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I did it on purpose.
- 1. I did it? On purpose? Did I do it? Oh gosh, what have I done? What is purpose even? I did it on purpose. Jamie Kosoy • @jkosoy • Grok 2023
- 6. “He sees a cookie, he eats the cookie.” – Arthur C. Brooks
- 7. “Design is the rendering of intent.” – Jared Spool, UI Researcher, leading expert on usability and user experience design
- 30. Redacted Slides
- 61. The time check slide Note to self: If we’re 45-50 minutes in then Grok is bored, start skip 💩!
- 62. Redacted Slides
- 65. Be a custodian for the health of your team.
- 78. You’ve got no idea how someone got there, but you have a lot of sway in what happens next.
- 79. So let’s take stock.
- 80. Go forth. Design. Render with intent.
- 83. Find joy in toil.
- 87. Bump the lamp.
- 91. Take care of each other.
- 97. What you do is much less important than how you do it.
- 98. Eat the cookie or don’t.
- 99. Thanks. Jamie Kosoy • @jkosoy • Grok 2023
Notes de l'éditeur
- Thanks for having me Grok! Matt, I’m the developer you were going to convince to go build… I dunno, something crazy, but sorry buddy. I’m off the market. Let’s be friends though, we have a lot of mutual friends in common. My name is Jamie, and I hope that the time we share together is inspiring and interesting and that, by the end of this, you’ll think a little harder about how to just do your best during your waking life.
- One thing I love about going NOT first at a conference is how one talk inspires the next, like a speaker exquisite corpse. I was reading this Gallup report on the airplane because I’ve become a weird person in my apparent old age and read Gallup polls in my free time. I didn’t have this slide in the talk until Daniel was talking in the 10/20s, but it connected for me, and it connected for me with Matt’s talk, too. (Sorry folks in room 2) I’m really interested in this first chart - 23% of those surveyed worldwide - not just the US - because I heard a theme in those sessions. I noticed a theme - finding energy in what you do when you’re awake. Firing yourself. Finding your passion. Building a legacy. Finding the right job. The balance between family life and passion projects and making money, or the fear of making money, or money rules everything around me. As with you all, I think a lot about this, and I think about it under the umbrella of being content while you’re awake. Which is interesting, because what would we do if we actually arrived at that place? It’s a survival instinct to be hungry, right? As a species we wouldn’t survive without something to chase.
- But I digress. We’re going to spend the whole talk on one slide. Let’s unpack more of that in the rest of the hour. Quick poll, as anyone NOT heard of Stripe? Has anyone NOT heard of Notion? Please don’t be shy, I’m not mad at you or anything. I’m not trying to be holier than though. I’m trying to gauge if I should explain the products. if you LinkedIn stalked me, you’d know I’m about 2 months into that job and that prior to that I worked at Stripe in a semi-similar capacity for the past 4½ years. Time permitting we’ll get into some of my work at those places, but my goal here isn’t really to go deep into the bowels of building enterprise marketing websites with you today.
- Instead I want to talk a bit about this. It’s titled “The Design Squiggle” by Damien Newman. It’s while it’s a funny illustration, it’s also a chart really of the design process. Now, if you’re a designer or artist in the room you may have heard that term, “the creative process”, but just to make sure we’re all tracking, it’s the blank sheet of paper. It’s the kickoff for the project. It’s trying to figure out your new dance video. It’s getting good at a new skill. It starts with absolutely no idea and on what direction to go and, over time, turns into something easily understood. Now I’d like you to keep this in mind as we play six degrees here.
- I want to start here, with this guy. This is Arthur C. Brooks. He’s been studying happiness at Harvard for quite some time. Now I came across him on this YouTube series that Wired puts on called [Something] Support. Anyone know it? They get an expert in a field and that expert looks at questions on Twitter and then gives answers to it. He studies happiness, and so he did one on “Happiness Support”. I’m going to play a short bit for you here, so we can set the stage right.
