The Role of Leadership
in Winning Design
don Fotsch
Green House Energy Management | [e-mail]

Three and a half years ago, I signed on as the leader/VP of user experience and design (UED) at PayPal, one of the undisputed Internet darlings of our time. PayPal wanted a leader with a strong design orientation along with a general manager’s business acumen. I loved the business, loved the culture, and was eager to apply my previous product/GM experience at businesses such as Apple and AOL, plus years of partnership with IDEO. This was a really “good company” enjoying admirable growth. But the question in my mind was, How could design help PayPal become a great company with ever more loyal customers?

While the PayPal business
was prospering, its experience-
creation engine was not. Key
design functions had been scat-
tered around the company or
simply did not exist. We didn’t
seem to know design’s role in
business success, nor did we
seem to know its role in success
with customers, at least not in
any measurable fashion. We
had virtually no Web analytics
to measure key metrics such
as checkout conversion. It liter-
ally took months and quarters
to make important changes to
our website. Not surprisingly,
designers within the company
said they would literally tell
friends and family that they
“worked at PayPal but didn’t
work on the site”—even though
they actually did! The first day
on the job, I was asked at an all-
hands meeting, “What do you
think of our site?” I paused and
thoughtfully responded, “A face
only a mother could love.”
Over the course of the sub-
sequent three and a half years,
we made significant progress
toward creating arguably one
of the strongest design shops in
the financial-services industry.
In the process, we addressed
many of the shortcomings noted
above and helped accelerate
PayPal’s trajectory from good
to great. Notable achievements
included building a global team
with skills that could scale with
the business, creating and exe-
cuting to design and brand stan-
dards, payment flow–conversion
improvements across the board,
driving significant revenue
gains, and some of the high-
est employee engagement and
retention scores in the company.
How did we do it? And what was
the role of the executive leader-
ship in achieving this progress?

design is the business As the most senior person in the company accountable for design, I felt strongly that everyone needed to have a common