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

“And when I heard that, all of a sudden, I went, wait a sec, like, boom, like that, that is why I do this. I am fundamentally a maker. In high school, I was a photographer. In college, I was going to be a filmmaker. After college, I went to music school. After music school, I started a graphic design studio. I am a maker. And I realized looking back, I was just hunting for my medium. And it took me until I was 27 to find software as my medium. And it's like, oh, I'm a maker that designed software. And then when I heard that, software is a medium, that whole.”
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 so I was listening to a podcast about the history of Silicon Valley by a Stanford group. The podcast was called raw data. And it was season two. And it starts off with an episode called Monument to a Dead Child, which is about Stanford University. And it ends with Zuckerberg's testimony in front of Congress. And in the middle of that, they start talking about the counterculture revolution in the late 1960s in San Francisco and elsewhere. And they quote this book by a guy named Fred Turner, I think it is. The book's called From Counterculture to Cyberculture. And he has this quote that is, you have to ask why it is personal computing got started in Northern California in the late 1960s when at the time every major tech company in the country was on the East Coast. And the answer is because there was a very small group of people in and around Stanford University that saw software as a new form of media on par with movies, music, and books.”
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
“Something that you believe. Yeah, you're so good with the research, Lenny. Yeah, look, so I left Pinterest in 2014. And I didn't have anything lined up. So I had some time to myself. And I was driving up and down the peninsula here in Silicon Valley meeting with other design leaders and just sort of, you know, I don't know, commiserating with people. And you may remember there was a very consequential presidential election in the United States in 2016. And there were some impression that social media had had a significant impact on that election. So I was kind of driving around Silicon Valley and I was just sort of wondering like what the heck happened. You know, I mean, I moved here in 1990 when the hippie ethos that was really at the core of Silicon Valley, the hippie ethos was still very visible. And you could, I mean, it was very much a part of what was interesting to me about the valley when I moved here. But, you know, 2016 is a long time later in that hippie ethos had gotten pretty quiet.”
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 it turns out like ship quote is almost as important as price, like things that if we had been watching them use our own product, I'm not sure we would have picked up on because we would have been sitting there yelling at them to click on the button or we would have had a bias in wanting to see the positive things. Whereas if you just watch people that are using adjacent products could be super useful. And again, we work in a medium. Software is a medium and we need to understand our medium in the same way, again, musicians go to concerts, filmmakers go to movies. You know, comedians go to comic clubs. Like, when do people like you and I go watch people just use software? Where do we develop that intuition? And unfortunately, I think you have to go out of your way to do 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
“Well, there's using your product, but I always think when you're watching somebody use your product, you come into it with a psychological bias that makes it hard for you to really see what's going on. So there's something about just understanding the audience and how they process information on a screen, not your product. Like at one point when I was redesigning a checkout system, we did what I call a reality check, which was we held a traditional usability style exercise in a lab and all that sort of stuff, but we had the subjects come through and go through checkout in other products. So we watched them go through like eBay and William Sonoma and Amazon or something like that. And we learned a ton about checkout.”
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
“Fumble with a chip card insert, or watch somebody try to figure out Apple Pay. And these are pretty seamless experiences. And still, there's cognitive friction and all this stuff. Just go rent a car and notice how long it takes you to figure out what the heck is going on with the dashboard, you know. There's lots of opportunities to try to develop that intuition of how people navigate the human computer interaction. And we need to find ways to go do that.”
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
“Time where people don't do so many usability studies, so a lot of folks get pretty far into their careers without ever having watched Mere Mortals actually use software. Instead, we're relying on metrics and stuff, which is, I sort of joke that like relying on metrics to understand what's happening at the user level is like looking at raw data from a radio telescope instead of just going out inside and looking at the night sky. Like you got to find a way to watch the audience. movie you know filmmakers can go to a theater they can watch people understand stuff comedians can go to a comedy club they can help start to develop an intuition about why people laugh none of us have an obvious way to go watch people use software so we don't really understand how humans process what's happening on the screen and you have to just find ways to do that unfortunately software is everywhere it's not just desktop or mobile software i mean there's atm machines they're ticketing kiosks kiosks there's point of sale systems everywhere just i mean go watch somebody over 70”
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
“Look, I think you have to find ways to go, you have to find mechanisms where you go out of your way to see people using software in real time. I've worked on products that have been used by billions of people. I've friends have touched billions of people. None of us ever get to see anybody use this stuff in the wild, in their natural state. Maybe we see them in a lab or something like that. I've never seen anybody just randomly using even Pinterest, you know. But there's ways that you can go and as a creator, as a maker, you can go and watch people using software in the wild. So I go watch, just go observe people going through self-checkout at Target, which is the best self-checkout, self-checkout I've ever seen. Go watch that, then go watch it at some other grocery store where it's not as great, you know, and like really notice what happens with people. Much to my kids' frustration when they're friends are over. I often grab their friend's phone and just sort of flip through it to try to understand how people are organizing their home screens and which apps they use. And maybe there's something in there that I haven't seen. I'll ask them what that is and ask them to kind of give me a tour of it. I think we're living in.”
