Episode 31: Jose Coronado on Design Team Recruitment

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, hosts Lisa Welshman and Andy Vitale speak to Jose Coronado. Jose is the Global Head of Design Operations for JPMorgan Chase and spoke about the career path to his current role. He also spoke about the maturity of design ops in the workplace and how Jose tries to avoid an exclusion by design dynamic when establishing recruitment and onboarding processes. Jose also spoke about the myth of the lone superstar designer and the importance of team collaboration.

Lisa Welchman:

Well I want to ask you what type of recruiting you're doing right now and how is that all going during the Great Resignation, but before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself?

Jose Coronado:

Hello, I'm Jose. I am the Global Head of Design Operations for JP Morgan. Basically our team is responsible for delivering all the products, the services, the infrastructure, the technology, and all the programs that the people in the design team need to be successful. We basically create things like, for example, the onboarding program or delivering the tools that the team needs for doing design or research.

Andy Vitale:

Awesome. So, Jose, I mean, I would love to know we've chatted about our backgrounds in the past and for the people listening. Like how, how did you get to a point in your career that you're able to be the Global Head of Design Operations? Like what did that path look like to get you there?

Jose Coronado:

Okay. I can share a little bit of my personal story or you want just a professional story? Either way, I can...

Lisa Welchman:

Both of them, both of them.

Jose Coronado:

Okay.

Lisa Welchman:

'Cause I think that, I think that's what the real story is, right?

Jose Coronado:

Yep. So it's interesting. I usually never talk about myself, but lately I've been reflecting about it and my own personal story is relevant to where I came to be as a professional. So I'm originally from Columbia. My background is in industrial design and then I came to the U.S. to do my industrial design master's degree in the University of Kansas. And my first meeting with my advisor here in the U.S., I ask him, "What do I need to do?" And he goes like, "What do you want to do?" And I go like, "I don't know." So go do whatever you want and come back, talk to me. And so basically I did the same thing that I did in Columbia furniture, packaging, consumer electronics. And it was when I get into consumer electronics that I uncover interface design and never look back.

Jose Coronado:

And it was my own exploration forced by my advisor that basically put me in the path. And then the... Let's say in my 20 plus years of career, I went from enterprise technology, working with internal systems for organizations working in human capital management products. Then in the middle of my career, I did management consulting. So the big companies, McKinsey Accenture type of thing. And then I ended up in the bank. All of this path was basically through all the way down from individual contributor to managing a small team, to creating a global team of multidisciplinary design- research, content, visual design. And when I was in McKinsey, I got a call from, from a good friend of mine. And he said, "Hey, Jose, we want to start Design Operations practice in bank. Are you interested?" And I said, "Absolutely."

Jose Coronado:

So basically the path for design operations is, I see it in three different ways. You come from design leadership, like I did, you could come from design program management which many people come from that area because they put structure, they put processes, they put, they put the foundational pieces that teams need to be successful. And the third lens where people come from is business operations. So they are really good at the behind-the-scenes aspects of budgets, headcounts, things like that. And I think I have been able to assemble a team that combines those areas of expertise to bring a structure and the scaffolding. I was referring to it like putting the first Lego piece, and then you put the other blocks on top of it. And we have been building the foundation for what I consider a successful design operations in the bank with the team that I, we have been able to assemble.

Andy Vitale:

Awesome. Lisa, I know you have a question, but I feel like I have a segue to yours. So Jose, I would love for the people that aren't really familiar with design operations, even though you explained it at a pretty high level, like how do you actually operationalize design?

Jose Coronado:

That is a tough question to answer because there's so many dimensions, but I'm going to simplify it in a manner like this. People, processes, infrastructure, and programs. When I talk about people, I mean, without the people, we cannot operationalize anything. So we have to take care of our people. We need to make sure that they're healthy. We need to make sure that they don't get burnt out, especially during the crisis that we are all going through. So we have to provide the support in what I call the entire employee life cycle, from the hiring process, supporting that there's timely connections with the person that we don't spend three months talking to somebody, and then we ghost them for a while, and then we want to make an offer. With today's cycle of employee turnover and the market being so hot for design, and basically for every discipline, is extremely difficult.

