Amber Cartwright: Leadership, empathy, and designing for impact

working in collaboration with my cross-functional partners as well as partners outside of the tech business has become very important to me. And I'm going to bring best of both worlds. I think to get your guide in regards to taste and intuition, strategic leadership in collaboration. I am your host Liam and this is behind the journey, a show where we explore the inner workings of Get Your Guide by talking to our incredible leaders about their journeys, ideas and strategies and also discuss how we can all embody our company culture to help us work towards our goals. Today, I'm excited to have VP of the user experience team Ambercat right here. She'll be sharing insights into her leadership style, strategies for success, her vision for the future, and an insight look at the ethos and culture at Get Your Guide. For those who don't know, we're a market leading company on a mission to connect millions of travellers with unforgettable experiences all over the world. So, if you're looking to embark on a new career journey and the thought of revolutionising the travel experience to sound exciting to you, head over to Get Your Guide careers now. Okay, let's get into it. Amber, hello, how are you doing and welcome to behind the journey? Hi, thanks for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation today. Same, thank you so much for joining. First of all, I want to kick things off with a proper introduction, so can you just tell our listeners a little bit more about who you are, where you're from, and how you came to find your new role here at Get Your Guide? Yeah, sure, so I'm a southern American gal. I grew up in a very remote area of North Carolina called the Outer Banks. I grew up in four-wheel drive territory only with wild horses running around, which sounds really magical, but for a girl who wanted to get out there in the world, it was small at the time, but now I really appreciate it. I left home at 18. I went to college and I had been dancing in ballet since I was three years old, and so I continued with that in my undergraduate degree, where I got a bachelor fine arts and dance. I then moved on and was dancing for a couple of professional companies, one in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the other in the Bay Area, but then, unfortunately, I got injured, and many dancers experienced this, and your shelf life was about 30 years old anyway, so I decided to see what else I might be interested in. I had done a choreography piece with a sound artist when I was an undergraduate school, so I reached out to him and I was like, "Hey, that technology stuff you do is cool. How can I look into it?" And he referred me to a program at New York University called the Interactive Telecommunications Program. It was a specialty program in the film, department at NYU, but focused on technology and art, so that's really where I launched into my digital side of my career. When I left there, my first job was motion graphics, creating different trailers and reels for a variety of companies like HBO, for example. It made a lot of sense to me coming out of being a dancer because motion design and motion graphics gets like choreographing on screen, so that was a natural progression for me. After that, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something in the design and creative field, and after college, after graduate school, the first recession hit that I had been part of my life in, and so I couldn't find a job anywhere in the United States, and I just sent out my resume to various companies around the world and a mobile technology company picked me up in Dublin, Ireland, so I moved to Dublin and it was a mobile blogging platform, which now we call Instagram, so it was really interesting to take part in that. When I came back, I got a job with teen people, and I was working a camera on the red carpet. I met a lot of really interesting people that way. I saw Rihanna on her debut night with Jay-Z, and so I've got a lot of really great stories from my camera operator time. After that, I tried a few other creative fields. I went and worked in a museum technology company, which was really rewarding. It was a lot of non-profit work, but I was living in Portland and just couldn't deal with the weather in Portland, so I went back to New York and really started my career in user experience at that point. I joined the company Huge in Brooklyn. Agency, it's like bootcamp for designers. You're working with all different types of brands, and then from there, I moved to the Bay Area and worked at Airbnb, and finally, right before get your guide of set Netflix. Sounds great. Very interesting. I understand on the weather point with a lot of not been to Portland, but originally being from Manchester, otherwise, I think we can align on that. But that's great. Thanks so much for explaining. So let's dive into your experience in the previous roles Airbnb and Netflix, obviously, two huge names. So it'd be great to hear what skills did you pick up during your time in each of those roles, and how do you or do you approach your work differently here that get your guide. First of all, the two companies are very different, and how they approach running the business, as well as product design. So Airbnb was 12 years ago. It was still a startup. It had not IPOed at that point. I was the eighth designer on the team, and the first design manager. When I left, there was about 250 designers, and that was a span of