Employee Development

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Daniel Filler is a visual designer who has been promoted beyond his capabilities at Capital One, unfortunately. During the 5+ years I observed him, all of his teams at Capital One were incredibly weak when it came to design strategy, content strategy, and discovery. He is simply not a very experienced user-centered designer and does not have a good understanding of UX process, and thus, he chose managers who are also strong in visual design skills and weak in UX skills, and the outcomes of their work shows this bias and weakness. The features tend to be based on little discovery and on hunches and intuitions rather than on a UX discovery process leveraging the wisdom of teams. Instead, he centralizes key decisions and promotes group-think, where lower-status people are subtly made to understand they should follow his vision rather than challenge it. He enforces a very hierarchical structure, while pretending that it's all a big "family." His redesign of the core bank ledger experience was found to have major unintended consequences several years later that subtly undermined the core banking experiences for millions of customers. Because Capital One has no accountability and people are promoted based on networks and relationships rather than outcomes, he simply moved on and his superiors never realized or censured that major blunder. People were still working on fixing all the problems 5 years after his “brilliant” vision was first launched in 2016. Another feature he presided over, “Moneyflow,” (which was copied from competitors without any actual discovery to understand the actual needs of real users) - flopped immediately upon launch. Almost no one used it and it was de-emphasized eventually. Junior team members predicted this outcome, but were silenced and ignored both before and after it failed. Unfortunately, visual design skills are not the best foundation for UX design unless the person learns the discovery process as well, and Daniel is an example of someone who has managed to get himself promoted despite having little skill or experience in UX design beyond just visual design. Daniel is a skilled talker - says the right words, but does not back them up with his behavior. During the Pandemic and the George Floyd outrage, he always said such nice things in big meetings, but then failed to actually care about African American employees, and about 5 left in a short period of time. When he was told how important it was to hire Black designers back to restore diversity, he just shrugged and didn’t really care. I saw that laziness and lack of real caring towards employees repeatedly from him. Another woman left, she told me, because she had been promised a promotion if she took on more responsibility, but when she did, she was passed over. She told me that she announced her departure without him ever expressing any interest or concern about it. So Daniel’s words have little value - take them for what they are - political language meant to control people and promote himself. I would recommend any serious UX designers to avoid him, but visual designers will do fine, especially white males.