Ignite Design: Lauren Von Dehsen on Scaling UX, AI Design Tools, and Product Leadership | Ep276

**Lauren Von Dehsen** (0:00)
How do you create a more grown up and mature research and design organization? And I had come from these environments where people were teaching me what that meant. And I was really lucky to work with groups that were coming from environments that had worked with the best and were doing it at such a high level. And then this opportunity was like, okay, what have you learned? And how do you put it into practice? And how do you take a company that wants to grow into that and take them to the steps to do it? So a lot of my role was really focused on how to build the discipline and the practice, but of course, how to execute and keep pace with a growing and changing company.

**Brian Bell** (0:56)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we're thrilled to have Lauren Von Dehsen on the program. She spent 15 years at the intersection of hardware, software, and human behavior, designing products that people interact with every single day without thinking about it. She shaped the UX of the Nike Plus FuelBand, very cool, when wearables were still a bet, helped define how smart home devices talk to each other at Nest, very cool, and then informed the Matter Protocol now adopted by Google, Apple, and Amazon, built Google House, Consumer UX, or from scratch, and then spent six years scaling SoFi to a 100 person design and research operation, and the list goes on. Thank you so much for coming on, Lauren.

**Lauren Von Dehsen** (1:34)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

**Brian Bell** (1:36)
Well, I'd love to start with your origin story. What's your background?

**Lauren Von Dehsen** (1:39)
I come from an industrial design background academically. I grew up in New York. Maybe that's also helpful to hear. I went pretty quickly into technology and software development following graduation. So it was a great entry point into the world to know that I wanted to pursue design much earlier than I find some of my colleagues knew that, and getting a head start into the space.

**Brian Bell** (2:01)
Yeah. So what was the aha moment where you're like, I'm doing this, I'm doing the design thing?

**Lauren Von Dehsen** (2:06)
Well, I've been credited as a very deep and sometimes overly deep thinker, is maybe the best way to say it.
Going into my college search, I was coming from a background academically that was very strong in math and science. Both of my parents worked at IBM and were in various forms of engineering and project management. But I had this lucky extra context that my aunt and uncle had gone to Parsons and were both graphic and industrial designers and had been pursuing that career, and I grew up around that and got to see what they were doing. So I'm a product of my environments and circumstances. But when I was looking through colleges and trying to really be thoughtful about what I was going to pursue, I found that as much as I loved the academics of math and science and learning it and studying it, I couldn't see myself being as excited about the careers I understood that would lead to, which wasn't necessarily all of the opportunities, but the ones that I had on my radar. When I thought about the times where I was doing creative pursuits, whether that was alongside my academics or during the summer, I found that I had a different level of passion and interest. I'm very fortunate that it all came back together and I actually use both sides of that. But I didn't know that when I was pursuing it and took the leap of a very, what felt like a very risky leap to go down the design path.

**Brian Bell** (3:25)
Yeah, and I didn't really even get exposed to design until I became a product manager, right? And I came into product management from marketing. And so I was even, and maybe in marketing a little bit with landing pages and things like that and email layouts, but really it was like product management. I was like, oh, there's this whole like world of how things are made. You know, I think one of the first design books ever was Design of Everyday Things.
Such a great book.

**Lauren Von Dehsen** (3:49)
Classic.

**Brian Bell** (3:50)
How are doors, you know, like doors designed? You know, like you could have a knob and you could have a plate and you can have a bar. And like, what are the different reasons for those different affordances, right? To open and close doors and you just learn this kind of stuff.