Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The importance of solo activity in the ideation process. This is not well supported in existing tools. I think it’s so important that you have a place where you’re just thinking by yourself. That might be because you’re generating the initial ideas that you’re going to bring to the bigger group, or it could be you have some intermediate products from the group and you want to take that back to your private sanctuary and mark it up or sketch it or remix it.

00:00:31 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. Mark a book I’ve been reading lately was suggested to me by our mutual colleague Julia is called Exhalation, which is a collection of short stories by Ted Chang, hope I’m pronouncing that right, who I think is best known for writing the book that Arrival was based on, but is a pretty prolific science fiction author in particular short story. Are you familiar with his work?

00:01:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I’ve seen Arrival, but I don’t think I’ve heard of his writing.

00:01:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can highly recommend it, and I don’t think Yuli is even a huge sci-fi fan, so that’s why it stood out to me when she recommended it, but it’s really fascinating because I think each story, some of them are really short, just pose sort of a hypothetical universe or hypothetical setup.

Where, what if the world was like this, and let’s just explore that philosophically.

So one of my favorites in there, which I think also the collection was named after, is about a creature who is essentially what we would consider kind of a robot, but their whole circulatory system and neural system is based on the flow of air. And their whole energy source comes from pressure differentials within their universe, and physicists in their universe have discovered that basically there’s a fixed pressure differential from outside like I don’t know, a bronze sphere or something that contains the entire universe and it’s just kind of like a alternate reality. Posing of a, I’m not even sure way to put it, but it’s fun to read and explore the universe, but it also ends up posing questions about our own world, I think, in the way that only science fiction can. So, yeah, recommend it if you’re looking for something of that nature.

00:02:20 - Speaker 1: Ah, interesting, and that alternate physiology idea reminds me of, I think it’s called Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary, yeah, by Andy Weir, that’s a fun sci-fi book.

00:02:32 - Speaker 2: Hm, I wanna know this one. I’ll put it on my list.

Well, there’s a fun little announcement here.

The Muse team has started work on a multiplayer or call it a collaborative version of Muse. In the very early stages of that, but this is something you and I have talked about a bunch of times on the podcast, typically when questions of roadmap come up, right? I always think of the Muse master plan as kind of being the step 1 iPad app for thinking, private thinking, step 2, sync to your devices, your different devices, and then step 3 is being able to bring other people into the mix. And step 4 is end user programming, but we’ll save that topic for another day. That match with how you usually think about it.

00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s the master plan.

00:03:16 - Speaker 2: And we wrote a little memo that we’ll talk about in some detail here today, but importantly it links to a survey, just a very short survey where we’re looking for some teams to help us out in, I would call it alpha testing, but really it’s about understanding how teams might work in a setting like this.

So of course the Muse mission is to help individuals be more thoughtful through the tool. We’ve done that through our private thinking to date, but if we come into a team or group, I ideation setting where there’s any other person involved, now we kind of have to go back to our early principles and figure out how that fits in.

And so one of the things we want to do is work really closely here with teams that have a particular shape. They’re a certain size, they’re working on certain kinds of problems. Problems to help us craft, not just kind of features or whatever on the product, but really understand the best workflows and the best way so we can help, in particular remote first team.

So I’ll link to that survey as well as a memo on group ideation here. So naturally our topic today is multiplayer, or I think collaboration is what I historically had called it.

Maybe in the local first paper we use the term real-time collaboration to refer to the kind of Google Docs era of you expect that there is a single location for a document that you’re working on with someone that’s sort of always up to date. Anyone who has the right permissions can make edit. It’s, I think multiplayer become the trendier word, so what exactly we’ll call it is still up for discussion.

But anything in which you’re bringing in another human to your thinking process is just a whole new area for you and traditionally we’ve even been, I would call it a sanctuary for your private thinking. It’s almost like this notebook and The fact that it is just yours is part of maybe what makes it special. So, what does it mean to bring other humans into that process? What’s the first thing you think of on that front?

00:05:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we had joked about this long running master plan, but we’ve had such a consistent vision behind this because it reflects our long running understanding of how ideas are made.

You know, recall the original impetus from you was, can we write software that helps people have better ideas? And in order to do that, the zero step is understanding where ideas come from.

And yes, as you get new and better tools, it changes around the margins, right? But there’s very long running patterns and practices and how ideas are formed, even from before there were computers.

And we’ve studied those a lot in the labs and at Muse. And one of those ideas, for example, was that you have these different form factors that you use for different parts of the creative process, the tablet, phone, and the desktop.

Another important finding was that ideas don’t come from single people. They tend to be recombinations of existing ideas which overwhelmingly come from other people. And in fact, we’ve called the original versions of Muse a private sanctuary, but the first thing you do is you bring in inputs. That’s the first step of the creative process that we’ve talked about. And those inputs tend to come from other people. So, even in its early forms, Muse was embracing this idea of thinking and forming ideas as a multiplayer activity. It’s just that the person crossing boundary aligned with the Muse software boundary. Now we’re expanding the new software boundary.

00:06:28 - Speaker 2: Mm, right, so in this case, if I wanted to remix, recombine ideas, input from other people, let’s call it the outside world, I bring that into my private sanctuary, I bring in the tweets, I bring in the PDFs, I’ve got my excerpts, I’ve got my web clippings, I’ve got a copy paste or something, someone sent me in an email. I’m kind of putting all that together in one place on a board, so I can kind of see it together, start to connect the dots, start to see patterns across it.

But once I’m inside the bubble, let’s say, of muse, then, you know, I know that that is mine. Nothing is put there by another person or even by an algorithm, right? Anything that’s on a board is cause you decided to put it there. That’s part of how we approached it.

Yeah, and maybe that’s the input side, right, the snippets, the gathering, the reading notes, the inspiration from elsewhere, but there’s also an output side, which is at some point you do need to transmit these ideas to someone else.

In many cases that is gonna mean you could do something like directly sharing a board screenshot or a PDF. A lot of people do the Choctaw style thing where they Share muse over a Zoom screen share or something of that sort and just kind of talk through it, or maybe like a loom, you know, folks who, they basically walk through their boards full of, say, like design crits or something like that, and then they share that kind of recorded video with their team, and you don’t need muse, but you’re using the muse boards as a visual to help transmit the ideas that you’ve come up with.

But sometimes it’s going to a production tool from there. So for me that would often be something like just an email or a slack thread, or if a little more seriously you want to impress someone, a client, an investor or something, maybe you’ve got a slide deck. So I’ve got the rough shape of what I want to say in muse now I’m gonna copy paste pieces of it into an email or into that slide deck creation software and that kind of pseudo. Yeah, it’s partially copying, maybe partially it’s transcription, rewriting, but I’m taking this rush sketch of an idea and taking it into this other tool where I can make it into something that I guess is consumable by other humans.

00:08:32 - Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, and so when we talk about muse embracing multiplayer or collaborative capabilities, really what we mean is that middle stage, the stage of ideation, brainstorming, outlining, sketching, forming, reforming, that going from The single player activity that has been amused to date to involving multiple people.

