Why I joined Parabola
Usually I use my Portfolio Site on Medium for career(ish) samples, design(ish) thoughts, and odd projects that I like sharing. That can include stuff about interface, bits about systems, and even tangents around music notation and data visualization. It’s good fun.
But, for a few minutes I’d like to directly discuss my career, as I’ve come across an opportunity to converge a lot of these focus areas into one grand project. I’m joining Parabola as their Design Lead.
Parabola
If you don’t know Parabola already, I’d encourage you to spend some time with the tool. Here’s my take …
A narrow definition: Parabola is a “no-code” task automation tool that is especially suitable for collecting, processing, and moving data. Pull [this data] from a website or API; combine it with [another table]; send it to Google Sheets. Do this every Monday at 8:00am PT.
The broader definition: Parabola helps people get things done in a way that doesn’t require the coding or manual work that those tasks would traditionally require. Parabola gives information workers the autonomy they need to save time (fewer manual tasks) and reallocate their talents to higher-order work.
But, to say it more plainly: today, Parabola is an interface.
Interface
Designers these days have varied titles and responsibilities. Lately, I’ve been going by “Product Designer” to give the gist, but others have more precise opinions about what titles map to which responsibilities. [shrug]
But a lot of digital design work today— even in Apps, for the Web, and for products that are ultimately user-facing screens — the “interface” isn’t even that critical to the user journey. Most Design is an assembly of conventions, constraints, copy, and previously defined system elements. Sure, by designing yet another signup form, I’m technically designing “interface” … but the user doesn’t care about the signup form; they care about what’s behind it. (If we’re being honest, the Designer probably doesn’t care that much about the signup form either)
But Parabola is different. Sure, the user is still ultimately trying to accomplish something that isn’t “using this interface;” but the UI has a more singular relationship with that desired accomplishment.
As a user, I’m trying to [avoid repetitive manual work]. By [using Parabola’s interface to build a custom data flow], I can accomplish that goal and incrementally improve my life.
I’ve found it to be a rare thing that the User Interface has such a direct relationship to the end user’s goals. Customers are literally buying the opportunity to use this interface.
In that way, Parabola is a Design-first or Experience-first offering. The customers affirm it, too, with a budding community of Parabola recipes and all the good feels on Twitter.
Believe me, all of that makes for a good place for a Designer to reside!
Systems-as-origins
The last team I worked on was the Threads Design System team at Plaid. I love design systems! Unfortunately, though, most folks in the Design community still see Design Systems as a specialized practice suitable only for larger organizations.
But I disagree: small startups often miss opportunities to establish early systems that would benefit them in the short- and long-term. We’re all in such a hurry to build the beta! We promise ourselves that we’ll clean up all the tech and design debt later on.
But we usually don’t. The initial decisions are fossilized as conventions that become difficult to revise. Fragmentation is inherited in version after version of the product through the first few years of growth. By the time you hire a “Design System” specialist, it’s probably because your frontend is a mess and you acutely need a systems resource. But by that point, it’s going to take exponentially more work to establish a system on top of products that weren’t built for it.
It’s like using Design Systems as an Emergency Room: “we’ve got another fragmentation patient in critical condition!”
But how about we try for “preventative medicine” instead? Small, early practices that can lead to better outcomes (and avoided “ER visits”) later on. Establishing systems doesn’t have to be as heavy as it sounds. Even simple systems— a small, prescriptive color library, a few atomic components, even definition around attributes like “depth” in UI — can go a long way in establishing directional design practices and, ultimately, speeding up both design and technical work.
And we all want to speed up work, right?
Audience (and opportunity)
The “no code” revolution has been … well, slow. It’s been pretty confined to categories, e.g., creating a website with SquareSpace or Webflow; or manipulating and displaying data with Tableau or Looker.
But we’re now seeing more flexible players, like Parabola, come in to provide comprehensive platforms for a wider range of solutions. Parabola’s approach is an especially promising one.
(This whitepaper does a fair job of outlining the opportunities from a vertical perspective; I’m going to move on to a more user-oriented one.)
Everything vs. key things
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with Javascript: sure, if I learn the right things — and add the right libraries— it makes me capable of creating work that I enjoy and share.
With Javascript, a developer can do anything!
— Real devs who actually like JS
But … as a user, I don’t need it to do anything: I just want it to do a few specific things (like extract data from a CSV, and draw charts, and make CSS more scalable). And it’s a real drag to have to learn all of these JS fundamentals and often arbitrary (imo) vocabulary, only to find myself then installing libraries — where you have to learn even more rules — just to get a few predictable tasks done. It’s still rewarding in the end; but it’s overkill.
My experience is not unique: a lot of folks have things they want to get done that a developer could help them with. But most people don’t write code (and don’t see it as worthwhile to learn, which I relate to).
So we’re changing the dynamic: at best, I see Parabola as an intuitive utilities layer for the Internet. Parabola has already started out with a few dozen operations that a user can easily pull out of a drawer to manage data. By evaluating the common needs out there and coding those into human-readable operations, we can build and build and gradually raise the productivity ceiling for non-developers everywhere!
We could really change things.
Team!
And, of course … this team! Everyone I’ve engaged with at Parabola has been keen, collaborative, and just plain fun to talk to. I think for most startups you’ll see some of the usual ingredients: a passionate founder, a flexible team, a build-first attitude. I love it. But Parabola’s team goes beyond that: it’s their unique mix of vision, practicality, joy, and customer love that I find especially alluring.
Recently one customer said that Parabola brought them dignity in their work; to them, this meant productivity, autonomy, and ultimately self-respect. The Parabola team heard this and immediately embraced the challenge of granting that same feeling, that power and dignity and positivity, to every last person they can reach.
And I think we’ll do it. Join us at Parabola Careers.