six years. So I saw rapid growth there, and it was my first tech job. So I was really figuring things out in the tech space. The CEO Brian Chesky was very inspired by Steve Jobs, one of his icons, and he, what that led to was a more judgment-based, intuition-based way of doing product design. He didn't really care much about the metrics. He focused a lot on what the customers actually feel, and the problems that he was trying to solve, or we were trying to solve. He taught me how important it is to be close with those that you are designing for. Some of my memories of working with hosts at Airbnb are some of the most treasured of my professional career. Other things I learned from him is really just trust your intuition, and damn good taste. Airbnb is known for how well-designed the products are. Fast forward, six years later, I left the Bay Area and moved to LA and was referred to Netflix by a friend, and Netflix was an incredible experience. First of all, the talent is top bar and some of the most talented people in their respective expertise in the world. It is very well written about the high performance culture, which also means there's a lot of imposter syndrome. When you first start, I have many shared stories with folks who started, and I was like, "It's okay. Just give it six months, and you'll get past it." Netflix was different than Airbnb at that. It was much more data-driven. So metrics were looked at religiously in regards to one very important input to how our consumers are behaving. Also, research was at the same level of value as gathering the quantitative insights. So I felt there was a good balance of hearing from our customers and seeing behaviors at scale. Some of the things that I learned at Netflix was I was really pushed to be the best leader that I could be. Watching and learning from these other experts in their fields, how they handled growth management, strategic thinking. I was really inspiring, and I felt like I grew a lot in those areas as a leader at Netflix. Netflix also believes in something that they call freedom and responsibility, which is since the employee-based at their hiring are so senior, we should absolutely give them the decision-making and the freedom to make those decisions. But with that comes great accountability. So it's responsibility of the employee to make sure they're getting all the perspectives, getting the feedback, and putting that into their final decision. And that really impacted me as a leader. It's true empowerment and trusting in those that you're working with, for what they're really good at and what they were hired for. Netflix was also a very strong collaboration culture. It's built into this idea of what Reed Hastings called the Dream Team, which no one individual is going to have all the answers. It is going to take the collective team of all the experts to make the right call in the end. And I'm going to breathe best of both worlds. I think to get your guide in regards to taste and intuition, strategic leadership and collaboration. That's great. Thank you so much for the interest in today. So as someone now, you need to get your guide. You've already experienced very experienced in leadership roles, big companies. How have you settled in to your role as VP of UX here at Get Your Guide? What ideas are driving your vision for the future? Well, first of all, I am loving Berlin. It is actually exceeded expectations. When I was in LA, it's really nervous about living in a city I got. I was like, "Oh, I want to try groceries at four flights of stairs, take my dog out every night." But actually, it's been really wonderful. My neighborhood is really charming. People are super friendly. I've met all my neighbors because of the package situation. But I started really building a community here. But when it comes to Get Your Guide, I'm about four months in now to the role. I've spent a lot of time meeting with people, listening, understanding what the needs are. for the user experience team, identifying those opportunities, and really forming relationships with my partners. I recently just published some investment areas for the UX team going through 2026, and there are a couple of areas that are shaping my vision for how we innovate on our creation process here at Get Your Guide for our products experiences and how we work with others. For example, with the innovative creation, we'll be looking into how our team adapts to AI as a fundamental part of our design process. We need to embrace all these new tools that are available for designers out there, like cursor, which is a prototyping application that you can actually prototype with code. And then partnering with our data products team so that we can rapidly iterate internally before we launch a product using some of the Gen AI technologies that we have in place here at Get Your Guide. The old way is to invest heavily in this ML model that's like a black box that you have no idea what is happening on the inside. The new way that we will try is how to see algorithmic results in prototypes and tweak them before we launch them to our consumers. For how we work with others, I think we need to think much more horizontally than vertically as a UX team. What I mean by that is that our customer experiences don't really have a start and a stop. They all go together if you think about a search experience, you just keep narrowing down and going back up and narrowing down. So that means my team needs to keep their eye on the ball of the overall customer journey