Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Explore the evolving world of design with Cameron Craig and Keith as they tackle the challenges of complex, monolithic products and the critical role of human-centered design. Each episode dives into topics like organizational change, the future of design in tech, and the emerging influence of agents on user experience. Perfect for designers, strategists, and leaders, this podcast offers insights on adaptability, communication, and the strategic thinking needed to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.
Cameron Craig (00:00.078)
that by the way.
Keith (00:05.425)
There it is.
Cameron Craig (00:06.529)
Nice.
Keith (00:08.86)
So for all you people who want to move to New York, this a part of the course.
Cameron Craig (00:13.708)
Yeah, have a think about that before you actually pull that lever.
Keith (00:19.002)
Yeah, it's it's loud. It's always loud. It's gotten louder in create. don't know. It's just I think it's just it's making me reconsider if I want to stay here or whatever. But that's another another podcast.
Cameron Craig (00:28.75)
Well.
We can, so the other thing, the other fun thing is I will, I will be leaving these environs for a slightly cleaner background because today it's 86 degrees, but that means in my garage, it's probably closer to 95 degrees.
Keith (00:51.997)
my god, you've no AC?
Cameron Craig (00:53.934)
Not in the garage. No, I mean what kind of what kind of luxury life you live in I'm just a design guy with a design job. I you know, don't I don't have that kind of money
Keith (00:56.571)
Dude, why not?
I I thought, I don't know. mean, I think.
Keith (01:07.203)
my God. You got to chat GPT how to find out how to hack that.
Cameron Craig (01:13.198)
I'm just drinking purple drink in the garage, Keith. I don't know.
Keith (01:13.522)
Yeah, kids book.
Keith (01:17.186)
Purple chick in the garage.
Cameron Craig (01:20.374)
Legit, like drinking the purple drink.
Keith (01:23.602)
Like a crystal highball glass, I love it.
Cameron Craig (01:26.35)
Well, you know, I try and keep it classy where possible, but like I'm not classy enough to have AC in my garage. Yeah, the purple drink. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, yeah. Hey, you know, I bought these highball glasses on Amazon. They were on sale like it was like six dollars a glass was like, yeah, I'll take like 10. Because, you know, like idiots are going to break that stuff. They come to your house, they party it up, you know, next thing you know, people like dropping glasses, you're like, I don't have an even set of six of these anymore. So.
Keith (01:31.27)
Yeah, that's what the AC budget way it went to the the crystal. priorities.
Keith (01:43.239)
my god.
Keith (01:51.184)
Yeah.
Keith (01:56.398)
Especially in the garage too. It's just like the dudes hangout area
Cameron Craig (02:00.288)
Yeah, mean, these are, I brought the inside glasses outside. Like, you know, I always get a stern talking to you about that, but you know, whatever. Here we are.
Keith (02:09.074)
What are you going to do? Drink purple drink.
Cameron Craig (02:14.914)
purple drink. So where are going tonight? What are we going to do? What are we talking about?
Keith (02:21.554)
So think from where we left off on the last episode, I think we're talking about what was the first op like? Like, how do we find the opportunity? Because I think no matter what anybody's doing, I think now there's going to be some kind of like, either it's going to be a crisis that you can leverage as an opportunity, or there's going to be a funding kind of thing. There's going be something usually, right? mean, whether it's like, we got to do AI now because it's
you know, somebody else is doing it or you got to cut headcount by 30%. So we have to find a way to kind of like do more with less or whatever, and then probably use AI. I think for us, it was both kind of like a crisis and an opportunity because I'll let you tee that up with like kind of what your side was thinking in terms of like dot com and in store and then kind of how that brought us together.
Cameron Craig (03:14.966)
Yeah, maybe like to your point, really great point, there is usually an event that drives people to action. And 10 years ago, the call to action was we need to be much more efficient in our operations. We need to be competitive with very large online retailers that don't have a brick and mortar presence, which I think
you kind of made mention of the last episode about it basically being a REIT, which is a real estate investment trust for those that don't know what REIT stands for, with a not particularly profitable brick and mortar retail on the front of. So back in the day, you would use your real estate money
as an asset that you could then borrow against to do the things that you needed. And so when Keith and I got to Macy's.com, they were in the state where they realized that they were no longer competitive for a number of reasons. The platform itself was not a state of the art nor modern enough to actually truly run real-time web ops against.
Second, they were losing market share both in the brick and mortar and certainly in the digital retail space to companies like Amazon, companies like Bonobos, companies like, at that point, oddly, The Gap. So you're losing market share. You don't really have a clear plan for how to modernize both your internal stack and your external offering. So you bring in or your venture
capital firm or your PE firm brings in a bunch of experts from around the industry to solve problems. And that's actually how I got there. And I think that's actually how you got there. But through a more circuitous route, which is you were hired on by one of the PE companies. Body shops, if you will, you were like one of five different little consulting.
Cameron Craig (05:29.304)
talent agencies that were brought in to like staff things while they figured out who to hire. So there you go. The basis usually comes in, there's a step change in something going on around you. There's a step change in the business or there is some driver that says we must act now. Fast forward 10 years and I think what you just said is absolutely right. Like the step changes in...
Keith (05:34.694)
Yep.
Keith (05:50.47)
Right. And I think.
Cameron Craig (05:56.75)
human computer interaction and the step change specifically with design and product is how many humans do we actually need to do the job when we feel like we can, I'm borrowing a term from senior leadership where I work currently, sprinkle a little AI on that and gain traction. Right?
Keith (06:17.628)
Just sprinkle, yeah, color the sprinkles? Let's not be racist.
Keith (06:25.093)
my god. man. So.
Cameron Craig (06:27.202)
I'll try and do that throughout the episode. I'll just do the hand single. And then AI. And then you get AI.
Keith (06:31.516)
That'll be the thing, That's, there's gonna be some moment.
Cameron Craig (06:40.462)
Good morning.
Keith (06:40.498)
coming home. mean, and this happened back then too. I don't know if we talked about this, but for me, AI now feels like going digital 2.0. Where instead of instead of just making everything from physical to like some digital information thing, it's learning how to think and like talk back to you now. Right?
Cameron Craig (06:48.558)
For sure.
Cameron Craig (06:59.062)
Well, so...
juxtaposing the Macy's problem with the current day problem, right? Like let's keep doing this, because there's a through line here. Back when you and I were there, a lot of it was feature development. It was feature development and bringing a non-digitally native organization into the digital realm.
Keith (07:10.278)
Okay.
Keith (07:27.068)
So by feature development, your team was structured around like features of the website or whether it was like merchandising, right? Exactly, yeah. I think that would help just for other people to kind of understand like, yeah, so keep going.
Cameron Craig (07:34.306)
Or whatever channel, whatever channel, yeah.
Cameron Craig (07:41.452)
So.
Here we are 10 years later and everybody has modernized their platform. They have figured out how to incorporate good digital practices or at least reasonable digital practices into their basic business. And as a result of that, they now have a platform that probably has one of two things going on. If they are a like a B2B play or something that is a technology that is being sold as a technology.
They probably have a lot of complexity in tech debt. That is a really hard thing to say, like together. So they have a bunch of debt. Or if they are a play where they are providing a technology or a service to an end customer, there's complexity there that they have never dealt with. And that complexity when you and I were at like kind of the pinnacle of the work that we were doing, as you remember, was personalization. Everything was about
How do I make sure that the right product lands in front of the right customer at the exact right time? How do I take into account their preferences, their sort of anti-patterns or the things that they don't want? And how do I make sure that their shopping experience is as tailored to them as it can be? That problem really hasn't gone away. And I don't mean that in the shopping world. I just mean that in the technology world. You want the right piece of information at the right time.
for the right customer within the right account, doing the exact tasks that they're doing. And the promise of AI is that it will actually solve a lot of those problems. And so now people are like, this is the latest placebo. Like I don't need to deal with my tech debt. I don't need to deal with the fact that I make 280 services that are all kind of the same in a lot of places. Instead, I can do one of two things.
Cameron Craig (09:41.516)
I can let the AI guide the customer through the interface or the experience to get them to the right thing. I can jump in and be like, Keith, I see that you're trying to figure out how to do a video enabled podcast. And to do that, you need a streaming server. You need whatever. And I can basically line those things up for you and be like, do you want to buy all this? And you're like, sure. That's actually how we got on Riverside. We're like, hey.
This thing does a bunch of things. does the editing. It's got an AI feature. know, lo and behold, it does transcription. So underneath Riverside is a bunch of discrete services that are these probably like either products or technology building blocks, if you will, that equate to an experience that an end user like you and I can use. We're not going to sit there and be like,
Keith (10:11.73)
Man.
Cameron Craig (10:33.804)
You know what would be really amazing is after we recorded the thing, if the recording went through some sort of AI transcription and on the back end came text. It would take us years to do that. And it would take Riverside years to do that if they had to build each of those discrete components. But now they're in a place where they can augment their core offering with all of these additional services that somebody else has built.
Keith (10:47.932)
Ehem.
Cameron Craig (11:02.414)
But if you're Riverside, that's still complex to put together. So what do you do? You sprinkle AI on that. Next thing you know, Riverside's like, hey, I just need x, y, and z. And it's like, the service provider can say, we have a transcription service, and we have an AI video enhancing service, and we have a basic video storage service and a distribution service for videos and for audio, and we can bring all that together.
We even have an endpoint that will allow you to update and upload that in real time. So as Cam and Keith are talking, the storage array isn't waiting for them to finish locally and then bringing that up. It's got caching that handles part of that so that after you and I are done talking, we're not waiting an hour for that to upload. We're waiting maybe like five minutes because most of it's been cached. They don't really have to do any of that.
Keith (11:58.194)
So if that's so easy now too, do you think it's kind of like all these companies are effectively just like ghost kitchens in a way?
Cameron Craig (12:08.182)
In some ways, yeah, I think that's a really good analogy, right? Like the infrastructure is provided to them and they're sort of like just provide the chef and the person who needs to figure out like what the, you know, what the business is going to be.
Keith (12:22.492)
I mean, because it's like, if all those pieces are there and the idea theoretically with like sprinkling AI on is just you understanding how to prompt the infrastructure or prompt the idea or the vision with enough fidelity for whatever you call it, a PRD or whatever to like make the thing. Then anybody else could do that as long as they're willing to pay the cost of the compute and the bandwidth and the infrastructure. Right?
Cameron Craig (12:50.252)
Yeah, essentially.
Keith (12:51.184)
I don't know. I'm just kind of thinking this out loud because like the biggest thing with Macy's, was a new world got introduced that couldn't properly integrate with the old world, right? The old world, we had mainframes, are effectively computer tanks that you have to really hard to destroy and stop, right? They're fault tolerant, meaning they always keep working. And because in the 80s with the econometrics of like business school,
that tied to their balance sheet. So that was like the inventory, which was billions of dollars. It was that's how they, that's why they didn't want to get rid of it. But
Cameron Craig (13:20.989)
yeah.
I mean, in some ways, like in the 60s, like that was IBM's sprinkling a little like number crunching, you know, with a mainframe or a mini computer over all these business processes. some ways, AI is a very similar monolithic service, right? But the thing is, it's interesting, like, because the way in which AI is structured and the way in which large language, wow, man, I gotta stop doing this.
Keith (13:41.275)
Yeah
Keith (13:51.654)
Have a long day.
Cameron Craig (13:52.43)
I got to stop the alliteration things, right? A large language model ultimately serves as a high level computer programming language, right? Like we keep abstracting away from the zeros and ones to where we are now where we're talking about Java or C++.
It has been a long day. C++ or any of the other languages that abstract away from the binary. now, like in some ways, a large language model allows a human to abstract one step further. And the highest level programming language is whatever your native tongue is. And in our case, it's English.
Keith (14:42.416)
This is like the current state moving forward. Do you want to talk a little bit about like the dilemma that we, like there was a crisis, we found an opportunity and kind of how we leveraged on that chance and how that kind of like started the journey. And we can kind of come back to what is the parallel now with like, you your spoken language is effectively.
the computing, like the programming language. And then the next wave after that is like, happens when this digital stuff touches the physical world? And that unlocks a whole other thing, which is making, you doing like the round trip of like your, your idea to, you just talk to the machine and then the magic box kind of spits out like computer parts and stuff.
Cameron Craig (15:36.92)
Sure. I mean, break that down. Where do you want to go first? Because I mean, there's a lot there to unpack. And I mean, I think one of the things that we talked about last week was technique. And maybe that's what you're hinting at is like, there are some basic techniques and some basic mindsets that we as designers, and I'm going to keep reminding us that we're talking about designers right now. And not to say that this is exclusive of other practices, but when
Keith (15:50.481)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (16:06.826)
When Keith and I come at this from the design world, and I believe that there is a lot of power in that, in the new world that we're in, because the way in which design thinks and ultimately delivers on behalf of the business is a skill set that is unique. And it's not to say that other practices can't learn it or can't become a part of it. But until you figure out how to design something and go through that life cycle,
which every human does it, but designers are actually trained in that. So maybe kind of going back up to what you were saying, the techniques, I think.
Keith (16:51.164)
We'll define design real quick and like the lifecycle and then I think we back the techniques into that. It's like how designers are solving a specific problem versus art is just giving me like an emotion. you may know. yeah, go for there.
Cameron Craig (17:02.04)
Sure. So I mean, again, I think what we had touched upon last week is design in some ways is this universal language of psychology, right? It is the connection that a human being has with the objects and the experiences around them, right? Everything is designed at this point in our sort of human society. There isn't much that we're interacting with as humans on a daily basis.
that another human hasn't touched in some way and shaped. Some of it, they've shaped the physical object or the physical experience and other things they have shaped the emotional side of it or the meaning behind it, but all of that has been shaped in some way. And so when we're talking about design at its most atomic or primitive form, that's what I'm talking about is there has been thought given
to how a human is going to interact with this and that process is design.
Keith (18:07.868)
Thought and intention towards the interaction. I like it.
Cameron Craig (18:10.7)
Yes. And so not everything is net new creation, right? Like you and I know this. Like a lot of our world right now is redefinition and reshaping, but that is still designed.
Keith (18:23.942)
You have to make a decision to solve a specific problem based on a specific unmet need. And that's kind of like the trade off.
Cameron Craig (18:29.39)
Correct. Correct. And so if we bring that down one level into the space that you and I were in, we were doing physical store experience. We were doing online experience and we were doing the crossover of online experience into physical experiences. And, you know, that that I think at the time was called Omni Channel, but I don't really know that that was actually right. Right. And Omni Channel was also, you know,
Keith (18:57.22)
No.
Cameron Craig (19:00.074)
sometimes thought about as the mobile device, the tablet device, the store technology, the website, all of those things. And in reality, Omnichannel was, I go back to the top of this podcast, it's like the right thing at the right time for the right human being when they need it. You should not give a shit what device somebody has in their hand.
Keith (19:24.826)
It should, it, yeah. It should be, but the way we mentioned that UX was structured by channel and like feature Macy's was equally structured above that for like marketing and merchandising. And then those teams own specific things. And because they were incentivized a certain way, like they would, a marketing team would add.
more friction for more offers in front of like a checkout line if it moved their needle like 10 basis points, which makes the whole thing worse because they're like, well, I'm getting my cut so I don't care. But they're at least transparent about it. They told you but you're like, well, WTF like this is like, this is all terrible. And you you can explain the terrible experience everybody knew. But it was like this Voldemort kind of thing where you couldn't mention what it was.
That kind of like company wide dilemmas is the thing I want to like touch on later too, because like whenever anybody says that we've always done it this way, or everyone's in tacit agreement that something is terrible, then that's never going to fix it. Like make a note of what that thing is and collect those. You're going to find five to seven or eight of them. And those will be the things that if you can design intentionally a solution to kind of attack those in parallel, like altogether, that's when you get the real power of this. And that's how you know your narrative that we talk about later.
is really going to fit all these pieces. You're actually designing based on what's necessary. But the problem with the socialization is how do you say the baby's ugly without saying the baby's ugly, which is like another episode to talk about. But yeah.
Cameron Craig (21:01.11)
Yeah, I mean, so maybe in some ways that is like, maybe we should talk about mindset, right? Because I think in breaking this concept down, your mindset needs to be a certain way. And I think that the thing that we found that provide success, there are some basics. At the very heart of what we found is that you can't
Keith (21:08.379)
Yeah, go for it.
Cameron Craig (21:30.834)
own anything. And I remember I remember you like Keith, like one of the things that I think we need to do next time, like when we get our technology straight. I was trying to do it right now is I was going to bring up the deck because by bringing up the deck, it will show the visuals that we were using to show the mindset and it will also like remind you and I of like, yeah, and then we said this. like why I bring up that you can't own anything is.
Keith (21:34.514)
You
Cameron Craig (21:59.072)
It is one of the hardest things in business to actually take, internalize, and turn into a practice. But you must, you must do this as a designer. It's like, you don't wanna own the thing that you create. What you wanna own is creation itself, right? And like, the moment you start trying to own the thing that you've created is the moment that you start backsliding.
Keith (22:10.224)
Here we go.
Cameron Craig (22:29.975)
And I think...
Cameron Craig (22:33.546)
I don't know that we ever successfully got my team to that place because a lot of those people came with me to the next job and they still were like trying to own things. But.
Keith (22:42.514)
No, it's because every company has a culture. this is another, not to give an attention, but part of the culture of Macy's was there was a good ride for a little while. So a lot of people were in the company doing just enough to make their quarterly whatever, or their yearly review. But they're one foot out thinking about the next thing.
So at that time it was like, Oh, journey maps or, you know, some, you know, whatever widget making thing for like UX. And that's what people wanted to like get in and own because it was more fun relative to like, you know, you're in the same damn meetings with the same people for the same channel and no one wants to change anything. And it's like, I remember going to some meetings with you guys. had like a notepad. like, okay, boom, boom, boom. What's, are we going to do? And people were like, what do you, what do you do? You take notes? I'm like,
Cameron Craig (23:13.816)
Great.
Keith (23:40.306)
do you mean we're gonna take notes? I'm like, Yeah, I'm take notes. I'm like, what are gonna do? It's like, you know, I'm here, it came in from like, New York. It's like, what are we doing? And it's just a different, it's hard to bust through that mentality. And sometimes that can be an asset because you can stand up but other times it can make you a target. But dude, I got the deck from Defcon. If you want me to I can screen share it too if you want.
Cameron Craig (24:03.394)
Yeah, go for it. I mean, if nothing else, it's like something interesting visual. But while you're getting that up, I mean, if I fast forward to today and literally, I don't mean like metaphorically today, but I literally mean today. I'm having a conversation with the two other leaders in my most innovative space at work right now. And the conversation went something like this. I need us to stop worrying about trying to own this product. And it was like,
I mean, there was some head nodding, but it was quiet. was like, I want to cut the code and hand the code off to one of our sister organizations. And then it got uncomfortable. It was like, wait, wait a minute. You want to hand our code base over to an organization that is nowhere near on the roadmap to where we are? You're going to speed their time to innovation by at least six months. I'm like, yes, I am. And it just went silent.
in the room. And then it was like, do we want to talk about this? Because I know it's a big decision and I want everybody aligned. don't want to do this without everybody agreeing that this is what we need to do. And thankfully, this is a pretty evolved group of people. And we got there within like five minutes and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, do it. But my point to them was, I don't want us to own the code base.
I don't want us to even own the product as it exists today. We actually own innovation for a very, very large team. And that's the thing that I want everybody in the room to feel ownership of. And innovation in that space means we've done it to the point where we are releasing code and we're releasing code in a go-to-market type environment.
Why would we stop there? Why would we... I'm like, I want the next thing. We know what the next thing is. Why are we not moving on the next thing? Well, because this person's still working on this and this person wants to make sure that these I's are dotted and these T's are crossed. It's like, none of that's important. Hand that off and let somebody else build it.
Keith (26:26.128)
I think right now people are freaked out because if they're not showing they're doing something, it's like, well, they're looking to cut half the company anyway, because everyone's kind of seeing the writing on the wall. It's like they're going to hold onto it even harder now, and it's going to accelerate the culling on an even grander scale for people, unfortunately.
Cameron Craig (26:47.259)
I think you're right. And I think that's the thing where, again, to go very macro for a minute, if you're in a culture that is operating with that type of fear,
I know it's hard to find a job, but if you work in one of those environments, I would say run. Because that is a recipe for extinction. And again, ask Keith and I how we know. We split from Macy's, and a year later, they just obliterated the building. We have a slide on our deck showing obliterated Sears corporate offices looking at the Sears Tower in Chicago, which they own neither of those things.
Keith (27:13.146)
Dude.
Cameron Craig (27:28.204)
Well, mean, Sears doesn't exist anymore, but at the time they still did. we said innovate or basically die. And it was not more than three years later that Macy's basically had a for lease sign on their giant digital building in San Francisco. So.
Keith (27:47.378)
I mean, it was a lot of people. It was like probably over a thousand people.
Cameron Craig (27:50.338)
Hey, you want to hear something else really funny? I have a designer that works for me currently in New York who worked for me at Macy's.
Get ready for this. Her current desk, her current day desk is 30 feet from her desk at Macy's.
Keith (28:10.74)
my God. So she's still like in the same building on 34th.
Cameron Craig (28:15.854)
She's in that building on Broadway, 1880 Broadway or 18th. Yeah.
Keith (28:22.009)
my God.
That's gonna be kind of like a mind frag.
Cameron Craig (28:28.478)
Her boss's office is still like an actual office there, even though her boss is long gone.
these are the things that happen, right? And when the culture of fear is in its prime, what's going on maybe at the design org level? Hey, I need to see those designs. Hey, we need to do a design review around this. Hey, has this been vetted for all of these different things? I don't know if like, know.
technology is going to be able to sign off on this. we need to make sure brands involve.
