Design Leader Spotlight: Dan Kraemer, IA Collaborative + Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer, Global Conversion at Netflix
Dan Kraemer talks business and design with members of Design & Innovation Global Community
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Speaker Spotlight Interviews featuring Dan Kraemer of IA Collaborative
Dan Kraemer, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at IA Collaborative and a keynote speaker at the 2021 Design Thinking Conference, is sitting down with fellow speakers and thought leaders to talk about the intersection of design and business, and how the convergence of both drives new growth for organizations. In the Q&A sessions, Dan is leveraging themes from his talk, which focuses on how large, established organizations can continue to Find New Growth, Create New Offerings, and Empower a Culture of Innovation.
FEATURED INTERVIEW: Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer, Global Conversion @ Netflix
Dan: Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
Fonz: I'm from Brooklyn, New York and I went to college in Atlanta. During my senior year, my university opened up a state-of-the-art multimedia computer lab called the Digital Aquarium which I basically moved into. I was there every single day and I taught myself all of the skills needed. Once I got out of college with a degree in Computer Science I immediately started doing graphic design as a Founder and creative director of my own design agency, which then led me into a few in-house web design positions. From there, I leveraged client connections and ended up starting my own business again, which was essentially a digital product — a content management system for independent artists and brands. It was a great opportunity because that's when I felt I really moved into product design and got a firsthand understanding of what that was all about. I was involved with every step: from ideation all the way through execution, metrics, and how to make the UX better. It was a whole different way to look at design beyond just logos and videos. From there, I moved into growth design and that's where I stayed for the rest of my career until now.
Dan: What from this diverse set of experiences have you taken forward into your role at Netflix?
Fonz: I’ve always practiced my communication as a self-taught designer and entrepreneur, and Netflix is a super collaborative organization where those skills are key. Coming into a company in the middle of a pandemic and never getting to physically meet anybody in person, and having to try to build relationships over video conference requires a higher level of communication skills. And I think that's been one of the number one keys to my success. I would also say that just being curious, and being not afraid to ask questions, has helped so much.
Dan: I love that. One of our Maxims at IA is “Always Learning” because you’re never ‘finished’ learning - it’s a continuous process. After a year and a half, how are you finding yourself still cultivating that important “beginner’s mindset” and asking questions?
Fonz: I'm so glad you asked this. We're working on a massive project right now that keeps changing and it requires you to really stay up-to-date, to the minute, on what's going on. There's really no time for assumptions. There's also no time to get left behind — so I’m constantly asking questions. When you're working on such a large-scale project that affects a massive number of people, you want to make sure you have user empathy. The biggest thing for me is seeing things through the eyes of the end-user and asking questions to understand them and their needs.
Dan: Absolutely - I couldn’t agree more. That’s a big value we bring as outside consultants; a lot of times organizations will assume they know who their customer is, but one of my favorite things to ask is, who is your customer today, and how are their needs changing? Who will your customer be tomorrow? Are we solving the right problem?
Fonz: That’s a great provocation! I’m a super research advocate. We’re fortunate enough at Netflix to be able to do amazing research globally where we can bring in prototypes of ideas and get feedback from the customer before we even build it and test it.
Dan: That’s great. It’s critical to embed research into multiple phases of a project, not just at the beginning, or as validation at the end. Even in the case of companies we’ve been working with for 20 years, we’re still not full-time employees, and that’s a good thing because we can provide an outside perspective, advocating for and conducting continuous user research.
Fonz: Yes. I'm also a huge fan of looking at our past tests and past products and projects, because there's always a lot of learning in those. We do a really good job of picking the metrics and understanding the hypothesis at the beginning and creating the specs that allow you to look at the designs or look at the UX. So all the information is there for you to feel confident when you begin.
Dan: Yes! It’s so easy for an MVP to be driven by technical feasibility, or unchecked business assumptions. But the most important question is always, what will most attract and engage users? What are they willing to pay for?
Fonz: It goes back to alignment, understanding. Making sure everyone on the team is on the same table, communicating and knows why you’re building what you’re building.
Dan: Exactly. OK, we’ve talked about the importance of staying connected to the user. Could you give a concrete example of that from your work on the ‘growth design’ team at Netflix? What are some of the big projects or initiatives you’ve worked on?
Fonz: My team is responsible for converting people who don't have Netflix accounts to become paid subscribers. My team is the homepage, netflix.com as well as what you see when you open up the mobile app and what you see before you log in on TV. That platform is our TV non-member homepage. And for the last 10 plus years, we've had the same design. But we felt there was a growth opportunity to convert new users by making sure we effectively communicated our value props and the breadth of content that we have. I was part of the redesign of that space, where we landed on an idea that is more animation-based because we can show the breadth of content, localize all of the copy to whatever language a person has set to default on their device, as well as dynamically bring in all of the titles that we want to show. It’s more inclusive and it’s tailored to your region. You’re going to see things that are way more relevant to you.
Dan: That’s a great example of design adding strategic value to the organization - and that’s just one team, and one component of the larger platform! It’s really interesting; we’ve worked with large digital product-focused organizations in the travel/hospitality and logistics space, and we’ve worked with them to become less product-focused (siloed into teams) and more experience-focused (connected across teams). Challenges that involve the entire business, like, how do you make ‘world-class service’ become a point of difference across all the different parts of your platform? Challenges like that involve coordination and collaboration across multiple teams and functional areas -- teams that aren’t always accustomed to working with one another.
Fonz: At Netflix, we’re really organized according to the customer lifecycle. That’s why I’m on the growth team and we’re focused specifically on new customer acquisition. But we make sure all of our teams are connected and talking to each other, especially on those bigger design projects.
Dan: How do you do that - stay connected across many different parts of the business, to make sure you’re keeping at the forefront of user and business needs?
Fonz: When you take a bunch of amazing designers that all know what's going on, magic can start happening. We meet as squads — which is your individual team, but then we also have our cross-squad meetings frequently. We have tons of slack channels dedicated to specific cross-functional topics. It requires us to always be updating each other on what we're doing. Everybody can visit in anybody's meetings. This way of working allows us to find any holes that need filling and suggest ways to push toward a complete, holistic experience. New design initiatives are very collaborative and everybody works on them. Ideas and suggestions across teams help us take it to the next level. Anybody can comment on our specs so that we have that super-inclusive feedback from everywhere. It's not just the eight people that are on my team — it’s insights from the whole company that go into the problem framing, prototyping and iteration.
Dan: I’m curious, do you as a designer feel ‘responsible’ for innovation? We’ve talked to some clients in the past who have said they believe innovation really needs to be everyone’s job, and that when organizations are structured that way, it’s more successful in the long run.
Fonz: Oh absolutely I feel like innovation is my job, my team’s job. We have some very high level growth and business goals we have to hit, but the way we get there is entirely up to us.
Dan: Yeah. Our clients come to us with high level business challenges like wanting to expand outside of their core business. Our challenge is to figure out where to expand, how to expand, what to build and how to make it a successful business. Innovation IS the job.
