Expert of the month: Grace de Athayde

By Janus Boye

Grace on stage at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference. She led a highly rated talk on “Building a continuous learning process - at scale”. Photo: Ib Sørensen

How do you make design accessible for everyone in your organisation? One option is to build an internal design community of practice, drip feed your colleagues with inspiration, cultivate a sharing culture and at some point let it go.

When I first spoke to Grace de Athayde, back in circa mid 2020, I was preparing our first European conference during the pandemic, and Grace wanted to tell her story about building a UX community at Danfoss.

While preparing her session, she made it quite clear, including on her opening slide at the conference, that she was not an expert. Still, I do think everyone who has met Grace in the past years, would say that she’s very knowledgeable about user experience and design.

These days she is wrapping up at Danfoss and getting ready to start a new job at the LEGO Group as Sr. Manager Digital Product Design as of 1 February.

She’s also our first expert of the month for 2022.

A learning journey from southern Brazil to southern Denmark

Grace’s journey begin far from where’s she based today. Grace grew up in Brazil and went to FURB - Universidade de Blumenau, some 9 hours drive south of São Paulo. She did a BA in Communication, with a final project in 2009 titled “Mobile Sites—An analysis of focus group about the user experience of mobile sites”.

To be able to afford her higher education, she started a small digital agency called Prelude Hosting. Designing websites was a hobby of years and this was initially thought of as an alternative to low paid part time jobs, but slowly and truly, it became more than just enabling her to get the money to buy books and fund the education.

After completing her BA at the University, she made the big geographic move from south Brazil to southern Denmark in September 2010, when her husband was offered a job at Danfoss headquarters. To Grace, this meant servicing the agency clients from quite a few time zones away, but the work was still there. The business grew, they welcomed new team members, new infrastructure, hundreds of iterations of our website, and by 2015 the agency was supporting an impressive 1,400 clients.

As she said in our conversation:

After a design-led redesign, the business saw a revenue increase of over 30% . Fascinatingly it was possible to create human, ethical experiences while also generating strong business outcomes.

While in Denmark, she also continued her formal learning journey. In 2015, she did a Minor in Design Business and Strategy at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

She also attended a 2-year program at Copenhagen Business School focusing on how to design and manage processes of innovation and entrepreneurship. And recently here in early 2022, she completed the UX Management Certification (UXC) from Nielsen Norman Group.

Sounds like a proper expert in the making, right?

Thinking outside the box to get a job

The best way to be interesting, is to be interested 

With a quote from Dale Carnegie, who famously authored the bestseller - How to Win Friends and Influence People, Grace told her story of how she landed a job at Danfoss in 2018.

She felt that the time had come to try something different than managing the digital agency, but how do you differentiate yourself in a crowded job market, in particular after have done more or less the same thing for almost 14 years?

Grace quickly realised that just sending job applications probably wouldn’t land her the dream job, so using the approach from Dale Carnegie, she tried rather to be helpful to a place where she wanted to work.

Specifically, her approach was to write a letter to the Director of IT Innovation at Danfoss, where she pointed out the lack of SSL encryption, actually an expired certificate, which meant some browsers would flag the website as potentially unsafe. In the letter, she showed her technical and creative skills, and also hinted that she was available to work, without being explicit.

It still took patience, but long story short: Grace, joined Danfoss in 2018 as a UX Project Manager.

Starting and managing a global UX Community of Practice

During her 4 years at Danfoss, Grace supported the efforts on Design Transformation by starting and growing a UX Community of Practice, inspiring the community to adopt design methodologies, and raising awareness of the need for a design system.

The UX Community at Danfoss went from zero to 200 members in less than a year - creating a place for sharing and peer learning. At the Boye Aarhus 20 conference, Grace shared what she learned on that journey and to her, the key point was really making design accessible for everyone.

Grace was far from alone in building the design efforts at Danfoss, and by setting up a cadence for open meetings that enabled conversations, they raised awareness of design topics such as user journeys & design systems with global teams.

She also shared some helpful design community management details from her experience:

  • Online presentations every two weeks (frequency is important)

  • Dripping content (keep community alive)

  • Find ways to make design accessible for non-designers

  • Hosting relevant events to the community

  • Intentionally cultivating sharing culture: “Oh this is nice - feel free to share in the UX Forum!”

Grace on stage in November 2020 at the Boye Aarhus 20 conference. Her work on the Danfoss UX community, enabled her to work with design transformation. This provided a foundation for her future role as Product Owner in a complex domain. Photo: Ib Sørensen.

Building a continuous learning process - at scale

In late 2020, she transitioned to a new role as Product Owner for the Alsense™ IoT Platform and in 2021, she then became Portfolio & Delivery Manager — Digital Service for the IoT Platform.

One of her key challenges working in product management, was to collect feedback from customers and colleagues in a sensible way, and put it to good use. Similar to other organisations, product owners were easily overloaded.

By implementing a new and structured way of gathering feedback, Grace worked on what she called ‘Continuous Learning at Scale’. Initially the change was happening in one Scrum team, later in five and before the end of 2021, it was in seven teams.

Grace back on stage at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference. This time on the project management track sharing insights on how to improve how they deal with feedback, dual track agile and more. Photo: Ib Sørensen

Learn more about Grace de Athayde

You can naturally connect with Grace on LinkedIn, but you can also meet her in person in our growing Design Leadership community.

You can also find Grace on ADPList, a mentorship platform that was founded in 2020 with the core value of democratizing mentorship for everyone

Grace recommends Leading without Authority, a 2020 book by Keith Ferrazzi, as it is all about trying to get the best in others, enforcing the positive and igniting the light in your colleagues.

Finally, a few member stories: