Episode 287: Career Growth for Individual Contributors with Cliff Seal
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the UI Breakfast podcast. I'm your host, Jane Portman, and today our awesome guest is Cliff Seal, UX Architect at Salesforce. And we're going to talk about career growth for individual contributors today.

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Hey, Jane. Thanks for having me. We're super excited to have you for this very non-sponsored interview and have your honest take on what it's like to grow into a very big company. So thank you for sharing, honestly. Yeah, absolutely. Before we dive in, tell us more about your story and how you ended up in a big company and what you did before and

your musical background, whatever you got here. Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, it's funny to tell people I've now been at a pretty big tech company for well over a decade, and I never intended to do that at all. My honest intention, especially coming out of high school and all that, was to do classical music performance.

So I went to music school for a bit, auditioned into one of the best schools I could try to get into all this. So I was really focused on that and ended up just having some life things happen to me to where I didn't necessarily feel comfortable pursuing a career in music and all of the

financial difficulties that that can entail early on. And what I ended up doing, which I think is a story of a lot of folks in a similar part of the millennial generation, I just started learning to code. And then I figured out I was pretty good at it. And then I figured out I was pretty good at designing the thing before I coded it. And I started working with more and more folks and was doing a lot of freelancing and all that. And

That gave me a lot of flexibility, gave me a chance to do something that was fun and interesting to learn and get better at. And then honestly, my whole kind of career path is a series of unexpected little twists and turns that turned out well. I never even intended to apply to the first full-time job I got where I worked at a big nonprofit building and designing their websites. And they maintained like a bunch of properties and all this stuff. I thought I was applying to do a contract.

position, ended up applying to do a full-time job and took a job I didn't expect to apply for at all. And that sort of like kicked off my career. And I ended up after that, I went to a startup at the time known as Pardot, which was a very small company in the Atlanta area who was doing B2B marketing. And they just had like

a really great company culture and reputation. And I wanted to work somewhere that I could have, you know, a lot of impact, but also work with really smart people who are smarter than me and could teach me things. And so I got that position, which was really awesome, and got the experience of working at a really tiny startup, and then was surprised to learn that we got acquired. And then actually had the fun experience of the company that acquired us getting then acquired. It

itself less than a year after that. And so I went from working with about 50 co-workers to working with, I don't know, 40,000, 50,000 in the span of about a year. And so while that was never really my intention, I kind of wanted to work at smaller places and really loved the customer base at Pardot and how quickly we could

respond to their needs and work with them. At the same time, what I've learned, and this is maybe some things we'll discuss today, I found ways to enjoy the work that I was doing as it scaled up, learned how to get better at it, and mostly came to appreciate how impactful design can be when you're working at a company that has...

literally millions of customers and users on the other side of it. And feeling the consequences of your design decisions and craft at that level was really enticing to me. And so it's kept me here for a very long time.

That's fascinating. I didn't know the detail that you came from the acquisition of Perdot because essentially UserList, the platform we run, is an email marketing platform. So I'm very familiar with the industry and what it takes. It's a pretty challenging design industry. It's a pretty challenging product for designers, I would say, put it this way.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Email is itself a topic that we could probably talk about for days or weeks at a time. Such a fascinating thing for it to be one of the older forms of technology on the internet and yet be somehow impenetrable as far as like marketing value, like the way that it all works. Like no matter how many times people try to change email, it just sticks around. Exactly. Exactly.

So, well, congrats on landing your amazing job at Salesforce, where you currently, you've been here for 12 years. Does that include the time at Pardot? Yeah, that's right. How do you count that? Yeah, so it's a little over 12 years, including my time at Pardot, but even just at Salesforce now, it's well over 10 years.

So as someone who has ventured into being a founder and doing two hours of design work per month in a good month, you know, I'm envious of people who stayed in design for their life and doing things they enjoy. Why do you feel that career growth is such a challenging topic worth discussion for people

designers when they choose to stay within bigger companies. Yeah, I think there are probably a lot of reasons for it. One that I think is important to call out, and especially that folks may not realize, design is pretty new still.