The fear is expressed through what feels like a rule set. And Keith, you said it earlier, we've always done it this way. If you start hearing you're working in an environment where it's always been done a certain way, that is a sure sign that fear has taken hold.
Keith (29:31.386)
Yeah, I mean, can you see this on the screen? Yeah, like.
Cameron Craig (29:33.292)
I can, yeah, yeah. It's kind of making me a little nervous.
Keith (29:38.13)
it. We would take pictures of I took a lot of pictures of street art, just because that's what I do on the side. But like, you'd also find, you know, if something was messed up, like the middle management wouldn't always want to like show it because they're like, no, no, it was just one off kind of thing. And I was like, No, this is like, and it's like this. Yeah, but this is, yeah.
Cameron Craig (29:54.988)
reality, it's happening.
Keith (29:59.012)
It's like, well, who do you blame? It's like, because this is store operations. And there's a specific manager for a specific store. And it's, they're like one of the B stores and some of the A stores. And it's like, the customers don't care. Like when they see this, they're like, Macy's sucks. Like, I don't want to come back here. Like broken glass, like in this like, it's, yeah. So, I mean, it was crazy. Even 15 years ago, like we were like, okay, exponential change is coming like now. And
Cameron Craig (30:15.522)
Right. I crashed out, man. Again. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith (30:27.768)
know, was too much for them. But when we the offsite, there's we can mean, I want to get into this at some point to kind of like
Cameron Craig (30:37.612)
No, I mean, get into it now. This is like the beginning. This is how we started. We were like, I mean, and, and, you know, once you kind of get used to some of the mentality things, right? Like own nothing, keep moving, keep innovating, keep giving back to the company or the organization that you work in, approach things with a design mentality. like,
Keith (30:59.548)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (31:01.954)
There's a deeper level of activities that you have to engage in. And this is, this is part of it, right? Part of it is understanding the environment that you work in.
Keith (31:12.036)
Yeah. So we, we went off site to like the old Macromedia like headquarters to get out of the space. And then we had these big sheets that we started putting just a bunch of posts on. And I just was like, okay, look, what are we grouping together? And you know, we're like, okay, they wanted to do like on the channel adoption. And it's about like, nothing was unified. Everything was busted. Obviously they want to grow customers. How do you do that? It's like making a profile to feed the data model is like terrible. So we just.
kind of came up with these kind of six kind of key themes. And this we did this in about like three days and then solidified it in a week. You know, two and half day business plan. And then eventually the company wide dilemmas came up where it's like you had this old world versus new world skew versus Web ID. The catalog was getting so it's the way mainframe works is it runs a job and it does it.
as many times as it's programmed to run. So what it was doing was it was running the catalog for every store at once at night across like 800 stores and the price for the same item at two different stores was different. So it was like so freaking complex, like unnecessarily. And obviously tied into like their merchandising kind of in sales strategy, but I mean, they just didn't understand.
These are very non-technical people and they didn't want to be thought of as a technical company at all because they're like, no, no, no, we're not tech, we're not Google, whatever, we're Macy's, we're retail. you know, and then if you ordered something, they're comparing it with Amazon because that was the next best thing with, you know, two day delivery. And you wouldn't even know what happened to your product in 24 hours. So like, you know, we had half a dozen or so of these things that we just kind of like put together. We're like, okay, whatever we design has to run through this.
And as soon as we got like nods when talking about this with two other groups, we knew we were like the carrier wave or the thing that was resonant was like coming together. And, know, this is, think we talked about, after we kind of put this together, you had an opportunity because it was your boss, your boss's boss, and like the consultant that they hired that was running the company that brought me in. He was helping do like biz dev stuff for them. And we're like, okay, look, here's kind of the whole thing to kind of just like.
Keith (33:34.044)
catch their attention in one shot because we were just supposed to look at like dot com. Like that was the opportunity we talked about. It's like, what is this? How do you get dot com back in the game? And it's like, you got to look at everything you got. can't just do one piece. was, they had this real estate and stores and product that they could make. And, know, this huge customer, like they just had all this opportunity because it was just like Legos, not always all physical, but it was like these modular parts you could put together. And that's what we saw as like the vision.
And then, you know, we figured out, okay, fine. You have these six vignettes. We had to kind of tell stories through all these things. And that's kind of how we built this like pyramid. You know, each of the themes kind of had like an idea. you know, and we just back it up with like data that we saw from terrible reviews that were just all over the place on the internet. Yeah. And so this is, and you know, one of the biggest, this is from Argentina ages ago, but it's like,
Cameron Craig (34:23.308)
Yeah, yeah.
Keith (34:31.602)
There's a cheap padlock and it's like, this is is Macy's infrastructure. was like, it was bolted together. It worked. You know, it was kind of a little clunky, probably didn't have a muffler on it. It was loud. But you know, like this was, they wanted to do personalization, but they didn't. It's like, they wanted to do Zempik and they want it to be turned into Olympian. It's like Usain Bolt overnight. And it's like, you can't do that. Like you can't become a professional. Like it just doesn't work like that.
Cameron Craig (34:53.644)
Well, mean, but as a designer, like, and what we're showing is you can point out these company wide dilemmas and not all of them are going to get resolved for a bunch of really good reasons. Sometimes it's too expensive. It's going to take too long. The investment actually, and what it enables is not worth actually going through the pain and agony of dealing with it. And those are
Keith (35:18.93)
I don't understand it. They'll give you a myriad of excuses.
Cameron Craig (35:22.414)
And some of them are excuses and those are the things that you can go after. And some of them, as we found out, are reality, right? Like you are not going to be like, I know you probably don't want to hear this, Keith, but the AS 400, the IBM iron that we are making fun of in this presentation from 13 years ago is still running at Macy's. It is too germane to what they're doing for them to ever remove it. And they've just
Keith (35:46.864)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (35:52.6)
figured out ways of working around it. And that is a totally reasonable business choice to make. It isn't the one that we would make. It makes our lives more difficult. back to technique, understanding the company dilemmas that you're in and then having a mitigation strategy or saying, we have to live with this. We are not going to spend a bunch of time trying to design through this or design around it. We're just going to live with it.
And we're going to move on to this other thing that we know will provide uplift or revenue or market growth or whatever it is. But being very deliberate about that and even stating back to the company, we've chosen not to deal with this because the risk is too high or it's too expensive or it's too germane to what you're doing on a daily basis. But you have to get everybody to agree to those things. Otherwise, you're working with different realities and
the moment you're working in a different reality, people start to detach from what you're trying to do.
Keith (36:57.702)
I think in hindsight, I would operate on everyone working in different realities and figuring out what is the tension of the carrier wave, the thing they can resonate against, the theme, the idea, the narrative, the metaphor to get them back on the same page. know, mainframes aren't bad. It's just the way that they were structuring them and setting them up was just terrible. you know, some middle manager would
bullshit and say, yeah, we can make this thing happen with personalization, it just, at some point, like what the, the biggest letdown was that Macy's had a lot of time and they knew a deck. I could have a decade to figure out how to like sunset these things and build the solution and test. And it didn't happen because of, you know, because monolith, because it was just the system.
the middle management at some point, I guess you kind of I don't know, because the last podcast AI was like, what did it call it? strategic scorched earth strategy or something. And I'm like, that's kind of what I think you might need to do sometimes just to kind of get the dead weight out of the way. One of the
Cameron Craig (38:03.246)
you
Cameron Craig (38:09.56)
that has to be a conscious choice. And again, you have to weigh that, like I was saying about the investment side of it. You have to have that risk profile calibrated as well. You can't scorch the earth to the point where it kills the earth. I mean, you can, but everybody better be ready to man the lifeboats. And that is what's happening now. And it's going to keep happening to people that aren't yet ready to.
Keith (38:28.583)
Yeah.
That's what's happening now.
Cameron Craig (38:39.82)
get creative and to maybe change their approach to the way in which they're doing business in very fundamental ways. And again, I keep bringing this back to design. Like design done well and the practice used well can help you think through these problems in lower risk, like high frequency ways where you're like, no, no, no, maybe yes.
Maybe yes, right? And like, you can get to the point where you eliminate a bunch of like possibilities that are very expensive things to try and, you know, travel down that path simply by thinking it through with a design process.
Keith (39:23.154)
So let's bring it back to today real quick. Because I love how you brought it back to design again. Because that's like the key, like the cognitive stuff, like the psychology, all that.
Design has the superpower. People aren't like listening. They didn't listen back then. And the same thing is happening now. So it's like, how would you recommend dealing with it or looking at it from as like a design manager, especially dealing with like technical teams who are like, we just put the AI on AI on it. And like, you know, it won't make a difference.
Cameron Craig (39:57.006)
Well, so mean, one thing is we design need to do two things upfront foundationally. We need to take some responsibility for the fact, and we touched on this a little in the last podcast. We need to take some responsibility for the fact that we've sat around on our own laurels for the last 10 years, still working in interface design, not maturing the practice beyond interface design and expecting the interface design like.
that there was going to be another revolution, like the difference between web enabled browser delivered experiences and the phone. We made a lot of money as designers on that transition, but we've not gone beyond that. We've been gilding that interface, Lily, for the last 10 plus years.
I'm sure people will send the hate mail and that's fine. Please send the hate mail if you hate what I'm saying about this. But there's been no real meaningful innovation in the interface space in at least five, if not seven, I'm gonna say 10. Like that's probably where the hate will come. But honestly, know, and in the space that I'm in now, I'm dealing with forms and tables.
Keith (41:16.818)
you
Cameron Craig (41:20.774)
And there's a time and a place for a form and time and a place for a table. But if you're getting ready for agentic delivery of information where the Keith agent or the Cam agent is going to break down the same information for Cam and Keith in a totally different way, design better be ready to think that through. Because the machines aren't going to understand the human side of that equation on their own.
Keith (41:40.892)
Mm.
Cameron Craig (41:50.376)
somebody, a human, to start to teach that pattern to the machine. And then the machine can do the pattern recognition and figure out what is the right version of this for Cam and what is the right version for Keith. But all of the form that that information needs to land in needs to be designed. so step one, own and admit that like,
We've spent a lot of time gilding the interface, Lily. You have to, we have to own that. Second.
Your your primary job at this moment is to define the design practice outside of that world. And what I'm finding is, and again, this is like this is my own practice. I am not immune to this. It's not like I'm sitting somewhere where people are like, yep, Cam, design is rad. Hire a bunch. Let's solve some problems like I work in an environment that's very hostile to designers. They're like, we don't really get what you do and interfaces what you do. And the interface sucks.
So why do I need you?
Keith (42:58.808)
Why can't I do that?
Cameron Craig (43:00.174)
I can do it better than you do because I actually understand the product down to the code. So just step out of the way and give me the tool and let me like build the interface. And I'm kind of like, great, build the interface. Cause I got other things I got to do, which is revolutionizing the way in which we think about the business in general and revolutionizing the way in which we think about this onslaught of a massive shift in HCI, right? And
If you're not thinking about that as a designer and you are not kind of, it's a little bit like the very end of the movie Point Break, Keith, where he's like, I gotta surf that giant wave.
Keith (43:38.034)
Bro's 50 year store, man. I was thinking about that the other day. I love that movie.
Cameron Craig (43:43.416)
Via conbios, Keith.
Keith (43:47.014)
God, dude.
Cameron Craig (43:47.894)
Anyway, like so, but you know the scene, like the movie's ridiculous. All the dialogue is laughable. But the cinematography and the visual design of that last scene where he's literally walking out towards that 50, like in some ways as a designer, if you don't see that in your mind as you're thinking about what's next for us, like you can ride that wave.
Keith (43:53.756)
There's a monolith man story we gotta talk about at some point like litter.
Cameron Craig (44:17.868)
and it's going to be the ride of your life, or you can get crushed by that wave. And you are literally going to be on a giant human heap of designers who are like, I don't know what happened. It's like all those people that were like hardcore dedicated to Flash who were like, my god, what do do now that I can't design in Flash? You're like, bro, you better have a better trick than that. Because if that's your calling card.
Keith (44:28.763)
it.
Keith (44:41.938)
One choice, we receive jobs.
Cameron Craig (44:44.182)
If that is your calling card, like we, need to have a serious conversation.
Keith (44:49.894)
Yeah, I mean.
If you think about the dilemma of designers now, they're stuck in systems that are forcing them to think purely on the interface because they don't value necessarily value and know what they do or understand they can do more or understand how that more with design can add value back to the business. Like you said, it's like, there's this massive shift coming and it's about the business, which, you know, I think a lot of designers like, oh my God, math, I don't want to deal with math, but it's just like, it's just value. It's like,
The thing I hate the most too is when you hear people talk about, it's a bad experience. I'm like, no, dude, like waste my time. Like it makes me physically angry. I want to TD Bank is the spirit airlines of online banking. People are like, oh, I get what that means. Like, the spirit sucks. It's like taking the bus, but in the sky and get the fleas when you get off the goddamn plate. know what I mean? It's like, that's what the, that's not a bad experience. That's like a, you know.
Cameron Craig (45:39.147)
man, that's awesome.
Cameron Craig (45:45.558)
Yeah, yeah, it's like a
Keith (45:49.988)
A quality of life-changing event kind of thing.
Cameron Craig (45:51.468)
Yeah, it's like every hotel that Macy's travel made me stay in in like midtown Manhattan versus like when I finally was like, no, I'll pick my own hotel, thanks. Yeah, I mean, so that's right, Keith. think like the problem space.
Keith (46:01.394)
Hell yeah.
Keith (46:05.34)
Tommy guide.
Cameron Craig (46:15.66)
The problem space really is that we have to invest back in the things that are the core of design. And that is not visual design. That is not interface design. It is literally the rudimentary or the primitive process of design. You take in, you observe, you take in a bunch of inputs, and then you go and you start to create. And
Like I also don't want to pitch the whole like doom and gloom thing around, the design practice is going to get run over by AI. Like a lot of practices are going to get run over by AI. But you know, Friday I was dealing with with my design, a few members of my like senior members of my design team who were getting bummed out like, hey, you know, we're in the most innovative space in your entire org and yet we're still getting run over by
Keith (46:53.679)
Everything.
Cameron Craig (47:12.322)
the development team, was like, so why do you, and this leads into my next point, right? Because designers classically wanna talk, okay, gotta, sorry, I'm all over the map on this one, but I gotta keep backing up. The concept of like, I need a seat at the table, or like, we need a seat at the table, like.
Keith (47:27.398)
Good.
Keith (47:38.012)
given to them.