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
“Place, we would think to ourselves, oh my goodness, that's like a lot of people, and we might think of it differently, we might behave differently. My team at Apple, but also my friends that are working at Facebook or Google or wherever, it's very hard to really understand that they're creating something in Figma on their computer that's going to be interacted with by billions of people, thousands and thousands of times. And if you lose sight of that, I think you just, I don't know, you get sloppy and disrespectful is the wrong word, but I think you just lose sight of how much impact you're having on other people.”
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
“By a bunch of people who knows where, and these products are causing them untold amounts of frustration and confusion. And it just takes away from their life quality. And I think we have an obligation as product people to put that emotional energy back into people's lives. They don't want to try to figure out how to navigate our login screens or go through our onboarding process. They just want to get home and spend time with their families and pet their dogs and have a nice dinner. I just think every time we make a demand on the audience, that's a failure on our part. And so I do think it kind of comes. I cast it in a moral way. And I talk about it that way because I don't think many people working in the industry understand the scale of what they're doing. Again, because it's an anonymous field. Like we don't, we never see anybody on the other side of the glass. But I think, you know, with this podcast, it'll go out to hundreds of thousands of people. Like if you and I saw all the people that will potentially listen to this in one.”
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
“With software in the last month. And obviously, yeah, every hand goes up. Okay, how about so far this week? Most all hands stay up. I'm like, okay, how about so far today? You know, in most of the hands stay up, and it's often that I speak in the morning, I'm like, okay, everybody's had a frustrating experience with software. It's 10 o'clock in the morning. Like, that's a problem, people, because each one of those interactions, it takes a little bit of energy away from you and it ups, it ramps your frustration just a little bit. And the bummer about software, both for the audience and for the creators, is that it's an anonymous medium. Like nobody gets to see who's making these things. You and I, together, we might be able to name six designers that have worked on products we care about. And the only reason we could do that is because I'm a designer and I know a bunch of them. By yourself, I'd be surprised if you could name more than a handful. So, you know, and again, we work in tech. So if you think about the billions of people out there that don't work in tech, to them, these products are just these crazy faceless things created.”
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, look, the example I use mostly is if you go to an airport and you watch and you look around, you'll see a lot of people using their phone to navigate that system. You know, they're trying to figure out where their gate is, what time their flight's on, whether or not they pull up their boarding pass, et cetera. And just watch people, watch their faces, watch the level of confusion and frustration. You know, some of them, some of them are tech superheroes like you and me and most of your listeners, but a lot of them are just mere mortals and they're not living and breathing this stuff all the time. And a lot of times they're super frustrated, you know, and then take that and scale it out to their entire day. And almost everyone living in a modern economy now is going to have hundreds of interactions with the phone or with a computer. And a lot of those interactions are going to be consequential. And unfortunately, a lot of those interactions are not going to be great. They're going to be confusing and frustrating. And when I'm speaking to live audiences, I often kind of ask people, you know, okay, please raise your hand if you've had a frustrating or confusing experience.”
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 don't know. I settled on tenant. I'm not even, I'd have to go look up the definition. I was trying to differentiate it from principles Because I think principles are just, you know, it's, I describe principles as sort of apple hood and mother pie. Again, they're just not something people are going to argue over. And so I didn't think it was wise to try to co-op that word and change how people think about it so much as I might be more successful just coming up with a different word altogether.”
