1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,140 Well, it's time for our favorite topic. 2 00:00:02,540 --> 00:00:03,600 How's the weather up there? 3 00:00:03,720 --> 00:00:06,380 But this is a special edition since both of you live in Seattle. 4 00:00:06,380 --> 00:00:09,620 I think I have moved somewhere that finally has similar weather. 5 00:00:09,800 --> 00:00:12,340 I thought I had lost my Dutch ID card. 6 00:00:12,960 --> 00:00:17,600 So I was out and about and I got to wear, you might be familiar with this, what's called 7 00:00:17,600 --> 00:00:20,260 a rain jacket while I was out today. 8 00:00:20,700 --> 00:00:22,760 It's a very novel sort of thing. 9 00:00:22,760 --> 00:00:28,380 It's very thin and it's this fancy one that has sort of like zippers on the armpits so 10 00:00:28,380 --> 00:00:32,540 you can cool off, which is a very fascinating idea that you would wear a jacket and need 11 00:00:32,540 --> 00:00:33,200 to cool off. 12 00:00:33,820 --> 00:00:39,100 But, you know, how many rain jackets do you think I'm going to need over two years? 13 00:00:39,280 --> 00:00:41,900 Am I just going to tear through these things or are they more permanent? 14 00:00:42,980 --> 00:00:43,780 To come to Seattle? 15 00:00:44,500 --> 00:00:46,520 Or just in a rainy environment in general. 16 00:00:46,940 --> 00:00:48,240 Say you live in a rainy city. 17 00:00:48,800 --> 00:00:51,380 Unless you're trying to match with your shoes or your bag. 18 00:00:51,660 --> 00:00:52,340 That's a good idea. 19 00:00:53,060 --> 00:00:53,900 That's a good idea. 20 00:00:54,140 --> 00:00:55,260 I hadn't thought of that. 21 00:00:55,760 --> 00:00:57,340 Now, do people do that in Seattle? 22 00:00:57,340 --> 00:00:59,320 Do they have matching rain jacket and shoes? 23 00:00:59,640 --> 00:01:02,740 I feel like people in Seattle have just given into the rain. 24 00:01:03,180 --> 00:01:07,060 They just understand they're going to be wet and clothes are not going to match. 25 00:01:07,320 --> 00:01:08,060 It's very different. 26 00:01:09,020 --> 00:01:10,140 Yeah, it's purely functional. 27 00:01:11,140 --> 00:01:15,920 When you travel away from Seattle, do you like inadvertently bring a rain jacket every 28 00:01:15,920 --> 00:01:16,240 time? 29 00:01:16,380 --> 00:01:21,700 Just because like you pack for the weather at home instead of outside of abroad, you know, 30 00:01:21,740 --> 00:01:22,620 abroad from Seattle? 31 00:01:22,920 --> 00:01:25,300 Or are you disciplined enough not to pack that? 32 00:01:26,140 --> 00:01:30,880 I never pack a rain jacket just because I'm just not very prepared at home either. 33 00:01:31,040 --> 00:01:32,320 I often get caught in the rain. 34 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:35,500 Yeah, I don't think I do either. 35 00:01:35,660 --> 00:01:36,700 Maybe I'll bring an umbrella. 36 00:01:37,220 --> 00:01:39,380 But even then, like those are from Seattle. 37 00:01:39,380 --> 00:01:43,000 Like I really feel like a tourist every time I use an umbrella in this city because no one 38 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:43,620 else wears one. 39 00:01:43,880 --> 00:01:48,300 Oh yeah, we've talked about that before where there's sort of like a little bit of like 40 00:01:48,300 --> 00:01:51,080 Seattle localness and you can't have an umbrella. 41 00:01:51,560 --> 00:01:56,580 So that negates my last follow-up question on everyone's favorite introductory topic, which 42 00:01:56,580 --> 00:01:59,120 is, you know, you've got these like golf umbrellas. 43 00:01:59,640 --> 00:02:05,580 And then you've got sort of like the, they're almost like the police baton of umbrellas. 44 00:02:05,640 --> 00:02:09,720 I don't know how long that is, maybe a little over a foot, but then there's like these compact 45 00:02:09,720 --> 00:02:12,680 umbrellas that are kind of like those compact bags they have. 46 00:02:12,760 --> 00:02:15,780 And like, do you all carry around a compact one? 47 00:02:16,180 --> 00:02:18,340 I mean, is that, or just no umbrella? 48 00:02:19,020 --> 00:02:20,420 I don't carry an umbrella. 49 00:02:20,420 --> 00:02:23,920 I learned my lesson the first week that I moved here from the East Coast. 50 00:02:24,300 --> 00:02:30,160 I had my nice umbrella with my raincoat and everyone was staring at me and I realized, 51 00:02:30,420 --> 00:02:35,420 oh, this is how you stand out in Seattle as a tourist or someone who's just visiting. 52 00:02:35,820 --> 00:02:35,980 Yeah. 53 00:02:36,100 --> 00:02:37,600 So I have to use the compact one. 54 00:02:37,900 --> 00:02:38,740 It's in a pocket. 55 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:41,120 So I don't feel too ashamed if I'm walking around with it. 56 00:02:41,160 --> 00:02:43,980 But then if it's actually pouring, then I do still have some coverage. 57 00:02:44,540 --> 00:02:44,620 Yeah. 58 00:02:44,620 --> 00:02:48,680 Now, do you think over here in Amsterdam, if I got one of those umbrella hats, I would 59 00:02:48,680 --> 00:02:52,360 fit in or would they think I was a tourist or just would they be confused? 60 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:53,140 Both. 61 00:02:53,140 --> 00:02:54,000 I don't know what those are. 62 00:02:56,480 --> 00:03:00,360 I'll have to let, I feel like, hopefully I'm not making this up from some dream, but I 63 00:03:00,360 --> 00:03:04,120 feel like there's these hats that are like umbrellas that kind of cover your head. 64 00:03:04,300 --> 00:03:05,640 I think you're thinking of a sombrero. 65 00:03:07,380 --> 00:03:08,740 Or an urban sombrero. 66 00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:11,160 The urban sombrero. 67 00:03:11,620 --> 00:03:12,360 That's right. 68 00:03:12,920 --> 00:03:14,380 I feel a startup coming on. 69 00:03:14,900 --> 00:03:15,400 That's right. 70 00:03:15,620 --> 00:03:20,880 Well, why don't you introduce yourself, guest, now that you've given your bona fides about 71 00:03:20,880 --> 00:03:22,880 surviving in the rain and fitting in. 72 00:03:23,340 --> 00:03:24,420 Who are you? 73 00:03:24,600 --> 00:03:25,780 What do you do around here? 74 00:03:26,920 --> 00:03:28,860 I am Salome Mordazavi. 75 00:03:28,860 --> 00:03:31,620 I'm a product design manager in the Seattle office. 76 00:03:32,620 --> 00:03:37,180 And I've been in the Seattle office for four years via Toronto. 77 00:03:38,280 --> 00:03:46,960 And yes, I work with a team of designers and product managers and engineers to build products. 78 00:03:48,400 --> 00:03:51,040 So you must have, did you, are you, are you Canadian? 79 00:03:51,780 --> 00:03:53,420 I am a hundred percent Canadian. 80 00:03:53,560 --> 00:03:53,820 Yes. 81 00:03:54,140 --> 00:03:58,080 What was that like getting like a work visa in the U S was that thrilling? 82 00:03:58,720 --> 00:04:01,720 I assume you've got one not to, you know, we can edit this out. 83 00:04:05,220 --> 00:04:05,760 Um, yes. 84 00:04:05,940 --> 00:04:12,280 I mean, I was warned about the intricacies of getting a visa, but much to my surprise, 85 00:04:12,340 --> 00:04:13,540 it was really easy process. 86 00:04:13,860 --> 00:04:15,740 Um, that's a very nice border person. 87 00:04:15,740 --> 00:04:18,180 I, we had a legal team who helped us out. 88 00:04:18,320 --> 00:04:21,620 So that process was unusually smooth for me. 89 00:04:21,940 --> 00:04:22,380 Yeah. 90 00:04:22,460 --> 00:04:22,680 Yeah. 91 00:04:22,720 --> 00:04:25,100 It's been, I, I, I have this experience myself. 92 00:04:25,100 --> 00:04:29,120 I'm still slightly going through it, but yeah, it is nice to have people helping you out. 93 00:04:29,460 --> 00:04:34,920 It's, it's like, uh, lawyers be awesome when they're doing exactly. 94 00:04:35,840 --> 00:04:39,960 Well, we have a, a few little news things to go over and then, uh, and then we're going 95 00:04:39,960 --> 00:04:43,800 to talk about, uh, product design and other exciting things like that. 96 00:04:43,800 --> 00:04:48,840 A topic that I think we talk about every now and then, uh, moon or whatever, but, uh, not 97 00:04:48,840 --> 00:04:49,100 enough. 98 00:04:49,480 --> 00:04:52,580 So why don't you, uh, what, what did you, what did you find for us this week? 99 00:04:52,800 --> 00:04:54,200 News wise, Richard? 100 00:04:54,740 --> 00:04:56,320 Yeah, there were a handful of things. 101 00:04:56,320 --> 00:04:59,360 First off, I noticed that at the end of last week, the folks, 102 00:04:59,460 --> 00:05:04,520 Google, the Google cloud team shipped a spring cloud module or library specifically for all 103 00:05:04,520 --> 00:05:05,560 their Google cloud stuff. 104 00:05:05,640 --> 00:05:10,520 So if you're at using GCP, you're putting your apps up there using Google pub sub or 105 00:05:10,520 --> 00:05:12,980 Google cloud storage, my SQL, all that. 106 00:05:13,100 --> 00:05:15,940 Now you have a nice way for your spring boot apps to actually talk to those. 107 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:17,720 And Microsoft has one of those as well. 108 00:05:18,100 --> 00:05:21,800 You see these sort of libraries trying to make it easier to use these first party cloud 109 00:05:21,800 --> 00:05:22,280 services. 