From University of Washington Industrial Design student to Director of Product Design at Meta
Mitchell Johnson is a 2012 UW Industrial Design Alum. He now works as the Director of Product Design at Meta. Previously, Mitchell designed for Disney and Microsoft (Xbox One).
Design wasn’t this selfish pursuit of proving yourself smart, but a genuine user need—and that was much more fulfilling.
Did you always know you wanted to do design when you first came to UW?
When I started at UW, I didn’t know about product design, industrial design, or interaction design as career paths. I came in as someone who studied math and science in high school and enjoyed the problem solving aspects of those fields. I was fortunate enough to stumble into Art 166 (University of Washington’s introduction design course) and discovered a different class of creative problem solving.
What led you into choosing ID over the other two concentrations?
I chose industrial design because there was this interesting relationship between the user and artifact that I enjoyed. You would put something new into somebody’s life, and they would be able to complete a task that they weren’t necessarily able to complete before. There’s a user, and there’s a product, and what is possible when those two things are together. It’s less about the specific technology, or the layout or visual design, but more about that
relationship between user and product, which felt very clear to me in industrial design. I think it’s something that exists in all of the disciplines today.
Are there any major lessons that you learned from each of the projects?
In each project, you hope that you’re picking up a new skill or exploring a new problem solving technique. I would hope that students go through school with that approach of don’t try to do the same thing for every single project—not the same process, not the same approach, not the same type or set of research. It might be the most efficient way to receive a good mark, but it won’t help you come out of school with the most robust toolkit.
In a professional career, it’s about having the right tool set and knowing exactly when to deploy what type of problem solving technique for the problem. That’s how you’ll be efficient and impactful.
In everything I did in school, I always strove to find a different approach, or to try something new because I just wanted to learn and develop
as many design techniques as possible. It’s nice to be able to choose when to go out of your comfort zone, but it’s also valuable to experience what it’s like and understand how it feels when others force you out of your comfort zone.
Is there a reason why you would move from one company to another?
When I do career growth thinking, I reflect where I’m at in my career and where I want to go. It comes down to: do I feel like I’m still challenging myself, am I out of my comfort zone? And am I still growing?
Do I feel like I’m still challenging myself, am I out of my comfort zone? And am I continuing to grow?
There are plenty of ways to continue to find opportunities for personal growth, including internal or external mobility. At Xbox, I felt I was really becoming more versed in social gaming, so I wanted to try and put myself in an entirely different position. Disney was interesting because it’s a traditional media company that was wanting to invest more in technology, and I wanted to see how I could play a role in that growth and evolution of the company at that phase.
The shift I made to Meta was another kind of interesting product space. Thinking about product at the scale of 3 billion users was another area that I still wanted to grow and challenge myself in through a new, different leadership setup. Overall, it just comes down to reflection and asking myself, “Do I feel like I’m continuing to grow?”
How did you initially hear about this type of role in the field that you’re in?
I think it was through design school at UW: networking as much as possible and trying to build relationships with people. That helps to get additional perspectives on what you can do or what’s available in terms of an opportunity.
I studied industrial design, but my first job out of school was digital product design in an envisioning lab. It was nice to be able to apply some of my industrial design skill there, but this job was primarily a digital rather than a physical product design space. So, this initial opportunity came from just connecting with the people around me, understanding what mattered to me in terms of design processes and the problems that I enjoy solving, as well as just being open to talking to people.
The 2012 cohort was the first to change from B.A. to B.Des. Mitchell initially wanted to study architecture.
In ART 166, Mitchell designed a cardboard box for eggs.
His senior capstone project was designing a car for car sharing.
Mitchell studied abroad in Rome through the UW Design Program.
In the Microsoft days, we did a lot of work to get the Xbox One live and out the door. We also did a lot of subsequent launches and feature updates surrounding the Xbox app on mobile and desktop, as well as a lot of social features: party chat and other chat experiences like Discord and Twitch integration.
Xbox had a subculture that’s different from Microsoft, which I’m not sure if this is still true today. There was this “us against the world” type of mentality, and that builds up camaraderie— you’re willing to try and go do crazy big things.
When I moved over to Disney, I started focusing more on horizontal design work, looking at improvements that we could make to video player experience across all of our digital products, whether that’s ESPN, ABC News, Disney Plus, or Hulu.
