<aside> 🌟 Samantha Berg is the Head of Design at Chime and has been a design leader in Silicon Valley for more than 10 years. With an extensive background in UX and human factors spanning almost 20 years, she now helps tech companies build effective and innovative design teams that create products for everyone.

Check out her sites below! 👀 LinkedIn 👀 Website 👀 Instagram

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🌟 Could you tell us a little about who you are and what you do?

I’m a design leader who creates and builds design teams at tech companies. I’ve been working in and around Silicon Valley for the last 15-20 years. My schooling was in human factors and ergonomics; a lot of understanding humans, how our bodies and brains work. My work background is in consumer electronics and bleeding-edge consumer tech, and I started at places like Motorola and Palm, designing physical keyboards for smartphones. As the world went less physical and more virtual, my practice shifted to be more virtual as well, which these days we like to call UX.

I spent a few years consulting, working on everything from phones, tablets, and TVs, to cameras, wearables, AR, VR, autonomous vehicles–all bleeding-edge tech. About 10 years ago, I decided that I wanted to go back in-house. I got into design because I wanted to make people’s everyday lives better, and I wanted to get closer to that. So for the past 10 years I’ve been working–usually at smaller companies–trying to empower folks who are under-empowered or disempowered. I spent some time at a startup helping small businesses and mom-and-pop shops compete with big box retailers, and I’ve spent the last six years in fintech trying to help the average American afford a decent lifestyle.

🌟 What factors encouraged you to pursue design leadership?

I learned early on that your manager makes a real difference in your day-to-day life. Someone who has your back, or has your best intentions in mind, or wants to help you achieve the things you want to achieve, those factors are a game-changer. Similarly, a bad manager is a game-changer in a bad way. I knew from my first job that I wanted to manage people because I thought I could be good at it - have their back, help them develop their careers, coach them to do more than they thought possible.

I remember being told at my first job that the skills you need to be a manager are not the skills you need to be a good designer. That’s an interesting phenomenon in any field, not just design. You come into a workplace as an entry-level employee, you get good at it, and one day they say “great, now you get to be a manager and teach other people how to do this”. But the thing is your skills are in color theory or interaction patterns, and that doesn’t make you well suited at managing other peoples’ careers. It’s a weird paradox: we have a bunch of people who are supposed to become managers because it’s the next step in their careers but they aren’t necessarily good at it, and we have a bunch of people who may be really good at it, who are under utilized. It all seemed (and still does!) really bonkers to me.

And so part of my work has been about making sure people can move forward in their careers without pursuing leadership, if it isn’t right for them, and empowering people who have good management skills to lean into that expertise.

🌟 What is one lesson you’ve learned about the design field that still influences what you do today?

The biggest thing is that we haven’t figured it out yet. When I first started in my career, it felt like we had a hundred different words for the same thing. Were we talking about information architecture or were we talking about interaction design or were we talking about UX? Visual design or UI design? Then you go into the startup world where they’re trying to hire the fewest people with the most skills possible, so you look for someone who can do everything, and what do you call that? Is this person UI/UX? Product design? Is it just generically UX? I remember early on in my career I never knew what job titles to look for. Two job descriptions with the exact same title could be wildly different and it was so frustrating. And here we are twenty years later, and the industry is still confused about what any of these titles really mean. I have my own point of view and terminology that I use to talk about this stuff, but that doesn’t mean that’s what other people in the industry use. If you look at it one way, it can be incredibly frustrating. It seems like none of us know what we are doing, and that we’re all talking sideways. But I’ve learned to look at it differently, and I find the ambiguity really empowering now. We are still in this phase where we get to define what the design industry looks like. We get to literally decide what these words mean.

For me, every time I build a team, I get to apply what I have learned in different ways. Sometimes you have teams that have individual managers for different disciplines, and sometimes you have cross-discipline teams where folks from different backgrounds manage a more holistic set of people. We’ve had many different versions of our design team at Chime based on what the company and team need and different points in time, and that’s what’s great about the freedom of this industry, there’s still a lot of ways to innovate and grow.

🌟 As a design leader, how do human factors and user experience influence your work?

It’s interesting, they factor into my work in completely different ways now than when I first started out. What I do now isn’t exactly design, or at least, design in the way we think about it; what I’m doing is ‘designing the design team’. When I think about “user experience”, I’m thinking about the experience my employees are having in their everyday jobs. I’m thinking about the business as the user, and thinking about what kinds of skill sets we need on this team, or how many people we need to hire to keep up with the initiatives our team promised. It’s a whole other level of human factors - it’s a lot less of the physicality and a lot more of the emotional-mental desires of these people. How do we design this team that gets people the opportunities they want, and feels like this is a good place to work? There are definitely still processes that are very similar to the design process. There’s still doing research and testing things out, making mistakes and learning from them.

🌟 Can you tell us more about the advocacy work that you do?

As a woman, I have run into certain obstacles in my career. Early on in my career, too, I definitely ran into ageism. There were rooms that I walked into where I was immediately discounted, whether it was because I was a woman or because I was young or a combination of the two. There was a project that I was a lead on, and I walked into a meeting with a client who basically walked out on me. It was an older, more traditional company that was used to working with leaders who were older white men, and when they saw a younger woman in charge of the project they assumed that the consulting firm I worked for had sent the “C” team, the shorter end of the stick. I’ve had to deal with a lot of that in my career.

It has become important to me that, since I’m now in a position of power, I not only help other women recognize and address those issues, but also that I try to eliminate a lot of those issues to begin with. It’s small things, for example: a lot of job interviews do a whiteboard exercise where, if it were in person, you would have to physically draw on a whiteboard. But what if you don’t have the capability to draw on a whiteboard due to a mobility issue? You are automatically disadvantaged in the interview, but that says nothing about the quality of the work you do. There’s a lot we can do to make the workplace a better place for everybody, and we are ignoring a lot of that hard work because we are so focused on the goals of the company or the product we’re creating.

I don’t know if I personally have a huge platform for advocacy, but I do value it very much and try to apply it to the things I do have control over. In terms of interviews, we have eliminated the whiteboard exercise at Chime, and I’m always looking for ways to improve upon the sandboxes in which I’m playing.

🌟 How does supporting and leading/creating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts strengthen design teams?

It’s simple - at the end of the day, you can’t design experiences if you don’t understand the people they’re for. If your team is full of one type of person, you’re only going to have one point of view or one set of experiences to pull from. If you have a diverse team, you’ll have more different points of view and more of an ability to understand the people you’re really working for.

When I think about diversity, I think of a lot of different things. We usually talk about identity when we talk about diversity: things like race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age. Those are all really, really important. I believe, though, that there are also a bunch of other types of diversity that are important too. I don’t say that to undermine any of the previous factors, I just think that we should go further. Things like experiences, background, socio-economic status, citizenship, family structure. Physical or mental capabilities too, and even things like introversion and extroversion, or whether someone is a night-owl or a morning person.