Part 1: Philosophie Origins
Interview with Skot Carruth of Philosophie Group, Inc.
Interviewer: First question is: what is Philosophie and how long have you been in business?
Skot: Philosophie is a consulting firm that helps our clients make better digital products faster. We focus in the digital space, generally on the new development of custom software for the purpose of either uncovering new revenue streams or helping to facilitate business operations. Sometimes that means cost savings or providing a better experience to employees or customers.
We’ve been around almost eight years now. We started in January, 2008. It’s been a whirlwind since then.
Interviewer: Where are your offices located?
Skot: We have offices in Santa Monica, New York, and San Francisco.
Interviewer: What do you do for the company, Skot? Please tell us a little bit about your role.
Skot: I’m one of the founders along with my partner, Emerson. When we started out we were both designer/developers. We did everything. Over time we came to specialize in various aspects of doing the work and now that we’re almost 40 people, we are working more in the managerial capacity. I’m currently the CEO and Emerson is the President of our East Coast operation.
Interviewer: Great. How did you guys first come together? What is the origin story?
Skot: Emerson and I met at UCLA. We were in an organization called the “UCLA Advertising and Marketing Team,” a completely student-run organization that is a lot like mock trial, only for advertising.
I was a fourth year when he was a freshman. I had worked in that organization for three years in a row and I was one of the directors for it, so basically I hired him. He was majoring in design — very smart, very digitally savvy, and we were at the time looking to build a digital team for our group.
That’s how we met. We worked together throughout the year and ultimately became very good friends because of this mutual interest and experience we had in designing digital products.
Interviewer: Great. Little off topic, but that program sounds amazing. Allowing you to get your feet wet with low risk.
Skot: Yeah, and it was something we were really proud of because many schools had an advertising program or major and the competition was actually integrated into it, meaning our competition had a lot of support from the department and from the faculty. But at UCLA, we didn’t have any such thing, so the fact that we were able to be competitive despite not having a lot of faculty guidance was something I’m really proud of.
Interviewer: Then when you say “competitive”, were there groups that would do bake-offs or . . .?
Skot: Not quite. There was an overarching organization called the National Student Advertising Competition and every year there’s a corporate sponsor that provides a case problem. The student groups from different schools compete against each other to basically win the account. It’s an advertising pitch competition.
Interviewer: Between you and Emerson, who is the hacker and who is the designer or did you both do a bit of both or how did that shake out?
Skot: We were both both in the beginning. But over time, as I said, we became specialized in different areas. I ended up going to kind of the extremes, so I was often doing . . . I don’t know, it would be generous to call it devops, but setting up servers and doing that kind of stuff on the back end. On the front end I was into very detailed visual design work, whereas Emerson kind of focused on the areas in between. He was very good at the interaction design and front end development.
Interviewer: Sure.
Skot: Since then our roles have switched again, but yeah, in the early years, that’s how we split the work.
Interviewer: Very cool. So you can probably hack up Linux from the command line?
Skot: Well, just a little bit.
When we started we thought we were pretty hot shit, like, “hey, we’re just two guys who could do all of this ourselves.” But once we found people who were better than us, we really learned to take a back seat in certain areas. Back end development, ironically, is something I’m more interested in now than back then, but that was a job we worked ourselves out of very fast.
Interviewer: Can you share a story from the early days that still gets you excited about bad ass you were even back then?
Skot: There’s a few that come to mind. Most of them are stories about how hard it is to make stuff and how much we underestimated things. I’ll tell one of those stories and then I’ll tell a bad ass story.
There was one piece of work that I’m still really proud of. I think it’s one of the best things we made in terms of outcome for the client. It was a custom t-shirt company, it was two guys and they were running their business manually with an army of interns.
The whole process was very hands-on. Basically their clients would hire them to do a custom t-shirt order and all of these interns were mini project managers. First they would go back and forth with the clients to submit designs and try to get them approved. Then they’d call up the printers and get their estimates, tweak the artwork so it’s finalized, make sure they get all of the sizes right, arrange the shipping…
There were a lot of steps in the process which translated to a lot of work because it was so manual. But the steps were actually super predictable from project to project, so it was a good candidate for business process automation.
So the client came to us and said, “Hey, we think we can use some technology to make this better.” We gave them a quote that was a fixed amount, based on a lot of back and forth about the requirements and basically we let the client tell us what they needed it to do and we agreed to a price and started the project.
As soon as we got into it and started to pick apart their process and all of the logical branches of it and the different features and integration points and UIs for the project managers and for their clients, it ended up being so much more work than we agreed to with the client. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, so the scope of the contract was completely off.
But these were friends of ours and they were a scrappy startup and I wanted to make sure that they got what they needed. We worked really, really hard on it and the system that we built was robust enough that the two founders were basically able to go into semi-retirement and the business practically runs itself. Still going strong 7 years later!
Interviewer: Great success story!
Skot: I’m super proud of that outcome because it made everyone’s lives better. As business owners, they had a really good outcome. The people they were hiring as interns became much more efficient and their work became more enjoyable. And because of the cost savings that this enabled, they were able to hire them for real, so no more unpaid internships…
Interviewer: How long in Philosophie’s history did this happen?
Skot: It must have been year 1.
Interviewer: Oh wow.
Skot: We earned about $4.80 per hour on it.