- [pause for laughter cause I’m eating a cookie] So metacognition is pretty cool, right? The thing I really love about it is it’s about intentionality. It’s the thing that makes us different from all other life on earth. As humans, we’re the only ones that can choose that way.
- And that reminded me of this quote that I love from this famous researcher, Jared Spool. The rendering of intent. I’m a designer and a coder, amongst other hats I’ve worn in my career, and I keep coming back to this one. The rendering of intent. Reminds me a lot of that squiggle. The right side, the straight line, is the rendering. That’s your web page, or your TikTok dance. The left side is figuring out the intent.
- Now I can’t think about that quote and not think about my friends Ben and Ayaka, who I met at my first big job, a company in New York called Big Spaceship. Like Matt, I also did a lot of CD-ROM burning and building crazy stuff in Flash, but I promise that’s not what this talk is about Much. Anyway, I hired both of these folks, and then they fell in love and they got married. Ben is from Germany. Ayaka is from Japan. They’d never have met if I didn’t hire them both. And I guess they thought highly of me building connections between people, what with getting married and all. They asked me to be the minister at their wedding, here’s a photo of that.
- And here’s part of the speech that I wrote as minister for the wedding.
- It was a designer marrying a coder, and so I based the entire arc of their wedding around the quote. I said to them: “Design isn’t simply making something beautiful or useful. It’s why you’re making that beautiful, useful something in the first place.”
- And I feel obligated to tell you about exactly the caliber of designer Ayaka is She does a lot of brand identity and illustration work, and I just love her attention to detail in this stuff.
- But this is my favorite thing she’s done because um, I was the client. This is an illustration she made for me. It’s hanging in my living room. It’s 5’x5’ and it’s all in colored pencil.
- Look at the detail here. The lighting on the wheels. It’s exquisite. I can’t believe she made this. It took her six months. Can you imagine what the squiggle was here? Imagine that giant sheet of white paper.
- … now the point of this talk isn’t to talk about how great my friend Ayaka is, though I could certainly gush about her. Let’s keep playing six degrees. This is a photo of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. The detail here. The craftsmanship. The technique. Imagine what the design process was here. The squiggle must’ve been fierce. But out of it came one of the most intentional, beautiful, most wonderfully human constructions ever made in the whole history of the species.
- Looking at that details reminds of me of this, so now I want to talk about Roger Rabbit for a little bit. What we’re watching now is one of the most important scenes in the history of animation. Watch it closely. Do you see it? Roger bumped the lamp, and look at how his shadow reacts to the light moving around the room. This was all drawn by hand. Look at the camera. It’s moving! The animators had to shade and animate Roger frame by frame with the lighting and the camera, and it looks completely natural.
- Now Roger Rabbit wasn’t the first example of animation being composited on top of film. There are lots of examples prior to that that. Mary Poppins, for example. But look at the characters here in comparison to Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Do you believe for one second they’re in the same world?
- Look at the gun pressed against Bob Hoskin’s cheek. Look at the eye contact between the two characters. They’re staring right at each other.
- The director, Robert Zemeckis, wanted the animated characters to interact with as many real-world objects as possible to help with the sense of realism. Look at the water coming out of Roger’s mouth in this scene. It’s real, and Roger is drawn perfectly around it.
- Look at Roger hit himself in the head over and over and over again with real plates.
- Here’s the rig that they used to make that happen. They used practical effects, so the plates were really there, and then animated Roger on top of this thing.
- I want to speak to the coders in the room for a moment, if you’ll allow me. I understand there are a lot of you running your own small shops, or maybe you’re in school or just out of school and looking to make your way in the world. This is a PR one of my engineers at Notion wrote last week.
- If you’re not a coder, a pull request (or PR) is a change to code you ask other coders to review. Look at how detailed this writeup is.
- He closed this PR the next day. He had a conversation with some other engineers and decided against the work. The code never even got used. This was all for nothing.