As a concept, you know, this whole principle of basically extending human computer interaction concepts way further into human behavior at scale and how people think about clicking buttons and what makes them click it and how do we figure that out and how do we manipulate it and all this stuff.

We've only had the computers that you could interact with for a relatively short amount of time. And so I think that that's a big part of what happens relative to career growth and why it feels really opaque for designers. Because effectively, there's not too many people at the store

top, so to speak, who have said, we've gone all the way through the career path and we started working together and here's how we think careers work in this field. You know, we don't have equivalent, you know, certifications like other types of design, like physical types of design, like architecture and things like that have. We don't have that sort of certification, which demands a level of rigor that we should probably have, but haven't had to so far.

You know, we're also not doctors or, you know, people who are expected to get very high level academic degrees. Instead, our value is very utilitarian, but then we can get really good at it. And so I think that the fact that all of that is so new is part of what creates kind of consternation and fear around career growth, because it can be difficult to figure out what that looks like. And it's different at every company you work at, it seems like.

So one of the sentiments I shared is that as a designer, I don't get to design much. But then you said that, well, as a designer, you also get a good load of things that are not designed within your daily work. Oh, yeah. Give us a sneak peek of what it feels to be a senior designer. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, we did. We did joke about this before we started recording. Yeah, there is certainly some magic to being able to stay committed to

every day in a full-time role to the design craft and not having to figure out whether I can sell the thing I'm designing in order to keep designing it tomorrow. That's, I mean, that's really great. I do enjoy that for sure, right? And personally, honestly, I have experimented with entrepreneurship in the past and things like that. For me in my particular situation, this has worked best at the time. But yes, the non-design aspect of our job

exists here as well. I would say, especially at, and I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush over large tech companies in general, but I work at one and I've been there for a long time.

Which means both I have kind of seen the patterns repeat themselves and hopefully I've gotten better at dealing with the patterns of what happens when a company has 70,000 people inside of it because people are interesting things and we interact with one another in unexpected ways. And so everything can be difficult to navigate. So that is what we spend a lot of time doing in my experience that's not design is figuring out, okay,

I just solved a problem, any problem that has to do with the company that the company needs solved. Okay, I just solved it. What do I even do with this now? Who needs to know about this solution? Who needs to approve this solution? Who should figure out whether this is the right one? Who shouldn't be asked because actually they don't know if it's the right solution or not, but they're expecting to be asked. So we need to make sure that they actually see it, but not in a way where they can give meaningful feedback that interrupts.

It becomes this kind of collage of how do I figure out how to tell other people about the work I've done to begin with, much less figure out how to actually get this work into a product or into documentation or into internal best practices. There is a lot of sort of loading up solutions and then kind of waiting for the right time to tell people that you have the solution.

And that itself takes a lot of energy and a lot of listening, if I'm being honest.

Tell us more about the push and pull dynamic of work that you do. Do you get much initiative or is there always like a curator that makes it happen, makes sure it goes to production into live product? Yeah, so this is a great question and I'll keep calling out probably every company is different in some really specific ways here, but this definitely intertwines as well with what we've talked about in terms of kind of career growth, especially as an individual contributor.

Because what happens is as you progress in your career, there's a sort of unspoken expectation that that equates to taking on broader and broader things so that your purview becomes wider and wider and you get sort of more and more authority. What I find is that that doesn't quite have the...

linear relationship that we kind of expect. Because yes, for a while, your purview does expand. Because a lot of times you think about your design work as, what do I own? What do I get to make decisions on? That's the thing I'm designing. I think as you go along in your career, whether you're doing like you, where you're working with a lot of different people all the time, or whether you're working with a bunch of internal teams,

I think you learn over time that purview is not the most helpful way to look at your impact, especially again, inside of an organization that's large.

