The Ledger, every show

“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, 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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“So obviously Tony Fadell would be one with nest. And he would, he'd be an outlier.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“Saying a company is, is design led does not mean it's designer led.”

“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 …”

“Every time we make a demand on the audience, that's a failure on our part.”

“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”

“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…”

“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.”

“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,…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“They're not useful as decision making tools because nobody would ever argue the opposite. You know, nobody ever sat in a meeting and said, oh, let's forget clear. Let's try to make it as confusing as possible.”

“Steve said, I want you to keep three things in mind. One is it should be difficult to make ugly presentations. Two, you should focus on cinematic quality transitions. And three, you should optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility.”

“You have to be opinionated, but that's how you're going to win. You know, there's no unopinion, unopinionated software that's been successful. You have to have a point of view.”

“Relying on metrics to understand what's happening at the user level is like looking at raw data from a radio telescope instead of just going out inside and looking at the night sky. Like, you know, so like you gotta find a way to watch the audience.”

“When you watching somebody use your product, you come into it with a psychological bias that makes it hard for you to really see what's going on. So there's something about just understanding the audience and how they process information on a screen, not your …”

“As soon as you produce something in high resolution, the feedback you're gonna get is gonna be about colors and shapes and like these presentation layer things, which are very loosely related to usability and value.”

“When I started asking it questions, I think what it was doing was it was statistically reflecting patterns back to me that already existed in my undermined, but because it was putting them into language, my conscious mind can now recognize them and respond to …”

“People need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something. Cause like…”

“How the tools you pick are going to impact the thing that you produce. So once you go into Figma, you've made a decision about the thing you're going to produce. If you stay in a sketchbook, you've made a different decision.”

“Habitica is just the most interesting example I've ever found is somebody really doing a fascinating mashup of a conceptual models, which is sorry, I'll stop. It's just, it's an unexplored and unexploited possibility of software ideas.”

“And so we live in a time when it's very easy to produce things at incredibly high production values, but they don't mean anything. And so they're just like fancy potato chips. There's no nourishment there, man.”

“They, at least when I was there, they had patented the pizza box cause they had reinvented the pizza box that you would get at cafe max.”

“20 of them are on the patent. There's 24 that were, that are on the iPhone patent. Now there's other people involved, but generally there's 24 people on the iPhone patent.”