Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It’s part of the foundational history of sketch of like facing this enormous monopolistic late 2000s Adobe, and now that the sketch success and define the category in the market, which then in turn attract more players and then because we chose a different path in the business and in growth, now there’s new juggernauts again.

00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product. It’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan.

00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam.

00:00:42 - Speaker 2: And joined today by our guest, Paolo Pereira of Sketch.

00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Hello, Adam, Mark.

00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And a topic we’ve spoken about a number of times is YouTube and its importance for learning skills in the modern world, but Paolo, I understand that you’ve found a way to sort of escape nature through YouTube.

00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is true. I’ve taken to watching camping and bush crafting and canoeing videos on YouTube. It’s someone that’s never done a lot of outdoor stuff, it is actually surprisingly relaxing.

00:01:15 - Speaker 2: One that I’m familiar with is this channel Primitive Technology where this fellow goes into the woods and builds, I don’t know, a hut or something using whatever he finds around sticks, mud, rocks, and of course the entire time doesn’t say a word, but it sort of has this meditative quality while at the same time you’re watching someone who is great at their craft do something that maybe you didn’t know how it was done.

00:01:42 - Speaker 1: I’m also a big fan of in that vein, there’s a Japanese woodworker who goes by Ishitani furniture and also the same thing, it does not say a single words and it’s just like long shots of him doing things over and over. And also, it does help that his furniture is absolutely beautiful, but the meditative aspect to it is a big part of the appeal to me.

00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background.

00:02:09 - Speaker 1: So, I have been a lifelong website maker from being an lobbyist when I was 14, then to being a student in university for software engineering, then on to a job, and I’ve mostly been a freelancer most of my career.

00:02:29 - Speaker 2: And I noticed looking at your portfolio from that kind of earlier time, a lot of your websites seems like you were specialized on event websites and especially design forward design focused events so I could only imagine those clients were enjoyable to work with, or at least the subject matter was close to your heart.

00:02:47 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely. That was for mostly XOXO and my friend Andy and his friend Andy put together and also uh building and other events that my friend Andy organized and of course it was a big pleasure because he didn’t have to sell the value of, of putting effort into the design and also then the people that looked at the work were more appreciative of it, which is, I mean, it’s always good when that happens, when there’s an appreciation from both the client and the audience about the work that you do.

00:03:16 - Speaker 2: And then what brought you the sketch?

00:03:19 - Speaker 1: So it was also in that capacity as designer and developer, web designer, and web developer specifically. I joined in late 2019 after a project had ended, I wasn’t really sure what to do.

And in retrospect, I could see that I was a bit bored of like, you know, starting a project from scratch every time, which is very good things going for it, but you know, as you know, you can only see the things that you didn’t get to do right after your ship and the problem with working on small freelance projects like that is well, you rarely get a chance to fix those, so they are going to live there just staring at you in perpetuity.

So I joined Sketch in the marketing team as a hybrid designer and developer. You know, what was at the time a very small marketing team, so like to get to do, you know, the things that I like to do, which is have a handy design and development and a broad perspective of the website.

But now in a situation where, you know, I didn’t have to do everything and there were much more competent people doing all the things that I didn’t like to do or frankly was not very good at, right? So we had great people doing. I can design illustration, you know, video production, copywriting, strategy, and it was great to be in that situation and I perform my strengths and other people bring their strengths and the end result is also much better for it.

00:04:46 - Speaker 2: And maybe it’s worth briefly here mentioning what sketch is. I think of it as being a pretty foundational design tool. In fact, it sort of kicked off the modern design tools revolution, I think in the last 10 years, but we don’t want to make any assumptions, so maybe you can briefly tell us what is this product and who uses it.

00:05:03 - Speaker 1: So, Sketch is now an all in one platform for design, both for design teams, teams of designers or individuals.

And it has 3 main building blocks. It’s got the workspace, which is a place for all your documents, your projects, your design system, and also for all the people managing people.

You get the thing that brought sketch to the limelight, which is a native Mac app for creating and editing designs and prototypes, and unbeknownst to many, we have a very powerful web app that works on any browser or any device.

This is not an app for editing. It is an app for browsing documents, for viewing documents with a full canvas, inspecting, commenting, playing prototypes, and even browsing symbols and all your styles of your design system in a components view, including, you know, exporting color variables as token that can use directly in web development.

So these three pieces make what’s sketchiest today.

I guess as you as you mentioned to this audience, people might know sketch more as like, it’s that Mac, it’s the design Ma app and to that I would say like it’s still that, but it’s so much more now and it’s, I think, worth the bias here, of course, worth a second look.

00:06:19 - Speaker 2: And I’ll just briefly mention Sketch to me is one of my favorite tools, not just in the utility sense, but in the sense of inspiring what software could be. I think it really redefined what a design tool could be, particularly coming from this kind of small independent team which I think will Talk about later in a time when in this market that was saturated by Adobe as the giant that dominates the creative tools design tool space, still does, of course, but Sketch came up with this product that sort of sliced the problem in a different way and yeah, remains, I think, sort of an industry defining tool even in this time of an explosion of new and interesting design tools.

00:07:00 - Speaker 1: First, thank you for saying that. I agree for what you said. I know I worked as sketch, but I’ve only been here 2 years and a half and the product is much, much older than that. I used it before. It’s definitely a category defining product, right? There’s just definitely, at least in the white design world, there’s a pre-sketch and a post sketch, and we’ll get to talk more about that later on by the end. But it is an immense privilege and responsibility to work on something like this, of course, that has it, you know, so beloved and it was such an important piece in the history of design tools.