Because that's, again, that's trying to draw a really linear conclusion about like, I'm in charge of things. And when I say things happen, then things happen. And then they get put in production and they get shipped. And that's how things work. Actually, that's not how really anything works. It's always more complicated than that and always in more complicated ways than you can anticipate to start with.

So that's a long walk to get to. In my experience, as you progress in being an individual contributor at a larger company, you are now being more strategic about where you apply your energy because you're beginning to get better at understanding what push and pull is about to happen. So in my experience, it's these days, so to speak, it's a little bit less

what do I do when I encounter the push and pull? And it's more like I am beginning to calculate the amount and the type of push and pull that happens when I make certain decisions, when I tell X, Y, and Z about this thing that I thought about, or when I decide to wait until the next quarter, because I noticed that it aligns with something in a document they didn't know that I saw. And if I tell them about it in two months, it's actually all going to land better. And like,

That sort of thing that I think we can tend to call just politicking, but to me it becomes design strategy. That is the nature of push and pull, especially at the level I and others like me are working at a company like this. We have

five or 10 years worth of things we'd love to see the products or the company do to improve itself, to make the experience better. And yet, you know, as you can probably guess, you'd be lucky to get 1% of those done. It takes a lot of effort to make anything happen. So.

Does that answer your question? Oh, absolutely. Also, it kind of results in many more, but yeah, let's take them one by one. Oh, yeah. We have a great episode here at UI Breakfast with Paul Bowag, who teaches designers this kind of politics, but for consulting projects, how to get buy-in and things like that. And I'm super thrilled to get these kind of insights from you when it comes to a company

So let's imagine you landed miraculously a mid-level designer job at a bigger company and you joined a pool of 200, let's say it's in hundreds, right? 200 designers from the top of my head in Salesforce, right?

or any other company, what's your plan of action? I imagine there is no handbook that truly describes how to act. Like there's probably one how to announce your vacation days, but not more. Yeah, no, great, great question. And yeah, I think...

I don't have the official numbers, but yeah, I think the Salesforce design organization is under a thousand. So measured in hundreds, but yeah, about at that scale, what comes to mind is something that we tend to tell folks who have just started almost all the time, which I feel like we always get a lot of surprise out of folks when we encourage them, but we basically say, Hey,

I want you to go ahead and relieve yourself of the idea that you can have a substantial impact in the first year because there is so much to learn about how not only like even just whatever your particular small purview is, there is so much history and technology to understand because there's a decent amount of proprietary technology at a big tech company, especially. There's so much to learn.

that what we noticed is that really smart designers who are really energetic, really happy to get this job, right? They come in and they want to immediately start solving problems. What happens is if you don't have a decent concept of the amount of complexity involved,

You tend to offer oversimplified solutions to problems you don't deeply understand. And unfortunately, what that does is it loses you trust with exactly the people you need to be gaining trust with as you started a new job.

And so like having that kind of like harsh, like just relieve yourself of needing to prove your worth, like your worth has been proven in your hiring to begin with. So what you can do now is dig into the things you need to know to be effective here and ask people a lot of questions. Um, that, that tends to be the place that we start with folks. Um, because especially with, um,

With a company like ours who has acquired a lot of other companies, there are also other kind of

buckets or spaces of technology that might have totally different considerations. So we really encourage people for better or worse to try to get into like, what are, what's the current company terminology? What are all the acronyms that everyone's using that you don't understand inherently? I love telling people to go find Slack channels that are public for the company that have to do with a topic they don't know anything about and just read.

Just read what's happening in that room and try to understand what people are talking about. You know, a lot of times people will kind of look back at you funny, like that doesn't have anything to do with design, but it doesn't take but three or six months or so before they come back and say, I understand what this has to do with design now. Because if I can't get anyone to listen to me, I can't make anything happen at all. Actually, very much aligns with my favorite principle called Chesterton's Fence.

it's about a governor that on their first day decided to remove a fence that was in the middle of the road. And that later it turns out that there was a reason for it. And I imagine like bigger companies, like just full of fences.

