Brent Laverty, UX
A designer skilled in the art of negotiation
Hello, could you please introduce yourself ☺️
Hello, I’m Brent! I have been in the design field for about sixteen years now, which is wild because I feel like I have no grasp on the concept of time whatsoever anymore. I have been at Amazon for around two and a half years now in this Principal UX Designer on the Buy with Prime team. I help the team extend Prime to direct-to-consumer businesses. This is the first time I’ve been in a purely commerce-focused role, so it’s been exciting to immerse myself in a new space. Whenever I make a career jump, I like to play in wild, scary new spaces that push me and help me avoid complacency. Prior to Amazon, I was at Spotify for six years, where I led product design for ad experiences across music and podcasts. Our remit was essentially to unlock engagement in an audio-forward, multimodal environment. Prior to Spotify, I was at Vox Media, where I led UX design across many editorial UX initiatives. From helping build an in-house product design team, to figuring out how to extend this emerging notion of responsive design (which sounds so quaint now) to web editorial by launching the gaming site Polygon.com and re-launching the tech site The Verge, those were really interesting and formative times. Even further back, I got my start working in interaction design at a few agencies.
What was your initial introduction to the field of design?
I would credit my dad for that. He was an industrial engineer and product designer. His most notable achievement was having designed, patented and engineered automatic sensor-operated flush valves and faucets. Definitely helped me realize that early on that the fusion of design, engineering, and user testing was a viable career path, but I didn’t really know that I’d follow in his footsteps. In high school I made some friends with some kids experimenting with HTML, PHP and Flash – so when we weren’t playing Dreamcast we were using Actionscript to create generative art inspired by folks like Joshua Davis while engaging with design communities online. That’s when I realized these passions at the intersection of art, design and code had practical application, and this expressive outlet could turn into a career.
How would you define a Principal Designer?
There are many shades of Principal Designer, but in a nutshell, I’d define the role as someone who helps clear extreme early-stage ambiguity with their expertise in user experience, in partnership in other functions bringing their own blend of domain expertise to the table.
The work can be strategic, higher-level, and high-priority, or high-potential, speculative, and unfunded. In any case, you’re often operating several steps back from any hard design work, working with your partners to craft and communicate narratives and paint a vision for something that will move the needle for the business while delivering value for our end users. Over the course of the project, the nature of your engagement might vary. You could be orchestrating the design process and helping uphold a high bar for craft, or you’re going very deep and executing in a hands-on fashion with excellent craft.
That’s just the work. Principals should also take ownership over ways of working and design culture, looking to help up-level process and craft on your team, through mentorship, modeling and the creation of new tools or mechanisms. Personally, I love to spend a lot of time here and actively help shape our design culture and refine our tools.
Which soft skills do you think are essential for a principal designer to possess?
I think there are two key muscles that people need to build in order to prepare for the Principal role – facilitation and negotiation.**
Yes, great design craft really matters, but I find that I deliver the most value when I’m gathering a cast of characters to boil ambiguity down into smaller, actionable questions and problem statements. If you can facilitate well, you can provide teams with the energy and the fuel to go deeper with investigation and exploration. Some actions I tend to take include…
Bring together core, cross-functional groups to align on a shared understanding of our objectives. What are we trying to do, and for whom?
Gather subject-matter experts and download their brains so that we can build collective knowledge and make everyone on the team and expert and advocate.
Foster the shaping and alignment against an ideal state, then compare it against the current state. Identify the gaps in experience, technology, and knowledge of our customers.
Outline the incremental steps to achieve the desired outcome.
On that second point of negotiation, I just believe that’s a crucial behavior for a Principal Designer, and why you were hired in the first place. We should absolutely advocate for great user experience, present compelling arguments for it, and help teams ship bar-raising UX. However, rather than digging our heels in and being uncompromising, we need to lean into our product acumen. We need to work with others, in the face of real constraints (time, market forces, technical realities, dependencies, the priorities of other teams), to deliver the best experience we can incrementally. This allows for velocity – it allows us to learn quickly, but we’re not losing sight of that grander, longer-term vision or overarching goals.
“There are many shades of Principal Designer, but in a nutshell, I’d define the role as someone who helps clear extreme early-stage ambiguity with their expertise in user experience, in partnership in other functions bringing their own blend of domain expertise to the table.”
Can you share a “principal project” that you created?
There have been several projects over the course of my career that afforded me opportunity to operate very strategically, but I think my most formative experience was leading design for Polygon.com at Vox Media way back in 2012. There was so much going on at that time, both internally at Vox and in the larger, surrounding web and tech landscape. Vox was in the process of bringing product design in-house, so I got in on the ground floor to help establish what design systems, process, and excellence meant for us. HTML5, CSS3 and responsive design methodologies were starting to emerge, and this meant we could finally release ourselves from the constraints of IE6 and deliver magazine-quality editorial on the web. Working out an approach and a strategy for how to use these new technologies in our design, while creating design systems and methodologies that scale beyond Polygon’s use case, was critical. This fusion of opportunity was the perfect chance for me to flex a lot of Principal-level skills. Initiative-level strategic thinking, vision setting and execution, and helping at the org-level to establish the bar for process and craft.
How did you earn trust after joining the Polygon team?