Cameron Craig (47:39.096)
Like, F that, like table flip, right? Like, that was my advice to the designers who I was talking to on Friday. was like, I don't want to hear about like how you've been wronged because you were not invited to some meeting and now a decision that has been made affects you in some way and you are like arbitrating that decision. Like, you don't like it, show them a better way. And don't show them a better way in wire frames. Show them a better way in some sort of either
prototype or code. And like you just said, you were kind of like, but I don't like math, you know? It's like the same thing, but I don't know how to code. And it's like, you do know how to code. Like you know how to code in the same way that soon a developer is going to know how to design. Go grab a tool and start having a conversation and you're gonna get like the framing and then you're gonna cut the framing into some kind of an IDE.
And then you're going to cut the code into the same frame in the IDE, and you're going to generate code. And they were like, no, can't be done. like, I, I.
I'm a stupid manager and I can tell you right now, I know exactly how to do it. I've seen it done. I can do it.
Keith (49:02.95)
People don't want to change.
Cameron Craig (49:03.96)
Two hours later though, Keith, like my senior most designers, like I'm in, I'm talking to Claude and Claude has given me like a methodology for like actually coding the feature that I wanna build. I'm like, great, and what are you going to do with that? He's like, well, I have a coding environment up and I'm cutting and pasting the code out of Claude into the IDE. I'm like, you're doing the exact thing that we were just saying that you like couldn't do. And he's like, I'm doing the exact thing that we.
we said I couldn't do it. I'm like, and how many elapsed hours are we? It's like, we're 180 minutes since you yelled at me. Like, okay, great.
Own the space. The tools are there. Like, do not be run over by the wave. Do not be run over by the other surfers. Like, you can do this. It is not rocket science. Like, that is the beauty of this AI revolution. It's not coming for designers. It's coming for everybody's low-level tasks. And guess what? Front-end computer programming for web-based interfaces is a low-level task.
Keith (49:46.908)
the mindset.
Keith (50:14.352)
Yeah, why the hell would anybody want to have to optimize the interface for like 35 different browsers with like all the different, you know what mean? All the different versions and everything. It's like, that's why I never got into it. I was like, man, this is like, this is like soul crunching.
Cameron Craig (50:27.468)
No, and why would it's absolutely soul crushing. It's soul crushing in the same way that like low level new grad designers are stuck being attached to some higher level like mid career designer. And it's like, I've sketched this and now you're going to go and build me every state that I've sketched out. Like I want to see the error states. I want to see the like, you know, positive state. I want to see the like, here's a question state.
And I'm going to need you to not use lorem ipsum. I want to actually see what it looks like in the interface. And so they have to go and research what's actually happening in the interface and put all that content in like same deal. Right. And guess what? The computer can do all of that for you at this point. Like the computer can generate the faux interface without the lorem ipsum. It can go and figure out like, Hey, what does this look like in the Macy's vernacular? What does this look like in the Safeway vernacular? What does it look like in the Amazon vernacular?
and bring that in. You no longer have to do any of that nonsense because AI is legitimately coming for your tasks. And it will come for more and more of your job if you let it. But back to the whole thing with the human to human side of it, do not try and own.
Your output. Own your innovation. In this moment, own the show, don't tell. Don't tell a product leader or a development leader that you need a seat at the table. Show them. Show them that you deserve a seat at that table. Invite them to your table. That's the best thing is like, look, guys.
You said this couldn't be done. You said the feature that I designed can be done. I've designed it and I've coded it. Here it is. Like, come to my table, bitches. You know, it's...
Keith (52:25.758)
And at Amazon, goes a huge, long way because it's like a heavy writing culture, a heavy data culture. like, yeah, well, yeah. it's like, exactly. So it's like, it's technically driven. want to see it actually, you're being evaluated based on the criteria that they are defining the physics of reality by, the cultural reality, if that's, you want to explain it that way.
Cameron Craig (52:33.527)
It's an invention culture.
Cameron Craig (52:48.462)
Yeah, yeah, 18 months ago I realized that I am nothing there without invention. If I don't actually invent something, if I don't eventually get my name on a patent, if I don't eventually contribute code through the work that I'm doing back into the system or enable others to create code, if I'm not a part of that, I am easily, easily eliminated.
Keith (53:16.31)
And it's a double edged sword because like at Facebook, I interviewed there a long time ago and I didn't know how to code and like, screw it. I come back when you had a code because that was how the culture was set up.
a blind spot forms because designers didn't want to deal with the headache of having to learn how to code and to build the muscle memory to get a seat at that table at that point because the tools, they weren't conducive enough or as accessible yet. But that is what makes those companies monolithic and weak at some point because you have the same mentality. Even if they're all brilliant people, they're all thinking the exact same way that there's no divergence of information, no descending opinion that can actually
Cameron Craig (54:01.132)
Yeah. Yeah. that, also let me be clear in saying that I am not saying mold the design practice to those situations. Like, I think that, too, is a recipe, like you just called out, that is a recipe for disaster. And it's a recipe for the company ultimately to fail in some way, right? I'm also not saying that
Keith (54:01.37)
say the Emperor has no clothes.
Cameron Craig (54:29.898)
engineering driven cultures or finance driven cultures or where we were oddly merchandising driven cultures aren't soul crushing in their own way because you you spend every day feeling like your practice is less valued. You're the bottom of the caste system in some way. Like you are the guy that is like there to clean up. And and that is shitty. There's no doubt about it. And
Keith (54:39.314)
You
Cameron Craig (54:58.466)
And I want to say that I've worked in a culture that doesn't have that as a part of its culture. And I can't say that every culture has had some dominant group that ends up being the gatekeeper, the rule definer, the system developer, you know, the we've done it this way for a hundred years. And that's why like we're as great as we are. And it's like that mentality as a senior leader.
is the thing that will kill your company.
Keith (55:30.684)
formation conditions tells you what that is the way the company started is that's I don't know we talked about that last week, but that that's like its own episode in and of itself.
Cameron Craig (55:38.306)
I mean, maybe that's where we start next week, honestly, because I think to do any of the things that we're talking about doing, you first have to assess what culture you're working in, right? Like, it took us, like you said, about 2 and 1 days to say, like, we kind of knew that decisioning and a lot of the rule set was developed in the merchandising group. We also realized that a lot of the systems that would hold us up or ultimately hold us back were merchandising-based systems. They weren't.
inventorying systems or the financial systems, like we could have worked around those things, but to do some of the personalization that we were talking about, we realized like, and you know, again, this is 13 years ago. the human systems that fed the digital systems were complex and monolithic on their own, right? Like, you know, a simple example, you and I were like, Hey, could an anti pattern be don't ever show me Brown? And
we were told emphatically that that would never work. And it was like, well, why wouldn't it work? It was like, because you guys aren't smart enough to understand that brown is a color, brown is a material, brown could be a brand. And we're like, but all of those things can be solved if you have like sub-definers on the word brown, like brown leather. Don't show me brown leather. Don't show me a brown leather belt. Don't show me brown leather shoes, right? Like those things,
smart search engine can figure out, if Keith doesn't like brown shoes, store brown and shoes as these attributes and don't show him the brown shoes. No. And it was, I mean, and I'm using brown, but it was gold. Gold was the actual thing. Gold is a brand. Gold is a material. Gold is a color. And we were like,
Keith (57:26.854)
You don't like gold? doesn't like gold?