Jose Coronado:

One thing that... One program that I created, for example, with the help of my team was an onboarding program. The first experience that you have with a team is during the interview process, but your first one as an employee is basically how you are onboarded. And I used to call it colloquially, week one was technology hazing week, and we needed to remove that friction. We needed to remove all the obstacles, the frustration, the waste of time. So that's basically how I mentioned enabling people, making sure that they have the technology, they have tools. They have the... Like all the processes that are supposed to happen actually happen, that nobody drops the ball on anything that needs to be done for the people that we bring on the team. From a process perspective, this is where the magic of design program management happens. How do we work? What kind of a place do we have available for the team? We have a design playbook that's very robust. Does every team uses the entire playbook? The answer is no, but people use many plays that we have defined in playbook. And when I mentioned plays, for example, discovery research, or user interviews, or journey maps, or concept sprints, or things like that.

Jose Coronado:

And then the last aspect is infrastructure. If you look at certain organizations that are growing, one might argue they have a Wild West perspective. Okay, you can use any tool. You can use any design system or any processes that you need. In an organization like ours first, because of security, we cannot do that. But we need to make sure that the designers use the same tools, that they can leverage the same libraries, templates, the design system that we have, that they have the right technology for communication, for collaboration, for everything else. So those are the kind of things that we do behind the scenes to enable the design team from a design operations perspective.

Lisa Welchman:

So you've mentioned your kind of sideways way of getting into your vocation, right and so, but it's probably, I'm not sure how old you are and you don't have to tell me, but it's more mature now and there it's more targeted. So if you were talking to sort of younger folks who are trying to break into this arena right now, and before we started recording this podcast, we were... I was kind of teasing you a little bit about, talking about recruit recruitment right now, which at the time that we're taping this podcast is very, very difficult, right? There's a lot of turnover and there seems to be a scarcity of resources. So things are really challenging, but even within that context, how, what tips would you give people who are trying to just sort of break in at starting? I don't work in the design field and one of the things that I notice online is a lot of junior resources saying they don't want junior people. They want like a junior job requires seven years worth of experience or five. So what do you see going on in that and kind of what tips would you give folks for navigating that?

Jose Coronado:

Well, that is a multifaceted question.

Lisa Welchman:

That's my specialty. I can't just ask a straightforward, I have to ramble into seven questions at once but... I'll step back.

Jose Coronado:

Yeah. I'll start with the last part, because this is very close and dear to my heart. And Andy knows these. I think designers claim, we claim that we are the champions of empathy, but we are not, we are, well, to some extent. Let me rephrase that. We're very good at exclusion by design. And the scenario that you just described, the junior designer needed five years of experience and stellar portfolio required. That is not inclusion. That is not empathy for, for people that need to help develop. We need to help develop the next generation of designers. So since I joined the bank, one of the programs that I have finally been able to successfully launch is a design development program, which is basically cohort for interns and a cohort for a two year apprenticeship for people with zero years of experience.

Jose Coronado:

Actually so, for the interns it's before they even graduate. I wanted to make it a little bit more expansive than people with a certified accredited education. I wanted to include career switchers, but for some logistical reasons and bank restrictions, I couldn't do it. However, the bank does have programs, for example, in software engineering program where their target for a particular program that they launched was code boot camps. So it is not that they don't exist. It's the fact that they exist in very scarce scenarios. So I tell you this story because I think it is our responsibility as established design leaders in whatever field of industry you are, to create the opportunities for junior people. They are going to be the next us. If we don't do that, we're going to kill the next generation of leaders or the next generation of leaders is going to take a long time to develop. And as you mentioned, there's plenty of opportunity. We're just defining criteria that sometimes is artificial to fill those roles. So that's the first, and as you can tell, I'm very...

