Design Mind frogcast Ep.55 – What Makes a Product Great?

In this episode of the Design Mind frogcast Peter Skillman, Global Head of Design at Philips, joins us to dicuss the evolution of product design and the role of design leadership. For over a century, Philips has been a global leader in customer-focused innovation, and in recent years, the company has shifted its focus towards pioneering health technology aimed at improving lives worldwide. Recorded during Milan Design Week 2025, Peter shares valuable insights from his leadership journey at Philips, as well as his experiences at Microsoft and Amazon.

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Episode Transcript:

Design Mind frogcast

Episode 55: What Makes a Product Great?

Guest: Peter Skillman, Global Head of Design, Philips

[00:00:03] Elizabeth Wood: Welcome to the Design Mind frogcast. Each episode, we go behind the scenes to meet the people designing what’s next in the world of products, services and experiences, both here at frog and far, far outside the pond. I’m Elizabeth Wood.

[00:00:19] Elizabeth Wood: Today on our show, we’re taking a look at the evolution of product design and design leadership. To do this, we’re joined by special guest Peter Skillman, Global Head of Design at Philips. For more than a century, Philips has been a globally recognized powerhouse for customer-focused innovation. And over the last decade, the company has really set its sights on groundbreaking health technology, focused on improving the lives and well-being of people everywhere. Earlier this year, we got the chance to sit down with Peter during Milan’s Design Week, and he was gracious enough to share insights from his time as a design leader at Philips, as well as at Microsoft and Amazon, among others. Here’s Peter now.

[00:00:54] Peter Skillman: What makes a product great? Sometimes doing less better is more important. Sometimes what you remove is more important than what you put in. Sometimes, performance isn’t just a feature, it’s the only feature. And I think that what makes a product great is often when you work backwards from the customer, and you really nail understanding their needs, rather than coming at it from a feature-based point of view. Like, I’m adding a new feature, competitors are adding features, we have to match the competition—you know, that’s the conventional wisdom. The unconventional wisdom is there is a diminishing return for those things. And if you focus on dressing people’s frustrations, that is wildly differentiating, and it is so hard for product organizations to just go back and understand exactly what the needs are and be laser focused on doing that and nothing else, right? So I think ultimately, what makes a great product is often what you’re not doing. Sometimes you want the product to disappear.

[00:02:04] Peter Skillman: I’m Peter Skillman. I’m the Global Head of Design for Philips. I’m the eighth leader of design for Philips in our 100-year history. So it’s a pretty scary responsibility, actually, if I consider the fear associated with having to maintain that legacy, but it’s really an honor to be in that position. If I think about what is my mission at Philips, and even in a broader sense, it’s that my job is to unlock the creative potential of other people and build great teams. I don’t care about my compensation. I don’t care about my title. I really am excited at how I can unlock and teach others.

[00:02:47] Elizabeth Wood: Like many of those who have found their passion in product design, Peter shared that he didn’t exactly start out with this career in mind.

[00:02:55] Peter Skillman: If we go way back, like I didn’t even know design existed as a career. I chose engineering initially because I didn’t know that I could actually go study design, kind of interesting. And when I was a kid, I would design and build things. And when I wanted to get away from designing and building things, I would design and build more things. And so that was just…my entire identity was wrapped up around, trying to invent and envision objects, designs, buildings, you know, cars, trap doors, as a kid, you know, whatever. And it was really only when I discovered IDEO that I really understood what design meant.

[00:03:35] Peter Skillman: There was a designer who was building furniture that I did some work for, and he told me about this company called IDEO in Silicon Valley, and he said that it’s connected with and they support this incredible design department, the product design department at Stanford. And he said, You should go and talk to Dennis Boyle. So Dennis Boyle is one of the great benefactors in my career, and he spent an hour with some kid just off the street—me—in his office, explaining what the career of design was about, and holding up parts that he had designed, and plastics, and medical, and toys and all these different objects. And I became so excited by that opportunity of that structure of actual design in the context. And he said, go to Stanford, and then maybe when you’re done, we can, you know, we can talk. And so he gave me his business card, and I put it in my wallet, and I vowed I would never take this out of my wallet until I gave it back to him as an employee.

[00:04:40] Peter Skillman: You know, it’s not easy to get into Stanford. They accepted in the graduate program just 15 people a year. So it was really hard. And so I felt very lucky. In fact, I felt like a fraud there. And I think maybe some people know this feeling where you compare yourself to the collective amalgam of the best qualities of everyone, and you feel like you’re completely a fraud. So, like, I had that feeling—sometimes I still do, you know, like, ‘Am I good enough?’ I went through that program. Then I was lucky enough to get hired by them, and I went back to his office, and at that time, it was actually David Kelley Design when I went to work for him, like it was a year before they became IDEO. And I pulled this tattered, torn up copy of his business card that I had been carrying around for whatever, four years, and I gave it back to him. And I said, I just want to thank you for all that you did for me. And I coach a lot of people, not even from Philips, because I want to give back.

[00:05:47] Elizabeth Wood: When it comes to giving back to the future of design leadership, perhaps one of the biggest pieces of advice Peter has on offer is to avoid being too narrowly focused on one aspect of design.

[00:05:59] Peter Skillman: I think that there is a generation of design leaders that perhaps didn’t recognize how significantly the game had changed. The speed of change, also through large language models, and certainly in the last three years, it’s transformed almost everything in terms of speed. I also think that the importance of software becoming far more influential in the experience means that you have influence when you are an equal product stakeholder with the developers and also with the product managers. And you have to know everything. The big difference today is that there is no shortcut. There is one unalienable truth in this world today: There is no substitute for the hard work of being insanely focused on continuing your learning.

[00:06:59] Peter Skillman: Design leaders have to be fully fluent In design, organizational planning, in how you handle interview mechanics, in how you have mechanisms for promotion and career ladders and software. And you know, what’s the difference between Swift and Jetpack Compose and React? And is the Headless version of React better than the React MUI stack from Google? Like, all of these technical underpinnings. And especially telemetry. Telemetry is how do you measure adoption, retention, engagement and task success? How are you building data pipelines to do that and setting up the taxonomy and ontology of your data structures? My point is, I think that for a while, people were really in their silo domain in design, and they experienced this huge uplift of visibility, also through co-creation and also through need-finding, and human-centered design, that was a big part of it. But then what happened, like in the last 10 years, is that evolved so quickly that the expectations of design leaders is that they fully understand the business. And that’s a different set of skills. And I think that’s really fundamentally what changed. And if you have those skills, you are in demand, and you can get a job anywhere, because that’s how the game is played.

[00:08:33] Elizabeth Wood: Another piece of advice Peter shared during our conversation was around the importance of focusing on the human aspects of creativity and design leadership–specifically around the value of being able to focus, rest, and reflect.

[00:08:46] Peter Skillman: One of the things I just wanted to share is about luxury and the luxury of time. I was reading this quote from Justin Walsh, that “Luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four.” And what’s interesting about being here is that sometimes you’re in such a state of urgency that you don’t get to what’s really important as a designer. What’s really important is to continuously feed your inspiration, your world view, the things that you come in contact with, the people, fashion, what they’re wearing, how they’re behaving culturally in a different context.

[00:09:33] Peter Skillman: I think one of the things that you get when you step away for a moment just to reflect is a vision of all the things that you often don’t normally see, and it’s just so important to make time to think about the details, because no detail is small. And you have to fuel your creative side, that is what every designer has to actually get out and look at forms and shapes and color and inspiration.

[00:10:06] Peter Skillman: Sometimes, I think one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to structure your time well so that you absolutely have time to reflect on the things that are really important. And often that’s how people feel. Sometimes I schedule 20 minute meetings and 40 minute meetings so that I have 10 minutes to stand up and maybe go thank someone for something, or do something really human and not be in such a back-to-back kind of context that you forget the human side of everything that we do.

[00:10:40] Elizabeth Wood: When it comes to understanding the human element of innovation, Peter has literally put this to the test. Over the years with clients and in competitions at Stanford, he posed a single challenge: assemble the tallest tower possible from twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and one standard-size marshmallow. Different groups of four were participants, from groups of business students to groups of kindergarteners. The results were surprising.

[00:11:06] Peter Skillman: The big idea is that the highest performing group of all, statistically, kindergarteners, perform better than the worst performing group of all: business school students. Now, why is that true? And it turns out that the kindergarteners don’t spend 10 minutes arguing about who’s going to be CEO of the Spaghetti Corporation. And it turns out that one of the great lessons is the death of innovation is status: status transactions and fight for power and control. And of course, in the world we’re living in today, it feels like there are some pretty brutal status exchanges going on throughout the world. But if you really want to innovate, it’s just about there is only make. It’s what Corita Kent said in the 1950s. The pop art nun designer Corita Kent said, “There is no win. There is no fail. There is only make.” And her view is, you just learn by doing, by building. You know, like, don’t plan obsessively, start building. And most people don’t actually have an innate understanding of the structural mechanics of uncooked spaghetti. So it takes some practice.