- But he writes at this quality bar for every 👏 single 👏 one 👏 of his PRs. He’ll write to this level of detail, even if he changes one line of code. It’s amazing craftsmanship. He does this because in code, a change can lead to a breakage. When that happens someone might have to wake up at night or on a weekend to fix an emergency. And when they do that, they might need to figure out where the breakage happened. And he wants to give all the detail he possibly can to that person. He wants to leave a receipt of every change he ever made
- Let’s talk about Stripe.com for a second. My old team at Stripe is called Web Presence + Platform, and it’s responsible for Stripe.com. Has anyone seen this site before? Many people out in the world think Stripe.com is the best website in the world. The team is very proud of to be stewards for pushing the web forward. I was extremely proud to be a part of it.
- Now I want to talk to you about my favorite feature on that website. It’s on a few spots throughout the site, but it’s not on this page anymore - it recently changed. This is stripe.com/payments.
- And I’m not talking about the glowy lava lamp gradient thing going on. Or how clean the page is or any of that.
- I’m talking about the Face ID animation.
- Here’s a recorded GIF of just the FaceID moving, pulled straight from the page. Now the page didn’t have a GIF - it was completely remade as a bespoke animation using code, and for those that know what it is, SVG. It’s all hand coded. Not even Apple does this on Apple.com. Nobody ever noticed this. No ROI. Nobody asked us to do it. We just did it. I remember the design engineer, Nick Jones, pinging me about his idea to make this. He was looking at the mockup and was like “I think we should animate this.” and I was like “That sounds cool.” The next thing I know he’s DMing me about progress on it. Sending me screenshots of individual keyframes of the animation. “Did you notice how it creates this kind of blue sphere at one point? I wonder if we’ll be able to pull that off in just SVG, or if we’ll need to use ThreeJS.” And then I was on a Zoom call with him checking in on progress - I can see the twinkle in his eyes in my mind even now. It was like he was drunk on this problem. I remember saying “Maybe the eyes should follow the mouse!” and he went bananas. He was so happy. And then he dropped it on the team in Slack. “Hey everyone check out what I was working on.” The slack channel went absolutely nuts. It was awesome. [IMPORTANT] If you’re taking photos or recording or tweeting, I’ll ask that you please refrain from doing so for these next few slides. The team deserves the right to share this with the world when they’re ready, but I’d like to share with you in confidence.
- Okay, you can get back to your liveblogging. [pause for laugh] I’m trying to be intentional with my life, and my life’s work, and how it lands for people. This is my personal charter. I’ll take a minute and just allow you to read it. [pause] If you’d like a template of this, I’d be delighted to share it. I’ve found writing down a manifesto for myself has been extremely helpful in staying in tune to the kind of focus I’m talking about here.
- And for those of you in the audience earlier in your career journey, I think you’ll get a leg up thinking this way. When I started my career, I wanted to make movie websites. I got into the website thing because code was the first thing I felt I was ever good at, and I thought that the future of the Internet would be movie websites, and I wanted to work on movie special effects and animation because of things like Roger Rabbit. This is a screenshot of one of the first professional websites I ever worked on, for Batman Begins. At the time it was 2004 or 2005, so there wasn’t an iPhone or a Facebook or a Twitter, and Google was really just sorting itself out.
- By the way, it turns out that I don’t know very much about the future of the Internet, so I’m probably a bad person to ask about that. Anyway, I built a lot of that kind of thing while I cut my teeth. This is probably me at the peak of my craft as a coder, but you’ll likely never be able to get this website up and running again on the Internet. It was built in Flash, which is a dead technology now. And who would save a Flash website for a TV show?
- My work as a coder was always in close collaboration with designers, or as we now agree visual designers. I loved to work with teams, and I’ve always loved to make the work cross-disciplinary and fun.
- This is Skittles.com, and the team I built this with joked for two years about what we would do if Skittles came along as a client.
- When it actually happened we had no idea what to do. We pitched making the site bite sized jokes that could work on mobile and desktop.
- A few months later this guy named Ethan Marquotte coined the term “responsive design”, which was a much more eloquent and intentional definition of what we were trying to do. If you’re not in the website business, it’s one of the most important phrases coined. It means that a site should reconfigure itself to work well regardless of if you’re on a phone or a desktop. The philosophy landed so well with people that it’s the reason you browse the Internet the way you do today.
- I guess I’m saying that Skittles.com was the closest I ever got to almost predicting the future of the Internet.
- Yeah. Sparkly.
- And that work led to building websites that were really complicated, like starwars.com. This is a hard audience to design for. Like who visits starwars.com. People who want to buy the movie? Fans looking up information on R2D2? It’s kind of not really either.
- Anyway I still like this version more than the current version.
- I wonder if there’s someone I can talk to to change it back.
- Liz.
- I’ve thought a lot about how teams and people work together. I taught in the Master of Fine Arts, Design & Technology program for about 5 years when I lived in New York City. I taught a class called Web 3, which has nothing to do with cryptocurrency because it was 2008 and nobody knew what that was, so give me a break. This is a slide I pulled from the first day of class. We got into this right after we read the syllabus. Many of my students had never coded in their lives, and most of them had never done any web programming. We got them all up and running in a day, demystified how it all worked. This class took a life of it’s own. Many of my students went on to teach their version of this class, and they preserved this idea years after I left. “Be a good ancestor”, right?
- One of the things I’m most proud of in my career is this. It’s called Melody Jams and it’s a music making game for iPhone and iPad. I could describe it, but I think it describes itself better. Here’s the trailer.
- The team that worked on this project mostly never met. In fact, most of us had just been introduced to one another. None of us had made a kids app, either. Our guy Matt cook helped with this! Give Matt a hand everyone. The animator of the crew, James, was really interested in getting this out there but had never made anything like this.
- Here’s James exploring a bunch of different characters for the game. Most of them never made it. I’m a big fan of the cowboy. He kinda looks like a furry jelly bean.
- I was coding the project with my buddy Georg, and Georg had never made anything in iOS before. So we prototyped together while James was figuring out the characters. Here’s our first prototype. We drew a circle.
- Our second one you could tap and turn the circle red.
- Then I asked Georg to see if he could figure out how to drag a circle around.
- And that became dragging lots of circles.
- And that became detecting proximity between circles. This logic was useful in the final game to detect if a monster you were dragging around was on one of the highlighted areas, so we knew whether to scoot it back to the menu or get that lil fella playing.
- My favorite part was the musician on the project, Nate. Nate had nothing to go on. What does the musician do for a monster music making app when there is no app and there are no monsters? I gave Nate some requirements - each monster could play two different loops and each loop had to be exactly four seconds long. Nate made songs as we went to get a sense of what might be possible, and shared them in Slack. Here’s the first song he made, for our main level called “The Garage.”
- And then later we added in a space themed level called “Mars Disco”. Here’s what Nate thought that should sound like.
- We launched it and told our friends. And one of our friend’s friend’s friends happened to know someone who was an editor for the store, And the next thing you know it’s being featured above Super Mario. I think we got to #1 in the top charts but I never snapped a screenshot of it.
- Here it is on iPad, right in front of Carmen Sandiego. I grew up on Carmen Sandiego.
- Here’s some stats for you. For awhile we’re tops in games, music, kids, and a whole bunch of other categories.
- The Washington Post reviewed it. So did the Chicago Tribune. I didn’t know newspaper reviewed apps!
- Spoiler: We’re not tech billionaires. But while that would’ve been nice, that’s not what this was ever really about. It was about making something special. And as I reflect back, I’m most proud of how the team gelled from nothing.
