Andy Budd co-founded pioneering UX design agency Clearleft. After leading and growing that company, he became an advisor, VC, and coach. He’s now written a book on how early stage startups can benefit from good design. That is the focus of our conversation.

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Transcript

Jorge: Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy: It’s really delightful to be here. We’ve known each other professionally for many years. We haven’t really spoken in a while, thanks to the pandemic and conferences. And yeah. I’m really excited to get time to chat with you today.

Jorge: I’m excited to chat with you as well, and as you’re hinting at in that introduction, I’ve always thought of ourselves as colleagues in that you’ve been in the design space. You’ve founded, I would say, a pioneering consultancy in the UK. Is that fair?

About Andy

Andy: That’s very kind. Yes, I, yeah, I would say that we were—my agency was a company called Clearleft, and we were arguably the first UX agency in the UK, very much inspired by the work that people like Adaptive Path did. And so I think a lot of people in the UK, their first ever experience of UX would’ve been an article that we’d written or a conference talk we’d given or a conference that we’d organize. So yeah, very you to say. So I’m British as well, so I tend to be awfully shy and waffle when people say things like that, but yeah, that’s very kind.

Jorge: You talked about Clearleft in the past tense and it still exists, right? It’s just that you’re not involved with it anymore.

Andy: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And we’re diving straight into the middle of the backstory, I guess. But yeah, so I founded an agency called Clearleft in 2005. I ran it as MD for 15 years, and then me and my business partners, Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter, who I ran the company with, we decided that we wanted to make the company employee-owned. And so we went through a process where we transferred the ownership of the company to the team. Because I’ve always been working in this industry not to make a lot of money but to see some kind of positive change in the world. And the team has always been a big part of that. There’s no Clearleft without all the amazing people that work there. And so why should the value of that be centralized into two or three owners?

And so, yeah, we went through this process of making the company employee-owned. As part of that process, once that process was over the line, I stepped back as managing director and handed the keys to the car over to Rich who had been wanting to be the MD, the CEO for a while. And then after a year or so, I stepped out to go off and do other things, to explore other adventures. And Rich and Jeremy are still very much at the center of Clearleft. I was literally just chatting to Rich today via email around some Clearleft related things. So yeah, I still love the company. I’ve still got a lot of respect for what they do. I think they’re still a really good design agency, and if you’re ever in the need for a good UX person, definitely drop on the line. But I’ve gone into pastures new the last few years.

Jorge: And that’s what we’re here to talk about. And I wanted to get into it like that because although you and I have known each other for a long time, we haven’t seen each other in a long time. And I’ve always had this ambient awareness that you had gone and done other things, right? And now you’ve written a book about it and I would love for you to share with us that trajectory that you took after leaving Clearleft.

The Role of Design in Startups

Andy: Before I jump straight into what happened next, I’ll give a little bit of my general philosophy and how I’ve managed my career, because I think it’s quite relevant here. I’ve gone through about three phases. I started life as just a jobbing designer, and then I moved into the founder of a design agency, and then this sort of third act, which we’ll get onto in a second.

But throughout that whole process, I’ve had a love of design. I’ve believed that design has a real opportunity to deliver value to individuals and organizations, whether it’s making products easier to use, whether it’s making them more accessible to use, or whether it’s driving revenue. I’ve always wanted to try and unlock this power of design, and I’ve always felt that design hasn’t ever quite been valued as much by people outside the design field as it is by designers. And that’s understandable. We’ve made career decisions based on our love of design, so of course, we’re going to value it more than a salesperson or a marketer or an engineer.

But a big part of my career up to this point has been driven by that desire to raise the profile of design. So, how have I done that? As I alluded to before, I started an agency that was all about design, and it was all about this new form of design at the time called user experience design. The way I describe it is if I’ve got an agency, I can get amazing design in the hands of ten or twenty customers. And that’s great. And at Clearleft, we worked with some amazing companies. We worked with people like Mozilla, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Holidays, and Random House.

And so we were able to put design in the hands of these amazing people. And obviously, all these companies had millions and millions of customers. That’s one thing we can do to raise the profile of design. Through that process, I would talk to the founders, I would talk to CEOs and help them appreciate the value. One of the things I’ve always loved about working at Clearleft is that whenever we left a company, their maturity around design had always increased. It hadn’t increased to a maximum, eleven out of ten, but it had always gone from five to seven or seven to nine. And so that’s one good thing we could do.

