Tell me a bit about your early years and where you come from.

I come from a big, New York City, Irish-Italian Catholic family.  I have eight older brothers and sisters and 21 nieces and nephews. I’m a bit of a black sheep in my family, politically and otherwise. I come from a very practical family of doctors and lawyers and bankers, and I was this artist and the performer. Nobody knew what I was going to end up doing including myself.

Interesting.

When I was young, I changed my mind every other day about what I was going to do, what I was going to be when I grew up. I probably stressed my parents out because they are very practically-minded. When it comes to language, they said, “Take Spanish!”, and I said, “I’m going to take French!” For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.” To his credit, he never said anything at the time.

“For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.””

I eventually majored in theater. It’s actually some of the most useful training that I did. You acquire an extraordinary set of skills in creating live theater. It’s highly collaborative, you have to work under stressful conditions, find ways around all kinds of constraints. It also develops your ability to empathize with other people and their stories, which is an essential skill for good design.

I definitely enjoyed the humanities and art, but I also had some interest in technology and science early on. Mostly as it related to how we can help people communicate or how can we use these tools to help people do things better and improve people’s lives. Always in an extremely applied way.

My graduate program really aligned with that kind of thinking. I was initially planning to apply to the NYU film school, but when I got the catalog, they had this program in it called the Interactive Telecommunications Program. The title sounds a bit dry, but the it ended up being a life changing experience for me. This was in 1994-95 when the web was really coming into its own, a time of really interesting experimentation. The program tries to meet at the crossroads of arts, technology, and people. It’s in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, so it’s kind of like a Media Lab run by poets. It’s really a remarkable place. Its student body was a mix of teachers, film-makers, policy makers, writers, journalist, artist and graphic designers. It continues to be an incredible advisory the experimentation. That’s where I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.

“I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.”

What was it like moving to Silicon Valley?

I should say I was born in Manhattan and then I grew up for chunks of time in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Tennessee. So we moved around a lot, but all on the east coast. I never lived west of the Mississippi. I went to college in Boston, then studied art in France where I met my Canadian husband. I attended ITP in New York City, and then we got married we moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts in the Berkshire mountains where I was at a startup called Tripod. Then we moved to Boston when Tripod was acquired by Lycos. At that point, I was pregnant with my second baby, and the industry was in the doldrums. I decided to stay home for a while and we moved to North Carolina to be closer to family and live on a leaner budget. You see, at that point I had had three kids in four years and so was home full time for about four years in the middle of all of my different jobs.

And then I went back to work when my youngest was two. I joined the design team at Wachovia of all places, may it rest in peace. It was a great company to work for and a great re-entry for me after four years of being checked out and up to my eyeballs in diapers.

I had established a lot of strong relationships with designers at Wired Digital which also got acquired by Lycos. People like Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman. Extraordinary designers who also happened to be good people. They had gone to work for Google and next thing I knew, so was I, dragging my husband and kids with me.

I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, “When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.” And that was about eight years ago. So I don’t know. I feel like it’s been an extraordinary experience because the concentration of talented, passionate people is so insanely high here. Just the level of competency and ingenuity and energy that people bring towards things is really special. And I think if I were ever to move to live some place else, I know that I would miss that.

“I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, ‘When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.'”

For sure.

That being said, it’s also an extraordinarily work-oriented place. When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.

Silicon Valley is like DC and LA. They are one industry towns, and so all of your friends are your colleagues and all of your colleagues are your friends, and even if you want to not think about work, it’s almost impossible not to. It can also be a pretty isolating place to live if you aren’t in the tech industry. There’s so much value put on tech that it almost feels that if you’re not doing that, you must not be doing something worthwhile, and that’s a shame.

So it’s a remarkable place to work. I have absolutely no regrets about being here, and I feel lucky every day to work at Facebook, a company with leaders and that I admire and respect and a mission I really believe in. AND it would be nice to have a little more balance sometimes.

“When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.”

How do you think your background and life experiences have informed your work, and how you approach design at a global scale?

Well…

That’s a loaded question, I know.

Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce. That being said, there are a few things about the way I grew up that shape my perspective.

I feel like growing up in a very large family with a lot of personalities helps me to be adaptive and collaborative in a way that served me professionally. I can get along with most people. I’m just naturally inclined to figure out compromises and facilitate conversations, because that’s what you do when you have eight siblings. It’s just a basic survival tactic. Working in teams of people from different backgrounds and disciplines, these kinds of interpersonal skills are not something I take for granted, and I think I have my family to thank for a lot of that.

“Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce.”

I also really cherish my humanities and liberal arts education because I feel like it’s made me more curious and empathetic towards people with different experiences than me. I really appreciate the push towards getting more people, especially women and underrepresented minorities, into science and engineering. At the same time, I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why. And that compass comes in large part through the humanities.

And obviously my training at ITP. The founder, Red Burns, was an important mentor to me. She really influenced my perspective and my philosophy on things. I don’t think I realized just how much until she passed away a few years ago. She was a total firecracker of a woman. She wasn’t that interested in the question, “What can we do with technology,” but instead asked us, “What can technology do for people?” Really putting technology in in service of people and not enslaving people to it. That’s something I really feel really passionately about.

And finally, I think that the people that you surround yourself with ultimately are the biggest influencers. My husband is a really wonderful person. Just by virtue of him, being from Canada and growing up in Quebec and just having a lot of different perspectives on things, I feel like he’s influenced my learning and development a lot over the years too. We’re celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this year, so I’m thinking a lot about that right now. Obviously I was 12 when I got married [chuckles].

“I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why.”

Obviously! As a designer, what is really exciting to you about your work? What activates you?

Something that always energies and inspires me is when I get to observe or experience the way other people live and and how those life experiences might cause them to see or value the products I build differently than I do. Years ago at Wachovia, we did a lot of research into how we could better support customers with severe visual impairments; this work was way ahead of its time. For most of us, online banking is a convenience, so we don’t have to go to the physical bank branch. But the people we met through that study couldn’t drive to a branch to take care of it themselves. For those who are blind or have seriously impaired vision, online banking is the difference between having financial independence and having to rely on someone else to do your banking for you. And the independence was crucially important to their well-being on so many levels. That made me realize something I’ve observed many times since…these technologies can mean very different things to different people depending on their context.

Most people look at Google search and think, “It’s so convenient to be able to look up whatever you want.” But, if you live in a place that doesn’t have libraries, Google in the difference between being able to educate yourself versus not. Or YouTube. Some people think of it as a place with entertaining videos, but if you live in a place that doesn’t have freedom of speech, it’s the difference between knowing what’s going on through citizen reporting or not.

I get really excited when we launch something and then get to see what people do with the things we make. When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. A good example is how Facebook Safety check came to being. Facebook wasn’t created as a crisis communications system, but with so many people connected on the platform, it was the natural and logical place for people to let their friends and family know they are Ok in the wake of a natural disaster or even a terrorist attack. So a team at Facebook observed this and designed not just for people but with people. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.

“When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.”

Ultimately I gravitate towards working on things that are good for the world. I know that sounds like a platitude. But I have to feel like the thing I’m working on intends to lift people up, in a very broad and democratizing way. I love breaking down the hierarchy. Whether it’s media hierarchy, or communication hierarchy, or whatever it is. I like the fact that a blind person wouldn’t have to rely on somebody to drive them to the bank. Or that a singer songwriter would be able to support themselves through YouTube videos instead of having to sign with a record label. Or that people could raise money for a cause they care about and actually move the needle on medical research like the ALS folks did on Facebook through the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Sometimes people look at what I’m working on now—digital advertising tools—and think, “Wow, you’ve gone 180 from there!” But I don’t see it that way at all. Ultimately what I’m working on now is about economic development and job creation. I think sometimes we look at the world’s problems—poverty, inequality, you name it—in very surface level ways, and what I’ve really enjoyed over past four years of working on the business side of Facebook is becoming smarter about how the world works, how society works, how the economy works and understanding that if you can help people provide for themselves, you have less war, you have less poverty, you have less terrorism, even.  

I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it can solve. That’s what I’m doing more recently in my writing; just trying to encourage more designers to look past the obvious flashy thing they can be working on and think, “What could I change if I applied myself to software for the government,” or “How can design get involved in making the criminal justice more equitable and humane?” These are all design problems. They may be less sexy, behind the scenes. It’s not necessarily going to get you a big splashy article in the technology magazine, but who cares?

“I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it solve.”

When did you start writing about your work?

I’ve always enjoyed writing and storytelling. As a leader, one of the most important skills is to be able to craft a narrative, a vision for what you want your team to aspire to, that captures their imagination. So in some form or another, I’ve been writing and storytelling my whole career, though I didn’t as publish my writing as much until more recently. The big driver of that was fairly practical.  We faced a big challenge a few years back attracting people to work on the business side of Facebook. It wasn’t visible to people. They knew the consumer-facing Facebook products, and that’s what most people coming in wanted to work on. I get that. And if it was visible to them, many were like, “Mmm, I don’t really want to work on ads.”

Making the work visible to people, helping them understand the impact, both on Facebook as a business and on society as a whole, how we can help improve the experience that people have at work day to day, as well as grow economies and create jobs…those were the big things that I focused on in terms of writing. About business design, and the way designers can have impact on a whole host of important issues.

Occasionally I’ll just get mad about something and write about it. A few months ago, I published an article about my uterus [chuckles]. I don’t know if you saw that.

Oh yeah [laughter]. We’re going to get to that in a minute.

I have 100 ideas of things that I’d like to write about. It frustrating to me that I haven’t succeeded in more consistently making time for it because I feel like it’s something that I’m good at, it’s something that I enjoy, and I feel a connection to people when I do it. But it’s always about capturing the time. You know how that is. I’m sure that’s how you feel about photography and other things.

“I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, ‘Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!’ It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions. I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, ‘How do you do it all?’, then ask the men too.”

Yeah, this project will very much be a snapshot of tech culture in 2016.

I’m a maker. I got into management a long time ago and realized that in the corporate context, the biggest value that I could provide is that I’m really good at building teams. So I had to let go of a lot of the hands-on contribution in the interest of making space for other people to do it. But I still have the urge, the urge to produce things, to find an outlet for that, to connect with what other people that are making and to be inspired by that. So I find different ways—you know, we have the Facebook Analog Research Lab where we print beautiful posters. I love just seeing what they’re making, and I get so excited about communication design that’s going on at Facebook. I think it’s really magical.

And then personally I do all kinds of things. I knit a lot, and I like to draw, and so writing – in addition to doing it because I think it’s really helpful to my work – is just a creative outlet for me. I never thought of myself as a writer until more recently, which is kind of interesting. I’ve always thought  of myself as a visual person or a performer, but I’ve surprised myself with how much gratification I get from writing.

Let’s talk about your uterus [laughter].

Everybody else is, why not? When I published that piece, I said to my husband something like, “At some point, I will regret making my uterus a topic of public conversation. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but…”

You’ve written about the bias that you’ve seen on stage or at conferences. You also touched on, as you got older, you became more cognizant of bias in tech in general. Can you expand on that?

Yeah. It’s interesting, often I’ll take weeks, even months to write a complex piece about design. But with the piece about women in tech, I wrote the bulk of that in about 45 minutes at a Starbucks. I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, “Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!” It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions.

I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, “How do you do it all?”, then ask the men too.

When I published the article on Medium, I wasn’t surprised to hear from a lot of women who said it really resonated with them.  But it was really interesting to hear from many men, too, who were like, “You know what? I’m really pissed because I realized nobody ever asks me about my family. I think it’s because they think I don’t care as much about my family as my wife does.” The whole thing is dehumanizing to everyone. It’s like, “Women, all you are is a group of people who help make families, and then also could work. Men, you are people who work, and maybe you have a family.” It’s all based on really unfortunate stereotypes and doesn’t allow people to define themselves and how they want to be seen.

I also noticed in your writing that you gave people books for Christmas and I did the same thing.

Oh really?

Yes. I gave all my best friends like 10 books that affected me deeply in 2015, because last year was a year of reading self-help books and being a hermit. You also mentioned that you’re not like a huge books person. What was it about those books that impacted you so much?

Well, it’s interesting. I’ll tell you something that hardly anybody knows because I’m still processing it myself. I just got diagnosed with dyslexia a month ago [chuckles].

For real?