- I care a lot about teams and teamwork. I think a lot about it. It’s my life’s work. I’ve built a career on collaborating with other people… I think if you asked me what type of designer I was, it would be a collaboration designer. Or maybe a culture designer. So let’s talk about why that’s valuable in the world. I’ve got a clip here from Mark Cuban, and he’s largely talking about entrepreneurship here but I’d invite you to try to find yourself in this clip, regardless of whether you’re a student, a public official, an entrepreneur, a manager, or whatever it is you’re doing
- Stress or de-stress. That’s it. It’s metacognition. That job you’re unhappy at? Maybe you have a choice in how you made it that way. Maybe you’re making it worse for everyone else around you, with your stress. Maybe someone else is stressing you out, and you can work to de-stress them. I think this is basically the key to a happy waking life. This is where I toil. This is what I’m trying to design. The least stressful way of working in the world.
- I’ve read a lot on management, and I’ve been workshopping a definition for myself. That “a manager is a custodian for a team.” But I think the lessons I’ve learned managing could be broadened to anyone on the team. I like the word custodian - it means caretaker, but it makes me think of a school janitor. I think most people think that’s a job nobody really wants, but it’s also really important and something everyone is unyieldingly appreciative of. And so what do I mean by health? Well, a healthy team wants to stay together. A healthy team is excited about it’s work. A healthy team isn’t working crazy hours all the time. A healthy team does something impactful for the organization it’s working for. A healthy team has a sense of ownership. And so on. A manager is responsible for noticing all the ways a team is healthy or not. Preserve and improve what’s working well, fix what’s not. But really there’s nothing that says you have to be interested in management or leadership to do this. So if you’re that coder who reads about 10x engineers, let me tell you from real world experience: That’s bullshit. Nobody codes any different than anybody else, in the same way nobody uses colored pencils any different than Ayaka does. You just find joy in toil, and find ways to de-stress. So let me give you a few book recommendations, and at the risk of thinking too highly of myself, some examples of how I practice the craft with intention. So let me show you some examples that I’m proud of that I’ve designed for my people.
- First, here’s a template I created in Notion for each of my reports. Again, if this is something you’re interested and you’re not into Notion I am happy to make a copy for you in Google Docs or Confluence or whatever it is you use. Let me know if you want to try this.
- Here’s what the 1:1 section looks like. I have my reports learn what a good 1:1 is and isn’t. I set some boundaries, like we won’t use them for project check-ins. I focus on coaching and finding opportunities for them to stretch. I check in on the morale and bandwidth.
- I ask them to fill out a career goals template, and we review it every six weeks and after every performance review. It’s amazing what happens when you set a goal that feels just out of reach. I’d say my reports achieve about 66% percent of the goals they set, and a lot of them are pretty ambitious.
- When a new hire joins my team, I ask them to tell me about them and we dedicate one of our early 1:1s to this. One of my reports in the past mentioned they suffer from extreme ADHD and are unable to focus in large meetings as a result. Their previous performance reviews were middle-of-the-road because people felt they weren’t paying enough attention in the meetings. How horrible must that have felt to them? We worked on ways to engage in forums they felt more comfortable, like long-form written documentation where they could get space to think.
- You can notice the health of a team by looking for things that are unhealthy. When I first joined Notion, I noticed right away that the team was feeling stressed about meeting large project deadlines. I also noticed that when someone came to our team Slack channel with an ask, the team would usually drop everything and work on it. Around the 22nd or 23rd I went backwards in Slack and generated this calendar for the team to discuss. We talked about what to do about it, and implemented a change. Look at that last week though. It started to slow down, and it’s been, to quote one of my coders, “climbing down Anxiety Mountain.”
- And if you’re curious what we did to fix it, we implemented a basic triage process. If anyone in here has ever done agile development before, this should look fairly familiar. Requests come in at whatever pace they want, but the yellow section only happens once a week, on Wednesdays. The blue section happens on Mondays, and the purple section is completing the work. This basically means that if you file a ticket with us on a Thursday it will be a minimum of 7 or 8 business days before we get to it, unless we deem it critical.
- And team health is delegating. I made the yellow and blue sections mandatory for the team, but I also made sure that the engineers and designers on the team are responsible for chairing the meeting. We had a team offsite the other week and, during it, one of them asked me if we should still hold the sweeps. I asked WDYT and they said they felt it was important. I told them that felt right to me, and I think it should come from them rather than from me so the team sees it’s a team norm and not a manager norm.
