Design Nation 2021: Building a Winning Product through Human-Centered Design with Sarah Alpern, VP of Design at LinkedIn

Sarah Alpern is a design leader with experience building startup design organizations, as well as running large teams for established brands. She currently leads the Design Team at LinkedIn. She previously designed and led teams at Wealthfront & eBay, and received her Masters’ Degree from Carnegie Mellon.

Business Today (Richard Zhu): What led you to design at LinkedIn, and how did your education/employment shape this decision? Was there ever a turning point or a defining moment for you?

Sarah Alpern (SA): Yeah, that's a great question. I had a very windy career path. I studied undergrad at UCLA, and studied cognitive science and business in college. After many changes in majors, I ended up going into product management right after college. I kind of fell into it through an internship, but loved it. I was also working alongside interaction designers as a product manager, and I would sit next to them and then be looking at the work that they were doing, and it was super compelling. And so definitely, that was a moment really early on in my career where I was drawn to design.

But, I actually ended up having a really windy road after that. I did product management; I was a stock broker for a short amount of time; I coached high school tennis. I really tried quite a few things, and eventually just decided to go back and invest in myself and went to graduate school. I went to Carnegie Mellon, and got a master's degree in human computer interaction. That took my [UCLA degree in] cognitive science, which is kind of psychology and computer science, and then added a third leg of the stool, which was design. It was an amazing experience going to Carnegie Mellon. The people there are super inspiring; you're surrounded by so much cool, cutting-edge technology. There was also a lot of robotics stuff happening. I got to do a lot of maker stuff. They have an incredible design school and art school, so there’s a lot of creativity there.

That really jump-started my career in design. I left school, and I got a job as a junior interaction designer at Ebay and made my way up to manager. Eventually, I was recruited over to LinkedIn in 2007, when we were a small, 200-person company on one floor of one building.

For the next six years, I had the opportunity to really grow up alongside the company. I saw the company go public, when it went from a small startup to a legitimate company that was helping people find career success and connect to opportunity. So, I was an IC (Individual Contributor) the entire time I was there. I even refused management because I loved the actual design; I loved being really close to making things. I then eventually decided to leave to go to another startup called Wealthfront, and this is where my windy path actually worked out really to my benefit. I never would have ended up considering or being considered for a company like Wealthfront, except that I had the finance background. A couple of years later, I was moved back by my old manager and mentor to come back to LinkedIn — this time, as a director, so I was actually managing and running a team.

One of the things that I always say, when I'm talking to folks that are earlier in their career, is to just embrace all the different attributes of yourself and all of your different passions and skills. When we're looking for people to join the team at LinkedIn, we look at people who are musicians on the side, who have all kinds of different passions and skills, because it actually makes you this really interesting, well rounded designer.

People often ask why I came back to LinkedIn. And, I did a lot of soul searching. I really had to stop and think, and I really recommend everybody does this, as they're thinking about where to invest their time with a company. Think about “What do I value?” and “What am I looking for out of a company?” For me, it's really around the mission of what the company is trying to do for the world. The people that I get to work with every day, the culture, and whether the cultures and values really align with me. And then, the ability to learn and grow and have impact.

When I thought about it and talked to lots of companies, it really came back to LinkedIn — it was the perfect place to come back to. Since I’ve been back, I've been here for almost four years. In that time, I took on more and more teams and eventually had the opportunity to run our entire design team, which is made up of product designers, user researchers, content designers, and an operations team of design program managers.

“For me, it’s really around the mission of what the company is trying to do for the world. The people that I get to work with every day, the culture, and whether the cultures and values really align with me. And then, the ability to learn and grow and have impact.”

BT: In February, you had an interview with Women In Product at LinkedIn, and in that, you discuss responsible design. Could you tell us a bit more about what that means, and what led you to embrace trust, accessibility, and equity in design?

SA: When I think about anywhere that I want to work, it has to be a place that is really mission-driven and is trying to do something that I care about in terms of the world. At LinkedIn, our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. That's a big goal, very aspirational. On the design team, in particular, we focus a lot on the word, “every.” How do you design for everyone? How do you make sure that you're making products that work, and also emotionally resonate for everyone? That’s really hard. And so, we think a lot about people around the world. How do we make sure that the products that we are building are working, are culturally appropriate, are really compelling, and are solving problems for people around the world.