Yes. Yes. Although to add a little bit of just kind of absurdity and silliness, because this is part of it too, it feels just as frequent that you find out like there are seven people in the company who say that the fence must never be moved from the middle of the road. And they swear, swear, swear that they understand why and that it's very important. And then if you ask the right person, you find out actually the only reason I feel this way is because someone else told me that

this fence could never be moved from the middle of this road. And so I'm just like channeling what they told me. It's like, okay, so does anyone have the answer or did we lose that like 15 years ago when someone left? So there's just, it feels like information scavenging sometimes just to figure out how to even help people ask good questions. Another important thing you mentioned is to try and get someone to coach slash mentor slash guide you on this journey.

How have you been doing this for yourself? Well, I want to be honest and share what's been difficult about it and what's worked well for me. Because I think just being honest about what is difficult about trying to be

An individual contributor in design in big companies in this year that we're in is a lot on its own. So as much as possible, especially inside of Salesforce, one of the many reasons I've chosen to stay there, despite not intending to be at a big company, is because I'm always blown away by the people involved.

that I get to work with. Like I, it doesn't take long to get into a meeting, discover someone new and just be kind of blown away by how sharp someone is or a totally fresh perspective.

So I'm grateful that that is generally true in the organization that I work in. And so as much as possible over the years, I have looked for people in roles kind of higher than me in the career ladder on the individual contributor track, which hasn't been a lot of them, but I've done my best to ask them for mentorship whenever possible. I think that there is a specific angle about if you are

trying to stay at a really large company, finding a mentor, I think within that company can be helpful for all the reasons that we've talked about already, like understanding the complexities and the

the politics, for lack of a better word, if you can get a good mentor to teach you those things and you not have to discover them yourself awkwardly or by making mistakes in public, that really helps. And you can move through a lot of things more quickly. And so I've tried my best to do that. I mentioned struggles though. One, I think externality of personality.

and web design being so relatively new and therefore our career paths being relatively new is that it can be really hard to find a long-term mentor because really skilled...

individual contributors can move around perhaps more than other folks. And so it can be difficult to kind of maintain that when they hop around, but I've done my best to maintain that internally. I have externally attempted a few times to get mentors,

because I've been, once again, kind of blown away by the level of information that they're sharing or something else like that. I just figure I'll freely admit to anyone else who's also done this. I've sent like cold LinkedIn messages to other designers, just like,

It seems like you would have a lot to teach me. I know that you literally have never met me, but if and when you ever, you know, have the space or bandwidth to mentor someone, I would love to learn from you. And then this can be true anytime. So you can feel free to come back if this ever works.

And that can be difficult. But I try my best to pursue that on a regular basis so that I have some forms of learning. But then secondly, I also make sure I mentor others who want to learn from me. And that is just as much of a learning opportunity in a lot of cases because it's

It's never linear. It's never Cliff teaches someone else about how to be a designer. It's Cliff and another person in conversation about how to try to do this design thing better. And the person in the mentor position is simply willing to offer more suggestions, tips, or things to experiment with.

So that's how I've sort of built those things up. And I'd also add that I try my best to maintain a

sort of level of pseudo mentorship with other people inside of my organization as well. Designers who can come to me freely and ask questions however they'd like to without being worried about going through official channels. And secondly, without it being a more kind of formal mentoring relationship. So I try my best to do all of those things and try to keep each of those plates spinning as much as possible.

Very briefly, because that's not the main topic, for someone being a mentee, what are some good and bad things to do? Like how would an ideal mentee behave? This is great. One thing I've learned about myself is I tend to be extremely intentional. And so when I do have mentoring opportunities,

A formal mentoring relationship. First of all, I do ask people to decide whether it's formal or informal. I think that's an important like step zero. And what that really means is, do you want to feel like you can come to me when you have questions, which is fine? Or do you want to do a specific thing at a specific time with a specific goal with me?

