Product Craft & Taste

“What I learned there is that actually, you're trying to deliver an end experience, and product, and story to your viewers, to your audience. It doesn't actually matter what's real. It matters what you see on the screen. It matters the emotion that it creates, the story that it creates, how it reinforces all of the other pieces.”

“Getting to that point and iterating a product to the point where it feels like magic the first time is very helpful. And it's often a question of just getting the performance to a certain level, scoping down, removing things. There's a lot of fine-tuning, I think, that makes you cross that line from it's cool and impressive but not magic to it feels like magic. I don't understand how this could be done.”

“Rule one is you do not work at Stripe. Rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer. We pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. More than 250 people have participated in Study Group.”

“The more I focused on how I show up and optics and having a good deck and all this, the less I got promoted. And then the more I dropped focusing all that, and just really focusing on the work, I want to make a fucking awesome product. Whether people like me or think I'm a good PM or presenter, as long as I manifest a great product into the world, that to me is the reward.”

“You want to be giving Devin tasks, not problems. You generally want something that is easy to verify and easy to test. You can work on bigger projects or bigger asks as well, but in that case you should certainly expect to need to steer Devin more to make sure it's going the right direction.”

“Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec.”

“I think the thing that I learned from him the most was the power of prototyping. And that even though he was such a great product thinker, he would always say, "I can't tell you if this is going to work. I have to feel it. I have to try it. And a mock-up doesn't tell you what it's going to feel like."”

“It really helps if people are technical and care about the craft. They get a lot of value out of the tool by themselves. That gives you something to talk about that's not collaboration - because no one wants to talk about collaboration. Nobody wants to talk about it. They just want it to work.”