[00:12:26] Peter Skillman: And the reason why the kindergarteners won is they just started building so they actually had more iterations and learned more, because there is only make, and the business school students were really fighting about who’s going to be in charge. And so interesting when I think about that and the lessons in organizational design. It turns out that really effective leaders actually just put others on stage. I think earlier in my career, I made a lot of mistakes here. You know, I thought management was that you should tell people what to do, and actually I was micromanaging people. Whereas I think that’s not the focus of leadership, and that’s not what unlocks ambitious and creative people.

[00:13:07] Elizabeth Wood: We’re going to take a short break. When we return, Peter will share more on his work at Philips and what success really looks like in product design.

[00:13:43] Elizabeth Wood: Now back to Peter Skillman, Global Head of Design at Philips.

[00:13:46] Peter Skillman: Philips started building light bulbs in 1891. And the very first year they were profitable was about five years after, when they got in order for 50,000 light bulbs for the Winter Palace, for the Russian czar. You know, like, that’s pretty cool. But if you look at the DNA of that, it was all about hardware and then consumer products. And there were different phases of the company. The first was lighting, and then it evolved into consumer products, and then experiences, and then really healthcare. And today, if you even abstract the logo, we have stars and waves. Stars represented light and waves represented communication–radio communication. Data is the new light and insights are the new communication. And that is inherently structured around how you manage software. So Philips is an innovation company that’s 134 years old that is now 70% software. So what are the things I’m focused on? I’m focused on the service experience, design language system adoption in code so that you get the agility that you need from actually having fully tokenized design stacks—which, for those listeners that don’t know what that is, that means that you’re able to update a component in minutes instead of months. It’s just a way of achieving high agility.

[00:15:10] Peter Skillman: The issues that Philips faces moving forward is, how do we become absolutely best in class, high speed, in high agility, in working backwards from our customer? And to do that, we need to really modernize our software approaches. And so I’ve become a software evangelist. That is one of the roles that I’m taking in order to address the thing that Philips needs the most focus on.

[00:15:39] Elizabeth Wood: Of course, expanding into new territory often requires forming the right partnerships. During our conversation, Peter shared more about why design success is so often dependent on relationships and shared values.

[00:15:51] Peter Skillman: The only time you have risks are when your business model is not aligned and your values aren’t aligned. That’s why trust and the aligned business model, these are the two things that really matter.

[00:16:02] Peter Skillman: This stuff is really relationship based. I mean, if I look at like, why do I have a good relationship with frog? We have a good relationship with frog because you’re actually perfectly aligned with our model. We don’t outsource our strategy. We don’t have giant strategic products that we want to hand off to you and have you go away and come back three months later and give us the answer. We want people actually in our office sitting with us as co-workers, right? And you will co-locate people. I have design firms literally asking for work 150 times a year. I mean, every two days, I have somebody that’s asking me if I would consider meeting with them and having discussion about working with whatever XYZ agency is. And I really tell them upfront that our model doesn’t work with 99% of the agencies that are often really focused on building their own individual brands, like “Ta da! We’re so awesome, we’re going to bring this thing to you.” But so I think, there’s trust that I ethically, like, you’re good people, etc, and you are. And then the second thing is that your business model is aligned. Our business model is so aligned because then you can also, because you’re global, you can give us people in Bangalore and in Shanghai, in Böbligen, Germany, and then there’s some more people in Eindhoven, and there’s some people in Amsterdam and Cambridge and Bothell…there’s not a lot of companies at scale that can do that.

[00:17:34] Elizabeth Wood: For Peter, making a great product always means focusing on what the user really values—especially at Philips where health technology has high stakes.

[00:17:43] Peter Skillman: In healthcare, there’s a crisis where our clinicians spend at times 40% of their day entering data and health record systems when they need to be connecting directly with their patient. So anything you do that allows them to shift away from the product experience and shift towards the human that I care about, that I’m really trying to heal and engage and listen to, and maybe you’re telling me something that the machines aren’t, you know, like that really adds to the value of care. And maybe even more importantly, how do people feel? Why do people go into healthcare in the first place? So I think that if you come at it from a business focus, as opposed to coming at it from ‘How are we going to transform the lives of these people?’ Let’s really try to understand what drives them, and then that’s what makes the product great. Sometimes it’s just doing less.