And I will help you with that. That sort of divides those two. I have a lot of people take me up on the informal bit, but on the formal bit as a mentee, okay, decide that you're committed to the thing. And then secondly, I just really want to encourage people on this, like in a, in a literal sense, respect that someone else has just decided to be brave enough to commit time to tell you

What's happened in their life, what works for them, try to answer your questions and help. So that looks like showing up on time. That looks like communicating. If you can't follow up in those meetings, that also looks like, which I encourage people with as soon as we kick off a relationship, it's your job as the mentee to bring the agenda every time we talk.

And I'm not saying it all has to be that way, but that has worked really well for me because I think that works well as an assumption for the mentee that like my job is to extract whatever information you're willing to give me in this moment. And so I'm going to come with questions or situations for feedback, and I'm going to keep this conversation going. We don't need to hit a point where there's a lull in the conversation and your mentor is just trying to think of abstract things to help you with.

So just being intentional, like very, very, very intentional, I think honestly is the most valuable thing a mentee can do. And they'll get the most back out of it that way.

What's helped me is avoiding a calendar-based schedule and then instead having like two, three meetings per year when the issue is so pressing. I just absolutely must have feedback from this person. And then there is no problem with like the stale agenda or anything like that. Yeah, that works too. Yeah, totally.

How does it happen that you progress, grow, get promoted and things like that? What does it even look or feel like?

So I'll express kind of two truths at once. One is I am genuinely and sincerely grateful to be at a company that cares about design careers, has written down what competencies look like for every level, and has kind of frequent internal conversations about improving that track for everybody and trying to make the promotion process as visible and fair as possible.

So that is 100% true. At the same time, what's true is promotion processes are very opaque, very, very opaque, difficult to discern success and failure. A lot of times you can't even be in the room where decisions are being made. So there's no real way for you to know what decision was made or why.

I just wanted to kind of call out that both of those things can be true and exist inside of the same kind of organization all at once. For me personally, what it has looked like is being, again, very intentional with what I see as competencies. So basically,

So I am currently an architect. And according to our kind of way that our roles work, if I were to be promoted next, that would be to a role called principal architect. So what I will do is take the competencies that have been outlined at that principal architect level.

and start breaking those down. Again, I'm very kind of intentional with my career, but this is what I've done every time I've made a significant step. So I have decided that I'm going to spend one to two years working towards that promotion. I take those competencies down from that next level. I then start mapping what am I literally doing and what have I done that builds up into this competency that demonstrates that I'm getting good at this

And then I also want to call out this only works if you have a manager who cares about you as a person and has a good intention. But when you do have one of those managers, I can go right back and say, okay, here is a list that I made about what it takes to be promoted effectively. And here's what I think I've done relative to that. Basically, what do you think? Am I right or wrong in some of these areas? What opportunities for improvement do you see?

And I acknowledge that my experience, not only as Cliff, but also as an American white male can differ from other people in these situations. I 100% acknowledge that. But what has worked for me is trying to get really specific about, okay, if you have feedback on a particular competency, what is it then that I should be doing?

Describe that to me. I'm going to write that down. And then for the next three months, I'm going to write down everything I do about that. And then I'm going to come back to you and say, this is what I did. Did that work?

And again, there's probably somebody listening to this who's like, yeah, I did that with my manager and it just changed every time we talked. That can happen and that can be tough. But in general, it works a little bit like a flywheel, in my opinion. You kind of have to keep that going. Sometimes you miss an opportunity and it doesn't work. But every now and then you'll sort of click into gear and make some progress and somebody can give you meaningful feedback that helps you make your own kind of promotion case happen.

So that's how it's worked for me at kind of every different level and has honestly run a little bit counter to the narrative that you have to do some sort of big public visible project or have some sort of particular success in order to make that work. That's really hard to discern at a big company. So I find it's better to break that down into chunks that you can track with the person who's in charge of getting you promoted when you can.

