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Jehad Affoneh, Sr. Director, Head of Design at VMware
As your organization grows, and grows and grows, you may find things start to look a little disjointed, almost as if they were created by different teams at different companies. This was the case at VMware a few years back, as they noticed products just weren’t lining up, even on a basic level. To create cohesion, a small team set out to develop a consistent look and feel with standardized micro interactions.
Fast forward to today, and the outcome of these efforts is Clarity, VMware’s fully open source design system. From a small project in the corner of VMware’s engineering organization, Clarity has evolved into one of the company’s most foundational UI projects. Jehad Affoneh, Sr. Director, Head of Design at VMware, has been working on Clarity through it all. Starting out at VMware as an engineer, Jahed today leads design globally across most of the company.
Like many internal projects, Clarity started out underfunded, with just a few people working on it. But it soon took off and continues to make strides. Jehad reflects on lessons learned, sharing strategies to help pull off a design system project of your own. He also speaks to ways design leaders can build credibility across the organization and how the role is really about designing for your team, the business and the user at an end-to-end level.
Carl: I am excited to welcome to The Bureau Briefing today a good friend of mine, Mr. Jehad Affoneh. How are you, Jehad?
Jehad: I'm good. How are you?
Carl: I'm good. How long have we known each other, is it four years?
Jehad: Three years ago, four years ago, yeah, the first time.
Carl: Koloa was the first time you came to Design Leadership Camp, right?
Jehad: That is true. Three years ago, three years ago.
Carl: Yeah, three years ago, yeah, and the world has never been the same for either one of us.
Jehad: That's true, that's true. My life has changed since then, and in a fantastic way, just to be clear.
Carl: Well, it's still nice to have you on the show, man. I know we've talked about it for quite a while. Literally anytime I'm around you, I feel my happiness quotient go up, so right now I'm a little bit giddy.
Jehad: The feeling is mutual.
Carl: Everybody listening knows that I generally get a little bit goofy, but I'm only feeling super goofy today. Not impressions level, not ones that would get me sued anyway. To start off, it's unfathomable to me that anybody would not know who you are, but give everybody just a little bit of your background and kind of what you're doing today.
Jehad: Sure. My name is Jehad. I am leading the design team at VMware. I lead design globally across the company or for most of the company. Before that, I co-created the Clarity design system which is VMware's design system, which we interestingly created actually outside of the design team, and then we brought into the design team. Before that, I started my career as an engineer which... Every time we go to the Design Leadership Camp, it's interesting to see the starting points of designers from different places that are not usually design, it's for design leaders today.
Carl: To me, it's like you're one of those rare engineers that possibly had a shot at stand up comedy. I'm just going to say it, you're a funny guy.
Jehad: I appreciate it, I appreciate it. [inaudible 00:02:03] comedy, but you know.
Carl: Well you make me laugh, that's all I care about.
Jehad: That's all that matters, Carl, that's all I aspire to.
Carl: So you started at VMware almost nine years ago?
Jehad: I did.
Carl: That is unfathomable to me that somebody is at one company for that long especially when you're moving into the design space. What is that evolution like in terms of what you were doing nine years ago to today?
Jehad: Yeah. I started at VMware in August, I believe it's August 22, 2011 which is almost nine years ago, which is just amazing that 2011 is nine years ago. I started as an engineer, as a UI engineer on one of VMware's products. I spent a couple of years as a UI engineer, then I started leading UI and UX for a newly created project which is now called VxRail, a billion plus dollar project for VMware. I think that was the transition for me into UI, UX leading both.
Jehad: It's funny today when someone says UI/UX, it bothers me to [crosstalk 00:03:15]. But at the time, that was kind of an opportunity for my entry into leading the UX side of a project. One of the goals of that project was to streamline how we create, and install, and build cross-product for VMware, so we had of look at all products across VMware. When we put them together in a typical design room... Just close your eyes, Carl, and imagine Post-it notes and pictures of products on the wall, the typical design room.
Carl: The Post-it notes, I'm seeing yellow and blue Post-it notes. Were there different colors?
Jehad: There were pink, and purple, and green, and it's just all the colors.
Carl: [inaudible 00:04:04]. Keep going, keep going.