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
“There's no unopinionated software that's been successful. You have to have a point of view. The question is, what's it going to be? So I'd say practically, like just try to look for places where it seems the team's having the same debate over and over and have it once, get it done and put it behind 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
“You know, it's very context specific, so it's a little bit like, you know, what are your tenants for parenting? It's a very specific personal type thing that's germane to your particular context. So I'm not sure if I have a lot of other examples. And I haven't heard this used by a lot of other companies. So I have a, you know, been able to add a bunch of stuff. We tried to come out with tenants for individual features and we kind of had trouble with that. It felt like they kind of operated at sort of the design strategy level. And I just think that varies dramatically from company to company. What I would look for is, you know, if you're a design leader or product leader, try to pay attention to what are the debates that we keep having over and over where people kind of seem to be digging in and things sort of seem to be bifurcating into two camps. And then is there something we can do where we just settle that, you know, we just have that debate once and for all. We decide as an organization. We're going left instead of right. And you're absolutely correct. You have to be opinionated. But that's how you're going to win.”
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
“People, how does this fit into the whole system? And sometimes we need to go along and do things that work for the product that don't necessarily work quite the way we might want them to for our feature. And so those tenants were all, again, they were all decision making tools. And when we would have design debates, we could just come back to those. Wait, are we actually starting simple and forcing them to opt into complexity? Are we doing something else here?”
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
“With complexity, that was their whole value prop is like we are super powerful tool, we can do all sorts of stuff. So when you sit down to Tableau, you know, it feels like you're flying the space shuttle. And if you're a professional data analyst, like that's great. That's the kind of tool you wanted. That wasn't what ThoughtSpot was about. We were trying to take data analytics into the hands of what I call mere mortals, also known as business users. People who didn't live and breed this stuff every day. So our goal with them was they could sit down and it was an approachable piece of software and they could turn on all the bells and whistles and power if they wanted it. So that was the second one. Start simple, let the users opt into complexity. And the third one was the entire product should look and feel like it came from a single mind. And this was a tenant to try to combat the natural tendency of enterprise companies to really fragment because you have all these different teams working on they're incented to work just on their little piece. And so they think about what's right for them and they don't back up to look at the whole thing. And so we had this tenet, you know, the whole thing should look and feel like it came from a single mind to just try to remind”
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
“Everyone could internalize and follow and hopefully then make the right decisions in that groove, if you will. And so we had three. I think you can't have more than three or four because you need everybody to memorize them. They can't be consulting a handbook. And so one of them was documentation is a failure state, right? Like in enterprise companies, a lot of times people think, oh, we'll just put it in the manual, it'll be part of the training. And I would constantly be coming back and go, stop it. Nobody wants to learn our software. Nobody cares. We are just one more browser tab in a world of browser tabs. We are not this user's complete world. They do not want to learn this stuff. Documentation is a failure state. Maybe we can't always avoid it, but we should do everything we can to simplify things so you can figure it out in the context of the product. That's number one. Number two is every interaction should start simple and the user should have to opt into complexity. So our main competitor at the time was Tableau. Tableau started.”
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
“Originating keynote went to Steve and said, You know, how should we think about Keynote? And Steve said, I want you to keep three things in mind. One is it should be difficult to make ugly presentations. Two, you should focus on cinematic quality transitions. And three, you should optimize for innovation over PowerPoint compatibility. And if you take that last one in particular, if he hadn't kind of said we're going to go this way instead of that way, that team would have spent the next 10 years gouging each other's eyes out over whether they should try to go for PowerPoint compatibility or innovation. And so when I was at ThoughtSpot, I realized pretty early on that I wasn't going to be able to have any sort of command and control over everything that was going to happen in the product. There was too many people involved, too many engineering teams. Most of them were in India. Like, I needed to move from a mindset of control to one of choreography. I needed to try to set the culture and set certain design tenets that”
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 look, there's a whole website dedicated to design principles. And if you go and you read it, you'll see a lot of principles like simple, clear, beautiful, fast, secure. You'll hear these words. And all these words are great. I mean, obviously, I have nothing against any of these words, but they're not useful as decision-making tools because nobody would ever argue the opposite. Nobody ever sat in a meeting and said, oh, let's forget clear. Let's try to make it as confusing as possible. So the idea of clear, it's nice to have out there as a, I don't know, sort of a platitude to move towards, but I just don't help think it helps you make decisions. And so tenants are really decision making tools. And it's sort of, you know, like a classic one is paper versus plastic. Like it's just too complicated to reconsider that every time you're at the grocery store. So you sort of make a rule for yourself and you're just a paper person or a plastic person. You move on from there. And so it's sort of that at scale and the story comes from when they were starting to work on keynotes. Apparently the guy who was responsible for.”
