Painter Emanuel Leutze was a German-born American immigrant. He painted 3 versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware. The original was destroyed during World War II. Another smaller version was hung in the White House from 1970–2014 and is estimated to sell at auction next week for over $15M.

The third version is a centerpiece of grand scale at The Met, where some of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with joined me in the epic spontaneous photo you see here. This is the story of how that happened and why that moment means so much to me.

Big Red

I was brought into Verizon as the former startup leader who was there to teach the big telco how to operate like a modern tech company. To do this I was handed a budget with room to hire 3 heads (Verizon is well over 100k employees). It wasn’t nearly enough, but they thought startup folks knew how to operate with limited capital (insert joke here). These would have to be incredible hires.

In my early career, I’d managed teams in tough environments and had learned much through the bumps and bruises. One of my takeaways from scaling Venmo from 10 to 20 to 50 to ~100 (at the time of the PayPal acquisition) was that people and culture are the foundation of great companies. Building that culture starts with employee #1. You can accomplish a massive amount with the right group of people. We got a lot of things right at Venmo and had great camaraderie, but there’s always room to improve.

I made building an amazing culture at Verizon the #1 goal. And I especially liked the challenge of doing that in a giant corporation like big red, who wasn’t exactly known for their employee experience at the time. I’m proud of the fact that today Verizon is ranked as an amazing place to work. This is my little piece of how we got there, or crossed the Delaware, so to speak.

Founding team

There were very specific goals for the Verizon customer experience– a mobile-first strategy with a brand new app, modernizing the website, and fixing the clunky checkout experience across channels. But I knew hiring against those specifics would be a trap. Work continuously evolves and I needed to find designers who could solve the broader categories of problems.

I focused my search on a product-centric, a marketing-centric, and a UI-centric designer. I needed them to also be broad generalists, self-sufficient, work extremely well together, and be capable of leading teams of their own. I was thinking way ahead while also addressing the short term needs.

After 3 months of working tightly with recruiting and vigorously interviewing candidates, I had the founding squad with Julia Murphy, Jimmie Solomon, and Bill Chen. I’ll write another article on luck in business, but suffice to say I was incredibly lucky to hire that remarkable team.

Getting to work

Julia took on interaction design, Jimmie took visual design, and Bill focused on tough UI challenges. I further overlaid the business unit org structure to each design lead, essentially giving business directors their own dedicated design function. Julia led customer engagement, Jimmie led sales/acquisition, and Bill led ordering/commerce.

This approach allowed me to focus on setting up mini-startups. I call them pods, which are essentially individual cross-functional teams, consisting of a product manager, designer, and an engineer or two. I’ll save the details of my pod approach for another time (it’s made its way into every consultancy pitch) but it’s important here because it allowed for true autonomy for those teams. I remember sitting down with another VP and saying “we need to back off and let them ship.” This was apparently unheard of, but I got everyone to play ball, and probably a few gray hairs along the way.

The pods’ impact was immediate and immense. I could easily map the impact of design initiatives to increased revenue and decreased cost. Finance could see $1 into my organization equaled $2 back to the P&L. Clearly it was time to scale the org.

Leading leaders

My bet to hire designers who could lead was spot on. As Julia, Jimmie, and Bill started hiring their teams and managing various agency extensions of our org, we could see that their design specialization responsibilities, combined with their business unit leadership, was a great way to scale.

This dual-pronged framework provided plenty of room for organizational growth. I added a design technology practice under Eric Winkle, a 10-year Verizon veteran who proved that transforming the stodgy telco into a modern tech company could happen from within. Creative agency veteran, Dawn Morris, came on to build our next-gen design (conversational and AI-driven experiences) and ops practice, managing horizontal needs like agency-based staff augmentation. Dawn and Eric hired a team of hybrid designer/engineers to take on a huge innovation project that would radically transform the service experience across the wireline and wireless businesses.

Three years into my time at Verizon we had gone from zero to over 50 employees and contract partners, with our org leading projects involving thousands of V Teamers company-wide, responsible for billions of dollars in business impact.

Takeaways

There are way too many takeaways to list but a few things stand out.

