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A podcast about design, diving in with leaders IC and managers from the design world.
00:00
The difference between a senior and a staff is a senior will do that sometimes when the opportunity arises, and when they do, they do it to good level of execution.
00:11
A staff is always looking for those opportunities and can identify them.
00:16
We don't have just people managers here and deal.
00:19
Being able to execute
00:20
at a high level in that vertical, know the work that's going on to a high level of detail in that vertical, know the designers to a high level of detail in that vertical.
00:30
Welcome to the Craft of Design, a podcast about
00:34
designers, how they level up their craft as an AC or as a manager.
00:40
Today's guest is Mark Aquino.
00:43
Mark is one of the amazing group design managers here at Deal
00:48
And we're just gonna dive in and get to know you, Mark, try to understand uh what got you to design
00:55
So maybe we can start there.
00:57
Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to designing.
01:01
Yeah, so super excited to to be here and and
01:04
chat with you.
01:05
So like a little bit about myself, Canadian, living in Spain, father of of two children, uh husband to an amazing wife, all the you know, all the good stuff.
01:14
As far as like getting into design goes
01:17
I always tell people I didn't really take the traditional path into design.
01:20
I didn't go to school for anything uh design related.
01:24
Actually I went to school for psychology and I was very focused on
01:28
behavioral psychology and the impacts of sleep on behavior and things like this.
01:32
So I did a lot of uh I did my placement in a sleep clinic.
01:36
So, you know, kind of fell backwards into design, I'd say.
01:40
But
01:40
Um the story is kind of interesting.
01:42
So while I was in university, uh my group of friends and I uh came up with this crazy idea for a business where we were
01:50
looking to bring uh electronic dance music artists from Europe into Canada because the the scene in Canada
02:00
wasn't that big.
02:01
It was hard to find parties and and things like this that were that were EDM focused or if there was, like it would be small time artists that, you know, didn't draw a big crowd.
02:12
So we came up with this idea and we created a business called Echo Drop Entertainment.
02:16
It was first called Zodiac, but that was copyrighted and so we couldn't use it.
02:21
So we changed the company name to Echo Drop.
02:24
We learned very quickly that, you know, that's a much more difficult business to get into than one might imagine.
02:30
Uh a lot of working with agencies, a lot of really late nights trying to catch people first thing in the morning in Europe, things like this.
02:37
So
02:38
We held that business together for uh uh I want to say almost three years.
02:43
Uh and then we ended up being fortunate enough that uh
02:47
a little bit of a larger company came along and said, Hey, you know, we're kind of really interested in what you built.
02:51
And in that time we'd been working with uh design agencies, dev shops, things like this to to try and create a mobile app 'cause we were trying to get really big on university campuses.
02:59
We figured that would be our niche.
03:01
And so when when we originally sold that, I I moved over to the agency side.
03:05
One of the agencies we worked with basically said, Hey, like come on, we'll keep you as a consultant for the entertainment space.
03:11
Like, you know, you seem to know your stuff there.
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But that quickly devolved into me working with the design teams.
03:17
Um I I had already had some experience like building websites and things like this.
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So it was kind of a natural
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transition for me.
03:25
So I did that for a couple years.
03:27
And around this time, uh so this would have been now twenty
03:34
The big banks in Canada were moving away from, you know, bringing external agencies in to build their products to start building their first product teams.
03:43
And so I moved over into consulting, helped some of the banks build out their first teams.
03:47
So BMO, Scotia Bank, RBC, for any Canadians listening.
03:52
I worked with them to build out some of their first design teams.
03:55
And that's kind of like how my
03:57
career started from there it was really easy to start moving into the the private sector and say like hey you know I'm really good at building teams like are you looking to build a design team are you looking to build a product team
04:08
And so I started joining companies under that guise.
04:12
I started working with this company called Intellects, where I would say kind of a majority of my my
04:18
career growth happened.
04:20
I was fortunate enough to have a a great boss mentor.
04:23
His name's Ray Canani.
04:24
He's an amazing guy.
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So I learned a lot from him there.
04:28
A lot about product mindset.
04:30
A lot about, you know
04:31
how to act within a product team that was working in the business and took that forward in my career.
04:38
I was asked by one of the investors from Intellex to move over to another company he was investing in called Procurify.
04:44
joined there and yeah that was my first kind of actual full time management gig and from there it's just been managing teams.
04:53
I joined Deal in
04:56
In twenty twenty three at the time there was forty designers.
05:00
And yeah, the I I joined the payroll team.
05:03
Payroll was a new product at the time.
05:05
There was four designers on the team.
05:07
Uh and since then we've scaled it up to
05:10
uh 25 designers on the team and now deal itself I think has a hundred designers almost.
05:16
So yeah, it's been it's been quite the journey here at Deal and and looking back on the career, it's it's kind of cool to draw that through line through everything.
05:25
You made it sound like super smooth how you moved from IC towards management.
05:31
You've mentioned at the beginning already that uh even in the banks
05:35
You were building teams.
05:36
Can you tell me a little bit about like how that got translated?
05:39
Yeah, so that's a good point.
05:41
I I've I've gotten really good at kind of smoothing over this conversation from like interviews and stuff.
05:46
So
05:47
The first thing to say is when I first started consulting, I didn't know what I wanted to be doing with my consulting.
05:54
I didn't know if I wanted to be joining a
05:56
an already established team and working as an IC or or whatever.