Jehad: We put in together and realize before we even talk about workflows being cohesive, before we even talk about case of experiences, these products didn't even look the same. The next and back didn't even live in the same side of the screen, sometimes next was on the right and back was on the left, and sometimes it was the opposite, just basic stuff, and realize we actually have a deeper problem to solve.
Jehad: We started kind of a project on the side at the time to build Clarity which is our design system, and quickly realized Clarity is actually bigger than that specific project. At the time actually, it wasn't really called a design system or at least I didn't know the term, but we got to get the company's look and feel cohesive, and we got to get the company's micro interactions and how people interact with products for VMware cohesive.
Jehad: We started focusing on Clarity exclusively where we created a small team, very underfunded of two or three people, or three or four people at the time to work on this. It grew quickly, we worked across the company, and we got Clarity adopted heavily across the company. From there, I moved to actually lead design for the company which at the time was a 30 people team, 30, 35 people team.
Carl: What is it now?
Jehad: We're now about 150, 160 people.
Carl: You're building an empire, sir.
Jehad: I don't like the term "empire", but we're building a great, great team with a great culture. It's an awesome team.
Carl: Empire.
Jehad: It's an awesome team that I'm just proud to be with for the journey.
Carl: You're going to make me edit that out. Then all my friends hated me because Carl said I was building an empire. Okay, fine, amazing team.
Jehad: I already blame you for most problems in the past three years.
Carl: Since you've always been out of office, I've had to pick up the mantle. [crosstalk 00:06:09].
Jehad: I think that's fair, I think that's really fair. Knowing the other thing that's fair.
Carl: I want to say this about Clarity, and maybe other companies do this as well. I think part of your success was you had an awesome T-shirt, right?
Jehad: I think that's actually most of the success, like if I think back to it.
Carl: You branded it, you gave it a cool logo, you gave it a T-shirt. It was something somebody could feel a part of. I have jokingly, but also you made it its own kind of entity. It wasn't the VMware design system, it was Clarity, and just by calling it that, it gave everybody an understanding of its purpose. So many times I'll hear about a design system and it sounds more like that bad 20s horror movie, The Blob, where it starts absorbing everything until people are scared of it, and then they just move away.
Carl: Talk a little bit about what kind of problems you had when you first rolled out with Clarity. Was it easily adopted, or did you have a lot of confusion? What was that like?
Jehad: It's a good point. I mean when we talk about the T-shirts, I mean it wasn't the T-shirts, but the brand actually mattered a lot. If you're creating a project internally, it doesn't matter how big or how small, if you don't have a name for it, a logo for it, a source of truth for it that clearly explains it, a vision for it for people to sign up to, then you're not really doing your project any justice.
Jehad: Because at the end of the day, you want to have a balance between this is work we need to do, and this is a mission people want to subscribe to. If you look at all successful missions or all things that achieve aspirational goals, they probably have a logo, and have a name, and have a brand because the end of the day, you want people to subscribe to something that's larger than the work. That's part of, in my mind, a huge part of Clarity's success.
Jehad: It wasn't easily adopted initially, we actually work closely with multiple different teams. I jokingly say, "It's the one yes, after 99 no's." To make it successful, you got to get used to rejection at some point. This is lesson for life. Having these conversations actually was really useful, it was kind of forced user research.
Jehad: We had to actually learn what people need, what people don't want, what people want to subscribe to, what people say no to. Even when the conversations were not truly deep conversations about the design system, they were really helpful in shaping our message. If you need to get a project like this adopted across the company, especially when there are tons of engineers and other teams working on similar things or what they believe or similar things, brand matters a lot.
Jehad: Brand is one. The other one that we did that mattered a lot was open sourcing it, because once we open sourced it, it's created this flywheel, this loop where we did a really good work in creating the first MVP for Clarity. We then open sourced it, it got populated externally, but at least it got talked about externally, that people internally started coming back and saying, "Wait, this is from VMware, this seems interesting, I've heard about it externally. I want to talk to you about it. My product doesn't use it. I want to talk to you about it"
Jehad: The third piece is we realized early on that Clarity is for developers as much as it's for designers, if not, if it's more for developers than designers, because at the end of the day people who make the decision to adapt and the wider decision, the bottoms-up decision, or the grassroots decision is developers. Making it a no brainer for developers was the thing that we focused on the most and the thing I think that paid dividends and still pay dividends today.