Lay the foundation

If someone is going to work on your team, get intimately familiar with the work ahead of their start date. Delegating is essential and important, but being oblivious to the problems being solved is not. Your hire will need you and rely on you to set them up for success. Even if the specific job is not your forté, personally invest your time getting familiar with it ahead of their start date.

Near yet far

I tend to spend a lot of time with my people early on–deep, deep in the weeds. I like to feel like I’m working for them or with them, side-by-side doing the work. And once I know they’ve got it, or are going to be ok, I get way out of there. I’ve heard feedback that it actually feels shocking when I step away, because all of sudden they have so much freedom that the autonomy can be daunting. I’ve seen great work come out of this approach, so I keep doing it and it keeps working.

Encourage camaraderie

I don’t have much appetite for internal politics. I’ve known leaders at every level and seniority who seem to get their kicks off of people on their team fighting for attention and adulation in hopes of a raise, or power, or who knows what else. I happen to think this is the wrong incentive for the types of problems I’m interested in solving. An executive-coach might tell you that some friendly competition on your staff is good for arriving at balanced solutions and helps preserve the hierarchy, blah, blah, blah… I’m not into it and I don’t buy it as anything other than self-serving careerism on the part of a leader. And don’t fall for the excuse that at the senior ranks there’s plenty of elbowing. Instead, make the world better, block and tackle, and don’t pass that toxicity on.

Study innovation and you’ll quickly find that the biggest challenges are solved with small teams who unequivocally work together. The “1+1 = 3” approach. Be transparent about the importance of this and directly ask your team to spend time with each other early on, get to know one another, and realize they are all responsible for bettering the team. It makes a huge difference, don’t skip it. If you see weird politicking, stamp it out with fervor.

If you want competition, set up your goals and incentives so everyone knows what’s going on. The greatest competitors at the highest level in tennis are also incredibly close friends.

Don’t dive in

It’s tempting to think that your 360 view as a leader somehow imparts a better perspective on a body of work. It imparts a perspective and you’re likely missing a huge amount of the other perspective. No matter how smart you think you are, it’s highly unlikely that the summaries you get will somehow leave you in a better place than a strong team member on specific work they are engaged with everyday. If you don’t believe me, you might need my next tip.

Plant high trust

Trust is like a seed. You need to plant it early, water it, care for it, and watch it grow into something beautiful that you can rely on. Eventually it’s robust and hearty and makes everything else possible. Trust is a two-way street, but as a leader, you are responsible for it. If you don’t have it with someone on your team, it’s on you. Lies travel fast, truth travels slow. When you have trust you can play the long game, which is just good business.

During my time at Verizon we maintained a 100% retention rate in my organization, during a time when designers, engineers, and product managers were fiercely recruited. That takes a forest of trust.

Be accountable

I prefer to give credit for success and ideas directly to my team and take responsibility for slip ups. But strong players on your team will invariably want to be directly accountable. That means you as the leader step out of the conversation and don’t play hero, which is typically for your own ego, nothing more. Something about balancing when and how to step out makes me better at my job and feels right as a human being. Folks seem to really appreciate this. Not much else to it.

Closing thoughts

“Doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.” — Winnie the Pooh.

This was written by A. A. Milne in post-industrial revolution England. A period of heightened productivity and huge ambition in business growth around the world. Milne served in both world wars and knew a thing or two about teams, goals, and perseverance. It’s easy to dismiss a phrase from a children’s book, a bit more interesting to think of the perspective of the person writing it and what their experience might impart into their words. This phrase is an important reminder to me of something I have certainly experienced with my teams.

Take walks, go on field trips, spend time together with your team intentionally not working. I certainly enjoy the time and can feel the difference in the team when they are back at it. If you’re remote, go for a walk while you talk on the phone about your favorite TV series or hobbies or nothing at all! Get creative and if all else fails, simply give folks some time back.

Which brings us back to where this story began. The organization we built at Verizon was on one such field trip, to spend the day doing nothing at The Met, when we walked into The American Wing and saw our budding nation’s first President in grand scale hanging on the wall.