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
“Up and look at the product. Maybe not at every state, but generally every six months or a year, you need to back up and ask yourself, Mike, am I proud of this? Is this something I am happy to be a part of? Do I believe in this? Is it representative of my best work, given the circumstances I was in, which has limitations around time and resources? Or am I just sort of trying to get through the day because I have other goals?”
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 they're not sitting there trying to do all these permutations with color and typography and ideas like they're operating in a really narrow vein because they know who they are. It's very much like individuals, you know, when you're a teenager or a young adult, you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to wear because you haven't really sorted it out yet. But by the time you get to be a little bit older, you've kind of got your personal style. And so dressing in the morning gets to be a lot easier. And it's the same thing like at Pinterest. I was at Pinterest at a point when Pinterest wasn't quite sure what it was. And so when we were going to do like an onboarding flow, we had to look at a really broad sweep of things because we were trying to sort it out. But if you in other places that knew what they were about, you know, Apple's the key example there, like we weren't trying to figure out what it was about. We were trying to figure out what was the Apple way to do this particular thing. And so that moves a lot faster. And I agree, like, look, having your soul at every little checkbox sounds like a high bar. And in some ways it is, but you also need to, I think you need to be able to back.”
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, inheriting your question is this assumption that design takes more time, and so I'm going to kind of reject that premise because I don't think design takes more time. I think design exists. You know, there is going to be a design. It's whether it's going to be a good one or not. And I think there's things that you can do so that you're able to operate at a quicker pace as design. If you, again, if you kind of get the tent, we haven't talked about tenants yet, but we'll get to that in a moment. You know, if you kind of create a shared philosophical understanding of the product and what you're trying to do, you can go really fast because you're not asking the question of what should you do. You're asking the question of what would this company with what we stand for do for this thing? And that's a much easier question that's much smaller. So if you look at the companies that have the largest design teams, they're often the companies that have the most ambiguous cultures and the most unclear design vision, right? When you go to companies that really know what they're doing, and they're clear that this is who we are, this is what we stand for. The design teams are super small.”
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
“Them being a part of it, you know, that it's like it's, I don't know, it's a part of their soul in a really deep, meaningful way. And I'm not sure you can graph that on to somebody after the fact. They kind of need to be there at the moment of inception, if you will.”
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, sorry, a buy-in doesn't feel quite right to me because buy-in feels like, oh, I've come to agree with you. And that's different from it's a part of me. When I'm talking to teams, the thing I try to tell them is I walk into the office every day with the idea that everyone that I work with is fundamentally a maker. Like everybody in product design, engineering, we've all chosen these careers. Everybody's super smart. Everybody's super ambitious. Everybody could have done a thousand other things. But they're choosing to spend their precious lifetime and creative energy creating software. And so I believe in my heart that they're all fundamentally makers. And the thing that I know about makers is that they all want to make something they're proud of so they can take it home at the end of the day and show it to their parents and say, look at what I made at school with my friends today. Like that's the fundamental thing. And they're all doing it from their own different points of view and their own different incentives and mindsets, but they all at the end of the day want to make something they're proud of. And so it's not a matter of getting their buy-in. It's a matter of”
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 like that's that stuff mentioned here is gonna be excited about they're not order takers, you know how do you make them part of the process and you know most every product of consequence that I worked on there was some moment when we were showing it to some critical person and you could see that they fell in love with it you know sometimes they're like literally pointing at the comps on the board sometimes you're in a meeting and they're just like God I just love this and for me that was always that was always the critical moment because I knew that you know design can't bring any of this stuff into the world on its own like we we can't raise this baby we need the village and we need the village to fall in love with the baby and so until that happens you're not really quite sure if this thing's going to take off or not and so it was always extremely important to me that you had a few key engineers and some product people fall in love with it so they could defend it and embrace it and enhance it and add to it and you got to bring them along at the very beginning”
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
“Identified the direction we want to go into. And then once everybody kind of falls in love with the direction, then you can go into the more tactical mindset of, okay, well, women can ship it and who can we show it to and how are we going to code it and when's it going to go live and all those sorts of things. But the trick is to try to find a group that can sit in the, again, in the ambiguous maybe space. I do think it's critical to have everybody together at the beginning so they all feel like they're part of it. And the worst thing is when you bring something fully baked. Well, the worst thing is when you bring something fully baked to anybody for their approval. You know, we could talk about this when you take a final design to an exec and an exec sees it for the first time in a high resolution state. We'll get to that in a second. But when you go to an engineering team that says, hey, you know, we've been working in the lab for six months and we have this thing that we love it and we just can't wait for you guys to build it and here it is.”