We think about accessibility and inclusion, making sure that [no matter what] your abilities [are], you can use our products and connect to opportunity. We think about equity — making sure that we are providing and making the world a more equitable place, and then we think about trust. I really feel like not only does design have a role in all of this, but it has a true responsibility. As the design team, we are crafting the experiences, we are sweating the details of the pixels and the flows, and we are the advocates for our users. We are the people doing a lot of the storytelling, through the designs that we make in the company, to really showcase how we can design for every member of the global workforce. As a leader of the team, and as a designer whose main task is actually to design the best, most resilient organization, I actually think a lot about “How do we make this easier for my team?” from a systems perspective. I think about this from culture, process, and tools: how do we make sure our culture is really set up to do this, how do you make sure that we build in the best process, so that it's easy and natural to design this way in a really responsible way? Then, what are the tools that we need to build or invest in?

BT: With over 17 years of experience in user experience design and interaction design, how do you think better storytelling through brand design and other human experience can bring us back together after COVID, in more powerful ways than ever?

SA: [COVID] accelerated kind of a brand new way of working for a lot of people. Many have learned and experienced so much during that time. I am pretty confident that our workplaces will never be the same again, nor will we think about work life balance and integrating work and home together in the same way. I think our expectations have just really changed. For me, that equals so many more opportunities for understanding needs and opportunities for people to innovate on solutions via service design and technology design. And then, of course storytelling, which is something I'm super passionate about, is kind of the key tool that connects the two. We're going to go, as an industry, and really understand “What are the opportunities now?” and “What are the pain points in this new world?” And then, we're going to design solutions for that. In order to get to great designs and great products to build, we as a design team have to be able to paint that picture of “What is the human experience now for our teams?”

“We think about accessibility and inclusion, making sure that [no matter what] your abilities [are], you can use our products and connect to opportunity. We think about equity — making sure that we are providing and making the world a more equitable place, and then we think about trust.”

Storytelling is really critical, and then we can innovate from that. For example, many people have seen that successfully working remotely is now possible. That opens up opportunities for people to potentially live where they want, close to family, outside big crowded cities, in the work hubs — it opens up for opportunities for teams. For myself as a hiring manager, I’m able to hire amazing talent from around the world, and not just in our little bubble. [This means] opportunity for different people from different places who think differently, who have diverse backgrounds and diverse perspectives. I feel really passionately that we need to design a product that works for the world. That said, there's all the mental health issues that have come up during this time and the boundaries are blurred between work and home.

BT: What principles guide design philosophy, and what are some questions that young designers should ask themselves as they start to discover their own creative approaches and design philosophies?

“When you wake up in the morning, and every night before you go to bed, say to yourself, “The user is not like me.” When we are designing technology or whatever we’re designing, you can’t be designing for yourself. In fact, you have to be extremely humble and recognize that something that works for you, likely won’t work for a lot of people.”

SA: One that has always stuck with me from Carnegie Mellon, from my human-computer interaction (HCI) classes, is this mantra that the head of our program used to tell us: When you wake up in the morning, and every night before you go to bed, say to yourself, “The user is not like me.” When we are designing technology or whatever we're designing, you can't be designing for yourself. In fact, you have to be extremely humble and recognize that something that works for you, likely won't work for a lot of people. That's where user-centered design kind of comes from. First, you have to go out and really understand people; you have to understand their needs, their pain points, opportunities, and wants; and then, you can design great things for them.

We can forget that sometimes. I've been working at LinkedIn on and off for a long time. It’s easy to just kind of get caught up in “I know what we’re trying to do, I know what our goals are,” but it's really important that we're always reorienting in the human beings that are using our products and really understanding them and designing for them. So that's one [philosophy] that I use a lot, and it's actually kind of fun. It spurs debates with people sometimes, when they say: “Well actually, this product that we're building...we are in the target market. So why aren't you designing for me?” It is always correct that we're never designing for ourselves, because even if we're in the target market, we understand the business goals too much. We understand too many details about the roadmap and what we're trying to do to actually be able to have that perspective of what somebody who's coming at it cold would have and how they would experience your product.

Another one is that I talk to my team about first meeting, and then exceeding, expectations. People, especially folks that work on our teams, are very mission driven — they really want to exceed people's expectations and make something so delightful, so great, and so beyond something anybody would ever expect. That's awesome. But, sometimes they forget to meet the expectations first. [Picture that] you are making a product or solution for people, and they come in with some sort of expectations or some sort of needs. If you try to give them all of this extra delight, but you don't actually meet those needs first, then you are not successful, so you have to orient and meet their needs first. [Then, you can say: “Okay, now how do we exceed them?”