06:00
So I did that a few times.
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But then there was a couple of times where I joined as, you know, the first or second design hire.
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And then the company was like, hey, you know, we want to expand, we want to grow.
06:09
And um
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It I I think like I've always I've always leaned into leadership very naturally.
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Uh when I was younger I was in this program in Canada called Sea Cadets.
06:19
It's kind of like pre-navy type of thing.
06:22
And so there I built like a lot of leadership skills.
06:24
And so it was always very natural for me to lean in and say, hey, this process that we have is a working.
06:29
Hey, we need to look for this type of person to balance out the team.
06:32
And I think
06:34
After enough of those conversations, people started saying, like, hey, okay, like, you know, you we need this process, like, why don't you go and build it and drive the the adoption and
06:44
Um, you do that a couple of times and uh that was kind of how my consulting trajectory went, I would say.
06:52
And then I realized, hey, I'm really good at this like process building, team building thing.
06:56
So I started positioning myself as a consultant.
06:58
I was like, hey, I'll come in and help revamp the team you already have.
07:02
I'll create new processes.
07:04
I'll help you hire.
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I'll, you know, find good talent.
07:07
And then from there it was very easy to say, like, okay, actually like I'm just building teams.
07:11
Um so when BMO, uh BMO for Canadians reached out and said, Hey, like we're we're building our first team.
07:17
We have a couple designers, but we're looking for people to come in and help us scale this out.
07:21
It was a very natural, like, hey, you know, I know what I'm doing in this field, like I'll come on, I'll help you.
07:26
This is these, you know, these are the the KPIs we'll hit.
07:29
These are these are the the milestones we'll look for.
07:32
And
07:33
I'd say that was kind of the big break between like kind of quasi-leadership into like actual, okay, we're we're building a team now.
07:41
This is my job.
07:43
When you look at
07:45
the changing of the jobs and I'm sure that in any workplace you have learned new things.
07:50
You'd have to adapt to different types of organizations, processes, speed.
07:55
quality organizational structure that impacted.
07:59
Can you maybe walk us through some of the more interesting ones?
08:04
Yeah.
08:05
So I mean the obvious one would be to talk about DL, right?
08:07
But I'll I'll leave that for a little bit.
08:09
Um
08:10
It it's kind of crazy to think about because back then like everyone was talking about agile, right?
08:16
And how agile could fit into these big enterprise
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banks or big enterprise organizations.
08:23
And so I feel like there was a lot of struggle at the beginning trying to figure out like, hey, as a design team, how do we work agile alongside these development teams?
08:33
And
08:34
people, at least where I was URC, hadn't quite figured out how to embed designers into development teams in a way that
08:44
that gave designers the space to do what they needed to do well and gave developers kind of a a good way to inspect what the outcomes would be from design.
08:52
So it was hard to plan.
08:53
And so we tried a lot of things like
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you know, d designers would be in the same sprint as devs, but working on things from the next sprint and, you know, that dual track agile things like this.
09:05
Um speed
09:08
at the time was it was looked at, but it was more like throughput on the dev side.
09:13
Like designers were just expected to keep up, I guess.
09:16
Like there wasn't really any
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pressure speedwise outside of hey make sure you're not blocking the dev team.
09:23
Um but what I found at that time, especially working in enterprises, like the pace of the organization was super slow.
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So
09:30
while it felt like we were always releasing, it felt like the organization itself was never launching anything.
09:36
Like there was never any big like, wow, we did this, you know, crazy thing that's changing the industry or in that sense, I guess like
09:44
Yeah, I came up in my career in this kind of slow paced, like, you know, hey, keep up with the dev team, but you know, don't expect any big bang releases or anything like this.
09:53
And I think as I started moving into smaller organizations or organizations that were still in like their series rounds of funding
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I started seeing the other side of that that coin where it's like, okay, you know, we we've made these promises to to investors.
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Uh, we have our quarterly roadmap, we need to be accountable to it.
10:11
So design, you know, you need to be
10:14
two weeks ahead of development and if you're not now it's a problem we're monitoring i the roadmap and if if you don't have artifacts ready for next sprint, you know, that's that's a performance issue.
10:26
So for that stage of my career, it became like, okay, so to do my job well, I need to make sure that not only am I
10:34
thinking ahead and I am I strategizing and making sure that design has a path forward and knows, you know, kind of what the North Star is.
10:42
But I have to make sure that my team can also deliver on a runtime.
10:46
And so
10:47
uh creating good processes, creating uh a place where designers felt like, you know, they could raise their hand and say, hey, there's a risk and and we addressed our risk quickly became super important.
10:59
Uh and I think all of that kind of prepared me for joining Deal where all of a sudden, you know, speed was something that was super important.
11:07
And, you know, we're talking two and a half years ago at Deal.
11:10
Uh it's even changed a little bit at Deal now, but
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Two and a half years ago a deal, it was like speed is the most important thing, you know.
11:17
Uh we have to get things out there quickly.
11:19
We're we're the newcomers in the market.
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So there's a lot of table stake features that we don't have and
11:24
if we want to be able to compete in the sales theater, you know, we need to have these these things, especially for a new product like payroll.
11:31
So tight deadlines, one week sprints, um you're quickly requirement gathering, knocking out a prototype.
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you know, sharing it with the wider organization or with a client saying, this is how everything, and then kicking that over the fence to engineering.