Obviously, if I went and spoke at conferences, I’m a huge fan of conferences. This is how we met. I love speaking at conferences because then I can explain how to get more value into the world to a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand attendees. And also at Clearleft, we ran our own conferences to do the same, so even a small little 30-person studio in Brighton, we could have an outsized impact on the world. And a lot of my colleagues would write books, et cetera, et cetera.

One of the challenges I always found… As well as UX design, we also used to run a conference called Leading Design, and I did a lot of work with design leaders, heads, directors, and VPs of design. And because all of my friends have graduated from being ICs to being leaders, and when I chat with them, they have the same kinds of problems: how do I raise the profile of design in my organization? How do I get my boss to really care about design? How can we have a bigger impact? And, actually, I started one of the things I do these days post-Clearleft is I do a lot of coaching. So at any one time, I have about a dozen heads, directors, and VPs of product design whom I coach. And those are often the really big themes. I’ve had a couple of coaching calls this morning, and those were the themes of those coaching calls. So this is an ever-present problem.

One of the reasons for that problem is all of these people that I coach are in existing businesses. There might be 200 people, there might be 2,000 people, there might be 20,000 people, but the companies have gotten to where they are today irrespective of design, rather than because of design. And so you have a founder that is going, “Well, we’ve managed to be really successful.” And then suddenly this design leader comes along and says, “Stop, you’re doing it all wrong. I don’t care if you’ve got a billion-dollar business, but have you heard about this thing called design?” And it can be quite patronizing. And the founder of this big billion-dollar company will go, “We’ve done pretty alright so far, what do you know?” So there’s always this tension there. There’s always this tension between design coming in later, not being able to make a place for itself, and pushing back against a leadership that has never seen design as critical to their success because it hasn’t been up to now.

And so I started thinking, how can I start getting into conversations with founders early enough that I can expose the value of design to them from day one rather than day a thousand? I thought, maybe the route into that would be into the world of investing. And so, I looked around and I found that there were about twenty or thirty other designers in the world who had moved from designing to investment. Daniel Burka, when he was at Google Ventures, was a classic example. Irene Au, who was one of the first designers at Google, moved into Khosla Ventures, and then Jeff Veen is another classic example from Adaptive Path.

But the thinking was, what if I can get into these companies early? What if I can encourage them to hire a good designer as their founding designer? What if I can help them see the value of design? And when it comes round to the coaching clients, I’m not coaching people that have founders that don’t value design; I’m coaching people who have founders that have been valuing design for five, ten, fifteen years, who have seen it as integral to the success of their product.

And yeah, I jumped into the world of VC. So I work for a company called Seedcamp two days a week as a venture partner. Seedcamp is one of the top three European pre-seed and seed stage funds, so really high profile. And I get to spend time with amazing founders who don’t give a stuff about design but really do care about making their product successful. And what does that mean? That means picking the right features and functionality, that means working their product into their user’s workflow because they’re usually trying to get people to switch from a current ineffective workflow to a better workflow. That means understanding what that workflow is by asking them a series of, who knows, research questions or discovery questions. When the product doesn’t necessarily work because it’s very rare that the first version of the product explodes, you need to start looking at the user journey to figure out what’s broken. Are they understanding the product? Are they able to get value quickly enough? Does the onboarding make sense, or are they being dumped into a blank landing page or an empty dashboard?

And these are the things that founders have never had to deal with before and have no knowledge or experience of how to solve. It’s an unfigured-out conundrum. They don’t know who to turn to. And so maybe the engineers will help, maybe the marketers will help, maybe the product people will help. And I’ll come along and say, “Hey, look, actually, this sounds like a design problem. Why don’t you talk to some designers? Why don’t you hire some designers? They might be able to help you think through some of these steps. They might be able to, I don’t know, empathize with your customers. They might be able to understand what those customers are trying to achieve and meet those achievements in your product. Because at the moment, your product really is built around the needs of the engineering team and the vision you have in your head, rather than around how people actually work and think and do things today.”

I often don’t even talk about design, but the approach I take is a design approach. When people start seeing traction, when people start seeing an improvement, and when they start wanting more of that, then I go, “Hey, why don’t you hire a designer? Why don’t you have a UX person? Why don’t you hire a researcher?” So I’m like building design capability, interest, and knowledge by stealth.

The Growth Equation

And yeah, you alluded to the book. That’s what the book’s about. I wouldn’t say this if we were on a founder podcast, but I feel safe that I’m with my people here. But yeah, the book is called The Growth Equation, and it really is about early-stage startup growth, getting that early product out there, getting your first few customers, iterating towards what we call in the business product-market fit, and how to do that from a designful perspective.

One of the things I realize is all of the books out there around growth don’t necessarily meet the values that I have. You know, it’ll be, “Hey, growth hacking!” Like how to trick users into kind of doing X, Y, Z. Or it will be like, “Behavior change! Like, we’re gonna gamify the heck out of this thing!” And that doesn’t relate to me. Or they’re out of product management. I’ve read one of the really popular books in this growth space a while ago, and they never mentioned design once. Every solution to a user challenge was, “Hey, we’ll get your product managers in.” And that just made me a little bit annoyed.

And so, I’ve written a book that also brings in designers and marketers and engineers and all kinds of people. But it really has a kind of a design lens through this. Because I’ve always believed that designers are the vehicle that delivers product-market fit. And so, yeah, it is a design book in stealth, but it doesn’t have that on the cover. And my goal is — and my ask for all the people who may be listening to this is — if you have a founder in your world, if you are working in an early-stage startup, if one of your friends is gonna go and start a business, buy them the book and give them a copy. Because hopefully, that will make your life easier, and more importantly, it will make the first founding designer on the team’s life easier because you’ll have a similar common language and lens to look through the problems with.

Jorge: I loved the book, and I think it’s important to note that I am not the audience for the book. And, this is not a book written for designers. As you’ve said, it’s a book written for founders, particularly founders of early-stage companies. Part of the reason why I love the book so much, there’s two reasons. One is it’s an exceedingly clear book and exceedingly well-written. And it feels like having a conversation with an experienced guide that knows what they’re talking about. But the other reason why I loved it is that these are very difficult times for design, and designers are doing this kind of like soul-searching. It’s like, “Oh, we are in the doldrums, and nobody values design.”

And this book, I see it as a Trojan horse for design. Like you’re explaining it, in that it is very concretely about how to get an early-stage company to be successful. And it just so happens that design is a part of that formula, but the point of the book is not to proselytize design, but to your point, it’s like, it’s framing it in such a way that design is an important component of this.

Andy: Absolutely. The core market is definitely founders, but in the same way as the core market for The Lean Startup is founders, I’ve met plenty of designers who have read The Lean Startup. I’ve met plenty of engineers who have read The Lean Startup and got value out of it. So I definitely think while the target market, like the ICP for this book is founders, I do think there’s value for anybody who builds and makes products. And also, this book is aimed at pre-PMF founders, like early-stage in the couple of years. But I also think a lot of the tools and the examples are relevant to companies of any size and stage. And so I do think there’s value beyond just that target market.

And I think this also goes back to one of the things I’m doing at the moment. I still speak at conferences. I spoke at Nordic UX a few weeks ago. And one of the things I’m mostly speaking about, like interesting, this is why I do work with startups and I do coaching, because I’m effectively telling the same story, but from a different perspective and a different lens. To the startup people, to the founders, I’m trying to tell them about product-led growth and all these kinds of things and nudge them towards design. But for designers, I’m trying to encourage them to be more businesslike. I’m trying to encourage them to use the amazing empathy that we have for our customers and our users, but realizing we need to deploy that same level of empathy to our business partners, our stakeholders, to understand what they’re trying to achieve, to understand their challenges and their frustrations, and to be able to serve them better.

We are not going to be able to get design to have a better seat at the table if we are difficult and spiky and grumpy to deal with. And I joked in my Nordic UX conference talk that the way that designers tend to want to raise the profile of design is by argument. By, “We’ve got half an hour to put the deck together for the leadership team’s away day, and so I’m gonna show pictures of Nest, and I’m gonna show pictures of Apple products, and I’m gonna show a graph that all of these companies — Airbnb — that have got design, at their heart are growing faster than everybody else.” And just through the power of conversation and conviction, all of the founders will go, “Hey, I didn’t realize that. I never knew that Apple were good at design. Thank you for taking the scales off my eyes. You are my hero. I’m gonna carry you out of the meeting room on my shoulders.” And suddenly, the world is at your feet, and we will do everything, and we will let you do everything you want.

And that never happens. What usually happens is you give the talk, everyone goes, “Oh, that’s lovely.” Pat you on the head, shoo you out the room, and then they get back to talking about the real important business. And the only way that I think designers can have influence is by understanding what that business is and by delivering it. By understanding the pain that your stakeholders have. When your salesperson says, “Hey, look, I need these two features to be installed in order to close this half-a-million-dollar deal,” you don’t go back to them and say, “How do I know that this is important? I need to go off and do two months’ worth of research to prove that this is an anomaly and this is…” That isn’t gonna make you any friends. What’s gonna make you friends is to go, “Yeah, sure. Let me move the backlog around. Let me try and get this done. Let’s squeeze this in. Let’s close that deal.” And suddenly, the salesperson, you’ve helped them not only close a deal, but you’ve helped them make their target at the end of the month, and they’re gonna really love you. And the more you can help that salesperson, the more you have a part of the conversation, a stake in the conversation, the more you can influence them, the more the next time they ask you for a thing, you can say, “That’s really good. But have you considered doing X, Y, Z or doing this way or doing that way?”

So, we need to build our reputation by first helping people and serving them, building trust, and then using that trust as a lever to make things better. The same is true of product. The same is true of marketing. I meet so many marketing teams who actively disengage from design because every time they talk to the design team, they’re a bit spiky and a bit sulky and won’t do the thing that they want them to do. And so they go out and they build their own design team, and then all of a sudden you’ve got three or four designers in the marketing team doing different things, different brand guidelines, messing things up, and the designers get all grumpy because that’s happened. But it’s happened because you weren’t willing to engage with them in the first place. You forced them to go and hire external designers. You forced them to hire an agency because working with you is so challenging. And so we need to be better servants. We need to raise that profile of design by helping people.

The best example for this was the early stages of GDS, Government Digital Services. This was, I guess, 10 years ago now. This was a tiny little kind of mini-project, almost like a proof of concept, that the government in the UK did to try and prove that they could build internally good products. Because what happened before, you’d go out to a big, 10-million-pound contract, they’d spend five years building the thing, it’d be an absolute nightmare, it wouldn’t work, and then the whole of the citizenry of the UK would suffer both financially and also terrible user experience.

So this kind of almost like piratical group of UX designers and product people got together and wanted to try and do something about it. But they realized that they needed to get buy-in. They went around to each of these ten most important ministers, like government ministers, and said, “What’s the one thing we could do really quickly that would solve a big problem, a big headache?” And minister after minister would be like, “Look, this is one thing I’ve hated about the website. This is one problem I always found. Like, why can’t we just have X as simple as Y?”

And within about two or three months, each one of these ministers got their quick fix. So all of a sudden, like these ministers who have been trying to do these things for years and years with no luck, because they’re constantly meeting resistance, suddenly you’ve got a team in the government that is doing these things and doing them quickly. So of course, they’re gonna say, “This person helped me solve this problem. Could you help me solve these three problems?” And then you solve the three problems they can help me solve these five problems. And all of a sudden you become a draw and a magnet for people who are frustrated because they can’t get stuff done and you can do it. And the more agency and the more respect that you have in the organization, the more flexibility you have not just to be told what to do in a feature factory, but to shape how the product works. And so that’s a big part of what this book is about, and this is also a big part of what my coaching and my speaking is about to designers, to get them to step up and be more sensible, considered business partners.

Jorge: I haven’t been part of an early-stage startup, but one of the things that the book made abundantly clear to me is what the business objectives are. Like you’re talking about, like, how can design help serve business objectives? And in a large enterprise or in a government context like the one you’re describing, there might be lots of competing objectives, and there might be different things that you could be working towards. And there’s the user experience, and there’s gaining traction with products, or delivering the things that ministers want or whatever. There can be all these competing directions. In a startup, I got the sense from reading your book that we have to be really single-minded, right? And the thing that you’re driving toward is in the title of the book, you’re driving towards growth. And you have a very short runway to do it. Why does growth matter for an enterprise at this stage in their life?

Why Growth Matters

Andy: I’m mostly in the book talking about venture-backed startups. I’m not talking about necessarily slow-growth, bootstrap startups. So I think a lot of the ideas and lessons apply, but the easiest way to talk about it in the framing of your question is a venture-backed, funded startup. And what typically happens is some kind of investor will give you enough money to deliver eighteen months’ worth of progress. Then you go back to that investor or a different set of investors, and you present the progress you’ve made, and if you’ve made enough progress, they will give you another eighteen months.

