Karri Saarinen: recommendation

Transcript context

…A lot of founders, a lot of product leaders, a lot of designers definitely want to create space for craft and making products really great, something they're really proud of, but in practice it's really hard. Very few teams and companies do this. Is there anything else you've learned about creating space for this sort of thing and prioritizing it for founders that are listening that are trying to instill more and more of this or do you have to be a designer CO like Karri and really it's hard to do otherwise? I don't think actually. It's not purely coming from me. I think all of us founders like Jori and Tuomas additionally, their background is engineering, but I would say I think they spend even more time on the details than sometimes I do. I think very early on when it was the three of us I would be the one doing the broad strokes designs like this is how the UI works and this is how some of the things work. They were the ones that were like, "Oh, there should be animation here and there should be this kind of thing here." I think it's like that DNA I think comes from all of us. I think with the craft it always starts with people need to care about it. If it's not valued in the company, then it's very hard for anyone to do because people don't feel like it's valued. I gave this advice to some founder. He was asking me about it and in their case their founders were coming from different companies. Maybe this one founder came from Airbnb and then the other ones came from Facebook and Amazon. For example, I think Facebook and Amazon have a very different culture on quality or craft or shipping. I think it's what I said to them. You need to align on it. It's like you cannot run a company with multiple different kinds of cultures. I think I made some points like why the quality is important for certain products and you should all believe in that and then instill that with everyone you hire. The other thing I would say that we like to do is we actually don't have much PMs in the company. We only have one and we can talk about more about it. One of the things I think that happens is when you build a team and you start creating these very specific roles for everything I think that often the PM can be the ones figuring things out and making decisions and guiding the team, but they're not the ones building the feature. They're not there looking at it the whole day like where does this button go or how does it work? I think a lot of that, this craft for us happens when we give the project team this ownership and the project team is just engineering and design. Then, when they start building that feature they start seeing these opportunities that this thing could be better. A good example of this is one of our engineers, Andreas. When we were building this right click menu in the app so you can click different things and under that you have sub-menus. Mac OS does this well where it's when you open that menu you hover on the menu and then you want to go to the sub-menu. You hover to the right. You don't have to go exactly horizontally to get into that menu. You can actually go diagonally or you don't actually have to hit the menu exactly. There's this safe zone, but a lot of software just implements like, "Hey, let's do this menu. Let's make the sub-menu." It only works if you exactly hover over the menu. Then, what happens is the user often misses with few pixels what they were trying to do. nts like, "Hey, let's do this menu. Let's make the sub-menu." It only works if you exactly hover over the menu. Then, what happens is the user often misses with few pixels what they were trying to do. What Andreas did, which we didn't tell him to do, is like, "Yeah, this kind of sucks and we should make this better." He figured out a way to create those safe areas that are dynamic based on the sub-menu positioning and everything. It's much easier now. You can go diagonally to the actual thing you want to go to. I think these things happen when you give people more of the ownership of the project and also the space to do that and then you also have leadership or generally the company culture that values the quality or the craft.…

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