00:07:36 - Speaker 2: And you work on the editor component. You talked about those three major pieces of the sort of larger sketch product or platform. What is the editor and what is your role with that?

00:07:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I, despite having joined in the marketing team as a website design and developer, I, since a year now work as a product manager on the editor team.

The editor team is the most primary and foundational level of the editing experience at sketch and ed sketch that is on the Mac app. And so we work on the little day to day things you do over and over, so much to become second nature, right? So this is things like selecting and moving and rescising, and lining, layout, editing texts, add new shapes, but also the sort of the home, sort of the building blocks of the UI, right? So you got the canvas, the toolbar, the list, and so on.

So in a way the writer is the place and the tools where all your design comes together, where you bring in pieces from your design system and you connect their prototypes and then you go and play and so on, but all these things converge and come into the editor is where you knowingly or not spend most of your time.

00:08:50 - Speaker 2: And those primitives make up the core and everything else is built on top of that. So to me that feels like a big responsibility.

00:08:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it is because I mean, so much of this becomes second nature muscle memory that if you disrupt something like this, people immediately know, right? Like something does not feel right, maybe you might know, you might not know what it is, but it definitely does not feel right because it gets to that level of closeness to the way you work, you can tell where the bounds are.

And I think that’s a You know there’s simply a characteristic of the creative tools in general, where there is like fast input environment and very, very, very short feedback loop environment and they are quite nonlinear, right? And so it’s a bigger responsibility to work in such a place. the user flow can just go really anywhere, right? So you can do almost anything at any time and as quickly as something starts, it ends right away. So you do all these small things really quickly over and over, you get feedback right away and so if the flow breaks, it doesn’t feel good to use the tool.

00:10:01 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is how to make product decisions and especially for creative tools or on a team that has a very strong design culture and you mentioned there briefly Paula, that your role is in product management or you are a product manager, but I think you come from this design background, not necessarily it’s called a classic product management background.

And I think also working on a product like Sketch that is so mature and as you said so beloved and has so many use cases, you know, one thing I’ve seen that seems almost counterintuitive is the longer a product has been around and the more it can do, the more things people will ask for.

You would think that eventually you would build everything and it would stop asking for new stuff, but it’s almost the opposite.

We’ve seen that with our recent launch here of Muse 2.0 and just the number of Different kinds of features people are asking for I feel is far bigger than prior to that, even though we just added a bunch of new stuff that people have been asking for.

So there’s always more and then you’ve got a large organization. There’s a lot of different stakeholders, customers, but people in the company vision comes from different places.

I think it’s a challenging area. So I’d love to hear how your team makes decisions and especially within the context of sort of your larger company.

00:11:12 - Speaker 1: You’re absolutely right, and I think it’s defining aspect of product that there’s always more to do than there is time or resources to do. I think that’s never gonna change and definitely took some learning and adapting to.

So, one of the key aspects of working a sketch that is Emma’s privilege is that most people on sketch use sketch. So having found its footing in the UI design market, sketch at its core is a vector editing. Design software. And so at Sketch we have a lot of people using Sketch in a lot of different ways and get a lot of feedback through them. So obviously we got designers and both product designers, which is sort of the core market, but also illustrators, icon designers, even motion designers that storyboard and sketch, which gives us a very different perspective on, you know, the same tool that product designers would use, but also this extends to engineers. That’s, you know, do diagrams in the editor and things back in the web app, product talks, retrospectives are often conducted in sketch with real-time corroboration, again, making diagrams, even anyone in a leadership position that when rarely they have to do presentations to do with them in sketch and really this is kind of where we live, right, like everyone browse documents, sends links around to sketch documents and Then a lot of folks in customer support and customer success are designers themselves, so there’s a big like design culture permeating every part of the company, and this is huge because it does shorten the feedback loop, you know, someone has an ID you can quickly Jump on it and understand better where they’re coming from, why the current approach is working for them, you know, and contrast to the perspective of someone else that has different needs and you use the same idea in a different way. And of course, it goes beyond our team, we suffer from everywhere from us and customer support, social slack workspaces, we have a few groups of people, events, testing programs and research programs that we run, and so on and so forth. So this obviously creates a huge amount of input and ideas and information that we have to process and digest, but that is, I think, ultimately a very good thing.

00:13:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a lot of different sources, a giant fire hose of inputs and ideas and complaints and problems and excitement for things you’ve just released or might release and certainly finding a way to find patterns and all that, I’m sure is part of the job.

It is interesting to me to categorize or to look at the difference between what I call internal feedback, that’s the dog fooding, sometimes they call it the team using the product and then external, your customers that are not working on it.

And I think there’s a trade-off to be aware of there, which is on one hand, you know, it’s often, especially for early startups, they say the wisdom is build for yourself, and as you said, it’s about the feedback loop which is that if you build a new thing before you even show it to any customers, you already know if the team internally is excited or is using it for themselves. That’s a really good sign. And if you’re not building for yourself, that makes it a lot harder. It makes the feedback loop a lot longer.