And so you are always in this kind of weird existential space. Because for most early-stage companies, they can’t be profitable and bootstrapped from day one because there’s an awful lot of effort that needs to go into making it sustainable. If you are a tech startup, you have to build the product, which takes time and effort and investment, and you might need to hire a bunch of people. You might need to hire marketing people, salespeople, yada.

And so there’s always a sort of investment that’s needed that is running at a debt for a while. And at some stage, Series A, Series B, Series C, it flips over into not needing that money to survive, but maybe it accelerates things. And so there’s always this kind of lack of air, lack of fuel, whatever you wanna call it. But also, what it does is it gives you specific gates. Every eighteen months, you need to go back to people and say, “Hey, look, we’re making progress.” And growth is effectively that progress.

The first step of progress is being able to demonstrate that you can build the thing that you have said you can build, and hopefully you can build it at pace. Investors don’t want to see a product that kind of takes ages and ages to build because you will potentially be outcompeted in the market. And so product velocity is a big measure. Like, how quickly can this team work? And if you see one team that can produce quality in six months and one that produces it in eighteen months, you’re gonna go with a team that produces the same level of quality in a short amount of time. And so speed and quality are really important.

So that is a form of growth because it’s an accretion of software, it’s an accretion of UI, it’s a delivery of value. But what you expect to be doing is delivering value over time, and the faster you can deliver value, the quicker you can get that value into people’s hands, the quicker they can extract it. Then you want to make sure that value is actually doing what you wanted it to do. And so, you want to see people sticking around. You want to see more people coming on board. You want to see enough traction that the next round of investors go, “Okay, yeah, like this doesn’t just feel like a good product, but I can see that it’s growing. I can see that it’s growing at 5, 6, 7, 8% every week.”

And what you track is completely up to you. Like, it might just be something as innocuous as registrations or people signed up to your mailing list, or it might be utilization of features, “Oh, people are using these features more and more,” or daily active use. I don’t particularly care what that metric is, and I think a lot of VCs don’t have a particular favorite metric because every product is different. But they want to see that the value you’re proposing the product delivers, delivers it, and delivers it in a way that is constantly almost becoming self-sustaining. Because they want to make sure that when they put that next amount of money in, you can use that money to turn it into more customers and more customers to the point that it becomes sustaining. VCs don’t want to just keep throwing good money after bad. They want to know that you can get to a point where you can be sustaining. And the way you do that is by having customers who will pay. And so growth is vitally important. And there’s a bunch of kind-of people that say that growth is the fundamental kind of building blocks of a startup. It’s what a startup is: it’s a fast-growing product.

I would argue that to some extent, most businesses care about growth, at least they care about profitability. They are not charities. They’re often competing in quite complicated, difficult markets where market share is important, and getting more customers is important, and making more money is important, and retaining people is important. Not necessarily just purely because of some evil capitalist machinations, although I’m sure people have those as well, but because they have an amazing team of designers and engineers and product people that they need to keep engaged. And the way that you get your salary and you pay your mortgage at the end of the month is by having a product that’s profitable. And if it stops being profitable, unfortunately, you might end up having to shrink back down. And so, maintaining a kind of a level of profitability and a level of growth, I think, is important for most businesses.

I think the difference between a traditional business and a startup is with a startup, there’s very little else because the team is so small, there’s not an awful lot of competing goals and egos. Because what I see happen in a lot of bigger companies is actually, people will often promote a feature or a product or an initiative, partly because they think it’s gonna benefit the company, but also partly because it benefits themselves. They can spend eighteen months building a thing, they can launch a thing, and then they can go to the next company and say, “Hey, I spent eighteen months building a thing and launching a thing, and all my bosses didn’t like it, but I powered it through and it went live and it had this really impressive impact. And so hire me for more money and I will do the same.” And so you see a lot of projects happening in businesses that are really driven by people wanting to have something in their CV, have something in their portfolio, and it’s loosely aligned to growth. But often it’s more aligned to that person’s individual status in the org.

And so, that creates a level of muddiness around how well that is aligned to growth. Whereas all of that kind of drama and politics often is taken out of a startup because there’s nowhere to hide because you don’t have those individuals there. Now, nobody joins a ten-person startup because they want to pitch a story for the next job that they’re joining. They want the company to grow and to be successful because they’re gonna make money, equity, yada, yada, yada. So I think it’s just, there’s clarity there.

