Hustle: Just Show Me the Damn Thing! (feat. Joel Beukelman & Ted Boda)

04/10/15 • 45 min

It’s a wonderful time to be a product designer. There's more design and prototyping tools available to us than ever before (and more and more keep popping up). It’s safe to say we’ll all be using these tools in various ways to achieve the specific results we need. Keynote is a fantastic low-barrier-of-entry tool that allows product managers, designers, and marketing professionals to achieve product success while maximizing time

In this special SXSW '15 Hustle/Balance Podcast cross-over episode, Joel Beukelman and Ted Boda talk about how Keynote has allowed cross discipline teams at Google, Nest, and Netflix to work quickly and efficiently together to craft great products.

Show Notes:

0:45 Drinking bourbon and opening up the show
1:30 Joel talks about his new job at Google working on Android Auto, how he and Ted started working with Keynote for prototyping at Netflix, and the inspiration of the Balance Podcast.
3:30 Ted introduces himself and his experience working on the Keynote team at Apple, Nest, and his new exciting projects.
4:55 “Keynote is my entire design tool.” - Joel
4:55 Keynote has all the features you need to plan, design, build consensus, track changes, present and spec your entire product; and can maximize valuable time.
9:50 Keynote does everything you need to do 80-90% really well in one tool.
10:50 Ted talks about presenting Design to Steve Jobs.
13:27 There are sooo many prototyping tools available today.
20:00 Just show me the damn thing! Oh that’s the thing!
23:40 Pixel pretty damn perfect. Your mock doesn’t matter. Even if your design is perfect the engineer isn’t going to necessarily make it perfect.
24:22 You’re at an advantage if you're working on a project with an established visual identity.
32:58 When you’re at a big product company it’s all about money and conversion and testing. The last 25% is the polish that happens in implementation.
34:00 You have to know the voice of your product and Keynote makes it easy for writers to hop in and do their work.
37:30 Details matter. When you’re doing something wrong for the driving context people could die.
39:00 Use the tools that works best for you. Joel and Ted prefer tools that save time.
41:25 Get ted and Joel to do a workshop at your company at www.keynote.com
43:23 Joel runs out of Bourbon.

###Links:

Visit the Funsize website
Subscribe to The Funsize Digest
Check out Funsize on Instagram

Show Notes:

0:45 Drinking bourbon and opening up the show
1:30 Joel talks about his new job at Google working on Android Auto, how he and Ted started working with Keynote for prototyping at Netflix, and the inspiration of the Balance Podcast.
3:30 Ted introduces himself and his experience working on the Keynote team at Apple, Nest, and his new exciting projects.
4:55 “Keynote is my entire design tool.” - Joel
4:55 Keynote has all the features you need to plan, design, build consensus, track changes, present and spec your entire product; and can maximize valuable time.
9:50 Keynote does everything you need to do 80-90% really well in one tool.
10:50 Ted talks about presenting Design to Steve Jobs.
13:27 There are sooo many prototyping tools available today.
20:00 Just show me the damn thing! Oh that’s the thing!
23:40 Pixel pretty damn perfect. Your mock doesn’t matter. Even if your design is perfect the engineer isn’t going to necessarily make it perfect.
24:22 You’re at an advantage if you're working on a project with an established visual identity.
32:58 When you’re at a big product company it’s all about money and conversion and testing. The last 25% is the polish that happens in implementation.
34:00 You have to know the voice of your product and Keynote makes it easy for writers to hop in and do their work.
37:30 Details matter. When you’re doing something wrong for the driving context people could die.
39:00 Use the tools that works best for you. Joel and Ted prefer tools that save time.
41:25 Get ted and Joel to do a workshop at your company at www.keynote.com
43:23 Joel runs out of Bourbon.

###Links:

Visit the Funsize website
Subscribe to The Funsize Digest
Check out Funsize on Instagram

Previous Episode

Hustle: Ships or It Didn’t Happen (feat. Bradee Evans & Seth Shaw from Photoshop)

It's SXSW '15 and we had the awesome opportunity to hang out with Photoshop product designers before our epic high-five hour party. Anthony and Danielle set out to tackle a controversial topic.

The dilemma is that there is a lot of great-looking design on the web at sites like Behance and Dribbble and also in a great many designers portfolios. Sometimes you see something that looks incredible aesthetically on the screen but then you find out that it was either unsolicited by the “client” (example: how many times have see someone redesign Instagram on Behance?) or that carries the footnote something like “rejected concept.” It might look amazing, but why didn’t it ship?

Show Notes

00:00 Introductions
05:30 It’s important to play, but there’s serious constraints with a 25 year old project
07:45 It’s fun to be wrong
09:18 It discounts the hard work a product team has put in
11:05 Let’s you think big and you need that to live!
10:20 A benefit is the “What if” which pushes the design
12:00 Project Recess, a new photoshop experience.
14:00 Scenario: 100% honesty, which designer would you hire?
29:00 Hire strong opinions, loosely held
30:00 Teams need both types to even each other out
32:44 “lovingly curating” keeping teams on a rotation to keep roles complimentary
35:08 Experimental projects in a product that don’t ship are still worth the lesson you learn
37:00 The best work may be conceptual stuff you can’t show
39:50 Understanding how a design vision can be rolled out over time
43:00 Some quick descriptions of Photoshop’s team structure

Visit the Funsize website
Subscribe to The Funsize Digest
Check out Funsize on Instagram

Next Episode

Hustle: Whose Job is UX? (feat. Peter Merholz)

Show Notes:

0:55 Rick is back from paternity leave. His new son is awesome.
1:11 Joining us on this episode is the Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, friend of Funsize, and a hugely inspirational designer, Mr. Peter Merholz.
1:30 Anthony chronicles Peter's background with the international consulting firm, Adaptive Path, which is perhaps best known for championing "User Experience."
1:50 Fun Peter Merholz facts: Peter hired Funsize while at Groupon and was Funsize's first client. Thanks, Peter! He also coined the term 'blog'.
3:44 Fun fact about the new Up4 from Jawbone is that it can do NFC payments!
4:00 The theme for this episode was conceived following Peter's blog post "There's no such thing as UX design."
5:20 Don Norman, credited with the coining the term User Experience in the early 90s, created the User Experience Architect's office at Apple.
6:25 Initially, Adaptive Path considered themselves a user experience consultancy because no one else was talking about user experience at the time. The term "design" was an avoided term because designers were not involved in product strategy, often reduced to pixel pushers and production workers.
8:40 "User experience is an outcome, not a practice." - Peter Merholz. There are many contributing factors to good or bad user experience, but design is only one part of the whole.
9:32 User experience designers were actually interaction designers, information architects, or other designers cloaking themselves with the phrase because it sounded good.
11:11 Picking apart the concept of the "User Experience Designer." A litmus test for the viability of the "User Experience Designer" career path: How would one grow as a UX designer? What's that path or evolution look like?
14:20 The thing that we call "User Experience design" may fit in two buckets: 1) Product Management & 2) Design Execution.
15:00 A historic lapse in balanced Product Management may have generated "User Experience Design."
17:00 Product designers began to create a set of user research & persona development practices in order to ensure product strategy would not forget to acknowledge the user.
18:20 Strategically-minded designers can lead products as well as strategically-minded engineers or business persons.
21:55 If we do call "User Experience Designer" a profession, it would be best compared to a film director.
25:00 Anyone who tells you they've figured out how the formula for the perfect product team is lying to you.
25:50 Peter eventually left consulting because he found the relationship they had with clients wasn't leveraging his agency enough impact on final products. Peter effortlessly flips the interview around on Funsize to discuss how we ensure impact with clients and products.
28:00 Funsize discusses our team structures and project pacing.
29:25 We share about a tactical program we run called Special Ops, in which designers may do work that can help steer the product in the direction we believe it should go. Special Ops often strengthens our impact within the client organization.
32:00 We discuss pairing design teams with clients and the importance spreading out designer's velocity across more than one project at a time. No designer works alone!
33:45 We talk about the problems with in-house designers at product companies and how to avoid driving designers insane.
35:00 Peter discusses tactical hiring decisions and team formation at Groupon, to which he gives credit for stronger impact of designers and decisions.
38:30 We recall our discussion with our friends at Adobe, where we learned that there's two designers to 60+ engineers at Photoshop.
39:00 Peter recalls hiring outside design support while at Groupon.
42:15 We note how, for consultancies, it's becoming just as important to help the people and companies you work with hiring internal teams as it is to help them with needed design work.
43:00 Design teams in an organization are very different from other types of teams, and they shouldn't be structured or managed as though they were...