00:08:55 - Speaker 2: And here I would be remiss if I didn’t reference a big influence on my thinking is Nicholas Cline, who we had on the podcast some time back.

Of course I’ll link that episode in the show notes, but he has a whole sort of career spanning hypothesis, you might say about what he calls collaborative creativity, and there’s a very revealing diagram there which is that In many cases, the process for an individual thinking through something is you have an idea in your mind, but then you go to externalize it in some way. That could be just jotting down in your sketchbook or writing it into a text file or even explaining it to another person, and it is that process of getting it out that you kind of get new perspective on it and you’re able to refine, there’s a sort of a feedback loop on that.

There’s also some famous quotes from Richard Feynman about his process of thinking through, you know, physics problems, where the notes on the page, he basically argues they’re not an artifact of his thinking, they are his thinking. The page is a sort of an extension of his brain in this case.

And so, Nico’s concept of collaborative creativity, which obviously is very heavily informed by the work he’s done at FIGMA the last few years, is one of, OK, can we add another person into that mix in a way that’s productive versus disruptive, and yeah, again, we’ll link that in the show notes for those who are interested, but I think there’s a potentially an interesting parallel for the right kind of collaborative thinking.

And I think this to me comes to an important distinction between the kind of relationship you have with a collaborator where you’re truly going to think together versus one that’s maybe more someone that you want to, let’s say, impress, I mentioned like clients or investors or applying for a grant. There you definitely want to externalize your thinking, but your goal is not to collaboratively think through. Something with the person on the other end, your goal is to transmit it to them or impress them or get them to buy your product or get them to invest in your company or whatever it is, whereas I think the collaborative creativity perspective and where I think we have more to say is one where you really have this true back and forth, and that includes What I would call creative trust. This is a term I’m borrowing from Hilary Maloney, who was on our podcast a little while back as well, but here, this brings you to being a team. And I think we talked about, well, too many Metamus references here, going back to the hiring episode, but the difference between me maybe pitching to a client and me bouncing ideas back and forth with someone that’s on the same team with me, that there’s a different quality in how we have creative trust in each other, and I think that Second one, that team or colleague, where we have this shared purpose and we’re working together, and we have this trust in each other, that can and I would argue, should create a setting where we should think things through together.

00:11:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and I think relatedly, there’s a difference between a production process versus an ideation process. To some extent this is kind of the other side of the coin you’re talking about, for example, with producing a deck for investors. There’s different output desiderata, there’s different constraints, and you come in hopefully with a relatively well-formed idea of what you’re actually trying to say. And we can elaborate more on this throughout the podcast, but it really is a different type of tool and kind versus a production tool for presentation and dissemination.

00:12:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that part of things is very parallel to how we think about the individual tool, which is, you know, part of the that we’re making with our company and part of the argument we’re sort of making to the world is that it is worth having a purpose-built tool for thinking and ideation and have that be separate from your production tool.

So, one articulation of this might be, if you’re a writer. is the best thing to do to sit down at the typewriter in the kind of historic setting, or maybe nowadays the word processor, and you’re looking at that blinking cursor on an empty screen, and I would argue pretty strongly no. And we’ve even pointed to examples of purpose-built writing tools like Scrivener, where they actually have a separate product that is a companion product that is an open canvas for ideation and figuring out your story. I think they focus more on fiction writing, because they really recognize that you don’t want to do that in The writing tool because that’s a production tool, and if you’re figuring out the flow, your characters, and the flow of the story and the big arcs and that sort of thing, it’s just kind of the wrong level of detail in a way.

And there’s a similar argument that could be made for, don’t just sit down at a blank code editor when you’re building a new piece of software, you know, get out there and whiteboard some of the basic architecture in what you’re building, or similarly with the design that you don’t necessarily want to start in a hyperfocused design tool where you can be hung up on corner radiuses and font sizes, you wanna be sketching it out in kind of very, very broad strokes.

So, we’ve made that argument on a private basis, but there’s a team. Or kind of group version that’s very similar, which is, if you’re jumping into those tools of the trade, you’re gonna be pretty focused on production details when what you need to be figuring out is, big picture, why are we doing this? What are our values, what are the goals, what are the non-goals, what do we hope to accomplish, etc.

00:14:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I’m wondering if we try to enumerate what these key differences are. An example of that would be if you and I were scientific collaborators and we were ideating, we would go to a blackboard and sketch some diagrams and some, you know, equations maybe and if things are going well, maybe you and I can read it. Whereas if we are publishing a scientific paper, we’re gonna go and type that in Latte, which is a whole ordeal, but it’s gonna be read by thousands of people, hopefully, so it’s worth that investment. And on the flip side, you already know what you want to say, so you don’t need to be figuring that out on the fly.

00:14:52 - Speaker 2: I really like the idea of Blackboard is on one far extreme and Latech formatted paper that’s, you know, been through peer review and is published in a journal, is on the other extreme. You know for sure that that latter thing is a huge production process, that’s writing the article and going through the peer review, all the typesetting, and so the ideas need to be good and right first. And some of that is gonna come from, of course, the research you do and again your private thinking, but also if you’re doing anything in a group at all, like a team of researchers, you need to be on the same page, aligned, da da da, there’s various like manager speak pieces of terminology for this, but precisely because it is so important. If you get in there and you’re working on the law tech formatted paper, but you don’t agree on what you’re gonna say or what your key findings were, or what you really learned from the experiment, that’s bad news.

Well talking about blackboards brings us to another key issue, which is this question of remote work. So, Muse is an all remote team, we have been from the beginning, which predates just a little bit, but not by a lot, let’s call it the acceleration of the shift to remote work with the pandemic starting in 2020, and so many of these loose ideation, let’s get on the same page, have big ideas. Settings that you can think of are something like, yeah, the researchers in front of the chalkboard, their product people in front of a whiteboard. I think of the TV writers room is one of the classic group ideation settings. We’ve written about war rooms before as well, which is kind of a similar concept in the startup world.

So most of these things do rely on first of all, these kind of loose and sketchy and low fidelity physical things like whiteboards and Post-it notes and sketchbooks, but they also rely on the benefits of body language and tone, and you can tell when someone’s getting excited and you can tell when someone’s kind of bored or disengaged or not quite with you, and I think all of that is so important for this part of it, which is Both the earliness and the rawness of the idea where you’re not again in that production tool and thinking about font sizes, but you’re just getting the big picture right.

And then when you talk about the group side of things that we’re truly all on the same page and we agree, versus that, I don’t know, someone wrote a document, people claimed Yeah, that sounds good, but maybe you’re not really on the same page. I don’t know. It feels like a very hard problem, and actually some have even concluded, yeah, that any remote team is just perpetually going to be at a huge disadvantage because of this kind of ideation, early phase, and alignment that’s related to that.