11:46
I felt ready for it because of my past experience, but also it was something completely new in the
11:51
in the velocity of not only having to have artifacts ready, but seeing them get launched as well in that kind of quick time period.
11:58
Uh especially like in the payroll side of deal.
12:01
Things have matured a lot.
12:03
Uh we're not working on one week sprints anymore for the most part.
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Um the teams actually have time to say, like, hey, this is where we want to go.
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And actually, designers are in this place where
12:14
We can take time for ourselves, craft a vision, say like, hey, we know this part of the product's broken.
12:20
Uh we know
12:22
e there's a lot of things we can do to improve this area heuristically, right?
12:26
So designers will work on that in their in their spare time or as kind of like a pet project and then
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you know, once every quarter, once every two quarters, we could come forward with this really cool vision, present it to the engineering partners and our product partners and get buy-in for that and that becomes part of the roadmap.
12:42
And so
12:42
It it's kind of cool to watch that evolution, I guess, over not only in the course of my career, but even my time at Dio.
12:48
Many people probably do not understand what is payroll.
12:53
What it entails why do you need twenty-five people working on something like and like designers working on something like this?
12:59
Tell us a little bit about Peril.
13:00
What is it?
13:01
Yeah, so Peril's my baby.
13:03
Uh-oh.
13:03
I I'm not working on it anymore now, but I'll talk a little bit about it because uh I think it it marked a a really important milestone in my career.
13:11
It's like one of the
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first times in my career, I've really felt proud of something that I've built alm you know almost from the ground up, right?
13:19
So payroll really, really interesting.
13:22
For for anyone that hasn't worked in HR Tech or or payroll.
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you think of payroll and you think like, Oh yeah, you know, I got my payslip, money ends up in my bank.
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Like how complicated can it be, right?
13:33
And to a certain extent, like on the worker side, that's that's true.
13:37
Well, you know, on the worker side we need to present, you know, a clean pay slip experience and
13:42
We need to help you understand, you know, the breakdown of your of your pay slip.
13:47
But on the actual client side, on our on our customer side of things, there's
13:52
There's a process that goes into running pay rate.
13:55
Um so at a very, very high level, that process is typically you're going or a payroll team in any organization.
14:02
Let's let's keep a deal agnostic for now.
14:04
A payroll team in any organization will fill out this thing called a payroll report.
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And that payroll report will have a list of employees on the vertical axis.
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And on the horizontal axis is kind of every line item that can feed into a pacelet.
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To keep it simple.
14:21
It's like line items on a pacelet.
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So think like salary, bonus, PTO, uh any kind of benefits you receive.
14:30
So once those companies
14:32
fill out this this report, it will get sent to whoever the payroll processor is, uh, provided, you know, they do processing outside their own organization.
14:41
That payroll processor will then need to take that report and upload it into a country-specific software and that software's entire job
14:50
is to take that report and translate it into something that is uh locally compliant, meets all the regulations, either in that country or in that state or province of that country.
15:04
And then on the other side it was spit out a pay slip that is compliant with local laws.
15:11
That payslip also comes attached basically with something that companies can bring to their bank.
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And that that something is basically a breakdown of how much money needs to go to which employees and and you know it helps facilitate the payment process.
15:26
So what that looks like a deal is we've had to create um two separate environments, right?
15:32
So we've got our client environment where they can go and they can upload their payroll report or they can manually adjust their payroll report in the UI.
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That gets sent to deal.
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Deal does the magic of converting it into locally compliant payroll outputs.
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And that gets sent back to the client.
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Client then needs to approve it.
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Once it's approved, you know, we can kick off the process of, okay, here's your liabilities report, here's your gross to net report
15:58
Um, here's the final version, your payroll report, here's what you need to take to your bank or what you need to pay to deal for us to send to the bank
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So that's kind of what that looks like on the client side.
16:09
But then on deal side, we've created another environment where we can ingest these reports sent to us by clients, do all the manipulations that we need to do, create the pay slips.
16:20
quality, uh, you know, QA those payslips, make sure that there's no problems, and also kind of triage ad hoc requests from clients because
16:30
You know, the the way I've explained it is very much the happy path of I submit my record and everything's correct.
16:35
But more often than not, a client or payroll person might forget a line item on a particular employee or
16:43
someone's joined halfway through the cycle and they want them to be paid with everyone else or they need to create an off-cycle for whatever reason because uh they want to give a bonus to this
16:54
particular person or there's a siding bonus that needs to go out or the you know there's a million reasons why you might want to change payroll in the middle of a run.
17:01
So we needed to create an environment that facilitates that conversation between our clients and our
17:06
our payroll experts, but also gives our payroll experts the space to manipulate the data and create pay slips and check the outputs and all of this kind of stuff.
17:15
So uh on the surface, yeah, it seems super
17:18
Simple, right?
17:19
But there's a lot that goes on on the kind of back end back office side of things to make payroll run smoothly to pay one point five million people around the world.
17:30
You mentioned that there could be some issues, some things that could happen.
17:35
You also mentioned the concept of cycle.
17:37
Can you tell us a little bit about what what is a cycle?
17:41
What can go what else can go wrong?
17:42
Like what what have you seen that went wrong in the past?
17:45
Yeah, a cycle is just essentially like a work period that people will be paid for.
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Um depending on the country you live in, those cycles could look different, right?
17:54
So for instance, I grew up in Canada, those cycles are typically two weeks, in some instances weekly maybe.
