Flashback to the summer of 2015. Obama was president. We were on the iPhone 6.
As a college student, I had grandiose dreams of living the bohemian high-life at a swanky Silicon Valley startup, thriving in an airy studio apartment with a vinyl record player in the corner and a rose-gold French press on white quartz countertops. These dreams are rooted in my experience interning in San Francisco at a chic office that was converted from an old train warehouse with free coffee, all organic cafes, and beer on draft.
A sense of invincibility washed over me after graduating from an engineering school with a dual major in design and IT. With a job offer in hand from IBM, the limitless sky was painted a fierce color of blue. IBM blue.
At that time the company’s design program was still in its infancy. A maverick startup burning bright in the belly of a colossal corporation. David with black Ray-Bans and tattoo sleeves flinging shots at a Goliath pent up with rage from design and tech debt that accumulated over the decades. Phil Gilbert and Ginni Rometty made it their mission to hire an army of designers to radically change the company from the inside out.
So here I was; a young pixel apart of this grand vision to help sling IBM back into the modern tech world and revitalize a culture of design.
Brace yourself, Goliath. Here come the designers.
Yet, my job was not what I expected and I could barely feel the embers of the roaring fire I was promised. Before joining Big Blue, I was originally assigned to a Smarter Cloud & Infrastructure. I was excited to work with my design manager, join what sounded like an established design team, and be part of this transformation. Due to unexpected winds of change, the org was dissolved and all designers were scattered across different areas of the business unit.
My new role landed me as a UX designer for a lucrative but legacy area of IBM— z Systems. Powerful technology, yet many of our customers were operating in a 1985 time capsule using 3270 green screens.
Since the 1960s, IBM mainframes have been engineering marvels, indestructible titans, that bring security, privacy, and resiliency within a company’s infrastructure. The IT service management software and web tools I was assigned to work on were powerful, but the UIs were fraught with legacy components and limited flexibility to embrace the new IBM design language.
As a college student, I had no idea what I was doing. I found myself in an area that was slow to change compared to other parts of the company. Remember those grandiose dreams from before? Well… my expectations didn’t meet the reality I faced. And because of this, I began to doubt my decisions after college.
When I first joined my team, I had to work with redesigning those legacy UIs, learning a complicated domain space that often felt very dry, and being the sole designer on a team with dozens of developers more seasoned and experienced than me. This was all layered on top of IBM going through a company-wide culture change from the inside out.
As an entry-level designer, I found myself in a critical role to advocate for my users while trying to slowly improve and modernize the product. So many questions. So many things to figure out and learn through the challenges that tested me.
🧐 How do I integrate design thinking into a team that had been engineering-led for years?
🤔How do I meet the user needs of an industry with a widening age gap, while balancing multiple learning curves for users?
🤨 How do I find something to inspire me to push forward in design?
For the first year, I was limited to using design patterns that mimicked Z users' old legacy tools. The transition from old on-prem tools to web UIs was gradual but still moving forward. Looking back now, I wished I had seen it that way instead of whining to my friends about having to a use glossy web 2.0 button.
I saw what my friends working at places like Facebook, Quora and Apple were doing. They were creating all these cool things that are used by many people. What was also a little soul-crushing was seeing other product design teams at IBM creating cool stuff that incorporated the design language and with cultural changes visibly taking root (in my eyes at least). The more I looked, the more I began to compare my situation to others, the more miserable I made myself.
There’s a quote from the The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck that explains the distinction between fault and responsibility:
“There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.”
— Mark Manson
No one was responsible for my situation but me.
I get to choose how I react to things, how I handle the situation and what metrics I use to measure my experiences by. I needed to come to terms and take responsibility for where my decisions led me.
I took on the responsibility to kick the negative Goliath out in my life. To be a small ember burning bright in the belly of z Systems.
At the beginning, I wasn’t open to taking on a challenge or putting myself in an uncomfortable situation. In other words, I needed to develop a growth mindset. Looking back at those first two years in Z, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity and am glad I didn’t run away.
The lessons I learned:
- Stop struggling and start engaging. For the first few months, I struggled with seeing the opportunity in redesigning legacy UIs. Being able to make the improvements albeit small in the daily tools of operators and IT admins is still progress. With the help of my design lead and manager, I began to see the bigger picture and learn that good design doesn’t have to be for household name products. It’s about making something better for others. I started to engage more in meetings and lead new features while building relationships with my teammates.
- Surround yourself with people who inspire, challenge, and encourage you to become a better version of yourself while enjoying the journey along the way. Although I worked remotely, I became more active in the local office by volunteering on small projects in the studio and using networks to meet people and become friends. Grab lunch. Reach out to people on the group slack channels.
- Seek out and find side hustles. I spent 10% of my time on side projects in the studio. It was a good way to get exposure, refine skills, and explore new domain areas. It also gave me the chance to meet new people who eventually became new teammates.
- Build a strong relationship with your manager. A good manager invests in the growth and development of their employees. My manager was great, he cared about my growth and was invested in bringing design to Z. I used our 1:1s to share what was going on in my project, what were blockers, and what were action items and plans I had.
- Have patience and persistence when things don’t go according to plan. Project plans changed. Products sunset. Life happens. Take everything as a teaching moment.
Sometimes the grass on the other side is greener. But before I threw in the reins and moved onto greener pastures, I needed to first take care of and water my own grass.
Sometimes we think we’re in tough situations, but our own insecurities and personal frustrations prevent us from recognizing the goodness surrounding us and the possible opportunities before us.
Water it as much as you can. Try to make a situation as best as it can be. Do everything in your control. There’s a point you’ll realize you’ve done everything you can do to make things better, you did everything in your control, and you gave it your all. But you owe it to yourself to be happy, challenged, and respected. When you run out of water, move onto a greener pasture. You’re not running away from anything but running towards something.
We’re a 106-year-old technology company, and we’re the only tech company that has moved from one era to the next. When you’re in tech, you have to transform.
— Ginny Rometty
Adriana Morales is a Design Lead at IBM based in Austin, TX. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