as well as innovation that can happen in individual places within that journey. I brought on two new roles that are going to help us with this higher level thinking. One is a very senior principled designer who is thinking about our customer journey from end to end. She's going to be working with the team to North Star, what Get Your Guide can be by the end of 2026. And then the other is an operational role who is strictly just trying to get our functions to talk and work together so that we have the context that the team needs to do the job. Great, thanks so much for talking us through that. I also wanted to talk about empathy, so it's something we try to keep top of mind here at Get Your Guide, especially when it comes to UX, whether it's been an empathetic leader while trying to hit tight deadlines or harness an empathy for customers to understand their pain points, could you just talk a little bit about how you utilize empathy in your work? Yeah, empathy is super important as an internal team. The soft skills are just as important as the hard skills. Having good EQ is critical to working in a profession that's dependent upon human behaviors and working in a social system. Building good relationships is a large part of the design roles. We need to understand each other's needs, collaborate on solutions, actively listen to our partners, there's going to be conflicts, so we need to be able to work through that really well and have the ability to inspire. So I think when people talk about empathy when it comes to user experience design, they're typically talking about the customers and having empathy with the customers. For me, that's a defaults, that is part of what we have to do. A harder part is having empathy for those you're working with internally and being really good at fostering those relationships. So thanks for talking us through all that. You've been here around four months so far. Can you share something with myself and with the listeners about what you've been working on that you're really excited about? Yeah, I'm really excited to dive into our supplier portal experience. I mentioned at Airbnb the close relationship that I developed with the host and the empathy that I had for them. They were really the heart and soul of Airbnb in the mission and our suppliers are very similar for us here to get your guide. We can't do this without them. And some of the things that I'm excited about that the team is looking into is how we can make the process of onboarding and optimizing the activities that they want to put on the platform, just really easy, super efficient, and which in turn will lead to a better traveler experience. If we make it easy, we get the right information, and then we can display it to our travelers. And I'm just really excited to start digging in with that team and developing a North Star for our suppliers. That's good to say. We can actually listen to the podcast with Johanna, who was talking about the improvements we've made with suppliers with the AI and the technology that's there and how much easier it is for products to get online. Yeah, they're using AI to help generate the types of insights that will help our suppliers show up better for travelers. Absolutely. And one of the things that we pride ourselves on, I get your guide, and I've been here a long time, almost 10 years, and it's our drive for cross-functional collaboration. So we just be great to hear, how do you encourage your team to build those bridges? How does collaboration help to drive more strategic and about for your projects? I, first of all, 10 years. Nearly. We're having embossary syndrome at the moment. Not twice. Hold on. One of the jobs that I've been doing a lot, as I've come in, is connecting dots across so many conversations that I'm having. So for example, I would be in an asset optimization conversation like, hey, how do we make these types of imagery better, but creative marketing wasn't in the room, right? So I need to bridge those gaps, or I would be in a conversation discussing how we merchandise the content from our suppliers and their activities to the traveler, but the supplier team wouldn't be involved, right? So I'm just starting to make those connections, bringing awareness of the right people in the room. I also spoke to those new roles that I'm bringing in that will really help with collaboration. I also celebrate publicly when people do a really good job at connecting the dots and praise them in really broad Slack channels, because that's the kind of behavior we want people to be doing. And of course, I also am responsible for thinking about how our team is structured, so that it fosters both collaborative thinking and deep innovation. Great. So at this point, summer 2025, we're full steam ahead. Can you just tell us a little bit more about how you encourage your teams to keep aiming high and what experience or skills would you prioritize if you were building your absolute dream team? Yeah. So I've had a lot of conversations lately about product quality. As a team, we've been defining what our quality standards are for everything that we launch and calibrating us against those particular standards. Some of the things that the team does in that process is go out and find inspiration in the industry, doesn't have to be a direct competitor. So for example, merchandising, the team took a look at Apple TV and Hulu, because there's really great merchandising that's in those apps. We also make sure that the team is staying on top of new trends, which