18:02
But now I live in Europe.
18:03
I live in Spain.
18:04
It those cycles are month long.
18:06
So it's basically just the pay period that you're being paid for and what that looks like kind of on the HR side or on the on the payroll expert side is
18:16
While that week or two weeks or one month is ongoing, there's a bunch of steps that they need to do to make sure that you'll be paid on time.
18:23
And there's different cutoff dates for
18:25
Some of those steps to make sure that, you know, the people processing payroll, with people putting payroll inputs into the system have enough time to do it properly.
18:33
One of the biggest problems that Deal had when I first joined was we had look
18:38
I think it was something like thirty percent client late submission rate on payroll, which, you know, on the back end on the operations side of things a deal caused absolutes mayhem, right?
18:49
You think like
18:50
In some countries, again, you only have a one week time or yeah, in some companies, some industries, you have a one week timeline to try and get payroll out for the next week and thirty percent of your clients are submitting late.
19:03
uh and you have a limited amount of payroll experts that can service this client, you know, you that's when mistakes start happening, that's when
19:11
payment can be delayed, you know.
19:13
Um it's a very scary time to be young on the payroll expert and and miss a payment date.
19:20
And then there's some countries where if you miss a payment date, it's a huge fine
19:24
So there's a lot of like legal and compliance issues with it as well.
19:27
So one of our first projects in Tayroll was actually to try and reduce the amount of
19:34
late payroll submissions.
19:36
And and so this ended up becoming like a complete overhaul of what our payroll product looked like when I first joined it was a lot of tables and charts and
19:43
There was this kind of supporting system called the payroll calendar, which was just essentially another table full of dates, and clients had to memorize these dates.
19:55
and times to know when things needed to be submitted.
19:58
And obviously like they don't live on the deal platform, right?
20:02
Uh and and we didn't make it easy to reference when those dates and times where it was hidden behind three or four clicks.
20:09
So clients would just kind of continue their business as usual.
20:12
They knew they'd submit payroll at some time this week, but not quite knowing exactly when.
20:18
And so that led to a lot of the problems.
20:20
So we ended up doing a lot of exploration, a lot of working with our clients, a lot of working with internal
20:26
payroll experts to say like, hey, well it would be a really cool way then not only can we reduce the late submission rate
20:35
But we can also help our operations team to reduce the error rate.
20:39
Uh, and we can provide our clients like a really cool UI that would help set deal apart from a lot of the competition.
20:45
And we ended up landing on this really neat kind of timeline feature that will follow you throughout our payroll application.
20:51
So when you land on it, you would see a timeline of all your different entities.
20:55
Uh and for those that don't know, an entity is just a a collection of
21:00
Uh just to keep it simple, it's a collection of people that needed to be paid in the same kind of cadence, let's say.
21:06
So you would see a list of your entities uh and a timeline for each of those entities online.
21:11
certain actions need to be performed and when they were due.
21:14
And then if you clicked into one of those entities, that same timeline would follow you, but it would be in much more detail now and even see the breakdown of exactly
21:22
what process within within that timeline is currently happening on the deal side, what should be happening on the client side.
21:29
Uh and it was really, really cool.
21:31
We got to work with some awesome organizations.
21:33
on that timeline feature and when it went out it it kind of came out to uh good customer uh reception that'd say.
21:42
So you mentioned at the beginning deal had to do lots of things to get to table stakes
21:47
Are we now in a place where we're like amazing?
21:50
Is it is it incredible or like what what are the key advantages that we have in this
21:57
I would say it's as a payroll product now, deals you know, if I say so myself, deals probably one of the one of the better experiences around my managing payroll on the client side that the that exists through the market.
22:08
And I say that like
22:10
being the one that was there while it was built, but it's true.
22:13
I think the the UI and the the client experience really helps.
22:19
make sure that you you can't make mistakes and if you do make a mistake, it's very, very easy to solve that we've got a a payroll support module that's baked right into the cycle.
22:30
So, you know, you don't have to go looking for like some separate chat or anything else.
22:34
You just open the cycle and say, hey, you know, payroll specialist.
22:38
I'll be your payroll specialist for my organization.
22:41
I messed this up as important.
22:42
Can you fix it?
22:43
And and you can tell me if if you can do that in this cycle or if we need to kick off an off cycle or whatever the remedy might be.
22:49
So it's all in there in context.
22:51
That's
22:52
A really cool experience.
22:54
I'm super proud of it actually.
22:55
Our next steps is looking at, okay, great.
22:59
How do we, from an operations standpoint, make this even better?
23:02
How do we make it so we don't have to wait?
23:04
for this processing of the report.
23:06
How do we make that happen instantly and in real time?
23:09
So clients can make a change on the report and see in real time how that will affect the pay slips.
23:14
And s and we can already do that in a couple countries.
23:16
Canada recently launched
23:18
So you mentioned that that's not what you're doing now.
23:21
What what are you working on now?
23:23
Uh recently I've transitioned over to our growth and our lifecycle teams.
23:28
Uh growth is exactly what it sounds like.
23:30
What people would assume is, you know, how do we drive product-led growth across the organization?
23:34
How do we enable clients to get started with deal in an easy way?
23:40
You know, is there a
23:42
Can we identify a subsection of clients that, you know, maybe don't need to go through the traditional sales processes and uh things like that?