110 00:05:22,280 --> 00:05:25,740 And this has been under development for a few months, but really neat to see that finally 111 00:05:25,740 --> 00:05:26,000 ship. 112 00:05:26,900 --> 00:05:31,520 And, and so how does that, uh, I mean, is that just spring cloud that's wired into GCP 113 00:05:31,520 --> 00:05:32,880 or, or what is it exactly? 114 00:05:33,420 --> 00:05:33,560 Yeah. 115 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:37,440 It really just means that from your code, you know, with some basic annotations and properties, 116 00:05:37,440 --> 00:05:41,460 it's really easy to consume those respective Google cloud services. 117 00:05:41,540 --> 00:05:42,280 So you don't have to do much. 118 00:05:42,280 --> 00:05:46,600 It really just says, look, look, my app wants to use Google cloud SQL for its SQL database. 119 00:05:46,600 --> 00:05:47,020 Cool. 120 00:05:47,580 --> 00:05:48,980 Here's some basic annotations. 121 00:05:49,060 --> 00:05:51,180 I don't have to have any too much funky stuff in my code. 122 00:05:51,840 --> 00:05:53,300 Not too much funky stuff. 123 00:05:53,560 --> 00:05:53,960 That's good. 124 00:05:54,580 --> 00:05:58,200 And, and then, uh, well, there, I only had one item this week and then, and then I'll 125 00:05:58,200 --> 00:05:58,860 hand it back to you. 126 00:05:58,900 --> 00:06:03,260 But I noticed, uh, I don't know if it was this week, but over at red monk, uh, our friend 127 00:06:03,260 --> 00:06:08,580 James governor is doing, trying to do some hardcore thought lording and he has deemed, what 128 00:06:08,580 --> 00:06:11,980 would we normally, I mean, I guess the fact that he's created a phrase for this, I think 129 00:06:11,980 --> 00:06:12,620 he created it. 130 00:06:12,640 --> 00:06:14,300 I went to go search, I Googled for it. 131 00:06:14,300 --> 00:06:17,420 And the only thing came up was like how to do term papers or something. 132 00:06:18,020 --> 00:06:23,360 Uh, anyways, he has this phrase progressive delivery, which I guess, I guess we, we would 133 00:06:23,360 --> 00:06:29,880 use the phrase, uh, rolling upgrade or rolling release where you, uh, the, the example of 134 00:06:29,880 --> 00:06:34,560 this, I always used, they went over it themselves was how, uh, when Garmin releases some software, 135 00:06:34,560 --> 00:06:40,160 uh, they release it to like the, uh, the Kansas city area, their Kansas city data center, and 136 00:06:40,160 --> 00:06:44,200 then kind of like their West, uh, us data center and their East data center. 137 00:06:44,200 --> 00:06:49,100 And then, you know, eventually they get to China and Europe and Latin America and other 138 00:06:49,100 --> 00:06:49,460 places. 139 00:06:49,460 --> 00:06:54,800 But it's this idea of, uh, you know, you might also call it a canary release, depending on 140 00:06:54,800 --> 00:07:00,180 if it's for a bug checking or to see if your software was, uh, I don't know, done well in 141 00:07:00,180 --> 00:07:04,220 a way that was helpful, but, uh, he, he's been wrapped, he'd wrapped the term progressive 142 00:07:04,220 --> 00:07:05,260 delivery around it. 143 00:07:05,260 --> 00:07:10,100 And then some people from, uh, launched darkly, uh, which that's a nice name. 144 00:07:10,160 --> 00:07:15,060 Uh, they sort of, uh, be more technical followup to it, but so there, we'll put that on the 145 00:07:15,060 --> 00:07:15,420 board. 146 00:07:15,560 --> 00:07:20,660 There's progressive delivery become a, uh, uh, an official, uh, thought Lord and lady, uh, 147 00:07:20,660 --> 00:07:21,600 phrase a thing. 148 00:07:21,800 --> 00:07:22,240 Yeah. 149 00:07:22,240 --> 00:07:25,820 I mean, your next, I'll, I'll endorse you on LinkedIn for progressive delivery. 150 00:07:25,820 --> 00:07:26,880 Oh, that's a good idea. 151 00:07:27,320 --> 00:07:27,520 Yeah. 152 00:07:27,520 --> 00:07:27,860 It'd be good. 153 00:07:28,320 --> 00:07:31,300 You can put that right next to a kettle popcorn making. 154 00:07:33,140 --> 00:07:37,120 The other thing I thought that was interesting on this, cause I bumped into James at the Google 155 00:07:37,120 --> 00:07:41,740 cloud conference a couple of weeks ago, talked about this was that specifically, yeah, there's 156 00:07:41,740 --> 00:07:45,380 different techniques for this, but it's not even just for performance things. 157 00:07:45,380 --> 00:07:49,460 It's not like just let's deploy a first and see if it works before we roll it elsewhere. 158 00:07:49,460 --> 00:07:50,700 It's also about feature flags. 159 00:07:50,700 --> 00:07:55,740 It's also about, Hey, let's tap some traffic, go here and see if these users convert at a higher 160 00:07:55,740 --> 00:07:56,820 rate than these users. 161 00:07:56,820 --> 00:08:02,300 So being better about not just constantly shipping all the software to all the places and turning 162 00:08:02,300 --> 00:08:07,780 everything on, but in some cases, purposely being smart about how you're pulling things 163 00:08:07,780 --> 00:08:11,660 out and delivering probably will even touch upon our product design conversation today, 164 00:08:11,660 --> 00:08:16,360 which is how do you potentially experiment with design in a continuous delivery sort of 165 00:08:16,360 --> 00:08:16,660 culture? 166 00:08:16,760 --> 00:08:17,200 So I don't know. 167 00:08:17,240 --> 00:08:18,440 It's a cool thing up. 168 00:08:18,760 --> 00:08:20,200 We'll see if people talk about it more. 169 00:08:21,500 --> 00:08:24,780 And then, uh, what, what are the other, the other two items you found, Richard? 170 00:08:25,060 --> 00:08:25,940 What else did we have here? 171 00:08:25,940 --> 00:08:30,300 So I threw in something around, uh, what Confluent shipped last week. 172 00:08:30,300 --> 00:08:34,380 This is the company that has the kind of the creators of Kafka on staff, and they've done 173 00:08:34,380 --> 00:08:35,440 some, some cool work here. 174 00:08:35,440 --> 00:08:39,820 And we worked with them to actually ship some things to easier to use Kafka on Kubernetes. 175 00:08:40,280 --> 00:08:43,740 So specifically Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. 176 00:08:44,020 --> 00:08:49,180 We worked with them building, testing these sort of Helm chart, actually deploy these Confluent 177 00:08:49,180 --> 00:08:51,220 platform or Kafka components to that. 178 00:08:51,540 --> 00:08:53,000 And then they also shipped a nice white paper. 179 00:08:53,140 --> 00:08:59,260 So it just neat to see some of these platform, more complex workloads, the more supportable 180 00:08:59,260 --> 00:09:03,300 way to things like Kubernetes, not just virtual machine environments or public cloud. 181 00:09:03,500 --> 00:09:04,560 So pretty neat stuff. 182 00:09:04,620 --> 00:09:05,420 You can try it today. 183 00:09:05,480 --> 00:09:06,340 It all works great. 184 00:09:07,100 --> 00:09:11,000 Well, the same thing actually this morning, just a few minutes before the podcast with a 185 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:15,640 Yuga Byte, great database as well, that now runs on PKS as well with some really simple 186 00:09:15,640 --> 00:09:16,220 installation. 187 00:09:16,940 --> 00:09:21,680 So, you know, neat messaging platforms, databases, we're getting better, I think, at figuring 188 00:09:21,680 --> 00:09:23,760 how to deploy these in container environments. 189 00:09:23,760 --> 00:09:29,260 The last thing I found was there was one more, I guess, the second project that the Cloud 190 00:09:29,260 --> 00:09:33,280 Native Computing Foundation actually promoted all the way up to a graduated project. 191 00:09:33,280 --> 00:09:40,000 That was Prometheus, kind of a monitoring infrastructure tool for apps and infrastructure and pretty 192 00:09:40,000 --> 00:09:40,520 neat stuff. 193 00:09:40,620 --> 00:09:44,920 I know Pivotal is playing around with this for some services as well, but people seem to 194 00:09:44,920 --> 00:09:45,320 like it. 195 00:09:45,400 --> 00:09:46,200 Yet another thing. 196 00:09:46,260 --> 00:09:49,020 There's a lot of things incubating with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 197 00:09:49,020 --> 00:09:54,620 We talked about Harbor in our last podcast, but good to see graduating through the program, 198 00:09:54,700 --> 00:09:55,460 not getting stuck. 199 00:09:55,640 --> 00:09:58,240 It's kind of never ending limbo in the foundation there. 200 00:09:59,040 --> 00:09:59,180 Yeah. 201 00:09:59,260 --> 00:10:03,800 I think unless I'm misremembering, there used to be, this is a little while ago now. 202 00:10:03,840 --> 00:10:08,100 I think there's a Pivotal Conversations episode where I talked with Diego when he worked here 203 00:10:08,100 --> 00:10:12,740 about Prometheus, but maybe that didn't happen. 204 00:10:13,100 --> 00:10:13,860 I'll have to find out. 205 00:10:13,860 --> 00:10:14,560 We'll pretend it did. 206 00:10:14,920 --> 00:10:15,020 Yeah. 207 00:10:15,080 --> 00:10:15,440 That's right. 208 00:10:15,520 --> 00:10:16,700 It was a good conversation. 209 00:10:16,920 --> 00:10:18,140 It was probably game changing. 