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The Future of Design Is Human — with Jod Kaftan
September 3, 2024 Brand Leadership Career Growth Communication Design Leadership Digital Transformation Leadership Management Strategy Teamwork
Guest Speaker
Jod Kaftan, Head of Product and Research Design, Oracle

As head of product design and research at Oracle, Jod Kaftan leads a design practice that strives to meaningfully impact climate change and provide SaaS solutions that bring critical energy services to populations globally. Jod has more than 20 years of extensive end-to-end expertise in the enterprise and at both agencies and startups, driving cross-channel experiences across platforms for blue chip clients such as Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Google, and Wells Fargo.

Jod has always pushed for businesses to become human-centered and provide solutions that are resilient and seek enduring value. Before leading design teams at Oracle and Accenture Song, Jod was an experience designer and strategist at shops such as Razorfish and Possible, where he’s been exposed to a large spectrum of business models and design problems, from CPG, financial services and entertainment; to nonprofits, startups, and innovation labs.

Make creativity part of every decision — especially the business ones

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, host Adam Morgan is joined by Jod Kaftan, head of product and research design at Oracle, for a candid conversation about the future of design in an increasingly automated world.

Together, Jod and Adam talk about how creativity is intrinsically tied to the human experience, why building a community of people who challenge you can lead to better design, and what creative folks should be looking out for as AI keeps emphasizing that it’s here to stay. As the world moves faster and faster toward automation, knowing where to keep and nurture the human touch will be more important than ever. As Jod says, “Creativity is a life force.” Listen now to learn how to harness it.

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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 5

Episode: 6

Episode Title: The Future of Design is Human — with Jod Kaftan

Guest Title:
Jod Kaftan, Head of Product and Research Design, Oracle

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Jod Kaftan
First is to have courage. The next is to have compassion. And the next is curiosity. These three things, if you can really embody these three values, right? Creativity follows. 

Adam Morgan
Welcome to Real Creative Leadership, a video podcast produced by The Stoke Group and hosted by me, Adam Morgan. Today, we are taking a trip, a trip to the future of design — or at least the future of design thinking. We’re going to be talking to Jod Kaftan, head of product design and research for Oracle. Jod has 15 years of experience as a design leader from financial services and healthcare to e-commerce and media. He’s worn many hats: writer, editor, UX and UI designer, strategist, builder, mentor, and future thinker.

And it’s that interest in the future that we want to dig into today. In this episode, we are going to discuss the future of design and creative leadership and the way we actually construct that design —  something John calls strategic foresight. So look for that and the role of human emotions and brain science in creativity and design thinking, as well as leading future leaders; it’s going to be a good one, so stick with us.

Adam Morgan
Let’s get going. All right. Jod, welcome to the show. I just first want to give you a chance to just introduce yourself to our audience so they get to know you better. If you want to give us some background of who you are. 

Jod Kaftan
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for the generous introduction. You know, when I, whenever you hear yourself being introduced, well, I should just speak for myself. I’m like, “God, I sound like a dilettante,” you know? 

Adam Morgan
You’re not alone. You’re not alone. 

Jod Kaftan
Yeah, so I’ve spent, you know, like the last majority of my career in the last 15 years have been spent consulting and about five of those years at Fjord and Accenture. So really working with clients and that golden age of design thinking, which I’m — let’s see what we’re in now. I’m not sure, but where design was really at the forefront of having C-suite audiences and coming up with breakthrough ideas, breakthrough products, and trying to bring those things to market.

But as anyone who’s been consulting for a while, it’s like, you get a little bit wistful about constantly giving your baby up for adoption and never knowing what happens to it afterward. And so I wanted the challenge of moving into the enterprise and I got it. And that’s where I’ve been the last three plus years at Oracle. And what attracted me to Oracle was really that we were working on products that would bring critical energy services to the grid and make them stable and resilient; helping reduce our carbon footprint through energy efficiency and B2B2C products. And now it’s been expanded to construction engineering products, which we are market leaders in and looking at ways to create smart construction platforms where we can be more efficient and create safer and more resilient buildings and things of those natures. So it’s been a journey and I’m still learning, but here I am. 

