We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carminia Panlilio a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Carminia, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Problem solving was what drew me to start my career in management consulting after grad school. During some of my more challenging projects, I was fortunate to work with creatives from awesome agencies and my eyes were opened. These wound up being the projects I loved the most. The solutions were innovative and the processes to arrive at them didn’t feel like work at all. That’s what started my journey towards design strategy and UX.

I initially learned my craft on the job; only years later did I go through the formal training for my UX Diploma. UX degrees as we know them now were not yet available when I was in college, but my business degree ended up being helpful because standing up a UX and Product Design organization required a high level of business and technical expertise.

At the core of every good product/UX designer is a genuinely curious and observant student of the world. You really have to study people and how they interact with the world around them to truly understand their needs, desires, and how to create products that help make their lives better. I think these are the most essential skills.

What gets in the way of learning is falling into habits and patterns, especially when you’re busy churning out UX flows, usability studies, and high-fidelity designs on tight timelines. The industry is constantly changing, and what worked a year ago may be obsolete today, particularly when you’re designing digital products people rely on. The key for UX designers is to stay current with industry trends and innovations across UX disciplines. The more we invest in our own development and understanding, the better we can deliver for our customers.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

There are two icebreakers I love to use in customer workshops. One is “What is your superpower?” and the other is, “What would the headline on your big magazine cover story say?” Both aim to understand at a very high-level how each person would like to see themselves through the lens of others and what legacy they want to have. The first time I did these exercises, my answers were “Connecting dots that most people don’t even realize are dots” for the first question. For the second, I answered with, “Carminia Panlilio, a creative and innovative problem solver.” I didn’t love this answer and felt it was a bit too simplistic. As the years have passed, though, it’s grown on me. For clients and internal customers who hire my team to solve problems, we bring solutions that others don’t or haven’t tried. We aren’t merely “pixel pushers” or “ticket takers” when it comes to designing solutions. We ask “why?” repeatedly to explore deeply and really understand not only what our customers need and want but what their customers/users need and want. One of our tenets is that design is a team sport: You win or lose the market as a team, so you want to make sure you co-create with customers and multi-disciplinary teams of experts to ensure you’re creating the best product possible. Like most creative pursuits, Product and UX Design can get very messy, but the aha moment comes when out of the messiness emerges a product or a service that suddenly people can’t imagine ever not existing.

Our Product Design organization delivers a “full stack” of Product/Service/UX Design and research services. We primarily help clients ideate and develop digital products (ranging from consumer-facing apps in the aviation market to B2B enterprise applications as well as mission-critical user interfaces for government entities) but we also help a variety of clients create services (spanning the entire customer journey with robust service blueprints) that drive customer loyalty and business growth.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Never assume you know what someone is feeling or thinking. Talk, ask questions, be invested in getting to truly know them. Each person’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations at work are different, which means you have to manage and lead with an eye towards what each one of your team members needs. That said, I have a pretty tight knit team and while we do occasionally go out for happy hours/dinners/team building events – activities that are great for boosting morale – I have found (through feedback I routinely seek from my team) that maintaining high morale comes from ensuring we have meaningful, impactful work and that we can count on each other to have each other’s back no matter what life throws your way. Also, nowadays, with the lines of work and life so blurred, it’s important to know that we are each supported when we need to take some time off to recharge.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I made a big career pivot back in 2013. At the time, my husband and I were juggling incredibly demanding political jobs in Washington, DC with raising two young kids, ages 3 and 1. Our kids were always among the first to be dropped off at daycare and the last ones to get picked up. We both wanted to get off the constant hamster wheel, but we still wanted to have careers we found meaningful. After looking around and exploring various options, I decided to pursue an opportunity with a company that allowed me to pivot into Product/UX Design leadership while raising our kids in a family-friendly beach town. Work and life are not always in perfect balance, but all in all, I feel very fortunate to be doing interesting work for clients whose missions I believe in. It’s also been rewarding to build an amazing team from scratch and help every member of it grow in their careers as designers and researchers.

Contact Info:

• Other: email at [email protected] or call 714-932-8514. Currently still in process of setting up website and socials for business. Mostly doing projects by word of mouth.