210 00:10:18,400 --> 00:10:18,540 Yeah. 211 00:10:19,060 --> 00:10:19,660 That's right. 212 00:10:21,080 --> 00:10:22,540 Well, yeah. 213 00:10:22,660 --> 00:10:25,080 You know, it's like over here. 214 00:10:25,160 --> 00:10:25,720 It's August. 215 00:10:26,140 --> 00:10:27,000 Slow news time. 216 00:10:27,300 --> 00:10:27,740 It's great. 217 00:10:28,120 --> 00:10:31,140 You can sit back and relax and enjoy getting lost in the rain. 218 00:10:31,420 --> 00:10:31,760 Mm-hmm. 219 00:10:31,980 --> 00:10:32,300 Yeah. 220 00:10:32,980 --> 00:10:38,900 Well, so how did you, guest, how did you find yourself doing design? 221 00:10:40,680 --> 00:10:44,720 Well, I was just curious to find out first, how many designers have you had on this podcast 222 00:10:44,720 --> 00:10:46,320 before we dive into everything? 223 00:10:46,840 --> 00:10:50,080 Well, as you can tell, I have an excellent memory for every episode. 224 00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:54,500 How many do you think, Richard? 225 00:10:55,020 --> 00:10:57,640 Has it just been maybe, I don't know, how many? 226 00:10:57,880 --> 00:10:58,620 Zero to one? 227 00:10:58,940 --> 00:11:00,340 I think it's in that range. 228 00:11:00,840 --> 00:11:02,320 Oh, we need to change that. 229 00:11:02,640 --> 00:11:02,860 Yeah. 230 00:11:02,960 --> 00:11:04,920 Well, that's, you know, you're the blazer here. 231 00:11:05,920 --> 00:11:06,420 All right. 232 00:11:07,060 --> 00:11:08,820 How did I get started in design? 233 00:11:09,400 --> 00:11:12,580 I guess I started in design as a child. 234 00:11:12,660 --> 00:11:17,760 I was very curious about art and basically the role it plays in our world. 235 00:11:17,860 --> 00:11:19,760 I spent many hours drawing and painting. 236 00:11:20,680 --> 00:11:24,180 And then I got really interested in human interactions. 237 00:11:25,700 --> 00:11:28,720 What makes us tick? 238 00:11:28,840 --> 00:11:30,060 What makes us motivated? 239 00:11:30,280 --> 00:11:31,240 What makes us excited? 240 00:11:31,480 --> 00:11:37,820 And then that basically led me to get into graphic design, visual design, interaction design. 241 00:11:37,820 --> 00:11:42,820 And throughout the years, I started getting really curious about technology and the role 242 00:11:42,820 --> 00:11:43,820 it plays in our lives. 243 00:11:43,820 --> 00:12:01,260 And then I just made my way into product design, which has been really, really interesting because you get to see all of the life cycles of the design process and work with humans and technology and try to bridge that gap. 244 00:12:01,260 --> 00:12:10,320 So, like in the software world, how do you distinguish between design and developers like to fancify up what they do? 245 00:12:10,540 --> 00:12:11,060 Engineering. 246 00:12:12,100 --> 00:12:14,660 Like, what are the differences? 247 00:12:14,920 --> 00:12:22,660 Not so much like a task base, like what people are doing tactically, but like what the point of it is or kind of the philosophy of it, so to speak. 248 00:12:22,820 --> 00:12:23,800 How are those perspectives different? 249 00:12:23,800 --> 00:12:24,820 How are those perspectives different? 250 00:12:25,620 --> 00:12:26,160 Yeah, sure. 251 00:12:26,240 --> 00:12:44,060 As designers, we think about the why and understanding the human experience, empathizing and observing and being curious and trying to understand what are those important touch points between a person and technology. 252 00:12:44,160 --> 00:12:53,480 And this is in something called computational design, this is a term that John Maida coined, and it's very different than traditional design. 253 00:12:53,480 --> 00:13:00,580 And so, in computational design, you have to think about the impact that the product or service is having on the audience and your users. 254 00:13:01,560 --> 00:13:11,060 And so, as designers, we're continuously trying to advocate for the user need and bringing that back to our team and helping the developers understand the why. 255 00:13:11,980 --> 00:13:20,740 And so, working with developers, they think about it in terms of how to build that thing that we are telling them that they need to build. 256 00:13:20,740 --> 00:13:31,240 And so, what we do at Pivotal is try to bridge that gap and bring that understanding to the whole team, including the development team, to really think about the end user and the customer that we're building for. 257 00:13:31,480 --> 00:13:42,060 And really inject the why into the code and to make sure that we're thinking about features in terms of outcomes instead of just features to be built. 258 00:13:42,240 --> 00:13:50,280 Salome, you and I talked about a couple weeks ago when we were talking about this podcast is that sometimes that can feel like that's a nice to have. 259 00:13:50,380 --> 00:13:56,420 If I'm an enterprise dev who might think like, I don't really, I mean, people have to use whatever I ship, especially if it's an internal app. 260 00:13:56,480 --> 00:14:01,980 So, what do I care to some extent if they really think this has a great design aspect or if it's just functional enough? 261 00:14:02,040 --> 00:14:03,640 Do you consider this an optional role? 262 00:14:03,640 --> 00:14:11,820 Or when you look at a product, you know, you look at a balanced team, you look at whether it's internal enterprise software or something that's external customer facing. 263 00:14:12,540 --> 00:14:17,140 Do you see that this is something you can kind of treat as optional? 264 00:14:17,240 --> 00:14:18,280 And do you really think this is mandatory? 265 00:14:19,140 --> 00:14:27,560 This is a great question because I continuously get questions like this from stakeholders of especially large enterprise companies who come to us, 266 00:14:27,680 --> 00:14:36,580 not understanding the value of design, not understanding the choice that the internal employees, which are essentially their users have. 267 00:14:37,340 --> 00:14:49,380 And so, one of the things to consider is, you know, as you're trying to improve performance of your employees and help them make sure that they are engaged and enjoying their job and being able to perform at their optimal rate. 268 00:14:50,040 --> 00:14:55,380 Reducing that cognitive load as you're interacting with a product or service is very essential. 269 00:14:55,960 --> 00:15:06,280 And so, if you think about you having a traditional top-down hierarchy and being able to tell your employees what to do, I mean, if you think about compliance rates, 270 00:15:06,740 --> 00:15:12,300 what is the last time that you saw 100% compliance rate where employees do exactly as they're told? 271 00:15:13,060 --> 00:15:15,220 So, choice is always there. 272 00:15:15,340 --> 00:15:16,040 It's always present. 273 00:15:16,040 --> 00:15:28,440 And you see it when you watch and observe employees come up with very, you know, extensive workarounds that are timely and, like, time-consuming and expensive to the business. 274 00:15:28,660 --> 00:15:34,980 And also, really make them feel unsatisfied as they're performing their job and tasks. 275 00:15:36,260 --> 00:15:51,100 So, when you really think about that is, you want to make sure that you are creating an environment where your employees are there to, you know, perform optimally, not just the status quo, not struggling with software. 276 00:15:51,320 --> 00:16:00,680 And so, if you can remove those barriers, the more of those barriers you can remove through improving that user experience and thinking about their needs, the better performance you're going to get out of them. 277 00:16:00,800 --> 00:16:14,260 And then, beyond that, you're going to, you know, open up this room for innovation where they are freed up to think about things that are more important than just, you know, trying to get around this badly designed software. 278 00:16:15,440 --> 00:16:15,840 Right. 279 00:16:16,120 --> 00:16:20,440 To the enterprise-y people, do they buy all that? 280 00:16:20,620 --> 00:16:21,900 Or, like, how do they respond to it? 281 00:16:23,120 --> 00:16:23,520 Yeah. 282 00:16:23,600 --> 00:16:25,000 I mean, they respond to it. 283 00:16:25,020 --> 00:16:28,620 They respond to it when you talk about the ROI of investing in design. 284 00:16:28,620 --> 00:16:36,340 And, you know, when you think about, there's a lot of amazing material out there that can speak to, you know, the companies that are investing in design. 285 00:16:36,460 --> 00:16:42,240 For example, I follow the design and tech report and the McKinsey report. 286 00:16:42,240 --> 00:16:50,320 And one of the things that really stood out to me this year, and I started trying to use those numbers to be able to build a design case, 287 00:16:50,320 --> 00:17:01,700 and the value of design was companies that invest in design, are design-centric, outperform the rest of the market by 200%. 288 00:17:01,700 --> 00:17:09,000 And so, this is a really interesting number that comes from the DMI, Motive Strategies, that's funded by Microsoft. 