But the flip side of that is if you do start to totally index on what is desired internally, and that’s easy to do because these are people you see every day, you know, if it’s a physical office, you see them in the hallway, if it’s a slack channel or whatever, it’s people you know, you know, certainly company leadership. And you know if they say I have this little feature request and obviously you’re just going to be naturally inclined to respond to that, but then that can lead to or I have seen the failure case of overemphasizing internal usage and there may be a wider audience of customers who are not as well represented on the team.

So I think you know both of those have their place, but it sounds like you found the balance there.

00:14:57 - Speaker 1: Yes, you’re right. I’d like to think that we did find that right balance, but I think that balance kind of changes between teams that balance between external and internal feedback in a product team, such as our design systems or workspace system that deal a lot with The way teams organize their work in process, you know, getting that input from the way other companies and teams work is extremely valuable.

I think for us on the editor, we tilt the balance or, you know, shift the knob a little bit more toward the internal side because, you know, on one hand, we do not get. That many requests of people pointing out or asking for new ways to say select things or align things and those things are not the top most people’s minds, but also because we want to make the editor a place that’s perhaps more agnostic, right, where we don’t want to push towards one way. Necessarily of working or organizing work or you don’t have to account so much for like, you know, very specific ways of working, but more have a place where we really optimize for directness, we have experience for efficiency and most of all for flexibility. So we want to have like a wide variety of things that you can do and try to think, you know, can most people make use of this? And so in that way, try to design a tool, you know, or set of tools or actions that’s for everyone.

00:16:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Now another trade-off to think about is these feature requests and prioritizing your work just based on sort of the popularity of what it is that people want next, but then there’s what I might call vision or new concepts and ideas. How do you balance which of those you work on?

00:16:41 - Speaker 1: That’s absolutely true, and we do try to balance this and we don’t have properly, you know, a formula other than do it by we’re listening to and try to, you know, not to veer towards one side fully or the other, as you say, which is I think a very good approach.

I think on one hand, we do like know what are the requests or more like people’s pain points, right, because we always want to look underneath the request and see what the pain points are.

And so we try to mix those a bit with things that introduce novel ideas and these can be Improving on problems or pain points that people might have gotten accustomed to, right? So I think this is quite specific perhaps to graphical editors because these are tools that have been around forever. Photoshop and Illustrator are very old tools and their concepts still carry over quite a lot, even though Sketch was this category defining tool that’s introduced a new way of working compared to the Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.

Many of these conflicts carry over, right, and they’ve been around us for long.

And at the same time, I think people are highly adaptable, right? People get used to a certain level of annoying or even people start working in the industry and some things are just the way they’ve always been, right? And Another way why we might do this introduce novel ideas is to prepare the way for the future, right, so it can be strange to see an update and it’s like, well, why would they do this? And often, you know, this is to prepare for something that’s going to come later.

We’re preparing the way we’re addressing something, perhaps, perhaps minor but become much more evident in the future.

And so we have worked on a couple of projects recently that are in these two camps.

On one hand, here’s our Pain points that the people have or parts of the app that are not very good compared to other tools and at the same time, we worked on things like, hey, here’s something’s always been done a certain way, but we had an idea.

About, you know, improving this a little bit and so we try to either work on those at the same time or balance and I think this is something with the rich traditional sketch, right? We’ve mentioned a couple of times how it’s defined much of the category that it still sits in.

And it did so, I think by doing both things, both of these things for, hey, here’s some things that we should be doing much better, and hey, here’s things that persist to this day because there are problems that people want and it’s kind of, you know, in retrospect obviously how to solve them.

00:19:24 - Speaker 2: Now can you give us some examples of something that might go in the more direct response to a feature request versus something that nobody really asked for but maybe sets up a foundation for the future?

00:19:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so one project that we worked on, which is on the face of it, very boring, very obvious, was a much improved corner radius controls.

So, Up until then it’s sketch, if you want to adjust the corner radius on a rectangle, which is the most common scenario, you would just go over to the inspector and you just like the slider, you control for them, or you have one input that represents all four corners. So you can’t do it on the canvas and also you want the corners not to be the same. It’s kind of awkward to do. Like you expect to use to see my columns in the canvas, you have to go into vector editing mode just for this, which is so common. And so it wasn’t great, obviously it wasn’t great. And at the same time, we were pretty late to the party, right? Every tool out there has this and they all solve it in a pretty similar way. And saying this, I think this is a case of like we did respond to a pain point, but we also like looked at what’s out there and we’re like, OK, I think that there’s a little step above that we can go towards.

00:20:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s true that a lot of times feature requests come in the context not just of I have a problem and I need a solution.

But that people do use lots of tools. That’s the nature of the world we live in now, that you can easily sample a lot of different ones.

Some people enjoy doing that just generally, but also just that you’re looking for the right things to fit your workflow and then as you’re exposed to the way other tools do things, you think, oh this is great. I’d like to have it in this tool over here, so certainly. Quite a lot of the feature requests we get from you do come from, for example, other tools for thought, particularly the more text-based ones, as well as design tools, as well as whiteboarding apps and so on, and someone likes a feature someplace else, and then they come and say, you know, I’d like to have this in you, so what else is out there matters a lot.

00:21:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, and I think in a project like this, this is actually great, right? Having all of these other tools in the same space as yours affords you a way to just go and try it out and see what you like about it, see what it lacks, right? It would be so much more trouble if you actually had to go and build all of these other ways. and then look for yourself, you can just go and try it out. And even if it’s in a tool that’s not exactly, you know, as you said, in case of music, it’s maybe the ideas that come from more text-based tools, there can be something lurking beneath like I want this exact feature by name exactly like this. There’s something lurking in there and what is the needs that made the person ask for this. I think that’s extremely valuable.

