Design Thinking for Admins with Adam Doti

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down with Adam Doti, VP and Principal Design Architect at Salesforce. He tells us about the team he leads that empowers Salesforce designers.

Join us as we talk about how Adam and his team have brought designers together at Salesforce, and the resources they’ve put together to help you apply design thinking concepts in your org.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Adam Doti.

A small but mighty team of designers.

“Salesforce Design is a small but mighty team that sits at the intersection of our product user experience design team, our customer success group design team, and our creative team in marketing,” Adam says. They have two main goals: build a culture and community of design at Salesforce, and bringing design to our ecosystem.

When they started, they knew they had a lot of design capability at Salesforce and they needed to find a way to harness it. They wanted to learn from each other and inspire each other, but they didn’t know how that would work. “Everything is designed,” Adam says, “whether intentionally or accidentally—stuff is designed.” And indeed, they ran into all sorts of people who were making design decisions: from professional designers to admins and developers making choices in their orgs. What they realized was that they needed to help people understand how to think about and see design.

Why Admins make design decisions every day.

The Salesforce Lightning redesign brought the platform forward in a lot of ways, “but it actually exponentially made the need for good design even more important,” One concept they focus on is relationship design, a creative approach to driving social value focused on building relationships with customers, employees, and community.

One thing they’re doing is a video series for Be an Innovator focused on the design thinking process. It’ll take you through the six phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, build, and validate. Each episode will have an exercise to help you put those concepts into action in ways that make sense for your org. 

Links:

• Blog: Foundations of Design Thinking for Admins
• Podcast: Guiding Principles of Design with Aran Rhee
• Podcast: How to Build Accessible Apps with Adam Rodenbeck
• Be An Innovator: Design Thinking

Social:

• Adam: @Doti
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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