Meet Polly D'Arcy!

Polly D’Arcy leads the product design organization at Wealthsimple, a company known for its beautiful product, forward-thinking brand, and, as is right there in the name, a relentless commitment to keeping things simple.

But as every good designer (or researcher or product person or engineer) knows: simple is freaking hard! So of course, this, Polly knows.

Polly started at Wealthsimple as a Senior Product Designer working alongside Danielle, and has grown with the company ever since, to her role now as VP of Design. She knows the brand and product inside and out and leads with strong taste; she’s also a great people leader who’s highly strategic, gives direct and honest feedback, and able to see whats around the corner.

These days, like many of us, Polly is rewriting how her team defines and scales taste in a world where everyone can ship, and more can ship than ever. We chatted with her about how she and her team are scaling simplicity.

Guest: Polly D'Arcy is the VP of Design at Wealthsimple

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear in the episode are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

Meet Ricardo Vázquez!

Ricardo Vázquez is a playful person. His infectious, optimistic energy is a hallmark of his leadership. It’s no surprise he wanted to talk to us about the role of play in creativity — and what happens to that spirit with AI in the mix always ready to give you the straight and narrow answer.

After his time at Shopify, Ricardo and Danielle worked together at Wealthsimple; more recently he’s led design teams at Dropbox and now Stripe, where his team is working on what a payments company can become beyond payments.

Guest: Ricardo Vázquez is the Head of Product Design, Money Management at Stripe.

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear in the episode are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

Meet our boss!

In this very special edition of Dear Danielle & Dave & Friends, we sit down with Matt Davey, Chief Experience Officer at 1Password, and the person who has to put up with our antics daily at work.

Matt has led the user experience team for a whopping 14 years. We are both part of the org he’s spent over a decade building alongside cycling through his many eclectic hobbies for much briefer stints, such as printmaking, radio, chocolate-making, 3D printing, biking, and surely many more. He also cohosts 1Password’s security podcast, Random but Memorable, and has his own excellent blog on design & leadership.

Recently Matt went viral on LinkedIn with the AI maturity model he developed to assess UX maturity in the age of AI (which was subsequently expanded by Jakob Nielsen - no big deal). We had a conversation with him about just that, hiring, and much more.

Guest: Matt Davey is the Chief Experience Officer @ 1Password.

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.substack.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear in the episode are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

Meet Jessica Pavia. Jessica leads both UX Research and UX Operations at BMO, where she supports a research team of 25 and an operations team embedded across a broader experience practice of over 110 people inside one of the more regulated, higher-stakes environments out there. Before BMO, she built her career at IBM and helped establish a design research discipline at Loblaw Digital, taught applied research methods at Seneca and Sheridan, and has spent most of her career, by her own account, in the business of patterns, which she traces back to being a kid obsessed with Where’s Waldo.

Jessica came to us with a mandate that’s been following her around for most of her career: “do more with less.” She’s got a lot to say about what that phrase actually means, what it doesn’t, and how she’s learned to translate it into something a team can act on without burning out. Below is an edited summary of our chat.

Guest: Jessica Pavia is Director of UX Research & UX Operations @ BMO.

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.substack.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear in the episode are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

Meet Konstantino (Tino) Kapetaneas. Tino is Director of Product Design & Research at Flipp, where he’s led and grown the function for nearly eight years, building the UX research practice from scratch, scaling a 27-person team, and helping evolve the company’s product from a single app to a multi-product ecosystem. Before Flipp, he cut his teeth on the agency side in digital health, doing formative work with patient advocacy groups that, by his own account, set the direction for everything that followed. Dave and Tino are also old colleagues; and if you’re wondering whether they’re real-life besties, Tino’s official position is that he can neither confirm nor deny this. Tino has previously written for us and we were very excited to have him on the pod!

Tino came to us with something that’s been eating at him: AI is making teams skip the alignment work, and we’re starting to pay for it.

Guest: Konstantino (Tino) Kapetaneas is Director of Product Design & Research @ Flipp

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.substack.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear in the episode are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

Meet Brooke Sykes. Brooke's career started in academia before pivoting into policy research with the Ontario government, and then into tech at Mozilla in 2022, where she now manages a user research team. She came to us with change management on her mind, and we got into the often underrecognized emotional side of navigating change.

Guest: Brooke Sykes, Sr. Manager, Firefox User Research @ Mozilla

You can read the blog version of this episode on our Substack Dear Danielle and Dave deardanielleanddave.substack.com

If you have questions, comments or would like to be a guest on a future episode, get in touch with us at deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.

For our very first episode, we sit down with Laura Shaw, Director of Design Research at Xero, to talk about the skill that underpins everything else: communication.

Laura's career path winds from ESL teaching in Japan to philosophy grad school to nonprofit comms to UX writing to research — and at every turn, the thread is the same: figuring out how to make things land. We dig into why the most brilliant work falls flat without the right framing, the most common mistake people make when presenting their work, why research outputs should be treated as products for their audience, and how AI is making workplace communication both clearer and murkier at the same time.

Guest: Laura Shaw, Director of Design Research at Xero

Links & resources mentioned:

• Different communication styles by colour
• Dear Danielle and Dave on Substack: deardanielleanddave.substack.com
• Get in touch: deardanielledave@gmail.com

The music you hear are Blue Sea and In Good Hands from #Uppbeat.