00:17:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting having worked remotely for a few years, and I almost forgot about the previous world of in real life, frequent collaboration, but it is a big deal. And even if we don’t always think about it explicitly, I think we have this intuition that there’s all these high bandwidth signals and conventions that you have in person. And so it has been a background thread for us with collaboration slash multiplayer. What do those mean for a virtual world?

00:18:06 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe this is a good point to talk about some of the ideas that are in the memo we published recently on group ideation.

So here was a place where we dived a little bit, actually, Linda dived into some of the academic literature on exactly this, how to have good ideas and often in the setting of a group environment. So, one paper that was influential for us is called Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea. And this is also quite interesting because they come up with various ways to rigorously, as much as that can be possible, measure what counts as a good idea and a developed idea, and that sort of thing, and they’re looking at individuals, but also groups.

And the first thing you might start with actually is, does it make sense to develop ideas together? Like, do we even want to do that? Is getting a bunch of people together in a room to like throw ideas out good and a seminal work there is wisdom of the crowds, which basically argues that groupthink is exactly what you think, which is the effect of people trying to Either come up with or develop a set of ideas together, kind of creates the lowest common denominator or loud voices crowd out the quieter ones or it just doesn’t produce good results and actually that is true. Certain kinds of classic brainstorming settings actually make your ideas worse than if just one individual came up with it counterintuitively, but there are ways to do it that can work. And to me, when you look at both the literature here, but also just reflecting on my experience of working on teams for now 25 years or whatever it is. There is a lot of value developing ideas together, and one of those reasons is essentially that, you know, when more people are either pitching in ideas or contributing to developing an idea, you just get more diversity of ideas and more diversity of ideas means better results typically because, you know, you’re just looking for that one great idea, the extremes are what matter, so there’s a lot of value to that.

00:20:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this starts to get into the Topology of idea networks, if you will. I think it’s easy to make the mistake if you’re thinking about coming up with ideas together, you think of, you know, the team, which is a fixed number of people, the idea team goes into the idea room and makes some capital ideas, right? Sometimes you try to do that, it doesn’t work, obviously. I have a much more organic, even messy model of how ideas happen with people that, critically, the set of people that you’re talking with at any one time is changing constantly. Sometimes it’s just you alone, you’re thinking, in the shower, whatever. Sometimes it’s a one on one conversation with a close colleague. Sometimes it’s you’re sending or receiving a big broadcast, like you’re reading a Paper, you’re writing a paper. Sometimes it’s you’re going to a conference and you’re having a bunch of people mixing together. Sometimes you sort of stir the pot and you change jobs or you move to a different part of the country and you are situated in a new intellectual environment. And it’s kind of like these atoms constantly colliding with different neighbors all the time. And that process is the more organic process that I think of, of where ideas come from.

00:21:06 - Speaker 2: Well, that sounds good if confusing. How do you think that worldview fits in with creating a great group ideation product or what kind of tools can we create to improve parts of what you just described there?

00:21:22 - Speaker 1: Well, I think it works best when the tool recognizes and supports those different workflows. And ideally you’re kind of minimizing the number of hops that you’re doing with the tool.

You can’t have one tool that does everything, but if you’re constantly hopping back and forth between tools, that becomes too much friction.

So while you’re in, say, your core ideation process, the aspiration is that Muse embraces the handful of key flows. You have your private individual sanctuary where you do your private ideation. You maybe have some lightweight sharing or broadcasting where you share a sketch of a memo with one or a few colleagues. Maybe you have capability to have ad hoc work groups where it’s, you know, I’m grabbing my colleague to go to the blackboard and sketch some stuff, and maybe you have the ability to have these longer term, more durable teams where people are tending to come to the same room over and over again and a create an intellectual corpus. I think if you’re able to support those handful of archetypes, you’re well on your way to embracing this more organic model of idea generation.

00:22:26 - Speaker 2: That certainly makes me think of what is now a pretty standard pattern for how you can share documents. Again, Google Docs, Notion, Dropbox, something like that, which is you have either the one off share, just give me a quick URL, you know, anyone that has the URL can view it. Maybe it’s read only, maybe they can add comments, maybe they can edit.

And then you have, on the other extreme, the more like persistent team workspace.

Here’s our Dropbox account, here’s our FIA account, here’s our notion workspace, and everything in there, basically everyone can see.

And then I don’t know if there’s as good a support for ad hoc work groups, but certainly I know we’ve made do with just kind of like making a top level notion page or Google Drive folder that’s like, I don’t know, we’re gonna go back and forth on some tax things with various bookkeepers and accountants, and so we just make a top level folder and everything that gets thrown in there kind of is shared for the whole ad hoc work group. So I think of that as being the gold standard or just sort of the state of the art. How much do you think that kind of does correctly map to the process you’re talking about there versus something that could stand to be improved on?

00:23:36 - Speaker 1: Well, I certainly think you can make it work.

We’ve made it work, you know, we use Notion for some of the stuff, for example, but I think there are a few areas where it doesn’t quite feel right.

One is the ad hoc work group thing. This varies by tool, but often that feels a little bit wrong. For example, it’s sometimes labeled as like a private or secret place. Like, you know, the default is everything is visible to your whole org. But you know, if you want to be, you know, one of those guys, you can make like a private Slack channel and only invite certain people. Whereas that doesn’t really reflect to me the very natural and normal process of, you’re not speaking to 1000 people at once, you’re speaking to people who are in the current room.

00:24:14 - Speaker 2: Two products I’m reminded of there would be one group chat, or I think you know, group chats have become a pretty major, what do you call it persistent but ad hoc, exactly as you said, way to do everything from keep in touch with family to organize around a shared trip to alumni from school to whatever else. Obviously that’s purely communication, but kind of has some of that quality, I think.

00:24:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually think group chats do this better because they index on the set of people. You have a set of chats for every unique set of people. At least this is how like iMessage works. And so you know when you’re going into this room, you’re talking to A, B, and C, and that’s very standard. That’s how the whole thing works. And it’s not like your default is to broadcast to every single person in your address book, right?

00:25:01 - Speaker 2: Another one I think of that goes a very literal approach with trying to create a more virtual online meeting place is Gather Town, where essentially they have a little video game app you walk around on, and the audio for people actually fades in as you get closer to them, and people have the ability to, I’m not sure how it works exactly, but basically lock into a private conversation, but you can actually see that on the map, you could see that they’re talking, but it’s not something you’re invited to. You can also walk into a room, a literal room on the map, and hear something, but it’s sort of, even if you aren’t really supposed to be there, there’s these sort of just general social mores that cause you to go, oh, you know, I don’t belong here, or maybe I’m not invited, or I should ask first, or something like that. Those are two maybe interesting examples of ways that some of these Call them like real world ways of communicating and working as we might do in a physical office, have made their way into digital tools.

