49: Unraveling Complexity in Product Development (ft. John Cutler)

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited. Apologies for any mistakes.

Jesse: I’m Jesse James Garrett, 

Peter: and I’m Peter Merholz.

Jesse: And we’re finding our way, 

Peter: Navigating the opportunities 

Jesse: and challenges 

Peter: of design and design leadership, 

Jesse: Welcome to the next phase.

Joining us to talk about what’s next for digital product design is John Cutler, veteran product manager and product management consultant. Along the way, we’ll discuss what product leaders know that design leaders don’t, facing ambiguity and uncertainty from executives, and how design leaders can more effectively advocate for the true value of their team’s work.

Peter: John, thank you for joining us.

We usually start by having our guests explain a little bit about what they do. And, in particular, in your case, I think that’s important because Jesse and I were saying right before you got on, like, we’re trying to track the narrative of your career arc but maybe you could just walk us through what you’re about, where you’ve been, and where you are now, or what you’re doing now.

John: Sure. Yeah, I’ll give the quick story. Dropped out of college, had a video game company. I made a bartending CD-ROM game called Last Call. It’s like when you shipped games on a CD-ROM.. 

Jesse: Yay, physical media.

John: And then I slipped into playing music. And touring with different bands, which is a lot of fun, and then sort of picked up more and more tech type jobs over the years you know, like adtech.

And I worked at a company that literally took PDF catalogs and made them into flipping page catalogs. That was a thing at the time that was, yeah, there’s probably a lot of good UX lessons in that. And then I got involved in B2B SaaS company. So software as a service companies and a range of companies from Zendesk and Appfolio and a company called Amplitude, where I actually was a product evangelist, where it was, I mean, I basically lucked into this crazy role at a company that fit my personality, where I like thinking about this stuff and I’m curious and I like teaching and I like packaging the things I’m doing as a product.

And I was this product evangelist at Amplitude. And that put me in touch with teams really from around the world, you know, hundreds of teams, I forget the number, but we maybe did, you know, a thousand one-on-ones with product leaders and met with hundreds of teams along the way.

So at, by that point, I had done some product management, UX research, then I was this product evangelist role. Then I did this product enablement role at a company called Toast. And here I am today. And that’s it, you know, UX research, product management, working in New York City and doing tech with that before it was called product management and just doing stuff and music.

And so yeah, pretty across the board, but there are some through lines. But that’s generally where I’m coming from. 

John’s distinct drive

Peter: As you were sharing, I was thinking about how I have gotten to know you, which is primarily through your voluminous engagement on LinkedIn. And you are always someone, kind of, processing conversations that you’re having with folks, things that you’re seeing, you’ve got your newsletter, you’re often posting and we’ll get to the content of that in a moment. 

But before then, I’m wondering, what is your drive? Like what, if you had like a personal mission or a purpose statement or something that’s kind of underlying all of this, that’s driving this questing kind of behavior, that at least, as I witness it.

John: We could probably go way back to childhood for that one. I mean, it is sort of funny. There was a school play, I think it was second grade, and the teacher, it was called Vernacular Island. She wrote the play called Vernacular Island, and I was the question mark.

Jesse: Wow. You were branded early.

John: I was branded very, very early. It’s like they got through all the letters with Cutler. Cutler, the question mark, you know. It’s funny because I always want to go back and find who the exclamation mark was. It’s probably the CEO of a company or something.

Jesse: Wow.

John: You know, so this goes back a long way. I think it’s a combination of being curious, working things through in writing, seeking to understand, and seeking some level of coherence from what I’m seeing. 

Yeah, a lot of it is actually thinking through writing. I mean, if I had done it all over again, I would have taken more careful notes on what I was seeing and probably written less. I didn’t need to think in public as much as I’ve been doing probably over these years and putting it out there. It’s been pretty time consuming to be honest. 

But that’s generally what’s driven me. You know, I get, I get these… I’m curious about something. I have these open questions that I’m trying to think through either in my personal life or my personal professional life, or more broadly, the sort of zeitgeist of things.

I mean, working at Amplitude, one day would be Amazon and Intercom and then some bank and then some plumbing supply company. And then some company that was going to do massive layoffs, another company hiring 10,000 people. And that just leaves you with tons of questions.

I mean, just one day like that will leave you scratching your head for months, right? And that’s generally what you’re seeing as I work through this stuff.

The variability of product management

Jesse: That’s interesting because I think that for a lot of the design leaders who listen to this podcast, the vantage point that they have is so narrow because they are operating within their role, within their vertical, within their market context. Peter and I were actually just talking about this the other day, the way that our experience as consultants required us, I think, to do a different level of sort of pattern-matching.

My sense is that although you do have a design background, you’ve been really focused on the product management side of the fence and the problems that exist in that space. And there are a lot of problems that exist in that space that are just simply unfamiliar to the design folks in our audience, despite the fact that they are engaging every day with the people who are directly trying to solve these problems. And so I guess that’s the first thing that I wonder about is, What are you noticing broadly these days about what’s going on with product management that might be really hard for design leaders to actually have a view into? I know that’s a really big question. Mm

John: Yeah, I, yeah. Let’s, let’s first acknowledge the diversity of contexts out there. I think that’s really important. So even when we believe we have deep or broad context, it’s usually not nearly as deep as one other person or as broad as the next person. You know, a lot of people in Silicon Valley are like, “I worked at 15 companies in the Valley.”

And you’re like, “Yes, you’ve worked at 15 companies in the Valley.” It’s actually still pretty narrow or, you know, I’ve definitely observed that product management is both decades old and years old in some ways. So one thing when you’re observing product management, I was speaking with a design leader recently and they just couldn’t make sense of it.

They said, you know, I don’t get this. I mean, we’re… design community, we figured these things out for a long time now and I don’t get product. They seem so wishy-washy at the moment. I mean, they seem like the weak link at the moment. 

And I think what’s kind of funny is, that people, if you go to a consumer goods company, for example, they have product managers, the product manager owns a clothing line or a shoe line. I have a friend who works at Deckers here in Santa Barbara, Hoka, their shoes. There’s a PM for that. Pretty defined areas of responsibility for them to do that. They own the P and L for that particular product. They have partners in engineering, the people who make the shoes. They have people in design, the people who design the shoes, right? There’s an understanding of how that thing works. 

And I was chatting with them about the problems in the product space. And they’re like, this makes no sense to me. Like, we figured this out. I don’t understand why things are so wishy-washy in software at the moment. So what we were reflecting on when I was talking to this design leader is that certainly some things that we’re doing now, some companies were doing 20 years ago, but there’ve been massive changes at the same time in ways of working.

I mean, I was speaking to someone the other day and I said, “Have you ever worked at a company where you could deliver something in days or hours?” He’s like, “Days or hours? No. I mean, it takes months to get anything done, right.” I said, “Oh, now take your skills and mash that against doing things in days and hours.”

“Oh, wow. Okay. That’s different.” 

Or another example during, you know, the, this zero interest rates thing. Imagine being at a company that’s not yet public, that suddenly has decided to have 10 products and 10 GMs and decide it’s a software as a service, but everything’s multi-product and you have to interact with finance and people say, well, these PMs don’t seem to have their shit figured out.

Yeah. Tell me how many times in history, a company that’s five-to-10 years old has 10 products, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and there’s that much pressure and there’s investor pressure and it’s growing that fast. 

So then I was talking to the design leader, they’re looking at the site, like it just seems so disorganized. Like, couldn’t they have figured this out? I think design was so much better in 2013. We had it all figured out then. 

And I was like, well, yeah, you had it figured out at the bank you were working at then. And you know what, the bank you’re working at then is not working all that different 11 years later, realistically.

But now run ways things were working through the ringer. And someone made this point, I was looking at Reddit, and they were talking about Marty Kagan. And they said, you know, yeah, Marty Kagan worked at eBay when eBay was the only marketplace in the world, and he worked at Netscape when it was the only browser in the world.

And, but I think there’s something very telling in that example, right? We could look back at those ways of working or Ben Horowitz or any of those and say, we had product figured out in the Valley in the mid 2000s. See, it was… We were doing it. It’s not acknowledging the rate of change and the diversity of situations that exist that PMs are finding themselves in.

And so I think that’s what a lot of people miss, and folks who are not on the product side miss. But frankly, I think the same thing’s happening in design. I said to the designer recently, “Have you worked with a modern design system such that developers and designers could collaborate in real time on, almost everything they’ve done?”

“Oh, no, no, no. I thought a design system was just, you know, our pattern library.” 

“Yeah, but have you ever worked with an active pattern library that allowed you to prototype in real time together?” 

“No, never worked with that. How would that work?” 

“Look, you can even go in and change the CSS yourself in this library.”

“Really? I can make pull requests?” “Yes.” Mind blown. Like, wow, collaboration would be so much fun if I was working like that. 

And so you just see, it’s just a very diverse set of experiences and swirl in the world. And I think that that’s one challenge. When you look at the LinkedIn idea-sphere or what people are sort of hot taking about product at the moment, it sort of removes context from it. The fact that some companies are operating like it’s 2004 and some are operating like it’s 2024. And there’s a huge mix and mash of what’s going on in the industry at the moment. And so I think that’s what makes it difficult for folks to wrap their head around what’s happening.

Peter: So I totally agree., I’ve seen this and I think… There’s a phrase context collapse, which applies…

John: Yeah.

Peter: …to, social media in this regard. I’ve had conversations recently with Kristina Halvorson around the world of content, because what happens is you have content strategists and content designers, and they use a lot of the same language and don’t realize that their contexts are totally different.

One tends to be much more marketing-oriented or kind of big, lots of words, content oriented, and the other is product-oriented and much more aligned with product design than it is with content strategy, but they both use the word “content.” They’ll say similar things around style guides or whatever and then not realize they’re talking past each other. 

But i’m wondering, then, because I think you, particularly given your opportunity at Amplitude, we’re able to engage across more organizations than most individuals, like, maybe, analyst companies would be the only ones, you know, your Forresters or whatever, who were similarly like every day they’re talking to a new company.

And I guess my question for you is, Is it a continuous spectrum of diversity and variety, or are there categories? Is there 10 types of organizations, 20 types of organizations, still might be big but a manageable set, or is it, you know what, like, don’t even go there. It’s more of this smear of what all is going on and you just kind of have to meet each company where they’re at.

John: So one of the funny things about this is that when people have deep experience in one context, they tend to extrapolate that context to all contexts. So they think they’ve figured out the first principles of the world, right? 

However, when you’ve, when you’ve worked with a bunch of different contexts, you also fool yourself. You think that you see the patterns of everything that goes across the world. And my friend Josh Arnold has this great quote, like the reverse Anna Karenina principle, where you start, like, detecting anti-patterns. So Anna Karenina said, You know, dysfunctional families are all different and happy families are the same,” you know, and it was like, well, actually successful companies are all different and the anti-patterns are the same.

So when you look across companies, you tend to be like, aha, look at that. They’ve got too much work in progress. I’m a genius. I noticed the pattern, but what you find out is like, yeah, no shit. You know, every company has that problem. Even the companies that are successful have too much work in progress to do those things.

I do think that you end up with some clusters. Or at least meaningful clusters. And the ones that I ended up in a lot of cases were, you know, I’ll just give you a real world example. 

Like at Amplitude, we had sort of five or six categories of companies and some were just very rapid scale-up we call the digital product native, but literally they sold a digital product. You pay for that thing. And you could divide that into B2C or B2B, but these also tended to be world-scale companies like a Figma or a Miro, these were just very rapid scale-up native sort of digital product selling companies. 

And then you start to get into the earlier B2B SaaS companies, maybe launched in the mid-2000’s or even earlier, and they’re on their second or third act. They’re more stable companies. They’re public. 

And then you got these massive world-scale brands like an IKEA, LEGO, or world brand like an Adidas. And they’re now embracing the sort of digital surface areas for what they’re doing, but they’re sort of world-scale.

And then you start to get into more complex healthcare and very sort of detailed non-digital product selling companies, which I sort of called service ecologies. I mean, they really were like a product… You could fool yourself that everything’s a product, but at that point, I don’t even care about using the word product.

They’re just very interesting things. I could probably add one or two more onto that, but I think that , if we thought about what are the variables. How old is the company? Did they take a leap of faith by selling the thing that they built, like the digital product, or did they make their money somewhere else?

Very, very important example for that. A massive brand, like a shoe company, is only going to afford one to 5 percent of their revenue on tech spend. So when people complain about this sort of centralized IT model for those companies, it’s literally baked into the business plan. They don’t have a lot of money left over. They thrived because they had centralized digital group that would do stuff for them. And so it’s very easy to point at those companies and say they might be behind, or you’re not Figma. Like Adidas, why can’t you be like Figma?

There’s a huge reason. Like Figma sells Figma.

Jesse: Yes. Yeah.

John: It’s sort of like, how old is the company? Did they sell a digital product? Did they start with a centralized IT model? And there are some regional differences in companies, and then you could sort of do subdivisions from that.

And that gets to a lot of the themes that you’re talking about. You know, B2B, vertical SaaS or horizontal SaaS are all subcategories from there.

Peter: This kind of dovetails with the hypothesis I have that I’ll bounce off you, which is… So functions like design and engineering travel more completely between these types of organizations, right? How a designer performs at Meta is how they are going to perform at Workday is how they’re going to perform at Chase Bank. They’re going to kind of do a lot of the same stuff. And same thing with engineering. 

Whereas product doesn’t travel, right? Like maybe 50%, maybe it’s even a third because the nature of the product practice or the product function is so specific to that organization it’s in. And I’m just wondering, one, if you see that as well, and then, two, what do you make of that?

Because one of the challenges that we hear all the time from designers, you know, being more design oriented, is a frustration in working with product. And if it’s because, like, the person you mentioned earlier, like we’d kind of figured it out in design 10, 20 years ago. 

We know how to work, why doesn’t product? And it’s maybe because of this variability. So what do you counsel then in terms of navigating these relationships, if product is that much more variable.

Product, Design, and Engineering

John: You know, I wanted to go back to one thing I said there about the sort of centralized IT model. When I think about that model and you think about how designers could look back two decades ago or engineers who could look back a while ago, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that those centralized models sort of allowed that stability, you know, it was the business, and tech. Business and tech, or the business and IT, and I think you’re exactly right, because if we think that product either sits on one side or maybe sits on the other side, or maybe get squashed into the middle, that explains why the role is very, very sensitive to the overall business model of the company or the culture of the company.

I mean, engineering leaders also have this frustration. They do, as well, frankly, a lot of the most interesting things in org design at the moment, and collaborating with design and thinking about systems thinking and thinking about ecosystems and platforms are coming from engineering and design.

They’re not coming from product, right? So Product is still sort of sitting there in that sort of weird business- tech overlap to do things. So, I mean, other than design leaders understanding that, Hey, it’s not all figured out and B, product in this company is having to adapt to the particular model, whereas maybe you’ve already accustomed yourself to being adaptable. 

So, you kind of know how to adapt the practice of design in these contexts. Maybe just the empathy is a good start, but here’s another thing I would urge design leaders to do. And I was meeting a great… last week, a great design leader from Google, and he was talking about an effort they had done in Google around Google Maps.

One thing that we discovered is that there’s still this problem that design comes in and comes out with what I would call their functional models. You know, we’re going to work in terms of journeys. We’re going to work in terms of X, or we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to operate design. 

John: And engineering is often coming up with their systems to think about their work.

And meanwhile, in this group in Google, the product team had their own model, thinking about it in terms of engagement or thinking about these sort of business metrics or thinking what they can do. So one thing that all design leaders can do is to maybe resist the immediate temptation to sort of go back to your functional camp, pick your models, like we’re going to work in terms of journeys, we’re going to work in terms of whatever it is, jobs to be done, we’re going to work in terms of scenarios. Product is going to do its businessy thing over there. 

One thing I did at Amplitude, and I’m not saying frameworks are a dime a dozen, but one of the things we did was this framework called the North Star framework.

One of the things it sought to do was to try to bring design and product and engineering together to a sort of a common model, and way of working to align. 

So I call this like the functional model trap where design leader comes in. They have got 90 days. They figure out their group. They figure out, we’re going to work in terms of journeys and X, Y, Z, A, B, C. Product’s off doing their thing. Engineers off doing their thing. This goes on for two or three years. And then the design leader wonders why they kind of quote unquote lost their seat at the table. 

It’s because the business got frustrated with all three functions and just decided to go over the top of them and come up with some framework that doesn’t work, right. So I think you have to reach out and try to forge a common model versus getting kind of too seduced by your functional models.

Jesse: That’s, that’s a very interesting point of view, I think, because a lot of the design leaders that I work with in my coaching practice I think really feel kind of cornered. And they feel cornered especially by the power that is invested in product as a function. That it is perceived to somehow have the inside line on some operational insight that is going to drive the ultimate model that everybody operates by.

And I think that for a lot of design leaders, the sense is that if you don’t show up with your own model, you’re going to get slotted into somebody else’s and the outcomes that you’re trying to drive and the success criteria that you and your team have been optimized toward, you’re not going to be set up to deliver those things.

So I wonder your thoughts on, on how design leaders address that.

John: Yeah. I wrote this post around the functional model trap, which offers some ideas. But I think that the summary there is you need to cross the aisle and see where the common ground is. A great example of this is journeys. You may have already had them on the podcast or will, but I worked with the design leader, Jehad at Toast, and he was great about just doubling down on a model that’s called journeys, a model that had a lot of salience across the organization, had a lot of salience with our customer support team, and had a lot of salience with product to a degree. And he doubled down on that particular model. So one thing is just, pick models that have salience in your company and make sure that you’re explaining to the product leaders why it makes sense to think about this and how it can be helpful, et cetera.

So that would be number one. I think the number two is, look to engineering, because… This is fascinating to me. All the org design stuff happening in engineering now, trying to sort of refactor the orgs so they can move faster and be more customer-centric, that will ultimately define a lot of the ways design works and can work and how quickly you can ship and how fast you can learn and the feedback loops in your company.

It’s amazing to me that there are architects in engineering doing something called event storming. There’s other forms of domain mapping. There’s behavior driven design. There’s all these techniques they’re using to basically figure out how to structure the architecture and structure the teams, essentially, that have massive implications for design.

And I’ve brought a designer into an event storming activity. And the designer said. This is the best journey mapping activity I’ve ever done. Does it help engineers? The engineers are like, yes, this absolutely helps us. And product is sitting there like, wow, I guess if it helps both of you, why didn’t we have this conversation earlier to be able to do it?

So that’s the second thing. Don’t underestimate what engineering is doing in these efforts, because it may have a huge impact on how you can work later on. And a lot of great work is happening in engineering around that. 

Now, there’s a lot of acceptance of socio technical systems. There’s a lot of acceptance of the need to reduce cognitive load. There’s interesting sense-making frameworks like team topologies. And other mapping type frameworks that are very familiar to designers. Like the capabilities are there in language that they can understand. And that’s a huge, huge opportunity. So that would be number two. 

And I think that number three is, wow, if you could work with product, and I’ve seen it happen where you acknowledge, not to get too nerdy, but there’s three fundamental model types. There’s capability model types, journey model types, and flywheel or business model type flywheel types. Product tends to own the business model flywheels. Design says they’re going to stake claim on the journey type things with a bit of capabilities and engineering wants capabilities ’cause they think that’s what they’re going to need to build an architect around. 

There’s so many opportunities to find common ground for that, or at least surface those models and work together with them. And so that would be the third thing, is seek the opportunities to jump over the aisle and integrate those frameworks together. The Google leader that I spoke about they did just that, you know, they really aligned around a journey, but then products started layering in their KPIs and other things in that framework and they were successful from doing that.