Cameron Craig (57:29.1)
Well, and the reality of that, not to go super far down that rabbit hole, but the reality of all that was it was fear driven. was like, but if I take brown shoes away from Keith in like five years, Keith might need to buy brown shoes for the kid that he doesn't have right now. It's like, guys, come on, really? But again, that was a merchandising driven, and they were like,
you know, their merchandising strategy was, you know, we want a giant rounder of a thousand things and like Keith can figure out like what of the things and like, it's like never ending. Remember the endless aisle, the endless aisle concept. And we were both like, aisle. my God. Like who's going to go through that? It's like.
Keith (58:08.892)
kitchen sink it. God.
Keith (58:16.624)
that in mobile first for a decade. was like, dude, mobile first was like 2006. It's like
Cameron Craig (58:20.576)
Yeah. Well, but the endless aisle thing, think, you, like at some point you did some visuals of that and it was like, it was like a pile of like jeans, like, like just thrown on the floor. was like, yeah, here's your endless aisle. Like everything's, it's a pile of crap that somebody's got to sort through.
Keith (58:37.522)
And that's like back to the psychology and what design is like It's like any any make I always talk about maps like a good map has an intention and it's about what you omit Not what you retain like you don't need everything you gotta like say no This is why boundaries are good You know in relationships and like finances and in design you got to make decisions It's why it's designed you have to make intentional decisions about these things and
you know, someone says, we could increase some stupid KPI or NPS score by 2 % by endless isling. Because they're just scrolling was a relatively new pattern of like infinite whatever on your Instagram or whatever. And people were just starting to use phones all the time. Like it was just starting to become like a disruptive pattern, not like in the Clay Cushion sense, but like changing your behavior in a fundamental way, making you anti-social or changing your own kind of like
organic behavior patterns because it was just, it was becoming so ubiquitous or so it was around, was everywhere. But one thing I want to talk about too with the mindset is this mindset of I can't do it. Like, I don't know what the solution is for designers. mean, I'm struggling with this now because like, like I'm powerlifting. I'm trying to like, find time to like go on dates. Cause you know, it's in New York, like my day job and immigration is totally fucking crazy every day. And it's like, there's a whole other model, like multiple model lists. So I get into.
So it's hard because there is a certain amount of domain knowledge you have to get the reps in to do it. But there's so many resources out there on Twitter or X whatever. You can even talk to the systems now, it's the Cloud or ChatGPT, whatever, have it help you. You just gotta sit down and do it. So we're highly advocating for that. And the other mindset that I think helps keep us alive is always having a hacker mindset too. It's like, fine.
Cameron Craig (01:00:23.436)
Yeah. Yeah.
Keith (01:00:35.282)
take my resources away, give me this bullshit team, like whatever, not that they're bullshit, but like they're, you get like your arm tied behind your back because they're like, oh, we're going to throw you like a little bone and you know, can do whatever with it and it'd ha ha ha. And then you got to find a way to make it work. And that's the hacker mindset. It's like, you got to find a way to, use the resources unconventionally. And it's not just the resource, but it's like how you deliver the payload to your audience. And like with merchandising or like the digital merchandising.
they were touching the buyers who were buying physical stuff that was getting sent to somebody else to make a physical thing to have to get put on a balance sheet and hit. I didn't know about cash conversion cycle at that point until business school. And if I had known about that, then it was like, then I could have been like, fine. If we had all this data, the idea we wanted to pitch to is that we had all this data is this brand and trend intelligence. We could say, look, we're not going to pay you for a year or six months, but we're going to tell you what's going on on like a day to day basis. So you can know.
because the forecasts were 18 months or the production pipelines were like 18 months long. Even for like cosmetics, it takes 18 months to like have an idea, to like procure the shit, to make it, to like brand it, to package it, to send it, to inventory it, to get to the actual supply, you know, the middle people. And it was too long. Like it was just, it was crazy. It's a year and a half. So if you could do that and then you could extend the amount of time it takes you to pay your supplier.
effectively having your suppliers fund your growth. And we knew this, but we didn't put it in business-speak terms specifically how... Because our freaking middle managers didn't know about it either because they understood profit and loss and number go up is good, but they didn't understand hacking the cash conversion cycle to make negative working capital work for you. that comes in handy with the right audience. So it's like the right payload, the right time, the right audience.
But this is part of like the always be learning kind of hacking mindset too that I think is really, really important. That's, don't know. helped us.
Cameron Craig (01:02:32.462)
I think we need an entire episode on that. think it's a great point. It's a great point. I think, yeah. So maybe we're an hour in. I think let's do two things. Let's summarize the big points of tonight. And I would say we finally got there. And the big points of tonight were around mindset. One, you need to take responsibility and ownership for the
Keith (01:02:39.442)
I would, yeah, I love it.
Cameron Craig (01:03:01.998)
place that we're at with the design practice in general. Don't beat yourself up, but be in a place where you recognize that things need to change and we need to evolve. That's one. Two, don't take ownership of your deliverables, right? You put those things out into the world, they are there to enable others, they're there to enable the company that you work for.
And you, as the designer, are uniquely placed in the fact that you are an unending wealth of ideas and forward thinking. And you can bring people along, you can train others, you can convince others. Like, that is part of being a designer. And I think, like, we have to lean into that as a practice. So that's two. Three, I think, which we'll start to tackle
next week, you need to understand the framework that you are working in. And part of that is the type of organization that you work for and are supporting. I'll park that. Like I said, I think next week we can dive into that because I think it's really important for everyone to understand the environment that they work in and what are the levers that they can pull. Keith added at the back end, which I think is another brilliant one, which is an episode all on to itself.
I got there finally as well, is the hacking mindset, right? Like, I think, you know, whatever gets thrown at you, yeah, some things are gonna bum you out and you're gonna, you know, feel like you took a hit. But if you can figure out, as Keith said, how to take that new dynamic or that new situation or whatever that new knowledge is and tailor your response and tailor and design the next thing that you're going to do, your next move.
Like you will always win in that situation. like, again, I'll parking lot my example of that, but I had that happen to me this last couple of weeks where I was the recipient of something that I was not ready for. And in the end, after thinking it through and kind of figuring it out, was like, there's an advantage for me in this. And I'm going to take the advantage by doing the following set of activities. And I'm happy to.
Keith (01:05:08.786)
Ahem.
Cameron Craig (01:05:22.552)
break that down because I do think as a design leader, it was a very design specific thing. you know, it's another great way of kind of trying to look at the situation that you're in. Did I miss anything in our summary?
Keith (01:05:38.038)
No, I want to like, add a little piece to each of these guys. This is like super, this is awesome. The way you kind of laid it out. All right, so taking responsibility, owning your place. This is an amazing time to be alive and be a designer. Like, there is so much happen. There's so much that you can do right now that like, please get out of the mindset of like, woe is me, I can't do it. Like the, you don't need permission. Like you can just do things, enter like you can just do things meme, like go and do it, make it happen. Learn.
Cameron Craig (01:05:43.17)
Do it. Do it.
Cameron Craig (01:05:50.222)
100%.