Adam Morgan
Well, that’s awesome. And I want to back up a little bit because I don’t think you’re — well, even though everyone’s journey is unique, yours follows a trend that’s very similar to mine and many others in that, you know, we start out in either an advertising agency or consulting or whatever it was, cause that’s where creativity lived. Let’s be honest, like, in the nineties and early aughts, that’s where if you wanted to do commercial creative, that’s kind of where you went, and the design thinking design led movement really changed that. And it really affected my career in a big way. The golden era of it really did change a lot.

I saw a lot of creative leaders moving from just consulting or agencies and moving in-house and having a bigger seat at the table. And like you mentioned, like, you didn’t want all your babies just, you know, adopted and tossed around all the time. It was a chance to own something and drive something. And when the world — the business world — woke up to that and really put a premium on, “All right, we believe in this innovative thought. We believe in this process. We want to change products.” And to be fair, it was mostly — it started around products, but I think it’s leaned and pushed into other areas.

Jod Kaftan
Absolutely. And you know, I was started at creative agencies and I gotta be honest — there’s parts of that I really miss, you know, because, because it was so new then. Right there. I mean, that’s what attracted me to it. I was a journalist, you know, and I loved aspects of media. You know, this was a frontier. It was — nobody knew what good was. Nobody knew what the right thing to do was. And that was exciting. You know, like, things were created from scratch. Looking at a blank canvas was how we, you know, approached every project and, you know, that’s changed obviously with the maturity of design systems.

And so it’s interesting to ask where does creativity lie in, you know, a mature enterprise UX practice? And that’s a question that I try to answer every day. I don’t have a binary answer to that, but I think you mentioned design thinking that has given us a way to have almost like a meta layer of creativity. What I mean by that is that it’s not simply the object itself that gets produced or the output or the product that contains that creative force; it’s all the orchestration and the relationship building and the alignment that you have to over communicate on to put a product out in the market of impact. And I think that’s what design thinking has helped us realize. 

Adam Morgan
And throughout your journey, as you’ve, you know, moved from journalist to UX, to this, to that, you know, now you’ve landed in product design. And I just want to just take a moment for those who aren’t as familiar — like, explain a little bit to our audience about that discipline. What is product design and your role in that? 

Jod Kaftan
Again, in a little history, like starting out, there were UX people (which frankly, we’re all generalists). They all came from different backgrounds. It kind of attracted this kind of outlaw type that couldn’t fit in anywhere else. And then they finally — they found a home in UX because it was so interdisciplinary and I still love it for those reasons.

And then there were like creatives, right? So when I was working at this shop in Santa Monica, you know, we had our creatives that we worked very closely with. I think, you know, my interpretation of product design as it means, as it applies today, it’s a confluence of — it’s actually a convergence of a few things happening. The maturity of design systems, you know, as organizations have increased their investment in enterprise teams, it’s hard enough to win new headcount for UX, but when you, you know, if you were to have to go and say, “Well, I need a visual designer and a UX person,” they’d be like, “Oh, okay, now you’re just crazy job.” Like, you know what I mean? So you, so design systems have taken some of the burden off of people that just have a pure capability and talent with visual design.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t need a design sense, right? Which is really important and we can get into the nuance. So I would say at least, you know, at a conceptual level, product design means a true T- shaped designer, someone who can do enough, be good enough across that, that design capability horizontal in order to ship products.

But I will say this: it’s much easier to take a visual designer that is interested in things like research and UX heuristics and, you know, getting into how the technology works and make them into a full-stack product designer than it is someone who maybe comes from a development background or a business analyst and stretch them the other way. It happens, and you have to be flexible to both, transformations, but visual design is still a really important skill, I think, within the product design framework, but it really does mean in my mind a generalist 

Adam Morgan
And let’s also point out, like, for the most part when we’re talking product design, it’s probably software, right? It’s not like we’re designing chairs or vehicles or whatever it is. Like, when we’re talking about product, the products themselves are most likely some sort of a software interface, something that people are experiencing. [00:09:15] 

Jod Kaftan
Yeah. I mean, it’s not industrial design, right? Which is the design of hardware, you know, or chairs and airplanes and things of that nature, right? It’s not service design, which we can talk about, which was another great area of growth for me in my career. So it, there are a lot of these disciplines that live in a different — are adjacent to each other and they can inform each other. Just like, you know, layers of an onion. I kind of — that is how I think of it.