Jehad: But yeah, if you're working on an internal project, create a logo, pick a name, have a mission statement, be ready to sell it like it's your own mission to the moon.
Carl: Then when you have people who weren't part of the organization, aren't part of your team, aren't even really a designer or anyone who's ever going to have a design system but they really want that T-shirt so bad that they make you get on their podcast so they can ask you publicly, "Can I have a damn T-shirt?", you'll know that you've done a good job.
Jehad: You're speaking hypothetically, right?
Carl: Hypothetically, of course, hypothetically. I love this open source idea because open source is good. It's like open source has this halo to it that it just means that everyone gets to contribute, it's something for the greater good of the development of tech community. That was kind of a stroke of genius. Was that something from the beginning, or did that evolve?
Jehad: We thought about it from the beginning but it kind of evolved, and the reasons for it kind of evolved. One of the things that really mattered to us was we truly actually cared about open source as a concept ignoring if Clarity is going to be successful or not. We thought that a lot of what Clarity depends, on a lot of the company depends on, many companies depend on is open source work that people do for the benefit of the community, and we thought there is nothing about Clarity itself that's going to be VMware only.
Jehad: There are brand elements on top of the design system that are VMware only obviously and protected IP, but the design system itself, I mean you can copy whatever design system you want, you just have to go rebuild it or restyle different design system to look like it so there's really no IP there. If that's the case, we want to actually accelerate people's journey towards design systems, and we want to accelerate people's journey towards providing better experiences across the community, and we thought it would be good to contribute. That was the main motivator.
Jehad: We also thought that, to be honest, at the time, we thought that if you put it out there publicly, it would be much harder to kill it. This is the mentality of an underfunded team that wants to move things forward. I don't think this was actually a real fear at the time but it was one that we had, and it's helped us. One thing that we probably didn't realize at the time that I think was really useful is we went full open source.
Jehad: Full open source means we don't have an internal repo, there is no internal Clarity code, there is no internal project management. I mean we have emails that we exchange internally but it's actually fully open source. What this has been really helpful at least initially as we got Clarity adopted, is we were able to get it adopted equally across the organization with the cover of open source.
Jehad: What this meant is when someone said, "Oh, I want this specific component for my team for this specific use case," the answer is, "If you can file a public GitHub ticket for it, then we probably would work on it. If not, it's probably too specific to your team for us to worry about it." That distinction provided us an equal ground with all teams versus the loudest team gets the most attention type of a relationship. I think a huge part of Clarity's success is this impartial, credible what open source type of view of this.
Carl: That makes so much sense especially when you get to the governance side. Part of what I'm thinking is VMware is a huge company, huge corporation, and so many new people coming in, other people going out, so you've got an ongoing growth. You said from like the mid 30s to well over 100 just on your design team in that timeframe, so you have to onboard people onto a design system. Then when somebody comes up with their one-off thing to be able to say, "Well, let's see if this can work because you have to submit the ticket."
Carl: How often is it when somebody has something they want to do, that as soon as you explain to them what they need to do, it just goes away?
Jehad: Initially, it was probably once a day. Basically, "Here's what we want and please build it for us," but today it's actually very limited. I mean people still ask for things that probably shouldn't be built into Clarity and there is a philosophical argument to be made about what should and shouldn't be in its own system and so on so forth, but overall I think the culture has been clear on what... The Clarity team has been very successful at creating a culture externally, that that is pretty clear on what's Clarity and what's not just from purely the open source versus not conversation. It's been really helpful.
Jehad: The one thing, the one downside I would say was that it's made it harder for... it required additional steps at the beginning for designers to be clear about how to contribute, because designers are generally not used to contributing to open source project, contributing a design to open source projects. That was kind of an interesting balance that we needed to hit.
Carl: As a result of showing everyone and getting everybody on board, it's a living, breathing design system, as opposed to one that's put out there, and occasionally somebody goes around it to put it back on somebody's desk or in somebody's email and say, "Hey, don't forget." This is the real thing that's just ingrained in the organization now.
Jehad: Right, absolutely.
Carl: You go through and create Clarity with a great team. See, I'm trying to balance off the whole empire thing now, with a great team who supported you, and probably you weren't even at work half the time, they were doing everything.
