 I'd like to introduce you to Mike Montero, Erika Hall and Peter Merrill. I think they need no introductions today, but they can present themselves if they like to. They're brilliant minds in our industry and I think they have a controversial topic to talk about today. Isn't that right Peter? Shall we speak now? Sure. Yeah, okay. Well, since this is the Voice of Design podcast now, I think Erika and Mike should kick it off. Okay, all right. Yes, welcome to the Voice of Design, the podcast which has been on a little bit of hiatus because of world events, but we're excited to be back and talking about important topics relevant to designers. Yeah, so that's what we're here to do, that other people might not be talking about enough. Such as? Such as user experience. Is it a thing? It's not a thing. Next. We are all here to undermine the premise of any conference we're invited to. That's what we do. I hear we're now just, the X stands for exploitation. That sounds great. Yes. Yes, there you go. There you go. I'm just going to be posting unionization links into the chat while you two talk. Is that okay? Yeah. Are they? No, we do have a global audience. Are your unionization links relevant to people around the world or is it focused on the United States? That's a really good point. Well, if for our Portuguese listeners, I would just encourage open revolution, which they're very good at. Yes. So I guess since Peter, you are notionally our guest in our podcast space, which is taking place in UX, LX, Bruno's convening space. My first question to you as one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path, Pour a Little Out, which was explicitly a user experience agency from the beginning, right? Yes. So why don't we start there? Why don't we go back? Back in time. And tell us what the idea was behind founding a user experience agency in 2001. 2001. So at the time, there were usability consultancies. I think Jacob had already started his consultant group. There was Creative Good that Mark Hurst started, and he might come up again, depending on where this conversation goes. But with Adaptive Path, we framed it as user experience. We had all worked in different aspects of not usability. Like none of us were user testers, right? Usability was user testing and usability engineering. And we all saw our work as designers, even though none of us had a formal design background. Jeff had been working at wire doing what we would call user experience design, web design, and writing about it with WebMonkey. Janice had been at Netscape and had led web design practices there. I had most recently been running design at Opinions. And I had taken classes on user-centered design and was all hopped up about that. And so when we launched Adaptive Path, it was with this idea of user experience. I'm trying to remember. Jesse had published the elements of user experience, the diagram, not the book. He had published the diagram by that point. So we saw user experience as kind of the new ground to stake out and to establish. With Adaptive Path, one of our founding principles was we wanted to advance the field of user experience. That was explicit in our, I don't think we ever said it publicly, but in our internal thinking. And so that's, you know, we were, and the idea being, you know, computers suck, technology sucks, all this stuff is poorly designed, it's pain in the ass to use. We want to help fix that because we're all going to be using it more and more every day. That was kind of the animating force behind Adaptive Path. Yeah. And I think this is interesting because weirdly, so the weird thing is I think you get to a certain point in life as we have in this business. And all of us have worked, it seems like worked at the same places, gone through the same organizations, hired each other for things. Yeah. I was trying to think of any friend I actually had that I had at no point had a transactional relationship with, in some capacity. Yeah, it got tricky. Our lawyer had to create a special form of our contract for when he was like both people's lawyers and stuff and couldn't really represent one of us. And so a funny thing about you and I, Peter, is that we did not cross paths, but you were at Clement Mock design, right? Before studio archetype by the time I got there. It was studio archetype. Okay, back in the late 90s, ancient history. And you, yeah, you were at studio archetype and then you left and I joined studio archetype right before it became part of sapient. And what I took away from that was not user experience. What I took away from that is that to do digital design, whatever we were doing, because Clement Mock was really engaged in a really what seems now is a super prescient in advanced way. Clement Mock was engaged in like design as a piece of business strategy, not just thinking about the user. And I think that I would say that would be, even though adaptive path definitely worked on the business side of things. Yes, I have one of those around here somewhere, too. I think an interesting distinction is that we came at it as like we're a design studio. And while our work was not totally dissimilar and some of your work might have even been more business strategy, you were explicitly user experience. Yeah, I mean, so I think the evolution of adaptive path is an interesting or has parallels with the evolution of user experience in some ways, right? Because when we started, we just wanted to do web user experience. We loved workflows and