Like A. A. Milne, Emanuel Leutze clearly channeled the importance of leadership in his painting, which dates to 1851, right out of the productivity-focused industrial revolution. I think that aspect of the work is what struck me when I spontaneously said “ok everyone, let’s recreate this painting!”

Without another word, in the brief moments between quiet museum passers-by, we all immediately knew what to do and where to pose. It felt like magic as we floated into position as one, captured in time without notice by the ever-present museum guards. A single photo, perfectly encapsulating everything I love about building amazing teams, and definitely my favorite version of Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Crossing the Delaware was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rock & Roll

It was the spring of 2013 and I was coming off a year touring with my band, Wildlife Control. We were the epitome of indie rock in 2012, featured on the all the blogs, topping Hypem, and our song Analog or Digital hit #12 on the alternative radio charts. I was in Midtown Manhattan, catching up with an old friend, Iqram Magdon-Ismail over Thai food, when he asked “so with all the music success, are you making any money?” I loved his directness, I also knew he’s great at math and that he knew, despite Wildlife Control crossing millions of streams and topping physical sales charts, our revenue probably wasn’t reflective of our global audience size. So I nodded and said “you know, a little bit I guess, it’s the music industry, so…”

I first met Iqram and his co-founder Andrew Kortina back in 2007 after a solo piano show in Chelsea where I debuted some new songs. The three of us hit it off immediately and developed a deep mutual respect for each other, our shared love for innovation, rhythm, and the NYC hustle. So here we were about 5 years, many post-show after parties, and several failed startups later, when Iqram suggested we join forces. “What would you think about bringing all your expertise from launching Wildlife Control over to Venmo?” At first I didn’t get it, but as we chatted I realized two things: 1) Iqram knew I dreamt big, followed my heart, and for this reason his proposition was interesting to me and 2) the various parts of Venmo, between the product, the brand, and the vibe needed to come together in a way that people would love. I knew how to do that, so we shook hands and our story begins.

Avocado, Kale, and Arcade Fire

A few weeks before officially starting at Venmo, I was in line at my favorite neighborhood sandwich shop, ‘Snice. As usual, there was some great music playing in the background. The two women in front of me struck up a conversation about it. Pointing up, one says to the other, “This is a great song isn’t it? Yeah, it’s Arcade Fire, aren’t they so good?” Now, I knew the indie rock catalog very well back then and though I didn’t know this particular track, I did know it was certainly not Arcade Fire. But in 2012, Arcade Fire had somehow managed to own the category of all music that sounded evenly remotely like indie rock. It was cool to identify with them, it was cool to talk about them, and it was cool to recognize their songs.

In that moment, as I ordered my avocado-kale panini, I knew what we needed to do to bring Venmo to the masses – button up the product and make sure that it was not only solid and easy to use, but also cool to talk about, cool to know about, and ready to ride the network effect to mass popularity. I knew this playbook, straight out of the music industry.

Day 1–30, Form Follows Function

I’d known Iqram and Kortina for a few years and so had a lot of context on Venmo heading into my official start day. I was one of the first users of Venmo, on SMS before they had even launched an app, providing early feedback. By the time I walked into our nice new open office on West 25th St., the team consisted of a small group of engineers, a designer, an office manager, and an operations lead. The mobile app strategy was finding its market fit in the early days of the App Store, and the team was finally achieving a monthly active user base in the thousands, with users they didn’t personally know.

But growth in active users was plateauing, certainly not hitting the hockey-stick curve every startup wants. Which is why they brought me in. While it was amazing to have engineers ship lightning fast and own their respective features, it also meant there wasn’t strong cohesion across the touch points that a user experienced on Venmo. For example– from the site, to marketing materials, to the app, I found over 30 shades of blue — all of which should have been the same single color.

I sat down and interviewed everyone to understand how they thought about Venmo, and how they might describe it to friends. Their descriptions were similar, but also slightly different. It was an engineering culture and the description was very functional. “An easy way to send someone money.”

Form follows function is a great way to build a solid product. This was one of the best examples of simplicity of design. The velocity of the team, how fast they shipped, was incredible and I didn’t want to slow things down.

However, payments is full of potential friction points, and user growth is exceedingly challenging for a new financial services brand. For compliance alone, Venmo required sensitive information like bank account, birth date, and social security numbers from its users. I knew Venmo needed to immediately feel inevitable as a brand and instantly build trust. It would take a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. The same hidden quality that Arcade Fire conveyed to music fans. “It’s Arcade Fire, aren’t they great?” When someone splits a bill, we needed the default response to be “Venmo me” — no further explanation given or necessary.

Buttoning up the Product

Two months in, during the summer of 2013, I had a plan. Apple had announced iOS 7 with its flat design aesthetic and Android was trending in the same direction. This was a radical departure from the skeuomorphic style that had dominated the early app store. The team fully embraced this as the moment to refactor our apps and button up our vibe.

I decided simplicity and speed were paramount. When someone is sending a payment they want to get the job done and feel confident in the experience. Zero friction. A few examples:

1. Helvetica Neue would be available on both Apple and Android devices, not requiring any additional lag time of an external font. Easy choice there.
2. We picked a single blue, which would feel immediately trustworthy yet distinct enough that it would be Venmo’s Blue. I chose a palette of cool grays that lent to the feeling of speed, lightness, and simplicity.
3. We worked hard on our own custom line-based iconography that was as straightforward as could be.

In total, the brand, design, and communication guidelines were a huge evolution for Venmo, now all buttoned up and ready for the masses.

Find great launch partners

In music, releasing a big record is like throwing a big wedding. The key is a lot of planning, various partnerships, and coordinating everything for maximum impact. It’s a moment in time and you get one chance to get it all to go just right. You need to pour your heart into it.

Since we were ready with an app that embraced the flat aesthetic of iOS, I knew that topic would be a great conversation point with Apple. They wanted apps to help encourage their developer community to move away from the popular skeuomorphic aesthetic and embrace this new design direction. We knew we nailed it and we needed Apple to see that. Conversations went well, and we worked hand in hand pulling all nighters to update our site per Apple’s requests. We timed our big release with the release date of iOS 7 and like magic– Venmo was one of a handful of iOS 7 ready apps that were featured in the App Store on launch week. It was a huge moment.

Downloads went through the roof. We were quickly moving up the charts. Then Google followed suit, featuring Venmo in the Google Play (Android app) store. We were cooking.

Lucas like to dance

It was time to turn up the juice. We looked at our social ad spend and realized the ROI (return on investment) wasn’t what we knew we could get. First we moved our ad spend into the “invite friend” feature of Venmo, testing out giving users $5 instead of $1 when they invited a friend. It worked so well we reverted almost immediately. But we now had a powerful growth dial and knew our hypothesis on ROI was correct.

Emboldened, Iqram and Kortina gave me full reign to think of the most effective way to spend our remaining marketing budget to blow growth through the roof. It was time to think about subways and taxis, the blood stream of NYC.

Unimpressed by ad agency pitches, we decided to go our own direction. I set up a DSLR in the office and took some high res portraits of our devops engineer Lucas Chi, Movember stubble and all. Sandra Rubinchik stepped in as copywriter and away we went. Lucas does yoga, Lucas wears jeans, Lucas likes to dance, Lucas uses Venmo. So much rhythm. So much vibe. This was gold and we knew it.

Let me explain…

Earlier I mentioned the importance of trust in a payment app. Andrew Staub, our growth engineer, found that an invited or referred user was 10x more likely to become a monthly active. We didn’t need to generate downloads, we needed word-of-mouth.

With a solid user base to build upon in NYC, I knew if I could get these pictures of Lucas plastered across subways, we’d get folks talking. Just like the two women grooving to what they incorrectly identified as Arcade Fire, we were on the precipice of capturing all the hipness that comes with knowing about something cool, or people’s tendency to pretend to know about something they think will make them cool.

I called up CBS Outdoor (now Outfront Media) and asked for their last minute subway ad inventory. They gave me a great price, knowing full well that it would be next to impossible for me to meet the printer deadlines to get these large ads delivered. I also bought an ad takeover of Bedford Ave, the subway station at the center of Williamsburg — the epicenter of hipsters slinging FOMO. CBS Outdoor definitely didn’t think we’d make the deadlines but knew we would owe the fees regardless.

Hearts racing we signed the papers, got the print specs, and I brought in Robin Spencer, a seasoned production file expert. We cranked through the assets, got everything delivered and our ads were up just in time for the holidays. We even got some kudos from the folks at CBS Outdoor. It was a Christmas miracle.

What happened next was beyond what we’d imagined.

NYC went absolutely bonkers over the ads.

Back then, most subways ads were ignorable boring corporate product marketing. Or Dr Zizmor. Our ads were in your face and patently not ignorable. People were talking, then Buzzfeed and Gawker, then major outlets like Fox News, Fast Company, and the New York Times — as 2014 rolled in, everyone in NYC, and many more across the country were up in arms about Lucas and Venmo.

Venmo had entered the national consciousness and “Venmo me” became vernacular. Job done.

Takeaways

Going from thousands of users to millions requires a type of growth mindset in teams that is constantly open and fluid, yet executes extremely fast and well. Setbacks are fine, as long as they are fast too.

Instincts are powerful.

Go with them, ride them. Almost nothing we did could have been read in a book. There was no example or model for drumming up that much interest in Venmo. Today, subways are full of ads for startups with big bold fonts. Back then, start ups didn’t advertise in subways because no one knew how effective an out-of-home advertising strategy could be for an app. It was all instinct.

Great decisions have massive long tails.

The design of Venmo that we launched in 2013 lasted over 7 years, well into 2020. During that time the user base grew from thousands to tens of millions. Transaction volume increased exponentially. Word-of-mouth never stopped. Anyone who lived in NYC in 2013–2014 knows that Lucas rides bikes.

Trusting each other’s ideas is a secret weapon.

I have met so many teams and professionals who need to have ideas validated by expert speakers and online articles. All good, but don’t ignore the brilliant ideas of the person sitting next to you, who’s living through the same challenges with you day in and day out. They probably have the best ideas– ask, listen, and believe in them.

Efficient multi-threading is essential.

Not the programming variety, we’ll save that for a different day. Executing multiple aspects of a focused business strategy leads to the hockey stick. I often hear this advice given to CEOs: “know the one thing you need to get right and if you just do that everything will be ok.” It’s important, but that one thing merely gets you survival. If you want amazing growth you need to solve multiple big problems at once, that all happen to be part of a singular vision. It means tough, intentional, and fast decision making—being in a constant state of flow. Easier said than done!

Leadership is all about bringing the very best out of people.

Iqram and Kortina saw something in me and knew I was capable of solving an incredibly abstract growth challenge. They gave me the charter and license to figure it out. I’m grateful to them for that incredibly unique opportunity. They were great at spotting unique talent. I relate. As a Grammy-nominated music producer this is exactly what top producers do with artists—bring out the underlying essence and channel it into a track. This is how I approach working with teams not just in the studio, but in any business. I’ve always found it to be tremendously rewarding for everyone involved.

Last but not least– everything is related.

When I was first starting out, I was encouraged to think of making records and starting businesses as two completely different things. Against my own intuition, I separated my interests based on how I thought the world sees them — music over here, tech over there, etc. After going from Wildlife Control to Venmo, it validated what I’ve always known, that these various pieces are all part of the same stuff. These unique combinations make us who we are. Humans aren’t built as a series of compartments the way businesses and products are organized, and even those are built in compartments due to logistical and operational necessity. Bring your whole self to everything you are involved with and your impact will be 10x, guaranteed. You do you.

Adieu!

There are so many more stories and learnings from my time at Venmo and that era of innovation. I hope you find some inspiration in these. ’Til next time.

What I Learned Launching Venmo was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Context, context, context.

I’ve learned that when dealing with large, complex solutions like ours, almost everyone involved struggles with understanding the relationship between their piece of the puzzle and the big picture. And because several of our products make up the big picture, our operations don’t naturally output many artifacts that illustrate the full context of our ecosystem and vision at Wavelo.

So explaining context internally to our teams has naturally been where I’ve needed to spend a lot of my time. Our teams are strong and autonomous, are knee-deep in shipping product, and they were craving the big picture stuff. I’m already seeing that connecting the dots will bring much more efficiency, excitement, and positive energy to our teams.