[laughter] My daughter has dyslexia, and when we were going through the process of getting her assessed they interviewed me and my husband. And after they interviewed me they were like, ‘’You probably have some undiagnosed issues.’’ I’ve always been a very slow reader, and I struggle to keep up with a lot of written information. I reverse things all the time and have a terrible sense of direction. There are a lot of things that in hindsight make a lot more sense. And so when they said that to me I was like, ‘’Hmm, that’s interesting.’’ I thought, ‘’I think I’m just going to get assessed, too, just to find out.’’ So I went through a formal assessment with the clinical psychologist, and boom, here I am.  

It’s kind of a wild thing to find this out a lot later than kids like my daughter discovered it. But I think you’re much better off finding that out today then when I was a kid. I don’t think people really understood it then. I think they may have thought that it was correlated with intelligence, which it isn’t at all. Maybe you get put in special ed when you didn’t need to, you just needed time accommodation. You know what I mean? I just think there’s a lot less stigma attached to it today. I see my daughter going through that. She’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine. I’m not embarrassed about it. I have a bunch of friends who are dyslexic [chuckles].” It’s like no big deal.

“If you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.”

I’m still processing what that means for me. But generally, I’m excited because I’m just a big believer in self-awareness and self-knowledge. If that’s true of my brain, I want to know it so that I can figure out how can I work more effectively. Just the recognition that I’m probably working X percent harder than I need to, and maybe there’s technology and tools that can help me have to work less hard at things is hopeful and liberating. I think I’ve believed in some contexts that I wasn’t as smart as the people around me, but the reality is that the mechanics of my brain were just slowing me down. I think we should all be interested in understanding how our minds work and how we can harness technology to work better.

When the psychologist asked me, “Margaret, what’s your relationship to reading?” I said, “I love stories.” She’s like, “That’s not the same thing. How do you feel about reading?” I said, “I love audiobooks.” I asked my mother one time what I used to do when I was a kid and she said, “You spent hours in your room, listening to those books that had the records that went along with them.” So interesting. Kids are amazing. They just figure out sometimes what they need even if adult don’t recognize that there’s an issue. Because one of the classic recommendation for people with dyslexia is to listen to audio versions while you’re reading the same written material. I guess I figure that out when I was three.

Anyway, I have hundreds and hundreds of books. I love stories and narrative so much, and yet reading a book just really takes me forever. If it’s not unbelievably engaging, I just don’t get through it. Which is frustrating because I’m an incredibly curious person and there’s 1,001 things I want to learn about. But I’ve found other ways to learn and grow. I don’t need to feel bad about it anymore. The reason this relates to the piece that I wrote about growth and vulnerability is two-fold; and this is so interesting in hindsight.

One is that Carol Dweck talks a lot about people with learning challenges in her book Mindset, because if you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.

The hardest thing sometimes is for people to get over their fear of failure, whether it’s professionally or personally. They pull punches all the time. They don’t take the risk, because they’re afraid of failing, and they miss all of the learning comes from failure. Mindset is a book that’s really been influential to me as a person, as a manager and a colleague, and as a parent, quite frankly. I really try to drive this into my kids, like, “Do your best and don’t worry about failing. I don’t actually care what classes you take, or what you study. But, don’t shy away from something because it’s hard.

And then, Brene Brown — who doesn’t love Brene Brown.

That was one of the books I gave to my friends this year.

Have you listened to any of her audio books? Her voice, her accent is just amazing. And she is so funny. But I think that book has been really influential for me, and just her teachings in general. And by the way, not coincidentally, both of those I listened as audio books. I never read the physical book [chuckle].

Funny, I think one of the things that I realized about myself, and I don’t know why this is, is that I am in a lot of ways unconcerned with admitting to my weaknesses. Sometimes it perplexes me about why people are afraid to do that. It’s absurd to think that we are all great at everything. Like its just an absurd notion, and I always tend to feel like if you own your bad PR, nobody can say anything about you that you haven’t already said about yourself. It’s very liberating.

What advice would you give to kind of young puppies starting out that you wish that you’d known in the beginning?

Take risks, especially when you’re young. You can fall down, but you won’t fall down that far because you’re already close to the ground.

[laughter]

It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.

“It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.”