#71 | Teslim Alabi | The power of thinking differently.
“If you know every single thing, then it’s hard to think outside of the box” — TESLIM ALABI Buckle up for a fresh episode of Designdrives, where you can learn from the world’s best and most forward-thinking design minds. In EP71, as inspirational as it was, we had a great time hosting Teslim Alabi, who serves as a Product Design Lead at Netflix, the leading streaming entertainment service in the world with 200+ million paid memberships. During Teslim’s decorated career before Netflix, he worked at one of the “Big Five” in Silicon Valley, Microsoft for almost 5 years, and co-founded and led the design team for Project Moca a.k.a. Outlook Spaces. We talk about his life experiences, challenges that he faced and also the story behind starting the social enterprise called Leads By Design, to actualize the mission of inspiring people from underrepresented backgrounds and underserved communities. In 2017 Teslim co-founded Seattle-based watch company, James & Muriel and led end-to-end for both industrial and product design teams on some high-end timekeeping instrument projects. During the episode, we chat about how he used a “yes mindset” to gain opportunities and get ahead in his career and also how his background as a designer coming from Nigeria make an impact to make organizations more customer-centric. We also chat about designing at Netflix, what makes their design culture more special and share some thoughts and predictions on what lies ahead for designers working in the media and entertainment industry. In the episode, we jump into: The power of creative ignorance in innovation. What are the opportunities and challenges in the entertainment content space and where can designers have the biggest impact? New content models with growth in contexts of digital products and innovation? What are the key challenges for people to communicate the “value of design” with business stakeholders? Role of the designer working in the entertainment industry in the future. and many more! Thanks a lot for your time and your learning Teslim! **** The Guest Teslim Alabi is a Product design lead, Entrepreneur and Mentor, currently at Netflix who is passionate about creating delightful and intuitive human-centered experiences at scale through innovation and product strategy. Prior to Netflix, he worked at Microsoft for almost 5 years, scaling innovative products, building 0 to 1 projects and leading design on several features and tools that help hundreds of millions of people worldwide be more productive. In 2020, He co-founded and co-invented a canvas-based technology named Project Moca a.k.a Outlook Spaces for organizing artifacts around projects and goals, leveraging it to explore the next frontier of connected collaboration and time management. With a background in Computer Science and Digital Media, he has explored storytelling and problem solving through various mediums like video games, animation and visual design. Teslim strongly believes in the value and power of mentorship, and views it as a way for anyone to pay it forward. He founded the Leads By Design Fellowship to inspire more people from underrepresented backgrounds and underserved communities to pursue careers in tech and to thrive. Also he co-founded and serves as the Design Director at James & Muriel, a watch brand based out of Seattle.