Jesse: I think one of the biggest breakdowns in here is how product perceives what design is there to do, and what design is there deliver, and what their partnership actually entails between the two of them and, and what they were there to negotiate and what they’re there to stand for, honestly, as partners, and I’m curious about your thoughts about that, about how that fits in with everything you’ve just now been talking about, because I think this is so important for design leaders to understand how they are being perceived from the other side of the aisle, right?

John: Yeah, and this goes to that weird aspect of experience, and sort of depths experience. So you meet this product leader and they’ve worked at maybe even these famous companies. And the first word they’re saying to you is, you know, where’s that Figma file or something, right? And you’re like, Oh God.

And so I think that the first part is realizing even people with deep experience may not have had the opportunity to work directly with a designer who cared about the overall company strategy and could help shape the product strategy, so be empathetic at first, they might not have had that opportunity to work closely with designers to do that. 

And I think that the second thing is, in many organizations, things are so reactive and there’s so many fires. The idea that there’s any time to think. I’ve seen a lot of design leaders get a lot of success by just putting, investing their social capital and finding some space to slow down. And they don’t see the other 30 meetings that these product managers in or look at their calendars and to do these things, and see how scattered a lot of these PMs are.

I mean, their calendars, their minds are just very scattered. I heard in many cases. And so I think that by carving out that time, like a couple days of deep work together and moving through these things, or maybe inviting engineering to do some of these sort of more domain-oriented or architectural activities at the same time, that can be huge. 

But I go back to my, I worked at a company here called Appfolio, where I was a UX researcher and it just will stick with me my whole career. You’re in this thing, you’re doing some form of participatory design. The designer is… their mind is sort of semi being blown by these engineers, not necessarily being great designers, but surfacing really, really interesting possibilities that technology can do. The product manager is just blown away by everyone. And then the engineers are like, wow, okay, that’s why you are paid to be a designer. At the end of the day, so that kind of working side by side in those activities, I’ll just always remember how the mutual respect meter just went through the roof. 

Instead of talking and telling we were doing together. And I’ve never seen that level of just mutual respect and admiration. Just even two days of doing that just goes through the roof. And it lasted for years. I still think about it.

Peter: Taking from what you were just talking about in terms of product design, engineering, collaborating closely together, that raises a couple of things. One, it sounds like at Appfolio you had a healthy collaborative environment, whereas many environments inadvertently discourage that kind of collaboration because each function is supposed to own something. And what do I own if my work is just being done together as a team? 

But then the other thread that I’m unpacking here is around the role of product. So, one of the things that I’ve started to say more and more is: sufficiently senior UXers with a particular orientation should probably just become product people, right? And, I think there’s some relationship between that kind of like almost pragmatic recognition of like, yes, there’s these functions that each have their responsibilities, but really it’s a group of people just trying to get something done.

So navigating teams versus individuals and then navigating how you move between these different functions. Curious your thoughts.

John: Yeah, well, a couple thoughts is that first, this is about national cultures and regional cultures as well. So you know, realistically, like in the valley, in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot more distinction between the roles. 

You know, it’s this sort of product designer persona. Yeah. We’re gonna bring this person in there, you know, we hire these rockstar engineers that ,they just want these other people to own it because that’s why they’re going to get their promotion if they own it. And I was talking to a friend at a company in the Valley and they said, well, engineer and designer looked at the PM and said, “Idea rejected, not going to do it. It’s not going to help us.” You know, so they had the autonomy, they had the power in these organizations to go back to the PM and say, sorry, you haven’t given us enough data or evidence about why this is going to work and it’s not going to help us, I’m not going to get promoted off of that, you know, this promotion driven development and design, I call it in some sense but it works.

A new model for product development organization

John: Not sure, you know, maybe it works in some settings, but it works in those cultures. So anyway, I’m trying to acknowledge that there is a, you know, a world scale of collaboration and individualism spreading things that probably impacts a bit of that. But I share your theory. I think that in the next 10 years, you’re going to see the following model emerge in some companies.

There will be groups of 30 to 50 people with one product manager, one sort of design lead for the whole group. A pod of insights. Insights will include UX research, quantitative, quant, qual, analytics, data science. So there’s a pod with an operations team that might have a subgroup of design ops and product ops, but generally operations. And so research ops will merge into that. 

I think 30 to 50 people is probably the maximum boundary of contained trust you can have in a pseudo remote world, where you can build trust around 30 to 50 people. I think in person, it could probably be more, but there’s a kind of size limit to that. It’s not going to be more than three levels of hierarchy. You’ve got to keep it pretty flat and efficient. 

And then I think what you will find is you will find 30 to 50 engineers and designers, maybe five, 10 designers, and then the rest engineers. And I think that they’re going to function, that there’ll be 1 PM for that group. And the reason why I think that is exactly to what you’re saying is, I think people are going to come to the conclusion that a product-savvy engineering lead and a designer are perfectly capable in those environments for, for leading. 

All this idea, and whatever we could say it came from the agile world, but it just came from a period of time for a couple of decades where someone decided that every group of three to five people needs a PM or a PO or something like that. And so now we assigned all those people and we called everything a product. Everything is not a product. Everything is not a product. 

So I think that this, honestly, we’re going to see this pendulum swing because there’s so much hype around products right now, the next three to whatever many years are going to be all these huge companies calling everything a product only to realize what the B2B SaaS companies are realizing right now, which is no, not everything is a product.

And maybe for the design leaders here, think ahead, let’s say that I’m right. Think ahead to how that might change your role. Do you want to be that person who sits to the side of that PM and then has a five to 10 people reporting to you?

Do you want to be one of those people there? Do you want to sit across the whole organization, across multiple pods of 30 to 50 people? I don’t know, but if, let’s say if my theory is right, you’d have to think about what that would mean for your role.

Jesse: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is a reshaping of the value proposition, both of the product lead role, as well as the design lead role. 

I want to bring your research background back into this, because I wonder where research fits into the mix here, because it seems to sit in this really, actually really important strategic space between design and product in informing the choices that both functions make.

John: Yeah, the research first, I feel so much the pain that the research community is going through at the moment. I do sort of feel as someone involved in the product space that there’s this, I would say it’s an unintentional gaslighting that’s happened for researchers around this kind of weird product discovery stuff and this research stuff.

And having been a researcher myself and PM, maybe I have the privilege of being more pragmatic. I’m like, yeah, I could just go either way. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I noticed for a lot of people, it really does matter what these titles are and what their boundaries and spheres of influence are in the organization 

You know, at Amplitude, I dealt with a lot of analysts, like analytics people, and it’s amazing the similarities between your average analytics employee and a researcher. Day in, day out, they’re called in to be pulled to like… Can we have a dashboard for that? C -uite needs a new dashboard for that. They’re like, damn it, but there’s strategic insights that could be saving the company right now. Why do you have me making a dashboard for the deck again? Just do it, go and do that. 

The data quality is often really, really messy. They’re having to fix it, just like a researcher is having to figure out this fire hose of qualitative data and what they’re going to do with it. There’s so many similarities, but in both of those cases, there was… A couple questions. 

Pull versus push. Am I just pulled in, am I “as a service,” am I research as a service, or am I strategic insights as a service, or am I a question answer as a service? You know, are we data snacking or on a good data diet? The same thing with UX research. Are we, are we research snacking or are we on a good research diet to do things? That’s why I think that, I mean, first of all, it’s hard to be a researcher, but I think that if we just extrapolate all these ideas, something’s got to give eventually.

And the scenario I gave you, the idea that you are elevating insights, both the quant and qual side of that, like, does it matter whether they have a leader that sits right to the side of the PM lead, the engineering leader, whatever? I don’t know, or maybe that doesn’t matter as much, but I think that there’s going to have to be some acknowledgement that quant and qual and these things to improve decision-making and sort of strategic sense are going to have to have some kind of first class place in this particular model.

In other words, it might be more centralized than people would like, but the size of the groups might be smaller and more containable, which might make it a better role for those people At Amplitude, you would find some companies with one quantitative analyst per 150 people, yet at a place like Canva or another place, you might find an analyst per every 10 people.

You’d find a UXR for every 15 or 23 people. And so those ratios have to come down in my mind for it to be pulled into less of a data snacking type role. And so I’m just trying to think of the physics of the problem. 30 to 50 people, then you can start having a group of people who feel they’re empowered and are driving strategy versus running around and playing whack-a-mole all day.

Peter: With the 30 to 50 people thing, your hypothesis or proposal that you only need one product leader over a group that large, Melissa Perr i actually said something very similar a few years ago when she was on our show. She was also reacting to basically what happened with agile transformations and, we needed to have thousands of POs, product owners, and now it’s becoming clear that those people aren’t adding much value. 

What I’m wondering though, and, I’m buying into your vision, right? As my wheels are turning, I think it solves a lot of problems that remain when everything is a group of six to eight people, right? Your two-pizza team can only do so much.

John: it’s like we’re talking about thousands of people or five people. There has to be some unit of size that’s between six and fifteen hundred.

Jesse: Yes. 

Peter: And that led to some of the thinking in the Org Design for Design Orgs book, where we had design teams of about six people working across what at the time were multiple squads, each with six to eight people, but if you could just take that design team of five or six people and plug them in and say, you know, they’re just part of this group of 30 to 50 people doing work together, the interface is clear.

You’re saying it with some degree of confidence, which I appreciate, but, that’s leading me to wonder, are you witnessing this happening anywhere? Are there early signs? I’m just curious, like, what have you seen in terms of companies trying to operate, I think of the 30 to 50 feral hogs on Twitter, in this group of 30 to 50, with a product manager and a pretty robust suite of capabilities.

Then you get product, you get engineering, you get design, you get insights and analytics, you get content, you get data, whereas when everything is eight people, you miss out on so many functions. Anyways how confident are you in this as a direction? And what is your evidence?

John: Well, let’s… Here’re the signals that I see. 

One, the pressure to flatten the orgs out. You’re seeing many companies just eliminate a whole level of management. So, if before everyone was thinking you need a PM for every seven people, someone is asking that question now at the moment. Well, what, if you had a PM for more? 

So that’s, one, the ratio thing. Two, way, way, way more roles open right now for principal or staff PM than there are for junior PM. So there’s some acknowledgement now that having a bunch of junior PMs running around the org doesn’t help the teams, doesn’t help designers. That, like, one senior or staff or more experienced PM can, can drive the coherence necessary for a lot more people than just six people. So that’s the second theme that you’re seeing there. 

The third, I think that comes along with that is you’re seeing the insights roles start to talk more about things like this, right? Like, isn’t this just insights and decision support? Like, isn’t this just a coherent thing? Should we be drawing these boundaries? Why? 

Imagine you are an analyst, you feel a little marginalized. Imagine your UX research and you feel a little marginalized. You look at your fellow marginalized people and you say, you know what? We’re kind of doing the same thing here. Wouldn’t it be great if we just joined forces here? So I think someone in that thread actually said that. So that’s like another signal. 

And then I think what you’re seeing in organizations is like the beginning of this, right? So you’re seeing, you know, these changes and reorg starting to happen, but I could be completely wrong. And one thing that we know for sure is it just takes forever for the industry to do anything, right? 

So, even if some org started moving in this direction now, it might take a while for it to work itself out. And maybe in more stable domains, that number could be bigger, maybe in very rapidly changing domains, zero-to-one type situations, it’s way smaller. You know, there could be a lot of variations of this, but I think it’s more helpful for us as like a thought experiment to tease out some of the, like, the zeitgeist issues at the moment.

Making space for holistic vision

Jesse: It’s interesting to frame this in terms of the way that the design community has talked about itself and its own value proposition over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so, because you know, we’ve been on this march toward the C-level, where the idea was that if you could create more, more centralized, more executive, more higher-level strategic leadership over design as a function, that would have a kind of cascade effect in terms of business value, in terms of product and user outcomes, all the things that we all love to see.

What you’re suggesting doesn’t really create a space for that. And I’m wondering about, like, where does holistic vision sit? Because I feel like that was like the promise, right? The promise was everybody would be aligning to some kind of holistic experiential vision for the product or the offering or whatever, and we could all feel really confident that we were doing something that meant something as opposed to running off in a million different directions.

So I wonder, yeah. What are your thoughts there?

John: Well, I think this is one of the things that many companies have realized is that the cascade, especially during times of a lot of incoherence and dissonance and rapid change, just creates fog. 

I don’t want to talk too much about the military, but in the military, they have something called mission command, and Stephen Bungay wrote a great book called Art of Action which tries to take those ideas and basically determines that, like, Andy Grove’s idea of cascaded goals and cascaded context, It’s just a version of the military’s mission command. 

Now, mission command believes in these frontline teams that are autonomous and that, you know, you cascade context and then they cascade feedback and magically it’s going to work out.

I was talking to an SVP the other day and they’re like, I have no idea what’s happening in my company. It’s so incoherent. I’m only dealing in these broad strokes. I have no idea what’s happening on the front lines. I’m being told by leaders, I need to get into the details. I’m not even sure the details I’m supposed to get into. And things are just… I’m sitting in this, in theory, exalted role, that I should be able to have all this impact, and it’s just too murky and too foggy at the moment with all the changes that we’re seeing. 

