design

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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'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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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 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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”