YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Baxley

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-06-12
most recent: 2025-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Earlier, like the digital world's not safe for our kids. Haven't we kind of done something wrong? So I hope people take that responsibility more seriously and try to help clean things up a little bit.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, BobBaxley.com is the easiest place. Right now, it's just a bento site, but I'll get some more stuff up there in the coming days, hopefully before this episode goes out. We'll see. But there's plenty of links there that'll help you connect to me on LinkedIn and some of my talks and a few links to some other things that I find useful. Just find me on LinkedIn. You know, I publish pretty much every day on LinkedIn. That's an easy way to find me. Yeah, I'm happy to be connected to whoever is interested in being connected. And then in terms of how you can help me, you know. I'll go back to what I said earlier. It's not really about me, Lenny. It's about these ideas. It's about the idea that software matters, you know, that we're making something for people on the other side of the glass and that it's a way that we show that we care and that we should care. So I wouldn't, it's not about me. It's about us together trying to create a digital world that we want to live in. You know, the digital world right now, it's not something we really want to live in. It's not a place any of us would turn our kids loose in. You know, you and I talked about this.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally changed how the game's played. But I just know for winning, the Warriors are at risk because Steph is meaningfully old for an NBA player and you can't have the whole franchise built around just him.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know a team, like a real team can't be dependent on a single player. And I think there's such a dramatic difference in the Warriors when Steph is on the court and off the court. You know, if you listen to the local announcers, they're always like, these non-steph minutes really matter, you know. I look at that. I'm like, that's not really a team then, right? That's like Steph and, you know, it's like Steph in the band of Merrimen. And the Warriors are bigger than that, right? Most of these basketball teams are bigger than that. Currently, I think across a lot of places in the NBA, there's a single player that can go down that makes a difference in the organization's success. And that just seems dangerous and not a team. So, I mean, I kind of don't know what to say. I don't know how you replace Steph Curry. He is this, you know, singular, I don't even know, even call him a generational player, but bigger than that. He is unequivocally the greatest shooter in the history of the game. And he's one of only two or three players that's actually.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just to go back to this idea of how once you create an expression of something, people baseline off of it. Recently, I got to hear Henry Modisett, who's had to design it at a perplexity give a talk. And one of the things he said that just really struck me was that people's conception of AI was founded by, was put out there by Hollywood years ago. So this idea that AI is going to take stuff over and is... Dystopian and malevolent towards humans and stuff like that. It's actually something that's created by Hollywood. And we're all like, and now we're like trying to outlive how, you know, and stuff like that. And so it's just such a great example of somebody put the concept out there and planted that seed in people's heads. And now we're struggling to get people off that baseline and to look at it with fresh eyes.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are like all this AI stuff is profoundly amazing. And I will encourage people, like one of the most amazing things for me about this moment in AI is that this, the kind of AI we're experiencing has been theorized for well over 50 years. So there is a vast warehouse of interesting, amazing thoughts from philosophers and engineers and social scientists and people thinking about what is this moment going to mean when we have this sort of artificial intelligence that challenges our concept of what it means to be human. So like there's so much stuff you could be reading to help you process this moment. And the very intense and profound psychological challenges it's bring forth.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we've kind of touched on all three of those things today when we've talked about the resolution of comps, we've talked about using gen AI to try to go faster, things like that. And, you know, those two ideas kind of collide in an interesting way. You know, people think if they cut their colleagues out of the pie, they can go faster. And it's true. They can go faster. You just can't go very far. Like you need a group if you want to go far. And just because you can create a brilliant image doesn't mean you got to good concept. Go look on Instagram. You'll find plenty of photographs that like tingle your senses from a visual perspective and you will forget them by the time you close the app because they don't mean anything. And so we live in a time when it's very easy to produce things at incredibly high production values, but they don't mean anything. And so they're just like fancy potato chips. There's no nourishment there, man.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So there's three quotes that I come back to all the time they repeat in most of my talks. First one I've already used, which is design is clear thinking made visible by Edward Tufty. Second one is from the American Landscape photographer Ancel Adams, and I've also alluded to this. And the quote is, there's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. And then the last one is an African proverb, and it goes like this If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are kind of in a certain genre. So these are different genres, and Habitica is really interesting because it mixes genres, it mixes role playing game with the do manager. And so I think it's a really powerful example of how you can really shift the user's thinking in the same way like movies, for example, like Star Wars is ultimately a cowboy movie set in space. And when you come to that, those two genre mashups are really interesting. When you come to a rom-com, you have a certain expectation of what's going to happen to rom-com. Sudden, if somebody suddenly got shot at rom-com, you would like that would not make sense to you in the same way that if somebody made a really funny joke in a John Wick movie, it wouldn't make sense. So I think Habitica is just the most interesting example I've ever found is somebody really doing a fascinating mashup of conceptual models, which is, sorry, and I'll stop. It's just, it's an unexplored and unexploited possibility of software ideas.