23:50
Can we almost consumerize what our product is and make it that
23:54
someone from a small organization can just log on, put in some credit card details and get started with deal.
23:59
Uh so that's the growth side and then the life cycle side is something really interesting.
24:04
Recently we've made a lot of changes to our architecture.
24:09
in and how we built our app ideal that allows for us now to focus on individuals and the experience ideal regardless of what kind of relationship they have with other employer.
24:23
So
24:23
You know, for those that don't know, there's a bunch of different relationships you can have with an employer.
24:27
You can be a contractor at your uh at your place of employment.
24:31
You can be a global payroy employee, which is kind of the typical relationship you might
24:36
experience if you if you work in an organization.
24:39
There's another type called EOR, which is basically you're an employee of deal but on behalf of the organization you work for.
24:47
And traditionally a deal
24:49
all of these were built to be separate things.
24:53
And as time went on a deal of those separate things became
24:58
more siloed and more separate and so we used to have to create multiple experiences for the same action.
25:05
So for instance
25:07
uh firing your employee, right?
25:09
We had five different ways to do that within the system, depending on what relationship that employee had with the business.
25:16
Whereas
25:17
at the end of the day there's certain fields and certain pieces of data that we need to capture.
25:23
Doesn't matter what kind of employee you are.
25:25
And so now this life cycle experience team is in a place where that's no longer kind of the technical constraints where you can start consolidating those workflows and
25:35
not only looking at the workflows that we've kind of been can confined into making because of the architecture, but now saying, okay, what are these
25:43
experiences that one goes through as an employee of an organization that we can start surfacing much easier or start celebrating or start
25:54
Providing guidance around, right?
25:56
Things like contract negotiations, redlining, um celebrating events
26:02
such a promotion you know, equity grants, things like this.
26:06
Now all the comes much simpler and and we can pull it into one more flow independent of what your relationship is with the employer.
26:14
Let's talk a little bit about your job.
26:18
You're a group design manager.
26:20
What does that mean?
26:21
Well, it sits between senior manager and like associate director.
26:28
And depending on which vertical you're in, you'll likely have one or more leads that report into you.
26:36
Each one of those leads will have a vertical that they're responsible for.
26:40
So in my case,
26:41
I now have the growth and life cycle teams.
26:45
So there's two life cycle teams, one growth team, and I have a lead designer who's responsible for the growth vertical.
26:52
you know essentially takes care of that but reports into me and so kind of the value of this is obviously you have the the manager that
27:01
is directly responsible for that vertical, but then you have someone who's a little bit more senior in managing, senior in their craft that can kind of
27:10
Uh keep an eye on everything that's going on, connect strategic opportunities.
27:15
Um, in my vertical, for example, there's a lot of
27:18
crossover between growth and life cycle initiatives.
27:22
And I I assume that that's kind of the status quo across all the teams.
27:26
That's why they're set up this way.
27:27
And so group really gets this unique
27:31
place where they're managing a large team, they're managing multiple managers, but they're also able to connect the dots on very important or strategic initiatives that are happening, maybe in silos within the teams that report into them.
27:44
So what does it mean from from uh kind of responsibility stakeholders that you're interacting with?
27:52
I think
27:53
What this means like at the stakeholder level is you're engaging with much more senior stakeholders than you normally would be.
28:01
So in my case, I
28:04
kind of direct partners with three senior directors of product, one for the the client lifecycle, one for worker lifecycle, one for growth, right?
28:15
And so I'm both a partner and kind of accountable for my teams to these senior directors, which I think
28:24
is a unique thing about deal where there's no kind of title guarding.
28:30
It's not like directors are like, oh, I only want to work with other directors or anything like this.
28:34
So
28:35
Within the design team, we get this really cool ability to have visibility at the highest levels of the organization.
28:42
It's not rare that the chief operating officer or the CEO will
28:46
jump into a project and say like, hey, can I get updates on this?
28:49
We've got a customer or um you know somebody that's interested in in knowing progress.
28:55
And so I get to interface with with uh lots of different senior stakeholders across the org.
29:01
How important is design a deal for the execs?
29:05
You know, it's a question that I get asked a lot also on LinkedIn and in interviews.
29:10
I can point to kind of our recent hire of a chief design officer and say, like, look, it I think that's that's a big signal, right?
29:16
Um from the beginning, like even looking back three years ago now almost.
29:21
Design has always been central to what made deals successful.
29:25
We've always obsessed about, you know, having the best experience in class for payroll for
29:32
you know, EOR for all of these different products and services that we offer.
29:36
And design was always at the forefront of that.
29:38
We've always been empowered to call out experiences, to
29:44
you know, kind of work off the side of the desk as far as like, hey, I think that there's a big opportunity here and and you know, make something better and approach product with it.
29:52
And and when we do, design is taken very seriously, especially when we say like
29:56
you know, hey, there's there's an opportunity to make something better for the customers.
30:00
Um and not only is is that design led the the CEO, the COO, um at the time kind of our
30:08
our head of product that design used to um uh report into would all be very passionate about design and pull in uh our senior director and say like, hey, what do you think of this?
30:20
Hey, something feels off about this and I can't quite put my finger on it.
30:22
Can we get a designer to look at it?
30:24
Um, so when you have that kind of advocacy at the the most senior levels of the organization, it really feels like
30:32
you know, to use the industry cliche, like design has a seat, but more than that, design really does have have a say when it comes to what the products look like, what they feel like, how they solve problems.