wireframes and site maps and that kind of stuff. Like that was exciting because that was new at the time. People weren't really doing it. And so that was what we got value in. But so often, clients would come to us with RFPs or whatever. And we would ask them, why do you want to do these things? And they almost never had a good answer. And so we we backed into strategy because we, you know, after our first couple of years, first few years, we saw so much of our work never get shipped. And we realized it never got shipped because it never had the right context. And so we backed into strategy because we needed to make sure that the context was right to support the design work that we were going to do. We didn't want to be strategists. We wanted to be designers. We just realized we needed to frame or be involved in framing the strategy such that the design was more likely to succeed. And I think that that was true for a kind of a swath of UX practice over those, you know, I was at an adaptive path from 2001 to 2011 for those 10 years. So we went from being web UX people to kind of web strategy in UX people to some form of strategic design consultancy by the time I left in 2011. We were doing a lot of like, what's the future of X, the future of commerce, the future of banking, those types of projects became more and more what we we were doing around the time I left in 2011. What did you think we were doing when we founded Mule? Mike? Me? Yeah. Oh, God. You just didn't want to have a boss, right? I mean, kind of. I mean, part of it was creating a space. Part of it was was creating a space where we could choose what we were going to work on. And I mean, that was that that had been frustrating me working for other people was, you know, finding myself working on projects that I didn't want to be responsible for. Like, I don't want to help this be in the world. So Mule was about that a lot of it. The sound of San Francisco rolling behind you. Got a firetruck. And also, I thought the word design and the role of designers was getting really short changed in this new digital world because it was it was designed by the people who got there first. And those people were engineers. And I mean, they made sense that they got there first. And at some point, they begrudgingly needed these people called designers. But it was defined in but the idea of a digital designer was defined by engineers. So it's like other people bring in some people to make this shit pretty. And what really scared me was that designers were beginning to accept that definition of who we were. And I really wanted to remind those folks who we actually are and what we actually do. And for me, like, you know, stuff like strategies and all of that, that's all included in designing things. Because designing things is, you know, figuring out how something works and what it achieves and how it affects. And all of that is involved in this big word of design. I think we've got there. I think we all kind of understand that now, which is great. It's funny because one of the themes of the podcast that Jesse and I have been doing this past year is charting what feels like a bifurcation in that vision. I think there are many of us who still are practicing that big D design that you're talking about, Mike, and recognizing all the ways that design and design practices can hopefully positively affect the businesses we work with. But there's this other strain that Jesse's been sensitive to. I think he's been engaging a lot with more like junior designers, people who are starting in the industry where, you know, you were talking about engineers just want designers to make it pretty. It feels like that's in this other strain that's actually gotten worse over time as these companies have gotten larger and they've gotten more and more designers. Those designers are simply turning cranks on asset production. And there's this weird bifurcation of design, sometimes in the same organization, but definitely as an industry. I mean, as the industry's grown, we've kind of run out of people to throw at it. So we've developed these process. We've developed methodologies where pretty much anybody can be anybody with a little bit of knowledge about a thing can be plugged into that slot. And we can put them in that slot and use them for eight months until they, you know, exhaust them and then toss them out and plug another one in. Right, right. It's very Charlie Chaplin modern times. It really is. That's the, you know, from one of the silent films that was made in 2001 when we founded our agencies. That's not true. But movies were still in, were all in black and white in 2001 still. So, you know, in one of one of the animating themes that I think that is happening in a dialogue going on right now is, is this kind of taking stock of where we are with user experience. And I'm curious as to your take on it. I wrote something in response to what I saw going on, right? So you had Mark Hurst published a thing about user exploitation, right? And his, his kind of sadness over what he saw as kind of the evolution of user experience from the kind of positive activity of helping companies better understand people to serve them to essentially what we see in most social media platforms where it's how do I gamify human behavior to extract capital on the podcast. Jesse and I did, he talked about the dream of UX and was it always a dream? Is it this figment? Were we right to even have this dream? I reflected on it on a post where I, I said we're waking up from the dream of UX. Like maybe it was a dream and we're waking up and now we're embracing the reality like UX isn't interesting. 