00:22:09 - Speaker 2: A small side note on corner radius is that I think of that as one of the features when I did use sketch the first time that struck me as, ah, this is a very different interface paradigm because when I would try to do rounding of corners, which is something designers like to do quite a lot, it turns out, particularly UI designers in Photoshop or other tools, they are often It wasn’t a very direct way to do it. It was more like a multi-step process of refining a selection or maybe there’s a plugin or something.

And so having that just kind of built right in as a core idea, I think was, I don’t know if sketch was the first to do it, but it was the first place I encountered it, and it seemed to imply a kind of a more modern paradigm.

So now if others have picked. That up and taking it further or given more flexibility. Now you’re getting the requests from your users, Hey, can you basically, you know, advance to sort of catch up to the state of the art but in a way this is the way that lots of competition in an industry, we all make each other better because someone picks up your ideas, they run with it, maybe they improve it a little bit, and then you in some ways need to follow on from that.

00:23:15 - Speaker 1: Totally, it’s a great perspective and I absolutely agree with the idea that we all make each other better. And I think in that tradition with these projects, we of course came pretty early to the party in terms of say direct manipulation here, and it was easy to go like, oh, this is whole problem, right? Like let’s just do what everyone else does. After all, I don’t see people complaining about it, do I? Which is, you know, in this case, you go to the canvas, you dry a control to change all the corners, maybe you will hold the key to just change one, and the inspector has all four corners like little inputs in a row with little labels, and that’s just the way it is, you know, ship it. But I mean, there’s a long standing suggest that’s catch up. Looking, you know, what could this really be and what are you really trying to do? Like, in this case, like, what if you only want to do 2 or 3 corners to be around? What if you zoomed all the way in, right? So, of course, we saw the needs because, you know, people ask us for it and because we could see very well that hey, all these tools are doing it better, but we didn’t want to settle for parity, right? And at the same time, in terms of like the approach, the design. In this and any other project, we looked at it and it’s like, OK, how can we achieve what we want to achieve by making the most out of our existing UI? Maybe, maybe we take it like a little step further here or there, but in a way, let’s say we build as little UI as possible, fewer labels, and particularly like no, you know. Single purpose solutions, like in the kitchen tool where no unit taskers, right? How can we solve this with all the tools and pieces that we have, maybe we honed them a little bit, but how can we, you know, combine that puzzle to solve this problem?

00:25:01 - Speaker 2: Nice. And then when you think about examples of something that lays a foundation, what would be an example on that front?

00:25:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, another project that we worked on is a project called Foresight. So what foresight is, is a way to preview the outcome of actions that you take that are not direct manipulation before you do them or as you do them.

To make this more concrete, so far we’ve applied to alignment control, so when you light layers to the left or to the bottom, or when you enter new values for layers with height, or X or Y positions.

So when you do that, or as you’re doing that, or hovering the control or typing a new value, we will draw a little projection of where your layer will end up or which shape it will have. So this brings the Immediate feedback loop of direct manipulation to operations that are more quick and precise, but are not direct manipulation. I will bring this beneficial aspect of one way of interacting with your design to the other way of interacting with design.

And this is something that we hadn’t seen a lot out there, but it turns out when you use it, it becomes immediately obvious exactly what it’s doing and exactly why it’s doing that. And so we saw here both a way to improve these operations without having to, oh, it’s not exactly what I wanted and do. But also a way to compare, like, hey, if I do this, by the way, here’s how it’s going to be and I can see still in my eyes how it is right now. And at the same time, we want to introduce more powerful operators for these input values, we want to introduce more flexible and more powerful alignment controls. We could say, hey, you know, if we make this more powerful, but also more complex, it will be good to have that immediate feedback if I’m doing the right thing, if I’m using the right operator, if I’m using the right modifier key, and so, shortening that feedback loop through foresight brings you that much closer to that.

00:27:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things I like about foresight is that so much of design work is kind of like when you go to the eye doctor and they do the, what do you like better, A or B? OK, now how about C or D, and you’re sort of doing that continuously of trying different small ideas to iterate your way towards something that hopefully is the best one and obviously a sort of folk practice you might say, or a method you can do that is to do the action, then press undo, then do.

Next action, then press undo and maybe even going back and forth. But here, for example, if you just wanted to try out a couple of different alignments, you basically just move your mouse back and forth across those buttons and you get to get a sense of what those are going to be like without that sort of undue step and that gives you a faster feedback loop and that in turn lets you get to your desired end state in a quicker and smoother way.

00:28:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough to come up with general rules for product design. It’s often case by case, but there are a small handful of things that users are gonna want to do in every tool, and this is one of them, the sort of like fast feedback slash compare, I mean they’re kind of two sides of the same coin. So it’s nice to see that you have such a strong support for that and sketch.

00:28:27 - Speaker 1: And we very much hope to bring that over to more things where it makes sense.

We see this really as a system for previewing the outcome of these actions.