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you go into Figma, you've made a decision about the thing you're going to produce. If you stay in a sketchbook, you've made a different decision. You know, if you go into something else, you've made a different kind of decision. So say the Leica M6 with film because of that. And then the software product I would point out, which is not terribly new, but I think it's worth noting, is a tool called Habitica. And Hibitica is really fascinating. It's ultimately it's a habit tracker and task management app, but it's fundamentally a game. It's a role-playing game where you create a character and your character evolves and can buy armor and go on quests and things as you check off your habits and stuff. And it is the most interesting expression of shifting conceptual models that I've ever seen. So if you think about a conceptual model, it's sort of the software equivalent of a genre in a movie. And so like once you say it's a project manager software, you're kind of in a certain genre. If you say it's a productivity tool, you're kind of in a certain genre. So if it's social media.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focused on recent, and I'm just going to push back. No, there's nothing terribly recent the stuff that I go back to. I'll give you a couple of nerdy ones. I have a Leica M6 camp, which is a film camera, and I recently started shooting with film again, which I absolutely love because it forces me to slow down. I always talk about Leica cameras. They're obscenely expensive. But the thing about Leica cameras is you show up different when you shoot with a Leica. So when people think about cameras, they think about the quality of the image. They don't think about how the tool is going to change them. And when you show up with an iPhone, you're thinking about sharing. When you show up with a film camera, you're thinking about saving film and you're spending more time composing and thinking exactly about the shot. When you show up with a digital SLR, you just take a whole bunch of pictures and hope something's going to turn out. And so I think these cameras are very useful metaphor for being conscious about how the tools you pick are going to impact the thing that you produce.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I'll throw one other in there, which is not something I've recently seen, but something I highly recommend for everybody, which is Lords of Arabia, Lords of Arabia is, I think, one of the two or three best expressions of the medium of film. And so when you think about the ability to hold moving pictures, characters, story, music, photography, set design, costume, like the whole constellation of variables that come to play into a movie, I think Lords of Arabia is probably one of the two or three most complete expressions of what the medium is capable of. And I think it's useful to think about in technology all the different elements of a product and all the different elements of a user interface and how you can break those down the way you can break down all these elements of a movie and how many pieces of software do we use where somebody is actually conducting that symphony in a really coherent, powerful, full-on way.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I really enjoyed severance. I enjoyed it as a filmmaker. I was just blown away at the filmmaking. I was intrigued with the story and the characters. And I think as someone who's worked in Basically, critique and commentary about the modern workplace. There were times that I just thought were unbelievably funny and insightful. It was definitely interesting watching it with my wife who was an attorney and hasn't worked in those kinds of environments. So it was like an episode where some people kind of got disappeared and the language that we were using was all around the language you would hear around a layoff. And so like I was laughing myself to death, but she was like, what? What's going on? So I thought everyone's super fascinating.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams, they uh, they create something that's highly fragmented instead of a single hole. So Zen and the automotorcycle maintenance. And then the last one is a book called Time in the Art of Living by Robert Gruden. It's just a very interesting collection of sort of impressionistic views of time and how time passes and what time means. So it's very different from the others. And it's not something probably gets recommended on your show too often. But I think it will help people in their lives in a powerful way.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the three books I'm going to recommend, the first one's a beautiful poetic book about typography called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Robert was the poet laureate of Canada. And the first 80 pages will change how you think about typography. It will open you up to the wonderful world of typography that we all live in. You will think differently about every sign you look at, about every movie credit you see, and it will give you an insight, I think into the designer mindset, when you understand typography, I think you understand where designers come from. And the best designers I know are just total type nerds. So highly recommend elements of typographic style. Second book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Many people may know, ultimately a philosophy book, but it's about the concept of quality, which I think is a very important topic. So it talks about quality and the importance of how things integrate into cohesive whole, which I believe is the main challenge facing most software.