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
“Look, I think you have to find some way that you are able to identify a few people in engineering that I refer to as creative technologists. So these are people that can come into what's ultimately kind of a fairly airy, fairy philosophical discussion about what we could do and like what's right from a conceptual model perspective. And it's ultimately it's sort of a philosophy issue. And there's not that many PMs or engineers that can sit in that space and be comfortable with the ambiguity of it all. Like a PM's likely going to come in and they're going to say, okay, well, that was a great one hour. What's the next step? And, you know, as a designer, I'm always like, well, the next step is we're going to have another meeting and we're going to talk again in the engineers oftentimes when they're starting to hear different ideas. They're already cutting into the code and they're trying to figure out what's hard and what's easy. And so I think the trick is at the beginning, can you find a small group of people from the different functions that can sit with the ambiguity of the space and talk through a broad range of 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
“Now I think it's structured a little bit differently, but design has always been part of engineering at Apple. So I saw it work quite effectively there, obviously.”
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, that was, you know, sorry, but like that's how it worked at Apple the whole time under Steve. Design always reported to engineering.”
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
“What's the thing that we're trying to produce? What's the incentives that we're trying to create? What's the future state that we're trying to get to? And which are these three options, permutations is going to help us get there the best?”
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, I would kind of defer to you on that, honestly. Like, you've talked to a lot more people across a lot more companies, so you have a much broader set of information you're working with. You know, if you add my whole career together, I've worked at maybe half a dozen places. So a fairly limited sample set. And every design team that I've ever been a part of, I've been a part of. So I also kind of have a biased view as to what did and didn't work for me in those particular organizations. I'll go back to what I said. Every company is different. Every culture is slightly different. It's not one size fits all. I point out the idea of design reporting to engineering just because I don't think people consider the possibility often enough. So there's, you know, there's three options. Design's own thing. Design's part of product. Design's part of engineering. And I think there's a moment when you can back up and make an intelligent choice about the pros and cons for each of those options inside your org. And so I would encourage people to just take a design mentality, you know, and put on that designer mindset just for a moment and say, well,”
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
“For a particular outcome, the way that most of the other sea level roles are held accountable. Sales has a number, engineering has very specific expectations, product has very specific expectations. And although I know this will frustrate some of my friends, I just haven't been able to figure out how that works for design. And again, it can vary from culture to culture. Certainly there's very successful chief design officers, and we could go through the list. I just think in many companies, that's a stretch. It's just hard.”
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
“Very tightly connected and kind of living together. It's not that you have to do that structurally from an organization point of view, but it's hard pressed if you don't. I also think you can just account for timelines and costs and things better when design's part of engineering. And many of my design friends will push back on this and they'll say design should be its own thing and it should be an independent group and we should have, you know, three co-equal branches of government. And that's a solid argument as well. And there's some places where that works beautifully. My experience is at design rarely has a budget or an army. And so it's very hard for them to really hold their own in that sort of a setting. Also, although you'll see people argue with me on LinkedIn about how design needs to be measured and we need to have metrics and be held accountable for a number, I don't really believe that in my heart. I think it's very, I've just never seen a number that you could apply to design that we could reliably affect. So I think it's very hard to hold design as an organization account.”
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'll say that every company culture is different and different organizations work in different ways. In my experience, I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process, rather than a byproduct or a part of the product process. So I just think what I've seen happen over and over in my experience at Yahoo, Thoughtsbot, Pinterest, other places, you know, when you're working directly with product, it's easy to kind of leave engineering out of the loop and product and design can go cook up stuff that doesn't quite make sense technically or is really hard to implement or is just a bridge too far. And I think that engineering doesn't feel like they're a part of it. So you bring them in at the end and they haven't really been brought along so they don't quite understand how to extrapolate from the specs you make into what should really ship. Maybe they don't bring the same level of enthusiasm to it because they haven't been brought along. So I think there's something about having the design and engineering team.”