I think most of these projects here, I think are on foresight and on corner radius, you know, in the end, they Double down on, you know, aspects of the application, both in terms of interaction, both in terms of UI, both in terms of foundational concepts and primitives, where we just took all the pieces that we had and we dialed them up a little bit, right? And so, For example, in the case of foresight, we took our overlay system that you had for hovering over layers to get feedback of what you’re gonna select and we brought it over to outcomes of actions and different types of interactions with the keyboard and mouse-based.

And then corner radius, for example, we took, you know, pieces that we had like our heads up display system that gives you Back next to your mouse or things like our handles, you know, little dragon resigns handles or in this case corner with these handles, and we, you know, not to get into too much detail now can easily respond to a keyboard modifier so they can be contextual to the type of shape or properties of the shape.

And so now we have taken the pieces that we had. And we enrich them slightly and now next time around that we reach for these pieces, now they can do so much more and we have, you know, made our sort of multitaskers even more powerful than they were before and while still fitting in the language of the app both in terms of interaction and UI.

00:30:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. And the small sharp tools, you know, a set of primitives that are very flexible and can be combined in different ways rather than making a million individual concepts that don’t really fit together is, well, something Mark and I are big fans of kind of from the Unix philosophy and so forth. You’ve mentioned a few different ways that you repurpose these primitives and use them in different contexts. Do you have another example of using primitives and enhancing them in this way and applying them in new scenarios?

00:30:43 - Speaker 1: I do. We are working on something new, which are artboard templates, so to contextualize a little bit in sketch and the tools when you go to insert an art board on your canvas. You have a list of presets, right? And these are things like iPhone 13, medium tablets, or even like, you know, slide deck or something like this, which are really just uh within the height for a certain artboard.

And we’ve had this in sketch for a long time and we update them when it makes sense and people can create their custom ones, but they stay local to their application, which is not very, you know, helpful for teams. And so, We looked at how can we make this way more flexible, right? And so we just reached towards our existing art boards. So the solution there was we taken art boards and You know, we have the check box and you say this art board is now a template. And now, by virtue of this, if that art board is in a library document that’s distributed to all your team, now when you go to insert art board, we surface all of those artboard templates that are in all the libraries you have in your application, so they can be distributed in teams. So By doing that, we solve the problem, hey, how do we make this easier for people and for teams to create and distribute their set of templates that they work with, but by virtue of doing this with existing art boards and now not with this like, you know, single purpose concept that we currently, you know, still have of artboard presets, along with that we brought over everything that our boards already do. So, you know, Presets have been so far empty, but they don’t need to be anymore, right? You can have them empty, but you can have them with things, you can have them ready for, you know, the home screen of your app or for like a wire framing template, and with that came over things like, well, you can have grids and rulers and layout. Grids set to the art board that come over. So by enhancing this, we had effectively, you know, big air quotes here for free. Everything that was good around art ports already by virtue of like reaching to them, bringing over to other existing concepts that we have like library distribution. So in turn, this means that when we work on featured enhanced art boards, we enhancing art boards and templates at once. So our team recently. Added support for locking the proportions of an art board. Well, now you can do this for individually art boards, but for the preset. So for example, our preset for slide decks or for photography aspect ratios will come with these, but you can also do them, you know, on just art boards that are not templates. And so in this process, eliminated this single purpose concept of a preset that had quite a few limitations. And by reaching to an existing primitive of the application that’s so foundational to sketch, we have improved the primitive in all of its use cases and so in a way it has this multiplying effect, right? Or whereby improving the primitive, you get potential in every way in use case where this primitive is represented.

00:33:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that.

I think the obvious thing to do if you’re tasked with designing a piece of a product, particularly maybe if you’re not looking at the holistic capabilities and instead just at what you and your team has to do is you say, OK, we need to make templates.

Great, we’ll make a template editor. First we’ll start with width and height, and then maybe, oh, people want to change the background, color will do that. Oh, now someone says, you know, this is for an iPhone, can you Fall to an iPhone frame, we’ll add that and pretty soon you’re making a duplicate but much worse version of the existing ability to edit art boards in the main product. And so if you are thinking holistically in that way and you can find good ways to repurpose these in this way, that’s very powerful in building products.

00:34:41 - Speaker 3: This also reminds me of the closure, closure of the programming language, the closure philosophy of having as many operations as possible on few data types.

Typical way, especially in object oriented programming languages, is that you have, you know, a class for animals and a class for books, you know, a class for all the things to your domain, then you write specific methods and you do those, whereas in closure.

The idea is that you only have a small number of very generic data types like a map and a list and a set and so on, and then you just pile on functions all the way from the core library all the way up to your own application code against those very generic types, and it’s kind of tough to get started, but once you get in that habit, it keeps compounding because you’re adding more and more capabilities to the small number of data types.

00:35:28 - Speaker 2: Another way to make, let’s say very zoomed out product decisions or perhaps product decisions that are based on zoom. criteria might be something like KPIs, that’s key performance indicators or OKRs, that’s a system that I think is best known for its relation with Google where it’s the sort of the idea that you set goals and you attach metrics to that, and then there’s usually some kind of cascade that goes down through the company. But maybe there’s also decisions based on just company values or brand values. What are some examples of decision making at sketch that is kind of in that sort of category?

00:36:05 - Speaker 1: So the editor is not a place where this could creep in, in theory, but in features of the products or even marketing websites or business oriented or closer to the business, this could certainly be the fact.

So at the end of the day, sketch is a business, obviously, and we wanted to keep it a sustainable, healthy business that’s very important to the company and its culture, but we could look at an example that was even from back from my time on the website where we were redesigning the pricing page and So you got your very standard pricing page, you got a standard plan, you got your business plan, and you got your monthly and yearly price. So, when we came to this, when we looked at our price, which is like $9 per month, when billed monthly or $99 per year billed yearly. We looked at this and we felt pretty strongly that, hey, you know, you pay party here, that’s the number on the bill, it should say 99, right? It shouldn’t say 8.25 because that’s the divided by 12 price. And it wasn’t really much of a question really. It was just like it’s the right thing to do, it’s The transparent thing for people, that’s the number that you see on the bill. This is, I feel very strongly, personally, this is the way it should be everywhere, right? Doing anything less, I understand it’s become a bit of an industry standard, definitely in the world, but it feels, you know, I’m not gonna say proposedly, but it does feel misleading. And so this is where, you know, if you were completely like KPI growth driven. The call would have been made. Now we’re gonna go with a lower number, right, cause that makes us look better. But, you know, all the way from the top it’s like, no, let’s not do this, right? Like, let’s put the number that people really do pay because it’s just the right thing to do.

00:37:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds to me like almost a moral decision, but obviously it fits with company values, and you call it an obvious decision, but it isn’t or apparently isn’t because it is very common that pricing pages show you a price per month and in much smaller font and maybe lighter color.

You know this is billed annually, and I think this does come to, yeah, the KPI driven and I like KPIs we use them on the muse team to help just drive our work and make sure we keep focus on what’s important to us, but it does lead to this long thread of, OK, we have all these numbers we’re trying to optimize for the person that’s working on the pricing page. They may not be sitting there and saying, Hey, hey, hey, I’m going to trick users with a dark. Pattern they’re sitting there and thinking my boss has tasked me with making this one particular number go up by 5% next month and I’ve tested a few different ways to do that and it turns out that one way to do that is to show the lower numbers, you know, it’s not a lie, it’s just a little bit misleading and it helps me accomplish that. It’s that accumulation of very small decisions driven completely by growth and KPIs that lead you to maybe an overall product and even industry, I would argue a technology industry that people are starting to sort of ask questions about like are these folks really the good guys and sometimes I think that’s overblown, but I see that thread that takes you all the way from, you know, very simple decision like how to show the monthly or yearly price all the way to, you know, big tech is the bad guy.

00:39:31 - Speaker 1: You’re right, this is about a system of incentives that the company has put in place and that is more often than not, yeah, not down to one individual decision, right, but about the path that you put the company and the organization on.

You are on this track and with this track comes a way of making decisions and a way of defining priorities that follow from like a fundamental and often irreversible decision about, you know, what type of business do you want to run.

And what matters, at which pace do you want to go, how much control do you want to give, how much control do you want to keep, all these decisions and then like it is a very big domino effect that then comes down to effect, possibly what appeared to be very, very small decisions.

00:40:19 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that’s a good moment to transition to talking a little bit about sketch, the company. I was really fascinated to ask you a little bit about this, and particularly your perspective as a relative newcomer, because it’s a company that I think we at Muse take as a bit of a role model. We have this kind of small giants concept of a company that does want to have a big impact but is not necessarily. maximizing for growth at all costs is about making a statement as well as making a business that can earn its keep, and I think sketch was kind of always in this, I don’t know if you call it like in the bootstrap quite thing, but basically just started selling to customers and Built a business based on that, and I thought it was really interesting that you joined right after they did a Series A venture raise a few years back, and I remember even seeing that in the news and kind of thinking, huh, that’s sort of funny because you know I had them slotted in my mind as sort of maybe anti-VC and that they didn’t need it. So tell me about joining the company and how you perceived what it was like then and how it is now.

00:41:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so to go a little bit back in history, just for contextualizing the audience, sketch has been around the in internet years, I’d say a very long time. So in 2010, there’s like one programmer founder, one designer founder, and then, you know, we’ll go to 2014, that’s when version 3.0 sketch comes in, you know, arguably like the single biggest version number possibly in the history of the company. Only 10 people there at the company 4 years after its inception, 4 years later on, the web app is 2 years old already. This was only 4 years ago, right? So this, we’re getting much closer to our current day.

Now in 2022, we’re slightly over 200 people and as you mentioned, in between there in 2019, this was before I joined, the company took a Series A investment round. And so, I will Like, very honestly say that I wasn’t particularly thrilled about this, right? Coming in and I was like, you know, same questions here, huh, right, like, hm, didn’t peg the company for a company that wanted to do this, and because we’ve seen over and over what happens in this scenario, right, this very common playbook and The tech industry, where you do this, and now you are on a particular track, right? In your episode about com companies, Mark mentioned how like, you know, once you get into that rat race, like now we have 5 or 6 decisions that you make over 10 years. Things can vary, but you’re very much on like a quite fixed track. But I think there’s a couple of things that are quite specific to sketch in the way and why this was done. Which definitely assuaged my fears when I joined, you know, so shortly after that. One is that, of course, this investment round comes at almost 10 years of a sustainable, profitable business. So it’s a very different circumstance to be in as someone that negotiates that, then why you do this?

00:43:25 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note just briefly that some other companies have followed a similar path.

GitHub is one that comes to mind where they started charging for their product and they were pretty scrappy. Small team and they managed to make it to some kind of ramen profitability pretty early on, but then later they had the opportunity to take venture money to sort of go bigger and you can argue whether or not that was the right decision for them, but I think it is a very different story to start with the company being on that VC train and the assumption that you can get to a certain level of size that will justify that investment and if you don’t fulfill those. Assumptions to get to that next funding round, you’re done, you’re out of business. You get to a place of some kind of being customer funded, even in not completely but in majority, that gives you a foundation for OK, now we can add some kind of investment money, including venture money on top to grow bigger or reach further or go to a bigger audience. We don’t need that to live. We want it to be able to reach a wider audience.

00:44:28 - Speaker 1: This ties back to like how the company was started, right? So it’s one programmer, one designer that, you know, don’t necessarily sit around like, yeah, let’s start a business and seek for money or whatever. They look around and they see the people that they know in the industry using tools that are not quite right for this very new fields of digital design.

And that’s what they start by doing, right? Like it’s the focus then and now throughout was the same.

And so, You know, the founder’s still involved day to day and the majority control and the focus is still like, you know, let’s improve the product, let’s do it sustainably and let’s sell it at a fair price, like we always have, you know, there’s no free plan except for educational institutions that is a 30 day trial, so you know, you can get your feet in the water, see if it’s right for you.

And so, you know, While this changed, like, of course, the size of the company has changed, the structure in the company has changed, we have a much more powerful web app. The focus has been pretty much the same and it’s like many years ago, it still is the point right now it’s like we don’t really want to go anywhere, right? This is a very, very, very long marathon that we keep on doing and I think this. Different perspective on longevity and growth and what does it mean to be successful that’s different than most of our peers, I think is something like really, really important and to the company and something that possibly doesn’t transpire all that much to the outside world.

00:46:01 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of themes there that are familiar, certainly to the com companies that you referenced there, but also for us on the Muse team here, which is Yeah, a sense of sustainability and a sense of an even pace and a little bit longer term thinking and contrasting that against the rocket ship is often the terminology that’s used for a lot of startups and it’s all about get as big as you can as fast as you can and then either go bust or get the acquisition or go to IPO and I think that’s also tied with a lot of the what I would call like winner take all or almost conquering the market style, almost like war.

Metaphors for kind of a capitalistic perspective, which you don’t get me wrong, I think capitalism is great, but there is this kind of extreme version of it and then that in turn can be tied to a kind of hype machine, you know, we’re changing the whatever, we’re building the future of whatever, changing the world, that whole routine versus, hey, we just want to make a good product, sell it for a fair price, be proud of what we’re making and sleep well at night knowing that we’ve done a good job serving our customers.

00:47:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, and I very much agree with that perspective. In this day that there’s like so many options, which is what a place to be really as a designer. People can get pretty tribal about it and there’s this silly win-lose narrative, right? And I and I think we as sketch. are profoundly uninterested in the narrative, right? So, you know, the sketch had for a while there when it proved the markets in the Adobe dominated world, sketch it like more of the pie or a bigger share of the pie to itself, right? And people see that, you know, there’s a lot more tools and companies sharing the pie. That doesn’t mean that we have less pie, right? There’s a lot of designers out there and design got its seat at the table and now the pie is getting bigger all the time and there’s space for a lot of tools. You know, look at a much more mature markets, you know, things like project management, people aren’t saying like, oh, a son of one that’s it done, right? There’s a mature market with key players being healthy and they can thrive and they can thrive because there’s more than one reason to choose a product and even companies that build like really close and tight ecosystems. Like, you know, interchangeable lenses cameras where it’s like you buy into a camera, you buy into a system really, and it’s kind of hard to leave, like that market is as healthy as it’s ever been, right? There’s definitely like at least in the digital camera market. So we do not yet subscribe to the narrative, right? Like now it’s the goal was to do, as you said, it’s a product that we’re proud of, right? It’s kind of paraphrasing a little bit. It’s not like making software to make money, is, you know, having a healthy business to allow us to keep on doing software, right? So, and in a way, like it’s kind of interesting that I think we’ve come full circle. I mean, we like sketch. I wasn’t there in the beginning, where it’s part of the foundational history of sketch of like facing this enormous monopole. late 2000s Adobe and now that the sketch success and define the category in the market, which then in turn attract more players and then because we chose a different path in the business and in growth, now there’s new juggernauts again. And so we come to a full circle where it’s like in the Key tools that are left because this market sort of matures a little bit, we come back to being the small one again, which I find is quite interesting, right? Like even at 200 people, which is, wow, so many, right? Like I was person 50, I feel, wow, it was so many, and when I joined people like, wow, 50, I remember when we were 10. And so it is a lot for us. I think we could still fit that idea of like the small giant, it’s just that the scale of the market and the industry changed so much around us, right, like the seat at the table got really big and now companies get like to our size when they’re like 3 years old. I think people don’t realize how fast like a different path like the VC rat race makes you go and so. I find it kind of interesting that we’re back to the idea of like having still an underdog fierceness and pride in the team, like, hey, there’s a lot of us, but we’re still, you know, having to do a lot with a lot less than other products, you know, more directly near us in the market. And at the same time, that’s a great feeling to stay through, through time like to these principles and You know, if we’re a bit smaller and we can’t match 1 to 1 what other products are doing, you know, that’s OK with us, like, if our slice is smaller, it’s enough for us and we’re proud of what it is and as you said, we sleep well at night, I think that’s really enough and that’s, I think success.