289 00:17:09,880 --> 00:17:18,980 And so, when you share these numbers, and you talk about, you know, when we explore and examine companies that are committed to design as a part of their business strategy, 290 00:17:19,400 --> 00:17:35,020 and track these, what they found in the DMI was that the companies that invested in the past 10 years in design and making design a central and integral part of their organization, 291 00:17:36,020 --> 00:17:40,040 they outperformed the rest of the S&P by 200%. 292 00:17:40,040 --> 00:17:42,520 And so, that's a really compelling number. 293 00:17:42,520 --> 00:17:48,800 And so, when you're thinking about, in terms of design, you have to make sure that you are speaking about the ROI, 294 00:17:49,640 --> 00:18:00,660 and speaking the business language, and getting out of the design mindset, and the design conversations and chats that you're used to as a designer, 295 00:18:00,840 --> 00:18:05,320 and think about the why, and think about always tying it back to the outcomes, 296 00:18:05,420 --> 00:18:09,080 and then think about if there's a way to quantify the value of the thing that you're designing. 297 00:18:10,040 --> 00:18:19,380 And that really helps drive the conversation towards the business side, which really, you know, that's what we're here to do. 298 00:18:19,520 --> 00:18:21,920 You know, products are here to solve a business problem. 299 00:18:22,460 --> 00:18:26,680 Good design is here to solve a business problem, and a user problem. 300 00:18:26,680 --> 00:18:35,720 And so, when you tie those two worlds and bridge that gap, then it's a more compelling story, and the business starts to care about it more. 301 00:18:36,420 --> 00:18:43,840 So, it sounds like you discussed, like, you've got to focus on the outcomes of the outcomes to convince the sort of stakeholders. 302 00:18:44,560 --> 00:18:44,780 Yes. 303 00:18:44,900 --> 00:18:48,460 Having better done software will result in a better run business, essentially. 304 00:18:48,580 --> 00:18:48,860 Yes. 305 00:18:49,140 --> 00:18:57,880 I mean, one thing that we continuously get faced with is a client will come to us with a set of features, and what we think about is, 306 00:18:58,180 --> 00:19:05,160 hey, like, it's great that you think you know how to solve this problem, that these features are going to do it for you, 307 00:19:05,160 --> 00:19:11,880 but we're going to think about these in terms of the goals and the outcomes that you're trying to achieve by these features. 308 00:19:12,620 --> 00:19:21,580 And so, what that really allows us to do as designers and as a, you know, cross-balanced functional team is really help us to understand, you know, 309 00:19:21,620 --> 00:19:27,540 why are we building this thing and use many different ways to achieve that same thing. 310 00:19:27,540 --> 00:19:33,140 So, I like to give an example to new teams when they come in. 311 00:19:33,520 --> 00:19:38,880 You know, if you ask your team to build you a ladder, they're going to come up with many ways to build you a ladder. 312 00:19:39,280 --> 00:19:45,080 They'll build you a wood ladder, a metal ladder, a purple ladder, but at the end of the day, it's going to be a ladder. 313 00:19:46,420 --> 00:19:54,720 But if you challenge your team to find a way to reach the top shelf, they're going to really be able to use their expertise, 314 00:19:54,720 --> 00:20:04,780 think outside the box, and come up with many different ways to solve that problem that is actually more valuable and better in the context that we're trying to solve the problem for. 315 00:20:05,720 --> 00:20:09,200 And so, that's what the power of thinking in terms of outcomes is. 316 00:20:09,280 --> 00:20:16,860 It allows the team to really use their expertise to be autonomous and go out there and try to figure out how to solve that problem best. 317 00:20:17,940 --> 00:20:24,400 And so, I think it's a lot of having that conversation over and over again and then trying to tie it back to the business value. 318 00:20:25,100 --> 00:20:25,840 Yeah, I love that. 319 00:20:26,200 --> 00:20:27,060 Focus on the outcomes. 320 00:20:27,200 --> 00:20:34,780 I mean, I think some people can see this work as maybe about making things look nice or kind of the aesthetic versus the actual utility and the value. 321 00:20:35,500 --> 00:20:37,420 Give me some examples of what you've seen. 322 00:20:37,480 --> 00:20:38,140 And don't name names. 323 00:20:38,200 --> 00:20:39,020 We don't want to shame anybody. 324 00:20:39,200 --> 00:20:41,460 But what does bad design look like? 325 00:20:41,460 --> 00:20:48,040 When you see that either in not even just, I don't know, how an app works, also maybe the approach that went into it. 326 00:20:48,100 --> 00:20:49,960 Like, what is a bad design that you've seen? 327 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:50,760 Or a couple examples. 328 00:20:51,700 --> 00:21:06,140 I guess one of the things that I try to think about when I think about design is, you know, breaking that association of just the visual alone, especially in product design. 329 00:21:06,860 --> 00:21:13,000 Often one of the biggest pains that we are faced with is like, oh, this application doesn't have a user interface. 330 00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:14,540 So, therefore, we don't need designers. 331 00:21:15,240 --> 00:21:23,020 But when you really think about all of the different touch points and the whole experience of the application, there is a human being consuming that at the end. 332 00:21:23,660 --> 00:21:46,020 And so, I guess I would think about bad design as something that doesn't allow the user to safely and effectively and comfortably be able to get the job that they're there to do done. 333 00:21:46,220 --> 00:22:03,860 And so, if you are making your users frustrated and if you are not allowing them to get from point A to point B in a timely fashion or you just get them lost in a way that they abandon that application or product, then that is bad design. 334 00:22:04,660 --> 00:22:12,020 And so, something, you know, I would like to separate the visual aspect, like the moments of delight, which are really great, you know, nice to have. 335 00:22:12,240 --> 00:22:21,800 But you can have good design that's really simple and not visually blowing your mind, be a good design. 336 00:22:22,020 --> 00:22:35,580 So, I think just the experience and being able to get your job done and being able to perform that task in an efficient way that you feel comfortable, you feel like you belong using that system is an important part of good design. 337 00:22:36,680 --> 00:22:37,660 Yeah, that makes sense. 338 00:22:37,940 --> 00:22:39,740 What do you, what's in your toolbox? 339 00:22:39,740 --> 00:22:44,800 So, when you're trying to do good design, what do you bring to the table besides, obviously, your skill and your background? 340 00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:47,420 But are there technologies you bring? 341 00:22:47,540 --> 00:22:49,960 Are there, you know, a workshop approach you like to bring? 342 00:22:50,120 --> 00:22:53,500 What are the sort of things that people bank on when they bring you into a project? 343 00:22:55,240 --> 00:23:05,600 I guess one of the areas that beyond the, you know, the typical tools we use, sketch, we use a lot of Envision products, 344 00:23:05,600 --> 00:23:09,260 which help us to be able to prototype quickly and easily. 345 00:23:10,860 --> 00:23:17,140 And then also other tools like Studio that's coming out, that's, you know, starting to replace sketch. 346 00:23:17,620 --> 00:23:22,860 Some of those tools are, you know, all designers know really well and use often. 347 00:23:22,860 --> 00:23:36,520 But beyond that is more bringing those conversations, basically helping the roles understand how to frame a problem from a user-centered way. 348 00:23:36,660 --> 00:23:44,620 So, from how can I take this problem and define it, understand it, and frame it in a way that is seen through a human lens. 349 00:23:44,620 --> 00:23:50,920 And I feel like that is a practice that design really is a steward of. 350 00:23:51,140 --> 00:23:59,700 And anyone who is building a product, whether they're a designer or not, they are in charge of understanding that human experience. 351 00:24:00,060 --> 00:24:02,780 And so, anyone building a product should be able to do that. 352 00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:12,360 And so, designers come in and are able to facilitate those conversations, teach those workshops, to be able to raise the design fluency of a team. 353 00:24:12,460 --> 00:24:17,900 So, a developer, when they're building a product, they can really think about, why am I building this product? 354 00:24:18,240 --> 00:24:19,580 What does this feature do? 355 00:24:19,780 --> 00:24:30,480 And to have those informed conversations and to be able to think holistically about the overall thing, outside of just those, you know, stories that they're working on right then and then. 356 00:24:31,520 --> 00:24:34,480 And so, that's part of the value of design. 