<aside> 🌟 Auldyn Matthews is a UX Design Leader and MHCI Class of 2013. Her experiences are primarily focused on healthcare technology, and she has worked in all levels of UX Design leadership at Phreesia, Elsevier, and consulting agencies. When she isn’t working, she is taking care of her two kids or crafting cosplays!

Check out Auldyn’s website and personal project, Experience Aesthetics!

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🆒 How did you start on your path towards UX Leadership? What inspired you to start on that path?

I was a triple major in Math, Spanish, and Psychology, and I went into undergrad thinking I was going to be a doctor. While the doctor thing didn’t come into fruition, I really fell in love with psychology, which lead me into human factors and later Human-Computer Interaction. I didn’t even know what the term UX was before I got to Carnegie Mellon, to be honest. All I knew was that this notion of technology doing good really spoke to me. After completing my Master’s, I practiced for about four or five years as an individual contributor. That project for Elsevier was the first leadership position offered to me. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a contributor was that not everyone cares about the user the same way you do. Businesses struggle to connect the impact that design can make to their bottom line. But when I had this position at Elsevier working on PatientPass, I got really interested in this idea of translating the work I’m doing to business outcomes, so that they continually invest in UX and see that we have value. That started me down the path I’m on now.

🆒 What is a project you’ve lead that you’re proud of?

One of the biggest ones I got to work on that actually got called out for some awards was called PatientPass. This particular project was interesting because if you look at the landscape of where tech and healthcare are right now, there’s a struggle between a process of agile design thinking with the more risk-adverse processes that a lot of healthcare has stuck with. This project is for Elsevier, the largest medical publishing company for medical journals and research papers. Elsevier has the best and latest content of medical research, but that information wasn’t getting to patients directly. I came in at the onset of the project, working with one other designer and a team of developers. We were able to go on-site to a client, use the electronic health records, and watch how doctors and nurses talk to patients about their health. We decided to build a product where we were sending patients these resources directly to their mobile phones. It was a very big deal to push this through in spite of the healthcare industry limitations and data privacy concerns. Patients used to have to wait to get a big packet of papers after they get discharged. Instead, you could be waiting for x-rays or such and start to read information coming in on your phone. It impacted people around the patient as well, like caregivers and family members. This helps those people keep track of that information and keep track of their diagnosis or treatment, and helps them take care of their loved one.

🆒 What are your responsibilities as a UX Design Leader?

The majority of what I’ve done as a leader is really connecting with and understanding product strategy, so that we know how to make a design really effective. If you think of design not as a team but as a function, “design” happens regardless of whether you have designers or not. Project managers, engineers, and developers all make decisions around design. When you invest in a UX team or a design team, you’re getting people who are trained experts at that process. A lot of what I do as a Design Leader is to advocate for the value of our teams, continue to grow them, and have conversations about how to inject the UX and human-centered design process to help with the vision of what the company’s products may be. There are still a lot of people who think UI and UX are the same, and so a lot of my responsibility is to mature the culture of a company and teach people about what UX actually is. We aren’t all a bunch of designers in black turtlenecks revealing an aesthetically pleasing but useless product, but it really is that intangible for some people in business. More generally there’s the people aspect of management too—setting up career paths, and skill inventories—helping the team continue to grow, and making sure to hire and assess people. I definitely don’t do as much individual-contributor work now, but it’s always good to have those tools in your back pocket.

🆒 What are some things you’ve learned about UX leadership that have been surprising?

The first thing was that there is no playbook for design leadership. As an individual contributor, you can go out and learn about UX or contextual design, but you have to figure out your own path as you go further into your career. It’s the same way as a design leader, but there are a lot fewer resources. A lot of the time, I find myself Googling questions, but finding that no one has had that issue. I like to tell people getting into design leadership to try to find other design leaders. UX is so new, and design leadership is so new, that asking for help from people in similar positions as you becomes really important. And more generally, I was surprised at how fulfilled I felt in design leadership. It’s way more rewarding to me to see other people produce really incredible and valuable work across a team that I’ve supported and fostered, than it is for me to do it alone.

🆒 Has your gender affected the way you’ve approached design leadership/leadership in general?

This might be a hot take. When I look at myself and my life, I’ve been described as bossy, I’ve been called a number of disparaging and misogynistic names both to my face and behind my back. And so as an effort to combat these negative perceptions, particularly when I first started working professionally after the MHCI program, I read a lot of books about women in leadership. At the time, Sherry Sander’s Lean In was big for everyone to read. She was at Facebook and Google, and had this incredible path to leadership as a woman. But the more I understand it, the more frustrated I’ve become with the notion that as a woman, you have to “lean in” in order to get anywhere professionally.

I feel that the more I grow into leadership, the more I have to be honest about who I am. I do have some “lean in” person qualities, but there’s another component to me that is still valuable, despite it not being considered as “needed” in the traditional idea of leadership. Things like being empathetic and emphasizing culture-building; the things that often go unpaid and unnoticed, but create good teams and successful relationships. I feel that the frustration for me and what I’ve been told, is all how to adapt myself into the existing corporate structures that were established by white men. I don’t disagree with a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten, but there’s not a lot of room for other parts of me. Are those parts not valuable? Are they not needed in leadership? So much of the rhetoric around leadership is about being more assertive and “leaning more in”, but I think we should approach leadership in a more wholistic way.

I look at myself as a woman in this environment, and I’m trying to figure out how to balance that assertive, “bossy” part of me and what other parts of me there are. It’s really hard when you’ve been told for a long time that those aren’t the valuable parts when you’re a leader. It’s a lot of introspection. I just wished people could bring more of themselves into leadership positions, instead of “leaning in”.

<aside> 🌟 Editor’s note: The concept of ‘leaning in’ in Sherry Sander’s book Lean In revolves around the idea of women matching existing corporate standards emulated by men to reach higher positions of power. Here are some articles that expand more on the content of Lean In and some discourse around it. Other readings around the topic of diversity in the workplace and in leadership include: Women at Work Radical Candor How Women (and Everyone) Can Form Deeper Bonds to Fight Bias at Work Marie Curie: A Case Study in Breaking Barriers THE MAKING OF A MANAGER by Julie Zhuo

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🆒 What advice would you give people who are looking to take on leadership roles in UX?

I just want to tell students to stop trying to be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs did his thing, go do your thing. Who are you, what do you value about life, and what are the skills you want to use to make sure those values come into fruition in this world? You can’t wait for another person to inspire you. You can only be authentic if you understand who you are, your strengths, and your limitations. And part of that is focusing on your strengths, rather than fixing your limitations. People are really good at finding inauthenticity, so being someone you’re not is very hard.