 To show you the story, in the summer of 1996, I was 19 years old and my friends and I decided that we were going to start a business where we were going to put menus on the internet for college students like ourselves who often lost the menus that we had in our dorm rooms. We went around to Boston, I was from Boston, we went around to a lot of restaurants in Boston and said we're going to charge them $10 a month to put their menus on the internet. And we sold about 500 restaurants in the course of like, you know, two or three months. And boy were we pretty psyched about that. We were like solving this problem for ourselves, for our peers. It was just one small problem. None of my friends and I knew how to make a website. And we had these people paying us and we had to figure it out really, really quickly. And the reason I tell this story is that I think of that summer as really the beginning of my journey in the world of product, in the world of user experience, in the world of design. And the first thing I think of when it comes to these kind of things that we do, at least the way I approach things, is about problem solving. So my first step in the world of user experience was not about designing, it wasn't about, you know, building things, it was about solving a problem and figuring out how to implement that. And we did actually eventually learn how to make a website and learn HTML and everything. But the first thing was what can we do with this technology? So I want to start there because we're going to kind of tell you a few anecdotes about my own career over the course of this talk. And I want to tell you that my fortune to have been working with a lot of these kind of bigger companies over the years, as well as helping to launch startups has taught me so much about how to approach people, how to approach problem solving, how to approach technology and how to collaborate with a variety of people. And I get to talk to a lot of those people on my podcast, which is called Story to Bottle, which is where I basically get founders and VCs and other technologists really, really drunk and get them to tell me about their their life story. Because that's what we're talking about. User experience product is all about storytelling. And you know, this this talk could be called finding your business voice, not your UX voice, I think a lot of the things we'll go over are actually about how we all adapt and evolve ourselves over time. And for me, when it comes to user experience, I like to think of the idea of like, this has been something that's been going on in the world for a lot longer than the internet's existed. People have been creating experiences since way, you know, 4,000 BC, probably even before that, right? And, and every time a new technology exists, or a new innovator kind of comes up with an idea, it generally is tied to how am I evolving the experience of the world. And I like to think of this because I think how we got to now is a really good way of kind of creating the foundation for our own voices. So as we say, like experience has been created for a long, long time. The reality is that user experience has actually been everywhere for a long time as well. And when thinking about user experience, I always like to think that it's one of the things that gets ignored a lot in in product design. It's a very catchy phrase right now. But I remember when I first started professionally doing user experience, you'd have a lot of people coming in and be like, we don't need the user experience person or the information architecture person, we just need a designer and a developer. And I think a lot of things, a lot of mistakes that were made on the internet were because of the fact that user experience was not appreciated for what it really brings to the table. And I'm a big fan of not reading from my slides, so feel free to read while I talk around them. But what I learned coming into information architecture and user experience and really product is that when you think about why you're creating that experience, think about who you're creating it for, you can really change a business. When user experience is done right and communicated right, it can totally flip something that was going totally wrong to totally right. I'll give you an example of this. About 10 years ago, there was a company called Backstage. Backstage has been a print publication for 50, 60 years. And Backstage had a problem. It had an internet, sorry, it had a website that was probably the most ugly, useless website in the history of the internet. And they hired us to redesign it. And basically they're like, we're going to reskin it, you know, you have articles about how to get an agent. It's like a business to business publication for actors and casting directors. So how to get an agent, how to audition, how to find parts and whatever. But the print magazine's real revenue always came from the back of the book classifies, you know, here's an audition, here's an audition, here's an audition. So we went out and did some research. And I'm a big fan of research on the talking to users, understanding what their motivations are. And we learned in the course of talking to users that no one wanted to read these articles about how to audition, how to find an audition, how to dissect a monologue, whatever. All they wanted to do was find a job. And then we started talking to casting directors. And casting directors were like, we don't care about these articles, either we just need to find a way to get these auditions out there so we can find the right actors for, you know, our shows. Well, it turns out, since no one really wanted the articles, the magazine really didn't have much of a purpose on the internet because all their site was was the articles. So we had to go to the publisher and be like, look