357 00:24:34,760 --> 00:24:50,160 The other part of it is, like, you know, thinking about organizing people and infrastructure, like, the communication components of a service to be able to improve the quality of interactions between, like, the services and the systems and the customers. 358 00:24:50,160 --> 00:24:54,400 Those are the intangibles, the invisible things that we don't see that designers do. 359 00:24:54,660 --> 00:25:00,260 That's outside of just traditional, you know, user experience and the user interface. 360 00:25:01,320 --> 00:25:04,840 And so, I think those are some of the things that design brings to the table. 361 00:25:06,180 --> 00:25:09,480 Yeah, you touched on real quick there, the idea of a workshop. 362 00:25:09,780 --> 00:25:13,540 So, you know, do you get in there at the project initiation? 363 00:25:13,900 --> 00:25:18,660 You know, when we instante some of the work, what does a workshop look like from a design perspective? 364 00:25:18,660 --> 00:25:20,660 Is it you with a bunch of sticky notes on a whiteboard? 365 00:25:20,780 --> 00:25:21,620 How does that play out? 366 00:25:22,480 --> 00:25:24,280 Yeah, there's a lot of sticky notes. 367 00:25:24,460 --> 00:25:29,760 I believe we keep the posted industry in business single-handedly. 368 00:25:31,320 --> 00:25:46,480 Yeah, I mean, what we do at the beginning of a project, we have a meeting where we basically try to understand the needs of the client, understand their goals, understand their users and the why they're building that product, and then basically highlight our assumptions. 369 00:25:47,000 --> 00:25:54,060 And then from that, you know, the role of the designer is, I guess, I say workshops, but it's continuously happening. 370 00:25:54,640 --> 00:25:56,260 We're always in front of the whiteboard. 371 00:25:56,500 --> 00:25:58,660 We're always talking, collaborating as a team. 372 00:25:59,320 --> 00:26:06,460 We work in what we call, I'm sure you're familiar with this, but for people who haven't heard this, cross-functional balance teams. 373 00:26:07,840 --> 00:26:15,880 And so we spend a lot of time chatting about, you know, our assumptions, understanding ways to de-risk them. 374 00:26:16,300 --> 00:26:21,040 And by, you know, doing that, we're making sure that we're building the right thing. 375 00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:28,180 And so that looks like a lot of conversations with each other, a lot of conversations with subject matter experts, with our users. 376 00:26:28,500 --> 00:26:32,960 And that happens in forms of different types of workshops or activities that we do. 377 00:26:33,620 --> 00:26:38,860 And they're not necessarily prescriptive because we try to understand this is not a linear process. 378 00:26:39,260 --> 00:26:51,660 We think about all of our design tools and activities that we do, like the workshops, as basically tools in our toolbox that we reach for, depending on the context. 379 00:26:51,980 --> 00:27:00,220 You know, so it may look like, you know, doing a customer journey one day to be able to understand the overall end-to-end experience of a service. 380 00:27:00,500 --> 00:27:09,740 And then that might extend to a service blueprint to try to understand the systems and the other people that interact and support that customer journey. 381 00:27:09,980 --> 00:27:14,640 And then that helps us to identify different areas of pain and opportunity. 382 00:27:15,440 --> 00:27:22,960 It may look like a prioritization exercise where a team can't narrow down a problem that is worth solving. 383 00:27:23,140 --> 00:27:25,340 And so they have too many things and they want to boil the ocean. 384 00:27:25,340 --> 00:27:35,700 And so we're able to help them and facilitate that conversation to be able to get them to, you know, narrow down the possibilities and think about, you know, what is important today. 385 00:27:36,500 --> 00:27:47,340 So it's a lot of those things that we do as a team, work really closely with our PMs, which at times the role of PM in design in those early stages is a little bit blurry. 386 00:27:49,440 --> 00:27:53,040 But that's what I would say the workshops look like. 387 00:27:53,180 --> 00:28:05,020 It's just continuous conversation around trying to understand how to, what is the problem A, and then how to solve that problem. 388 00:28:06,600 --> 00:28:30,040 Yeah, that reminds me of one of my, you know, somewhere in the middle of my stack of things I'll never actually do, work mind palace organization things, is, you know, as you're just going over, like in the, in the labs part of Pivotal, like sort of metaphorically and literal, for lack of a better phrase, there's a lot of thought technologies that are, as you say, like conversational tools. 389 00:28:30,040 --> 00:28:34,680 So there's, you know, the software you would install and tools that you would use and all that kind of stuff. 390 00:28:34,900 --> 00:28:41,820 But, but then as far as I can tell, there's also a lot of like, here's how we do this quadrant thing that to prioritize stuff. 391 00:28:41,840 --> 00:28:45,560 And here's how we, here's how we have a conversation to suss this, this thing out. 392 00:28:45,580 --> 00:28:51,080 And they seem pretty, I don't know, tell me if I'm wrong, but they seem, what's the positive version of rigid? 393 00:28:51,220 --> 00:28:55,700 They seem well-defined of how you do them. 394 00:28:55,700 --> 00:29:06,600 And then it would be, it'd be fun to like have a, I don't know, a book or a booklet that was like all of the, all of the thought technologies for doing things instead of just like, you know, here's how to use a build pack. 395 00:29:06,600 --> 00:29:17,340 That stuff's fun and everything, but there's, there's a whole, this whole other packet of stuff that, that Pivotal does that is, I don't know, in some PDFs there, but not sort of cool. 396 00:29:17,340 --> 00:29:33,680 Maybe you say that, but myself and some designers actually across Pivotal Cloud Foundry, one of the designers and Martina Schell, we're working on a Pivotal field guide playbook right now. 397 00:29:33,800 --> 00:29:46,800 And so that's at the beginning stages, we have an outline and we're basically talking about, you know, the principles and the methods and some case studies that we find would be valuable for the community. 398 00:29:47,220 --> 00:29:54,760 And this is basically trying to understand the value of design in the transformation story. 399 00:29:55,000 --> 00:30:05,380 And so I think that's something that we know intimately well working as designers within Pivotal because we have a very robust design community. 400 00:30:05,380 --> 00:30:10,080 We have a very active Slack channel, we have design round tables. 401 00:30:10,080 --> 00:30:20,260 And so one of the things that's not really apparent to the community outside is the design, the wealth of design within Pivotal. 402 00:30:20,420 --> 00:30:34,980 And so that's one of the passions that I have is try to bring that to the forefront, you know, to help the community understand just, you know, how rich, you know, the resources that we have at Pivotal and the processes and the methodologies are. 403 00:30:36,160 --> 00:30:37,840 Yeah, that would be exciting. 404 00:30:38,500 --> 00:30:39,540 That would be fun to see. 405 00:30:39,960 --> 00:30:42,380 Yeah, it's a project that I'm working on. 406 00:30:42,540 --> 00:30:45,940 And so a lot of folks are involved and being really supportive. 407 00:30:45,940 --> 00:30:53,340 And, you know, it started with a conversation with an email out to Rob me talking about, hey, I think this is really important. 408 00:30:54,080 --> 00:30:55,320 This is the value of design. 409 00:30:55,820 --> 00:30:57,720 Can we have a conversation about this? 410 00:30:57,760 --> 00:31:07,060 And this turned into him being super supportive and engaging the leadership team who are now actively supporting this initiative. 411 00:31:07,600 --> 00:31:12,180 And so it's been really great to work with Martina and other designers across the globe. 412 00:31:12,280 --> 00:31:28,560 And, you know, bringing that global gap even closer, we feel like, you know, it looks like conversations in London and Berlin and other parts of the world and really bringing that knowledge of design and distilling it in a shareable fashion. 413 00:31:29,060 --> 00:31:40,840 What are the ways, I mean, you mentioned your Slack channel programs like this, is that like, what are the ways that our product design community kind of just gets better at stuff? 414 00:31:40,900 --> 00:31:42,720 How do we share information with each other? 415 00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:47,280 Are there things that you felt you've learned from your peers over the last 12 months, even a design concept? 416 00:31:47,280 --> 00:31:50,520 Or, you know, I still have design of everyday things on my bookshelf. 417 00:31:50,640 --> 00:31:53,000 It's one of my favorite books I'd read a long time ago. 418 00:31:53,100 --> 00:31:56,500 But are there things that you've learned over the last year from this community? 