 everybody, and you are very welcome to our 42 courses speaker series. And our guest today is Fons Morris lead product designer and global conversion at Netflix. For us quite a design legend. We're hoping that at some stage, he might share some expert product design tips and advice. He's just told me luckily he's a great fan of 42 courses. And you are very welcome Fons. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Really proud to be here. And I meant that about the fan of 42 courses, being a self taught designer and a fan of education. I really think online education is the present and the future. So proud to be here. Thanks for the invite. That's great to hear. And maybe that's something we can chat a little bit about later, but maybe just for those who joined us, I can just hand over to you Fons to just tell everybody a little bit about yourself, your journey, how you got to where you are today. Sure. So tomorrow is currently based out of San Jose, which is about 45 minutes south of San Francisco, Northern California. This is what you would call the traditional silicone valley. That's because all of the other tech companies started here, the headquarters are here. I've been out here for about four years now. I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York, but after a couple of failed start, I don't want to say failed, that's too harsh. One successful startup and two that didn't really pan out. And going in between corporate America entrepreneurship around 2018, I was married then I had a kid, and I said, I need some more stability. So I had to give up my entrepreneurship dreams. And I went into actually work at Coursera, which is another huge all on education platform. And before that, I was in and out of, like I said, entrepreneurship, I was working at Comcast. I started my first design agency after I got out of college, and that got acquired and the family investors that acquired that put up money for me to build my first product, which was a content management system for independent artists and brands. And that's when I transitioned from what I would say was a web designer into a product designer, because it was my responsibility to actually take this idea from ideation all the way through execution. And that's when I started to see there's so many different responsibilities and roles that go under the design umbrella. And then I just kept going after that I did that product and I went back into corporate America work that's amazing agencies. Then I went back and did a second startup, which was similar to what we're using now, which is a video conference and platform, about two years before the pandemic. So if we would have hung in there for another two years, I don't know where I'll be right now, probably beyond the island somewhere in the middle of the ocean. But we were a little too early. So we ended up not being able to keep that that company going and then that's when I went back into corporate America. But ever since then, I've just been doing a lot of mentoring, doing a lot of public speaking, just really trying to promote more people to get into design and support the current people that are in design. That's so interesting and talking about episodes in your business life before when things didn't necessarily work out and sort of rather aping the Elizabeth Day approach. All our failures, you know, we learn from them and you know, they they took you to where you are today, you're saying the previous company had been successful. I mean, what do you think back on your experiences there and what you think you took from them? I just think experience is the best teacher and by me being a self taught designer, I'm very confident in my design and my skills and who I am in my career. So I don't really suffer from impulsive syndrome because I earned this as opposed to feeling maybe I went to a prestigious school and somebody gave me a grip. No, no, no, no, no, no. I put in all the hours. I put all my 10,000 hours into this and I've dedicated so much of my life to design that I'm very confident in that. And I say all of that because I really think all the different experiences that I went to to help me understand more about myself, more about what I wanted out of my life, my career and also it really helped me take the step, the little step to get all the way through design to really learn and understand it. And it let me know that I'm a risk taker and it also lets me know that if I believe in myself, I can be successful. So that there was a lot of fundamental things I learned about design and myself by going the path that I went and I don't think I would change anything. Well, I would change that. I wish my first company really made it but then once again, who knows where I'll be right now if that company blasts it off. So I take that back. I wouldn't change anything. I just know that dedication and being a risk taker is very, very important. Do you think that it made you more determined because you were really instrumental in carving your direction as opposed to a standard route from school through college? Yeah, I mean, I could say that it made me determined because I didn't really have anything else to fall back on. I didn't come from the most prestigious or wealthy family. So it was either I figure out how to make this design work or I'm staying, go back to New York and try to figure something out. So I just what happened was my university opened up a multi media computer lab and I just completely moved into the lab for two years, like literally every single day. And I taught myself every possible skill, anybody getting a multimedia design would need. And that was enough for me to get my first. So and then I started doing logos and doing smaller projects for myself. But it was one website that I did for another student that was in the lab. They worked at a furniture company and she got me the redesign of their corporate website. And that was the first website that I really officially made. And I got paid some real money from. And at that moment, I was hooked because nobody else I knew was able to use their skills to make that much money. And that's what let me know I might be onto something. And it might be really time for me to try to think about how to take this to the next level. So the determination and that website just really let me know I have a talent and the skill that people want. It's so interesting. And I know when we were chatting just before we kicked off, we were talking about online learning and in inclusivity. And I know that that's something that you really bring to the table when you are working for Netflix. So maybe you can just segue into obviously your work with Netflix. But again, how important that is that a platform is accessible to absolutely everyone. Yeah, sure. So I'm a super, super proponent of accessibility and accessibility has a lot of different layers to it. And then when you think of a company that has as many customers as