00:26:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think on the flip side, I feel like Google Docs, for example, whenever you try to do ad hoc work groups, plus nested content, it gets really messy. It basically you get lost, like, who’s on this document? Do I belong in this document? Is someone accidentally here because they’re shared on a folder, 3 levels up, cause there’s no structure and grounding to it, you tend to get lost and accidentally share people on stuff. And whereas at least with something like slack, cause there’s only one layer of hierarchy, you don’t have the combination of ad hoc plus nesting, plus arbitrary degrees of freedom that tends to get you confused in Google Docs.

00:26:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of that may just be sort of design implementation of Google Docs gets a lot of credit for essentially defining a whole category of multiplayer tools and really setting the standard, you know.

That big share button, and the ability to add people by email, and the ability to make a link that’s a quote unquote private link, that’s something that’s been widely copied, and I would say notion basically has borrowed a very similar concept and improved on it, sort of design wise, let’s say, not major conceptual changes, but incremental improvements and just making stuff a little clearer.

But I do think I have the same challenge with both of those tools and others that followed the same model, which is I feel like I’m just always messing up the permissions.

So I go to share something with someone and they can’t actually see it, and then I realized I put it on the wrong email, or maybe I forgot to add them, or in some cases, you know, I did want to work on it in a private space, maybe I have it in the notion kind of private area, and then I go to send someone the link, and then I realized I haven’t actually moved it into the workspace or shared them on it or made it visible.

And yeah, then similarly being surprised that something is visible to a lot more people than I thought, which may or may not be a critical problem, but it just sort of like is this disconcerting.

I don’t know, like I’ve had this happen very occasionally in the real world where like you think you’re speaking to one person and you turn around and you realize there’s like 5 other people that were in the room that you didn’t notice there and it’s just maybe it’s not that you said anything that they couldn’t hear, but just as humans, I think we decide what to say or what things to express based on that who we think is listening. And so I feel like my mind is constantly modeling who’s listening to me right now and how should I shape what I’m saying. According to that, I think basically all humans do some version of that. And so when the permissions, and I’m not even sure that I like the term permissions, but just the who’s listening or who’s likely to hear this, or who should be hearing it slash reading it, when that doesn’t quite match with what I think it’s supposed to be, then it’s just constantly disconcerting to me somehow.

00:28:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Oh this is reminded me of another aspect of ad hoc work groups, which is people inside the org versus outside the org.

My perspective on ad hoc work groups going back to this very organic, messy, fluid model of ideas bouncing around, is that Idea landscapes aren’t neatly partitioned into organizations. Those are key nexuss where you have a lot of atoms bouncing around in close proximity. They tend to be talking a lot to each other within and around an org, but there’s also critical connections outside the org.

And there are also whole fields where the notion of org doesn’t quite work.

I keep coming back to this academic example where you might be a professor at a university, but your collaborators are almost always in different. Universities around the country and around the world.

So what’s the organization in that case? Is it your research program? Is it the University of X? Is it economics? Who knows, right? And I feel like for a lot of tools, they do well, or they do OK if you want to form an ad hoc work group within whatever org is paying for yourself. Software.

But if you want to go outside.org, well, I don’t know, do you have admin permissions? Do you need to give them an email address at the same domain, you know, is that a new billing seat? It becomes a bit of an ordeal, and it doesn’t reflect how easy it should be if it was kind of honest, the underlying social dynamic.

00:30:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, ordeal is a great word because I’m a big believer of things that you do regularly in your creative process, at your work and your life should be smooth and easy and low friction.

And to me, something like people coming together to form a work group of some kind is a really common frequent.

Activity, and it also doesn’t have super clear boundaries.

Maybe this just reflects a slightly different way that I think about companies, but referencing our hiring episode there again where we do these pilot projects with people.

So we have a candidate, we do the pilot project, we’re giving them access to a bunch of stuff like GitHub repos and Google Docs, and Figma and other stuff, just for that week that they’re doing the pilot, then we might do a longer segment there, and so there kind of is this progressive getting more.

Involved with them in some cases, or in other cases we’re working with a freelancer and we actually have a pretty long term, pretty detailed project, and we do share a lot of tools, but they’re never joining the team, they’re never gonna have an app use app.com email address, or maybe they will, maybe actually we do a freelance project for a while, and then we actually decide, you know, this is a great fit, they’re gonna have them join the team.

And so I guess you could say there’s these maybe concentric. Rings of how deep in the org they are and how much kind of direct responsibility and access and all that sort of thing that they have, but I often feel like the ordeal of bringing someone into a space to work with them, that friction doesn’t reflect the more fluid nature of the way that we collaborate in the world today, or at least the way that I collaborate.

00:31:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and now that you mentioned this, I’m reminded that this is also a function of ideation versus production. Production is going to tend to be more isolated within an org. If, for example, you’re producing your end of quarter financials, like, yes, that’s gonna be pretty contained within the organization, although I don’t know, maybe have some accountants, but when you’re doing things like ideating, brainstorming, discovering. Often that just involves stuff outside the organization. You’re reading papers, you’re talking with colleagues, you’re bouncing ideas off friends, and so even if it works mostly in the production world for ideation, you want something that’s more organic and fluid.

And one last thing I’ll say here, cause I think it’s really important. We’ve talked a lot about the mechanics, for example, of adding someone in the permissions and so on. I think the vibe is also really important, even if the mechanics were the same, but outside collaborators got like an outsider badge whenever they were in your channel or space, just that alone makes it feel weird and impairs the creative process, I think. So that’s ad hoc work groups, which I think is a pretty big gap with respect to ideation.

Another big one in my mind is the importance of the solo activity in the ideation process. Often, this is, again, not well supported mechanically or vibe wise in existing tools. You can kind of make a private thing, that’s always within, you know, the orgs that kind of always belongs to the org, and whenever you make something, it has to belong to one or another org, it can never belong to you, in many cases. I think it’s so important in the creative process that you have a place where you’re just thinking by yourself. That might be because you’re doing your very early stages of the creative process where you’re, for example, generating the initial ideas that you’re going to bring to the bigger group, or it could be, you have some intermediate products from the group. And you want to take that back to your private sanctuary and noodle on it. You wanna, you know, mark it up or sketch it or remix it. And I think supporting having both a private space that feels absolutely first class in the same way that a professor of private office feels as first class in the classroom. And being able to easily move things back and forth, take things from your private space into the group spaces, whether they’re ad hoc or durable or broadcasting, and bring things back in. I think that’s really important, and I don’t see it super well supported in existing tools.

00:34:09 - Speaker 2: Yes, well, you hit on something really key there and it certainly fits with my personal experience of working on teams that the private thinking that you know today we support in Muse is actually just as important for group ideation, which is a little bit counterintuitive.

It’s not really one or the other and in Doing the research here for the memo, I was pleased to discover that the academic literature supports this exact thing, and they sometimes refer it to a hybrid model, which is in contrast to uh what’s called classic brainstorm.

Everybody get in the room, talk through everything until we completely agree about what we’re gonna do, and then we leave the room and go execute that a hybrid model is one that mixes private thinking.

With coming together to filter through ideas, merge our ideas together, argue about them as the case may be, pitch them to each other, influence each other’s thinking, and that there may be even multiple iterations of this, then you leave again.

