Michelle Lee began her career as an aerospace engineer, working on satellites, wondering why it took so long to launch one. A friend's room full of toys changed everything. Someone had to make those things. Why not her?
What followed was a winding path through the toy industry: an internship at IDEO in 2004, a startup she spun out and left, and a return to lead the Play Lab. Over two decades, she brought over 250 products to market with Hasbro, Mattel, and Sesame Workshop, and today, she is Partner and Executive Managing Director of IDEO's San Francisco studio.
Michelle is also a faculty member on Future London Academy's Executive Programme for Design Leaders. In our recent conversation, she shared why play is not the opposite of serious work, but how serious work gets done.
IDEO's founder, David Kelley, used to draw a seesaw in his classes: one side labelled with a heart, the other with a dollar sign. It's the tension every design leader eventually has to manage: doing work you love while keeping the business alive.
The mistake is treating them as opposites.
"You can't over-focus on the numbers. How people love their work, how they're motivated, how they're able to continue to perfect their craft — all that contributes to the business side."
The heart and the dollar sign feed each other. The leaders who figure that out stop trying to balance the seesaw and start seeing it as one connected system.
IDEO's IQ report surveyed 100 leaders. The ones who scored highest on revenue, profit, and confidence about the future combined both dreaming big and being able to execute.
“You can't just dream. You can't just be curious. You have to be experimenting. You have to be doing.”
The leaders most prepared for uncertainty are the ones who can answer both questions at once: What could this become? And what does it look like when it's real?
Once, instead of a slide deck explaining what working with IDEO feels like, designer Dave Vondal built a game on an actual Game Boy. The client received a handheld console in the post with a custom game that let them experience the design journey themselves, navigating ambiguity, deciding who to talk to, and learning along the way.
And they were like, “What's this? It's not a deck, it's a Game Boy with a game on it.”
But it worked. You can describe a process, or you can let someone feel it. One of those is much more persuasive, especially when what you're trying to explain is hard to put into words.
When IDEO built its studio spaces, they chose concrete floors instead of carpet.
Carpet sends a message: be careful, keep things tidy, don't make a mess. If you drop paint or glue on concrete, you just wipe it up. It gives you permission to get messy and try things. This is exactly what IDEO’s culture encourages – experiment, make mistakes, learn and improve.
Culture is mostly made of small details. The question worth asking of your own space: what does this environment tell people about what's allowed here?
At IDEO, everyone has to come to a meeting with a prototype. Showing the half-done work isn’t unpreparedness. It's how you avoid wasting everyone's time.
"If you show up with a janky foam core prototype, you invite people to give you feedback. If you show them something finished, they won't tell you if you're on the wrong track."
IDEO's three Rs explain it well. Keep it Rough, so people feel comfortable telling you it's wrong. Keep it Rapid, so you can do it again. And keep it Right by making sure it answers one specific question, not trying to solve everything in one go.
Every day, on the walk to work, Michelle plays a game of spotting things that look like something else. A paint splotch on the pavement that could be a dog. A piece of gum that might be a chariot. She photographs it, sketches on top, and sends it to her daughter, collecting them in a folder called Street Doodles.
By the time she arrives at the office, her creative muscle is already warmed up. Even if those ideas weren't about work, she practices seeing things differently. Creativity isn't something you can switch on and off whenever you need it. It's something you have to exercise every day with small habits.
If you want to learn from all these top experts how to build and scale companies, find out more about our Executive Programme for Design Leaders. Take your career and leadership to the next level by expanding your network and learning from the C-level faculty.
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