- Team health is about delivering feedback that sides with the teammate. Remember Eric, who wrote that great PR and then cut it short? It’s cause he accidentally stressed out another team with part of the work. His approach to working with them caused them to panic. I could’ve told him to quit being a butthead, or I could’ve fixed it myself. Instead I reminded him how important he was to the team and suggested we workshop ways to communicate more effectively.
- Team health is making sure that their ideas are as included in our roadmap. Here’s a bunch they’ve already created.
- We use a lightweight template that I recommend they fill out whenever a good idea comes up. It takes as little as five minutes if they want it to. Again, I’m happy to share Google or Notion versions of these docs if you’d like to try them with your team or schoolmates or whatever.
- I did a similar team with my team at Stripe, and you can see we wrote a lot of them. And we prioritized a lot of them. One of them was so impactful it became a key thing for the team to support and helped get three people promotions.
- And team health is connected to really getting to know one another, and to doing your best to care about their success and their lives.
- The engineer who needed the job to keep his family in the country. The first woman on the team, who wanted a crack at leading a project for the first time. The student who challenged herself to get good at public speaking, because she had a lifelong stutter and wanted to show she could beat it to the world. The best leader I knew at Stripe, who went back to her hometown six months a year to help her parents take care of her nephew because her sister was in rehab. I made a choice to be in this room, to be in my field, and to be with the people I’m surrounded by. The least I could do is try to make their waking lives a little brighter.
- So that’s the kind of designer I am. I design teams, and I design culture, and I design the relationships I have with the people I spend my day with. I love this kind of toil because it feels so wonderful when someone achieves something they didn’t think was possible for themselves, or they see me show genuine care about their work and their lives. It’s what I did when I coded, it’s what I did when I taught, and it’s what I do when I manage.
- In my opinion to design is to do the most human of all things. To be deliberate and to make to the best of your ability as a human.
- The squiggle is real. Whatever you set out to do, it will be hard and confusing and challenging at the start.
- But on the other side of it, if you believe in yourself, is something beautiful and elegant that makes the world a little better. I believe that.
- Find joy in toil Work is about finding something that gives you a sense of accomplishment, and being in service to others.
- It doesn’t matter if it’s a Flash movie website
- or the next Blue Mosque.
- If you’re in this room, I hope it’s fair to assume you’re educated and of enough means that you can go for it. Not everyone has that privilege. Take advantage.
- And that last slide reminds, me. Bump the lamp. As often as possible.
- Not because it’s your job or because your boss told you to, but because it will satisfy your desire to be uniquely creatively excellent.
- Find something that you just seem to find unlimited energy for and do that to the very best of your ability.
- You’ll thank yourself. I’m sure of it.
- The Grok homepage says “it takes a menagerie of skills and differences to change the status quo.” I’ll add that it takes empathy and connection, and so I invite you to adopt my personal principle as your own.
- You can do it with strangers you’ve never met. That’s what most of us are to one another anyway, right?
- Elevate the people around you to achieve things they didn’t think they could.
- Empower others. Especially those who haven’t felt empowered before.
- You bring your whole self everywhere you go. You don’t get to leave a part of it behind. That’s you, and that’s me, and that’s everyone.
- If you buy what Arthur C. Brooks is saying, and I do, then I’d argue you have some element of choice in whether to be happy or unhappy at your job. That you can render that into existence. That it’s a design problem. Whether you’re working on building the next Blue Mosque or making an illustration in colored pencil or coding a website or building a community right here in Greenville, I think it’s about what you want to design.
- I believe what Arthur C. Brooks said. I’m inspired by his research, and his succinct, direct way of communicating it. You can choose to be intentional. You can choose to make your waking life better, and perhaps through that the lives of the people you are directly around. 85% of the world is unhappy during their waking professional lives, and my hunch is some percentage of them don’t realize how much control they have to do something about that. What can you do to be a part of the rarified few?