9 things we’ve learned in 12 years in Tech

Words by Simon Vieira, Olivia Perry & Stu Amos.

From the dawn of social media, to the rise of cryptocurrency and Smart technology, almost every facet of the tech industry has changed dramatically in the last 12 years. We’ve learned a lot. Throughout the journey, we’ve charted our paths by designing, art directing, teaching, consulting, and finally, as founders of our digital product and brand design studio, Agency In The Wild.

Despite the rapid evolution of the tech business, we’ve learned a few things along the way that still hold true. Today, we’re sharing those lessons with you, starting with the most intimidating of all…

1. Starting your business

We have started different businesses in the past, but our latest venture, Agency In The Wild, felt different. Our main advice? Just start. Prioritize profit and your customer needs. Repeat.

We are living in a new digital wilderness, one that substitutes the physical world for the convenience and hyper-connectivity of the virtual one. We found that in this new world, there are new rules:

• Old Rules = Have a business idea, build it up with as many features/services as you can, take your time to make it “perfect” and push it to the market. Keep adding new features on top of all the other features. Prioritize growth over profit, and spend a lot of money on marketing.
• New Rules = Talk to a niche market, pull their wants and needs, and identify the minimum lovable idea that the market is willing to pay for. Build the idea with the market, teach and learn together, constantly iterate and evolve. Prioritize profit, and spend a lot of time AND/OR money on brand thinking, design and community building.

2. Hiring your team

A business is a finely-tuned machine, but how do you make sure you hire the people that you need and want for your business? It all comes down to the job description and the interview.

Creating the job description

• Find the responsibilities and the pains and gains that exist in the current position you want to fill. In other words, find the needs, wants and what’s working.
• Pretend you have hired the perfect candidate and one year has passed. Write a thank you letter to the employee for all the fantastic results the candidate achieved in that position. That list of accomplishments is the guide for everything you need to look for in a candidate.

The interview

• When interviewing candidates for the role, relate the interview questions to the company values — we call this brand thinking. For example, if one of your company values is putting customers first, ask candidates to relay a situation where they had to put their customers first — simple, right?
• Instead of fixating on a candidate’s input and years of experience, focus on their results and work quality. A potential hire might have 20 years of experience, but if that experience was doing the same or similar types of work, they only have the equivalent of 1–2 years of results experience.
• If possible, hire your finalists for a week of work. That will give you tangible results and an idea of what the candidate can do for you.

3. Prioritize effectiveness and results over perfect design

When it feels like you have a million things on your to-do list, it’s easy to get caught up in checking off the boxes. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about productivity, it’s that effectiveness is more important than efficiency. Humans can be very efficient at the wrong thing; to be more effective, we have to ask ourselves two questions:

1. How would this action help me move the needle forward?
2. Why are we doing this right now?

If the answers align with the overall vision and mission, we’re on the right path. If not, it’s time to reprioritize. This idea brings us to a method we call selfless design. Aesthetic appeal is great (isn’t that one of the reasons we got in the business?), but it doesn’t matter how pretty a website is if it’s not intuitive or functional. As designers, it can be challenging to set aside our preferences for how a project should look and focus instead on the results. The fact is, effectiveness doesn’t always equate to a beautiful or perfect design.

When Craig Newmark created Craigslist — not the most beautiful design in the world — he focused solely on the results. He used his intuition to design, build and market a service that helps people achieve their goals — he put his customers first. This is a perfect example of selfless design.

As an industry, we need to understand that there’s something that transcends design — that something is the integration of design, business and technology working together to achieve results. If we want to create fantastic products and services, these three entities must collaborate with the ultimate goal to serve people well and help them achieve their goals. In short, results transcend perfect design.

4. Generating new ideas (the right way)

Forward thinkers don’t copy. They don’t compete. They create. They avoid following what others have done. They trust their intuition and run with it. But where do these culture-shifting ideas come from?

“The answer is simple: Differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.” — architect Nicholas Negroponte

Disagreement within your team fuels this creativity. If you’re in a meeting and people are debating, you’re on the right track. The key to expressing these differences in a productive way is disagreeing from a place of passion, bypassing the limits of the mind and pushing ideas forward, rather than arguing only to feed the ego (stay tuned for more on that).

In our experience, the best way to encourage a team to disagree for the sake of a better product or company is by following this pattern:

1. Identify the primary goal of what you are trying to do. Encourage conversations by asking questions like, where do we want to be in one or two years?
2. Ask people what their main concerns are with the goal, then reframe the problems that come up as questions. For example, a fear of having 10 million users might be: We don’t have enough server capacity. When writing it down, reframe the concern as: How can we have enough server capacity to support 10 million users?
3. Answer all the reframed issues with your team. The resulting answers are the next action steps that your organization needs to take.
4. For big decisions, bring in an expert to validate your action steps and catch blind spots. For instance, if you’re dealing with money or sensible data, bring in a cybersecurity expert to bulletproof the security of your idea, or if you’re about to invest serious money on your marketing plan, hire an expert to spot red flags so you can move forward with confidence.

Treating others how you would like to be treated is the means to disagree respectfully. Follow the above steps and notice how the process allows room for respectful arguments, which all lead to the action steps you need to follow. The magic happens when teams argue with passion, an open mind, and are willing to change their perspectives to benefit the greater good.

5. Knowing when something is right (or wrong)

In a startup, everything is a hypothesis until proven otherwise in the market. In other words, everyone is right and wrong until your product is out in the wild — everything is a test. All tests should help startups figure out two things:

1. Can the product or feature add value to customers? We can use acquisition, activation and retention metrics to answer this question.
2. Can our company profit and grow? We can use revenue and referral metrics to answer this question.