guys, you might want to rethink your entire model. You need to stop thinking about articles and you need to think about auditions. And we want you to create a, basically a SaaS platform where people can subscribe, submit their resumes and get parts. Now, luckily, the founder or rather the publisher of this publication was really into like, you know, private equity. He just wanted to flip this business. So he listened to us. And six months after we did that research, we relaunched this whole thing, creating brand new platform for auditions and increased their revenue by 500% in the first three months. Not speaking about user experience, the business impact of user experience and my like pride in that project isn't just the success of obviously backstage getting money, but it was having the kind of hutzpah, if you will, to tell them to change their model, to come at it from, here's what I know as a user experience person. Let me tell you why you want to start with this. I could not have done that in my early days because I wouldn't have had, I don't think the foundation, the tools at my disposal to have that conversation. Because one of the things for me when it came to my voice in the world of user experience was after I learned about problem solving, the next thing I learned was how passionate I was about problem solving. And going to backstage in 2012 and saying, you know, you have to rethink your whole model doesn't really work when you're just doing it from a passionate standpoint. I had to come at it with like logic and reason and models. But in 2000, I was somewhere 2000, it was 23. And I was working at a consulting company as an information architect, which we now call user experience designers. And I was very passionate about creating something that was going to work. And I got put on a project for General Electric at this company. And GE was the number one client at this consulting company. And I was put on the most expensive project by GE at this company. By the way, again, 23 years old, there was no business that I had being running user experience on this on this project. But here I was. The internet was young.com 1.0 was happening. And I was super passionate. And so because I wanted to create such great experiences, I would kind of push back, let's say, on our clients at GE, who were a little bit older, who I didn't have, probably didn't have the respect I probably should have had for them or for their knowledge. And I would get into arguments with these people. And this one woman who was very nice, her name was Kay, she came to me one day and she wanted to create a forum section on this kind of financial learning website. And I was like, great, we can definitely create a forum section for you. No problem. And I looked at this, this is an opportunity. I was like, this is my chance to design a forum that will be better than all the forums that are out there. And Kay said to me, that's nice, Dan. But I just like this form over here on this other website. It looks really nice. It's clean. Can we just use that design or that aesthetic for our forums? And I was like, no, no, no. I got this. And I went home for the weekend. I spent all weekend designing this new forum system. Oh boy, it was amazing. And I came back on Monday and I said, Kay, look at this thing that I made for you. It's going to rock the world of forums in financial learning. And she said, no, no, I don't want that. I want the one I showed you. This is what I want. I feel like, you know, I was pretty straightforward about that. Well, I was not going to have that. And we got into it. And boy, did we start yelling in the middle of an open office where everyone around us stopped talking on the phone and having their meetings and could hear us yelling. My boss conducts me, taps me on the shoulder. He's like, can I talk to you for a second? And I was like, all right. We walk outside of the deck of the office. And he says to me, what are you arguing about? What is this fight you're having? And I'm like, well, you know, she wants the forums this way. I think they should be this way. And he's like, is this, this the sword you're going to fall on? This is the thing? Like, are you prepared to get fired for this, this forum that ultimately doesn't matter? And I thought for a second, was I willing to sacrifice my career for these forums? And the obvious answer was no, I was not going to do that. But I had to think about it. And I thought about this like over the years over the past like couple of decades, I think about this fight I had and how passionate it was and how angry I was that we couldn't do things the way I wanted to. And I had to listen to the client because they were paying for this. And I learned something from that about like my own journey, which is that I had to find another way. I had to learn how to have that conversation and show that passion, but do it in a way that made more sense that was more logical that that, you know, not that I was ever going to win that argument, but at least kind of try to be more persuasive than yelling. And what I thought what I thought was really interesting about the my boss to tap me on the shoulder was he was a yeller himself. He would scream at our clients. He was also very intimidating. Six foot five Viking looking guy who, you know, could get away with it. He would hang up on clients who'd slam the phone down. Later on, he had actually became an employee of mine and he threw a table at me. So he that was his voice, you know, and not mine. And I was trying to like figure out, well, why does he get away with this and why don't I, to this day, I really can't tell you, I think it's just part of like who he was and how we kind of showcased himself. And I should not have mimicked that. So I took away from it, like I need to find another way of doing this. Now, having those soft skills is really important part of these experience. But let's talk about the other sides of it, too, right? So there's, I think there's a different reason that people get into product, like I got into it because I wanted to problem solve, you know, and by the way, I've never taken a design class in my life. And I should not be allowed to design anything because I am a terrible designer. But I kind of live in this world of like, you know, information architecture, interaction design, and usability, that's kind of my kind of where I kind of live in my my head. I know some great UX people who live in the visual design world that live like obsess over typography, I know friends of mine who are content strategists, they all kind of come out of a different place. And I think that like, a good designer or a good UX person, a good product person has a little bit of these things and probably has certain ones that kind of shine higher. And I think that's true of great designers, too. Like, my art director is not a great UX designer, but he can think about it a little bit. He's not a great developer, but he kind of knows how to talk to developers so that, you know, we're all kind of sitting and swimming in the same language. Now, I give this as an example of kind of where we live in user experience, because the world of user experience is actually quite broken. I mean, we don't know how to talk about ourselves. We don't know what to call ourselves. We don't even know what we what we are. Are we product designers or we use experience designers? Are we UX? Are we UI? What is the difference between UX and UI? Like, no one really knows the answer to those questions. And I don't think we have to answer them. I think it's about focusing on what we're good at and what we're trying to do, which again, comes back to me thinking about problem solving. I mentioned that I never taken a design class. That's technically not true. I took design classes when I was in college for theater, so I knew how to design sets, I knew how to design lighting, I knew how to design makeup, but I've never taken an actual graphic design class. But I think that when it comes to product and user experience, you don't have to have taken a design class. You know, I think a lot of the soft skills that people have to kind of learn come from way different topics than actual technology. You know, my background is theater and literature and journalism. And I think those all speak to storytelling. And I mentioned earlier that this is about storytelling, not about, you know, design per se. And my voice is coming from how does that how does that storytelling work and reflect itself in my daily life? And I'll give you an example of this. So I think theater and product go hand in hand. I think that in good product, you have a designer, a developer, a project manager, a UX person, maybe a writer, and they all kind of have to be collaborating so that everything comes out the right way in the end. In theater is the same way. If you have a lighting designer who's not talking to the costume designer or the set designer, you might have someone on stage who's who's a costume is totally washed out by light because there was no communication. So I like when I approach product, I think of it the same way that I would approach theater or a movie or whatever. You know, someone might approach it differently. So my friend Sid Harrell, Sid is a UX civics person. She's very much into like city engineering and whatnot, very well known person in the world of UX design. Her background is poetry, so fast in linguistics. And her kind of, I was talking to her about this, I interviewed a bunch of UX people for this talk to see how they came about their language. And she said that, you know, poetry and the structure of words is kind of how her storytelling journey took place and how she kind of thinks about putting things together in cities and designing cities, which was kind of an interesting, I think contextual story compared to mine. So this all comes down to the idea of like, we're building our voice over time, right? We're starting with, for me it was problem solving, then it was passion, you know, applying these things and then borrowing from other people, right? And I like to look at like, what can I borrow from myself? So my background always says theater, musician. I was not on the basketball team, but I certainly managed it like a nerd. And I own bars. And all of these things were about creating experiences. And I'll tell you kind of a side note on the bar part of it. We were just talking about this earlier. I started opening bars in 2009. And this all goes back to my voice and storytelling. I wanted to see if I could apply all the stuff I do professionally and digital to the offline world. Can I do user research? Can I think about collaborating with a designer and a developer, in this case, construction person to make something that solves a problem? And I went to a neighborhood and I looked around this neighborhood in this village and I was like, what kind of bar doesn't exist here? I got an Irish pub over there. There's a sports bar there. There's a craft beer bar next door. I was like, I want to create something that's more like someone's living room. Like, it's when you could hang out all day and because in this village in New York, you know, there's no one has a living room. The apartments are like the size of, you know, behalf of this room. And I did that. And I actually went through the regular collaboration process I do with my team at Charming Robot with a developer, I mean, construction worker, an actual designer, a bartender who helped me kind of craft cocktails, a chef to help me craft food to really understand how this could all work together. And our Yelp reviews actually reflected this. I sold the bar in 2015, but our Yelp reviews were many of them were like, hey, this is just like my living room. I love that I can come here and hang out here all day. The bartender is my friend, you know. And that all kind of came together without telling the story of you have a living room that's outside of your apartment in New York, and this is a place that's friendly and calm and a place you can always kind of always enjoy your day. And this is why I think to myself that like all those skill sets that we have, they all come together, you know, and allow us to start telling stories, allow us to create great experiences. Wow, that is blurry. And at the same time, I think the challenge is that because you can have such a wide variety of backgrounds to kind of come into this world of user experience, it also makes it very confusing for people to even know what we do. Jonathan Corman is another great UX person who has a very, very strong attitude, let's say, and I really enjoy the fact that he was very straightforward to me about saying no one knows what we do. My parents asked me what I do. I have to tell them I'm a designer because I have no clue what user experience means. But as I was thinking through this, I was thinking through the argument I had with that 1K, I started to think like, how did I evolve this? When did like, when was the next point in my life that I kind of got a sense of what I actually do and why I might be good at it? And I realized that it was the, when I started to have empathy, when I started to look at like, oh, I'm not just solving this for a business, right? I'm not just trying to solve this problem because I want to. It's because I want to create something that actually solves a problem for people too, that actually gives them a reason, like I go back to my menus, that a reason for existing. And so around 2007, I had some really good luck. I had the fortune of creating or launching Hulu. At the same year, I redesigned CNN and the New York Times. And what I learned was that like, I was learning how to approach problems from my kind of human point of view. And so in 2007, when my friend Kevin and I finished working on Hulu, we left, we left this big agency we were working for, and we started our own agency called Hard Candy Shell. And boy, did we have a definitive voice as designers. And we were ultimately complete assholes. Our voice was just arrogance. And it wasn't arrogance from like, a bad place. We didn't mean to be arrogant. We just looked at ourselves as the Gordon Ramsey's of user experience design. And we would yell. But we would come at it from a place of experience. This wasn't me at 23 yelling at my client. This is me at 30 yelling at my client. So those seven years, big difference. But the reality was like, we weren't wrong. We launched from Hard Candy Shell, we launched Run The Runway, we launched Foursquare, we launched Guilt. We had a great run of startups that we got to create. We redesigned The Wall Street Journal and helped them make money on a subscription basis, which no one was doing at the time. But we just did it with such attitude. But at the same time, we wanted to have attitude. We wanted our voice to be a little bit edgy. We wanted to be able to push back on our clients and tell them no, because we had learned at big agencies that you're not allowed to say no. You say yes, because there's more money coming in. But as a small agency, we can be a bit more picky, right? So we did that. And on the one hand, we had some successes, which is great. On the other hand, what we noticed was it all started to trickle down into our team members. So here we are, 30, 31 years old, feeling pretty good about ourselves. But then we have like a 23 year old you as an experienced designer who has been out in the world for a couple of years. Now they have that arrogance too. Where'd that come from? They didn't spend the past 10 years, you know, building up a resume of work, and yet they have the arrogance. And I remember sitting there like in my office being like, this is not fun. I don't like any of these people. And I don't like myself. It got to the point where everyone was so arrogant and full of themselves that you couldn't have a brainstorm meeting because everyone was afraid that their idea would be shot down or laughed at. Not a great way to go forward. But it took me a few years to really kind of, I think, really get this. I mean, I'd say it started in 2007, but it was a little while before I really kind of looked internally and said, okay, Dan, you got to figure out how to do this better. And so while I did that, I kept thinking about storytelling. And how can I use my craft as a storyteller, as a writer, as an actor, as a journalist to be better at convincing people why they should do things. And it started in the arrogant world, but it evolved into being more about giving evidence, backing things up with quotes from users, like looking at the analytics and being smart about how you tell the story of analytics, which is funny because you don't think of analytics as particularly creative, but they do tell a story. I always say that the analytics can tell you everything except for why. And then you go to do the research with the people, and people give you the why. And combining those things of what kind of got me to be not just opinionated, but informed. And this is like where I started really getting to be, I think, a much more, much calmer, I think, a much more approachable designer. And more importantly, I think a more solution-oriented designer or UX person. And this is why I said this is about not just your UX voice, but your business voice. Finding solutions is really what it's all about. And pointing out when things are wrong is only helpful if you can give them a sense of what direction to go to make them right. And doing that with kind of a more, let's say a stronger attitude, one that is more positive, one that isn't insulting someone, or at least it's not telling them, making them feel bad about themselves and making them feel bad about their product. It's about making them feel hopeful, making them feel excited. And for me, it took four years, 2007 to 2011, four years of just feeling arrogant. And I remember I was out for drinks with a friend of mine who was a creative director in 2000, I think it was 2010. And we're having drinks, and he worked in an agency that I previously been at. And I had no respect for that agency. And the reason I had no respect for it was because I just thought the work they were doing was kind of boring. It was kind of trendy. It was like chasing trends and not really thinking creatively about things, but just kind of doing what everyone else is doing. And I just think it was kind of uninspired. And I told him this, and probably not the best way, basically. So I said, you should quit your job. You should leave it. You're doing terrible work there. You're better than this. Well, we didn't talk for six months. And the reason we didn't talk for six months is I didn't realize how much I'd offended him. Well, that guy and I eventually made up. And in 2011, after four years at Hart-Kinney-Shell, I couldn't deal with it anymore. I was done. I was sick of the attitude. I was sick of the arrogance. I was sick of all the negativity that surrounded everyone every day. And so I said to this guy who had quit that agency at that time, I said, let's start another company. Let's do this better. And I apologized to him, obviously, for being so arrogant. And he said, all right. And we started Trumming Robot. And I left Hart-Kinney-Shell, sold my shares to my partner, and was like, good luck. I hope you succeed. But when we started Trumming Robot, I was like, I don't want to come at things so negatively. I want to be solution-oriented. I want to be empathetic. And it changed not just my whole company, my whole business, but it also changed my life. I became a happier person by being a more solution-oriented person. Finding out that, oh, I can be helpful and I can be nice and friendly. And what happened was at Hart-Kinney-Shell, we didn't really have repeat customers, which is crazy because we had very many successes. But no one ever came back. And oftentimes, if they did come back, we said no to them. Because we were like, we already did you right. You don't need this anymore. And Trumming Robot, I was like, that's a terrible business model. You need to have people come back because they'll be loyal to you if you help them again, and again, and again. So I mentioned that backstage story earlier. So the guy, John, who was the publisher of Backstage, he then left and went to Billboard. And at Billboard, we had a different problem, but we tackled it and solved that problem for Billboard and for the Hollywood Reporter. And then he came back to me again when he went and bought another media company called Modern Luxury. We, over COVID, when no one was doing anything, we changed their business to the digital side. They had done no digital, almost their whole existence. We revamped it, came back to us again in 2022 when he bought a company called Clipper, which is like a local coupon company. And this guy came back to us five times over the years because we don't just help him, we legitimately partner with him. And that was a change of pace for me. But I realized that as I've gotten older and as I've kind of devolved and developed my voice, it's because my way of thinking has changed. And I can't let myself kind of sit there and kind of just be the person I was at 23 or at 30 or at 40. And how I do that, and how any of us do that, is really about listening to other people. It's really about taking and borrowing the things that we see from people that are inspiring to us. And then I think it's about being honest. And I think oftentimes the honesty is about telling people things that they don't want to hear. It's just telling them things they don't want to hear in a better way, right? Telling someone that their website is garbage, maybe not be the best approach, but you can convey to them that it's garbage by telling them, here's how you can make it better. And I think the other thing is understand why we're making choices. Like when I was at that big agency in 2000, and I was at the other one in 2006, we were not allowed to ask why? Why are we doing this? Why are we making these choices? As much as the arrogance of Hulu did attack me, the best thing I learned from that project was when I sat in front of Jason Calar who became the CEO and he was looking at this stack of like 180 wire frames that we had worked on for six months for Hulu. By the way, they were garbage. I mean, they were some of the worst things I've ever put on paper. And they all came from bad ideas because no one was allowed to ask why. In fact, when the TV executives had these ideas for different features on Hulu that we knew were going to be failures, we would try to push back and our boss would be like, no, no, no, they're going to pay us more for them. So we just do them. So Jason Calar sat there with a stack of bad ideas that were returning to the worst ideas that were six months worth of work. And he said to us, how do we get here? And we told him in a very arrogant, probably tirade way. But he said, you know what? Let's throw it all up. Let's toss it in the garbage and let's start over. And we did. We started over and we designed what became the first three years of features in Hulu. We designed it all in six weeks, July to August 2007. And that question he asked us, which we should have been asking him, right? That changed my whole approach of like, I can always ask why. It's not about saying yes or no, it's why are we doing this? Why are we doing this now? Why shouldn't we do this later? And then I kind of layer that in with what are the different ways that I can approach things, like not being a yelling person like my former boss, but I had another boss who was really empathetic at one point. He was very calm and would sit you down and be like, all right, you know, looks like you're having trouble with this. Let's see if we can push through this together. And he was very collaborative. And I realized that his collaborative nature was more in line with the way I approach things. That's why I really appreciated that. And then I had another boss who I took some other things from. And then I like would listen to someone else. And I took a little bit of that arrogance, you know, with me, I still have a little bit of it, but I temper it with other things. And, and then I listened to my other friends who are in the world of UX. My friend Steve, he's a brilliant, probably the most calm UX person I've ever met. Every time I talked to him, I feel like I'm being like, you know, kind of rocked in a cradle. He's like just so, but he's so approachable and he's so nice. And I don't think he's ever said, I don't think he's even ever sworn in front of me. Like, he's just a really good guy who I've learned from as well. And I've stolen some of his stuff. And that I guess that's what it comes down to in the end, is like, our voice is never going to be done. You know, we're going to have phases in it. We're going to change or evolve it. And it's because we're always going to be learning. And that's the most important thing in anything in product is never stop learning. And I think I worry about this all the time. I don't know about you guys. I'm 46 years old. I am worried about becoming a dinosaur in technology because of everything that changes so fast, right? Now, you know, whether you're into Web 3 or into AI or you're still working on regular e-commerce or whatever your content, like everything is always evolving. And if we're not evolving with it, we're going to get lost. Or we'll be arrogant and that arrogance won't be, won't be merited, which you shouldn't be arrogant anyways. But we always have to be learning because if we're not, we're going to get caught behind. And we're not going to have anything to say. We don't have any sort of voice at all. So I'm going to leave it at that. But any questions? Yes. You know, no one's ever asked me. But I think that, you know, I think that what people assume is at this point in my career, it's, I have a resume of things I've worked on that people have heard of. So they're like, oh, I want to hire you for that. I think that, I think the problem is actually it's different. The problem is they think that I do everything. So they're like, Dan, I want to hire you for this project. And I'm like, right, but you know, you actually need like this group of people that I've been working with for 15, 20 years who kind of back me up and help me and whatever. And they're like, well, but you did this. I'm like, no, no, no, I did not do that alone. And that, yeah. You're in the background. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I think there's like, I talk a lot about this when it comes to UX, like education wise, I don't think there's a right combination of education. I mean, there are things that I prefer. Like, I want to hire people who have humanities backgrounds, right? Like, I think that's really important because it kind of helps you shape things into something that makes sense. But I also don't think you have to go to college, you know what I mean? Like, I think that, I think that any good person in user experience, any good person in design, any good person in development should have a little bit of knowledge of all those things so that you understand what's being built and what can't be built and what can be. And so I don't know that anyone's ever questioned in my background, but you know, I'll question that was I questioned people who take UX courses. I don't want to hire them. I will not hire them. I've been burned by those people. And I say that as someone who created the first set of UX curriculum about 10, 11 years ago with my friend Sarah, and I walked away from it because I was like, this is not something that should be taught in the schools. No one should pay for this. It's just something you learn at a job after you get your degree or learn from something else. So yeah. No, take everything away from this. Yeah. I'm literally like 16 years down the road from you, the only difference is I'm creating an agency and a serial entrepreneur than you are, which is a good thing. I see that as a new sea possibility, but I tend to do it for jobs. A lot of times they keep asking, okay, where did you get your education? Where did you get your experience? And when I don't have the degree, how do you answer that when they ask you, where did you learn what you did? Why don't you have a degree when you do this, do you have certifications, etc? I mean, the first thing I would say is that I tell people I just started doing it. Right? So like, I didn't even know what I was doing. I say to people like, when I started my company in 1995, 96, whatever it was, like, I didn't know I was creating, doing user experience and information architecture. And when I got my first job as an IA in 1999, I didn't actually like it. So I tell people like, you know, I kind of found my way into this world by realizing when I wasn't good at and realizing what I was good at. Like, I'm not a good designer. I thought I was going to be a designer and I was like, terrible at it. But I tell people that like, I learned this stuff by talking to people, by researching, like seeing what else is out there, by looking to people who are my senior. Once I got rid of my arrogance and like, actually started seeing what other people brought to the table. And then I just say, look, here are the examples of things that I've made that show that I can know what I'm doing. And the last thing I tell people is that I'm always learning, right? I'm always keeping abreast of what's going on, because what I made last year or 10 years ago doesn't have any relevance to what I'm working on today. And I would tell someone that who is 22, you're just out of school. If you took that UX course for some reason, and you feel like you got something out of it, what did you really learn? Because if you're a developer, I have a guy I'm working with, he's just out of college. He's a developer. He's a front-end developer. He's working with my CTO right now. And I listen to them talk. And this kid, super smart. He doesn't know anything about development, even though he's a degree in engineering, computer science, because he hasn't done anything. So I think it's about telling people what you've done, showing that you know what you're talking about, showing that you've evolved from the first thing you did to what you did last year, and that you're looking to do something new and exciting. And the education doesn't matter. I don't think. I don't know if that helps at all. No. It comes out of storytelling. The theater, they figure out the story. I don't think that your body is getting them to access it because and particularly the offshore people, or if they come from India, and they really can come down to you on getting that education, getting that degree, showing that sort of thing. Groups, they you know what you're talking about. Let me show you about your work. Can you speak to that? Yeah, that's a good point. You know, it's funny is like, I'm so anti-certification when it comes to UX. Like, I definitely like rally against it in a lot of ways. And I think that when this is this is true, I've worked with a lot of people in India as well. Like, I think there's a rigidness about that style of working that actually makes it harder to be creative when it comes to good UX and good storytelling, which is problematic. I mean, I'm not going to say that you can't be great UX person in India. You can be. But like, I just think you don't get as much originality and innovation. And you know, and I think in certification, I see I see this with people who take UX classes, they are taught to do something a certain way, and then are often told you can't do it these other ways. But there's no can't, right? There's no there's just, is it okay for this solution? Is it not okay for the solution? And when you're when you're so rigid, you're certified, you kind of you lose the forest of the trees, if that makes sense. Of course, yeah. I start with probably the lowest common denominator. You know, it's interesting when you're building a startup, for example, you always focus on like the bottom of the funnel, like we're we're who might not be the biggest audience to start, but we're right, we're going to get the most bank for my buck. When looking at a wide like a bigger organization, like if I'm doing something for like the New York Times, for example, huge audience, right? I try to think about what are the most relevant use cases for the different audiences? And where am I going to get the most bank for my buck? Where am I going to like, create things that are going to get those audiences interested? I think you get much less interesting design solutions with those kind of things. But that's okay, because you're going after a mass audience. The other thing I think about is, I don't like personas. I think personas are overused trope. I prefer thinking about things in terms of behaviors. So when I think about that way, I don't think about their 20,000 different personas is what is the intention of someone when they come in here? And I think travel is a good example. If you're working on a travel website, you have a person who is a planner, like a long term planner, you have a business traveler, you have someone who's looking for the cheapest flight, you have whatever, and all those can all be the same people just with different intentions. And so when I think about that way, it's a little bit easier to approach design. So kind of related to this, I know you're going to say, what do you think about they, I know, started to create some automated bots where they create basically personas and they can talk to each other and they make these backstories, but they're just AI, but they're actually using this for UX market studies. But what do you think of that? I think it's garbage. I mean, I remember years ago, I was working in an advertising agency, and I'm also not good at marketing. But I remember we were sitting there and we were doing like a brand day for a Scotch brand. And we were making personas and we were telling the story, okay, this is Peter and Peter is 41 years old and he works on Wall Street. And he does that. I'm like, what are we doing? Like this person does not exist. And I think when you're trying to make, I think when you're making up personas, and this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I think when you're making up personas, you're kind of designing them to your will as opposed to people actually want. And so that's why I love going out and doing research without any sort of thesis. It's like, I want to hear what people say and watch what they do and kind of start designing from that versus let me get an idea of this person in my head, and I'll tell you, when we designed Rent the Runway, we thought we knew who we were designing it for. We thought it was for sorority girls who were going to things at their sorority events, whatever. We were totally wrong. It could not have been more far off. The biggest audience that we learned later was military and housewives because they had more events to go to than sorority people did. And so I think if we had thought that way from the beginning, we probably would have approached design wrong because we would have been thinking about a very different person, which would have destroyed the brand equity that we've built up. So that's why I think making up personas is just not particularly useful. Yeah. Yeah. That all goes back to behaviors. Yeah, exactly. Yes? So how do you go about finding those people to do research with? Good question. I use a recruiter. There's a couple of recruiters that are pretty good nationwide. And generally, I know this is going to sound somewhat hypocritical, but I know the kind of people I want to talk to, at least if I'm doing like, I just did a project in crypto. So I wanted to talk to people who understood Web 3, who were holding on to some sort of cryptocurrency or NFTs. So that helped me narrow a little bit of who I want to talk to. But generally, I work with the recruiter. We create a screener to figure out how we get down to that. We build them down to the right people, and then we go talk to them in person. I will say for that research, though, we usually only do like anywhere between 12 and 24 interviews. I think after about 15, you're kind of done. And the one-on-one in person or two-on-one, like two people, one note-taker, one interviewer, and one person. And I don't do any focus groups. I hate focus groups. I think that they're just another bad way of getting, you know, having damaged data because you have a heard mentality where someone starts following someone else. And the one-way mirror thing is just the worst. Like everyone knows someone's back there. And I'll tell you this story. This is, I think this is really funny. Why focus groups? So years ago, I was working for Newsday, which is like a local Long Island newspaper. And we were doing focus groups to test out some ideas of digital products they want to launch. And it will say, for the most part, these focus groups were actually pretty good. We had some great recruits, a lot of parents, whatever. And we got through three focus groups. And it was very clear. The two things were very clear. One is that the products that this company wanted to launch, no one wanted. Like, not a single person wanted any of these things at all. But the other thing that was clear was everyone wanted something. It was one thing that was very clear, like the product that this company should make. It was like so clear, it was like, like, why wouldn't you make this, right? So we're in the middle of the last focus group. And my friend Kevin and I are moderating it. And we have our laptop open and we get a message from our client who's behind the mirror. And just in all caps, it says, get back here right now. We're like, in the middle of like a conversation, we're like, okay, guys, have some M&M, we'll be right back. And we get into the back room. And our client is furious. And I like, I picture this and I don't know if this is actually true, but like, her entire team seemed like they were cowering in the back and she's like sitting at the doorway, just like smoke coming out of her ears. And she was like, this is a disaster. What are we going to do? And we're like, that's pretty obvious what we're going to do. We're not going to make these things, we're going to make this thing. And she's like, no, no, no, we have to do these things. I'm throwing my roadmap. And I was like, you can change your roadmap. Like, there's an obvious product we made here. And she just didn't listen. She didn't listen to them. And she eventually got fired. But I think the lesson for me was like, we have to be adaptive. We have to be listening and we can't put our own ideas onto our users. That was a long answer to your question. I'm sorry. Cool. Oh, I'll come right back to you. I just want to get to you. There's some reason those things always go together, too. I'll tell you, I think the best way of doing that is having a really, really good project manager. I'm not good at a lot of things, apparently. I'm not a great project manager. But I do think that being willing, you need to be able to say no. Or you need to be able to say no, but, or, you know what I mean? And I always like to use money as a way to get people to stop spending the scope and then the timeline. Like, it's like, okay, yes, you can do that, but it's going to cost you another $10,000. And it's going to add to the timeline. Oh, I want to take less time. Okay, well, then what are we going to, what are we losing? What are we taking out of the project? And I think it's hard doing that the first time. And sometimes people will walk away and clients will be like, oh, too bad, someone else will do it. And I always tell people like, look, you can go, if someone else told you they can do this faster and for less money, go for it, go for it. I guarantee you, you'll be back here in six months. And I would say that's probably correct 70% of the time. But it's really, it's really hard. It's just about pushing back and being very firm. That's, that's the only way to do it. So I'm sorry. Yeah, I have a slide in my kickoff deck for every client that says, you are not the user. I say, you might be a user, right? I might be a user, but I'm not the user. And so one of the rules I have, and I tell clients to keep me honest on this too, I say, none of us should be saying to each other, well, this is what I do, or when I'm on my phone, I do this or my computer, I do this. And I say, if you hear me say that, or any member of my team say that, call us out on it, and we're going to call you out on that too. And boy, you know, the first couple of times you do that, they learn pretty fast. Any other questions? Well, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate your time.