Jorge: That came across. There’s clarity, there’s focus, there’s commitment to getting to the next goal, basically whatever it takes. And I got the sense that the job description is not what matters here, it’s actually getting the job done. And you have chapters on things like founder-led sales and stuff like that. And I would imagine that a designer working in that context as well needs to be abundantly clear on what the targets are. And I think that it requires a different attitude. You talked earlier about building a pitch deck that basically sells design for design’s sake. I, that’s not what you said, but that’s the way I heard it, right? Like you’re showing the pictures of Apple products or whatever. I’m gonna read a quote from the book, that I would love for you to react to, because I think it talks to this. You say, “Building a successful product is more than just building a good product that meets user needs.” And I think that a lot of designers would hear that and go, what more is there?

What Designers Get Wrong

Andy: Yeah, absolutely. I have seen so many amazing products that fail to get use. And if they fail to get use, is it such an amazing product? The purpose of a product is, I would argue, to deliver some kind of value, some kind of utility. And if you have this beautiful product, but nobody ever sees it, it’s like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Like, if the most perfect product in the world never gets any use and so the value in that product is never unlocked, is that actually any good? Whereas I’ve seen plenty of products that you could argue from a UX point of view are mediocre, but there’s something about the combination of the product and the utility and the marketing and the sales that is allowing more and more people to unlock the utility that is in that product. And there’s a delta between the utility that is delivered by your new products and how they were doing things before.

And I think this is, for me, I think the big sort of challenge that a lot of designers face. Designers often believe that their job is to make the best product possible. And if they can’t manage to make the best product possible, even if the product is significantly better than what came before, they have failed. I joke again in my talk, at the moment, that I see product launches where the sales team is super happy with the product launch and the marketing team is happy and the product management team is happy, and over in the corner, the designers are sitting there, and they’re looking crestfallen, and they’re depressed. It’s almost like someone’s died. And you are like, what’s going on? Why aren’t you happy? You’ve made this thing so much better than what was there before. The problem that designers have is they’re not seeing the improvement of the product that’s out there; they’re seeing the product that could have been. They’re seeing all of the thousand paper cuts that meant that beautiful, clever onboarding process they did got cut, and this other thing got cut, something else got cut, and even if the product is 80% better, they’re mourning the 20% that could have been. And what happens is the first time that happens, every designer goes, “Oh, I’m angry, my company doesn’t care about design. I’m gonna teach them that that 20% is important.” And the next time, the same thing happens. And the third time, the same thing happens. And eventually, a lot of us designers get really jaded because we can never build the perfection that we are aiming towards.

But the way that I explain it in my talks is, I think designers believe that product development, that their job, effectively, is a game of chess. And in a game of chess, it’s played out over a long period of time. The best player always wins, and the way you win is by studying the moves deeply and thinking deeply. It’s an intellectual challenge. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. And every time a problem comes up, there’s a right way to solve it where you win, and there is a wrong way to solve it, where you lose. And so we are completely optimizing for perfection. We are optimizing for this kind of “perfect or lose” scenario. The problem is that most of the time in the real world, in the product world, we are not playing games. Now, there are some instances; if we are building and designing a flight cockpit, it’s gotta be perfect because if you mess up, people die. If you are building a reactor system, people f-up, they die. If you are building a train coordination system, if people f-up, you die.

Now, I use these three examples really specifically because the heritage of our industry, UX design, comes from CogSci, it comes from HCI, it comes from people designing these critical systems. And so, is there any wonder culturally that when we are building a new widget for a cat social media product, our DNA, the way we’re being taught, is we’re thinking about it as if it’s a nuclear power plant control center that has to be perfect? The reality is actually in most instances, in 95% of instances when we’re making that social media product, it will go through dozens of iterations, and each iteration will get slightly better and slightly better, hopefully. And the product will live over the course of ten or fifteen years.

And what it really is, it’s like a game of poker. Your job in poker isn’t to make each hand a potentially winning hand. Your job really is to get dealt a bunch of cards, make a quick decision as to whether this is a hand you want to bet on or not; if you don’t think it’s a strong hand, you want to lose and lose gracefully, but lose quickly. And if you get a really good hand of cards, you need to figure out how you can play that in order to maximize your win. And so, in poker, maybe every one in ten hands is the hand that you’re gonna lean into and play. And if you’re a really good poker player, you can win the whole tournament with maybe three or four really amazing hands, and you minimize your losses elsewhere.