Use every test to answer one crucial hypothesis question at a time. Passionately build, measure and learn until you find the answer. Treat each hypothesis as a step to move the company closer to answering the points above with total confidence. Use design and brand thinking to help you figure out the most critical questions to answer for every test.

A startup is one learning experience after another. The most significant problems we’ve seen with startups are:

1. Burning cash
2. Lack of product fit
3. Egos

Problems one and two are relatively easy to fix: Ask for more money or pivot. Number three is the real startups killer.

Be nice to each other, put egos aside and meditate. Remember, you all have the same goal.

6. Integrating product design feedback

Asking for feedback, and knowing how to receive and implement it, is critical for product design. Both types — objective and subjective feedback — are essential and valuable.

• Objective feedback gives us actionable items. It’s straightforward, backed by data and hard to debate.
• Subjective feedback communicates personal feelings and perspectives. When products collect subjective feedback over time, it provides a collective sense of how people like or dislike a design/product. This feedback is debatable and can take a long time to generate consensus.

Like any situation that involves navigating personal differences and perspectives, dealing with subject feedback can be tricky. First, let the team know that customers have the final say. For example, if, from a test of 10 customers, 6 complain about color, that is enough subjective feedback to take action. There can be exceptions, and we should trust gut feelings, but only when they are strong and make sense.

Second, group all the feedback (both objective and subjective) and filter it based on impact — something might take a lot of effort to change, but yields little results. Results are what people need to do on a particular screen/flow. If the feedback helps people achieve what they want to do, or helps make things clear, prioritize implementing that feedback.

7. Designing your own joyfulness — learning to trust your intuition as a path to happiness

“Intellect is the functioning of the head, instinct is the functioning of your body, and intuition is the functioning of your heart.” — Osho

The difference between when we started 12 years ago and where we are now is nothing more than the trust we have in our abilities, process and intuition (especially our intuition). We believe that anyone can design their way to self-confidence in two steps:

1. Transcend your animal instinct with intellectual knowledge by learning as much as you can.
2. Transcend your intellectual mind with your intuition by meditating and being present as much as possible.

Once you’ve mastered the above, you are released from expectations and fears and are free to create from a place of true liberation — sure you might make mistakes, but that’s part of the fearless evolution process.

Let us ask you this question: What’s more critical in business — intelligence, knowledge, creativity, or intuition?

Think about that for a second.

Here’s our answer:

🧠 Intelligence is constrained by knowledge.

📚 Knowledge is limited.

❤️ Empathy and creativity are infinite but limited by ego.

🌟 Intuition is infinite and comes from the divine — all the above should serve intuition.

8. Designing for the future

As humans, as innovators and as designers, we’re always looking for a way forward, a way to improve and surprise and push the envelope. My co-founder, Stu, and I have designed and lived by the philosophy that design without data is just art, until we started working with Artificial Intelligence.

Now we believe that design without emotional intelligence and intuition is just a design created by a machine. Notice how products are looking and behaving more and more the same? We are all designing as if we were machines, but the fact is, AI can do more precise and faster design work — including creative and strategic “thinking.”

So what are the skills that the designer of the future needs? The answer is a combination of data, emotional intelligence and intuition. These are the ingredients that will give designers a competitive advantage over AI. Designers need to master the art of being human or risk being replaced by the machines we helped create.

9. A collection of essential principles we have picked up along the way:

Through our 12 year careers, we’ve picked up these principles from literature and personal experience that have helped us survive in the new digital wilderness. We hope they help you too:

The Five Agreements

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Avoid taking anything personally.
3. Avoid making assumptions.
4. Always do your best, not more, not less.
5. Love ourselves and treat others how we would like to be treated. [The Four Agreements, 1997]

A prototype is worth 1,000 meetings

Fast, iterative prototyping means no more long meetings, expensive decks, or painful deliberation — just quick solutions to solve the biggest challenges.

Better done than perfect

Perfection is an illusion of the mind. Get it done first, then improve it.

Pain + reflection = progress

There’s no progress without reflecting on pain. Do this often. [Principles, 2017]

Endure the lows, optimize the highs

There are going to be low points in the ride. Endure them. There will also be high points. Optimize them. [The Messy Middle, 2018]

Don’t estimate your time. Instead, budget it

Every time we estimate how long something will take us, it’s accurate — said no one EVER. Budget your time by taking the total amount of time you have, and give yourself chunks of time to finish the tasks you need. For example, let’s say you have one week to build a website. Instead of estimating every task individually (a waste of time that’s not going to be accurate anyway), give yourself a budget of one day for research, two days for design and two days for development.

Encourage disagreement with suggestions AND commitment

• Good scenario: There’s a possible decision. You disagree and give another suggestion. Everyone evaluates the possibilities with a focus on what’s best for the customer. Regardless of the decision, you commit all the way.
• Bad scenario: There’s a possible decision. You disagree but don’t suggest an alternative. You don’t commit. The guaranteed next step is blame — whether on the decision, the people, the tools, or the process — and everything is going to feel like an eternal loop of problems without solutions. That’s a recipe for a toxic culture. [Inspired by Amazon Leadership Principles]

Prioritize emotional intelligence

“The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions.” — psychologist Daniel Goleman

Self-awareness is at the core of emotional intelligence. It allows a person to understand their strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, it helps one recognize their emotions and their effect on their team and their team’s performance. This is critical as a leader because it underscores all other types of intelligence. You might excel at your job on paper, but if you can’t effectively communicate with your team or clients, you will quickly plateau. We could write a whole separate blog on why emotional intelligence is so important, but this article from Harvard Business School provides an excellent overview.

Exercise your body, mind, and spirit.

Take care of yourself. Your work is a reflection of how you feel; if you’re in good shape mentally, physically and spiritually, your work will reflect that.