But I guess what I’m observing is you have to be able to translate that overarching context to action somewhat effectively. And I think that what a lot of these large organizations are experiencing are actually their strategy has changed, but their org structure and architecture have not changed yet. 

So the company, for example, now believes that the end-to-end experience is important. They hired in the chief digital person to make sure the end-to-end experience is important. And, literally was on a call the other day where someone said this, like we went through that, we were all bought in. And then we realized we have teams of 250 people and someone had a great model the other day, they called kebab orgs and cake orgs. A kebab org is like a kebab is the journey, you know, like a journey based teams and a cake is. You know, you’ve, got these layers… 

Jesse: yeah. 

John: …and it was kind of an interesting analogy that like, there’s a certain physics to the problem. So you get this design leader coming in with the aspiration and the mandate to create these consistencies. The strategy has changed. They’re thinking about the bank in terms of end-to-end experiences. They’re thinking about the consistency, but the architecture and the org design hasn’t caught up to the point where you could do that in any meaningful way, with teams working effectively to do that. 

And so I think what I’m talking about is not a challenge against that idea, but I’m thinking like, say you were the CDO or whoever, and you did have these sort of pods of groups that had at least some sort of domain focus or maybe owned a journey or maybe owned, they’re big enough to do something meaningful. I mean, like with 50 people, you can do something pretty meaningful. I wonder whether that would give them more ability to actually act on their aspirations for consistency versus just talking about vision in theory. 

Look to engineering

Peter: You just mentioned how strategy has changed, but the org structures haven’t necessarily caught up yet. And that’s leading me actually back to something you were saying, where you mentioned how engineering has been refactoring. This seems to be a trend that you are witnessing.

I’m not exposed to engineering and engineering teams much, so I don’t know what the trends are over there, but you mentioned how they were refactoring so they can be more customer responsive. Architecture using new techniques like event storming, STS, those types of things. 

If this is a trend in engineering, what is that in response to? Where are we at in the arc of this? Is this happening industry-wide or is it like a crossing the chasm, only the leaders are doing this right now? Help unpack that a bit more.

John: it’s happening industry- wide. So, I would highly recommend any design leader to join Gene Kim’s community, which is the enterprise leadership community. He wrote an amazing book called Wiring The Winning Organization.

Gene’s community are the CTOs. These are the, engineering leaders of these organizations. What’s fascinating about that community is the level of dialogue. Now we’re like, again, we’re talking about. How can we reduce cognitive loads so that people could actually get anything done? Are we aligning our architecture around customer domains? The driver there is speed, but it is customer centricity to be able to do that.

Also, if you’re a design leader and you don’t know necessarily about the engineering side, if you get this wrong, or these things are incongruent, all the pressure to design everything up front or all the inability to experiment or all the inability to research and spend time in divergent thing is probably driven by the fact that nothing is happening because there are thousands of dependencies. So when there’s thousands of dependencies, the only way to get something done is to turn it into a big ass project.

Jesse: right.

John: And run it like an old school IT project. So a lot of the drivers for this in Gene Kim’s book, it’s, like, slowification is one of his things. Like, how can we actually slow down to be making better decisions? How can we have lower cognitive load? How can we have time for deep work? How can we do these things? 

And I think that that’s, what’s driving that group and that community. It’s controversial, but I would say there were more that will impact the designer’s lives coming from the engineering stuff that’s happening at the moment, then it’s happening in the weirdo product world. 

Product world’s always going to be a weird place. So I’ll give the why it’s so critical to be collaborating. If you don’t get designers involved in these activities to refactor the architecture and think about the need and the journeys and the customer needs, you’re going to come up with the engineer’s view of what the customer domain is.

For example, you imagine a company that’s trying to fix the problem of auto body shops. If you just tell an engineer, Hey, guess what? We need to rearchitect our architecture around the jobs of an auto body shop. What are they going to do? If you’re, I’m just being all, I’m being friendly to engineers here. Unless they do these activities like event storming, you know, the things are gonna go like, well, an auto body shop is a formula. You know, you’ve got to bring the car and you’ve got to fix it. They’re going to think about it in very mechanical terms. That’s what an auto body shop does. 

John: If you as a design leader don’t get involved in that activity and say, no, let’s start considering the domain here. let’s start considering the journeys across an auto body shop, or who are you really serving? It’s actually parents instead of, you know, hot rod drivers or whatever. The critical thing is, if it takes three years to ship anything, you know, the world will have changed around you and all your great research and wonderful designs will be obsolete by the time that team gets that thing done. So I think that’s important.

Jesse: Yeah. 

Peter: Is this a recognition that agile transformation failed? ‘Cause part of me is like, weren’t these engineers, the one who advocated agile transformations, which are causing the problems that we’re all on now trying to unwind?

John: No, no, no. so this is what folks need to understand is that you know, Agile circa mid two thousands, was a group of people who were not selling anything necessarily, right? They were literally like this podcast, right? These are the people, if you go back, there’s something called the C2wiki, which is this old, like agile wiki. If you see the depth of conversation on that thing about challenging the norms of what they’re doing, the first “agile is dead” post came out in 2005.

That community is way ahead of this. They’re 20 years ahead of that particular thing. And so folks like Martin Fowler and other folks who, you know, Kent Beck, kind of distance themselves from the, this agile industrial complex that’s happened. Design also has its industrial complex. 

You know, it’s the CX industrial complex, just buy all these tools and you’ll be set. You know, you’ll be a great design leader, customer 360. You know, there’s all kinds of, everyone has an industrial complex to do stuff. 

I think that the challenge was agile was local by design. It was about teams. Small teams doing work and that was a feature, not a bug. The idea of scale at the scale we deal at in these organizations was just a non-topic.

And that was part of what made it special. And so you see what I would say is these things like SAFe are almost institutionalized incoherence. You know, so, SAFe isn’t saying, by the way, you’re not going to be doing Safe in a year. Like if you keep refactoring what you’re doing, it’s, Oh, guess what? We’ve got 3000 people with tons of dependencies and somehow we have to get those 3000 people to ship anything in the next six months or the next three months to do things. 

So I think that, like, Gene’s community these architects, these people are thinking in terms of socio-technical systems, are definitely at the right spot at the right time to deal with the challenge of the moment. And it’s not an indictment of the agile community to do it. It’s just, it was never really part of that problem thinking on that particular scale to do it.

Acquiring influence

Jesse: In my coaching work, I’ve worked with a lot of design leaders for whom it’s so hard just to know what to advocate for…

John: yeah.