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll just add to that one thing. Like, I think people need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something because like, well, I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be self-promoting. And I try to counsel them and like, look, it's not about self-promotion. Like it's like there are ideas that you care about that you want to see succeed in the world. And so get out there as an advocate of the idea. It's not about you. It's about the idea. And like don't be afraid to stand behind the idea.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I tell the story one because just an amazing story, and it does kind of force you to go back to the moment of like, wait, they didn't actually know how to do it. Like, we only know how to do it now because they've done it, you know, but there's that moment of uncertainty. And I think you kind of have to embrace and be amazed at that. And it also shows you the power of these ideas. Like a really great idea somehow finds a way to live on. Somehow it just sits out there and it just waits for its time, you know, and Yuri had brought this idea into the world and it just sat around and then somebody discovered it and dusted it off and was able to push for it and it came through. And then maybe the third lesson is like ideas need champions. They need champions willing to put themselves on the line for them. So if you believe in something and you've made your case and you can really make your case, have the courage to your convictions and get behind it and fight as hard as you can for it.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John discovers it years later, and John's trying to sell lunar orbit rendezvous. It's not going over at NASA. And so eventually he decides to go around all the hierarchy and he sends a very famous memo to one of the top guys at NASA. The memo starts somewhat as a voice in the wilderness. And then it goes on. And then there's points in there where he's really emphatic. And we want to go to the moon or not. And then he goes through all the math of how going to the moon is all about weight. And this was the only way to do it. And there was no other option, stuff like that. He just made the case. And, you know, it was, I mean, he risked his whole career. The whole thing could have blown up. He could have been fired for going around the hierarchy and all that sort of stuff. But of course, he's able to champion the idea. And I think it was another year or so after that famous memo, which you could read online. It's like nine pages long or something after the memo. It was still some time before they adopted lunar orbit rendezvous. But eventually they do. And even with Don Braun himself was very complimentary to Hubalt for kind of pushing that perspective.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is truly a spacecraft. It only flies in space, which means the engineering requirements around it are profoundly different because it doesn't have to survive re-entry into the Earth, right? And so as a result, it can be much lighter. And it turns out that the whole problem of landing on the moon is it's a weight problem. Like you got to lift all the stuff off the Earth, which is incredibly expensive for fuel. You got to land it on them. I mean, there's just a lot goes on. And so Hubalt had come across this paper from a gentleman named Yuri Kondrachak, who was living in Ukraine in the 1916, 1918 when he wrote this paper. And he was the first guy to theorize lunar orbit rendezvous. And I try to take people back to that. Like, you and I could think about going to the moon, but Yuri Kondratciak in 1918 is on the plains of Ukraine looking at the moon, and he's actually thinking about how to really go to the moon. Like he's figuring it out. And so he writes this paper.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we're talking about going to the moon. Nobody knows how to go to the moon. And there was three different options for going to the moon. One at the time, one was to build a big giant rocket and just go straight to the moon. It's called direct descent. And the main advocate for that was Werner von Braun, who was the main rocket guy in the world. A little bit of a complicated past, but nevertheless, Werner von Braun's a big guy. He's got the president's ear. Yeah, he's like, let's build a big giant rocket, go to the moon. People are like, yeah, problem is when you get to the moon, the rocket's still super big. So these guys are going to have to descend a big ladder. That's kind of a problem. So that was one idea. There was another called Earth Orbit Rendezvous where he spent two spacecraft into Earth and then you link them up in Earth orbit and then one of them goes off to the moon, but you still got to land that thing on the moon. And then there's a third idea called lunar orbit rendezvous, which is where you build a spacecraft that includes a smaller spacecraft. So you send up two spacecraft together, one of them smaller, much lighter, and you use that just as the ship that goes down to the moon's surface and back up. And that space.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just to take yourself back in history a little bit, John Kennedy, President Kennedy, goes to Rice University, I believe, his 19th September, May 1962. He gives the famous moon speech. We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it is hot, that whole thing, which I also have to say, and maybe a link to this in the show notes as well. Everyone should go watch that talk. That is the perfect TED talk. It clocks in right at 18 minutes. It shows you how to sell a big giant bold vision.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here we go. The particular question you're asking is John Holwalt. So, John was, I can't remember exactly where he was in the NASA hierarchy, but he was one of the people that was tasked with figuring out the question of how do you go to the moon?”