This implies that in your structure, you can get promoted to the next level without them needing to demote anybody else or remove them. So there is always the unlimited pool above that you can strive for. Is it always the case for other companies? What I've found is that that

perception is fairly nuanced in the sense that, yes, so in my situation, for sure, the implication is accurate that it's not a promote and demote equivalent, kind of like a zero-sum thing. But this is part of being an IC at a really big company and trying to understand how it works as a system internally, right? Headcount is a really interesting thing that companies like to play with

And a lot of times you'll discover that there is some sort of headcount rule about promotion or what happens when you promote or what happens if there's too many people at one level in a certain group. And all of a sudden it has this negative externality you don't know anything about. So that's also been a part of the journey in progressing in general is also being willing to just sort of say, okay, there's always going to be stuff I really don't understand about how

Effectively, human resourcing works, even though I hate that term. And that becomes kind of a wild card every time you're pursuing a career growth moment too. One of the angles we're discussing here is that ICEs, the career path you want to have does not include managing people. However, everywhere we look, it does include managing people. How do you ensure that you stay on this solo path?

IC path. Like, has anybody ever, you know, tried to make you a manager? Of course they have.

Like, how do you ward that off? How do I ward it off? Well, I have been fortunate enough, and I really want to be clear about this as well. I've been fortunate enough to be able to say no when those moments have arisen. And when I say that I'm fortunate, I mean, I can feel secure that if I say no, I can keep my existing job, which doesn't always happen, like both in the short term and the long term, right? A lot of people make that call because they're worried about stability. And that makes sense. But you have been asked.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's see. I mean, yes. I mean, I say this truly humbly and self-aware as much as I can. But like one thing I have come to understand is as you improve in communication, just basic communication skills improve.

you become increasingly desirable as a manager because that is a lot of what they do. Like just being able to talk to people kindly, write a decent document. And thirdly, a topic I also care a lot about, like if you can get and give feedback really well to a designer, like you're going to get asked. And

And so to be very honest, I take that on a case by case basis. I don't know if this is the term that exists globally, but I would never lay down on the train tracks, overseeing an IC for the rest of my life. Like if I needed to make a move or try something different, I'd be open to that. And I have had many colleagues who are extremely talented and knowledgeable individual contributors who have tried being a manager and flipped it back.

And have felt like that was an enriching experience for them as well. That's a good word to use. Yeah, they probably have more fanciful language, but yeah. You also mentioned some sort of ceiling that you hit.

Not so much glass ceiling in your case, but more like organizational ceiling that hit as an IC because there is no more, no higher position to grow in. How do you think about this? How do you manage it? How do you recommend people think about it? Yeah, this is a fun question. And not only because it's interesting to talk about, but because to me, it feels like such a designery question. Like, how do we find the unknowable unknowns of a thing and then try to figure out, well, who needs to design this thing to begin with?

It turns out a lot of times it's us. So yeah, what you're speaking to and what we talked about a little bit before we start recording as well is, yeah, because I think because our industry is relatively new, plus our function within companies has evolved over the last decade. I mean, you and I both have been around long enough to remember when the design needs a seat at the table conversation was the thing that was happening.

Well, in the time since then, a lot of people have gotten that seat at the table and some of us have been uninvited because we didn't do a super great job once we got there. So now we are in more of a place, I think, especially where as you get better and better at being an individual contributor, it becomes just in a literal sense, more and more difficult for someone to help you get better at your job because there are fewer and fewer people who are using

using the generic term, better than you. And it becomes harder and harder to get the type of feedback that you need to grow in your career because, I mean, just using myself purely as an example, I'm not special here, but in the company that I'm in, there is one known IC role above the one that I have now. And even the- Principal architect. Yes, principal architect is what we call it currently, yeah. But-