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
“Remove teammates. And oh, the designers don't need engineers, and the PMs don't need the designers, and everybody thinks they can throw engineering overboard. And I'm like, stop it. Like, we all need each other. And we need each other because we need those different mindsets. And any one of those mindsets is just too mindsets inhabits somebody's head completely. I just don't think you can simultaneously hold multiple mindsets in your head. So it's not that one of my PM counterparts couldn't bring a lot to the design table. It's just I need you to play that position. Like in baseball, like, you know, like the second basement doesn't cover first. That's not how it works. Like, you know, everybody's got to spread the field and play their position so we can take care of the whole thing and respect that together we're going to come up with something better than any one of us would have come up with alone and embrace the creative tension, welcome it. We still have to all go out to lunch and love each other and have fun together and keep in mind that we're having”
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
“Don't try to bleed into their space. I very much believe that once you get into a company, your job is to figure out your role and respect the boundaries between the different groups. So I'm like, you guys, you know, tell us what you need us to do, what the features need to be, when they need to be delivered, what the issues are, and then give us the time and space to come up with a solution to those problems. And then we can work together to decide whether or not our solutions actually solve the problem as you understand it. But I'll stay out of your roadmap and you stay out of my design stop, you know. And let's try to get to the promised land together. So I assume that the product managers, particularly in enterprise SaaS companies like my team, thoughts about did data analytics. My team didn't know anything about data analytics. We didn't have any of that insight. We didn't have the bandwidth, the mental horsepower to go out and do that stuff. Like we had our hands full just trying to figure out the UI. And it's one of the points I try to make too when people are starting to theorize that Gen AI can.”
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 the best lines I ever heard was for my friend Joe Joseph O'Sullivan that at a dinner one night he said, you know, saying a company is design-led does not mean it's designer led. And so what I try to hammer home with people is that when I talk about design as a mindset, I'm talking about as a mindset. Like anybody could have that mindset functioning in any role. Any designer could have a product mindset. In fact, I think that's a lot of what the design community is trying to get at now. And they say designers should be speaking the language of business. I think what they're saying is designers need to inhabit the product mindset as well. And maybe to some degree, even the sales mindset. So look, both functions matter. I look at my counterparts in product and I assume that they are much better connected to the customer, that they understand much better, the business realities. And I expect them to drive the roadmap. I may have some points of view on the roadmap. I may offer some critique. I may have my own suggestions and agenda in there. But once they say this is the roadmap, I have to believe that they're right.”
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, you have to bring a lot of people in once you've got once you kind of figure out what you're doing, right? And so to your point, like once you realize you're building Disneyland and you've kind of got the whole thing set and people know what it's about, then they can come in and understand, oh, I'm playing my piece over here. I'm supposed to, you know, I'm supposed to design the ride for the new or design the line experience for the new ride sitting in tomorrow land. But I know where that fits into this larger thing. So I think you can scale once you have clarity of vision, but it's very difficult to get vision with a lot of people.”
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 something, you know, it's like the four is too few for what we're trying to achieve at scale. But even if you look at Pixar, any good movie, like on the scripting and story side, it's usually a fairly small team. Even when you move into character development and stuff like that, it's fairly small. And then it really scales when you move into production. It's just hard to figure out something new to do together when there's too many people involved.”
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 just always have to point out to people that there are 20 people that worked on the original Mac. I mean, it's 20 of them. That's it. 20. Susan Kare was one of them. And Andy Herzev, you go through the list. 20 of them are on the patent. There's 24 that are on the iPhone patent. Now, there's other people involved, but generally there's 24 people on the iPhone patent. And that was kind of the team. That was like Project Purple that was doing that stuff. These are not massive, massive groups doing these things. And if you had put a massive group, I don't know, man. Maybe it'd end up with a Zune or something completely different. Who knows? They probably didn't.”
