{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Love At First Try","title":" Taste, quality and what it actually takes to build software people love (w/ Bob Baxley)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":5609,"description":"A lot of SaaS products ship fast and skip the thinking. This episode is about what happens when you don't, and why that actually matters for growth.\nBob Baxley spent 35 years designing software at Apple, Yahoo, Pinterest, and ThoughtSpot. Products he worked on have been used by hundreds of millions of people. He's one of those people who has spent a long time thinking carefully about what makes software genuinely good, not just functional, and why so few companies get there.\nIn this conversation, we get into how to build a culture where quality is the standard, how to get your whole company to care about design without a single presentation, and how the decisions you make at the conceptual level shape everything downstream.\n \n🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:\n0:00 - Why the tech industry is in a speed race and what that means for product quality\n7:37 - How Bob fell in love with computing at 11 years old and why that shaped everything after\n12:31 - Why timing matters as much as talent when it comes to what you can build\n13:58 - How economic pressure from VCs is changing the pace of design work inside companies\n24:36 - The real difference between sales-led and product-led companies, and why it never changes after founding\n27:05 - Why design teams have hurt themselves by hiding their process from the rest of the company\n30:00 - How Bob's team ran an internal influence campaign at ThoughtSpot using weekly Loom videos\n35:49 - What a head of design actually does on a sales call and why it worked\n37:42 - Design tenets vs. design principles, and which one actually helps teams make decisions\n42:30 - What choreography over control looks like in practice for a design leader\n47:51 - The difference between micromanagement and being in the details, and why it matters\n54:55 - How to think about quality within constraints instead of chasing world class as a target\n1:00:46 - Why taste is hard to compete on, and which layer of the market you actually need to nail first\n1:01:15...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/CalfqiGBPL_RhmXPTA6aQSk59NwzAYGpNJ6fyshYlL8/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9mMGM3/MjgxYTFlZTJiN2U0/NDFlYWNiYWY0MWUw/ZWVjNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}