Jehad: Carl, you're getting this shirt, just don't worry about it.
Carl: Okay. I'm just making sure because I need some blackmail material as well. How does the team change from when you first started off in the mid 30s, now... How many did you say there are? Over 150 now?
Jehad: Over 150 designers, engineers and researchers.
Carl: How does that evolution take place? What are the big additions or changes from when you started to now?
Jehad: I think Clarity gave us a lot of momentum and credibility especially with... We're to some extent an engineering-driven organization, or most people on the team are engineers. Team meaning the wider VMware organization, or our [inaudible 00:16:33] organization, which meant that credibility with engineering team was actually extremely fundamental for us bringing design into the organization, and Clarity gave us a ton of that credibility.
Jehad: We started basically focusing on how do we bring design itself, user experience and product design in a much stronger way as an equal partner into the organization. The way we worked is we actually set up expectations in what we believe design should do. We focus internally first to ensure that we, as a team, are able to do this and we're able to actually do a good job as a design team of delivering on this, and then it was relationship building across the organization.
Jehad: Working with engineering and PM leadership on ensuring that design is involved, that expectations of design are beyond UI and visual design, and you know, I built this, make it pretty, and changing expectations slowly also changed how much of design you need to actually ship good experiences. From there it's grown.
Jehad: I think the number one thing that made a huge difference is we had the credibility, we built strong relationships through Clarity, and we carried on the momentum of these relationships to actually drive design across the organization, which is not generally the typical way a design comes into an organization. Usually, you have a design, you create a design system, versus the other way around.
Carl: Right. Today for you, I mean comparing where you were nine years ago, today you're on world-class podcasts, that's obvious.
Jehad: Of course.
Carl: You're sending out T-shirts to weblebrities.
Jehad: I think today I've officially made it. Like I'm sending you a T-shirt, [crosstalk 00:18:16].
Carl: I didn't hit record, damn it. Just kidding. What is your life like now? I mean from when you first started and you were probably really hands on, like what do you spend most of your time doing now?
Jehad: I'm a huge fan of the book, I don't know if you know the book, Principles, and for anybody that knows me is going to hear this and roll their eyes because they've probably heard this like a trillion times from me.
Carl: I couldn't believe you saw that when I rolled my eyes. I was like, "He's got cameras in here."
Jehad: We're not on camera, just for people listening. I know you too well, Carl. I'm a huge fan of the idea. The book is great, it goes through work principles and life principles and how to orient your life around these principles. One of the principles that I really believe in is the way to think about your role regardless of where you are in the organization, but especially if you are in user experience, is it's in the order of user, business, team, self.
Jehad: The book doesn't talk about this, but it talks about how to organize yourself around principles, and this is one of the principles I truly believe in. To me, that's how, to some extent, I spend my time. I focus on how much time I can spend and actually ensuring that we're moving user experience forward in things like designer views, especially into [inaudible 00:19:41] across the organization. I spend a lot of time on understanding the business and our business goals, especially the executive leadership team and making sure these business calls are understood across the organization.
Jehad: I'd probably spend equally the same amount of time on team. I think a part of this is... in my mind, the way I think about it is as we move from individual contributor you're designing for projects, and as you move into management and design leadership, you're designing for team, you're designing for business and you're designing for the user at an end to end level. You're still designing, you're just solving different problems.
Jehad: Then standing in the background and just let the spotlight actually hit the team that does the work on the ground that's actually doing an amazing job, there's nothing more than wording in my mind than growing, mentoring and seeing both team members and teams mature and operate. There's nothing more rewarding if you're a manager if that's the role you aspire to.
Carl: All joking aside, you're a huge part of the community. Some of the content that you put out, the things that you've written, just the wisdom that you've shared. I know, I know, I said wisdom and you're going to deflect that because that's who we are. You really are out there not just helping your team at VMware, but you're helping design leaders all over the place. On behalf of all of them, they aren't here with me but they mean it, thank you.
Jehad: I appreciate that, and thank you. Thank you for saying it, I hope it's helping, whatever I'm writing or doing I hope it's helping folks. I really appreciate it.
Carl: Yeah. Well Jehad, thank you so much for being on the show today. For everybody else, we'll be back next week and we'll talk to you then. All the best.
Jehad: Thanks Carl.
Carl: You got it.
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