Like, product design can exist within service design. But I remember my old boss at Fjord saying every product is a service waiting to happen because we’re in a SaaS environment today where the technology is changing so fast that you have to approach product design as almost like a service design mindset, cause nothing’s fixed, right? Like, things are constantly going to be changing, you know, which is what John Maeda, I guess would also refer to as “computational design,” just to throw another term in there. 

Adam Morgan
Well, what do you think is most misunderstood about product design? Like, did people get it? Like, did it makes sense?

Jod Kaftan
Well, it really depends on the organization, of course, right? And one of the things I am focused on at Oracle, and again, I — Oracle is huge. There are many design leaders at Oracle and I have a specific focus over a couple of different industries, but, you know, it really depends on the maturity of that organization. I think what’s often most misunderstood — unfortunately, it pains me to still say this — after being in the, in the field for, you know, 20 years now, that it’s still associated with UI. It’s still associated with the presentation layer. And it’s really painful for me to say that after coming from Fjord and Accenture, where design was strategy, right? Design was customer, the equivalent to defining customer value, which if I said that at Oracle, you know, or other big tech companies, they’d be like, “Well, that’s strategy’s job, right?” And so I think what’s misunderstood is that it’s localized to that presentation layer is still even to this day, but that’s also our superpower.

And I remind people on my team, one thing we can do better than anyone else — and I’ll say this till probably my last days on this earth — is we can bring form to where there is none, right? We can take the intangible and we can make it tangible, persuasive, emotional — we can make it a reason to believe, right? And that will always be our superpower, regardless of the technology. Maybe AI will help us. I don’t know. We can talk about all that later. I think that’s the big misunderstanding is that, you know, it’s the top of the iceberg that you can see and not the 80 percent below the water. 

Adam Morgan
Yeah. It’s always hard to quantify that when people just say, “Oh, you just put lipstick on it, right? Like you can just make it look fancy,” but it’s — design doesn’t just mean the upper layer. And the interesting thing for me is I — so I come more from the enterprise, the marketing side of design. And I think there’s — well, there’s a lot around that. There’s some companies, “Those two different two worlds ne’er shall meet,” and some of them, they’re a lot more tightly integrated, but even the way they work and function, like, it’s just a very different, I know that the design system that I use and run for our website is very different than the product design systems, even though we work together to try and create some cohesion and some — many elements that are common. But tell me about your experience between that divide between product and marketing design and how that’s worked for good or ill.

Jod Kaftan
Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, maybe I’m one of those experienced people that just has the hubris that everything is experience, you know, and all —

Adam Morgan
The brand — 

Jod Kaftan
Yeah. Or you could take that brand perspective. Like a lot of brand strategists I’ve worked with have said, I don’t want to stop at upper-funnel. I want to be with you while they’re using our services and even as they’re exiting our services, everything’s a reflection of that brand. And I think that’s a good metaphor. So I think of experience design in that regard too. But that being said, I mean, maybe this is an oversimplification, but I like to think of marketing design as a promise being made, right?

For the most part, you could call it that brand promise. And product design is the fulfillment of that promise, you know, but they can overlap absolutely right. Like, there are moments of marketing. Once someone is already a paying customer, that needs to be consistent with the quality of the experience they’ve already signed up for as a customer. So, I don’t think it’s something to oversimplify. Okay? But roughly, that’s why as a product designer, I’m always concerned with how we’re talking to clients at the very beginning of our sales cycle. What’s being promised, right? Like, you know, it’s very siloed at these organizations. And if I didn’t raise my hand to say like, “What are you guys talking about when you pitch the value proposition of our products,” right?