The phenomenon of that role not being developed enough and of the role I'm in, architect, not being developed well enough, is a very known and constant thought of people in this architect role that I work with. And so actually, we actually had a summit earlier this year internally of folks. We kind of delineate them as levels. So,

architects and the couple of principal architects that do exist inside the company, we all got together for the purpose of discussing, hey, a lot of people don't understand a lot about our role. A lot of people ask us what it is that we're supposed to be doing on a team to begin with when the way that we got here

was ostensibly by being one of the better designers in any purview. So like it becomes kind of this confusing moment where it's like, hold on, did I just like hit escape velocity or something? And now, whereas before, if I got a promotion, everyone knew what to do with me immediately. Now I get a promotion and everyone goes,

well, I don't want you thinking about anything too small. So like, what should you be thinking about? And it's like, well, oh, okay. So we need to connect dots for people. One of the things we discussed at this summit was just literally, can we further define this role that we're already in now so that we can tell people what it looks like to be good at this? Because it's sort of like,

evolving as it happens. Something else that helped us, our chief design officer, who frankly, like one of the primary reasons I continue to stay at Salesforce is because our chief design officer is pretty incredible to work for. And she's just become that chief design officer in the last few years. And so I also looked forward to that transition. But one of the things she did for the summit was we asked her, can you tell us what you perceive as this role being successful? What does it look like for you?

Even in that case, we're like, I mean, at this point, that is the answer with a capital A, right? Even in that request, she graciously sent us a 15-minute video talking through it because there was no direct answer, right? Like every time that you kind of talk through it, there were all these different angles and approaches. And really all that came out of it, again, we took another long walk to sort of get here, but one of the things we learned about that was

What this company values about very high level individual contributors is that they know that they can pick us up from where we are right now, whatever we're working on and whatever team we're on.

And if something becomes executive fire drill, so to speak, or something becomes like a pet project that needs to take off and do the classic sort of zero to one design stuff, we can be plopped directly into a group of people that we've never met before with technology we may have never worked with on a product we're not aware of, and we can get started.

And that has come to be sort of the defining characteristic of what it means to be at that level inside of our company. But that just leads to us writing a bunch of documents trying to describe what I just said. It's hard. That's fabulous. It leads me to even more questions.

I'm curious, we've talked about vertical growth, you becoming a UX architect. Does it imply any horizontal shifts in your trajectory? Did you ever be like designer, senior designer and you were like, whoop?

Like, yeah, or anything like that. So I find that it's mostly kind of a function of how teams divide themselves downstream a little bit. So for instance, what I what I work on currently is the portion of Salesforce called Marketing Cloud, which itself has a whole bunch of products inside of it, including Pardot, which I mentioned earlier. If I were to define my purview on paper, it would be all of that.

but I never have any projects where that is the actual purview of the project, right? It's more anywhere in this space, you need to be aware enough of what's happening to be able to sort of go in and be a specialist very quickly. So sometimes you get deployed to go unblock a team who's either having a hard time or has encountered a difficulty that they need help working through. And so you're sort of sent in as a specialist, right?

But as a specialist who's expected to be a generalist enough to be a specialist in any of those buckets. And so that's, in my experience, that's a little bit of how it works. Whereas when I was, you know, a few levels earlier in my career, it was more like, oh, I'm responsible for this portion of the product. Now I'm responsible for these portions of the product. And eventually it becomes, you know, at some point,

seemingly indiscernible moment, you sort of cross the Rubicon and you become like, oh, now I'm sort of doing strategy for business using design. I'm not really just doing the design for the business anymore. So that's been my experience with it.

Also, given that you work on a whole bunch of mature products under your wing, it's not like you make important UX architectural decisions every so often because there is such a huge legacy you're working with. Totally. What do you get to strategize about unless you're building 2.0 or 5.0 something, which I imagine is not happening every day?

Man, this is a great, great question, specifically because it gives me another way to talk about why I've stayed at a company like this for so long. Enterprise companies who have a commitment to maintaining legacy software. So like, as you mentioned, we'll then have instances of like, okay, we're doing 2.0, 3.0, 5.0, whatever, right?