Jesse: Where to push, what ideas to champion, what things to let go of, what is the actual path forward that is going to drive them toward fulfilling, you know, the vision that they have for what design can bring to organizations.

And so I’m wondering from your vantage point, acknowledging that we’re painting the entire industry with a very broad brush, what are the things that can help design leaders prioritize what they advocate for and where potentially they can turn to these fellow travelers for support? 

John: Huge thought that comes from that is what if we apply the same principles that we do to our external customers, to our teams? 

And that’s basically what, when I talked about thinking about in socio-technical systems and reducing cognitive load. So for example, if a design leader comes up and says, you know, I want it to feel effortless for our teams to work together, and for us to collaborate and for us to do these things yeah, that might not seem like it’s advocating for the customer out, but it’s advocating for the customers internally and that’s a common sphere.

I’m just thinking about things that are resonating in other communities… 

Jesse: Yeah. 

John: …that could then, like, up the influence. So for example, if the design leader’s saying like, “Wow, it’s so curious, like the architects they use words like flow or lowering cognitive load or the ease of release, ease of experimentation” or things. And yeah, you could go in and say, well, that doesn’t sound very user centric, I don’t care about your velocity thing. 

But maybe the common ground is, wow, I would like it to be really easy and effortless for our teams to work together, to collaborate. The engineering side is sick of shipping things that don’t work because they have to maintain it. Ironically, the people who feel the pain, the worst are the engineering teams that have to to maintain the feature soup shipped over five years, none of it’s working and they have to maintain that stuff. So that would be number one kind of, that’s where the connection is. They hate maintaining all this stuff. So, that might be the engineering side. Like how can we make it easier to do those things? 

I think that another area, sort of another vector of influence is: just humans and the pain that they’re experiencing. Think about, wow, you know, there’s a UX researcher and I don’t think she was even a trained service designer, she was wearing multiple hats, but came in with this great analysis of like what an outage feels like. What does it feel like for everyone involved, employees, customers, engineers, support? And I mean, CEO down to frontline person’s mind was blown.

Like, this is a real example, human pain, right? All the humans involved. So I think that’s always a great place. So I do think that there is some alignment there, especially even in the product folks where they look to design to really understand that and expose those insights and think about that. Like, where are people struggling and where is it really having an impact on humans? And I think that that always counts.

And then I think that the third element is you can go a long way by just deeply understanding the business situation that you’re in. And so I often ask people like, have you listened to the last earnings call? Do you understand the situation that the company is in at the moment?

And I think that that’s where it’s always that balance between the healthy tension model, you know, you pay attention to users or that happy customer thing I just said, and we’ll take care of the business. And, I’m beginning to think that what that model does is… Healthy tension works when conditions are generally healthy, but when the shit’s hitting the fan, healthy tension becomes highly unhealthy tension, right?

So I think that there’s that element of just deeply understanding the situation that the company is in and thinking strategically about, like, where will great design be a huge force multiplier for the company and for folks here and thinking on that strategic level. So I noticed a lot of design leaders say, well, I’ve been brought in, so I need an experience vision or I need an experience strategy.

And I keep waiting for them to say like, no, given this landscape and given that we’re in just from a business level, like these are the three levers where design as a discipline is going to create huge force multipliers for this business.

Jesse: RIght. 

John: And a great example is, let’s say you’re selling into an enterprise environment and it’s highly complex multi-sided ecosystem of partners and other folks, and no PM is gonna really understand all of that and keep that in their head.

You know, you want to go into that meeting and say, We’re going to win as a company if we can understand the complex relationships between these three or four different parties and enterprise companies, including their partners and their customers outside the building. 

The only toolkit to really understand that is the design toolkit. Like, we have a way, our capabilities, our design capabilities are purpose built. And that can be a huge differentiator for the company. It can lower our customer acquisition costs, our customer retention costs, all that kind of blah, blah, blah, business stuff. I’m, of course, I’m a PM and I’m saying that, so maybe design folks are like, ah, I’ve heard that whole shtick about the business impact. But I’m not talking about business impact of UX. I’m saying, what is your strategy for the design toolkit and how it’s going to create force multipliers for the business?

And you know, people talk about, what is this product-led or product model or whatever. I’m sick of all that, to be honest. I think we have a toolkit. The toolkit is design, data, and technology, and each of those is like its own toolkit, right? Like people in technology understand the technology toolkit. They understand what we’re going to be able to do with these ones and zeros and how we’re going to do it. Design is also a toolkit. You know, it’s like a toolkit of methods and techniques and all kinds of great things you can do. And the reason why I put data as the second one is that’s like information, right? Like ultimately, a lot of times we’re moving information. The data we have is really important and data is neither purely technical or purely design. It’s its own thing. 

And so I tend to think that, like, what we’re doing is using this toolkit to create great outcomes for customers and create good outcomes for our business and our communities and things that we’re doing it. And labeling that all “product” seems disingenuous. That’s silly. We sell products. 

You know, like, I don’t think it matters what we call these things internally. Just say, there’s a design toolkit, a technology toolkit, and a data toolkit. And how are we going to work through those together to create great things for the customers? And that usually gets them excited as they’re doing it.

When it feels like things are beyond your control

Peter: The sense I get from reading what you write, John, and the conversation we’ve had, is you tend to operate, and correct me if I’m wrong, at a waterline that’s like director down, right?

It’s about development. It’s about making stuff. And how can we get the people who are trying to make stuff to do a better job working together to make that stuff? The 30 to 50 people kind of solution, right, would be kind of director level down. 

But when I think about the forces that have led to some of the challenges that we’re facing, right, like the corruption of agile, or the engineers hating having to maintain products that don’t make sense, oftentimes those things that they were required to build did not emerge from the group who was responsible for product development, but was put upon them by executive leadership.

And I’m wondering what you’re seeing in terms of, how do you engage this leadership suite? These executives who aren’t always good actors, right? There’s a lot going on at that level. There’s a lot of things they’re responding to in terms of the market or whatever. But where many of the problems that I see my clients addressing, is because of stuff that’s been pushed down on them from an even higher source that they can’t ignore.

John: I mean this is a tough one because, I mean, even VP, I mean, everyone’s feeling this fog and swirl and stuff right now. It just depends their perspective on it and a lot of it feels self-inflicted, but a lot of it is sort of macro factors.

I don’t know, I do talk to a lot of people and like, if the leaders just understood design or if we could just do this and do that, it would all be okay.

Like, in the United States, too, it’s like any problem, we just need to lead harder. If we just led harder, it would be better, I think people need to also think about their own sanity and their own sustainability in the business and realize that we’re in a fairly incoherent time at the moment. There is that quote from the Shane Parrish book, Clear Thinking, is, like, no unforced errors.