419 00:31:56,500 --> 00:31:59,100 And how do you make sure that everyone keeps getting better at this? 420 00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:00,360 Yeah. 421 00:32:00,620 --> 00:32:05,080 I mean, as I mentioned, we are continuously speaking to each other. 422 00:32:05,540 --> 00:32:07,580 We are sharing knowledge through Slack. 423 00:32:09,080 --> 00:32:14,960 Try to organize, for example, like we organized a design roundtable for all of the West Coast. 424 00:32:14,960 --> 00:32:20,800 And so we had new designers that joined, I know it's not West Coast, but Austin. 425 00:32:21,320 --> 00:32:26,540 We wanted to really help them understand the design community at Pivotal. 426 00:32:26,660 --> 00:32:37,220 And so we hosted this roundtable that included Seattle, San Francisco, LA, and Austin, some folks from Dallas, and some other folks that were able to join from the East Coast. 427 00:32:37,220 --> 00:32:44,500 And so we have conversations and talk about, like, what's really important to us in dot vote beforehand. 428 00:32:45,380 --> 00:32:55,860 And then beyond that is there's just such a wealth of information out in the community and in the world of design and product design. 429 00:32:56,060 --> 00:32:59,660 You continuously have to keep up and learn and understand. 430 00:32:59,960 --> 00:33:02,920 Like, I follow the design and tech report, as I mentioned. 431 00:33:03,680 --> 00:33:07,320 There's a lot of great resources that, you know, great podcasts. 432 00:33:07,540 --> 00:33:11,600 One of them is my favorite is, like, high-resolution podcasts I listen to. 433 00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:23,380 I go to a lot of different events, like Creative Mornings, also active in Hexagon Women in Design Community, which used to be XXUX. 434 00:33:24,220 --> 00:33:31,240 So basically, it's really important to just be out there talking to different designers and really understanding what's new. 435 00:33:32,020 --> 00:33:36,380 An area that I'm really interested about is inclusive design. 436 00:33:36,380 --> 00:33:44,640 And so that is something that came out of OCAD University and is now a framework that Microsoft is sharing with the world. 437 00:33:44,820 --> 00:33:53,360 And so I had the privilege of bringing Tim Allen to come speak at one of the events that we organized in Seattle. 438 00:33:53,360 --> 00:33:58,340 And we did a workshop with him, myself, and Myra Vega from San Francisco. 439 00:33:59,340 --> 00:34:08,820 And that's been really interesting because, you know, in the world of MVP, minimum viable product at Pivotal, 440 00:34:09,340 --> 00:34:22,200 how can we make sure that we bring in the value of inclusive design early and sell that to our stakeholders and our clients so they can think about that at the beginning? 441 00:34:22,440 --> 00:34:29,940 And so that's one of the challenges and experiments that we're running with one of the clients next week who's really interested in this topic of inclusive design. 442 00:34:30,140 --> 00:34:39,160 And so I guess what I'll be experimenting with is to how to bring inclusive design into the lean world and what could that look like. 443 00:34:39,340 --> 00:34:50,960 And so that's one of the areas I've been really passionate about, learning more and practicing more, which really changes the way people design things. 444 00:34:51,120 --> 00:35:01,240 Instead of designing for the 80%, you think about designing for the people that are most excluded and then expanding that out to many. 445 00:35:02,320 --> 00:35:07,460 And when you really think about the ROI, and Kat Holmes is really amazing, she talks about this. 446 00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:14,820 She's the director of inclusive design at Microsoft, and she says she gave this example of amputees in the U.S. 447 00:35:14,820 --> 00:35:23,400 And for example, if you're thinking about your primary user, you may not think about an amputee population, which is 26,000 people in the U.S. 448 00:35:24,180 --> 00:35:36,340 But what they frame it as is, if you think about someone who has a temporary disability, like if you break an arm or you sprain your arm, you're not able to use that arm anymore. 449 00:35:36,340 --> 00:35:40,820 Then you have a temporary disability, and that number jumps all of a sudden to 13 million. 450 00:35:41,960 --> 00:36:02,680 And then they frame it even further in a way that is more compelling, and it's thinking about the temporary, like situational disability, which is like you are maybe a new mother, and you hold a baby, or you have something that's preventing you from using your hand because you're carrying a box or a bag. 451 00:36:03,100 --> 00:36:05,280 Then that number jumps up to 26 million. 452 00:36:05,900 --> 00:36:26,700 So the area of design that's been really exciting for me is to try to understand that really the human experience, all of those, how we interact with the environment, and how can our products fit seamlessly within that environment that allows us to interact with them in a comfortable and safe and efficient way. 453 00:36:27,740 --> 00:36:40,080 So it seems like, I mean, no pun intended, one angle on some of that is like picking which perspectives to design for, if you will. 454 00:36:40,180 --> 00:36:44,900 And like how do you sort through those perspectives? 455 00:36:45,640 --> 00:36:54,880 Like that's a clever and a good way jump from amputees to people who only have one hand available to do something. 456 00:36:55,380 --> 00:36:56,500 I mean, your example was great. 457 00:36:56,500 --> 00:37:10,920 And so like how do you, like if you were to do the, you know, the four quadrant, you know, Eisenhower-ing, you know, priority thing, what's the exercise look like for here's all of the perspectives or potential users or personas or whatever. 458 00:37:11,500 --> 00:37:16,900 What does it look like when people filter down to the ones that they want to include, I guess? 459 00:37:18,180 --> 00:37:33,660 I guess one of the things that's going to be the challenge to try to see how we can do that in a lean world, in a world of MVP where you have limited resources to try to get this minimal viable product out to basically validate the concept. 460 00:37:33,660 --> 00:37:48,640 And I think that could be something that you decide at the beginning to say like, hey, I know this product or service is going to be something that is used by the world and I wouldn't want to expand my reach as much as possible. 461 00:37:49,340 --> 00:37:57,800 And so after that early validation, hey, even if this is something that I should be solving for, I think it comes more in the framing phase. 462 00:37:58,340 --> 00:38:09,600 After you have defined a problem and validated that problem as worth solving, then during the framing, you start really thinking about, you know, who are the people that are being excluded? 463 00:38:10,240 --> 00:38:16,140 I think accessibility is one of the basic baseline foundations for this. 464 00:38:16,240 --> 00:38:20,740 I mean, you think about that, you think about like the people that are interacting with your products or service. 465 00:38:21,620 --> 00:38:24,740 You want to be able to be inclusive about all those folks. 466 00:38:25,120 --> 00:38:28,460 And so that is something that I don't think is optional. 467 00:38:28,620 --> 00:38:36,400 I think it's, you know, if you're building a great product, you have to think about the variety of users and that are going to be interacting with it. 468 00:38:36,440 --> 00:38:38,380 And also you have to consider the aging population. 469 00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:42,140 So I think at the baseline, you have to be accessible. 470 00:38:42,140 --> 00:38:55,740 And we've done some great work in the Seattle office, pairing with developers to understand what are those things that we can bake into our products early on so we don't have to go in and think about it after and refactor after. 471 00:38:56,660 --> 00:39:02,160 So then your product becomes more sustainable and scalable in the future. 472 00:39:02,740 --> 00:39:17,940 But then beyond that, observing your users and seeing what are those environmental constraints that are going to impact your product in the long run and which one of those to prioritize, I think, is an interesting conversation, interesting challenge to have. 473 00:39:18,420 --> 00:39:37,840 And that comes from observing your users and seeing what are some of those, you know, early foundational choices that you have to make as far as the limitations of that product when it comes to inclusivity. 474 00:39:37,980 --> 00:39:39,940 What are those and which ones do you want to prioritize? 475 00:39:40,580 --> 00:40:04,100 That's something that we need to focus on and try to understand with your team and see which is more important, you know, is it going to be someone who is not able to hold your product or is going to have mobility issues or are they going to have visual impairment issues and how can you navigate those waters in a safe and effective way? 476 00:40:04,620 --> 00:40:16,600 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think as ever, like, you know, wrapping one more abstraction layer around the core process of, like, seeing what models emerge to think about sorting those out. 477 00:40:16,760 --> 00:40:24,700 That would be fascinating to see, like, how you even, like, put it on paper to get to the point where you can make a decision. 