset that people want to do, they need to really localize it, they need to be able to find content that resonates. They need to be able to find text strings. How you think about templates working in other countries. Non-English languages are a really big deal. And so really thinking about the scale of what we're doing and the scale of it across the global companies we work with is incredibly important.

0:19:16.0 Kailey Raymond: And an incredibly hard thing to do. So I feel like the advisory aspect of having boots on the ground, folks in market that really understand the cultural implications. And nuances and I like what you said around localization versus translation because that's it. It is like if you take a video that you built in the US and you just translate it, guess what? You're probably going to miss the cultural element and maybe you're gonna offend some people and it might just be completely off base. So you have to think about upfront how you design. You're totally right. It's like everything needs to be done from the very beginning.

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0:20:46.6 Kailey Raymond: I want to take it in another direction. We're talking about right now setting the right foundations, making sure you're designing from the very beginning with this really inclusive mindset. Now this maybe is not an exclusive mindset, but I'm wondering if you in your career have a decision that you've made or you've been on a team that's made or whatever, but it didn't go as expected but it taught you something just really interesting that you hold onto.

0:21:12.9 Ann Rich: So many. So many. So I'm going to use a more recent one because I think it's really relevant for this gen AI world and the different mindset you have to be in. So when we started designing and building gen studio, it was really in the moment of prompting. The industry was hyperfocused on great prompt writing, prompt engineers were the next big thing. Everyone's opening prompt engineering, tons of jobs there, tons of focus there. And that was the momentum that we were in at that moment. And fast forward to the release, six months later, which is not a lot of time in a large company for doing a massive release. And when we released, the entire world paradigm had shifted, the entire world had shifted to conversational experiences to age agentic, which frankly at that time people didn't, I think even know what age agentic meant, but they were using that word. And people inside of companies were building their own apps to solve these problems using vibe coding, vibe marketing was a thing. And it was a really tough moment because we had built something lightning fast, we had built it for a modern moment in time, but it didn't have the flexibility and extensibility required in that new era.

0:22:36.1 Ann Rich: And that was mind blowing to me as a leader of what I needed to do as a leader. How I needed to guide my team was different. How I needed to push on research and not design research but technical research, how I needed to change the way we thought about getting to betas and to V ones and really the speed and completeness with which we had to pivot and evolve our way of working and developing a complete new mindset was really wild. And that mindset has to be focused on experimentation, iteration, early POCs, iterative testing and validation, while also building exceptional user experiences. It was a really big mind shift and I'm really grateful that it happened when it did because I think it did allow us to change very rapidly. But normally that kind of moment of a release is a celebration and instead it was a get back on and keep going. And so I think that is sort of the world of software development at this point, especially if you're in a team that is building for new and undefined use cases. And so it was a good learning moment. It was a hard moment.

0:23:50.6 Kailey Raymond: No kidding. Yeah. To your point, you might not even have the ability to think about some of the use cases that end up happening on your platforms in this new world. It's not something that you could even come close to predicting at this point because things are moving so incredibly fast, which is why, what you were talking about a little bit earlier with, what did you call it, co-innovating. Working with your customers as you're building because this building in public kind of phase, whatever you can say that. But we need to be able to show our work really fast and get validation because it's changing so fast. By the time that you release it, it's probably irrelevant, maybe sometimes, so I hear you. It's much hard.

0:24:41.5 Ann Rich: Yeah. Yeah. And in many ways, the core of it isn't irrelevant but have you built it to remain relevant over time and that's... It was from customers and from these early betas that it was like, "Oh we're competing with an email." That's a super different problem to solve. We're not competing with the ability to generate content. That's a different need.

0:25:06.3 Kailey Raymond: Incredibly different. I'm also wondering, we're on this tangent of pushing ourselves working with folks, things that haven't worked. So are there things that you think that design teams should stop doing?

0:25:23.4 Ann Rich: I recently wrote an article called How to Adapt Your Design Practice for the Age of Generative Technology. And part of what propelled me to write that was that it really seemed like the way design was operating had to change. And I think what's really interesting about this moment is, of course, there's a need to learn new tools and work with AI. And I think there's some designers and companies that are moving away from tools like Figma completely. And I think vibe coding and the ability to create these prototypes and anyone can create prototypes like that, is a massive change. But for me, the bigger change is more around UX and interaction patterns and the foundation of software design. And so as we think about this, it's really changing from a two-way model of communication and interaction to a three-way or more discussion, which in the article we call human model interface experiences. And that's really thinking about it being a human, the interface they're working on, and then all of the things happening behind the scenes.

0:26:38.9 Ann Rich: And in order for someone to be successful with what you're designing, designers have to start understanding the technology behind it. They have to understand what the model will put out at the end and what's good about it, what's bad about it, what might need to be iterated. Because in order to deliver on the use case, you actually have to understand the technology. And it will change the interface. It will change how you communicate. It will change the content design. It will change the type of information you give to a user as they're waiting for a response. All of those are design moments. And for designers doing Figma and static design, that doesn't work anymore. You can't do a happy path conversational interface without knowing what the conversational interface is going to do and how it's going to behave, what the output is, what the user needs are, and what it can do on its own.

0:27:38.9 Ann Rich: And so it's a very big paradigm shift for me of, yeah, you have to be able to do great visual design and that may still be in Figma, but you also have to be really embedded with engineers and with the research to understand what material. It's almost like the paint is different. I think about it like our palettes of paints, like there's an entirely different paint. And if you don't have that paint, you can't actually finish the picture. You can't finish creating what you need to.

0:28:10.0 Kailey Raymond: I like that. It used to be two-way, now it's it's three-way. There's this additional layer of what if everybody had five assistants every single day that could run in the background and be doing all of this work? What does that change the way that you build products, the way that you communicate, the way that you can do anything? It is a massive kind of step forward. If an agent can run and, what is it? They can do like an eight-hour workflow now, right? Or they're getting close to that. Whoa, like productivity through the roof. The way that we're even designing job descriptions need to change immediately because eventually we're going to be all managers of agents. So how do you make sure that folks have that embedded into their skill set? Incredibly hard problem to solve.

0:28:59.4 Ann Rich: And ultimately, technology can only be successful if the people and processes support the technology. And so as we think about these technologies being brought in and introduced, if you design something that's too far ahead, it's not going to work in the current processes. But if you design for the current processes, it's not going to be far enough ahead. And so I think there's this sort of, it's like a true innovator's dilemma of which one do you design for? And that also goes back to working with customers and helping to reshape those processes and understand the people that they are putting into these processes and the way those expectations are changing. And so I do think there is this amazing moment of anyone who's ever done change management, it's like people process technology, and we are super focused on the technology and the impact of the technology. And ultimately, the people and the processes have to be able to support the use and that technology has to support them.

0:30:01.7 Kailey Raymond: It's usually the boring stuff that we tend to not think about enough that gets in the way of progress. Technology obviously moves way faster than our ability to catch. Our people and our processes up to to speed. It is an incredibly hard problem to solve. We've been in it since '22. Think about it. We're like, "Okay, great, the world's just changed. ChatGPT is going to completely change everything." And then you get MIT telling us that actually all of the AI pilots that have launched are not necessarily embedded, not necessarily giving ROI. And it's exactly what you're describing. It's because folks didn't focus on the people and the processes. And it's kind of this challenging loop we've been in for four years, but I really do believe that '26 is the year that it starts to take off in an earnest way. And AI will prove true ROI with folks and workflows will start to change. We've already seen a ton of wins come internally here. I'm sure you have a ton that you can talk about as well, which is actually what I want to ask you about. I want you to brag a little bit, Ann, which is, is there a project or something that you're really proud of that showed a really measurable difference for your users?

0:31:23.0 Ann Rich: One really big win was a customer co-innovation. And this was all around the launch of Firefly Design Intelligence, which launched late last year. And that was all built on the foundation of a co-innovation with Coca-Cola on Project Vision. And so this was really bringing designers and creative professionals together on what they needed to do and how they would like to scale their workflows, to remove the rote work, to remove the manual work and the redundant work, and really creating a solution that would enable them to scale. And so it was really putting the practitioner of these creative workflows at the center and defining what we call a style ID that allows them to bring in campaign guidelines, hero assets that have been created just for this campaign, custom model elements, different layouts, all the right logos, and to be able to dynamically on the fly generate different layouts using all the foundation of that the creative professional has created and really be able to allow that scale. So you don't have to go repeat and translate every single different one. If you're going to a different region, you don't have to suddenly go and find new assets.

0:32:46.1 Ann Rich: They're actually all in the asset repository that allows them to do it and being able to dynamically have semantic search that pulls in the right asset for the right food, let's say. And I think that was a huge win because it really focused on not taking away the work that was core to the team, which was doing these highly creative campaigns, doing those highly creative assets at the very beginning. Not taking any of that away, but allowing them to have the scale and to really scale into regional markets where there might not have been the ability to have content there. There might not have been the ability to have content that was relevant for that audience because as we talked about earlier, localization isn't just translating. And this allowed that scale to happen. So that was one that was really exciting and I think ties together a lot of what we've been talking about of the practitioner, the workflow they want, how to scale with them, and then how to really productize that and move beyond the single innovation into a big product.

0:33:48.6 Kailey Raymond: And you're talking to somebody whose team runs global campaigns. So what you're describing, really music to my ears personally to be able to actually hit people in a meaningful way wherever they are in the world with one unified campaign message and feeling. So that makes a ton of sense. I also like what you're saying with models, you would think that you would only build it for enterprises because enterprises are the only folks that would care or that would pay you or whatever. You're right, that's speaking to this shift around what's happening in the market today and the need for folks to really highly personalize and create and that's just an interesting one to watch. Maybe you've already mentioned what you're going to say here, but I'm I'm curious because we've been talking about process and people. Technology obviously is faster than that. We talked about these co-innovations which I think are leading you guys to build some really interesting things fast and with the future in mind. But what's an internal shift that helped your team design more effectively?

0:34:57.5 Ann Rich: One really important thing I really took to heart has been really changing the way I have thought about hiring over the last year plus and really thinking about what mindsets and what technical expertise are needed. And as I said, the visual craft is as important if not more important than ever. And you need people that can think technically and think about technology and painting in this new way. And so it's been a very interesting moment. And I think about it a little bit like the early days of the internet or the early days of mobile apps. I worked in a design consultancy and everyone needs an app era and it was like, "Why do we need an app?" It's like, "They don't need an app, but they want an app. So we're going to deliver an app." And like, "Who is that app serving? Do people want more apps in their phones?" It was that kind of question. And I've thought a lot about that because we're designing for interactions that may not even exist yet or that are using paradigms that are being used in different ways.

0:35:55.2 Ann Rich: And so we're also creating new paradigms in times of interaction. And so how do you get well versed across different modalities? The amount of curiosity, testing, leaning into new technologies, not just for productivity. But you have to know how to design in this way, using this medium, which means you have to understand how that is being done at scale in a variety of different ways. And so that is an internal shift in yes, people, but more in process and mindset. And I think the last thing that's been a big shift, and I think this is, we hear this a lot of places with like, "Full stack employees or shift left then shift right." But there is a changing expectation of design. And yes, the ability to be able to shift into different disciplines, be able to lean in. AI allows you to lean into skills and different things that you may not have been able to do before. And I think this is really unique for designers who used to be engineers or designers who were strategists as well. Those folks are going to lean in in different ways and are going to be able to drive a different power in different ways based on their full skill set.

0:37:05.2 Ann Rich: And so it's been really also uncovering like, who is really technically minded and who can drive forward more technical conversations versus who is really good at product strategy and research and can actually drive forward those customer innovations or product strategy and requirement definition. And so it's been really looking at the complete skill set of folks to be able to understand what AI should support them, what tools they should lean into, and really focusing on like, no one's saying it's not my job, but it's sort of who or what can help me do my job. Yet to an early draft or early version, but also being honest, like a cursor prototype isn't production ready. So what does it mean to make that production ready, which is a whole another thing.

0:37:51.9 Kailey Raymond: I always think about this when it comes to employees and hiring with your skills are a T. The top is breadth, the vertical is the depth. And I think for a really long time, especially with more siloed organizations, we really focused on the vertical part of our T. And everybody was going really deep and these skill sets. And I think that with AI, there's a really big shift towards the top of the T, which is, I don't know. Big guess, is that people with a lot of more diverse experiences that can think about problems from multiple different angles. Technical, yes, is going to be important, but really the biggest thing is curiosity. Are you going to lean into this problem and ask the questions and try to do things in a different way? Or are you going to lean back into the T, the vertical part of the T and go back to the tried and true, the things you've always. That might be a detriment to you in this era, which is just a very different shift than I think we've been seeing in the job market for quite a long time. And I've taken up a lot of your time today. I've learned a lot and I have just one last question for you, which is, do you have any advice for designers who are really looking to elevate their voice within product or executive conversations?

0:39:12.6 Ann Rich: One of my biggest pieces of advice is to focus on data and advocating for the user rather than an opinion. A lot of times design can seem like an opinion, but actually the design decision is often based or should be based, in my opinion, on data and user need rather than something that looks good. And if you do that, then when you're being questioned on the why or what's the impact? Why should we prioritize this against other things on the engineering backlog? You actually can have a very different conversation if there's data and user need at the heart. And it changes the whole conversation and it changes the way your cross-functional partners perceive you, the way executives perceive you, and the way they trust the work you've done because you're showing and proving that you have put the effort in and understand the why behind it.

0:40:15.6 Kailey Raymond: Excellent advice. I can think about five rebrands off the top of my head that basically did exactly that. Where you're like, "It was a no-name company and then they turned into this billion dollar brand, and it was data driven." So interesting. And thank you so much for chatting today. I think that you guys are really at the forefront of change that's happening in the industry right now and I learned a ton. I appreciate it.

0:40:39.1 Ann Rich: Thank you, Kailey. I really enjoyed the conversation.

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