20 years ago UX was interesting. Now a friend of mine, Joe Lementia put it on a slack I'm on. He's like, UX is furniture. It's just there. We just do it because that's what you do in the same way that you do marketing and sales and other things you do UX. And so it's not special the way it was, which is both good and bad, right? It's, it's great that it's accepted, but it's bad. I think because some of the points you were making earlier, it's now just like interchangeable. What were you going to say, Mike? We're, we're old enough that we were there at the beginning. So, and that was exciting to me because we were kind of Norman might disagree, but well, God, you almost got me to say something terrible. F, well, F J and D. Did you almost, did you almost go there? Okay. We were there close enough to the beginning. We were kind of, we were helping to define this shit. Like, you know, I don't have a degree in this shit. Do you have a degree? You're a fine artist, right? Yeah. I mean, those things didn't exist when we came into this industry. So we were all like a bunch of misfits coming into this, this new frontier of a thing helping to define it, figuring out how it went. And that was all very exciting because I love shit like that. And like any industry, it matures. And I think that's where we are now. It's matured and right, which is, you know, very good and also not as interesting to folks like Goss, I think, or these folks like me, who's like, yeah, okay, this is boring now. Okay. Good luck Salesforce. I'm going to see what's new to saying that. But no, I mean, this is, this is what this is a cycle. Industries show up. They much and you know, they're interesting to some people than they mature and they're interesting to another group of people. It's like people who build companies and people who run companies. Yeah. I'd say that the one of the big differences is I would say personally, I never bought into UX as a concept. Like, I saw that I saw the things that you were the ideas that you were advancing at Adaptive Path, I thought were were important, but I always thought that framing was limited because we were all working on digital systems design. And I felt that the framing of UX was a way to kind of do this hygienic carve out where you didn't have to worry about the whole system. And I think that framing and I won't put this on you because I think I think the work at Adaptive Path was in general principled, right? The choice of clients and things and the things the values you advocated for were good values that I would say people have used that framing to kind of pretend like other participants or people influenced by these systems, what in business are called externalities? It was a way to ignore those, right? It was a way to say, oh, if I'm a designer and I'm focused on the user, then I am the virtuous part of the business as opposed to I'm one part of the business and I can't separate myself out from how we make money, from how we treat employees, from how we treat contractors, from where things are manufactured. And these are things that I think service design starts to point at. But I always felt that UX was a way to do that sort of like artificial conceptual barrier that made people feel better about themselves than they deserve to. Well, you know, in 2005, if I had time, I could pull up an early keynote deck from Adaptive Path. I was going to say, I have a parchment, I have a scroll. No, well, in 2005, we were talking about service design. We had actually just hired Dan Saffer, who had been at CMU and had studied with Shelly Evans, and his head filled with notions of service design. And he looked at the work we were doing and he's like, you're calling it UX, but this is service design. And the heart of it, and I think this gets to the book on the right there, Erica, the heart of it is research. The moment you start actually engaging the people on the other end of these services offerings, whatever you want to call them, and you appreciate the messiness of the lives they lead, you realize as you're saying that UX frame is constraining, it's insufficient. And so for my last 10 years, we were trying to figure out how to become a service design consultancy, except no embots, at least in the United States. Not in America, weirdly in Europe. Yeah. So you can do it, you know, live work is also 20 years old this year, I believe, right? And they've, I don't know how thriving their practice is, but they've sustained for 20 years or meld studios in Australia. I mean, there's service design companies elsewhere. I don't know if there is one in the United States fjord was kind of when they got acquired. I don't think there's a dedicated services. Oh, Patrick Waddlebaum in harmonic is the only one I can think of. And there may be eight people in Atlanta. Like we just haven't developed a market for thinking systemic for design to be allowed to approach problems systemically in American businesses. Why is that? I have a glib but hopefully, probably unfortunately accurate answer, which is how it's bought. A budget search siloed by departments and these the systems types of stuff that Eric is talking about crosses departments. And so unless if you're being brought in by the CEO, anyone who has whatever budgetary authority you're engaging just doesn't have the ability what they