Interviewer: But the eternal satisfaction. You’re still telling the story today.
Skot: Exactly.
Interviewer: You said you had another story.
Skot: Yeah. The other one that came to mind, and this is actually how we met Nick and Brendan, who became partners in the business and built our engineering team.
We had a relationship with a small creative marketing agency. They hired us so much that we basically became their digital team. They would come to us with cool brands and creative ideas they wanted to do to market them.
There was this one product that was an alcohol brand, they called it “modern absinthe.” It was absinthe, which wasn’t very popular in America when we were doing this, which was neat. It also had this interesting mirrored bottle that was kind of a unique product attribute. They talked about how it reflected the history of the spirit in a modern way, great metaphor.
Somehow that led to us having the idea that the website experience would be as though you were looking through a zoetrope. I took the idea to Nick and Brendan, who were our favorite freelance hackers. I thought they were just brilliant. There was nothing that they couldn’t figure out, so I was excited to share this.
I said, “Hey, guys, I want to do this new effect on this site. I’ve never seen anyone do it before but basically I want the pages in the navigation to be arranged around the inside of a cylinder and when you click on one, it goes through all of the pages in between that and the one you’re going to. You see them whizzing by and you land on the page that you clicked on.” I sent them examples of zoetropes.
When they came back and they were like, “Yeah, we think we can figure this out,” I was completely stoked. Again, it was our collective naivety that allowed us to take on that project and to take on that challenge. But when they figured it out and we did all of the optimization and had the satisfaction of really being the first to do something like that in JavaScript, it felt really good and I’m still really proud of that work today.
Interviewer: Did jQuery exist yet?
Skot: It may have. If it did, it was just starting to get traction..
Interviewer: Finally, where do you see Philosophie in 10 years? What’s the North star of the organization?
Skot: We want to validate these values and methods that we’re using. Even though the agile manifesto is 20 years old at this point, its underlying values are not widely understood or adopted.
Similarly with lean startup; it’s really just a restatement of what product designers have known for a long time. You have to test what you’re making before you just build it.
For some reason in our industry, we’ve been kind of ignorant of how products in other fields that were successful have actually gone to market and had that success.
We want to demonstrate how effective this way of working is in a measurable way so that organizations see clearly that there’s no better way to do it. We want to define that state of the art in terms of process of building digitals products and platforms and demonstrate, through the success of people who have worked with us, that doing it this way is better. That it’s going to increase the likelihood that the product is still around after five years, for example, or that it grows faster than products that took a more traditional approach.
We love to be able to demonstrate that companies that work like this have higher retention, happier employees who are more engaged. We like to demonstrate that companies that practice user-centered design have happier, more loyal customers. Ultimately, do they have a better share of the market than their competitors? Do their customers give them higher feedback scores? I’m really committed to proving that what we do here has good long term outcomes for the companies that we work with. That is, in short, the guiding light for Philosophie.
Interviewer: Great. Bottom line, whatever the KPI is to go over that and beyond, right?
Skot: Yes, in the short-run. But we really want to look at long-term measures of product and business success. Not just, “hey, next quarter profits should be higher.”
Interviewer: Right. Because that’s almost the easiest part, right?
Skot: Yeah. We want to build things that are sustainable and valuable and not just toys or things that show a temporary lift but just everyone gives up on after a couple months.
Interviewer: Last question: what’s behind your company tag line, “Make It Better”?
Skot: Oh, yeah, I’m glad you asked about that. It has a lot of meanings and it’s kind of funny. It’s not necessarily . . . I’ll put it this way. When we came up with the tag line, it was kind of like we were in a New York subway and just thinking, “What do we do?” It kind of just flashed into my mind, we make stuff better. Then we started discussing it and it was, “Wow, that phrase makes sense in a lot of ways for us.”
One, we believe in quality, so when people hire us to do a job, we’re going to make that product better than the competition, our competition. However, we also believe very much in agile development and a core tenet of that is iterative improvement. Even after our product launches, continuing to make it better and not just letting it stagnate is something that we value a lot and talk about a lot. That’s kind of how it affects the product itself.
But then we started thinking about how do we do this? How did we get to where we are? How did we gain the ability to do this level of work? The simple answer was, well, we’re very invested in making ourselves better. It’s kind of one of the core values that we look for when we hire people is people who are constantly trying to improve at their own craft and constantly educating themselves and care about getting better and better.
So the “Make It Better” kind of applies to every individual at Philosophie and their commitment to self education and pushing their personal practice, and by extension, our involvement in the design community, in the development community, in the agile and startup community is how we kind of take our own desire to push the state of the art and promote that across our industry.
Interviewer: That’s great. So “Make It Better” is not just externally facing, resonates with everybody on the team personally.
Skot: Yeah, yeah. Also it’s fun, just like the name “Philosophie”, it’s fun to have a phrase like that that actually is spoken so commonly within the organization and it’s that reminder. Every day someone says, “Oh, why don’t we start with this and then we’ll plan on making it better?” or, “Why don’t we take this thing on the site that seems to not be doing so well, let’s make that better.” Just the fact that it always comes up in conversation makes it a really fun tag line.
And that brings us to the end of Part 1. Watch for the next installment, “Part 2: Philosophie’s Tools and Processes for Innovating”, coming next week.