Lisa Welchman:

You're passionate about it.

Jose Coronado:

I'm very passionate. And also, like, very upset with ourselves because we have created those barriers of exclusion. And that is not fair, is not fair with our peers, it is not fair with the people who want to break into design. And many of them have shown more grit and desire and discipline that many of us have shown in many situations. So I think they're well deserving of those opportunities.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah I mean you bring up a really good point there because for me, in my generation of folks who work in digital spaces, let's just even more broadly, we kind of wiggled our way into it on the back of the evolving web and internet, right. There weren't any skills, if you saw an opportunity you could dip right in, and those corridors have hardened now. There's doors and places to go, and I think that we're not always sensitive- I'm really glad that you brought this up- sensitive to the fact that they can't navigate it the way we did, because it's a completely different world.

Andy Vitale:

Right. You know, I think about the barriers that we created. So when we all got involved in what we do, there were like Lisa said, different pathways and as you learned as you went, but as our industry has seemingly gotten more and more mature and have different programs and degrees that people can go to learn and get that foundational knowledge, what we're seeing is, as we know that we need to look for different perspectives and different backgrounds and increase the amount of diversity that we bring to the table on our teams, you know, the schools that we look to recruit from now are the schools that don't necessarily have design programs. So if you look at the historically black colleges and universities, there's some that have industrial design, some that have psychology that ties to research or sociology, but there's not a lot of those schools that have true design programs.

Andy Vitale:

They're starting to add technology programs. So it, I think, although our job postings, don't say that... They kind of do, they cover like years of experience or equivalent degrees or something. But for those entry level, we're looking from, at our internships now from a different lens so that we can attract people that don't have that background that our traditional designers have come in through. But I know that doesn't happen everywhere. And Jose, I know you're also doing similar things at your company, so how's it been? How's it, how's it been going?

Jose Coronado:

I feel, well, we kind of steer away, I mean it's still in the same trend of Lisa's or, you know, question, which I didn't get to the second part.

Lisa Welchman:

That's okay, pick any of the seven questions I ask.

Jose Coronado:

But talking about the diversity recruiting, I think one of the efforts that I have been very explicit and intentional about is in this specific design development program, we met with the sourcing people, we met with the recruiters, and we told them this has to be a diverse cohort. So what was interesting, we got, several hundred applicants, we got the finalist and the ratio was around 60/40 male to female, female to male ratio, and about 80% people of color and different underrepresented groups. The final recruiting number was 80% female and maintain the 80% ratio of people of color underrepresented groups. My bottom of the story on this one is that representation matters. When you have one person of an underrepresented group or a woman against nine of the same, chances are that single person doesn't have a, don't stand a chance in terms of being picked in that short number of 10. But when you have five to five or seven to five, seven to three, or, you know, eight to two, chances are a little bit more balanced in terms of what you can can achieve. It's not easy. It requires a lot of work, but hey, why are we here if not to do the hard aspect of that work?

Lisa Welchman:

Well, yeah, I mean, you are a design leader and you are designing your organization and the inclusivity and the diversity and the existence of varying viewpoints can only strengthen the work.

Jose Coronado:

Oh my goodness, spot on.

Lisa Welchman:

So I think you would be remiss to not do that job, right?

Jose Coronado:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And so I think that's the point that people miss sometimes. They often think it's, of it as like, oh, it's a handout. And I, the way that I've always seen inclusivity is that these people are going to enhance your organization and make it better. And they're going to bring perspectives in that you weren't able to think of before, because these people weren't here. And so I would really love to see that sort of dialogue change from being sort of like, oh, we're doing you a favor by bringing in you and allowing you to have this opportunity, to almost the opposite is, which is lucky you. You get to have all of these people inside of your organization who are going to bring all of this other opportunity.

