Design

“I think research has a very, and design has a very important part to play in raising the ceiling of what's possible. Whereas AI has mostly lowered the bar, but it hasn't, hasn't raised the ceiling.”

“I actually think some of our strongest product staff are going to be converts from design and from data science who are just looking to expand their reach.”

“If you want to build scalable, real systems, explore broadly, build the right thing, not just, like, something fast, then I think it's really important to lean into design not just from a visual and aesthetic standpoint, but also from a user experience standpo…”

“People that are just like, yeah, design me the thing, you know, you're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out. And in a world where there's just more than average in terms of software and media and advertising and content, I mean, You know th…”

“Staying out is hard, and I think that it takes not only human steering and human intent, but also it takes a point of view, and I think that is something that people fall down on all the time because it's kind of scary to have a point of view. It's like a real…”

“There's an amount of like novelty that is more important in design than it actually is in software engineering. Like software engineering, you almost, you must want it to over index unknown patterns, right? Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of …”

“My understanding is that the industry standard for design to verification in ASIC ASIC project is like one to three, one to four.”

“Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship, and sometimes that really annoys people you know, and it do…”

“Meanwhile, I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design, might be coming from data science, might be coming from engineering because the ones that have judgment, the ones that can talk, the ones that want to stay current, they might b…”

“I think that there are pixel generators and then there are tastemakers. And I worry that in design, maybe the industry itself conflates design with more production and not with taste. And so I think there's a lot of companies that you would talk to, and even w…”

“I think the alpha is in design, just like in marketing. It's not the tools. It's not the channels, not the metrics. It's the storytelling. It's How do you cut through the clutter in the snappiest, most compelling possible way?”

“I think it will get better at taste and judgment and design. Yeah. Like I think we might be holding onto that a little bit too much and saying like, oh yeah, like, you know, a designer or somebody will always know the best thing to ship or the best version of …”

“If you want to find great colors, look at a bird. Don't look at a book. Like, look, look, look at a leaf, right? Look at the ocean. Look, look, look, look, go to a tide pool, and just look at the colors in that tide pool.”

“Forget about decisions on tech stack. Forget about which back end they're using, which front end they're using. That doesn't matter. Quality, taste, design. That's all you need to optimize for in the future that's ahead of us.”

“The PM design and engineering jobs in their most coarse grained forms, not in their like, really find detailed forms, but in their core screen forms as roles are all converging.”

“And I think that speaks to how these roles are going to evolve in the future. The lines are going to be blurred between whether you're in legal or in risk or in engineering and design even.”

“I am very optimistic that generative AI is going to like, you know, really lift design In the world and make it one day equal to engineering. I think that, I don't think that's a crazy thing one day.”

“I think this is happening now too, even more in the age of AI, and the value is moving up the stack even more. That's why the design is the differentiator more than ever, because it's not just dev tools are a little better. It's, wow, you can create a lot of c…”

“She grew up as a musician, and then went into the field of design, so going back to that, you know, cross area, cross field, discipline connectivity, Like, I definitely think there's something to that.”

“There will certainly be far more software. It's probably a fairly safe assumption. Far more technology. What differentiates it is probably how it feels and how it works. And that's very hard to copy, right?”

“It feels to me that the better code generation gets, the more design matters, and the more that actually the human pushing on design matters too, because even if you have a good starting spot from your design system, from, you know, AI generation, whether it b…”

“What you really want is you want to diagnose with data and treat with design.”

“If you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, then like, what is your differentiator? It's design. It's craft. It's attention to detail. It's point of view.”

“When you disconnect production from design, you get very bad at design.”

“I've, I actually have never seen a company that grafted design on after the founding. So I've seen lots of, I could name lots of companies that I think are kind of design led, not always designer led, but design led or design centric, but I've never seen someb…”

“In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process rather than a byproduct or a part of the product process.”

“I've just never seen a number that you could apply to design that we could reliably affect. So I think it's very hard to hold design as an organization accountable for a particular outcome, the way that most of the other C-level roles are held accountable.”

“Sometimes you can charge two, three, four, five times more when you have better design.”

“Design you might think of as that thing of visual manipulation on a canvas drawing some mock, but actually just as valid is A bunch of iterations via prompting or just as valid is writing some code because maybe designing via coding is faster.”

“Where art is more about kind of like asking questions whereas design these days is more actually about kind of problem solving and answering questions. They're learning solutions, basically.”