And of course, it probably depends on how big the thing you’re working on is, if it’s the figuring out, you know, your roadmap for the next 2 years, then maybe it’s worth really spending a good chunk of time on, and if it’s something smaller, then maybe you only want to go through this process once.

But this hybrid thinking, hybrid group ideation means that a private place to think, whether it’s actually an office or leaving your physical office to, you know, go to a coffee shop, take a walk, whatever is important, so that’s kind of the physical space side, but on the tool side, it says, OK, if we want a tool that helps us think in groups effectively, That tool also has to be great. Maybe it’s even more important that it be great for private thinking.

00:35:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a really good point about the importance of private thinking for groups, which seems obvious in much respect, but I hadn’t quite thought about it in those terms.

So to my mind, those are the two big ones, the importance of the solo sanctuary and the ad hoc organic networks. And those are two pretty big deals.

Now, like I said, I think that the existing model isn’t wildly off. I think there’s a lot of good workable stuff there. So I don’t think we’re looking at something that’s radically different, but I do think those are two important aspects on the collaboration architecture.

Now we can also talk a little bit about the product architecture in terms of features or mental models that support group ideation. I think some of this we’ve kind of talked about in previous podcasts, but there are a couple of things that I think are worth going over again.

One that we’ve already mentioned today is the importance of the right level of fidelity, which is this idea of like sketching. So I don’t think we need to rehash that one more, but that’s what I wanted to mention.

Another is the right level of durability. So for example, if you have a team ideation tool that only lasts one session, that’s not gonna work because ideas take days, weeks, months, multiple sessions going back and forth between different size groups to form. So we think it’s important that the tool supports that level of durability, which is, you know, I would say kind of days, weeks, maybe months. I think ideas that take multiple years to form tend to rely on bigger superstructures and tools. Like journals and so on, and ideas don’t form instantly, generally, it takes takes time. So I think having something that supports that level of durability and persistence is key.

00:37:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so with that description, the ideation, especially team ideation becomes something that’s in this middle spectrum on the time horizon, like you said, days, weeks, maybe months, where one extreme is totally ephemeral and like whiteboards tend to be that way unless you take a photo or whatever, it’s gonna get erased.

Someone else uses it, it’s gone tomorrow, or in the digital space, something like just a Zoom meeting, right? You have a conversation, I don’t know, I guess you could record it or something, but whatever said is just kind of lost other than the memories of the participants or any notes you take.

And on the other extreme you have what I would usually call knowledge management, and so for individuals, that’s usually note taking tools. So, Evernote is classic there, right, and their logo is an elephant precisely because they say we don’t want to forget. You can put something in there and no, you can still get it 5 years later, and I do think a lot of the, let’s call them team knowledge management tools, team wikis, like a confluence notion ends up kind of being in this category is a lot about, I want to carefully put this garden information. Into this tool and know it’s gonna be there for years, maybe evergreen, or at the minimum that I’m not gonna lose or forget anything.

And I would argue, especially based on the description you just made there, that being in this middle ground between ephemeral and super long term, but being more on the scale of like weeks or months, sort of the duration of a project, and then you move on to produce the project and the Aviation materials are, you know, they’re very interesting. Maybe they’re good historical references to have. Maybe it’s good for new people on boarding the team to go back and kind of read this, but they’re not really current anymore in a way it’s desirable that they would kind of fade into the background or be archived or something.

00:39:15 - Speaker 1: Right, they’re gonna either need to get burned into produced artifacts like papers or slide decks, or burned into your mind, you know, eventually these patterns become ingrained in our neural architecture, and we don’t need to constantly go back to written boards or whatever. If something doesn’t meet either of those two bars after 369 months, I’m not super optimistic that it’s gonna ever escape.

00:39:38 - Speaker 2: Well, some of those things might turn into cultural knowledge or team culture, and you may indeed encode that into, for example, an employee handbook, but that is more of a produced transmission.

Here is a thing we took time to sit down and write out because we know our company’s core values and way of working, and that’s not going to change over the next 5 or 10 years.

We can hand this to all new employees. It’s not an idea. process. It’s just a transmission of existing ideas, but in those early days when you’re still figuring out how do we work together, what are our values, the process of coming up with that very much is in that we’re still thinking it through and figuring it out. That’s not something done in one brainstorming session, it’s something done over time.

00:40:21 - Speaker 1: Now, another thing that I found really important for ideation is the 2D infinite canvas. And I was thinking about why.

I think a key reason is that you have a lot of raw material and you don’t know where it should all go yet.

And so if you’re forced to linealize it, it’s already an impossible mess and you’re doing all this work that you don’t want or need to do. And I guess it only becomes more acute if you have a bunch of people throwing cards onto a board.

It’s almost like going into flat world.

If you have to linearize it into a single document, why do we have to put all this stuff on a single line? Doesn’t make any sense. It’s much more flexible and empowering to be able to have two dimensional space to be able to expand that space as needed and to be able to take advantage of the 2D positioning.

We use this so often for doing things like rows versus columns, where rows is an aspect of the product and columns are timeline or something like that. It’s a really useful group ideation tool.

00:41:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the infinite canvas, I think is absolutely key to what will make this work.

I also think of it as a call a product risk maybe, both courses technically difficult to implement, although I think we’ve managed to handle most of that already, but the other part of it is that people find this document type overwhelming.

I know Figma has run into this. I know Miro and other kind of classic virtual whiteboards have run into this, which is when people come into a top to bottom, you know, mostly text document, you know where to start at the top, and there’s only one direction you can go downwards. It’s essentially truly one dimensional in the sense that the line, you know, the characters flow and they just wrap around.

And so it’s more approachable and when you go into, especially when you bring in some kind of zooming elements like free zoom, like you have a design tool or like we have with the nested boards, it can be overwhelming. Where do I go, where do I look first, what order do I go through this in.

So that’s simultaneously the strength and the weakness.

And I think for an individual tool, it’s one thing because the people who self-select into using the tool, they get it, they decide they want it, that works fine, but on a team, it could be tricky where you’ve got a 5 person team and two of them love the infinite canvas. Three of them are like, uh, I don’t know, this is sort of overwhelming. I don’t know what to do, but really, you know, if it’s gonna be truly a space where everyone can bring their ideas, you know, it needs to be somewhat accessible to everyone on the team.

So, I think that’s a big product challenge ahead for us.

00:42:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s a good point. It’s easy if you’re the person placing all these random cards on a board, you know, to understand your master scheme for what it all means, but it can be harder with a group. I see that, yeah.

At the same time, I go back to the physical analogs, like the writer’s room in the war room, and you couldn’t imagine such groups limiting themselves to a single line, right? It would just be goofy. But there are some subtle constraints or guardrails that they have.

For example, there’s basically one level of zoom, there’s flexible but not totally infinite, you know, you can’t go below the floor above the ceiling.

In fact, it usually tends to be about an eye level. You know, there’s things that are way below or way above eye level or are understood to be less important.

There are some things that you bring in there to make it more approachable. So I think we’ll need to figure out what those things are for the digital medium.

00:43:41 - Speaker 2: And so far we’ve been talking about all the foundational ideas that went into this, things we’ve been thinking about and working on with this product for a long time and the more kind of private ideation space, as well as what we knew we would want to work into the team or group product, but Actually, we have a working alpha, and it is very, very much an alpha, to say the least. We kind of wired something together. This was your idea actually was to say, hey, we can make a thing that is a standalone app that would never be shippable as a product, but can use the basics of our local first sync technology to make it possible to kind of simulate the multiplayer experience.

So we’ve had that working for a couple of months now, and we’ve been using it on our team to do all kinds of group ideation. What have we learned so far? What kind of workflows have come out of it and what things have been surprising? I’m curious your take.

00:44:35 - Speaker 1: Well, I think it’s been awesome. We’ve been using it a ton. I actually just came back from a little vacation, and I had 1 gigabyte of content to catch up on from all the stuff the team had been doing over the past week or two.

Just goes to show how much stuff we’ve been putting in there.

But yeah, we’ve been using it a lot.

I’m looking at our team board now, and I’m seeing a lot of planning and kind of ideation and a lot of sketching, you know, roadmap, sketch, podcast, sketch, feature sketch, design sketch.

Yeah, I found it very helpful. And I think we’re starting to see the idea network topologies emerge organically, at least those that are supported by the current alpha.

So we have people doing independent work and then bringing it to the group.

We have sort of broadcast modes where people, for example, put together a board for an upcoming summit and share that with the whole group.

We have some ad hoc work groups, for example, you and I are on a board for this podcast.

Yeah, overall, I think it’s been pretty cool.

00:45:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve really been enjoying it as well. I would say we do use it for a lot of things like planning that previously we might have used notion for, and and it is more fun there just cause it’s fluid, it’s colorful, you can sketch stuff and you put images or have vertical columns or whatever, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a breakthrough product in those areas where I find it really, really helpful is the true shared ideation.

And so, for example, Linda and I have been working a lot on some of the things having to do with storytelling, including things like demo video scripts and writing memos, and so on, and she’s done a whole bunch of customer discovery, let’s say user research, and it’s like collected that together on a board, and we’re like trying to extract patterns from that and see what we can learn, and the ability to go back and forth.

In this setting as a kind of like slow brainstorming, I’m not sure if that’s quite the right way to put it, a sort of an asynchronous back and forth has been really just so much more fun, I feel, than either scheduling Zoom meetings or doing it in Slack, or kind of a don’t even remember quite how we did it before, but it seems just obvious that this is, for me at least, is a great way to work. And then also observing others and how their flows are, and so one good example here is a lot of the work on the core app, or sort of the user facing interface tends to be Yulia and Leonard, so Leonard does the design work, Yulias of course are Master interface engineer, and so for example, I’m just looking at their board right now in the comments card design, which does include, of course, some mockup work and Figma or whatever, and he brings some of those sketches out and includes it here, but then they’re going back and forth in this way that I love going. The board overview and you have this kind of branching conversation where it starts from the mockups and some text blocks that Leonard’s written out about some of the questions and the trade-offs and then there’s sort of like the comment threads are sort of branching off in several different directions and you can kind of follow those threads. And then there’s little inline sketches, and I’ve seen the two of them go back and forth on this stuff, both just kind of in sort of like pairing sessions, but very often also just in slack threads, but those are, I don’t know, kind of excruciating to read. I don’t know what it’s like to be on the inside of it, but it’s just like, I’m Really interested. I love watching their process. They’re both so incredibly talented, but these long slack threads with an occasional image pasted in or an occasional video, kind of a little bit dry slash, you know, I tend to skim it, but here I don’t know, it’s just so interesting to follow the branching threads of the creative process.

00:48:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of things I would pull out from that. One is, I think we’re seeing more ideas being co-developed by more than one person. So the way this would have used to work is Leonard would basically write a notion page, and he would become the owner of the notion page, and you might, you know, leave some comments on the notion page or, you know, send him a little slack message, but it was basically Leonard’s page, and that was the common design, or would have been the commons design.

But for some of these boards that I’m looking at between Julia and Leonard and you and Linda, for example, it feels more like the idea is being organically co-developed by a small team. And that goes back to this idea of team ownership of ideas that you were talking about before, and I think it only really becomes possible where we have a shared medium like this.

Another thing that I noticed is, again, it’s very extensive use of the two dimensions. I’d say about half of these boards are actually in some variant of the row column format. Sometimes these are time, it’s person, it’s chapter. It’s area of the products, it’s the ABC, you know, there’s all kinds of different ways we use rows and columns, but it’s quite common.

The other pretty common archetype is like the choose your own adventure, you know, branching storyline type thing, where it’s like a roadmap dependency graph or a design discussion branching thing. And I also would reiterate your point about these artifacts being a cred a little bit. I often had this problem as the person who wasn’t right in the middle of these dialogues between Julia and Leonard, or you or Linda, where I would see just hundreds and hundreds of lines go by and slack. And I’d be like, OK, what was the conclusion? It was, you know, basically telling me to go read the whole slack backs were all like, I guess so. But now there’s this much more satisfactory like it isn’t perfect, you know, sometimes you got to go back to Slack to get some of the contexts, or sometimes. It doesn’t quite exactly reflect the current state of our thinking, but it feels much better to have these artifacts that are creating around all the key things that we’re working on, roadmap, comment design, collaboration architecture, hiring, all these really important things for us. There’s basically a board for it, so it’s great to see that now.

00:50:14 - Speaker 2: One thing we haven’t had the chance to test yet is having a new team member come on and getting to immerse themselves in this world as a way to kind of understand our current thinking.

And again, we have used notion for a kind of a version of this in the past. We tend to, yeah, put a lot of internal memos, here’s kind of a technical design for something, or here’s a plan for how we’re gonna handle, you know, support duty going forward or something like that. And here’s a launch plan for a feature we’re working on.

But it’s exactly as you say, those, for some reason, the notion documents, I don’t know if this is cultural or if it’s something to do with the tool, but they’re very structured and once someone makes one, it’s like you said, it’s that person’s document.

You don’t feel good putting things in it, only comments. But comments are like, really, really limited, right? I don’t think you can even put like a clickable link.

I wanna like add a comment which is like, well, what about, you know, this citation and link to a paper or an article that could be relevant and it’s just literally you have to copy paste it out of there, you can’t even click on it, let alone an image or anything else like that. And I wonder why that is.

We’re just tried in some cases, or I’ve either encouraged people to or for myself, tried to like modify other people’s documents, and I feel like it just doesn’t Work, it’s just like someone else owns this, I’m not gonna touch it other than leaving comments. I wonder why that is.

00:51:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is very real. I think part of it is the level of fidelity, you know, notions is incredibly beautifully designed, polished interface. It’s so good that you can present it publicly, and many people do.

And so it kind of feels a little bit weird to go in there with your half-baked feedback and just scribble all over it.

I also think there’s an issue with the linear realization of where do you put your comments.

Now, the nice thing about comments and something like notion is that they do correctly go next to the thing that you want to comment on, but they don’t bust up the piece itself.

And the other pattern that I’ve seen there, by the way, is people will scroll all the way to the bottom, hit enter 5 times, hit a bunch of equal signs, and then say like, you know, Adams, feedback here.

But then, you get the full richness of all the different media types like images and links and stuff, but it’s also disjoint from the thing you’re commenting on.

And the nice thing about the 2D environment is you can just add more space to the right, draw some arrows and say, OK, this is my feedback on this and that, and it preserves the original flow of what it was of the original document, but you have your own full richness medium to add your feedback in.

00:52:41 - Speaker 2: You have actually done that explicit creating a space for someone to write into, so we often use a shared notion document.

This would be, I guess, an example of the one-off sharing. We have a guest on the podcast where I say, OK, well, here’s the rough topic, here’s some of the stuff we might want to talk about.

Feel free to add your own bullets and links to the document, and I found when I did that initially.

Where I had just kind of sketched some stuff that we might talk about, the guests kind of was disinclined to put anything there, but when I started putting explicitly a section that is Adam’s notes, Mark’s notes, and name of guests notes, it’s clear that there’s a place they can put their stuff and they don’t feel like they’re disturbing the rest of it.

And then in many cases, I copy paste from there into, depending on how much prep I wanna do, I might copy paste some of their ideas into the overall structure, but yeah, you have this thing where it’s just, yeah, we don’t wanna mess with each other’s stuff, which is fine, but the process, or I think it comes from a very naturally good place of not wanting to Disturb someone else’s hard work, fair enough, but if we’re going to come up with truly shared ideas together, we need to be willing to mess with each other’s stuff, and maybe some of that is just cultural and will change with time, but I think that the tool can encourage that.

00:53:59 - Speaker 1: One other little anthropological nugget that I’m thinking about is the form factor question. So, my observation of creative professionals is they tend to have one of two setups. They usually either have a personal iPad, personal laptop, and work laptop, or a personal iPad and personal plus work laptop.

And I think that’s for a few reasons. I think historically has not been a lot of work that happens on the iPad.

And conversely, I think the desktop slash laptop is the form factor of choice for professional collaborative work. At least it has been historic, but it just kind of is what it is.

And for me, I’ve often found myself using the desktop for even our muse collaborative stuff, and I use the iPad a lot for My personal work and for my like solo sessions on group ideas. I’m curious, Adam, how your device usage breaks down and how you think about the different form factors for collaboration versus solo work.

00:55:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I’ve gravitated to something very similar to what you’ve described, that my computer, you know, laptop or workstation is The place I go to do work-ish things or really production-ish things, like even recording this podcast is a good example. I’m in front of the big monitor, I’ve got the mic, I’ve got the notes up, but I’ve also got the window up where I can see you and see the recording progress and see my levels and so on. And I guess you can do that stuff from an iPad, but it just feels like I want that full kind of production studio set up where everything’s in front of me and I have the space to spread out there.

And similarly, just looking at My use of our kind of team prototype thing here, I use it way more from the Mac, and that’s more a function of the fact that I’m very often Yeah, it’s just you’re working on the computer. That’s kind of all there is to it. You’re at your desk, you’re at the workstation, and there’s obviously thinking that goes there, but there’s also just planning, and there’s referencing that stuff where it’s like, OK, we developed this idea together of this, you know, script for a video we wanna record. OK, now I need to reference that while I’m recording a video, all that is happening on the desktop computer.

And I do use the iPad for accessing the group ideation space, but this really is the stand up from the desk, go over and sit down in some place in a more kind of reclined position. I’m moving cards around with my finger, I’m scribbling on stuff, I’m kind of recombining, sketching, that sort of thing. But one effect of that is, yeah, it would be interesting to just even do an actual measurement of this, but I think what it comes down to is I use Muse way more on the iPad for my personal stuff, and then some on the Mac, and then for work it’s sort of inverse, which is I use the Mac way, way more and just pull out the iPad occasionally.

00:56:53 - Speaker 1: One other thought on form factors has to do with inking.

So, we don’t use inking a ton, but I do think it has some very important uses.

It’s great for doing little diagrams and like connect the arrow things. It’s great for quick markups of documents, and for me it’s very important for the earliest stages of ideation.

I’m just trying to get my hand on something I like to use ink on my iPad. And this brings me back to the Muse approach versus other existing tools.

I think Inc is basically critical for ideation. I think it’s really non-negotiable for the complete creative process.

And furthermore, it’s along with my opinion that the only place that’s suitable for inking currently is native apps on the iPad.

And you think about it, there just are not that many native team collaboration apps on the iPad.

Often they’re, you know, web-based apps, or they just don’t have an iPad app at all.

And so this is in my mind, a small but critical aspect of the museation story for teams.

00:58:04 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that brings us to a bit of the technology or platform choice side, which I think is a really important part of the bet we’re making with our business, or perhaps just the artistic statement we’re making about the way that we want the world to be, which is, of course, local first. Now, that’s a syncing technology, we can talk about some of the implications that has for collaboration.

But to the point you were just making, there’s really two types of, let’s say work apps in the world. On one side you have those native apps, and there’s many great apps with really good kind of sketching in capabilities, usually much better than Muse, because they’ve been able to make it their main focus.

Something like good notes would be a good example there, something like Paper by 53, and these are fast, they’re beautiful, they use the capabilities of the tablet really well, maybe they have a lot of different options. Options for inking and that sort of thing, but they have either no ability to collaborate or share or whatever it is, is very kind of limited. It uses some clunky iCloud thing or just isn’t real time or something like that, just the world of native apps just was never built for a collaborative multiplayer kind of sharing type setting.

And then on the other side you have the cloud, and certainly something like Figma or Miro or there’s many others, of course, like we’ve already talked about Google Docs and Notion and so forth, and those tend to start from, there’s a page you load in your browser, collaboration is, I don’t wanna say it’s an easy thing to add, but it’s a very natural thing. It fits together with the fact that really your browser is a thing client to the program is actually running on the servers.

Owned and or rented by the software provider. And so in that way, because we’re all sort of connecting to the same sort of shared computer or set of computers, we’re accessing the same program running from the same database at the same time.

But that has the problem, of course, that your work is not at all at hand, certainly doesn’t work offline, you don’t have real ownership of it, it’s really in this far away computer, and it can’t be fast, and it can’t really take advantage of the hardware capabilities. And of course, you know, someone like Notion, I think even Miro does have an. iPad native app, but they tend to just not really feel native to the platform. They’re sort of a bit of an afterthought. I’m not trying to disrespect the teams that have worked on those products, but you can really just feel that it comes from a company whose culture is web and cloud. And that always feels a shame to me. So, something we’re doing with Muse product in the business that I think is totally unique, and time will tell if the market likes this, is we’re bringing together a cloud style of real time sharing and collaboration with, as well as sync between your devices, with a fully native, fast, all your data is local, take full advantage of the hardware app. And putting those two things together is a huge technical challenge, but I’m really excited to see, already we’re seeing the ways that that feels fundamentally different from what we know from either the cloud world or the pure native app world.

01:01:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to very briefly recap the implications of that.

Local first means that you have a copy of all the data relevant to you on all of your devices. In the case of a single player that’s relatively straightforward, it’s basically all data that you’ve ever written that hasn’t been deleted, at least, and you have a copy of that locally. Now with multiplayer, it becomes more complicated cause it’s all the data that you’ve ever written, or all the documents that you’ve ever been shared on directly or indirectly.

But if you do all that right, you have a copy of everything that is or could be relevant to you on your machine already. And the key implication of this is that certainly any reads are gonna be super fast. So whenever you go to zoom into a board, for example, there’s never a spinner or anything that’s already there.

You’re not going to some server to load a board, you just open it the same way you would open a local file.

And even rights can be faster because the app has a sort of complete ecosystem locally can do everything it needs locally, as if it was offline, so it can display your right instantly. It doesn’t need to wait for some server to acknowledge your right to have gone through. That all just happens in the background.

01:02:21 - Speaker 2: The real world implications of what this is going to be like in terms of feel and user experience will be revealed to us through this alpha program and then beta and then going to production should we get that far, but you’ve already hinted at some of the things we’ve already seen in this kind of early prototype which is you came back from A week of vacation and had to download everything that the team had been doing, because that’s the way that it works. It downloads absolutely everything, and I think there’s probably a future version where we need to do a Dropbox selective sync type thing where you only download the stuff that’s relevant to you or that’s in front of you right now or hasn’t been archived or something like that. But at least for the moment, everyone has a complete copy of the work space, and that means you’re downloading it.

Now it doesn’t block you from using the app while it’s doing that download, and actually most of that data is the, I guess you call it blob data, you can go back and listen to our Episode on local for sync if you want to get into the technology, but most of the data is stuff like PDFs, images, videos, and that download may take a little while, but all the cards are in the right position, you can zoom into stuff, the text is all there, and you’ll just have kind of a blur hash download pending for things like images and videos and PDFs that haven’t shown up yet.

01:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m still a pretty big believer in this idea that all the metadata is fine. You know, everything that you’ve ever typed or drawn by hand in your life, or that any of your collaborators have ever drawn, if it’s appropriately compressed, it’s just not that much data. You should be able to download it all fine. And then if you do some basic things around maybe lazy loading big blobs or prioritizing them appropriately, things like that, I think it should be fine. But, you know, it’s gonna be some engineering work and we still got to prove it in production.

01:04:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that proving is as much, you’ve talked about how business ventures and product development is largely a matter of testing your hypotheses against the laboratory of the world, you know, what does the market want, what do people value, and so forth, which is, I love, for example, the fact that everything is always fast and at your fingertips. I love that I can work offline. I’ve already had the chance once when I flew to a little conference to Essentially work on a plane, on my iPad in our team workspace. All the data was there, and just when I landed and reconnected to a network, it all synced itself back up, and that worked great, and I didn’t feel cut off from my work if I wanted to do some thinking while I was on the plane, which for me is often a great place to think. And whether that specific use case is important to people or not, or in general, whether that kind of offline capability is important to people or not is, you know, something we’re gonna learn through this process.

01:05:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think another thing that we’re going to have to grapple with is the implications for permissions. Now, this is more different than the performance side of things.

Performance should basically just be strictly better, or almost entirely so you do have this challenge around downloading big chunks, but the permissions model is different.

In the classic cloud world, when you’re collaborated on a document. You’re really only granted the temporary and revocable privilege of accessing this document’s data on the server. You basically have nothing locally, and every morning when you go to load up your to do list, you’re either blessed or not by the server. And at any point, your organization can revoke that from you. And once that happens, you have nothing locally. And to be clear, there are lots of benefits of this, and there are reasons it’s done this way, aside from just the technical reasons of the historical cloud architectures. But in a local first model, You have a copy of everything, and really strictly speaking, once you have data, people can’t take it away from you. You can be a nice citizen and say, you know, my colleagues have asked that I remove this document. I’m therefore going to delete it from my device. But the notion of revoking is fundamentally different. It’s more about saying, you are no longer going to receive updates from us, and we’re no longer going to listen to updates from you. But anything that you’ve seen with your own two eyes, you know, how are we gonna take that away from you? We really can’t.

01:06:19 - Speaker 2: And that, I think, leads into a whole set of ideas that we have around work idealism and greater agency for individual creative people in the modern economy, and indeed, I would love to do a whole podcast episode on that, so maybe I won’t let us fall down that rabbit hole right now.

But I think that some of the cloud model permissions, centralized administration is connected to a particular way of companies working that may in some ways be shifting a little bit, but we’ll see, we’ll see.

There’s a place to end.

I’d like to go back to something we touched on briefly in the group ideation memo, which is not just how do we best develop ideas together, but actually why do we even want to do that in the first place? What’s the value of shared ideation on a team? And for me this has very much to do with the number of years I’ve spent in various kind of team lead roles of different kinds, including here on the Muse team, and just something I’ve learned over and over again is If someone has to execute an idea that they weren’t involved in shaping, then it’s just really hard for them to do a good job. They don’t know the why, they don’t know where this came from, their sense of just excitement and motivation for, yeah, doing something that’s truly theirs is limited.

Instead, they’re just sort of a worker bee that’s sort of cranking out someone else’s plan.

And so something I’ve learned about great executing teams really is you come up with the ideas together, and it’s not just about the idea in the first place, but what I would usually call the developing of the idea, which is the iteration, finding the nuance, it’s not just that first spark of an idea that does usually come from one person.

But that you together are exploring the idea, exploring all its nooks and crannies, and coming up with, I guess a plan would be the right way to put it, but when you go in and get ready to execute, you really all went through the process together. You ran the ideas together, and now you know what you’re doing, and now you can execute really well when you do that. And having learned that lesson the hard way, many times, either as a team member or a team member who’s leading the team. It’s just something I’m really passionate about, and so, something I hope we can achieve with this product that would be, to me, an amazing breakthrough, is if you can make more shared ideation on teams, and that results in more shared ownership, those teams will execute much, much better, and that to me is kind of a really exciting vision of the future for a collaborative muse.

01:09:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that a lot. It’s as if the idea isn’t just the result of this network process we’ve been talking about. In some ways, it is the network itself and the pathways that you’ve trodden through it. It’s just as important perhaps as the artifact that you end up with.

01:09:23 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ by email, hello at museapp.com. If you’re interested in giving a try or helping us shape this multiplayer collaborative muse, whatever that’s going to turn out to be, certainly visit the survey link here in the show notes. And Mark, I’m really excited to be on to stage 3 of the master plan. Right on.