Build all the bridges. All the time.

No person is an island, and no company exists without strong relationships, both externally and less obviously, internally.

Externally, I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback we’ve been getting from technology partners as well as CSPs interested in “simple software that makes telecom a breeze.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen such immediate and tangible desire for new products as what I’m seeing at Wavelo. It’s humbling to know we’re working on something that addresses a huge need for so many operators globally. Thank you for all the great early conversations and I look forward to many more.

Internally, since we’ve organized by function (product, engineering, customer support, etc) we need better, faster bridges between functions. Building bridges means that we are more likely to assume positive intent, which is vital when moving fast. Strong bridges across organizations take constant work, are never perfect, and at times are extremely difficult to maintain. But this a long term investment that I can see will be vital to our success as a company.

Our strongest bridges exist between Wavelo and its customers. I’ve previously mentioned our great partnerships with Dish and Ting Internet. Building MONOS and ISOS are massive undertakings. It’s the true collaborative spirit that allows us to innovate on behalf of our customers. We are thankful for these solid partnerships, which perfectly brings me to my last point…

Gratitude.

Having started dozens of companies and successfully scaling several through IPO or acquisition, I’ve learned there’s never a perfect, stress free way to create massive value in the world. It’s hard work, so reminding myself and our teams to be thankful for the parts that are working well, is super important to going the distance.

The war in the Ukraine, which weighs heavily on so many of us, comes on the heels of a two year global pandemic. Reminders to take nothing for granted and more than ever, to hold space for what our colleagues may be going through on any given day.

In the spirit of gratitude I’d like to give a shout out to the rest of the leadership and our teams at Wavelo. You’ve made our first 60 days a time where I’ve expanded my horizons and grown as a professional. As we bring on new folks, with an awesome diversity of experiences from around the world (come join us!), I look forward to preserving the sense of camaraderie we’ve established on this rocket ship.

To wrap, a hearty thanks to friends and former colleagues for your support here on LinkedIn over the last couple months. This is a super exciting time and a journey I’m humbled to have the opportunity to share. Onward!

In our rapidly-evolving digitally-centric world, I often fall into the trap of thinking of design as the latest glossy app or shiny consumer electronics product. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that design is as old as human kind; an ancient and innate part of who we are as a species.

Simply put, design is the successful arrangement of thoughts, materials, or technologies to advance towards a goal. We all do it, designing our schedules, homes, and vacations. We design consciously and unconsciously, going through iterations and self critiques, endlessly optimizing towards our goals.

In helping businesses, I’m often asked “what makes good design?” There’s an understandable need to quantify it, measure it, and establish value. Over time I’ve come to think of good design as exhibiting four qualities that are quantifiable to varying degrees. I like to use the humble swing as an example of the versatility of these qualities.

1. Good design is Timeless. I would guess anyone in any era sees a swing and knows exactly what it does. The design itself requires no change to continue being effective. It’s a perfect marriage of the underlying technologies and the form they take.
2. Good design is Functional. No one doubts the functionality of a swing. It clearly accomplishes the amazing goal of allowing humans to defy gravity over and over again. Amazing.
3. Good design is Beautiful. Probably the least quantifiable. Beautiful design tends to be something everyone agrees on without convincing. I find most swings to be beautiful objects. If you think about it, I think you’d agree.
4. Good design is Personal. The swing excels here. The seat fits almost anyone. You can change the length of the chains to adjust the height. It feels like it’s there for you. We create memories and emotions around good design.

The Round Table

The next timely topic is design process. How do we design? How do we design together?

The design process has clearly come into vogue as Design Thinking has become a mainstream part of business training. Agile and Lean are close siblings to Design Thinking—leading to this feeling that understanding our customers or users, and then collaboratively working through the problem and potential solutions is something that is hyper modern business practice. Something that requires training.

However, design process is not new. It’s fundamental to who we are. By nature we seek to solve problems and millennia of evolution has lead to humans who excel at telling each other stories and working together to achieve common goals. The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are examples that bringing together a team of various skill sets and aligning on a common north star is a strong strategy to win.