And this is how most businesses think. Most businesses think that all of the things that you think are vitally important, they don’t care. They like it to be good, but they’ve got a backlog of a dozen features and a dozen initiatives and yada, and they know that nine outta ten of them won’t deliver, but the hope is that one of them will deliver and deliver big. And the way that you get better and win more money at poker is speed of play. Play really quickly. Get to that tenth hand really quickly. And a lot of it is about making bets and being willing to lose small amounts of money.

And so I do think that if designers, we can understand that mentality and we could treat our work more like poker than chess; rather than playing the perfect hand, be willing to get to that 80%, and then do it again and do it again and do it again, and constant iteration. And then eventually, we’ll find that hand, that unique thing that we put into the product that does end up making a big result.

And a lot of the time, again, and this is, this is the other thing is, like, because we come from HCI, we’ve been taught that the right thing to do is to do research. And I get it. I love research. Research is brilliant, and there are certain instances where you don’t understand what the solution is and you have to go out there to talk to the market. But sometimes, you’ve just got to go out and play a bunch of hands really quickly. If you wanna beat a game of chess, you research how the chess master plays, and you can probably beat them. It’s really hard to research games of poker because it’s context situationally specific.

And I kind of joke sometimes, like, how many designers does it take to change a light bulb? First, we need to do a three-month project on the role of light in society. But that is the attitude that so many designers have. Like, they get asked to change a light bulb, but they didn’t see it as a light bulb. But they see it as, this is my one chance to go out and do research to understand… There’s a kid’s TV show in the UK called Blue Peter, and once they had Jony Ive come on. And the Blue Peter presenter, like they had this kind of beautiful lunchbox and the Blue Peter presenter was like, “So Jony, how would you encourage our audience to redesign the lunchbox?” And Jony was like, “No, we’re not redesigning a lunchbox, we’re designing a method for bringing your packed lunch to school. And you can’t say we’re redesigning the lunchbox because that informs the solution.” And all the designers are like, “Ah, that’s brilliant, Jony, you are my idol.” And so we have that attitude, but sometimes we are just redesigning a lunchbox. Sometimes we are just changing a light bulb. Sometimes we are not, but 90% of the time we are. We need to understand when to push back, when to advocate for research, and when to just get up on a stool and change that bloody bulb.

Jorge: This feels like a really good place to bring the conversation to a close, but I’m just gonna reflect back to you what I heard here. I heard three things. I heard clarity. I heard focus. And these are two things that I think almost come built-in with the early startup: we have limited resources, we have limited time, and we have very specific goals that we’re working towards as a team. So clarity, focus. And then the third part of this, which is what you’ve been just talking about, is agility, right? Let’s not get paralyzed overthinking things.

And this feels to me like an important message for designers in general. I suspect that a lot of folks who are operating, I was going to use the phrase founder mode, and I realized that’s become a bit of a loaded term, but people who are in this kind of early stage, they have some kind of skin in the game here, like they founded a company and are making it happen. I suspect a lot of this comes with that territory. And the book structures what these folks need to look at in such a clear way that I think it’s gonna be helpful to them.

But for designers, like this is a book that’s worth reading also, if for nothing else as an illustration of the sorts of things that matter to business people. Even if it’s just within this one segment. So I want to encourage folks, even if you’re not a founder and are a designer who is not planning to go into the early startup stage, I think that this is worth checking out.

Closing

Jorge: So Andy, where can folks learn more about the book and about you?

Andy: Many moons ago, I would’ve said, go to Twitter here, but sadly it’s a dumpster fire, I think Americans say. So don’t get anywhere near that. The best place is probably to hop over to my website, andybudd.com. If you’re interested in the book, it’s andybudd.com/book. I am probably on social media at the moment. I’m most active on Threads. I am also on Bluesky and Mastodon, but I rarely go there. So if you want to chat and interact with me, other than my website, Threads, or to be honest, LinkedIn. So hunt me down on LinkedIn and follow me on LinkedIn. And obviously, if you wanna buy the book, all good bookshops, some bad ones as well, but particularly Amazon. So if you go to your local Amazon store, you’ll be able to buy the book today.

Jorge: Brilliant. I’ll include links to all those things in the show notes. Thank you, Andy, for being on the show and best of luck with the book.

Andy: Thank you so much. It’s been a delight chatting to you, and I can’t wait to meet up again in person.

Jorge: Same here.