Naming is hard, but have you tried working with people? with Guy Segal

I can’t believe I’m already saying this, but chat we only have TWO more episodes after this one and it’ll be the end of On Theme season one! 🥹 Time flies when you’re having fun dealing with a cultural polycrisis podcast editing delivering spicy takes! Stay tuned for an end-of-season wrap-up minisode and some ideas on what’s next for the show.

🎟️ p.s. have you gotten your ticket for the Into Design Systems conference yet? It’s coming up soon! Send my generous show sponsor some love and get your ticket to hear about a11y from experts like Cintia Romero and (past show guest!) Daniel Henderson-Ede, on Figma variables from expert YouTube star Mr. Biscuit, and portfolio guidance and ROI toolkits from Justine Montgomery and Romina Kavcic — an excellent lineup. See you there!

🎧 listen to Episode #15 with Guy Segal on the messy, complicated world of… working with other people!

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Guy Segal joins me to unpack the messy, complicated world of… people. Guy shares practical strategies from his experience at Thomson Reuters, including the powerful "pre-mortem" exercise he used to rebuild trust and alignment for the design system. We get vulnerable and unpack why (as cliche as it sounds!) genuine listening, storytelling, learning to give and receive feedback, and actively engaging with product teams, is so much more impactful than relying solely on processes or artifacts. Plus, Guy shares why he hated it at first when product teams started using the name of the design system.

🎧 Naming is hard, but have you tried working with people? with Guy Segal — #15 (65min)

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Elyse:

How do you start building that trust back [from a failed previous system] — like, you can't just say, oh, it's gonna be different this time, I swear!

How do you start communicating that, first to your design system team, and then getting them to communicate that to your product teams?

Guy:

I think the pre-mortem was very successful in that sense because it proved to the team that we are talking about this and we are going to be proactive. Again, not saying we got everything right. And we're still finding ourselves slipping into old habits, or forgetting to be as transparent as we can. But it's definitely better than if we didn't do that planning ahead.

I think the really big change [that helped] the team to understand that things might be a bit different this time, is any sort of external proof. Because I can tell the team, oh, it's gonna be different, people are gonna love this, everyone's gonna use it, adoption is gonna be at 120%!

But until they see people outside of the team, talk about the team, talk about the design system in a different way, that's not gonna make a difference. So when they hear the Chief Product Officer mention the design system in an all hands, that's a wow moment. Wow. Okay. It's not just us now. There's awareness of it.

And when the first team adopted a few components from the design system and were very positive about that experience, and talked about it, again, that's proof that things are happening. So you really have to seek and grab any sort of, I would call it testimonial, and evidence, that people are paying attention.

That's the first step.

Elyse:

So how do you start doing that? When you are also in this scenario where, like, you got brought in to make a new system or change the existing system. That takes time. Even for your own internal team, there's a time lag, between doing some of the work and actually seeing some of those testimonials.

What do you do in that interim period, before you have anything to show?

Guy:

That is the toughest period. It's always a question of, how soon after you start to work, people are gonna come to you and ask, when can we see some stuff? When, when are you starting to deliver the components?

I think what was really important is to talk about the design system, every opportunity I got. So one of the first things— after that pre-mortem and starting to do some of the work and gathering requirements and those kind of things— we picked a name for the design system, cause I really wanted to have a name that the team can rally around, and would be different from previous names of other design systems in the company.

And once we did, I made a big announcement, and I had our content designer write a story behind the name, and why it's called that. And we just announced the birth of the design system. There was nothing else to show at that point, but we had a name, we had an identity. And I tried to grab onto any of those opportunities.

So the next big milestone, we had the beginning of a Figma library. And again, we had a live event and we demonstrated it, and we explained how we got to it, and what's next. Really trying to find opportunities that demonstrates to the design system team that people are paying attention, and people care about what they do. Because if they don't feel people care about what they do, then again, motivation gets lost.

Elyse:

Yes. I love that. There's this really great quote from Brad Frost, he has an article called Choosing a Name for your Design System. He says, "A design system's name is its brand name, and that name becomes a shorthand that encapsulates and embodies what the whole effort is about."

I love that so much, because that rallies us around something, like, oh, we're doing it differently this time. And all of those little things start to build that, that trust, that sense of community, that sense of—maybe this is a little bit of a, like, spicy way to talk about it, but that sense of specialness—othering people can be really, really damaging, but we love to belong, we love to be part of an in-group, we love to have a label to apply to ourselves, to bring us together so it can be really positive as well.

And so when you have a group of people that's like, hey, we can all get behind this effort and we are the, what's the Thomson Reuters design system?

Guy:

Yeah. It's called Saffron.

Elyse:

Like, we're the Saffron team, we are on board. This product team, like we're so excited about this Saffron effort. That matters so much because people naturally really wanna belong to a thing, and when they belong to a thing, they wanna see it succeed.

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See you next episode!,

Elyse