[00:18:35] Peter Skillman: You are kind of cutting to the core of what I consider you the classic Amazon five questions. Those five questions are: Who is your customer? What is the key need–what’s the pain point? What is the most important advantage that you bring to them? In other words, what’s your solution? Four is, how do you know if you’re right? How do you know if that’s the right problem you should be solving? And fifth is, how are you visualizing it? Because often product orgs will answer those first four, and then it’s kind of an abstraction for what the solution is. And instead, you want people to have a bias towards prototyping and building and validating really quickly, and then they can fail when it’s really inexpensive, instead of after they invest six months in business analysis and then discover, oh, that’s not really what the customer wanted.

[00:19:22] Peter Skillman: So, I think we apply those five questions to a given context, and that context is usually, in healthcare, it’s the clinician and the patient. We have this thing called the Quadruple Aim. The Quadruple Aim is we seek to deliver better health outcomes, reduce the cost of care, deliver a better patient experience and deliver a better clinician experience. So trying to look at it from both of those lenses is the goal. And then there’s a bunch of, I would say, secondary customers. There are people like the hospital CEO, somebody in purchasing, there’s somebody in repair. So we can look at especially the surface experience flows around a particular persona. But most of the time we’re really thinking about the patient and the clinician.

[00:20:13] Elizabeth Wood: Ultimately, Peter says design success can be measured by one goal: getting a product out into the real world for real users.

[00:20:21] Peter Skillman: I hate the term design-led organization. That feels really wrong to me. Like, I don’t want to be design-led. I actually want to be user need-led, customer-led. And I think that in some ways, when I said earlier, like, designers need to know everything, that’s really what’s changed. We need to know everything. I think that I also want product management and the developers to know design, and I want them involved in design directly. The best high output companies are all overlapping as equal product stakeholders. You stay in your swim lane, but then there’s still times when you influence because of your direct acumen in these other areas. That’s really high performance. And I think anytime that gets out of balance in any context, if any one of those stakeholders becomes too powerful, usually it’s a bad outcome.

[00:21:10] Peter Skillman: If you don’t ship a product, it almost doesn’t matter. I mean, I hate to say it, like, we want the failures to happen really early, when they’re not expensive. But like, if it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t really count because you often don’t learn, really learn, about the customer, about their needs, until you’re at scale. And it’s really easy to miss stuff. You know, back at one point when I was managing Outlook and Skype, you know, when I was at Microsoft, I was the head of design for both and we rolled out one new launch of a Skype build, and we tested it with, I don’t know, 100 people, 150 people, and it seemed really good. And there were some professional users that turned out to represent something like 20% of the overall volume of calls that we didn’t test because we just didn’t even know how big a deal was. And it was missing this huge feature of being able to see multiple screens at once. And they were so angry. The lesson is you really need to get your product out there, or you have no idea. Shipping matters.

[00:22:15] Peter Skillman: The Kindle story is a really interesting one. Steve Kessel, you know, brought this thing to Jeff Bezos and said, “It will be a failure. We will lose money on it. It has an overwhelming 256 megabytes of memory and four shades of gray.” And what Jeff Bezos said is that, “I’m willing to lose money for years because I have such a strong belief in the user need. Let’s iterate on this thing in the market.” What’s fascinating about Amazon and AWS, where I was the head of design for AWS for a while, I think it’s their execution speed. Sometimes they will go directly from concept to shipping, almost with no validation in mind. So that works when you have two-way doors. It doesn’t work when you have one-way doors.

[00:23:01] Peter Skillman: But I think there are lessons in some of the great cultural advantages of each of these companies. You know, that’s the advantage of being in an agency, is that you see different approaches for things. That’s the same reason why I think there are advantages to, you know, having four or five years of experience somewhere, and then bringing a lot of the best parts of their ethos into the new company. There are some companies I mentioned earlier that I would describe as very high performance, but low psychological safety. And psychological safety matters. So what I’m doing is I’m taking some of the best things that I’ve learned in terms of specialty mechanisms and bringing that into what I consider to be an incredibly loving, value-centric company, which is Philips.

[00:23:50] Elizabeth Wood: That’s our show. The Design Mind frogcast was brought to you by frog, a leading global creative consultancy that is part of Capgemini Invent. Check today’s show notes for transcripts and more from our conversation.

We really want to thank our guest Peter Skillman, Global Head of Design at Philips for joining us today and sharing insights.

We also want to thank you, dear listener. If you like what you heard, tell your friends. Rate and review to help others find us on Apple Podcasts and  Spotify. And be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Find lots more to think about from our global frog team at frog.co/designmind. That’s frog.co. Follow frog on X at @frogdesign and @frog_design on Instagram. And if you have any thoughts about the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at frog.co/contact. Thanks for listening. Now go make your mark.