Bob Baxley
SVP of Design & Experience, ThoughtSpot. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperatorauthorotherLinkedIn ↗bobbaxley.com ↗
Bob Baxley has spent over 35 years in technology and software design, previously serving as Director of Design at Apple and Head of Product Design at Pinterest. He authored the book Making the Web Work and serves as Senior Vice President of Design & Experience at ThoughtSpot.
1shows
1appearances
37statements
4resolved
2supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Bob Baxley said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Baxley: Design achieves peak impact as phase zero of engineering
“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.”
Baxley: Companies cannot graft design culture on after founding
“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…”
Baxley: GenAI won't replace teammates because individuals cannot hold multiple mindsets
“When people Are starting to theorize that gen AI can remove teammates, you know, and oh, the designers don't need engineers and the PMs don't need the designers and like everybody thinks they can throw engineering overboard. And I'm like, stop it. Like we all …”
Baxley: Design Organizations Cannot Reliably Be Held Accountable to Quantitative Metrics
“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.”
Apple Design Always Reported to Engineering Under Steve Jobs
“That's how it worked at Apple the whole time under Steve. Design always reported to engineering, you know, they're there. Now I think it's structured a little bit differently, but design has always been part of engineering at Apple.”
Baxley: Large Design Teams Signal Ambiguous Corporate Cultures and Unclear Visions
“So if you look at the companies that have the largest design teams, they're often the companies that have the most ambiguous cultures and the most unclear design vision, right? When you go to companies that really know what they're doing, You know, and they're…”
Baxley: Slack and Pinterest Struggled Because They Lacked Long-Term Vision
“Slack and Pinterest, I think are examples of companies products that became companies, but neither one of those places really knew what to do next because they didn't have a bigger vision of the change they were trying to see in the world.”
Baxley: Teams should wait as long as possible before drawing visual mockups
“The thing I would say is that you should wait as long as possible to draw a picture. Like and that, I think that pushes against all the gen AI tools that help you create prototypes.”
Baxley: Tony Fadell's Nest Is an Outlier Among Apple Alumni Startups
“So obviously Tony Fadell would be one with nest. And he would, he'd be an outlier.”
Baxley: Companies Hire You for Former Culture's Values, Not Behaviors
“The thing I took away from Apple, and I think this is true for anybody changing from one major culture to another is most likely the new place hired you because of the values of the organization you left, but not the behaviors.”
Baxley: Meta Is Still a Startup, But Amazon Is Not
“I had this other theory that a startup is still a startup until the founder moves aside. So by my definition of even meta is still a startup in a way that Amazon's not. And, you know, an Airbnb is still a startup in a way that Pinterest is not because Ben's mo…”
Baxley: Google and Amazon Do Not Compete on Design Like Apple
“And Apple does, Airbnb does. I don't get the sense that Google does. And I don't get the sense that Amazon does. And that's not a critique on them. I don't think that those organizations are competing on design in the same way.”
Apple Generated Billions From Its Global Online Store With Just Six Designers
“You know, we had six designers for a store that ran in 30 some odd countries, 12 and a half thousand instances of the store doing billions of dollars of revenue. We had six designers like any other company would have had 60 or more.”
Baxley: A design-led company is not necessarily designer-led
“Saying a company is, is design led does not mean it's designer led.”
Baxley: Enterprise Software Documentation Is a Failure State
“Documentation is a failure state, right? Like in enterprise companies, a lot of times people think, oh, we'll just put it in the manual, be part of the training. And I would constantly be coming back and go, stop it. Nobody wants to learn our software. Nobody …”
Baxley: Every demand made on software users is a design failure
“Every time we make a demand on the audience, that's a failure on our part.”
Baxley: Successful products treat metrics as consequences, not drivers
“I've never seen a product be successful that used metrics as a driver for what they were doing. I've seen a lot of companies be really successfully seeing metrics as a consequence and a way to evaluate the quality of their decisions”
Baxley: Product managers should avoid handing visual sketches to designers
“The thing that I will say about to keep in mind for PMs is there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think i…”
Bob Baxley: Rapid random feature experimentation does not create great products
“I'm not exactly sure Darwinian evolution is the way we create great product, but a lot of companies are making a run at it.”
Baxley: Public Fear of Malevolent AI Was Planted by Hollywood
“So this idea that, that AI is going to take stuff over and is ultimately like really dystopian and malevolent towards humans and stuff like that. It's actually something that's created by Hollywood. And we're all like, and now we're like trying to outlive how,…”
Baxley: Software Industry Is in Its 1920s Film Era
“I, we are still in early days of trying to figure out how to make software together. I think of it sort of like where the film industry was in the 19 twenties. We've had our talking moment. We're kind of on the cusp of having our shift to color movement, but w…”
Baxley: Deep cultural indoctrination makes leaving companies like Apple difficult
“You know, you get kind of indoctrinated to those, all those standards and it's really deep. It infuses all of your behavior and how you conduct yourself in the company away from the company. And so I think it's pretty hard to immigrate successfully from one of…”
Baxley: Startups frequently outgrow the emotional and developmental capacity of their executives
“I came to think that the job of a startup was to grow the founder so they could continue to lead the startup. And I think what's true for founders is also true for a lot of other folks in the executive staff. It's very hard to grow emotionally and developmenta…”
Baxley: Product ownership cannot be retrofitted through after-the-fact buy-in
“It's not a matter of getting their buy-in. It's a matter of them being a part of it, you know, that it's like, it's, I don't know, it's a part of their soul in a really deep, meaningful way. And I don't, I'm not sure you can graph that onto somebody after the …”
The other half of the tape: Bob Baxley's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bob's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | SVP of Design & Experience, ThoughtSpot | 1 | 37 | 50% 2/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |