S2 Ep. 7 - Andy Markov - Creating Future of Product Design Introduction Andy Markov is the CEO of Within Inc. and a veteran UX executive leader with nearly 30 years of professional experience. Nurturing brands like Ferrari, Citibank, Sony, and L'oreal, Andy is an expert in information architecture and web business. A successful business strategist and angel investor, his heart lies in design thinking, and a lot of brands including NETGEAR and Mastercard have leveraged his insights on how to make their product more accessible, and more user-friendly. Discussion Points Do you think that brands do impact one's career trajectory or where they're headed? 02:29 One of the biggest products that Andy has worked on and you might have seen, is the PlayStation. So Andy, tell us more about it, It's such a popular product, what was the journey from a design point of view? 03:55 How much the bigger companies have played a role in pushing for a good UX? 07:48 Rapid fire. 11:08  If anybody is just starting out in their career, what your advice would be for them to watch out for? 15:33  What your advice would be about the design leadership side of things? 17:13 Show Notes UX comes in naturally as product building organization. So that's the pitch we give to our customers, we help customers go to market faster. 06:45 The largest challenge of a design leader is to show the organization the ROI on design. 08:53 The trend I see is his innovative businesses and innovative startups are starting to compete on design, right and design spoke broadly not just to say software design, hardware design, or industrial design, but a lot of level of thinking, coming up with ideas. 09:42 Look out for great products, study those great products, see what you like about them and understand how the features are being built. 15:43 Designers, in specific, need to understand what developers have to consider work very closely with developers create those partnerships with engineers, and leverage also the engineers or technology pieces because a lot of that innovation does come in from the engineering side. 15:54 What is a phenomenal team, right? It's people you trust, people that have talents and people that understand the business, and people that understand the discipline. 17:30 And products themselves tend to provide that opportunity, especially in great products when you're building something you're passionate about and want to keep on building. But I think in turn it becomes our job as leaders to get people excited about those products.  18:39 The excitement is actually understanding your customer right and understanding what they need. 19:09  Contact LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andymarkov/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/andymark Company website: https://within-inc.com/   #productdesign #ux #businessleadership #softwaredeveloper #webdevelopment #teammanagement