This is a good question, because a lot of the core team members joined the company before me. The first thing I did was just immerse myself in this new environment and pick everyone’s brain, from tenured designers to the editorial teams. I wanted to understand the general ins-and-outs of design, the voice and tone that the editorial team wanted to cultivate, larger industry trends that inspired the team so we could raise the bar.
The second priority was coming up with a structured game plan. Polygon had only had a rough launch window when I showed up, and the design canvas was largely blank. I worked with Vox's head of design to build out several different phases for the design process.
We began with general immersion and research. This meant conducting interviews with editorial to better understand the editorial brand they wanted to create, and the sorts of aesthetic targets that they had in mind. This led to us spending a lot of time in libraries and vintage book stores, studying pulpy magazines from the 60s and old science textbooks for inspiration. This led to an extended visual design phase, where we rapidly moved these insights into very structured visual exploration, starting with mood boards across a range of directions, then into speculative and editorial layouts and UI cues, eventually culminating in a presentation where we aligned on a direction. Then came the design system work, where we settled on the core components the site would need across breakpoints and editorial entities while working hand-in-hand with engineers to rapidly stand everything up in code. It was very organic and energizing working this way, lacking a lot of the structure of process and approvals you’d see at larger companies.
What valuable experience did you bring from your time at agencies that contributes to the success of in-house design teams?
Do you mind if I curse while answering this question😅? Working as a designer in an agency setting can be brutal – long hours spent working on so many things at once spanning many clients and across so many forms. One moment you’re working on a rich media campaign without the aid of storyboards, so you have a hovering art director giving you real-time input on how to animate something. Another, addressing a ton of unstructured feedback from the client on a site design. Then you’re off to a brainstorm. Next, you’re off to a client meeting, after which there’s a press check across town. You might not have a weekend, but you won’t complain about it because you’re living life in the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis and staying afloat is the paramount concern. Agency experience benefits me to this day because I’ve cultivated an extremely high tolerance for bullshit, which means I don't get frustrated or flustered easily when things aren't well. I can tolerate a high degree of nonsense. I have built a very thick skin. I feel as if I can deliver quality quickly. Going in-house has afforded focus. Instead of spanning a million clients and a million deliverables, I can go much deeper on far fewer things, with a healthy work-life balance, and iterate as we learn more. Still, wouldn’t trade that agency experience for anything.
Was there a moment where things clicked for you that you decided to stay on the IC track?
I've wafted between IC and management quite a few times over the course of my career. I am sure there will be yet another moment where something will click and I’ll be a manager again. Similar to what other interviewees have mentioned, it's not a one-way door. The skills that you develop, both hard and soft, are transferable across roles. It's a matter of exercising them in different ratios and enhancing your proficiency in those areas.
What led me to this role at Amazon was honestly an intense longing to be exclusively hands-on after growing a team and leading it for five years. At the onset of the pandemic, my team at Spotify had grown quite large, which meant that my day-to-day was almost completely focused on people management activities and coaching, and I was incrementally distanced further and further from the product strategy, design craft and execution. I loved managing that team, but need to be close to the work to be truly happy. Design is fundamentally what gets me up in the morning! My decision to join Amazon and revert back to an individual contributor (IC) role driven by a desire to reset and center myself by focusing on strategy and execution again, jump into a scary new space that’ll push me in new ways, and to sharpen my hard skills.
“I’ve wafted between IC and management quite a few times over the course of my career. I am sure there will be yet another moment where something will click and I’ll be a manager again. Similar to what other interviewees have mentioned, it’s not a one-way door. The skills that you develop, both hard and soft, are transferable across roles. It’s a matter of exercising them in different ratios and enhancing your proficiency in those areas.”
What advice would you give to a senior designer who is trying to decide between the IC track and management track?
If you’re approaching that fork in the road, I would really stop to think and unpack. Assess your motivations. If you enjoy mentorship and coaching today, assess whether you’d enjoy doing that full-time (and then some). Assess your comfort with being measured by different standards. Would you be comfortable being measured not by the quality of your output, but that of your team, and thus your ability to foster a design culture that’s high-performing, healthy and happy? Assess the altitude. Will you be comfortable owning a very large remit, but not being able to be present in all those spaces, all the time? Talk to others to see how they’ve navigated the transition.
Ultimately, recognize that it’s reversible. If you try management and don’t enjoy it, or miss being completely hands-on, then switch back. Like I said earlier, the roles are really similar, you’re just flexing behaviors in different ratios. I think you’ll find that the strengths you built port over either way. Management made me a stronger communicator and negotiator, and generally helped me develop backbone — something that helps tremendously as an IC.
What excites you about being a designer in the next few years?
Like I mentioned earlier, I like scary and uncomfortable new spaces. I’m certainly excited about all the emerging, transformative, disruptive technologies on our doorstep like AR, AI, wearables, and all that stuff — but I’m mostly excited about the work ahead and the critical responsibility we have. The roles we designers and researchers play are going to be all the more important, as our skills and perspective are critical to shaping how these technologies are going to fit into society and our lives in positive and additive ways. In a world where computers are making decisions on our behalf, using various inputs to dynamically produce conclusions or even interfaces, how do you make sure those outputs are understandable, usable, even ethical? That’s the exciting stuff right there.