And if we don’t fulfill that promise, right? And it’s a little bit different in B2B products where I work in enterprise related products, because you can easily rationalize underperforming experiences by saying, “Well, they, they bought with us again, they renewed their RFP.” Well, these are huge RFPs and the buyers — there’s a lot of political reasons why someone might renew an RFP and it might not be because the UX is so good. So that’s something that I think is really critical for people in my role. You should care about every aspect, every touch point in which the brand is representing. It’s voice and making sure that there’s cohesion and consistency in that.

Adam Morgan
I love that simplification. The brand marketing folks make all the promises and the product folks have to fulfill all those promises, so we better be on the same page, right? I just want to emphasize that that’s so, so important. And in companies where I feel like we’re tight and close and communicating and working together and understanding the promises and what’s being made is such a better experience for the customer and a better experience for us as employees in those companies. I feel like when we put up these walls and it’s all about, “No, you’re in a different design org,” and it gets so in the way and it causes so many problems and it’s such a worthless battle. So I’m with you. 

Jod Kaftan
One other last thing I just want to add to that is I think what can really help break down, you know, this orthogonal operating model that happens in organizations is to realize that we’re not designing products. We’re really designing relationships, you know, and when you get into the relationship business as a product designer, you start to see dots connect that you didn’t before, right? And if you think of that, like, brand promise stuff or the marketing design would be focusing on, that’s lik  the early stages of a relationship. Like, you know, I’m building trust. I’m being interesting to talk to, you know, because you get from me what you don’t get from others. Then when our relationship gets more serious, right? Product design is then, you know, reinforcing and strengthening that relationship. So to me, that relationship thing really unifies the whole thing. 

Adam Morgan
I love it. Yeah. We’re in the experience era, not just in making mousetraps. It’s definitely about those relationships. I love that. I really love the way that Jod describes the need for alignment across teams throughout the customer journey. The marketing design team makes the promise and the product design team fulfills that promise. That is so true. It’s so amazing. And it really reinforces the need to prioritize those connections, because it’s those connections that influence team culture, which we know is so important. Now let’s dig into Jod’s perspective on creative leadership and why he thinks strategic foresight is the key to the future of design.

Adam Morgan
I think I’ve never been more challenged than now to bring creative leadership into sort of this age of big tech companies downsizing their design investments and you know, just solely focused on AI. And a lot of these are engineering dominant cultures and like I said, they can sometimes turn creativity into a math problem that can be solved. And you even see — you know, this is even with the rampant IP violations, you know, being made by Gen AI, Gen AI art bots, whether it’s using Scarlett Johansson’s voice or just the struggling art, the struggling artists IP that’s living in a flop house and Bushwick, right? There’s an advancement of the technology and there’s not an advancement of the ethics that can create some unique challenges.

So I like to think creative leadership is also primarily focused on what’s called “moral imagination.” What future do I want to live in? And what future do I want my customers and the people I work with to live in? So my approach is really to find an opportunity, find a weakness in the existing orthodoxy, and it usually has something to do with a dearth of long term thinking and innovation. And why is that? Because we’re living in this era of short term CEO tenures, right? Where they’re chasing down revenue, right? And they’re kind of like, “Yeah, it’s five quarters from now. I won’t be in this job. That’s for the next person’s problem to worry about.” And so we’ve deprioritized that longer-term thinking as a result and the propensity to engage envisioning and creating greater resilience to disruption.

So I try to find something that everyone wants: exciting ideas that go to market. And then it’s really about trying to get people to unlearn things that they’ve learned in order to do that. “Well, we’ve always done it this way. What are you, what are you proposing here? This short sprint, that’s going to be havoc. We can’t pull the resources off their other project.” No, we can always find a way. You just have to keep plugging, keep plugging. Right? 

And my other starting point is really to find my tribe. And what do I mean by that? Find the people that are restless dreamers — somewhere else in the company, actually deliberately outside of design. If you can find those people — it could be an intern that works in sales and that could be a burnt out SVP of engineering that’s that’s bored with what’s in the roadmap — find your tribe and be their spark. Once you have that coalition of willing dreamers and doers, you really can be an unstoppable force. It doesn’t happen overnight, but I do think that is part of how I try to approach creative leadership.