Netflix does, which is we're in a 220 million plus, you don't really want to build a platform. Well, one, you don't get to that many users by building a platform that's not accessible or inclusive. And then second, you don't want to have that many users and 90% of them don't really feel like this platform is for them. So as part of the product and design team, we go through a lot of rigorous steps to make sure the platform is as accessible as we could be from having support of over 60 languages in our content to our UI and our product supporting over 33 languages to doing intensive accessibility audits to doing tons of usability research. I actually have a user research some today and I had some yesterday and the day before we spent a lot of time talking to our customers to make sure we understand what our customers want. And then we do a lot of work to make sure that no matter where a customer is coming from, they feel Netflix is built for them. So we do things to try to make it feel semi personal even before you even sign up for a platform. And then after you sign up, we continue to try to use our algorithm to make sure that this platform and that your experience feels tailored to you. And I think that's super important when you think of how broad our customers are. We have customers in over 190 different countries. I don't want to ever build something that only somebody in the United States or only in South America can enjoy. I really take pride. My team takes pride in building a product that the whole world can enjoy and to do that, we just make sure that we cover a lot of different steps so that people you can comment on the content because that's very subjective. But what we don't want is for you to be able to say that the platform itself was not inclusive. It's something that fascinates me because something I often comment on is my parents told me that they don't go to a certain place anymore because the car park requires you to use a code on the phone. And so they don't and they don't know how to do that. So they're just gone somewhere else. And that when you hear extremes like that, and then when we talk about Netflix, which is one of those things that everybody knows it. Everybody knows it, whether they subscribe or not everybody. And as you say, the accessibility is is the ultimate reason in my mind for the success. But I read something that you posted recently and it was on the subject of resilience. And if you don't mind just reading and you remember writing this a couple of weeks ago, you said this is why resilience is critical in tech. One day the headlines are yelling Netflix days over. Then the next they're saying Netflix blockbuster comeback. Resilience in your line of business. How important is it? Super because I mean, it's almost as if when you're at the top, everybody's going to be trying to bring you down. It takes a lot of self control. It takes a lot of willpower. It takes a lot of just confidence in yourself and in the brand to work at a company like Netflix because when I cut on the news, oh, Netflix's ads, are they on their way out? Oh, Netflix stock is down. Oh, Disney Plus is this. And this is not even when I'm at work. This is my I actually have a really funny story. So I was meeting with my team. It was one of the best meetings we've had on yeah, everybody high five at the end. It's like great. We think we have a really strong plan moving forward. I think that meeting ended at four o'clock. I'm a Twitter guy. I like to read on Twitter. I opened up Twitter at 401. And before I could even scroll or click on anything, it's a massive article on the side talking about Netflix days is over. It's on its way out. It's going to have record cancellations. And I'm just thinking to myself like, Wow, I just left the meeting where we're talking about how happy we are. And as soon as I open up social media, I see them dragging the company. And to be honest with you all, we have to really decide how much of the media we're going to interact with my friend, who's the director, she completely blocked Netflix on Twitter, because she doesn't want to see anything related to that because she knows she works there and she doesn't want that to kind of affect her thoughts on the company and moving forward. So you really have to juggle how much outside information you want to expose yourself to to prevent it from kind of seeping into your day to day work. And like I said, you'll get up one morning and they'll say Netflix is done. They lost their subscribers. They'll never be able to come back. And then my team, we're working hard to prove these people wrong. And then I get up the next morning and it's like, oh, Netflix quarters numbers came out, they're up to million people, they're back at the bottom of the industry. So you really want to just we don't do it for the the accolades from the press, whether it's good or bad. We do it for the customer. We are 100% dedicated to providing and building the best content and platform for our customers. And we don't let anything stop that. It is unfortunate sometimes when you see the bad news, but that's why I said that you got to have the willpower and the confidence in yourself and your team and the company to push through that so that you can get through those cloudy days. And then you see the sun on the other side. It's fascinating to hear some stories, you know, more on the inside. But you know, regardless of the company, the company that you work for, your skills at the end of the day are as a good UX designer. So maybe let's just sort of peel back and go, you know, to talk about that as as a core skill. And what do you say to people when they ask very general questions? You know, what do you need to bring to the table to be a good UX designer? Problem solving, you have to love solving problems. If you don't love solving problems, then I just don't know if designers and this is separate from how good you are in your craft. And I'm saying your craft like, oh, I can open a figment design the best UI ever. Or I even know how to code. I'm not saying none of that. I'm saying, do you love design or do you love solving problems enough that when somebody that you can analyze the situation and say one, you can analyze the problem. And then two, you can come with a solution in your head. And then three, you can try to put the pieces together to figure out how to execute on that. So I would say like the problem solving is the most critical part of design. And then second, I would say is communication. I spend so much time every day talking to tens of people. I probably communicate with maybe 30 to 40 people a day. And on some days, it might be even 50 to 60. And depending on how big of a medium you have, it could be easily 200. So if you can't really communicate well, and now that we're in this new realm of video conferencing where you don't get to see somebody's maybe body language or have a hallway conversation, all you have is this box and it's 