And I’ve extended that to think about, just don’t do things that have a low probability of working. And so what I think about that right now is there’s so much swirl and so much dissonance that like, take care of yourself. And for example, like, you could probably project yourself three to six months ahead and say, does this presentation really, really have a shot in hell of making any difference in the sort of current zeitgeist?

And the answer would be no, like five to 10 percent probability that’s going to work. That’s the thing that you can just save yourself the heartache at the moment, like, just conserve energy. 

And so this is probably not what you want to hear, but I think what everyone can do at the moment now is just work within their sphere of control or locus of control. Conserve energy. Don’t gaslight yourself. Maybe try not to gaslight other people, and see how these things are going to pan out.

But there’s also an incredible opportunity now at the moment, this dissonance presents this opportunity, right? Because there’s new things. I mean, AI is a really good example of this where it’s just freaking everyone out. And there’s a lot of dissonance in the companies and people are throwing around money or not. And like, that might be an opportunity to think about a journey, for example, that could benefit from focus. And yes, just sprinkle a little AI on it, whatever you need to do, but this can be like a big opportunity.

So I think that we have to like, we have to surf the wave of incoherence and sustain your sanity and don’t make unforced errors. 

Do the all pre mortem: It’s three years from now. And legitimately, is the idea that you went to the C-suite and told them yet again about what human-centered design is, that presentation that they’ve done. What’s the probability that’s going to make any difference compared to, oh, guess what? There was an AI hackathon and we like basically hacked it to bring in a lot of ideas about what customers are trying to do in here. And we won the hackathon with a group and we’re shipping that next week. Like probably the hackathon thing is a lot more coherent in the grand scheme of things. 

So I don’t know, take care of yourself. Like we need you around. The idea that there’s 48 year old design leaders who have like stellar background and think they’ve just had their last job in tech is one of the saddest things in the world to me. 

And I’ve seen that in multiple folks now at the moment, they’ve been simultaneously like aged out, which is ageism, but the market is not looking for them at the moment, the other companies are like, no, we’re, we’re back down to business. We’re trying to get the work done. We’re moving and grooving. We’re in the details. We don’t want that C-suite shaper at the moment. Like we need the person who’s going to get it done. 

And so I think you almost have to like ride the moment. Like that’s the zeitgeist at the moment. And, stay sane to work, continue working. ‘Cause we need all these people with these vast amount of experience over these decades. I think that that’s very important.

Jesse: I’m curious in the face of all of this uncertainty and challenge what is there to hope for, do you think, for design and product leaders together and what they can create on the other side of this moment in the zeitgeist and this place of uncertainty?

John: Well, maybe it’s the North American in me talking, but I’m like, well, who knows? I mean, this, followed by working out of an impending recession, might be an opportunity to do things differently. This is a great point. So if you’re looking at right now and saying, Oh God, the business world is going to stay like this forever, just sort of very ruthless, not really systems thinking, you know, it’s like very simplistic. There’s a lot of justing going on. There’s a lot of like narrative soup at the moment. If you imagine that it will stay that way forever, this is a very depressing time. 

But I think that there are possibilities here that this is like every bubble, like every phase shift, there’s a sort of this liminal period, which is really uncomfortable. And I think that we could project also some good outcomes to come to this. Like, I’m kind of excited by the idea of these 30 to 50 person pods, if that would happen, because I think that that maybe is the next level of doing this.

I was listening to a podcast recently from an engineering architect and they said, wow, I think we’ve learned some major, major lessons. What would it be like if we could get our teams collaborating a bit better to come outta this? I think that we’re in for a couple years of pain, but I mean, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think someone like, Cameron Tonkinwise would say, we’re gonna design our future here, like design futures.

There’s all that complex stuff that I… I should have been a designer. Seriously, you guys have so much fun. You could be in all these different levels all at once. I think that there’s a future here that could be very exciting and interesting to work in.

And so I’m just holding out hope for that. And I’m just saying that don’t assume right now that everyone is a malicious actor. There’s just, again, I was talking about that VP who just imagines the world being very foggy. 

I’ll leave people with this thought. Think about how many times in your life, you had to choose between staying in the wicked problem or just seeking the simple solution.

I remember packing up my car from New York City, done a lot of not so good things in that. And I’m like, that’s it. I’m out. Clean slate it. That’s kind of equivalent in many of these environments to the layoffs, right? It’s like, Oh my God, things have got so incoherent. We don’t know what’s happening. We’re not profitable. The economy’s changing. Ah, ah. 

It’s not a wholly irrational thing to think, I don’t know, maybe if we just start with fewer people, something will work out. Have you ever been a designer and gone so deep into some design and been like, I’ve thought about all this wrong, let’s clean slate this thing and move it out.

So I would just say that the idea that it’s all malicious acting at the moment, again, maybe I’m just showing my sort of optimistic side, but I’m an optimistic pessimist. It’s really shitty right now, but I’m sort of optimistic that maybe it’s just murky for everyone. We’re just doing what we got to do and it’s going to work its way out.

Jesse: John, thank you so much.

John: Yeah. My, my pleasure. This is great. Yeah. this is a great podcast. This is awesome. 

Jesse: Thank you. 

Peter: Yeah. What’s the best place for folks to follow up with you?

John: Oh, okay. So right now, after the many years of 50,000 tweets on Twitter and over 2,200 images that I created for Twitter, I have them all in a file. Decamped from Twitter. Once it, once the logo changed, I could emotionally disconnect. It was fascinating. There must be a design lesson in that. 

Jesse: The power of design. Yeah. 

John: My dopamine was so set on the bird that once it became that other thing, I didn’t look at the tab again.

I’m just not, not on Twitter. And so LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is driving me crazy, but LinkedIn for now, or the newsletter is a good spot. You could, it probably, I think it has my email in it because somehow people figure out my email from the newsletter and then write me messages. So that’s the best spot.

Jesse: John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

John: Yeah. My pleasure. Yeah. I admire both of your all’s work too. So this is a real honor to do this.

Peter: was fun. 

Jesse: For more Finding Our Way, visit findingourway. design for past episodes and transcripts. You can now follow Finding Our Way on LinkedIn as well. For more about your hosts, visit our websites, petermerholz. com and jessejamesgarrett. com. Peter recently launched The Merholz Agenda, his semi weekly newsletter. Find it at buttondown.com slash petermerholz. And if you’re curious about working with me as your coach, book your free introductory session at JesseJamesGarrett. com slash free coaching. If you’ve found value in something you’ve heard here today, we hope you’ll pass this episode along to someone else who can use it. Thanks for everything you do for others, and thanks so much for listening.