30:45
And we really do put the users first when we're thinking about how these products are built and what things they're trying to solve.
30:55
A lot of designers really enjoy the initial part, the part where you research, you find out the problem, you can influence the roadmap.
31:06
What does that look like at you?
31:08
Um at deal, I think this manifests in a bunch of different ways.
31:12
Um so you know, you've got the classic, hey, we want to reach out and talk to X amount of customers, you know, you link up with the um CSMs, they
31:21
book you some calls and you know over the next two weeks you you talk with a bunch of customers and that that happens and I I don't see that um you know unique to deal at all.
31:31
One of the things that that's definitely unique to deal that I like to point out when people say, like, you know, how do we get customer feedback into the product?
31:40
Is the fact that a lot of our product focuses on
31:44
I'll say users that are deal employees or are deal adjacent.
31:49
So for instance, we've got a lot of back office products that are used by deal itself.
31:56
A lot of our front
31:57
our our like user-facing products are used by deal itself as well, right?
32:01
Um but I'll I'll kind of split it up into those two.
32:04
So our
32:07
Our back office products are used by our operations teams, be that for running payroll, for um
32:14
planning customer onboarding or implementation, even things as far as like you know tracking where people are in the sales funnel and and um making sure that the experience of
32:27
handoff between one internal team to another internal team is is smooth.
32:31
All of that is built by deal internally used by deal.
32:35
And so when we're focusing on those products, it's super easy to get feedback and the the company's actually desperate to give it, right?
32:43
So you almost
32:44
like you don't have a funnel that you're trying to maintain, you're you know trying to hold people back from giving you feedback at times.
32:52
So that that part uh is super good.
32:55
Um
32:56
When it comes to external facing products, again, Deal, uh, you know, to use the industry term, likes to dog food our own product, right?
33:03
Um so we've got this program called Deal on Deal.
33:06
And whenever we
33:08
release a new product that you know is either a big bet or is something that we truly believe in as far as and you know this is something our customers should be using all the time, we'll use it first, right?
33:19
So
33:20
We recently released our our engage feature, for instance.
33:25
You know, we we did it to a lot of fanfare on LinkedIn.
33:28
We said, hey, this is a really cool new product.
33:30
What we didn't say is that we were using it internally for about a year before that, right?
33:35
Um and so that gave us a lot of time to find the kinks in the system, um, the things that
33:40
that don't work or the things that do work really well.
33:43
And you know, we would agree have people from Deal reach out directly to us and say, like, hey, I'm having a problem with this, or hey, this can be a little bit better.
33:51
I think the best designers at deal are the ones that maintain relationships with those customers that we've talked to in the past.
33:58
So for instance, when I was working on
34:00
payroll um we were really close with some payroll customers and the actual payroll managers at those customer orgs like we knew each other on a first name basis they were sending me
34:12
emails directly to my inbox with feedback.
34:15
So if I needed to set up a call with them, it was really easy.
34:18
And in some cases, you know, this was happening with like the global head of payroll.
34:23
And they would say, oh, let me put you in contact with
34:25
you know, Joe who's running payroll in you know Arkansas and and wants to give feedback on this thing.
34:33
Um so I I think it's it's really cool in that way that uh deal kind of
34:38
maintains this professional relationship, but also this kind of personal relationship with a lot of our customers.
34:43
And it it does make that um that discovery part of the process even more fun than
34:50
You know, it would be traditionally.
34:52
Two questions now.
34:54
At deal, does at if I look at the roles that we have available, we have some senior designers, we have some staff designers, we have senior staff designers.
35:05
And if I look at the management track, which by the way, you can transition from one to another whilst retaining your salary.
35:13
If you want to, we have the lead and we have the group design manager.
35:19
Can you guide us what is the difference between a senior and a staff?
35:25
What is the difference between a lead and a group design manager?
35:29
This is a fun question.
35:30
I was just talking on LinkedIn today with um with a bunch of people about this.
35:35
I'll I give you my opinion on it.
35:37
I think like
35:39
This is something the industry as a whole is still trying to figure out, but the way it manifests ideal and the way I see it are are pretty similar.
35:46
So I think at the senior level, you're
35:49
you're a trusted executor, right?
35:51
Like you've proven you're a trusted executor.
35:54
Um you manage your team or teams that that you're responsible for
35:59
for delivering for uh your trusted partner in those teams.
36:02
You're already contributing to the roadmap.
36:05
These are our like baseline expectations of a senior designer.
36:09
Which might be different from another organization senior designer, but ideal we say like as a senior, you know, you own just as much of the roadmap as the PM or the engineering lead of the team.
36:19
As a senior, you're also working within your team to improve processes.
36:25
You're looking for, you know, where gaps in the system are that that could
36:29
potentially improve the way we work at deal.
36:32
Like that's expected of you as a senior.
36:34
Senior is this this high-level executor that's responsible for lifting the team up with them as they grow.
36:40
Now, uh some of those things people are going to say like, oh, but that's what a staff designer is responsible for, especially when it comes to like processes, improvements, um, a little bit of cross-functional execution.
36:51
To me, staff designer uh is a kind of a whole other level.
36:56
You're doing all those things that senior is doing, plus now you're engaging
37:01
around not only processes in your team, but processes across the entire organization, right?
37:06
The big hot button topic right now is AI.
37:09
You know, how are we using AI
37:11
AI.