Adam Morgan
I’d love to respond to that because I think many think of creative leadership just as the managerial part of it, of just like, “I’m a leader and therefore I got to lead other people and manage.” I love what your focus is on — is on the visionary aspect of it. Like that leadership, creative leadership starts with a vision. Creative leadership starts with this alternate reality of the future that you really want and then finding your tribe. I love that. I think that’s so critical, especially as you go up the chain, that skill and that aspect of creative leadership becomes more and more and more important. I know in my role, that’s my job. I got to figure out the vision. I got to figure out where we’re going. 

Jod Kaftan
Right? And sometimes the vision, it’s not the how, it’s what — it’s the outcomes. Like, our job as a creative leader is to define those aspirational outcomes. And if you are defining how exactly you’re going to get there all the time, you are cannibalizing the creative capital that already exists on your team. You know, and, and what — let me give you an example. One of my aspirations is I want the reason that people renew their RFPs or they renew a license with us is because our UX is so good that they actually cited it as the reason. “We chose you because your UX is better than anyone else.” Right now, how we achieve that is I look to collaborate with the smartest people on my team, right? And it really is context dependent, but I think we have to — we have to define those aspirational outcomes. Now, no matter how impossible they are, because they give people a reason to believe 

Adam Morgan
Two thoughts of just you saying that, that are just so great. Number one, first of all, I like the idea of finding a vision, but not curtailing the team. I think it’s critical. It is like, you want to make sure everyone else catches the excitement and the energy of it all to push, ‘cause it takes a lot of people to push. You can’t push it alone. And then I like this other second thing of like you being like, It’s not enough to just have a vision. You can’t be the Turd Ferguson visionary who’s just like not giving a chance for anyone else to shine, and Steve Job is Job-ifying it. You know, I think that’s so critical. ‘Cause these are big, intricate, you know, multifaceted, layered, cross functional, blah, blah, blah — throw in whatever word you want — like, beasts of products. And it’s not just an easy, you know, just point a finger and make everyone go do it. 

Jod Kaftan
I think it’s less about kind of through the cult of personality, exerting force around you so that people, you know, submit to your vision. Like, that worked in advertising long ago, but now the creative leader has to be more of a choreographer, right? And it has to excel at things like really listening, you know.  And as any good leader should, it’s a lifelong practice that — I won’t even tell you that I’m good at, but it’s an obsession now because now I see it as actually the foundation for a paradigm shift and change. If we really listened, you know — it’s funny, you know, like when I — if I were to talk a little bit about a perspective on creative leadership, you know, what precedes that creativity, I like to say, are three values, if I may. 

Adam Morgan
Please. 

Jod Kaftan
So, first is to have courage, the next is to have compassion, and the next is curiosity. If you can really embody these three values, creativity follows. You need courage, right? To propose a preferred future. It just takes courage because all preferred futures are political, so you’re going to get resistance. But if you only have courage, you’re going to — you might be proposing really bad ideas. So what makes a future preferred? It’s that compassion and that curiosity and it all starts by listening. You listen with an open mind, right? And that can lead to this. I like to call it disruptive curiosity, right?

Because if you’re genuinely curious at your core, you can hear it. You can look beyond what that user research interview, what that person is saying and look even deeper and deeper and deeper, right? Because you’re, you’re curious and you don’t have a bias. That’s just one simple example. And I also like to say, listen with an open heart, ‘cause that can lead to disruptive compassion. And I mean, you can even look at things in history, like disruptive curiosity, uh, probably was the force that created people like Galileo and Thomas Edison and disruptive compassion probably created folks like Gandhi and MLK and even Tolstoy, right? Now imagine if Gandhi and Thomas Edison collaborated, what they could have been, what they would have made together.

So those, I call them the three C’s and they’re very important to me and I don’t live up to them every day, but I aspire to, and when I have lived up to them, I’ve really seen the results happen. 

Adam Morgan
Well, and an aspect of that listening and that curiosity is, and something I’ve talked on this show a lot about is as a leader — it’s like you talked about political futures and how it’s like — are all these futures are political when you’re really doing that curious thinking, you’re understanding business strategy, you’re understanding how to talk marketing strategy or product strategy or, you know, backlogs and timelines? Like you move beyond your space of just, you know, yeah, I’m just going to try and solve this problem. And instead you’re getting to a higher level. So you, as a leader, you grow and you become a bigger asset to the company in many ways by, by moving in that space. 

