Shooting for the Moon!
Design Driven NYC Event presented by FirstMark Capital
I recently attended a Design Driven Meetup event at Parsons School of Design, presented by FirstMark Capital. Design Driven is the largest design community in NYC. Each month, it hosts an event with talks from top-tier creative leaders from emerging and established companies. The guests of the evening were the following:
• Katy Kasmai, Founder of TeamExponent and Engineering PM at Google
• Ben Babcock and Benjamin Running of Jet.com
• Jennifer Thibault of 18F, which makes digital products for government organizations using lean startup methods
• Khoi Vinh, Principal Designer at Adobe & former Design Director at The New York Times
Katy Kasmai gave an inspiring talk that I’d like to summarize. You can watch all of the talks at the bottom of this post. Katy works at Google by day and advocates for Moonshot thinking in life. She also works on TeamExponent, an organization she founded, that promotes the concept of Moonshot thinking to solve the big problems of our time.
What is Moonshot thinking?
It is an approach to problem solving that aims to deploy exponential growth forces, radical solutions, and breakthrough innovations — instead of aiming for small incremental growth. Moonshot projects tackle problems that have enormous value to humanity, but are technically complex problems, often deemed as “out of science fiction movies”, “technically impossible”, or “crazy”.
She used Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive as two examples to highlight the exponential impact of Moonshot projects. Tesla, as we all know makes electric cars and is thriving under the leadership of Elon Musk. On the other hand, Fisker Automotive is a lesser-known, short-lived car company that produced hybrid electric vehicles.
The failure of Fisker is due to the fact that it didn’t offer a real solution to the core problem at hand — to stop climate change. Instead, it made a safe bet and offered an incremental solution.
Tesla’s most difficult technical challenge came not in building the cars with electric motors, but in creating an infrastructure around their vehicles to make practical use of them. Through a strong passion and the persistent drive of the Tesla team to solve this problem, Tesla has managed to build 602 Supercharger stations with 3,519 Superchargers in the U.S and in doing so, helped Tesla get past a major hurdle in accomplishing mainstream adoption of their technology.
Moonshot projects in nature have big impact objectives and high technical complexity, therefore extremely passionate and talented people are drawn to them. She shares an anecdote about SpaceX (ironically another Moonshot project led by Elon Musk) and its explosive failures in attempting to launch a rocket. The rockets blew up multiple times, literally in front of the team that dedicated themselves to building them. Instead of giving up, the team was eager to improve their rocket, based on learnings from their mistakes. The team completed the production of a launch-ready rocket in one month, the same amount of time most of us can’t even build a website in.
One team member exclaimed after numerous failures, “I think most of us would have followed him(Elon Musk) into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that.” This is the spirit cultivated by having a valuable goal and a passionate team willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen.
What make teams successful?
- A clear elevating goal
- Unified commitment
- Collaborative climate
- Standards of excellence
How do we get collaborative?
All members of the team need to have a “Yes, and….” attitude. It means you’re not afraid to be wrong, but are able to cheer on your team toward the goal.
Katy offered the room full of creative people some challenging closing remarks.
“We have some huge problems (in the world), and we need all the people we can get solving them, so no more dating apps……….. We have about a 100 years left on the planet, and if we don’t have everyone solving them, we will have a shitty 100 years. We’ve got to start feeling a sense of urgency….and we just gotta do it. It starts with you. What’s your moonshot? Just do it.”
In conclusion
Day-to-day tasks for digital product development is sometimes measured by incremental results. We need to continue to innovate and execute each incremental task with a high standard of quality. In the process, let’s not lose sight of the bigger objectives — for Mic, it’s to provide the most informative and trusted news platform for our generation.
As ambitious as that already is, feel with even more conviction that we shouldn’t be afraid of Moonshot thinking. We must embrace it, make it part of the workflow, and take big problems head on — with all the passion and dedication they require.
Video Links:
Katy Kasmai, Founder of TeamExponent and Engineering PM at Google
Ben Babcock and Benjamin Running of Jet.com
Jennifer Thibault of 18F, which makes digital products for government organizations using lean startup methods
Khoi Vinh, Principal Designer at Adobe & former Design Director at The New York Times