Jose Coronado:

Absolutely. I think one concept that I have been talking about for a while, many people talked about culture fit. I prefer to use the culture add perspective, because if you fit in the culture, you're going to fit into a mold, into a... You know, for example, well, I will not name any names, but okay, you hire for one school. Well, everybody's going to be have common ,kind of similar things, but if you hire from one school, hire from a person with non-degree, hiring a person from a career switcher, which brings me to your question originally, how do you recruit for design operations?

Lisa Welchman:

You brought it home. You did bring it.

Jose Coronado:

How do you recruit for design operations? Well, the universal designer answer, it depends. And the reason I'd say that is because, for example, and we are going to get into it, into the heat of the hiring comment or hiring questions that you have burning, I need to improve our hiring process. So what do I look for? Do I look for a designer or do I look for like a person with some HR background or some recruiting background or some talent sourcing background? Well, I guess you know what my answer is going to be. I don't look for a designer. I look for maybe an HR person who has experience with a recruiting designers or an HR person who has the little experience or a person with a nontraditional background that has been doing some sort of recruiting. And that's exactly what we brought to the team, a person with totally different skills than that, what would be a fit to who, to what we have, but actually an important supplement to address a gap that we had in terms of the skillset that we have.

Jose Coronado:

So how do we, or how do I recruit for, for design operations and I'll get into a larger design team perspective. So for design operations, I'm a little bit more flexible than for design but one thing that we are looking for is people who have experience with design teams and it could be in-house, or in agencies could be small groups, could be large groups, many people that come to my team come from like a team of one or two design operations people. And they go like, "Oh, you know, there was no opportunity to grow. We want to go where there's support, where there's established leadership, where there's programs to grow for."

Jose Coronado:

Another perspective is it would be great, but not for me is not as critical breaking point, if you have what I call enterprise or complex domain experience. So I mentioned human capital management. I mentioned enterprise software. I mentioned enterprise technology, those are non-financial services, but it doesn't matter because we can teach you the financial service domain.

Lisa Welchman:

Right.

Jose Coronado:

And that's one of the biggest myths about like JP Morgan recruiting for designers? What, what is that? How, we didn't even know that JP Morgan had a design team. And many people think, and get initially turned off by the idea of, I don't have design financial services experience, therefore I'm not able to get there.

Jose Coronado:

So that's why I define kind of the domain perspective as complex applications. I never said financial services.

Lisa Welchman:

Right.

Jose Coronado:

Because we can actually help you that. And what, the reason I mentioned the flexibility between design operations and the design team at large is because we haven't covered over the last three years, that when we bring people from not complex domains or small teams, they have a lot more difficulty acclimating to a large complex organization, large complex product programs. So that's why we are kind of always refining what kind of profile can we make and support to be successful in the organization. And that's one of them. The other key characteristic, and this applies across the board, is kind of the saying of always be learning, always being curious, always being able to ask questions. If you don't come from financial services, you have to be very open to learn in your domain.

Jose Coronado:

You have to be very vulnerable to ask questions that you think maybe are silly questions, but they're critical to help you understand the domain area that you are working on. So those are two critical things. And then the third aspect that we look for is a person that has the ability to build relationships and create a strong partnerships. I've been talking about these. Sometimes I do it in the keynotes, and sometimes I just do it in conversations with designers, but the myth of the Lone Ranger designer, the superstar designer that just went away and created something magnificent and did a big reveal are a long way gone. And even those figures that we keep in the back of our, in posters or in memes, and we shared their thoughts, they never worked alone. They have gigantic teams to support them and make possible the fantastic designs that they put in the market.

Jose Coronado:

So I think it is very, very critical that the person is of a collaborative mindset and is able to develop strong relationships in the case of design with traditional products and technology. And in terms of design operations, with legal, with compliance, with security, with vendor management, with technology engineering, with all the other teams that we usually as designers don't have to deal with. But because we are the enablers of the team, we're the ones that have the protecting walls. So they, so the team doesn't have to deal with all that stuff. So those are I think the three key characteristics that, of the way that we look for bringing people to the team.