Essentially, design process will always be about having the right skill sets at the table, creating rituals that allow those skill sets to have a common language, and utilizing tools that maximize the potential to solve problems in a given medium. Today we use Design Thinking, Agile, Lean, and the ever popular and fun Design Sprint.

Fundamentals

Anyone who’s every worked as a designer knows that there is often some explaining that comes with proposing a solution. Design is fundamentally a change agent. And change tends to take work.

We naturally resist change because it triggers a sense of the unknown. It’s good to remember this resistance is just a basic human survival mechanism. Through calm reasoning and open demonstration, most people will easily see the benefit and value of a well-designed solution.

I’m not sure when I realized this but product design is really only two things.

1. The creation of a new product or feature.
2. The redesign or evolution of an existing product or feature.

In either case, it’s always about change.

Capacity

When we zoom out on history and look at the aggregate effect of our constant designing, we see all this change has a significant impact on a measurable value. That value is our carrying capacity to sustain human population.

Early Human History

During the first 95% of human history, around 200,000 years, our population grew relatively slowly. Most of our time and energy was spent moving from place to place, looking for food, and surviving. By the end of early human history, human population was around 2 million people globally.

Agricultural Revolution

About 10,000 years ago we began learning how to farm. This allowed for more time to solve other problems like build housing structures. This created the ability for us to sustain significantly faster population growth than before. By 1750, the global human population reached 700 million.

Industrial Revolution

Through rapid advances in technology and manufacturing, we’ve seen the world population grow at unprecedented rates. From the start of the Industrial Revolution until now, in less that 200 years, our population has grown by over 10X, to 7.7 billion.

As we solve new types of problems, we increase our capacity to sustain human population. Clearly there are limits to purely using population as a measurement of the value of the solutions we design. Hopefully this measurement allows us to see the profound effect of our innate drive to design solutions when paired with our biological programming to perpetuate our species.

Shifts

Within the broader revolutions outlined above, there are smaller shifts that make up a given a period. For example, the Agricultural Revolution spanned the Stone age, Bronze age, and Iron age. Those time periods are easy to see and categorize in hindsight.

Looking at our current Industrial Revolution, we’ve clearly entered a time dominated by the emergence of computers, software, and digital technology. We could refer this as the Computational Age or Information Age. But it’s much harder, perhaps impossible, to predict when enough change is happening that we’re on the cusp of a new revolution.

The reason I wrote about carrying capacity earlier was to show that technology allows us to sustain and grow human population. From farming to urbanization to capitalism, these advents help us fuel population growth.

So how is the Computational Age effecting population growth? To put it in perspective, during the last 50 years we’ve added more people to the global population than in the entire previous 200,000 years of human history. Our ability to use digital technology to automate processes that once took significant manual work has exponentially increased our carrying capacity.

And as we dig deeper into the Computational Age, it looks like we’re only getting faster at this. In the past 20 years, businesses have shifted their strategy from “Digital First” to “Mobile First”. Now, with the maturing of machine learning, natural language processing, and voice interfaces, we are entering a shift to A.I. First.

A.I. First

Thinking back to design, process, and fundamentals—it helps to have words and common vocabulary around design processes that work for specific types of problem using a given set of technologies and tools. Arthur used a Round Table, and modern businesses use Design Thinking.

Design Thinking makes sense to solve problems through a customer centric lens. But will those processes and tools help us advance the ability for machines to understand humans and build solutions for us?

Lately I’ve been exploring the following thought.

The first 40 years of computational design have resulted in a process called Design Thinking. The next 40 will require Machine Thinking, in order to enable Design Conveyance.

Machine Thinking

Machine Thinking is the set of methodologies and culture used by humans to teach machines how to advance towards a design goal.

Traditionally in modern product development you’ll likely find a core team of a Product Manager, Product Designer, and Application or Product Engineer. In an A.I. First model we need to add a Machine Learning Engineer and a Machine Learning Researcher.

Unlike traditional product development process, the team’s job will center less around what humans (or users) need and instead focus on the creation of algorithms and pathways for a machine to learn and output based on that learning.