could pay a million dollars for a service design effort, but they wouldn't because it's going to benefit people that aren't in their department. And so why would they do that with the limited funds they have? Yeah, I remember, you know, first going to Europe when I was, you know, doing the talking thing and meeting all these people and they were all service designers. I'm like, what the hell is that? And they'd explain that makes a lot of sense. Why don't we have that service design and bidets? We need to get those over here. And I think the other so the second difference that is a little less glib is both Europe and then talking to friends in Australia who do service design work, about half their business comes from public public institutions, the government typically. And in the United States, our public institutions don't buy design. Well, we just recently got a government. So maybe that'll change. Hopefully, we'll see, we'll see what changes. But even under Obama, I mean, things were better, but it's not like you saw all this really interesting public service design going on to help people access healthcare to help people improve their communities or the kinds of things that service design in Europe and Australia, they're working on how do we make life better for citizenry? And that's just not something that Americans think about. There was a, I mean, the US Digital Services was beginning to go down that path until they got kneecapped. It pains me to think of where they might be right now if they hadn't lost the last four years. True. But with both USDS and 18F, those are still, they exist not because of design, they exist because they're trying to save costs of technology. And the people running it understand how design helps manage technical spend. But it's not about citizen experience. It's about healthcare.gov tanked. And we can't let that kind of thing ever happen again. Right. The theme of this podcast has now been, let's talk about how dysfunctional American design is to a group of Europeans. Well, do you want to steer us in a new direction? They have to let me in. If I want to go back, they have to let me in. That's true. That's true. Well, yeah, I don't know what the pandemic rules, the border rules are at this time. I mean, it's tricky because I think what you said, like what you framed as a glib answer, Peter, I think is the right answer, which is how something is purchased is incredibly important, like in terms of defining how that service is provided. So I mean, that's important. I feel like, and this is something that when I was on your podcast with Jesse, this is what I, what is interesting to me and what I talk about a lot is the extent to which designers, however they define themselves, designers who are working on these digital systems that are becoming more and more, not just like interwoven with the business or the government of the organization, but substantively are in digital terms, that business, that organization, since so much of life, especially now is rendered on the internet. Designers don't learn enough about business as part of their design education. And I think, I don't think they learn anything, do they? Like anything. Yes, not even, not even a little, they learn nothing. They learn this set of like, like fictional principles, and it's, it's like learning a mythology. It's like, it's like learning physics from, you know, Ovid's metamorphosis and then being released into the real world. And, and I think that's, that puts everybody at a huge disadvantage for a couple of reasons. One, like designers think like, oh, I'm inherently because I care about the users because I want to empathize with the users. My work is somehow inherently good, even if I'm working for an organization that makes its money in what we might call a an ethically suspect way. Well, I don't work at that department. I don't work at that department. Yeah, I've had conversations with people with like, oh, we're better, we're somehow better than the rest of the business. And that actually having that attitude makes it less likely that you're able to influence, to actually influence people. And so what I end up in my research, like sort of training consulting practice is often like helping a lot of confused designers and researchers, you know, put on the they live glasses or see the matrix or whatever and realize like, oh, this is why you haven't been able to have influence because the way influence and design choices work in an organization is fundamentally much different than the mental model of your practice that you've been handed in an environment, which is not that. Right, right, right. So, you know, when you were on our show, you use the phrase, the business model is the new grid, which is a great meme and possibly the title of a book. And it reflects this, what you're talking about in terms of instead of designers worrying about snapping to a grid, they need to worry about snapping to their business model and how they might be able to influence and impact the business model. Something else though that's less specific about business model, but about business is one of the things that I learned. One of the things I didn't understand until I became a VP, there's this thing, you ever watched The Simpsons and Homer becomes an executive and he gets access to the executive washroom and there's like the string quartet and the birds and all that kind of stuff. What's sad is that there's a there's truth to that that like when you cross this threshold from director to VP in many organizations, things become apparent to you that you just had no idea about and that they didn't tell you. And one of them when I became a VP, I had to start working with the finance folks, the CFO's department and planning budgets and headcounts for my organization. And one of the things I learned is the degree to which companies are structured by how they code their finances, right? So, you know, is it, do they code it by department? Do they code it by project, etc. etc. There is a information architecture, a taxonomy of how budget is considered in an organization by the finance group that is usually fairly arbitrary, maybe based on an org model and not much else. And that financial taxonomy runs the company. It is the gears that are what's turning and running the company. And if you try to do something that doesn't align with those gears, it just gets like Charlie Chaplin in the machine. It just gets ground down. And so you have to be aware if you're going to be a successful and effective design leader, how to, if you can't change those things, which often, you know, especially once you first realize that they're in place, it takes a while to change it, you have to learn how to how to work with those gears in order to get the results you want, which many designers just don't even know is a thing. Like, it's just like, how did I just thought I just make good stuff and we ship it and we're done. And so uncovering that, did you just pull a book from behind you? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I've got a citation. I've got an interesting thing. So one of the most like, my cue of things that I want to write is like so long. And then I have, because I still like to do consulting projects and I get involved in my work and I'm like, oh, but I should write, but I'm working with all stuff. But one of the things that we observe in our consulting work that I haven't seen anybody else talk about that was such a strong pattern is that if the client team, if the had if the leadership of the client team, not like the project manager logistic stuff, but the actual like, you know, the project champions or the people on the core team, if there was a dyad, and we saw this in different types of organizations that consisted of depending on the side of the organization, like that VP or above executive level, if there was one representative in the core team that was VP or above CEO, something like that. And then there was one director level. And if they were working in partnership to lead the project from their company side, that project went well in a way that wasn't true in other projects, because for exactly that reason, because the VP could manage up and have the trust of the leadership, the director knew what was going on across the organization and could talk to people like in the so-called trenches and have their trust. And then if they were working and strategizing to say, okay, I need to deliver this message up, I need to have this decision made up here. And the other person could do the like, I need the rank and file to buy into this, they could do that. And so there's a large like, digital transformation project, which was something we worked on a lot by but not by that name, because everything was a design project. If that diet was in place, that project had such a higher chance of succeeding in genuinely influencing the organization. And we were actually in, with at least one client, we were in meetings that like the director level person could not go to, where we met with the CEO and we would be in those conversations. Yeah. And the director level person knew the lay of the land and they were like, yeah, they were like, Oh, I can't go in that room with you. It was weird. And then we'd come back and tell them what happened in that room. But there really was that so we have experienced as coming in from the outside where it's like, we're from the outside, we're not part of your hierarchy, we can talk to anyone in your company from top to bottom across. But people on the client team were variously allowed into certain rooms, depending on that. So I definitely right. Well, and I am there is a deep truth to what you were saying that I have I have witnessed not not quite in that way. But I so I think a lot about organizational levels. It's one of my work, one of the I don't know, I don't I have myself you turned off. So whichever one I'm pointing whichever fingers pointing at the book, because I think a lot about or I think because I'm thinking because I'm thinking a lot about organizations. I think a lot about what are the delineations? How do you distinguish a manager from a director and a director from a VP? And one of the things that happens when you go from like senior director to VP senior directors, you're right, tend to work out and down, they're responsible for a team doing work and delivery. So once you cross VP, you're to now you're too far away from delivery. So you're working out and up, you're managing the relationships with executives and stakeholders and all that kind of stuff. And there's this pivot point. And I haven't thought about it with what happens if you get these people, one of each working together, you basically get now a 360 view that neither one of them has access to before then, or or a heart. Yes. No, it's magic. Like having that dyad on a major project is because we saw this. Were you just Doug Henning me there, Mike? Was that a Doug Henning rainbow of magic? Magic. Yeah. And it's so many of these things that are observable phenomena that no designer learns about until you've like done enough weird stuff with different organizations. And I'd say the other thing that I think came up possibly, I don't know if on the podcast, but it's come up in previous conversations, that when design goes in house, because I think we don't have time for like the three hours of the future of consulting in the future of UX. When design goes in house, it's a different practice. Like we we talked about this at like the very beginning of our conversation with like all of a sudden you're turning stuff out. But even if you're like in a production design role, right? If you're in like a leadership role, your work in an organization is constrained. The questions you can ask my favorite topic is constrained because you're internal. So the practice totally changes. Oh, so the other book that's super good, the design way, which is like the philosophy of design, presumed, sorry. I'm sorry, the authors are Harold Nelson and Eric Stolterman. This is a good sort of the conceptual underpinnings of design. It's really, it's a philosophy book about design. But they presume a designer-client relationship. And I'd say so. Sorry, that's just so archaic. I know. But I'd say like many of the concepts that designers use come from that sort of base assumption that people don't really talk about. And there's an assumption that just because you're making the same sorts of deliverables, that you're doing the same thing in house as you are in a consultancy. And I would say untrue. Design changes when you're a department in the organization. It's a whole different practice. Even if it looks to the outside observer, like you're baking the same things or making the same type of choices, the practice is very different. That's true. And when I was looking up, I was trying to think because there are advantages and disadvantages to both. I left consulting. I left adaptive path because I found that agency-client relationship a barrier to the kind of work I wanted to see getting done. Because you hand off something to the client. And then when it's finally shipped, it doesn't look anything like what you handed them. And you realize there were a thousand little decisions being made. Probably all with the best intentions, but without someone with the vision to guide those decisions towards the design outcome. So I'm like, I'm going to go in-house so I can be the steward and make sure that when those little decisions are being made, we're course-correcting towards the vision, not letting it kind of go off track. And for that work? Yes. Yeah. No. I, when I was a group on in particular, I was able to see things through that wouldn't have happened if I was external. And so there's a team-building camaraderie that you get and a credibility that you get by being in-house. I mean, I can tell you, I'm sure you know about this, right? But in-house people, not just designers, but in-house people have a strange relationship with their external partners because they're not on the team. They get to just leave after six months. And these are the folks that we're going to be sticking around doing the work. And so you get this credibility as a designer when you're embedded in the team, but you're right. You kind of lose some important perspective. And depending on the company, you might lose access or that ability to ask certain questions that for whatever reason, only external people have that opportunity for. So I guess it's a matter of learning how to employ and deploy which relationship win, depending on what your goal is, what it is you're trying to achieve. Yeah. And I think something that's true of us, and I think it has a lot to do with our very, the way that we chose clients and the way that we chose projects, our rate of shipping, like our rate of seeing something exist out in the world that you could draw a linebacked was very high, very, very high. We were at like 80% like what we've done saw the light of day, which I felt was very unusual among agencies. And I think, but I think that had a lot to do with the type of projects we picked and why we picked certain projects. Did you have a sense of what, what were some criteria that were clues that you would be successful, that what you would deliver would be produced? One, it had to be critical to the success of the organization. That was one of our client criteria. One of our key is that it couldn't be, oh, we've got budget, we want to try a thing, something like that. Clients had to come to us and say, if this project doesn't work out, I don't know about the future of our business, I don't know about the future of the department, something like that. So if they had the fear when they came to us and they're like, you better not set this up, that project would launch because it would get the attention and the resources. And we didn't work, we never chased after big brands and we never chased after like Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies because the couple of times we got involved in that, a lot of times we'd find out we were one of 70 parallel initiatives and that wasn't interesting, right? It's not interesting to do something, oh, and the shiny, the sort of big brand stuff, those people were always internally just a heinous toxic shit show. So we would find people were like, oh, you're trying to do, that's a technical term, you're trying to do something in the world that we think is good and useful, not just like we could let nonprofits but not necessarily. And this project is important to your organization in some like make or break kind of way. And then it didn't matter how big the organization was, it mattered that they could afford us, right? But given those criteria and I think those, because we stayed consciously small and stayed focused, we were able to have those criteria. And if a client met those criteria, the chance of it launching were very high. So, and I don't know if we have to wrap up or whatever, but something you said there, right, if this is core to their business, like if they're going to suffer, if this doesn't work well, I'm wondering how if at all Mule was held accountable for the success of the work? Because one of the issues you see again and again with design and designers is they love authority and they hate accountability. If you want to make all the decisions but they don't want to be held responsible if it doesn't work out well. That's a generalization but one I've sadly seen true over and over again. And that's one of the reasons why I design can be marginalized because designers don't actually end up signing up for accountability. Do you share some accountability when someone comes to you with what they consider business critical or how was that manifested? I would say it was totally reputational, right? Because I know some clients talk about like, oh, we have a guarantee, we have certain metrics. Most metrics are bullshit and a lot of times the part that we're actually responsible for, you can't tease that out. You can't go to this ROI design place. But we made a commitment very strongly that we would make our best effort that our part we would hold up our end of the bargain. And it was purely like everybody wants to find a formula. Everybody wants to find a metric, like a number. But I think we're just like qualitative to the core that it's like, okay, you made your best effort to help us do the thing we needed to do because we were never solely responsible. And we would tell people where things might fail because everything fails at some point. So we build things to the best of our ability with the research and all the blah, blah, blah. And then we would tell people it might fail here, here, here or here. So let's make sure that we have plans in place to make sure that we know what to do if any of those should happen. But the idea that I mean, we've never told people like this is perfect. It's like, this is gonna be interesting. And here's some things to watch out for. And here's what to do. If any of those should happen. And helping actually helping people learn and helping people see their work through our eyes. We have clients come back to us and say things like, Oh, my God, I've got your voice in my head yelling at me. And this, depending on which one of us they were the most scared of. It would be one of it could be either of us. They were more than they were me. I'm more afraid of her than I am of you. Yeah. But that's because I'm smart. Yeah. So I'd say that's where the that's where accountability came in. It was that commitment. It was that like, we have decided that we are going to work together on this. We're going to tell you what the limits of what we can do for you are. And we're going to tell we're going to give you advice. And if you ignore our advice, go with God, my friend. Right. And we try not to over promise in terms of, yeah, like Mike said, when we completed the project, we'd say, okay, you go forward and you have to continue learning and evolving the system. And the most successful projects were the ones where it wasn't exactly the same two years later. But they said, Oh, we learned some things. And within the system that you helped us develop, we were able to adapt to new information. Because that's the mindset. So it wasn't like, Oh, you guys were totally right about everything. It was like, you guys helped us be able to become a learning organization. And you didn't hem us in to the system that had these like assumptions that the world was going to remain the same forever. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's great. It was funny, an adaptive path for we didn't do kind of this type of analysis. But Jesse and I, Jesse used to always be frustrated that about half of my projects would would kind of get shipped roughly as we designed them. And almost none of his means like, why, why does that how does that happen? I don't know. I also think, you know, not to that case, I tended I think more towards pragmatism. If I and it's one of those kind of double edged swords as a design later, you want to be a visionary and idealist and encourage people to strive to achieve more than maybe they think they're able to. But my pragmatic mode is like, I just I want to I want to make it better. This conversation I've been having with the client I'm currently working with. We're about to, we might ship the latest iteration of a feature. Everyone looking at this latest iteration is it's not good. My question is, is it better? Because better is better. And I'd rather putting put something better out in the world that's not good than just leave whatever is even crappier out in the world. Like that's if we're gonna have to make a I don't want to hold out for some hopeful, amazingness, if that we will probably never ship. I'd rather just let's make it better. And every step a little bit more a little bit more, maybe we'll get to someday get to good. Digital systems are never done. That's the thing. Well, and the part of the system that I think we were always very good at accounting for was the human side of the system on the client side. Like we tell people this is the best solution for you at this time. Because unless you're willing to hire, like, you know, somebody in this position, somebody in this position and adding, you know, a giant photo budget, for example, you can't do this other thing. So this is the boat that you can row. And we will design that boat for you. Well, we are not going to design you a yacht, because you only have three people to row it. You don't. Well, yeah, yeah, just seeing I used to, yeah, he would he would try to get you get them all excited about the yacht. And they were down here and they just couldn't bridge that gap. And I'm like, here, how about it? How about a better dinghy? I got you an outboard motor. Yeah. I mean, the thing that we used to tell people is like, we can design you something that's going to look fantastic on day one. But we need to design something that's going to look great on day 647, which means that it needs to be something that you can keep up with and you can manage. Well, and that was, I mean, thinking back to studio archetype, one of the one of the things I was conscious of after leaving studio archetype was that era of design firm just did not give a flying fig about whether or not a client could maintain the brilliance that they were delivering them. I mean, it just didn't even factor into the consideration. So so you should give them something and they would launch it and then six months later it would be torn down or it would start falling apart because they had no ability to maintain it. The Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Peter. No. Oh, it's so good. Yeah. What is it? It's really at the Vasa. It's it's a giant warship that was built to please the king in Sweden at that time, or whatever it is, glorious metaphor metaphor. They rebuilt the ship and this glorious giant largest ship that had ever been built to this kind went out like 50 yards into the harbor and sank to the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure it did it beautifully. It did. It was stuck in the mud for 400 years or something. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, it looks like we're coming up on time here. We could we could have old folks shout it cloud for hours here. I don't know. Oh, there's Bruno. Hi, Bruno. Anything you want us any any questions you want to ask us? No, this was really interesting and it made me reminisce of the time of our dinner chat at UXLX when we had all these interesting conversations with people from the industry. I love these parallel chats. And I think most of what you've discussed is stuff that we experienced as well, this side of the pond. And I think the main difficulty in our end, it seems to be like still people don't understand enough of what we do to value our input. We still have to sometimes people hire us and then we have to educate the whole organization about it to get everyone on board. So it's still one of the major hurdles I see in the business. I mean, I think that's true in the United States as well. And it's something when I think about design and design leadership a lot. And some people ask what's the difference between design leadership and other leadership, right? Is a VP of design all that different from a VP of engineering or a VP of marketing, etc. And I think the way that VP of design is interestingly different is the amount of time they have to spend educating people within their organization on what it takes for design to succeed and the impact design can have. I think those are now assumptions. Now, they might be flawed, but they're assumptions when it comes to marketing and sales and engineering and these other more mature disciplines. And it's just part of our job to continue to, I mean, I think the word education is right. That is a key part of our role that we cannot neglect. We don't have a choice. But it means that we don't have time to do the other things that people think we ought to be also be doing. So we're stuck between a rock and a hard place there. Good. Yay, design. We'll leave people with that inspirational message. It's mostly a lot of annoying conversations. And if you love that, be a designer. Love it. Well, we're all here to change the world. Yes. Well, I mean, to the spirit of the conference, right? If you're getting to that master's level, it's not as much about craft. It's about communication. It's about relationships. It's about education. That's the job. If it was simply about making good design, if we could just do good design and it would ship somehow magically, that would be awesome. But it's not. Thanks for bringing it back around to the theme, Peter. That's my job. Well, it was a lovely seeing you all here. Thank you for joining us. And for the attendees watching, we still have Erica's master class. Oh, yeah. And by my book and go to my various way of properties, by Erica's books, even though they're old now. No, we could just see. See, I set you up. See, look, I set her up. Isn't that nice? A whole chapter. That's a second edition. He stole your orange. His background is your orange. A whole chapter about surveys. Definitely, definitely get that one. And conversational design, I think is still that one still relevant. But yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Bruno.