37:11
And a lot of staff designers are leading the charge on that ideal with saying like, hey, here's my workflow using AI, right?
37:19
For green field products, here's how I create prototypes using AI.
37:23
Here's how I use ideation using AI.
37:26
You know, for things that are a little bit more limited in scope, you know, here's what my AI workflow looks like.
37:32
That that would be like a stack designer that's leading the charge for a process change across Steel.
37:37
More than that, they're also looking at strategic opportunities across deal for products.
37:45
So, you know, maybe they're talking with uh another staff designer or a senior designer from another vertical and they say like, oh
37:53
this thing you're working on sounds very similar to something I'm working on.
37:56
You know, maybe there's a third option where we build this new product that solves both use cases.
38:02
And they're able to pull not only the right designers, but the right PMs, the right engineers, the right stakeholders into the room to sell that vision and say like, hey, this is the thing that I think we should build instead.
38:16
And and that's really what makes the difference.
38:19
And now the other thing I've heard is like, oh hey, like seniors should be able to do that too.
38:25
And I agree.
38:27
I think the difference between a senior and a staff is a senior will do that sometimes when the opportunity arises.
38:34
And when they do, they do it to good level of execution.
38:38
A staff is always looking for those opportunities and can identify them because they've done it so many times already as a senior.
38:46
And that really feeds into our philosophy at deal around
38:51
acting as the next role before receiving that promotion, right?
38:55
You know, it's kind of not our philosophy to take a leap of faith
38:58
on someone as far as like a promotion goes, we we really push people to be acting in that next role.
39:04
Um because not only is it is it better for that person and and to grow their skills and you know to receive that promotion as a as a
39:13
as a way of uh uh rewarding the work that you're doing and saying like, hey, this is exactly what we want to see of you in the next role.
39:22
But I think it actually does deal in the industry a big service as well because you know now you're
39:27
you're actually getting that value out of the person as part of their job description.
39:32
And then the senior staff level is is kind of the new one, right?
39:36
So this is somebody that's acting at that staff level that's doing everything the senior does, everything the staff level does.
39:42
But then brings a level of execution, frameworks, stakeholder management to it that only comes with having done the staff level version of that work
39:55
you know, a hundred times.
39:57
Um, you know, it's it's that comfort with those stakeholders, it's comfort with the process, it's their ability to drive buy-in for those things that the staff designer is trying to get buy-in for.
40:09
Um
40:11
It's just a it's it's that next level of execution.
40:14
And typically they're looking at things organization-wide.
40:17
So now we're not talking about one or two verticals.
40:21
We're talking about, hey, there's a big gap.
40:24
in the market or in our product or or in the way we're executing on things, we can solve it by bringing all these cross-functional partners in from across the org and and driving towards this solution.
40:38
We, you know, we don't we don't have just people managers here at Deal.
40:42
Um, but the lead is very much responsible for one vertical um
40:49
And being able to execute at a high level in that vertical, know the work that's going on to a high level of detail in that vertical, know the designers to a high level of detail in that vertical, and be working with
41:03
uh not only the product team to identify opportunities and you know um put things on the roadmap that that impact the entire vertical
41:12
but also working with their designers and to help grow them, to help prepare them for that next step in their career
41:19
uh to provide feedback in context on time, you know, that's going to help grow the designers, of course, correct the designers.
41:27
So that's very much at the lead level.
41:30
At the group level, it's all of that, plus looking across many verticals or multiple verticals, and also helping to grow that next generation of managers, which is the leads, right?
41:44
In my role, I'm looking at my lead designer and saying, hey, you know, what is he very strong at?
41:50
Where's some areas we can improve
41:52
And my job is to put a spotlight on the things that he's very good at and let him thrive in that space.
41:59
And in the background, work with him on areas that I think if he improved, you know, he would have a much larger impact.
42:06
in his role in his career and and here at Deal.
42:09
And the same is true for for my direct reports as well on on the IC side.
42:15
becomes like mastering uh mastering a skill set versus being good at a skill set
42:24
A lot of people are asking what's a typical day looks like.
42:30
You've got that question a lot of interviews.
42:34
Is there like a one answer that we can give now that no one would ever ask us that question again?
42:40
Oh my my typical answer is like there is no typical day ideal.
42:44
Our teams work.
42:45
obviously with their PMs and with their engineers.
42:48
So your typical day is obviously, you know, looking at your
42:54
roadmap or your list of things that need to get done, right?
42:57
Um prioritizing that or making sure it's already prioritized.
43:01
Being transparent with your team as far as you know where you're at with those things.
43:05
pushing back on things that need to be pushed back on, executing things that need to be executed on.
43:11
And at the same time, myself personally, I like to give my designers
43:16
time that they can choose to use daily or weekly to explore other things around deal that they would like to improve, things that might not be attached or vertical, although they could be if if that interests you
43:28
but also, you know, things in other verticals and and work with other designers to to um to fix those things or to improve those things.
43:37
So
43:38
As an example, I have a designer on my team.
43:40
He's very good at motion design, very good at interaction design, and has a passion for it.
43:47
And so he'll often go and ping designers in completely other teams and be like, hey, I was working on this like
43:52
credit card wallet concept and like I really want to show it to you.
43:56
Like what do you think?
43:57
Or working on like expense submitting processes.
44:00
Like what do you think of this?
44:02
And it's just a cool way to hone your skills and drive conversation across the organization.