But these companies that maintain the legacy, it means that you have to design new versions of things in ways that doesn't break the older version when the old version may have been built in technology that's no longer applicable, helpful, anything, right? Like one of the sort of like maxims at Salesforce in general is like if you add, you know, it's this big sprawling set of applications and things, but there's like a core application a lot of folks are familiar with and it has,

things called objects, which are just data tables. But it's all terminology from before web apps were super prevalent and all that stuff. Point being, there's a maxim that you can't add an object and then take it away later, ever.

ever. If you add something, it must be either maintained or you have an extremely rigorous kind of deprecation and end of life process that at a minimum is going to take you five years, even if you started it as soon as you shipped it. So to me, that

And I would understand if this doesn't connect with every designer. I totally would. But for me, the complexity and scale of those problems is fascinating. Because then when I get to strategize, like, you know, I'm thinking of a project right now that I certainly can't talk about, but is related to, right? Like kind of bolting on new functionality onto a suite of legacy systems, like multiple legacy systems. And so the design that we end up talking about is sort of like...

okay, let's get together with our most advanced, like distinguished architects from the engineering side. Let's get our most experienced product people together. Now, let's basically start saying, this is what we want the customer experience to be like. What's wrong?

And then we keep notching it down, right? We find out the technology won't work. There's something in the way. Okay, let's revise. All right, what do we have now? Can we do this? Yes or no? And then a whole bunch of people are sort of breaking this down. And so to me, it's a bit of an abstraction of the traditional design critique process. Instead of asking as much about, is this a text input or a text area, or should this be in a modal or whatever? We're now asking people like,

Does the API language of this connect with how our customers think about how they would want to integrate this thing when it becomes possible? And so your level of complexity around those questions are not only really difficult, but to me, like really fascinating and interesting. And it's part of what's compelled me into a design career through individual contributorship. And I think a lot of other people I work with are kind of engaged by that level of thinking as well.

Thank you so much for sharing honest things today with us. I think this is the first time I'm actually talking to humans so openly about anything enterprising. Yeah. Literally. So if I have someone asking me a question about big companies, I'm just going to send them your episode from now on. Thank you. No, I totally appreciate that. And honestly, I've come to

I've come to love and appreciate that I can be this person for other people. Like I said, I literally never intended to be a person who stayed at a single company, much less a giant enterprise company for over a decade. Like I would have told you, I literally did not want to do that. And so to kind of be in this position reluctantly and then be able to tell other people like, yeah, here are the difficulties.

But also here are some of the cool and fascinating bits that come up when you do it. It's a real joy for me. So I'm glad we were able to talk about that. And also as someone from the other side doing the entrepreneurial thing, I can tell you for sure from my own experience and dozens of other founders that

Being a founder is not the holy grail of getting a good salary. Like this is not the way to make loads of money. So I guess your good sides combined with nice stable income and, you know, some sort of security, it's a wonderful deal. Don't always, not everybody needs to be a founder, do their own thing. I agree. If our listeners want to learn more about you,

First, I want to make sure we include the link to your design feedback talk, which you can watch in full online. That's another topic you're passionate about. Oh, yeah. That's one. Where can they find you on socials or anywhere else to learn from you?

Yeah, so my dear mom decided to name me first and last name, two words that already exist as other words in the English language. But the combination of those two words is not common. So honestly, I am pretty much the only Cliff Seal on the internet. So I get the privilege of just being like,

You can Google me and find me on whatever it is you would like to find, especially as Twitter has transitioned from being a thing that I treasured into a thing that I'm just honestly scared of. I'm a lot less active there, but I'm available in a lot of different places. And you can see not only some of my

past work, but all the talks that I give, I care a lot about providing them accessibly to other people. So all my talks have like full transcripts, audio, video, and all that stuff at cliffseal.com. You made such a wonderful pitch about finding you on socials. And then it turns out you have a proper website with all your videos cataloged. Yep. Got to keep my domain. Thanks so much, Cliff. Have a wonderful rest of your week.

Thanks, Jane. Really good to talk to you and nice to meet you.