May-Li Khoe: What it means to manage: Designing teams and cultures for the future

Design To Be Conversation

In today’s episode, I speak with May-Li Khoe. May-Li is an interdisciplinary, quatricultural, twice-immigrant artist-researcher-designer-inventor who combines invention with cultural practices, bright colors, faces-on-things, and glitter. She brings over 20 years of experience in design, including serving as VP of Design at Khan Academy, co-founding two companies (Scribble Together and Sprout, formerly MakeSpace), and recently creating a music and dance toy-game for the new Playdate game platform. Before that, she worked on new technologies at Apple and other tech organizations ranging from IBM Research, the MIT Media Lab, and Dynamicland, to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Universal Music Group, and Oakland Museum of California. She also DJs, dances, writes, makes art, speaks, teaches, plays music, and cultivates joyful ways to subvert the status quo.
We dive into what it means to manage and lead by understanding the emotions that drive people’s behaviors in an organization, the power and responsibility of being a manager versus influencing as an individual contributor, ways to communicate your true authentic voice as a new manager, and how EQ can help you manage more humanely and inclusively in the future. Check out links mentioned in the episode: Catt Small’s article, Should you become a design manager and Kat Vellos’s tweet on the Fast Co. article, The DEI disconnect between tech leaders and their teams.