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should clarify, I am a fan of astronomy and space, but I'm a particular fan of the Apollo program because I view the Apollo program and the moon landings as the greatest peacetime accomplishment of mankind ever. And I think it's an incredible, there's a profound number of leadership lessons and individual lessons to be learned from that program. And I've done multiple talks about this. I could go on for hours”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for the computer nerds out there, you could think about it as a compiled code versus interpreted code, right? So you undermine how to work in compiled code. And it can do a lot of stuff that you can't really do in the interpreted code, which moves slower and kind of has different orientations, and we call that consciousness. So I was feeding ChatGPT all this stuff over the last year or so. And there are all these patterns in my undermine that have been going into that that I wasn't able to express with conscious language. And so when I started asking it questions, I think what it was doing was it was statistically reflecting patterns back to me that already existed in my undermind. But because it was putting them into language, my conscious mind could now recognize them and respond to them. And so again, I found it as a sort of a life coach. I found it very useful as a mirror back to things that I was probably already thinking. And it helped me clarify my thoughts. It's not pushing me in new directions that like a human might do, but it's still been.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A tortoise mind by a gentleman named Guy Claxton. And in that, he talks about the undermined. And sometimes you might have heard this as your unconscious or something like that. But I think of your undermind as the part of your brain that's processing information before it gets to language. And then when you go to consciousness, you've turned it into language. And language isn't the full universe of things you can think. Language is what you can think in English. And if you talk to multilingual speakers, they'll tell you that they can think things in other languages than what they can think in English. So if you only speak English, you're only in one vein of what you can think, but your undermined is operating through all this other stuff.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was also useful. I use it for a lot of exercise input, that's useful. And the exercise that I've gone through most recently was I realized that it was inferring these things about me from the things that I had asked it to help me with in the past. So instead I just switched. I just went to ChatGPT, started a new project, and said, I want you to be my life coach. I want you to ask me five questions a day for the next five days. Let's go through those so you can explicitly become better at helping me with this task. And so we've just gone through that process. And it's been really useful for me. It's no substitute for a therapist or a real coach or anything like that. It's not a human being. It doesn't care about me. I'm not saying that you should use it instead of these other options. You need a human being as well. But it's been very good at reflecting back to me things that I think have been floating around in my undermind. And so there's a wonderful book called Hair Brain.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my job right now is trying to figure out what my job is. And so the thing I've been using AI for is I've very explicitly been using it as a life coach. And so I had seen a couple of prompts about asking it if, you know, what a blind spot was or what my strengths and weaknesses were. I'd seen some prompts about that stuff. And one of them was really fantastic. One of them was an outdated mindset that I'm holding on to that's not still serving me. And it came back with this very polite prompt or a very polite response about, well, given your age and your profession, it's not surprising that you're very wedded to the idea of control. But that's not really the world we're living in anymore. And that's not probably going to suit the thing you're trying to do next, which is writing and publishing and speaking and stuff. And although it's statistically derived, it did come back with a really nice phrase, which I've used in your show, which was try to focus on choreography over control. And so I thought that was really useful. I asked some of my blind spots.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The obvious solution, yeah. Look, I think at some point, hopefully, people just back up and ask themselves Are we actually producing better product because of this process? You know, I mean, and we're going faster, but faster can't be the ultimate goal. Like you need to be creating something great as well, right? Something that's sustainable and frankly that you're proud of and that your users find value in. And if you're just throwing so much spaghetti at the wall, I don't know if having a spaghetti throwing machine that goes faster, you know. I mean, look, there's a counter argument that you can say, oh, it's like Darwinian evolution and we're just going to spin through a bunch of random mutations and see what, you know, what happens. And I used to joke that, you know, it's true that, you know, if you take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and give them 14 billion years, you could end up with a tiger, but you don't know you're going to get a tiger and you could get a six-headed shrimp instead. And you don't really know when it's going to ship. So I'm not exactly sure Darwinian evolution is the way we create great product. But a lot of companies are making a run at it.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This seductive thing of hey, let's just go make the comp and see what we think. I don't really know if you're going to get anything great out of that process. Maybe.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, because they knew exactly what they were doing. And so the PMs were always like, what the hell happened overnight? You're like, well, it turns out that the high res stuff, that's not the hard thing. The hard thing is like the heavy lifting of thinking. What are we really trying to do? That's the hard part. And if you do the high res stuff, you just, you really muddy the waters. And I think you end up spending a lot more time churning if you didn't, again, I'm going to go back to the movie metaphor because I studied film. If you're trying to fix script issues when you're in production or storyboarding, you're going to churn and you're going to waste a lot of effort. So you got to figure out what you're trying to do before you go draw the high res stuff. And I think a lot.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a movie that has a really bad story. And so at Thoughtspot, we used to use what we called Block Brain Diagrams, which were even simplified versions of wireframes. It was just big chunky blocks. Here's how the screen could be and where things might be located. And because it was so low fidelity, people couldn't get into commenting on what it looked like. We had to talk about conceptually what it was. And so we were trying to build up this firm foundation where we could go from the block frames to wireframes, like to kind of the final expression. And I think it helped us clarify what we were trying to do conceptually. So by the time we got to the final visual presentation, that stuff was actually really simple. I mean, initially it made the product team really nervous because we would be sitting in these block frames and wireframes for sometimes weeks. And they'd be like, when are we finally going to see the comps? And then what would happen is because we had such a robust design system, once we locked down on the block frames, we could send it to an agency and they could do the full high res comps in a day.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Push them to develop too quickly and you put them out in the world and expect them to be able to stand up to critique too early, you're just going to squash them. I often think about them like a little plant in the Pixar movie Wally. You know, you've got to give that little guy a little space, a little time, some water and some nourishment. And you can't really just suddenly put him out in the wind and think he's going to make it. And so I think a lot of there's a lot of very fragile, interesting, quiet ideas that I think you need to give some space. And when you jump to the expression of them, I think you're putting them at risk. I'll also say that everybody when they look at a prototype, what they're focusing on is the visual and textual expression. And so as soon as you produce something in high resolution, the feedback you're going to get is going to be about colors and shapes and like these presentation layer things, which are very loosely related to usability and value, right? It's like focusing on the special effects.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a production tool, right? So, like, once you know what you want and you can give it a really robust prompt, then I mean, I haven't played with it a lot myself because I'm not an operational role right now, but presumably it's really useful at cranking out that actionable prototype, which you can click and, you know, experience. And I've said for a long time that interactive idea needs to be expressed interactively. So we're not talking with our hands and we can really understand what's going to happen. So when the idea is ready to be expressed, I think those tools are probably fantastic. But, you know, ideas start off pretty fragile and the best ideas start off really fragile. And I think when you”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the same thing on the roadmap. Like, you decide to roadmap, tell us what we're supposed to do. I will ask you about it and they push back and we may have some back and forth, but that's your responsibility. I'm going to trust that you are trained and you know what you're doing and you're going to make the right call. And I just want you to give me the same level of respect.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across one of the product managers one day, and she's like, Hey, this link on the homepage, you know, we have to make it blue. I was like, well, we don't use blue links anywhere. And she's, yeah, yeah, but we just have to make it blue. It's like, well, we're not making it blue. And a couple of days go by, and I saw the homepage and the lake had been made blue because she had got around me and she'd gone to engineering and just made it blue. And I saw her in the hallway again. I was like, you know, what the hell's up with that? And she goes, well, people couldn't see it. And I'm like, oh, they couldn't see it. So it wasn't prominent enough, right? She's like, yeah, it wasn't prominent enough. I'm like, well, great. You know, there's like a hundred different things we could do to make it more prominent. one of which is making it blue you know which is the thing that came to you first because you're not a designer like that's naturally because it's the most obvious thing but it actually doesn't fit in with these larger things we're trying to do so i've often i try to encourage the product managers to like what's the what's the problem with the thing and then let us solve it don't don't jump to it and tell us this is what we're supposed you know don't tell us this is just exactly what we're supposed to do and again it”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much less something that comes out of one of these Gen IA tools. You know, everybody kind of goes, oh, that's the thing. You just keep doubling down on that thing. And what's happened is you've taken the possibilities from this big, broad thing down to this tiny little thing from an AI system that's trained on existing solutions and existing ideas and maybe not even thinking about it the right way because all you've really given is your first order thinking and so I think there's a way you can stay in these things conceptually and conversationally where you can get to your second third fourth idea and that's where stuff gets really interesting and again i don't think that has to take a lot of time that can be over the course of a single meeting you could get to a second third fourth idea you just have to be willing to not jump at the first thing that looks like a possibility like you get that possibility and go okay well that's interesting let's table that what else we got you know there's one story that kind of related that's useful uh in one of my previous jobs uh i was responsible for the public website i remember”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I would say is that you should wait as long as possible to draw a picture. And that, I think that pushes against all the gen AI tools that help you create prototypes. And there's obviously a lot of excitement around that. I can just give a prompt and the AI is going to crank out a UI for me. So I don't think I'm using the term right, but I had this idea from ARC that I call the primal mark. And that's the first mark that you make on the canvas. And once you make that mark on the canvas, everything you do after that is in response to that mark. It sort of sets your baseline. And so for me, I always felt that as soon as we drew a picture that looked even remotely real, like everybody gravitated towards that and said, oh, that's the thing. And people are so uncomfortable with ambiguity that they can't really deal with the tension of, well, that might not be the thing. And so as soon as you draw a picture that looks even slightly realistic.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it almost is a point of pride. There's no way I'm going to go execute that exact thing. So you're right. Like PMs have to give you the space to operate. And I think a lot of what they're trying to achieve could be done in more informal ways, conversationally in whiteboards, things like that. But you need to narrow the problem for the designers. They need constraints. They don't need a tiny little box, but they need constraints. I think in terms of like you don't you don't give them an airport tarmac and you don't even give them a football field. You give them something more like a basketball court, you know, they're sort of a scale at which they can do their design thing.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you go back to my example of the script and storyboard, scripts don't contain pictures, right? There's still a lot of opportunity to think differently and to come up with original things and have a lot of creative input in the storyboarding process. So the script is living mostly in words, which is largely how PMs function. The thing that I will say about to keep in mind for PMs is there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think it out. But if a PM came to me with something that was drawn and kind of fully baked, my response was like.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either kind of compressing the PRD experience, you know, and bringing the designers into that, kind of co creating with product and design really rapidly. But you need to, I mean, you could think of it in some ways as designers are going to draw the storyboards. And if you don't give them a great script, they have a very hard time. Yeah. And then you give, you know, you can't give the shooting crew ambiguous storyboards or you're just going to waste untold amounts of money on set. So if you think about those three steps from script to storyboard to production, like it's all about getting rid of ambiguity. And so the more ambiguity that can be removed upstream, the faster design's going to go.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, design is a problem solving methodology, so the more variables you can remove before they go into the process, the more efficient it's going to be. And if you give designers a lot of ambiguity, they're going to spend a lot of time spending around. And honestly, that's your fault is the client. I mean, as a design leader, I think one of my main challenges is frankly trying to make the PMs better clients, you know, helping them get more specific. It's very common if a design team to get extremely ambiguous asks from a product team. And then they have, and the problem for design is they have to take all that ambiguity and they've got to ring it all out. So when they give it to engineering, engineering knows exactly what to code because computers don't tolerate ambiguity. Like engineers need to know what the things going to be. And so design gets stuck with a really ambiguous input, but they have to have a highly specific output. And then they're oftentime boxed to do that. And it's just not a recipe for success. So you're much better off.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As possible. And I think if you leave it open as to the emotional response you want users to have, you're inviting a lot of ambiguity, which is going to invite a lot of inefficiency.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directory, and then they added a bunch of stuff around the edges, but it never seemed to make a lot of sense. And so I think people operating inside Yahoo, you know, it ended up ended up being inefficient because they were having to deal with all that ambiguity. So I think that that can also be a pretty big risk for founders. They end up kind of with a product idea. And they think that the company is the product. The company is not the product. The product is the product. And the company's bigger than the product. And so you need to have some vision that speaks beyond just this particular thing. I think Slack Slack can honestly both Slack and Pinterest, I think, are examples of companies, products that became companies, but neither one of those places really knew what to do next because they didn't have a bigger vision of the change they were trying to see in the world. So, I mean, back to your, you were asking a very pragmatic question. I think you need to work on your prompt before you go to your designers and try to give them as much clarity about what you want to produce.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's something that's always over the horizon. And it's been a very useful organizing principle for their acquisitions and how the company grows. Amazon to be the Earth's most customer-centric company. Okay, great. That's a vision. They will never get there. It tells you how they're going to expand. Apple doesn't have an explicit vision, but I might describe it as personal computing can have a transformative effect on the lives of individuals, right? And I think that kind of focuses a lot of what they're trying to do. Disneyland, still the best vision statement of all time, which is the happiest place on earth. So once you tell an employee this is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, then you're signaling all sorts of things about how they need to pick up the trash and how they need to show up on time and how they need to wear their uniform. Like you're just signaling a whole bunch of stuff. So when I talk to founders, a lot of times they just don't have that clarity of what's the vision of the company. And to go back to Yahoo for a second, I never heard of vision. And so I'm not really sure what they were ever about. They kind of stumbled into the...”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think if you can give, you know, I mean, maybe one way to think about it is like a big giant AI prompt. You know, the more context you can give it, the more specificity you can give it, the more this is what I'm about and what we're trying to get to, the more the designer is going to be able to figure out which swim lane they're supposed to be in to produce something. So if you, I think if you're going into it feeling like the design process is going to take a lot of time, it's because you haven't been clear in your creative brief, so to speak. Which often means you're not really clear in your own head. And I think I have worked with a lot of founders and we could identify a bunch of big companies who I think got started that weren't clear in their own head. I mean, I don't want to, you know, Yahoo was an amazing company, but if we just look at Yahoo for a second, I worked there. It was never clear to me what the founding vision of Yahoo was. And I talk a lot about vision statements. And we could say, like, the vision statement of Google is organizing all the world's information. That's a great vision. They'll never achieve.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I often don't think about what I want them to do. I just think that's sort of a selfish way to think about it. They have something they want to do. Like, I'm trying to help them. Like, I'm not, I just don't ever approach these things of the user something for me to exploit and take advantage of and manipulate. I know there's people that do approach it. There's definitely a risk to confusing doing something because it's a driver versus something as a consequence.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tonight you're going to be at dinner with a few hundred thousand people all across the country. And if we take just one example, you know, you're going to be at a very nice diner with a grandmother and her two teenage sons in Ohio and the check's going to come and the waiter, the waiter, the waitress is going to hand over the device to that grandmother because she wants to pick up the bill. And you have the opportunity to either make her look like a superhero because she knows what she's doing or to make her look like a fool in one of her teenage grandsons is going to grab the device and do it for her. You're at the dinner table. What are you going to do for grandma? You're going to show up as well as you can? Are you going to just like let this whole thing fall apart because you didn't think hard enough about grandma? And that's true for Toast. That's true for every product any of us are working on all the time.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations that I'd have in design reviews, some executive would go. I don't know. Ultimately, this just kind of comes down to a matter of opinion, right? And I was always like, no, it does not. Like whether we choose blue or red is going to elicit a certain emotional response from the user. What is it we want them to feel? And then let's make sure that we design something visually that evokes that emotion. So again, I think what you really get your head around the fact that there are people on the other side of the glass, real life human beings having emotional moments, you know, with the thing that you're putting in their hand and that they're focusing their attention on. Like you are in those moments. And are you going to own it and show up and be the person you want to be in those moments or not? A few months ago, I was, I guess, a little longer ago, I was talking to the team at Toast who makes the handheld point of sale stuff that they use in restaurants. And the thing I was trying to tell them is whether or not you see.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a hammer and saw. They're not really pulling out an emotion for me. Maybe there's some if you're a carpenter, but I don't naturally have an emotion with kitchen tools or, you know, things that I think even more sophisticated tools like calculators and pulleys. I still don't have an emotional response to them, but every piece of software I have an emotional response to. I either feel confused or empowered. I feel like my world's gotten bigger, my world's gotten smaller. Like they all have an emotional component. And I think once you realize and accept that, then you can say, oh, there is an emotional component to what we're doing with this product. I could just leave that to chance, which is what most people do. Or I could try to be conscious of it and we could try to bring that into our conception of what the product's about and try to be purposeful in the emotion we're trying to elicit from the user. And I think that's where design, particularly visual design, can have a huge impact. So again, in many.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concept of what I've been doing with my life and who I was about, it just sort of like all came together really quickly. And I realized, oh, I'm into software because software makes me feel a certain way when it's working well. And what I find so troubling now is that a lot of time it's not working that way. And I remember the first time I saw a computer, I mean, probably a lot of people on listening to the show can remember maybe the first time they saw a desktop computer, probably the first time they saw Pension Zoom on a phone. You remember all that stuff like it was just freaking magic, man. I mean, it was the future. It was so cool. And it just felt like the most amazing roar borealis or sunrise or whatever. There was like a sense of awe and wonder that filled me and probably a lot of listeners. That's probably the thing that motivated you to be in the field. And so I realized like software is a medium because there's an emotional component to it.”
2025-06-12 · Lenny's Podcast · 35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source