00:51:14 - Speaker 2: I think the pie getting bigger, which includes not only design having more seats at the table, having more respect industrywide, but also I think you mentioned this earlier and talking about other teams, for example, the web viewer for Sketch, and maybe that’s intended, for example, engineers that want to take a design and implement it or there are other Parts of the product and other people who are not designers per se but who might be using a design tool and I think that’s one of the things that the evolution of design tools over the past 5 to 10 years has helped accomplish and so it makes a better collaboration between these different functions more respect for design as a discipline.

Which is good because everyone can work more effectively and then in the meantime, yes, there are more designers, more products to design, more people who are adjacent to design need to work with design tools and hence that market just grows and grows.

00:52:09 - Speaker 1: And in this fields, I think we’re a very interesting time and design tools industry because I feel, you know, that there’s these are the Adobe years, there’s the nascent years where like sketch, defined the category. Now there’s now like the last few years, there was like, wow, it seems like there’s a new design tool every other week, that’s for sure.

And I think we end now a phase where there’s a little bit more consolidation and maturity, right, you see, on one hand, different tools and companies sort of like finding different niches, pivoting to slightly different space and at the same time you see sort of the thresholds of like what the design tools. Do do match a lot, and I think that’s inevitable, right? Like people have the same problems everywhere, right? Like a designer that uses Tool A versus Tool B, like a program is code editor A, code editor B, you know, a little bit different here, but assume you’re working on the same language systems, like your problems are relatively similar.

And so I think we might now be entering a very interesting phase where I think it’s beneficial to us where the differentiation comes through the experience, right, to the depth and duration of experience through the design principles and that they’re manifested in. The app pros or even like company principles, cultural principles, moral decisions. So you see this in tools that have been around for so much longer, for example, code editors, right? Like people that are choosing them are choosing them for a reason, right? They’re not choosing films like, oh, it does less than this, like that’s fine. I want to use it because it’s closer to the way. I think to the way I operate, the way I express myself, and I think that’s very interesting when you have a space for tools to have their own distinct personality, their own distinctive appeal, and through that give people reasons to choose them that are not simply like the race for doing the most.

00:54:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a great point. A diversity of tools to choose from where it’s not just about does it fulfill the function, you know, the very utilitarian need that I have, but can I choose something that just fits my vibe or I just like how it feels, you know, you mentioned code editors for me I like sublime texts because it’s very minimal and fast and that suits me.

I know other folks who are incredibly productive with really full. Featured IDEs with refactoring support and all these fancy features and for me that doesn’t feel great. It gets I feel like it gets in my way and I want something simpler, but I totally respect that other people are more productive with something more full featured and there’s room for that.

There are dozens of code editors and even among the most popular ones, Vim and Emacs and VS Code and XCode, you can even name. Irish sects that are in the top area and that’s true in most places in the economy, right? That’s part of the abundance of capitalism. You go to any store and the number of different brands of shoe and types of soda you can buy, there’s a lot, and they may all serve the same basic purpose of covering your foot and so on, that you can choose based on style, based on aesthetic, based on what you think about the company that’s behind it. And I think we had this sense in the recent past or maybe currently that there was a more of a winner take all dynamic in software, but I think that might have been a bit of a red herring. There was a couple of dramatic historical examples, Microsoft Windows and Intel, the sort of Wintel dominance a couple of decades back might be one example, but in fact, I think that even Any kind of like pseudo monopolistic, you know, giant you can think of, OK, there’s Facebook, but there’s also Snapchat and TikTok and Twitter. What about Amazon? Well, you’ve also got Shopify managed to build a huge business out of an e-commerce platform. So I think there was this sense that there can only be one product and therefore you have to race to take the whole market, but I don’t think that’s true anywhere else in the economy and I think we’re also starting to see that in technology.

00:56:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and on this topic of abundance and a diversity of options, I think it’s especially important for these professional tools like a design platform or a code editor, because if you are respectively a designer or a programmer, you’re going to spend 468 hours a day. On this tool. I mean, this is a big chunk of your moral life.

So using a tool that you feel good about that has good vibes is actually really important.

It’s not just a cosmetic thing, it’s not a trivial thing. It’s where you’re spending a lot of your professional time and energy. So I think it is really important that people have the ability to choose a tool that feels good to them, and we’re lucky that we have that in at least these two domains.

00:57:04 - Speaker 1: It really is an incredible field to be in. I think for all the evolution the design tools have had over the past 10 years, it feels like there’s so much more to go, and being able to like have an active hand in That evolution and particularly in an organization and the products that places emphasis on, you know, a different way of doing business, a different way of approaching product, a different time horizon and track. I think that’s immense privilege and a really exciting thing and I mean fortunately, being able to do that on this team on the editor and working day to day.

On the Mac app, which you know, one could say maybe a dying art, definitely amongst bigger tools because the web affords you, and I’ve long worked on the web on my career has been on the web, but the web affords you so much more accessibility and such a lower barrier of entry. I feel personally it’s like a huge privilege and it’s a really, a really exciting thing to do every day.

00:58:12 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MAHQ or you can write us on email low@musa.com. And Paolo, thank you so much to you and your broader company for inspiring all of us as a small giant for helping bring the design tools category into its full and current abundance and for making sure all our corners are rounded.

00:58:38 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much and thanks for having me.