In Machine Thinking, we are designing a set of interaction models for a machine to learn, output, and interact with a human (or other machines) with potentially infinite variations and outcomes.

As designers we naturally labor over the finest details of our work. But in an A.I. First model, we will not know many of the details. Machine Thinking places the emphasis less on the perfection of the design output, and more on the robustness of the design system.

I’ve encouraged teams to spend more of their cycles creating strong system maps, agnostic of interfaces, that outline the interaction model. In Machine Thinking this becomes even more valuable.

A simple Machine Thinking exercise: what are the fewest number of components (interaction or interface) that are capable of solving the greatest number of known transactions?

Conveyance

Design Conveyance is the ability to deconstruct abstract human intuition into teachable constructs that can organically self perpetuate.

There are A.I. First teams around the world currently engaged in teaching machines how to design fashion, create music, and write poetry and prose. While the output is far from perfect, it is advancing at an incredible pace. At this point, machines are getting so good at writing fake articles that their writing could easily be mistaken as human written news. A.I. generated images of people look like photos of actual people who we would assume really exist.

These examples are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying in their potential. However, they still require a significant amount of human set up and development and only produce very specific output. Said differently, humans still need to define the specific problem for the machine, and the machine can be taught to design a solution.

But what if machines can be taught to identify problems without us and create those solutions independently? Could they find and solve problems faster and better than humans? And if machines are solving everything, what becomes our role as humans of the future?

Cognitive Product

Cognitive Product: product designed for exponential learning deeply tied to human behavior — Justin Reilly @justinmreilly

My former colleague and friend Justin Reilly has significantly influenced my thinking on the shift to A.I. First. His definition of cognitive product is important in that it outlines two key factors: 1) exponential learning and 2) a deep connection to human behavior.

I believe that as we mature in Machine Thinking methodologies and improve our abilities in Design Conveyance that Cognitive Product will become as table stakes as a web site. All information that we interact with across any touch point will have a level of intelligence that gives it a distinct advantage over most popular software and hardware today.

We are already seeing the performance benefits for companies who have embraced the shift to A.I. First. Netflix is an obvious popular example of software that excels at learning and presenting information in a way that is deeply tied to our behavior. I’ve done my share of binging against my own best judgement.

I was intrigued and alarmed by this recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Fortnite. I first heard about it through my 6 year old son excitedly doing “the dab” and “the floss”, mimicking his older friends who were hooked on the game. I thought of it as most parents do, the latest harmless video game that kids are into. But the WSJ article outlines something different in Fortnite. With its massive online user base combined with machine learning, Fortnite is constantly improving on player engagement. It is competing for kids attention on an entirely different level than before.

Like with many videogames, the more people play Fortnite, the more data is generated about what captivates players the most and what drives players to quit. The constant stream of information boosts the ability of game designers to use machine learning to amplify player engagement.

As games get smarter, parents feel outmatched. “It’s not a fair fight,” said Dr. Richard Freed, child and adolescent psychologist and author of “Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age.”

Fortnite feels to some like an uninvited visitor, one that refuses to leave.

— Betsy Morris, Wall Street Journal

Next

Under the hood, A.I. First product will exhibit 4 design characteristics.

1. Reinforced learning
2. Always on
3. Interface agnostic
4. Blurred lines between physical and digital

The examples of Netflix and Fortnite affirmed my belief that A.I. First is already upon us and the early movers are winning. It also leads me to believe that the initial movement toward A.I. First will not look and feel distinctly different, but that cognitive products will perform better than previous generations of computational design.

As we look towards designing the future, I’m inspired by the incredible possibilities afforded by advancing technologies. I’m also deeply aware of the responsibility that comes with the power of these modern tools. It’s more important than ever that we learn and prioritize what is truly valuable to us as a species.

This is a big part of why I fiercely advocate for diverse teams and thoughts in the creation of cognitive products. It’s only by collaborative and inclusive work that we can arrive at solutions that work for the nearly infinite scale enabled in an A.I. First world. As algorithms generate new works of Shakespeare and Beethoven it will become increasingly important that we not only teach machines, but also ourselves, what it means to be human.

Machine Thinking, Conveyance, and the Future of Design was originally published in TDS Archive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.