44:07
So my designers have that baked into their day.
44:10
Depending on the day, we have like team uh design critiques, we have uh information sharing, especially now with kind of the emergence of AI.
44:19
We have a
44:20
a weekly meeting where we kind of show and tell what we're doing with AI within the team.
44:24
It's very much around like building
44:27
bonds with both your design team and your delivery team, being transparent, showing your work, being the owner of what it is to be a designer at deal.
44:39
So I want to do like a lightning round.
44:41
What is a book or podcast that you find yourself recommend to people often?
44:47
Ah, okay.
44:48
Uh podcast, uh Be a Better Human.
44:51
Um
44:51
I really like that podcast.
44:53
Um has very little to do with design, um, but sometimes there's some design-centered episodes and it's just all about ways to be a better human.
45:01
They bring experts on about a certain topic and they'll talk about that topic for an hour.
45:06
And you leave the episode feeling like there's something you can do to improve your life in some way.
45:15
Any film show play that you've seen recently that you're like, you guys should watch this?
45:24
The first thing that came to my mind was the movie Encanto and Disney.
45:27
Um so my son recently got into this phase where he's obsessed with Disney movies.
45:32
And um
45:33
Uh Enganto is one of those things where you watch it and uh you're like, oh, that's a good movie.
45:38
But the more you watch it, and anyone that has kids knows this, you watch a movie a million times because your kid loves it.
45:43
Um, you start finding all these really, really interesting details.
45:46
And um, for anyone that's into music and music theory, like Lynn, Manuel, Miranda.
45:51
did an amazing job with that movie.
45:53
And I think anyone that's into writing, storytelling, there's a lot of really cool writing moments and techniques that were used to help tie that movie together.
46:04
So if you're a nerd like me for those things, uh you'll really like that movie.
46:09
What's a thing in the world of design that you used to believe and now you're like, actually, maybe it's not that true.
46:19
Yeah, um that designers need to uh always advocate for the user and die on that hill.
46:31
I think junior in my when I was much more junior in my career, you know, I would I would be a huge blocker to a lot of the things that were trying to be built because I would say like, no, like we don't know enough about the user to to say this is true or
46:45
or whatever.
46:45
And I think as you get more senior in your career, and I don't know if this is the industry changing or me just maturing in my career a little bit, maybe a little bit of both.
46:54
But now I think designers that know when to advocate for the user and know when the material uh gains for the business are much better and and can balance those two out.
47:10
What's the one value from the deal values that you resonate most with?
47:16
Uh I'd say together everywhere.
47:20
Um
47:21
So the reason for this is as much as I love that deal is a completely remote company and this value is about that as well.
47:32
Um, I I love w remote work, but I really like getting to meet my team in person and you know, travel to to different hub cities where we have a lot of designers and getting to meet up with them and things like this.
47:44
I feel like
47:45
the connections you build with people and the opportunities that come up when you're in person are just uh in separate uh like and non-negotiable, I'd say
47:56
London is waiting for you.
48:00
Next.
48:01
It's the next one.
48:03
Come, come.
48:04
We we we have lots of designers here.
48:08
Any take on how you are nowadays utilizing AI and what what gets you most excited about it?
48:17
Um yeah, so a couple ways.
48:19
Uh so I have I've created like a series of cloud skills that allows
48:26
Claude to analyze all of our Slack channels and then all also like public forums and things like this for customer feedback for
48:36
um uh public feedback, indicators of churn, um CSAT, uh anything you can think of that might be like a signal that one of the product areas I'm responsible for isn't doing well
48:49
And it gives me this weekly report on it, which has been like super crucial in a lot of conversations with my stakeholders and my partners on the product and engineering side.
48:59
It actually helped us like
49:01
shape our roadmap this year uh this quarter, which was really, really cool to see.
49:05
That was one of the earliest use cases, I think, of of Claude and getting it right.
49:10
And nowadays, um I think
49:14
The coolest one that we're experimenting with right now is a design quality thing.
49:21
So this is kind of a a filter.
49:23
So before people come to critique
49:27
I ask them to put their their prototype or their Figma flows into this filter that we've created with Claude, and Claude will
49:38
uh list out you know who's all going to be presenting what on on critique and also it will share its report
49:45
of those things.
49:46
So like everyone knows, okay, Cloud's already caught this.
49:48
So we don't have to focus on these things.
49:50
Let's focus on things that the AI didn't catch.
49:54
And so that has been really, really cool as well.
49:56
What's one problem?
49:58
that if you could wish uh the gods of AI or technology to solve for you, that would make your job much easier.
50:06
That is not possible today or is one thing that you would ask for.
50:10
Oh biggest thing right now, top of mind for me is hiring.
50:14
How do you identify the designers that are like the most high agency by nature in the hiring process?
50:24
Like that would be amazing, right?
50:26
I think a lot of the hiring process is is set up to identify these designers.
50:32
And if you could have one call or, you know, two tops with someone and be absolutely certain that this person is going to come in, have an impact as quickly as possible and move the needle in the direction that we want to be going.
50:47
Like that would solve 90% of my issues these days.
50:50
Where can people reach out and find you if they want to chat?
50:53
Yeah, definitely reach out on my LinkedIn.
50:55
It's just slash Mark Aquino.
50:59
Thank you for listening to the podcast.
51:02
Please subscribe and also leave a review.
51:06
It really helps.
51:08
Thank you.