478 00:40:25,400 --> 00:40:25,840 Right. 479 00:40:26,160 --> 00:40:27,120 That'd be fun stuff. 480 00:40:27,120 --> 00:40:31,960 Well, another, like, I forget when it was, but another follow-up question earlier. 481 00:40:32,240 --> 00:40:36,660 Like, I think we were talking about, like, I don't know, like, measuring things at some point. 482 00:40:37,140 --> 00:40:43,020 And I'm curious, like, how do you, how, talking of figuring out how to come up with the thing that you care about. 483 00:40:43,240 --> 00:40:48,780 Like, you mentioned something about, you know, I'll use a canonical example, right? 484 00:40:48,800 --> 00:40:53,620 Like, how come people keep abandoning their shopping cart or, you know, they could abandon an app or whatever. 485 00:40:53,920 --> 00:41:01,880 And, like, like, in your experience, like, how do, other than the obvious thing of, like, we would like people to buy the stuff in their shopping cart. 486 00:41:02,580 --> 00:41:10,380 Like, how do you come up with these tracer metrics that you can use to track if something's working or not working or if improvement is gone? 487 00:41:10,440 --> 00:41:16,660 Like, how do you, if you've got a blank whiteboard or a stack of post-it notes, like, what do you start asking about and filtering through? 488 00:41:17,440 --> 00:41:19,280 Yeah, it's, like, a really good question. 489 00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:27,940 One of the things that's really important to establish early on is the benchmark of where you are with that product or service. 490 00:41:28,100 --> 00:41:32,540 And so if something that you're trying to improve, you have to know where you are to be able to improve it. 491 00:41:32,600 --> 00:41:35,680 And so what are those metrics that you define early on? 492 00:41:35,740 --> 00:41:47,580 And we work really closely with our product managers who play a central role in defining those metrics with our clients based on the business outcomes that they're trying to achieve. 493 00:41:47,580 --> 00:41:56,960 And so those become later on into, like, features that will be able to drive towards those outcomes. 494 00:41:57,300 --> 00:42:15,580 And so as you've defined a problem, validated that that is a problem that's worth solving, started framing a solution around it and testing that solution, you're going to have a lot of good data to understand, okay, you know, at least qualitatively, the users are wanting to use this product. 495 00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:22,700 But then once it's out in the wild and you're testing it with, you know, your early users, it's really important to have those metrics defined. 496 00:42:23,400 --> 00:42:39,620 And so depending on the business outcomes that they're trying to achieve, and then also the product goals that they had set at the beginning of the project, we will be able to define those metrics that are specific to that product. 497 00:42:39,620 --> 00:42:59,540 And so we can say, you know, the number of signups, for example, for this application or time spent on this page or time spent doing this or conversion rate of this specific, you know, sale of this product. 498 00:42:59,540 --> 00:43:17,520 And so those are something that we set afterwards and basically measure that with our team continuously going forward to see, you know, which feature is performing badly, which workflow is being abandoned, or how is it being improved by what percentage. 499 00:43:17,520 --> 00:43:26,880 And that's something that our product managers are really good at doing, and we work really closely with them to understand where is our product performing well. 500 00:43:27,240 --> 00:43:30,740 And if not, how can we go back to the drawing board and iterate? 501 00:43:33,540 --> 00:43:33,940 Interesting. 502 00:43:34,420 --> 00:43:43,960 One thing I wanted to ask you, I mean, as we think about learning some of those metrics in this net, you also touched on earlier, even how you pair with different people on the team. 503 00:43:43,960 --> 00:43:54,340 And as you think of pairing across customers, and again, how you think about the right things you're tracking and measuring and even sharing inclusive design ideas, who do you pair with? 504 00:43:54,760 --> 00:44:01,060 And then back to the customer, do we always ask our customers to also provide a design person for you to pair with as well? 505 00:44:02,260 --> 00:44:13,160 Yeah, so one of the things that's really important working at Pivotal, you know, our mission is to transform the way the future gets built. 506 00:44:13,300 --> 00:44:14,180 And so what does that mean? 507 00:44:14,560 --> 00:44:23,140 That means, you know, we pair with our clients at labs to be able to teach them our software development, design and product management disciplines. 508 00:44:23,140 --> 00:44:33,680 And so they come into us, our workspace, we have co-located space for the team, we work together, we pair with each other. 509 00:44:33,680 --> 00:44:57,200 And that looks like an ideal situation would be that I have a product designer that's coming from the client side that I pair with throughout the day, throughout all of the different tasks and different workshops and different design activities that I do to help enable them to be able to work in the way that Pivotal builds and designs products. 510 00:44:57,200 --> 00:45:03,720 And so that would be ideal to have a client come in with a product designer. 511 00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:19,220 And so that's not always the case, you know, at times, you know, we may not start with a client designer at the beginning, but, you know, shortly after, we really encourage a client to help us to be able to deliver that value. 512 00:45:19,220 --> 00:45:27,480 And the only way we can deliver that value is to have a client designer to enable same thing on the product management side, same thing on the development side. 513 00:45:28,380 --> 00:45:38,060 And so not only do we pair with our counterparts from our disciplines from the client side, but we also do that across disciplines. 514 00:45:38,060 --> 00:45:45,000 And so I will do a lot of pairing with my product manager from the client side and also Pivotal side. 515 00:45:45,180 --> 00:45:50,360 And same thing with the developers from the client side and our developers. 516 00:45:50,620 --> 00:45:52,700 And that looks like a lot of conversations. 517 00:45:53,380 --> 00:46:03,000 The nature of the way we work is so collaborative that, you know, there's very little need for any documentation or any specific meetings. 518 00:46:03,220 --> 00:46:08,460 So we can just turn around and swivel our chair and have a question, ask a question. 519 00:46:09,120 --> 00:46:20,200 We can do a quick dev design pairing where I can sit beside a developer and we can go through the designs and think, you know, really point out the areas that we need changes in. 520 00:46:20,900 --> 00:46:28,240 Same thing, our product managers are very involved in the user research and the interviews. 521 00:46:28,240 --> 00:46:39,060 And we also encourage developers to rotate in, you know, they may not always be able to be available during all different, all of them during all different user interviews. 522 00:46:39,060 --> 00:46:44,860 But, you know, we like to get pairs rotating in and sit in and really listen to the users. 523 00:46:45,400 --> 00:46:47,840 And that really helps them to understand the why. 524 00:46:47,920 --> 00:46:52,200 And I've seen like a light go off when developers are part of that story and they get really excited. 525 00:46:53,700 --> 00:47:05,640 And even through like through what we call a design studio, which is a sketching session that we do as a team after we've defined a problem that we want to solve. 526 00:47:05,940 --> 00:47:14,280 We write our hypothesis as a team and we go and sketch and we converge on a design that we want to go and test that fake. 527 00:47:14,280 --> 00:47:30,380 And so you're really able to bring in the expertise and the knowledge of your developers who are thinking about the feasibility of what we're building and also the product managers, you know, especially from the client side that are always thinking about those outcomes. 528 00:47:30,600 --> 00:47:32,980 You know, those are our north stars that we're trying to drive for. 529 00:47:33,380 --> 00:47:40,760 And the designers, you know, who are thinking about how to add value from the user side and, you know, bring that moment of delight to the user. 530 00:47:41,940 --> 00:47:48,820 And so those three worlds coming together and sometimes data science, because that can really help us understand how to visualize things. 531 00:47:49,440 --> 00:47:55,280 We come together and we collaborate and basically design becomes a team sport. 