Andy Vitale:

So Jose, you know, you and I both know that when someone's starting a design operations practice, a lot of times it's the leader or the leadership team creating this list of things that they want to tackle in order to mature the practice. And what happens is it becomes a side hustle. And in everybody's spare time, they're moving the needle on like 15 things, 2% here, 2% there. So what advice would you give for someone that maybe is, has that small team, or potentially is ready to actually formalize their design ops practice? What are some of the things that you may tell them that they should do, or how they start to explain that they need this practice and what the value it will provide to the organization is?

Jose Coronado:

Yeah, so it's very interesting because I think you and I came to the same conclusion about design operations. When we were leading a team, whether it's a global or regional or local, we were doing the recruiting, we were doing the onboarding, we were doing the tool selection, we were doing the design system, we were doing... I mean, we were responsible and accountable for all of those things. And maybe about seven years ago, or five years ago, a few people started coming up with a concept of design operations and what it meant to our industry. And I think the initial realization is about time saving and areas of concentration. So for example, if you're the design leader and you are investing time in the tooling and the standardization of processes, you're not investing the time into managing up and managing across and building those relationships across with your peers in design, in technology, with your peers in product, with the executive groups that are sponsoring your team and where you are showing them the value.

Jose Coronado:

So I think one of the areas for people to demonstrate the value of design operations is about how much time do we give back to the design team to actually focus on designing, researching, relationship building value demonstration. And that is, that was actually the way in which I was able to demonstrate the need for design program management in the bank. And we were able to show how we gave time back to the designers and the design leads. And we were able to create some solid infrastructure.

Jose Coronado:

And we added more, one more Lego piece to the puzzle, to the foundation of the building blocks of the team that needed to be there. So that's one way that we go about doing it. And you don't have to start with a team of 10. I mean, I started, when I got brought in, I started with a team of one, then two, then four, then eight, then 16. But it has been a gradual evolution, I've been asking for 10 people from day one, but they said, "Show me the value, and then we'll show you some." So it's an, obviously you can ask, you can be left out of the room, or you can get some, and then that's basically the growing process and the evolution of the growth of the team.

Lisa Welchman:

I always, I find this conversation around ops and a word we haven't said in this conversation, but near and dear to my heart, governance, interesting. Because just natively for me the way I think it's like, of course you can't do it without governance and ops. Like what would make you think that you could build anything big, you're like saying, "We're going to the moon, but we're not going to be organized about it." Right. We're just going to... So I'm, it's good, but I guess what it really points to, like we were talking about with how people are being recruited is just a sense of maturity that's happening in our industry and around the work that we do. And so I think it's really good to hear that. And I think people are going to be really happy to hear all of these kind of detailed tips that you've given them on how they can do that. And maybe you'll get some people to want to come and work for you, too. So I think we are kind of at the end here. Yeah. I'm going to ask the Andy question. So how... I'm learning how to be Andy. So the question is, if people want to get in touch with you, how can they get in touch with you?

Jose Coronado:

So I am very active in Twitter. Coronado. So J-C-O-R-O-N-A-D-O one. And in LinkedIn, Jose Coronado. And you look, there's no, I mean, there's plenty of Jose Coronado, but there's only one at the bank, so at JP Morgan. Or I'm also a keynote speaker in many, many events during the pandemic. I haven't done much public speaking, but conferences are restarting and hopefully we'll get a chance to see each other in person in a design or leadership event soon.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Hopefully the fun will start again.

Jose Coronado:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, thank you so much for giving us time today. We appreciate it.

Jose Coronado:

I really, really appreciate the invitation. Thank you for a candid conversation. I mean, some of these topics are, as I mentioned, very passionate and to some extent, to some people might be controversial, but I think we all have a role to play to make our industry better. And that's basically my message that I would like to leave away for people.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, amen to that.

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