“I always kind of say like is not a design word. It either works or doesn't work.”

“My point of view is that design has the opportunity to differentiate software at this age of AI, where we'll see whole new workflows emerge, where designers, engineers, product will work together in different ways than maybe they're doing today, or at least di…”

“And for example, at VRChat, we are doing both smallest and biggest work, Lenny, and they are sort of run as parallel work streams. The product management team is leading the charge of the smallest work, and the design team is leading the charge of the biggest …”

“I think that investors should be extremely judgmental of companies that have poor design, because it's basically You should figure out a way to get it done for almost zero dollars. And then all it takes from that point on is hiring one person who's a great des…”

“You know, design certainly does make, you know, business sense, but even if it didn't, they would still do it, and I think that, that, that's that x factor. That's the thing that's gonna make, you know, hard decisions along the way possible. And certainly wort…”

“And when you're just getting started with a new product, the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it, right? That's an engineer. That's a designer. That's a salesperson or a support person. They're the front line of the smallest loo…”

“Probably before you see potential replacement of any part of the design role, you instead see augmentation and you see access. You see efficiency so that designers can get more done. And I think probably a lot of engineers do more of their, put more of their t…”

“Probably everyone's learning to do a bit more of everyone else's job in this current moment. That said, I definitely think there's still immense value in product, immense value in design, immense value in engineering, and so I think those roles will continue t…”

“I'd, you know, since the, I'd never heard of the word design. Design wasn't talked about. There wasn't good design in shops. There weren't design museums.”

“If you just kind of like go to first principles here, there's so much that you're not able to communicate via a prompt. Like if you think about great design, it often captures something about the culture, the ethos of the moment. It captures something about th…”

“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report To the founder, product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”

“I got an engineer. He's amazing. And I got a designer and he's amazing. We don't really need product people. Like who are these folks? We know what we should do here. That's also a disaster. So like, I'm just picking one of the many sort of. Initial conditions…”

“Consumery software, which means you're building a software for regular humans. I would argue you have equal parts engineering, design, and product. Products there to tell the story of the customer and to influence, like, to think like the customer, to think si…”

“Design, it has a ton of performance and it comes from the fact that we have like figured out user-centered design, this process or design thinking, which IDEO popularized, like that's what we're supposed to do.”

“Silicon Valley often treats design as a service organization. You know, like design is catching things before it go out the door. It's not actually typically part of the development process.”

“A design leader's job should be managing the design first, the people second.”

“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report to the founder product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”

“If it's getting you clicks, design is irrelevant. If your value is coming out of it, right? So. If I make a design and they can't execute it falls apart.”

“So I severely believe in the fact that design can't trickle down from top. It needs to start from the bottom. We could sound very cool in a zoom meeting, but if the person coming in the event did not feel the brand, it doesn't matter.”

“The key I think to keep in mind is, you know, it's easier to teach tools and process than it is taste and character.”

“This is a skill that anyone can grasp for. And like, there's examples of good design and bad design all over the internet, right? So you can easily copy.”

“We would get towards the end of the project, bring design in, and they would use each project as an opportunity to squeeze in like, oh, and we can simplify here. And that's just a classic way to blow up scope at the end of the project because there wasn't a de…”

“People often have this like, oh, you know, design and user experience is on the other side of the coin. You know, it's like, it's a totally different industry and they're at odds with each other, right? Being data informed and being quantitative versus like be…”

“If they have a sense of design and empathy, Then they'll figure it out. And design would mean that they'll reduce friction with the end user, but also they'll think about design of the organization and design of the sales force and design of marketing and all …”

“There was an uphill battle along the way, obviously, selling people on, frankly, the importance of design and what it could do for them, and, you know, we look at it now, and it's obvious that was a huge differentiator in the company, and it really set us forw…”

“Copywriting over design, 100% any day.”

“If you're in the market for a budget car or everyday car, you're so many cars cover that well enough today that design tends to be the deciding factor when it comes to making that decision of what car I want.”

“So I think it's good to use computers, obviously, but I would never, ever believe in using a computer as a tool for creativity at the beginning. You can use it later, like I said, to give you variations and options and things like that, and maybe to speed up t…”

“The design was actually not about the output. It was a process of problem solving, and if you applied it, you could apply it to all sorts of different things.”

“The second thing that you want to think about from an org structure perspective is tie-breaking. Where do you want the decisions to be made? So for example, if you want decisions between product and engineering to be made by you, then both functions should rep…”