Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:36:29 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:36:29] S1: Well, I think for us, design actually has always operated as a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important. It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship. And sometimes that really annoys people and it does slow down the shipping process. Sometimes it means that if you don't know how to work well with design or get your ideas in front of design, that some really innovative or cool new thing developed by a PM or developed by an engineer maybe doesn't get shipped as fast as it should. But that bottleneck is really, really important because that's what results in a cohesive customer experience. And I think you can see when an app has been built by teams who are responsible for different pages of the app or different parts of the experience, but there isn't really a cohesive through line. And I think for us at Snap, having design really actually be that bottleneck in terms of helping to manage what we're shipping and what it looks like and how it all works together, I think is really important. [00:37:25] S0: That's a good segue to something I wanted to ask you about, which is you're famously very in the weeds on everything that is going on, all the things that are shipping, you're very close to the pixels. I'm curious how that's evolved for you over time. Are you still in there looking at everything that's about to ship? And what's your just philosophy on founders having to be involved in, let's say, the pixels and the details of the product?
00:37:48 · Evan Spiegel
[00:37:48] S1: First and foremost, yeah, this is what I love to do. I love building things. I love making new products, services for our community. That is what drives me. I really, really enjoy that part of the process. So it's not work to me. It's something that I really just love doing and love doing together with our team. And so I think for me, in addition to all the great people I get to work with here at Snap, the thing that wakes me up with a smile on my face every morning, the reason why I'm skipping to work is because I am in the weeds on what we're building and shipping to our community. That being said, there are always smarter, better, more talented experts working on all the different things that we have going on, but I really do like staying close to what we're creating. I don't think it's relevant just to founders. I think no matter what type of company you're running or your role in the company, staying close to your customer, staying close to the product and the way that it's serving your customer is the fundamentally most important thing you could possibly do. I think I absolutely subscribe to the old school, walk the floors, talk to your customers, get out there and stay in touch with what's actually happening with your service, with your community, with your team. And I think that's probably the most important job that any leader can do in any company is stay close to their customers, stay close to their team.
00:39:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Evan Spiegel
[00:39:07] S0: Do you feel like, especially for a consumer and consumer social product, this is extra important to just be extremely in the weeds on everything that is shipping and say having your design team have to approve everything. Do you feel like that's especially important for consumer? [00:39:22] S1: I don't think it's especially important for consumer. I think it's especially important for any company that wants to deliver great products to their community. Companies have different points of strength and differentiation, but if you want to differentiate on the product experience, I think it's really important that leaders stay very close to that. [00:39:39] S0: Is there anything special you look for in the designers you hire knowing that they're basically running the show and just approving everything and just kind of like the right hand to Evan? Is there anything in particular you look for when you're hiring these designers?
00:39:52 · Evan Spiegel
[00:39:52] S1: Yeah, there's a couple really important things. First of all, we make all of our hiring decisions just based off portfolio. So that's really all we want to see. I really don't care where you've worked or your level of experience. In fact, most people join our design team right out of school, not from a big tech company or something like that. And really what I'm focused on is understanding the portfolio, and I want to see two things from the portfolio. The first is a really wide range, and that is the difference between art and design. So there are lots of people who have a very distinct style, right? They have a very distinct way of building things and creating things. That really is art, right? They're expressing themselves and their own personal point of view on the world, and it can be very beautiful, but it is not design. Design is really about empathizing with your customer, empathizing with your audience, your viewer, whoever it is, and then building something that really resonates with them. And that means you need to have an extraordinary amount of range. You've got to be able to build and create things that look totally different. So when I'm going through a portfolio, the first thing I'm looking for is like, are they building stuff that all looks the same or are they building things that look really different that have been responsive to different sets of needs? And that's how I know that they're a designer and not just an artist. And then the other thing I want to understand, and typically I interview every designer that joins our team, and what I want to understand is why and the story behind the work that they created. So typically what I'll do is just say, "Hey, pick something in your portfolio, anything you feel strongly about it." You could love it, hate it, I don't care. You just have to feel strongly about it. And just tell me the story of why you made it and what you learned through that process. And I think pretty quickly you can understand someone's process in terms of building something or inventing something, how do they go about it? And I'm really trying to make sure that we have people who have different ways of doing that on our team. One of the strengths of our design team has been that people come from lots of different backgrounds. They might come from 3D animation or they might come from electrical engineering.
00:41:52 · Evan Spiegel, Lenny Rachitsky
And that's a real strength to have folks who see the world differently and have totally different sets of skills. [00:41:58] S0: So as I was preparing for this chat, I talked to a bunch of people that worked at Snap over the years and I've integrated their ideas throughout already. But one that came up that I thought was interesting is I hear that you spent a lot of time developing young design talent and that's a big focus of yours. Can you just talk about how you develop young design talent?
00:42:17 · Evan Spiegel
[00:42:17] S1: Well, I think the number one way to develop young design talent is just help them make lots of stuff and get a lot of feedback from whether it's our customers or their teammates or myself directly. And so, one of the things that we do that's different at Snap is your first day that you join the design team, you present work. And it's really, really important that the first day that you show up on the team, you're making things. And that just sets the tone for the rest of your experience on the design team and growth on the design team because really that's what we're all about. And so I think folks who can get comfortable very quickly in that velocity of making things, that's where the ego sort of melts away because when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares that most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine. What we want to get rid of is that sense of preciousness that people have around ideas where they feel like, "Oh, I've got this one really perfect, great idea, and if people don't love it, that means that I'm not a great designer." It's like, no, that's ridiculous. We all need to just create as many ideas as possible that will lead us to some really great ideas hopefully over time. And so I think for young designers, establishing that velocity of ideation very early on is really, really important. And then the other thing we do that I think is different, although I don't know, I've never really worked anywhere else, is we don't allow designers to get stuck on specific products or verticals for very long. We like to make sure people are rotating through different parts of the product to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives and also to avoid getting bored. If you're a great designer and you're stuck designing the chat experience for three years, I mean, how boring is that? It's really exciting, I think at Snap, to be able to work across all of these highly engaged product services. We have one of the largest maps in the world. We have the biggest augmented reality platform. These are really exciting opportunities for designers and it's important that we are rotating them across all of these different products so they're not getting stuck.