Jod Kaftan
Absolutely. And, and what we’re up against — and a lot of people don’t talk about it is — there’s a little bit of a judgmental hubris in our industry. Like, “Oh, if I, if you ask questions, you’re not with it.” Or, “You’re not keeping up to date with the trends,” or “Shouldn’t you know this by now?” And I think it really forces people into a box and keeps them timid, right? We’ve got to make it safe to learn again, because we’re going to — that’s going to be this — I mean, that’s what Alvin Toffler, the guy who wrote Future Shock,  the seminal book that a lot of futurists reference — he’s like the skill of the future will be how to learn and how to unlearn, right? And we’ve got to make that happen if we want successful designers. 

Adam Morgan
Well, that was the perfect segue into our last section that we want to talk about, which is the future of design. So what do we need to keep in mind for you? Tell me, what is the future of design in your mind?  What’s this ethereal place that we’re going to land in?

Jod Kaftan
Well, like creativity, I think design will never end, right? There’s a lot of anxiety right now in terms of what impact AI will have. I think we should be mindful and not in denial of some of the shadow qualities that are at risk. You know, the disregard for, you know, an artist’s IP is one example. And then if it’s constantly referencing existing art that the learning model has been fed, like, where’s the originality? But then, you know, you could sit back and you could say, “Well, robots aren’t designing all the movies that come out recently.” And there have been very few original movies, by the way, in recent years. They’re all just remakes, franchises. Willy Wonka has been made three times. You know what I mean? So my hope is that the future of design is somehow still affiliated, daring with courage and originality somehow. 

Adam Morgan
When it comes to creativity, there is a large step that happens. And you and I have both done a lot of research on brain science  and neuroscience and all these types of things. And I just want to bring up one chapter of a book that I think sums it up for me really, really well in this, this future and AI and all this kind of stuff. And it’s from The Runaway Species by David Eagleman. And he talks about this idea of like, you know — back with Lincoln, when he had his cabinet where it was like this group of rivals, right? Team of rivals. He describes in the brain that that’s really what’s happening in that. Humans aren’t like machines that it’s like “A plus B equals C,” — like we’re always like “A plus B equals D, F, Q, R,” like, we don’t know. And it’s this team of — there’s all these things that are pushing and shoving around in our brains to win.

And sometimes one part wins and sometimes another part wins and that’s why we’re so unpredictable and so random and it’s so beautiful. And I think there is an element to that of like when you understand the brain, that creativity will always have a home. We can automate the hell out of things and it’s fine, but just know like,  creativity of us making those leaps and changing ideas. And like you said, adding new fodder to the model, like it’s that part of the human world to me, like will forever. Let me know. There’s always going to be a job for creative brains and creative people. And so don’t worry about it, but just start to explore that strategy, those futures, those things, and try and bring that all together.

Jod Kaftan
That’s beautiful. Thank you. I mean, that really resonated for me. Creativity, for me, not to get too spiritual or anything, but it’s life force. Creativity is inseparable from life, and just as life is unstoppable, no matter what they try to do, it will always be there in some form or fashion. So is creativity.

And, and I do think this: true creativity is an act of rebellion. It’s a rebellion and it’s only loyal to the possibility that it serves. It doesn’t care about any consoling norms that we are told to adhere to. And, you know, in business, we talk about disruption. Well, creativity at its core is intrinsically disruptive. And so that will always be true. How it actually gets expressed and manifested, I think that will always be as long as there is life, there will be creativity.

Adam Morgan
Thank you, Jod. This has been such a great conversation, and I hope everyone listening learned something from it. I know I did. 

As always, you can find me at AdamWMorgan.com. And finally, this show is produced by The Stoke group, a full service digital agency that specializes in content marketing, video, and interactive experiences. So if you’re looking for a partner for strategy or content or anything else, visit thestoke group.com. Thanks again for listening. And we will see you on the next episode.