30 minutes for this meeting or maybe Slack or email. So you need to be able to make sure that you're communicating clearly to people and you're able to communicate the decisions that you made to your team and you need to be able to communicate well to your customer. So I would say one is problem solving. And then to his communication. And what about really sort of feeling feeling for you for your user feeling for, you know, feeling I don't really know what I mean. But, you know, in the issues when when it's such a when it's such a wide base, it seems a bit overwhelming. For sure. Well, that's what a problem solving comes into play because hopefully you have empathy while you're coming up with that solution for the person. You're not just saying what you think is the best. You're you're you're understanding where that user is at that moment and the decision that you came up with was for the benefit of the user, not yourself. So I usually do call that out, but I'm going to stop calling out the user specifically because that is almost a given in that solution that you're coming up with. You should be solving this problem for your user. And if you're not really understanding where that person is, or you're not really understanding where that problem then I don't really know how you're going to solve that. So when it comes to solving problems at Netflix, yes, there's a ton. There's a million problems that need to solve. But this is where the structure of the team is very, very important as well as the leadership is important because we have strategic bets that the leadership team decides on. And this is kind of like what our path will be for the next year. And now every bet is not related to every team, but it is all related to the benefit of the company. So now the product and the design team, maybe there's three bets on there that affect us. So not that we don't care about the other 22, but that's not our focus. So I just went from all these problems to now this is the problem that we need to focus on. And now from these three, we need to prioritize these problems and we need to see what's going to have the biggest impact. What's the biggest problem? What's going to take the most to solve and what's going to have the greatest return on problems? And that's how we kind of prioritize what we're going to work on. And then you break that down even more granular into, okay, well, who's going to execute on this? And what are all the pieces you need to execute on this? You need your data scientists. You need your front end and your back end engineers. You need your product designers. You need your PMs, your TPMs, your design managers, your directors, and all of us kind of come together like a unit to be able to solve this problem. And then that's why I said communication is important because Netflix is very cross-function. I work with more non-designers than I work with designers because we're also a very lean product and very lean design team. So I worked to maybe, I don't know, end engineers. So it was maybe like more designers and engineers. So I'm always trying to figure out what's going on, learning what's going on. And that's how we get to this, the root of what problems are we going to work on. And then now, now you get even more granular where you start deciding on things like, are we going to test some stuff? Are we going to just do? And if it's a just do, that's a different path than if we're going to test things. So it just goes from this all the way up top and it keeps getting smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. Until at the end, you actually find yourself working on a specific problem that you want to solve and that the company should solve. And we also tie in the metrics to make sure we understand what success of solving that problem looks like. So like, I know I gave you a lot, but that's me trying to make it as simple as possible. The need for the need for focus and not being distracted by, you know, it's just all around you, isn't it? I'd say that's very easy to get distracted. It takes a lot of focus. And just earlier on, you were talking about the number of people you speak to, the the research that you do, maybe give us a little bit of an insight into the sort of research that goes on. Oh, the research is amazing. I mean, you would think I'm on the research team, how much I speak highly of them and how much I value them. It's I think the worst thing I could do as a product designer is sit here in Silicon Valley with the fastest internet and the fastest computer and think I'm going to come up with all the problems. I mean, come up with the solutions for all the problems our customers have without ever really talking to our customers. I feel like that's a little because you don't know me. So how you want to solve my problems? And that's the part that research bridges for us. It helps us get access to our customers. So right now for for a a product I'm working on, we just met with a couple of users from the United States. We're meeting with some more from Canada and then we're going to do another round of U.S. and another round of Canada. And the reason we love that is it allows us to test certain things here from the customers before we even put the time in to building this or investing in this because what happens if you don't talk to your customers and you build this? It's the wrong solution. It's the wrong problem. And now you roll it out. Nobody likes it. Nobody understands what's going on. You got to roll it back. You take a brand hit because you're in the media. So we avoid all of that by putting so much time into research, whether it's quantitative research, which is another project I'm working on now where we're generating some questions and some images as some prototypes that we're going to send to about 12,000 customers to get some feedback from them on what they think before we even move forward with it. Versus another one that I'm doing right now is we're actually showing them actual screens before we release it to the public to see if there's any last little bit of tweaks that we need to do. So we do research all across the world. We try to hear from as many people as possible. And our research team is just very, very, very, very thorough. They're amazing. We do these qualitative or these quantitative surveys and then they take the data afterwards and they put it into this amazing report that they share with the whole company. And then as the product team, we can use that data and those results to see do you need to make any edits, make any changes to anything that we're working on or has this research actually validated everything that we thought and we're ready to go. So a ton of research all day global. I mean, some days I have meetings from six o'clock in the morning to nine o'clock at night because depending on where people are like right now it's only 820 here, six o'clock in South Africa. It's about four in Europe. So how do you plan all of these logistical meetings and things like that as well as why the research team is so amazing and they just, they really help us, I think put out the best products we can because we heard from the customer and we're solving the customer's problem, not just what we think. I'm so interested in that. My background is market research and it was fascinating in the first few months of lockdown, seeing how everyone adapted to online focus groups and it really was, really was an interesting period of time when everybody who used to go door to door had to suddenly find new ways, new ways to do it. So I find that. And it's great. I mean, it's great when you think of, it gives us now this access where prior to the pandemic, we actually would have to fly to India to do the research or fly to Brazil or fly to Europe. We're now to lose, I mean, I want to go to Brazil and India and stuff like that. When you think of the efficiency of now, we can stay where we are and work with our cross-functional and our international partners to schedule all of these research calls and quantitative surveys. We can hear from people everywhere. I mean, Australia versus New Zealand, two completely different people too. Even though they're so close, when you talk to somebody from Australia and somebody from New Zealand, they think about Netflix completely different. They use it different. They think about streaming differently. So you don't want to generalize them together because they're so close. You want to hear from them. And I love being able to hear from people all over the world. And that's why we're so confident. And we continue to build a platform that is the number one stream. That's fascinating. And in my other little sort of pet interest is behavioral science. And we're always talking about how important it is to recognize the culture of the people that you're dealing with. And it's absolutely huge. So important. I mean, I can't even tell you how important that is. And that's another reason why we work very closely with our content design partners because we are literally massaging this content every day to make sure that we're putting out something that resonates everywhere. There's times where we'll write something in English and we'll think it's perfect. And then when we translate it into Spanish, we're like, does it make as much sense for recently we were trying to come up with some copy. And the way we speak in English, it was great. But when one of our engineers, that's from Brazil and another engineer from Japan, they said the center structure doesn't line up the same way. So you can't just say it the way you would in English and these other languages. So we had to go back to the drawing board again because when we put out messaging, we wanted to land the same way everywhere. And that's how you build that inclusive culture people don't feel, oh, Netflix only speaks from a Western perspective. You feel Netflix speaks and presents itself from a global perspective. And that's fascinating as well. I know that localization in video games is just an enormous part of creating the right feel when everyone's taking part in it. And I haven't actually thought of localization in terms of Netflix as a platform. Localization is huge for us. I actually have a really cool story. So internally we built our own language. It's not a language we speak, but it's a design font that we built. And the reason we did that is we do have the backing capability, but this is too late if we use this route where I can deliver my designs to my engineers and they can build it. And then we have a backing system that then localizes all of the content into the different languages you wanna see. But that's way too late, because by that time, what if seven or eight of the languages are breaking the design? Now we gotta go back and redesign things. So to avoid that, what we did is we created a font that is pretty much our representation of what this could be like in some of the longer languages. Sometimes Spanish, sometimes French, sometimes German, sometimes Czech, sometimes Japanese. And what it does is it converts a basic English sentence. It adds about 20% more characters to it and it adds different accents and things like that. So it allows you to see what it could be like when you get to another language. So by having resources like that, that allows me to keep retweaking the designs and trying things until I get to a point where I'm really happy with this. And then now I can give this to the localization team who can then give it to engineering. By the time I get the sample back, I'm very, very close to where I wanna be opposed to, I haven't seen it in other languages. And now the first time I see it is when the engineer gives me a demo and at that moment you don't wanna have to make massive changes because it's too late, like they've already built it. So the pseudo code as well, pseudo loc is what we call it, it's like pseudo localization, brilliant tool. Has saved us, me as a designer personally has saved me a ton of time. And that's the type of stuff that we put in to make sure that we're always building the best experiences. So localization is critical for us. So fascinating. Now, somebody who is joining us today was asking about questions. So all of you who've joined us today, absolutely put your questions for funds in the chat box. And in the last sort of 10, 15 minutes, I'll bring you in so that you can put your questions. And I can see one popped up in Philip. I'll come to you in a little minutes, Philip. So just before we go to the questions, very sort of general approach, but I know I've heard you talking before about good versus bad UX. And I'm a sucker for always finding new pages that I think, oh, I wonder what they think of that. So I know in our design UX course, you talk about the classic Google page. And sometimes you need people to point this out to you to get it gone. It's so obvious, but... It's the number one website. That's the number one website of all time, if you think about it. And I'm not even saying after the search page, I'm saying just the landing page. It is so efficient. And that's why I say it's great UX. You can't even really get confused or distracted. The only time you can get distracted is if you look at the doodle. And even the doodle is amazing because even though that UI is so simple and so clean, look at the power of that Google block at the top. They've now opened that up to students to come up with Google doodle. They opened it up to celebrate different communities for holidays. So the only thing you can edit is that little box. And other than that, you can search. Why I say that's good UX is, even though the Google doodle stuff is cool, I didn't come there for that. I came to search. So when I want to search, I'm not confused. I'm not. They didn't slide an ad in. I didn't want to type an ad. And now I'm buying some sneakers or I wanted to type in something and I got rerouted somewhere else. You get their simple text field. I type in what I want. They give me the results that I want. I think that is great UX because you solved my problem. I wanted to search for something and you made it easy. I think bad UX is when you put too much on the page. It's overwhelming. You just don't even do what they came to do anymore. Now there's somewhere else or you kind of have trickery dark patterns where, oh, I thought it was this and now I'm here and then this and then this and this and this and this and this and it's like, wait a minute, did you trick me? And sometimes I know we've all had those experiences where you've used the platform. You're like, I feel like I just got tricked. I'm not with that. Like I'm not with tricking somebody to get where I need them to go. I'm with let's figure out the problem. Let's come up with a solution. Let's keep refining it and get the person the information that they need so that they'll come back again. They'll be happy to tell other people about it. So I think the Google search page is an amazing example of great UX. And I think any website that overwhelms and misleads and has dark patterns is bad UX. And ultimately people won't come back to an experience like that. Yeah, it fascinates me that people who aren't trained such as myself will constantly have these conversations where you'd be, oh, so on this site, it was so clunky. And you can see it, it's there and you're not even trained. A lot of people whom we know who are copywriters they just seem to enjoy sharing, you know, good copy. Yeah, is this something that you sort of take pleasure in sort of sharing good pages to learn from or understand the results or, you know, bad ones? Yes, well, it's changed because of what I'm focused on now. When I first, yes, I always look for inspiration. I love seeing other designers and other teams that have come up with amazing experiences. So I love that. But I can't always use that in what we're doing at Netflix. We have a very strict design style and theme. So it's not always about creativity with us. Sometimes it's about just being efficient and clear messaging and getting people through whatever experience you wanna get them through. But with that said, do I have a page full of inspiration? Of course, I wanna see how is Disney communicating to their customers? How is Amazon communicating? How is a pharma company communicating? How is a sneaker company? How is a eBay, all these different companies not to ever copy to just see because you respect those companies and you know they must have put some thought and some energy behind it. So if they've rolled this out to their customers, you just wanna put some time and thinking about well, why did they roll this out? What's the strong points of this? What's the parts that I don't like? And now can I use this information in what I'm designing anyway? And I mean, I think looking at the market is really smart but it's never from a competitive perspective. I don't look at Disney to see how can we beat Disney? How can we be better than HBO? It's what can we learn from their experiences? And to be honest with you, a lot of our streaming competitors copy us. So I don't need to go back to the other seat what we already did. We already did that. The highest form of flattery, I think they say it is. I'm gonna say anything about any brand. I'm just gonna say Netflix definitely pioneered the UI and UX for streaming. And we've talked about localization and you've talked, you touched on sort of fonts and things like that. But obviously the whole bigger subject of branding, the identity of Netflix, maintaining that brand identity is obviously a huge subject. Super. And it's, I mean, it's just so hard to try to always get it right. But what we do is, that's why we have these amazing cross-functioning teams and we have the UXDs qualitative research so we can reach out to people and understand from a small sample size, the market doesn't like this. So if this small group doesn't like it, it's probably a good chance the bigger market won't. So why learn from the bigger market when you can learn from the small one? And there's been many times I've done, this is another great story that I'd like to tell. It was a project that we're working on, huge project, billion dollar impact. And we thought internally that we had it figured out. And when we went to qualitative research, every single participant that we spoke to, he did not like it. We were listening in the back room, like, this is bad as it sounds. I can't be this bad. By the time we got to like the third day of research, we all huddled up and was like, we might wanna actually revamp this whole thing. That's how confused people were. That's how much people did not like it. And that's how much we value the brand where we thought if we kept forward with this idea that we were currently pitching, we thought that it would have such a negative impact that we completely just went all the way back to square one. We couldn't believe you were this far into the process and had it all the way back to square one, but that's why research is so important because it allows you to learn from a smaller group as opposed to from the bigger market. And when you learn from the bigger market, it might be too late to make any edits after that. So we take brand very serious. There's a brand team that we work with for visuals to make sure that we're not putting out things that don't align with the brand. The content team has their own principles that they go by. So each team also has their own principles and values that they design and build by and that allows us all to kind of stay in line to understand that the Netflix brand is super important and you should never talk about that. Now of course Netflix is such a big brand and as we said, a platform just everybody's familiar with but for anybody maybe who's on the call today who's in a smaller company or wanting to build a platform, is there some advice you give in terms of a process that you use or things people should look out for? That's a good question, but it's also a question that has a ton of different answers to it. So from a smaller company, you should always no matter what your position is in a company, you should understand the vision of the company and the mission statement of the company and you should make sure you're aligned with that. That's like first step one, because if not, I don't know how dedicated or passionate you're gonna be about what you're working on, right? But once you get past that point now, you know if you and I, Louise, we have a company that we sell mugs like this, we need to be in sync to make sure that we're selling as many mugs as possible. What does that mean? The same thing I just said for Netflix, we're understanding who wants mugs, we're understanding what kind of mugs they want, we're understanding who doesn't like mugs, we're understanding why they don't like mugs and we also are understanding what makes a great mug to what user. So we're still doing the same research, maybe you don't have global people participating, maybe you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on each one, but you still fundamentally respect the research part. So I think that's the thing is you look at these bigger companies, the Metas, the Apples, the Netflix, the Googles, but you look at them and you try to see what can you take away from what they're doing that works for your situation. Even if you're a one woman design agency, you can still learn a lot from these bigger organizations that will help you figure out your process. Every org has a different process. Coursera was nothing like Netflix and Coursera was nothing like Comcast, but you know what I was able to do? I was able to pull out all of the positives and negatives that I think I needed to understand to be able to continue to grow in my career. And I think that's the same thing with this question. Figure out what your main goal, what the success look like for your team, for your company, for your user, and then work backwards to figure out how to get all the way to step one and in between step one and that is all of the things that you need to do, which will be research, which will be competitive analysis, which will be testing, which will be talking to customers, getting prototypes out there. So I don't think there's one exact answer. I think it's more about being in tune with your user and understanding from the business side what the success look like. And I think that's where I am as in my career, I no longer only care about the visual or artifacts I create. I care about those and I care about it's my user happy and then I care about am I making money for Netflix? Am I really doing my job? Which I think my job is not just designing things. I think it's, I know it's, it's converting users. It's converting our subscribers. It's keeping people on the platform. It's increasing retention and how do you do that? That's going to vary depending on the company that you're at. But at the end of the day, keeping somebody on your platform is keeping somebody on your platform. Maybe you'll do it in different ways, but the end result is keeping them there. So you can do that type of stuff as a smaller company. Stay focused but understand the business side, understand the user side. And then if you see any small samples or ideas from bigger companies, try to mimic it. And I understand everybody doesn't have the same budgets we have and stuff like that, but where there's a will, there's a way. That's really great advice and much of it is very, is the core tenets of running a business. So that was great to hear from you. Now, Philips asked a very good question. And if you would like, Philip, you can put the question to Fonz yourself if you would like to unmute yourself or I can ask a question. Come on down, Philips. Come on down. Good afternoon. Nice to meet you, Fonz. Thanks, Lise. Yeah, I guess it's in the chat, but I was really curious, like your world sounds like you make simplicity out of chaos. I don't know how you do it, but I thought my agency was a complicated company. Like, where do you find the innovation? Like, you're so passionate. Like, I imagine that it's difficult to find. I'm almost like that quiet space to do your best work amongst all that data and information and relationships that you go in the communication that you said you're so important to you. I was curious about that. And also, I'm in a bit more of a subtopic, really interested in, you know, how you maybe, I don't know, I hate the word, globalized, but it's something that an author of a UX book used where they talk about persuasion tactics and color psychology in different countries and things. So two different questions. And the other thing I just wanted to say, nice Codepaxi cap. Do good, Phil. Always do good, man. Thanks so much, Philips. Great question. Pleasure. Great questions. I love what I do, man. So where do I find the time? Honestly, I don't know. It varies. I'm a father, my husband, I'm an entrepreneur, I love my job, I do public speaking. So I just put a lot into my days to be honest with you, but I'm very, I just have my priorities to get, Philip. That's what I'm gonna say. But I'm mature in my career. So that's how I understand what my priorities are. I make time for my family, but I communicate with my family so they understand how much work I have on my plate. So if daddy's gone for a couple hours or I have to travel, they understand that. So there's no real easy answer to that because there's ebbs and flows. Some days, like today, I have like 10 meetings. Today is just a 10 meeting day. There's nothing I can really do about that, but I don't have 10 meetings tomorrow. So tomorrow I only have two meetings and I'll use that free time to now whether I need to do anything personal, whether I just wanna go for a walk. However, I wanna spend that time for myself is what I always make sure I do. And sometimes I have to go multiple days or multiple weeks where work is intense and I might not really get that time that I want, but I always make sure that eventually I'm gonna get there and the Netflix has a great culture of supporting that where we have a very tight knit design or so if it says, Philip, you're like, man, I'm busy. I gotta go out of town. I just need a second. All you do is talk to your design partner. Somebody will step in to help to make sure that you have enough time to do what you need to do because it is a lot of responsibility. And if you don't take that time, you can burn out. So it just depends on, but for me personally, I just love it. So like now I'm up early and I'll get up early for a chat. I'll stay up late for a chat. I'll work on a Saturday. I work on a Sunday. But once again, that's because I'm passionate about what I do. Don't get me wrong. I like getting paid every two weeks, but I don't work for the money. I work for the love. And when you work for the love, you won't, once again, where there's a will, there's a way. You'll make a way for something like that. So at your agency, y'all can think of that stuff the same way. We try to keep our meetings a little light on Fridays if possible. So you can kind of get caught up and maybe prepare for the next week. And we also make sure every meeting has to have an agenda because we don't want people coming to meetings that they don't need to be. So there's a lot of little small things we do as well to make sure that people don't just become superly overwhelmed with just trying to, like you said, stay innovative and stay passionate, but also innovation at Netflix is a little different than other companies. Innovation at Netflix is moving the needle on revenue, moving the needle on subscribers. That might be, hey, you know what? Instead of the button being over here, let's just move it over here. To some people, that's not, it's not innovative. Like you just move the button over. That button move might equate to like $25 million. So the innovation at Netflix is a little different than when you think of other companies. And I had to learn that because when I came in the door, I just wanted to be the best ever. And my whole team was like, slow down, buddy. Got a lot to learn and understand what's going on here. So with that, I now know innovation sometimes may be the best, greatest idea ever. Or sometimes innovation may be, let's just remove this from the experience because it's not really helping our users. First question. Second question. We don't really use the color based off of like tactics like that. Because remember, we have this one universal brand that we want people to more equate with than we do. When you go here, you get this experience. When you go there, you get that experiences, which is why if you look at television, web, iOS, Android, exact same experience as close as possible because that's the brand that we would rather build as opposed to, you should watch Netflix on TV because it's the best experience or you should watch on the mobile because it's the best experience. We're like, no, you should watch it on any platform, anywhere, anytime because it's an equal experience. And I think that's the same thing I was saying earlier about that's how we work with our customers. We do have one piece I want to add is we have a very diverse workforce. So when we're in these meetings and we're presenting our work and we're presenting these suggestions, we have different people from different communities that could speak of if something is not resonating well. Like I said earlier, we wrote some stuff and when we translated into Spanish and to Japanese we was like, this is not working well for us. So let's go back to the platform as opposed to let's try to write something that works specifically for Spanish or specifically for Japanese it's like too big of a target market to try to be specific like that. So we try to be as focused in general as possible but I do understand what you're saying as far as those little smaller tactics could they possibly work in places? We just have too many customers. Like I said, we're in 190 countries. So to try to start doing things for one specific as a snowball that will end up probably backfiring. Thank you. Thanks so much, Phillip. That really was a great question. That was a great double question. You get two points for that. Thank you, Phillip, for joining us. What do you say to young people wanting to start out in this particular career? Is there a sort of a standard bit of guidance you like to give people? Yeah, I get access question a lot and I think it depends on where the person is and I think my answer has grown over the years. But what I want to say is I want people to be passionate about this. I don't want you to just jump into this because it's the hottest new job or it's trendy or your friends is doing. That's not enough. Once again, I want you to become a designer or a product designer because you want to solve problems. That's the first thing. If you're not cool with solving problems, don't become a designer because it's going to show eventually that you're not in this for the right reasons. If you've come to the conclusion that you'd like solving problems for users, I now want you to take this next question and say, well, what kind of problems do you want to solve? What kind of user do you want to interact with? What kind of company industry do you want to be in where somebody could say, this is great because I just had this conversation. The way I think now is if I meet a younger designer and they say, I want to be in design, I say, and do what? And they're like, I don't know. I'm like, see, that's the first problem that we have. That's the problem that we have because what if I told you, I think you should go down a little bit. And I think you should start learning how to use Figma. But you really wanted to be a UX researcher. You should know Figma, but is Figma the best first starting point for somebody who wants to be a UX researcher? I don't think so. So I want people to have a better understanding of what they want to do. And I tell a lot of people to just pull out your phone. Pull out your phone, look at your apps and see what's the number one app, like the one, two, three apps you use the most. Ask yourself, why do you use these apps so much? And then ask yourself, could you make this experience better? And what would you change? And would you want to work at that company? This is like five easy questions you could ask yourself that would completely help direct you in the right way for your career. Because you can say, the number one app on my phone is Gmail. And it's like, why? You like communication? Okay, well, if you like communication, do you want to work at Google or do you just want to work in communication in general? Because there's a ton of email clients out there. So do you want to work at Google or do you just want to work in communication? And now if you want to work in communication, you want to work in SMS as well, but you only want to work in email. So if a beginning designer can take a little bit of time to focus on themselves like a product, the way you want to focus on other things as a product, you can ask these fundamental questions that you really need to help start your path. And then from there, you can say, you know what? I think I need to go to a platform like 42 courses and get some intro because I still don't really know what I want to do. Or you may be a little more advanced like Phillip and say, I already know what I want to do and I'm looking to get even more skilled in that area. I think everybody is path is so unique and individual, but we all need those beginning stages at the beginning, those beginning questions at the beginning to really make sure that you're starting off right. So all of that, like I hope you get it. I think yeah, I think that's really super advice. Like jump in the pool, but don't jump in it deep in yet. Like it's okay to jump in the baby pool and get familiar, how deep is the water? Is the water cool? Can you swim? Can you not swim? And then if you see that this is not enough for you keep going, but I think a lot of people run like they're one to a bootcamp, spend thousands of dollars, have their expectations not be realistic for the bootcamp. Didn't do the research to understand what the bootcamp was gonna teach or what the results were gonna be. So now there was a minute where a bunch of people were graduating bootcamps with a lot of debt and no next step. That's the worst case scenario to me. You just actually took two steps backwards with now you have more debt and you're not even more clear on where you wanna go. So I think it's less about trying to feel like you're being a designer and doing designing things and focusing on yourself and taking that time to really see his design for you. And if it is, now let's start that journey. And is it going back to school? Is it learning some tools? Is it finding a mentor? Who knows? It's great advice taking the time to look back at yourself rather than charging forward aimlessly. Because you can do that easy. Like you can easily go and roll in a program and spend 10, 15 thousand US dollars and get out of it and say, now what? And it's like, I don't know, tell me what's next. So I don't want that. Like I want people to really understand why they wanna get into design and then let's try to figure out your path after that. Okay, we have another question that's come up and Louise, please kindly ask this for me. So I'll read the question out from Syrac. Could you share your experience funds with internal communication with a team which might not completely agree with the idea, the solution or the design? And then you talked about communication. So maybe some tips on communicating with your team that work for you. For sure. So like I'll answer the second part first. When communicating with other teams, give enough context. If I'm not in your team, if I didn't help with get to this point, then don't expect me to understand everything. Make sure you're clear with your context so that I can start from the right place. And then be a good listener. Let explain what you need to say and then hear from the other team. And now y'all decide it's about compromise. It's about compromise. Engineering never wants to do what design does. Why? Not to be negative, because we have all these great, ambitious, amazing ideas. The engineers are the ones that have to build this. So they're like, do you need all of this or do you want all of this? And a lot of times there's a back and forth of, this is what we want to do. Why? Because, well, could you do this? Maybe, maybe not. And it's just back and forth, but because there's this deeper understanding as Netflixers that we are doing what is the best for the company, that's where both of us are coming from. So neither one of us are usually wrong. It's more of, we need to get understanding where both teams are coming from. We have different goals. We have different responsibilities. So you want to understand where another team is coming from, help them understand where you're coming from and then you come up with a compromise. I think I will compromise, I was just talking to one of my engineering managers yesterday in a one-on-one and he said that he thinks that's the part of reason why our team's relationship is so strong is because we compromise well. We'll suggest something. We include engineering early. So it's not, we're finished. Here engineers go build this. Hey, these are some ideas we have. What do you think about this idea? So by us building these things together, it feels more teamwork. There's better understanding. There's more alignment, which usually lessens the confusion. So you want to communicate early with people and you want to give that right context. You want to be a good listener and you want to know how to compromise. That's so great to hear you say to compromise because so often we admire people when they sort of stand their ground and yet that can be an obstruction rather than being able to move forward. That won't always work, Netflix. I'm not an engineer. I don't know the back end stuff. So why should I keep pushing on something where the expert is telling me, hey, Fonz, that's not going to work. Okay, cool. Does that mean I need to scrap the whole idea? Will some of it work? And usually they'll say, yes, some of it will work. Okay, so let's build on that. So we're timed just for one more question and there's a question here from Fidel. I don't know if you want to ask the question yourself. Fidel, you are very welcome to. If not, I can read it out for you. Are you still with us, Fidel? I'll just carry on and see if Fidel manages to unmute himself. So Fidel's question was, how would you advise a self-taught designer with no formal design education trying to get a job at a big company? Sounds like your life story there, Fonz. I mean, you got to have patience for them. If you knew how many jobs I got turned down from, if you knew how many last round I made it to and I'm waiting for the recruiter to call me to tell me I got the job and instead they call me, tell me they don't, you would be surprised, right? So it might not go as fast as you want. It might go as fast as you want, but you got to have patience with yourself, right? And you have to be honest about the expectations. Netflix is not gonna hire a junior designer because the responsibilities are too much, right? But I also helped Netflix launch an internship program. So maybe somebody who can't officially get on a Netflix check out the internship program, ask yourself, why do you want to be at a big company? It's like, what's the difference between if both companies are paying you a great salary, does it have to be at the big company? Is it just for the name? Everybody's trying to get on that company. So it's probably gonna be harder to get on at that company. But if you really want to get on at that company, then I'll give you two pieces of advice. One, you should probably meet somebody that's at that company so that you can start to learn from them, be a mentee to them, maybe find somebody to recruit her, start learning what it takes to get on at that company. And then second, I would go to every big company's website and I would always look at their jobs, available jobs and I would always compare my current skills to what the requirements for these positions that I want are and that helps me understand where am I at? If the job is requiring me to understand Figma and data scientists and I don't understand Figma or data scientists, the chances of me getting that job are not high, but I also know what I need to work on that. So I'm a go learn Figma, I'm a go learn data science and then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna apply to that job and I might get it. So it's more of a getting out there, meeting people from the community that may work at a big company like that to give you that inside information that you need. And then second, always staying abreast of the jobs that's available and comparing your skills to what the market is looking for. And if you don't have those skills, now you got some homework to do. Thank you so much for answering that Fonz. And we've come to the end of our session, the time has gone so fast. It's been a very intensive hour masterclass with you Fonz. I feel like we've just got so much super information that you've shared with us. So I really, really want to thank you for giving us your time today. It's been an honor to have the opportunity to talk to you. Thank you everybody who took the time out of their day to come and join us on this talk. And we hope that you will join us again. Thank you very much Fonz. And I'm LinkedIn, reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm here. Thank you, Louise. Thank you so much. Bye everybody.