532 00:47:55,280 --> 00:47:57,360 And it's a very collaborative process. 533 00:47:58,060 --> 00:48:13,820 And I guess as designers, it's our role to be able to facilitate those design conversations and help the whole team really understand how to do this for themselves and how to basically think about the problem from a user's perspective. 534 00:48:15,980 --> 00:48:19,620 Well, I have a final question, then we'll wrap up. 535 00:48:19,720 --> 00:48:28,360 I was, I was, I was doing my, my research and maybe there's, there's someone with your same name over there in medium, but I, I, maybe this is back when it was liking versus clapping. 536 00:48:29,180 --> 00:48:33,300 I just like to say clapping, but I think, I think you, you clapped. 537 00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:35,960 I don't know if you actually did it audibly or just clicked on something. 538 00:48:35,960 --> 00:48:37,580 That would be a fun design discussion. 539 00:48:37,700 --> 00:48:44,520 What's up with this clapping stuff or whatever it was that, but there was, there was a write-up of like the, the golden ratio. 540 00:48:45,160 --> 00:48:52,900 And, uh, I don't think about that very much, but, uh, you know, uh, I was reminded, uh, the question I always have is like, but why is that so appealing? 541 00:48:52,900 --> 00:48:54,740 I mean, it is appealing, right? 542 00:48:54,740 --> 00:48:58,860 Like, especially when you get the pictures with the shell superimposed on it and all that stuff. 543 00:48:58,860 --> 00:49:04,440 But like, why do you, uh, what it is about that thing that makes it nice? 544 00:49:05,300 --> 00:49:19,740 I think it's, um, it's really interesting because, um, I, um, into like a spiritual, um, world and have a lot of those kinds of, um, interests. 545 00:49:19,940 --> 00:49:22,320 And so I spend a lot of time thinking about these things. 546 00:49:22,320 --> 00:49:28,100 And so I guess, um, the golden ratio is something that exists in nature. 547 00:49:28,100 --> 00:49:38,460 And so you can see, um, it's the very beautiful mathematical formula and that creates this harmony in nature and basically the way the world is built. 548 00:49:38,860 --> 00:49:43,460 And I think that's, that's, that's what's interesting about it. 549 00:49:43,540 --> 00:49:54,660 And if you think about, um, golden ratio and design, um, that's something that really allows the eye to be able to, um, understand what is pleasing. 550 00:49:54,660 --> 00:50:05,940 It's, it's a natural looking composition that you can leverage in your design work to be able to, um, create something that's harmonious and visually appealing. 551 00:50:06,380 --> 00:50:19,760 And this gets into a really other interesting area of called biogeometry, which is the study of Egyptian temple science that really measures the vibrational effect of objects and shapes. 552 00:50:19,940 --> 00:50:25,600 And the ratio plays a huge role in how you interact and feel about that object. 553 00:50:26,380 --> 00:50:28,660 Um, but that's a whole other conversation. 554 00:50:29,200 --> 00:50:29,820 Oh yeah. 555 00:50:29,860 --> 00:50:30,660 That sounds interesting. 556 00:50:30,940 --> 00:50:38,480 Well, I like, I like the, uh, so, so at the very least there's sort of like, I, I forgot that part about the golden ratio shows up in nature a lot. 557 00:50:38,480 --> 00:50:40,660 So there's, there's like a familiarity to it. 558 00:50:40,780 --> 00:50:45,260 Like if you end up seeing that over your lifetime, it's just like comforting, I guess. 559 00:50:45,460 --> 00:50:55,820 Well, I assume seeing things you're familiar with is comforting unless you're familiar with terrifying things, but there's, there's, there's things that are not trying to attack you in golden ratio. 560 00:50:56,160 --> 00:51:08,720 Uh, and then, and then also, I mean, I don't know if there's some sort of like, uh, evolutionary theory to design thing, but like, there's probably something that if all of this stuff has, uh, evolved to be golden ratio ish. 561 00:51:08,720 --> 00:51:24,080 Uh, not that it's sort of like, uh, I don't know, teleologically means something, but like that there must be something nifty about it, that things, whether they're plant shells or, uh, or people, but yeah, you see it in plants. 562 00:51:24,080 --> 00:51:30,460 You see it, I guess, in like at least 4,000 years back, you see it in the way the pyramids were built. 563 00:51:30,460 --> 00:51:41,460 And so, um, you see it in a lot of, um, art by Leonardo da Vinci is like one of my favorite painters and Michelangelo also, um, you see it in like the last supper. 564 00:51:41,660 --> 00:51:42,520 It's really interesting. 565 00:51:42,520 --> 00:51:52,360 And so I think it's this underlying universal law, um, that is very mathematically driven. 566 00:51:52,360 --> 00:51:57,660 And I feel like we resonate with it in a way that, um, makes sense to us. 567 00:51:57,660 --> 00:52:05,140 There's a really, um, great biologist, uh, Rupert Sheldrick that talks about this theory of morphic resonance. 568 00:52:05,140 --> 00:52:12,740 And he really studies the, um, the vibration of things and the resonance that you go into with these objects. 569 00:52:12,740 --> 00:52:13,620 And it's really cool. 570 00:52:13,700 --> 00:52:15,120 That's also another whole topic. 571 00:52:15,620 --> 00:52:22,380 Um, but yeah, that's really important to understand the impact visually and vibrationally that your design has on the world. 572 00:52:22,660 --> 00:52:27,340 That sounds like something that would have put on the, uh, that gold disc on the Voyager or. 573 00:52:28,040 --> 00:52:29,660 Or the Joe Rogan podcast. 574 00:52:31,140 --> 00:52:31,920 Yeah, yeah. 575 00:52:32,200 --> 00:52:48,660 I mean, I mean, in, in theory, if, if something like the golden ratio is a, uh, I don't know, mathematical nature, uh, universal, then the fact that you could like, you knew about it and you could like print it on something would be one way of communicating with other intelligent things. 576 00:52:48,660 --> 00:52:48,860 Right. 577 00:52:48,920 --> 00:52:54,380 That like, yeah, it's sort of like, uh, somewhere a couple centuries below warp technology. 578 00:52:54,580 --> 00:52:57,140 Like we reach this level of understanding. 579 00:52:57,140 --> 00:52:58,900 So we must be intelligent. 580 00:52:59,340 --> 00:52:59,820 Right. 581 00:52:59,820 --> 00:53:00,420 Something. 582 00:53:02,340 --> 00:53:02,700 Anyhow. 583 00:53:02,860 --> 00:53:04,260 Well, uh, thanks for being a guest. 584 00:53:04,560 --> 00:53:05,440 That, that was good stuff. 585 00:53:05,560 --> 00:53:07,900 Now I need to go look up some, uh, vibration things. 586 00:53:08,220 --> 00:53:12,620 Now that I know the, the, the, uh, the sort of street name and the fancier name for it. 587 00:53:12,740 --> 00:53:13,880 I can go look into that. 588 00:53:14,340 --> 00:53:27,900 I was so, uh, in, in addition to having more, uh, design people on, which, which we've talked about a little bit, where, uh, where would you point people to if they were interested in, uh, more things, uh, that you work on or just, uh, pivotal design things? 589 00:53:28,240 --> 00:53:30,200 What's a, what's a, what's a, what's good follow-up for people? 590 00:53:30,200 --> 00:53:52,380 Um, I think the good follow-up for people from the outside looking into the pivotal community would, um, I guess we have a lot of amazing talks on YouTube, but I think we are, as I mentioned before, need to really bring out, um, and surface and communicate and share our internal stuff with the external world. 591 00:53:52,380 --> 00:53:56,700 Um, and I think we're working on that now, so that's going to happen within the next few months. 592 00:53:57,060 --> 00:54:09,880 Um, so I think until then, um, there's not a lot of things that we can really point to, um, but hopefully very soon we're going to have our field guide that we're going to be able to share with the community, um, at large. 593 00:54:12,440 --> 00:54:13,500 Well, that sounds good. 594 00:54:13,640 --> 00:54:19,460 We'll have to, uh, we'll have to have a, uh, uh, uh, I don't know, a follow-up as, as that emerges. 595 00:54:19,800 --> 00:54:21,160 Yeah, totally. 596 00:54:21,800 --> 00:54:22,380 Well, great. 597 00:54:22,440 --> 00:54:23,800 Well, uh, thanks for listening. 598 00:54:23,940 --> 00:54:26,100 As always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. 599 00:54:26,400 --> 00:54:35,640 If, uh, somehow you're miraculously listening to this episode and you don't know where it came from, maybe, maybe, uh, there was a big conversation at dinner and Alexa just started playing something. 600 00:54:35,920 --> 00:54:37,520 This happens to me every now and then. 601 00:54:37,860 --> 00:54:46,380 Uh, if you want to find this episode and many others, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations, uh, with no space or anything. 602 00:54:46,540 --> 00:54:55,860 And usually every Thursday, if I've, uh, done my job, uh, we have a, we'll post the show notes over at pivotal.io slash podcast. 603 00:54:56,000 --> 00:54:58,140 And with that, we'll see everyone next time.