is an almost constant job to do, but the team is really proactive anyway when they see things, they will share it with a larger team so that helps to keep that inspiration going. And recently we just introduced a quality metric that will help our teams cross functionally understand what I have said for expectations on the quality bar. Thank you, Airbnb. For skills, I'm really thinking about how important it is to have strong learners and those who work in ambiguity well. Technology and trends are changing every single day. If you're a strong learner, then you'll be able to adapt to those much more quickly. And we're going to start up. So ambiguity tends to happen in this environment. And for those who can really take that amorphous problem and break it down into how to solve it step by step, are really the skills I'm looking for and those are soft skills. I think that is where the trend is going to keep going in the future for design. Great, thank you so much. So onto another one of your many talents is your sub-stack writing. So the latest post on your sub-stack blog, the other half, talks a lot about the importance of having fun and cultivating value in the workplace. Can you talk about how these came across for you and get your guides culture? I started the sub-stack right before I came to Berlin and the way I write is whatever is on my mind at the time is the reflections that I'm writing about. In particular, the having fun and cultivating value was directly related to the experiences that I was having here at Get Your Guide. As leaders, I think we are navigating a tech world of employees who find work a huge part of their identity, that sense of purpose. I think that's very strong here at Get Your Guide. So the human side of leadership is getting more and more important. My posts tend to focus on the human side of leadership as maybe when you think about leadership more, how do we get things done and identifying gaps? When you're talking to someone whose identity is their job, it is a much deeper relationship that you need to have, and that's what I write about, vulnerability, how to have these human connections, what it means for that to be in the workplace. And these are just thoughts that I have that are forming as I am working in companies where the purpose is so much part of what's driving people. Great. Are you ready? Obviously, we have our Get Your Guide. guiding principles. Is there one that resonates with you or stands out for you more in your day-to-day work here at Get Your Guide? Just to what I was talking about, I think the one that resonates with me most is curiosity as our compass. That is what I think about and what I'm writing about. It's just being curious about doing new things, exploring new areas for myself as a leader and for my team, and that has to come for me from a very curious side, a very optimistic and positive side that with all the change that is spending within our industry and like I mentioned as humans, keeping an open mind, I think it's just really important. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A really unique perspective. To read the full blog article, Amber was referencing, you can click the link in this episode's description to her substack. Amber, thanks so much for all your insights today. I want to finish up by chatting a little bit about our favorite topic here at Get Your Guide, which is naturally travel. A huge part of why travel experiences can be so meaningful is their ability to show us new things. I've experienced that myself helps us to build human connections, making credible memories. So to finish up, can you tell us about your most extraordinary travel experience? Actually, I want to tell you about the one that I just had this past weekend. I went to Norway, which is one of my most favorite places in the world. There's two places I feel like I have felt closest to my soul, which is Corova and North Carolina, where I grew up and the West Coast of Norway. I travel to reconnect with myself, which for me is connecting to nature, disconnecting from the things that distract us every day, our phones, our computers, social media, and my goal is stillness. Stillness is a very hard thing to do in today's society, and I've been conditioning my mind to be able to do that again a year ago. I could only meditate for five minutes and I'm up to 22 minutes a day now, and travel helps me to recharge and reconnect with that side in myself in a more chaotic day-to-day life. So I tend to take a long weekend every month to try and do that reconnection. So travel, for me, is about connecting to my spiritual side and personal growth. Can you tell I lived in California for 12 years? Sometimes travel is just about having fun and being with friends and family, but I do travel a lot for that connection to myself and reflection time. Great. Thank you so much. Where's next? What's the next travel destination? Next, actually, I'm spending. I'm going to telecommute all of August and a very small island in the Swedish archipelago's open Stockholm. It's called Delaro, and the only way that I can get around is by boat. Okay. So my pup and I are going to be there for a month, avoiding the heat of Berlin in August and hanging out in Sweden. Sounds amazing. Amber, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. You're very welcome, and if you want to learn more, check out behind the journey on all major streaming platforms for more episodes and insights into how we're working to reshape the travel experience industry.