Keith (01:06:06.962)
don't take ownership of deliverables. Okay, this is seeding social capital. This is a whole other episode. So if you want to get the seat at the table and you can show it can be done, then you can start moving this laterally and intentionally like sunzooing this around different parts of the org. And you help those people look good in front of their bosses. And now all of sudden you have not just a seat, but you got like a big boy seat or a big girl seat, whatever, like, you they're in boot, because you're driving the thing then because they're like, oh shit, this is done. I can't ignore this. And if somebody else
Some of the peer sees it, they're going to leverage this because they're going to think the same thing I'm thinking, which is they're going to get promoted and they're not going to get axed by AI. Understanding the framework you're working in, operating conditions. This is this whole episode. This will help keep you alive because you're going to learn how to read the game in ways people aren't going to comprehend. Formation conditions, I learned this from Clay Shirky taking one of his two of his classes at ITP. He was a social software guy. gave us a book or he gave me, I took
I bought him a replacement because he's like an old mentor, but it was small groups as complex systems and talked about formation coordination and the way you start is the way you roll. So if you go on a date, you know, they're hot, maybe they pay, maybe it's fun, but the talks like talking to a brick. That's your dynamic and perpetuity. But you kind of get used to that workflow. Because once it starts moving, that's what you kind of that becomes homeostatic. That's the path dependence that maintains. If you understand that, then you can tell if someone's going to make a move, are they an amateur, they professional.
Cameron Craig (01:07:20.877)
Mm.
Keith (01:07:34.886)
They're professional. They're very, you know, specific rhyme and reason to what they're doing. They're intentional designing in a different way. If they're chaotic and they're idiots, like they're really hard to beat because they're just, it's like, it's hard, but that's his whole thing. The dinette, right. It's understanding how to read the ties, the tide clock of kind of like the culture.
Cameron Craig (01:07:44.556)
Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:07:50.316)
Yeah, I love the concept and the analysis that you put in there too of like hard to beat. think that that's very true. That's very true. You can't, you cannot beat a non strategy. You'll get, you'll get hosed every time.
Keith (01:08:03.118)
No, they're just crazy. they're like, it's like, you can't, it's like, you can't negotiate with crazies on the street in New York. They're just like, no, you're, you're, you're gonna have a bad day. Like, don't do it. Just keep going. And then the hacking mindset, anything that's bullshit that happens, it's an opportunity to change it. You just have to understand how to like flip it and work with it because someone, if they're going to throw you into the bus, they're making a move that you can kind of pivot or Perry or maneuver around.
Cameron Craig (01:08:12.706)
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Keith (01:08:31.974)
and then redirect intentionally. And if you have that mindset, then it's like, okay, cool, new opportunity. And that's what we learned to do really well is that we wouldn't just be like, okay, there's going to be A, B, C, D. It wasn't linear. It was like, okay, one of seven things is going to emerge like organically, like waves kind of hitting and kind of creating a big super wave. Like you don't know when or where it's going to happen. You just know it's going to happen. And so you kind of just have like a rough improvisational plan put around that. And that's, that's what I think you have to do too. And it's very much thinking like a hacker.
Cameron Craig (01:08:56.428)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Keith (01:09:01.714)
on top of that. But yeah, so that's all I was thinking of on top of your structure.
Cameron Craig (01:09:04.214)
Yeah, well said. Well said. I love that. And really good texture over the top. I'll add one thing that I think is important that is not anything that we talked about, but you're seeing the dynamic play out between Keith and I. Find a partner. And by that, mean in your work environment or in your life environment, find somebody.
that you can bounce ideas off of that can be a sounding board that will listen and provide you with true and rational feedback. I think without that, it's really easy to get in your head and to start feeling crazy. And oftentimes, I think,
We would start and end our days together, every day, when we were working together. And I think it helped both of us because it helped normalize some of the things that we were seeing. And we were on two completely different coasts as we are now. And you would see things, or you would be interacting with people on the phone or in different conference calls or in email. And I'd be doing the same thing. And it was like, OK, we need to compare notes on this because this person said this and this other person said this. That's one end of it.
I think the emotional side of it as well is you need somebody to validate that you're not crazy because the monolith of the system or the organization around you at large, it may not intend to make you feel crazy, but it will do things that end up making you feel crazy. And having a partner in crime or somebody that is a mentor or somebody that you're co-hacking with,
Keith (01:10:20.601)
Yeah.
Cameron Craig (01:10:43.448)
prevents that from happening and it keeps you in a much better headspace, which keeps you strong for the ultimate game that you're playing. So find that person.
Keith (01:10:52.05)
100%.
So if you can't find that person and you work at a big org, go find the chiefs of staff and talk to them. They're mostly, they're like who you ex people were a decade ago. Really diverse, weird backgrounds, really cool. They have their eyes on totally different, so many different things and they're usually working solo in the trenches behind the scenes. I guarantee you you're going to bring, if they're smart and they're usually system thinkers, like they're going to be psyched and you can be like, Hey, this is what's going on. So I'm working on just going to do so, buying some coffee, see what happens. And if it does like, us know.
Cameron Craig (01:11:23.074)
Yeah. I mean, I think, and again, Keith, maybe you can talk about this since you occupy that space now in another episode. But, you know, in the 11 phases of innovation, I believe that the chief of staff can play any of those and sometimes plays multiple or all of those roles, right? Like they can be a gatekeeper, they can be a megaphone, they can be all these different things. And
I mean, you're spot on. I am picking up my boss's chief of staff from the airport tomorrow, right? Because I'm literally like, you hold the keys to a number of things. And she and I have a really amazing relationship. She comes to me with, help me think this through, right? So we have a very symbiotic relationship. Great, solve my financial problems and make it all OK with our boss, you know?
Keith (01:12:22.968)
They're not the kind of people to throw you under the bus. And if they do, that's a huge tale about the politics of the organization that you got to get the hell out of there as fast as you can, because they're brought in as a henchman, not somebody to actually be like a skilled operator.
Cameron Craig (01:12:37.026)
That's correct. A good chief of staff is trying to maximize the inputs and outputs of the people that work for the boss. if you're getting thrown under the bus by somebody's chief of staff, you know you're in deep, deep water.
Keith (01:12:47.132)
And everybody.
Keith (01:12:54.578)
Deep dark water.
Cameron Craig (01:12:56.43)
All right, I'm going to do something kind of funny that we said we were going to do. I am going to pull a brief clip from a business book and I'm going to play it and we will have a laugh about it because it's ridiculous. All right, here we go. To the most strategic initiative of the company on which the survival of the entire company hinges. And yet hundreds of engineers are paralyzed, unable to do what needs to be done.
In that moment, Maxine decides she must bring this level of productivity that she's helped create for middle schoolers and her open source project to the Phoenix Project, even if it means personal suffering in the short term. No.
Keith (01:13:36.358)
God.
Keith (01:13:42.418)
HAHAHAHA
Cameron Craig (01:13:45.42)
It's a...
Keith (01:13:47.166)
It sounds like really bad intro to a really bad romance novel you'd buy at the airport on a business trip.
Cameron Craig (01:13:51.264)
It's like an ABC after school special around developers. Yeah. Yeah. I plan to write design porn at some point.
Keith (01:14:02.737)
have the AI help you do it. Just sprinkle some AI in it.
Cameron Craig (01:14:08.212)
All right, man, this has been a blast.
Keith (01:14:10.62)
Dude. Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you, man. This has been a crazy day. It's been a great and I'm glad to have you as a friend and to talk to you and reboot these conversations again,
Cameron Craig (01:14:17.44)
Same, same. I appreciate everything you do. So thank you. You've always been an amazing thought partner and a leader that I truly have gained so much from. So thank you as well. See, and there's another lesson for everybody. Thank the people that you're with. Like do it often. It matters. It really matters. All right, we'll see you next week.
Keith (01:14:31.174)
same man. Appreciate it.
Keith (01:14:36.932)
Yeah, dude, 100%.
Keith (01:14:43.186)
Alright, thanks a lot. Later guys!