I think designing at Disney, where brand and storytelling are so important, were fun projects because they have to resonate with people.
It moves fast sometimes, maybe even a little bit chaotic at times. It was a company that was quick to say that just because this is the way we do something today doesn’t mean that is the right way to do something. So, at times we would redo the entire parts of the experience that were working well to always try to come up with something new, something innovative that would grab the attention of the gaming industry.
Innovation
It’s definitely a place where people work at Disney, because they truly love Disney. Everyone is operating with the best intent. You are not competing with others since you know how the brands you work on are loved. That’s actually the most important thing.
It’s definitely a place where people work at Disney, because they truly love Disney.
Leading teams across Core Navigation, Design Systems, Design Tools, Accessibility, and Usability
At Meta, it’s been all things Facebook. Over the course of the last year, we’ve really worked to evolve the experience. There’s a long list of things that happened that increase the quality of the overall experience by decluttering the experience and making it more streamlined. But that’s really more of a thousand small things, just due to the way this company likes to test, iterate, and ship products.
Meta is a very formulaic company because it’s an engineering company at heart.
The math has to add up, no matter what you do. It’s analytic in that sense, black-andwhite at times, and straightforward. So, performance is important. We want to make sure that the people are achieving impact in interesting ways, and that does shift and shape the type of design work and the type of relationships that you build.
I don’t do a lot of hands on product design. It’s a lot more organizational leadership nowadays. Back when I was a contributing member doing hands-on work, my day would probably be more like: getting into the office and doing an early set of design exploration, taking the middle part of the day for meetings, reviews, critiques, and then finishing with another chunk of time to do more exploration and iteration.
It doesn’t matter if interns have all the technical skills today, as long as they aspire to continue to grow.
When I’m interviewing people, I ask, “do they demonstrate the right behaviors?” What I mean by that is: for technical skills, people can learn, grow, and develop those over time. But, if you notice people don’t aspire to continue to grow, then they are never going to learn any of those new technical skills.
It’s something that shows me that you can put this person in any position, and they’ll continue to learn what it takes to solve problems.
People who lean into and are excited about collaboration is also a big one. Just knowing that in any one of these companies, you will have to work with other people to get what you’re aspiring done.
I think there’s a lot of problem solving skills and behaviors that are shown through how you take a big, complex problem and break it down into manageable pieces. This is something that’s been true at any place that I’ve worked at because you never know what problems people will be asked to solve.
Something that I always look for in any position that I hire for is storytelling. I think it’s one thing to be able to do all of that problem solving. If you can’t explain the work and in an easy and straightforward way so that non-technical people can understand, or so that hyper-technical people can understand— that, is a big piece of it.
It’s just about having clarity and communication, whether it’s written or oral, or how you display work, presentation, or anything.
I think it’s one thing to be able to do all of that problem solving. It’s another thing to explain it.
If those are the values you care about, make sure you’re living them today.
Every job I have ever taken was from a relationship.
What strategies have helped you find jobs in the field of product design?
Every job I’ve taken in my career was from a relationship, and has been from people who I respect and enjoy working with and who have felt similarly about working with me. That is primarily how I have found jobs, and at every point in my career I’ve made a transition.
There’s a VP of design, who I’ve had a good work relationship in the past.
I started talking to them saying, “Hey, I’d like to learn more about your company.” Fortunately, a lot of those talks have turned into: “Well, the best way to learn about the company is: why don’t you come and work here?”
Is there anything that you wish someone told you while you were still in school?
I believe no one tells you this in but it’s hard to understand that your career is longer than you think, about 30 years long. If you start out with:
“I’m 6 months in,” or “I’m a year into this job, and it’s not exactly what I want my long-term career to be like”— and that’s okay.
It’s just being able to understand that time scales. We work how long? 35, 40 years? So, often I see people get really frustrated 2 years into their career.
retirement party. It’s a way to get an understanding of when you’re 65 and retiring, what would you want somebody who’s worked with you for 20 years to say? That’s actually what is valuable and important to you.
Those first few years are important, but those first years don’t define your entire career.
I think it’s helpful to get people out of that mindset to ask themselves:
“Am I putting the time and effort on the right things in my life? Or are there actually things that I truly care about?” If those are the values that you care about, just make sure you’re living those today.