Ian Silber: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that. You've also, when we were chatting ahead of this, you actually told me you believe this is the best time in history to be a designer. Yeah. I mean, I truly believe this. I can't even imagine... Okay, history lesson. When I was getting into design, I was in my teenage years and to learn things, I was learning to design and code, and you could view source on a HTML webpage and see how things were built. And that was how you had to learn. And you could, I don't know, it's like Dreamweaver. And there were these really... tools that actually were really cool. But to compare those to today, if I were just getting into design, the fact that you can learn so quickly, you can have an idea to working version of it in a matter of minutes. You can be so expressive and I think anybody can be a designer. And I think that as more and more software is made, more and more products are made, I do think that the human element of design is going to really start to become more and more important. It's always been the case that I think that companies with great design can of course stand out. I think that's going to be more and more important. I think that products that fully understand their users and that make something delightful, when anybody can make anything, that's going to become one of the most important dimensions of a product and that's how people are going to evaluate it. And so I think designers stand... that is our core job. And then on top of that, I think that designers are just much more empowered. So I was talking to some friends that are thinking about starting a company and talking about the ratio of design to engineer and how at a startup, maybe that's totally different. It may have been like you're going to have one designer and I don't know, 15 engineers or something like that. Maybe at a startup, I've seen that sort of ratio. But they were talking about, "Well, maybe we'll have two designers and one engineer. One really good engineer who can make sure that we're really building something that's rock solid from an engineering standpoint, but then we want two really creative people that are going to be thinking about how we build this product." And so thinking about that, I think that there's just a huge opportunity for designers. I think that internally we see that more and more designers, we are completely empowered, to take an idea, to take a early research concept and try to figure out how we can actually package that up into something that people want to use or that solves some sort of unmet need for our customers. And that is a designer's job. And so I think that maybe more and more people start to think of themselves as designers. But either way, I really do think it's the best time to be a designer. So along those lines, when Marc Andreessen was on the podcast, he had this hilarious way of describing the state of the product org right now. He's like, basically there's this three-way standoff. PMs, engineers, designers, they all think the other roles are going to go away and they're the ones that are going to win in the end. And so there's those Spider-Man meme where they're all pointing at each other. And I'm curious, because I can see a case for each role becoming the dominant role. And I completely agree with you that with all of the tools being shipped, there's a thousand X explosion in products being shipped. There's just endless streams of things to pay attention to. You'd think design would be such an opportunity to differentiate and stand out. I haven't seen that yet in just an acceleration of design hires and explosion, as you said, two designers to one engineer. Do you think that's coming? Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Do you think it's, as you said, just early and people will realize, "Oh wow, we need a lot more designers."? What do you think's going on?…

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