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
“Vision of what they're doing and the benefit of operating with a smaller staff is not just that it saves money on payroll. It's that you have the way the minds come together to create something that feels like a singled whole is a much higher chance when you have fewer people involved. You know, you don't, I sort of joke about the Beatles. You get the Beatles with four people. You don't get the Beatles with eight people. And you certainly don't get it with 24 people, right? Like the teams get too big and you just can't get that what Brian Eno calls seniors. So Brian Eno has this great word that he uses. Senius is the genius that comes when you have a group together. So seniors is sort of the collective idea of genius. And I think that's something that's really magical that I've experienced in my career. But usually in smaller groups, it's hard to do with a giant group.”
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
“Look, you know, again, to go back to Apple, but we could also talk about Lego, Leica, Porsche, Airbnb. I mean, there's other companies Patagonia. There's other companies that make sense as a design centered organization. And if you think about like everything they do at all ladders together into like one cohesive, sensical thing, it's integrated, makes sense as a unit. And I think that's a huge difference and at an incredible strategic advantage because the company can operate with much greater efficiency. They can onboard new people and get them in line. Like, you know, Apple, for example, on the store that, or the team that designed the online store, we had six designers for a store that ran in 30 some odd countries, 12 and a half thousand instances of the store doing billions of dollars of revenue. We had six designers. Like any other company would have had 60 or more. So Apple's able to operate with much smaller staff because they have real clarity.”
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
“We're describing the part of the iceberg that sits above the waterline, you know, which is the result. That's one of the outcomes of design, but that's not the real heavy lifting of design. Design's more like liberal arts or philosophy or something. It's like, what do we try to achieve at a much lower level? And so when I talk to founders and people about the value of design, what I'm pushing them on is when we can get organizational alignment around what we want to do philosophically, why do we exist? What's the vision for the company? How do all these things ladder up through vision, through mission, through specific tenets, design strategies, and then into actual execution? How do we ladder that whole thing up so it makes sense as a whole? That's the magic of design, right? So the difference is when you design things, you end up with a bunch of bricks that are piled into a beautiful impenetrable wall. And if you don't do that, you end up with a bunch of bricks scattered across the backyard. And they don't really add up to anything. And I think that's one of the things if 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
“Me back up and just dissect a little bit the way you described design because you described it in really tactical terms. You said beautiful, intuitive products that make sense. I think it was something like that. So what you were describing was.”
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
“Constraints and issues than engineering or some of the other problem solving methodologies. So I look at again, I look at as a company, does the company think in a design mindset? And Apple does, Airbnb does. I don't get the sense that Google does. And I don't get the sense that Amazon does. And that's not a critique on them. I don't think that those organizations are competing on design in the same way. But again, I want to go work in a place that is an organization thinks in a design type method.”
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'm going to go back to the Edward Tuftty quote that I use all the time, which is design is clear thinking made visible. And so, you know, I think most people when they talk about design, they think of it as the visual expression of an idea. They think of it as a team or a function or a group. I think of it as a holistic mindset. It's, you know, like when design thinking became big, I was always really confused because I didn't know how else she could think. That was just sort of how I naturally thought, which is, you know, design is trying to imagine the future you want to live in and then take the steps to make it real. You know, it's living with a certain type of intentionality and almost sort of a Buddhist type way, which is different from science, which is sort of observational trying to understand. It's a little bit different from engineering, which is, you know, we kind of know where we want to go at the end, but we're trying to kind of go one step at a time versus designs trying to like see some, you know, further out future state and account for a larger or sort of a different set of”
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, why would you want to work at a place that doesn't value the thing that you do? That would just, God, that would suck.”
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 don't know, Burma or China or something, it would be wildly more challenging because the base view of the world, the base understanding of the world is just different. And it'd be much harder for me to adapt to that.”
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
“Nutanix before he came to ThoughtSpot before he started ThoughtSpot. And so when I heard that, I'm like, oh, this is a guy that gets designed right from the very beginning. And I've also come to believe that I actually have never seen a company that grafted design on after the founding. So I've seen lots, I could name lots of companies that I think are kind of design-led, not always designer-led, but design-led or design-centric. But I've never seen somebody grafted on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or doesn't exist. And so the thing that I'm looking for when I interview is, is it there at the beginning? Can I get a credible story that tracks it back to that? And if that's the case, then I think I can find a way to navigate in that culture. Like we sort of have a shared value system in a way that like, you know, as an American, I could immigrate to Australia. And the culture would be slightly different, but we'd have a shared value system that I could relate to if I moved to.”
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