A third one that I would leave you with is that relationships really matter when you are trying to design and build great products. You know, I have folks join the team who are trying to navigate: “Where are other people I’m going to work with, what should I know about them, what is my role versus their role, what if we have arguments?” What I just always say is, you're inevitably going to disagree sometimes with folks. In fact, we intentionally put people on a team, who maybe have different backgrounds and different skills and different perspectives, because we think actually, all of those people together are going to make a great product. What's super important is outside of that, building those relationships and really connecting as humans together. When you connect as a human and make real relationships with the folks you're working with outside of work context or hard situations, then when hard situations come up — which they inevitably will — then you have that trust that you have each other's back, that you have good intentions, and you're able to build something great together.

“If you work on something that you are passionate about, you will do better work. You will light up, and you will make other people want to work with you and be inspired by you.”

I think the last one that I talk to people about all the time is when they're thinking about where they're going to work, and what sort of job they should take. I feel very strongly that you should start with what you're passionate about. If you work on something that you are passionate about, you will do better work. You will light up, and you will make other people want to work with you and be inspired by you. Prioritize working on things that matter to you versus short term getting to the next level, where you’re trying to orient to get the promotion. Almost across the board, I see that people are much more likely to find career success if they follow their passions, [instead of just] focusing on what's going to get them to the next level of career success. Make sure that your values match the company's. If you are mismatched with the core beliefs of the company, you are going to have to either spend most of your energy trying to change the culture versus making great things, or you're going to be pretty dissatisfied. Right now, designers have a lot of choice about where they want to go. Picking someplace that matches your values is super important.

RZ: It said that some of the greatest products cater to needs we didn't know we had. After leading a major redesign of LinkedIn last September, what's become your process for anticipating and designing for customer needs that might not have surfaced yet?

SA: Thank you for bringing up our redesign. That was a massive effort and partnership across so many people and teams in this company. It is hard to make a change like that to such an established product like LinkedIn.

We started with a lot of research. Talking to people — frankly around the world, because again, we're trying to enable economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce — we wanted to understand their thoughts and their perceptions of LinkedIn, as well as what they really wanted and were looking for. We found gaps that we wanted to design for: between how LinkedIn was perceived and what people were looking for, and frankly, how we saw ourselves and the value we wanted to bring internally. for instance, many people see success as something other than the corner office. Success could be: I make enough money that I conserve every day. Success can be so many different things and yet, a lot of people see LinkedIn as this very buttoned up place where it's about achievement, and it's about you trying to get to an executive position. And so, we worked to really identify attributes of our brand that map to the values that people were looking for, and that we wanted to bring. For instance, warmth and humanity; an active community that's here to help and support each other; and then opportunity, whatever that means to you. Then, we designed a look and feeling UI that aligned to that.

It was really important that we weren't just starting with, “Hey, LinkedIn needs to be modernized. Let's make this cooler.” First of all, I don't think we ever could have aligned on a new design with that as a criteria. We really wanted it to be based on [the following questions], “What value do we want to bring to the world?” or “How do we represent our brand?” Taking a step back to your larger question around the process of designing for customer needs or anticipating customer needs that haven't surfaced, I have a couple of things. One is user research. We think about user research in a lot of different ways, starting from foundational research, where you don't go in with a product that you're testing. You just go in and maybe watch people in their own environments at work or at home, and see the tools they use, the kind of breakdowns, and also identify needs and opportunities. You then use that to facilitate innovation in the design process. [User research then extends] all the way to more usability testing and prototype testing, to make sure what we're building is compelling.

“When you solve a problem for a small amount of people, oftentimes, you’re making a product that works for so many others.”

There's other ways that I think we anticipate and design for user needs. We try to keep an eye on how people are using our product in unexpected ways. What are the workarounds, and what is the unexpected value that people are finding in our product? Then, you can go ahead and actually design for the masses. I personally really like inclusive design as a method for innovation. I don't know if you've seen the Microsoft inclusive design principles; they're really good. The one that really resonates for me, is the “Solve for one, extend to many,” which means starting with potentially a disability or some sort of a need that maybe is not representative of the entirety of the world or a large group, but when you solve a problem for a small amount of people, oftentimes, you're making a product that works for so many others.