Sketch from “the art of experiments”

I made a drawing for this article about running experiments. People often cite Steve Jobs as someone who made decisions solely from intuition so I drew a turtleneck to juxtapose it with data.

Binary thinking stunts innovation. Data and intuition are complementary, and should not be put up against each other. Quantitative data can foster creativity. The new Gmail UI isn’t perfect, and this isn’t a critique of it specifically, but rather an opportune time to discuss experimentation and testing. As Ran Liu says, growth design is good product design. The practice of growth is dear to my heart, and it typically gets a bad rep. Though there are certainly people who mispractice it, growth is not about getting people hooked. It’s helping guide people and teaching them to get the maximum value from your product. As a result, it grows your business. It’s one of the reasons our product pillar that has growth teams at Webflow is called Lifecycle.

Originally posted on Substack

Metaphors and allegories sketches

In issue 92 of Proof of Concept I did a piece about metaphors and allegories. This article covered how you can create metaphors and allegories to discuss really abstract and complex challenges. I made a drawing of a whale to depict Moby Dick, one of the most famous allegories of all time.

Instead of getting frustrated about literalism disrupting the process, find ways to deconstruct it. The reality is developing products is hard, and getting a group of people to have a common language and align on direction is even harder. It’s inevitable that this happens. Metaphors and allegories spark an excellent level of fidelity to building common understanding. Alignment doesn’t happen in one meeting and must be fostered over the course of the product development lifecycle. Let’s look at ways how these figures of speech can be used in the design process.

Original post: https://www.proofofconcept.pub/p/designing-with-metaphors-and-allegories

Startup growth: oil and water

When you join a startup that is growing rapidly, there are usually two groups of people. The first is the tenured employees who were there super early to get the company off the ground with the founders. The second are people who’ve been at other companies that have scaled to where the company desires.

The two groups integrate at first like oil and water. Instead of picking, “this is how we’ve done it” vs. “we did this at company y” the goal is to blend the cultures together.

The first three episodes of Andor

Spoiler warning if you have not watched episode 1-3 and Star Wars: Rogue One

I spent the weekend binge-watching TV shows—most of it on Disney+. In addition to watching the brilliant documentary Light & Magic, Andor is a series I started watching. The television series is a prequel to a prequel, telling the story about Cassian Andor (played by Diego Luna), one of the main characters in Star Wars: Rogue One. The Star Wars film often typo’ed as the word for red in French (go, Rouge One!) is a prequel for the opening of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Cassian Andor is not a very likable character. You’re introduced to him in Rogue One in a scene of him shooting a wounded ally in the back, in fear that the wounded colleague would give information away to the Empire. However, I’m hoping Andor becomes a world building sequel the same way Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater did for the acclaimed Hideo Kojima game series. Disney released the first three episodes of Andor all at once. It was a brilliant move as releasing the first episode may not have got people hooked. This show has a much different pacing than what people might expect since it’s 12 episodes and planned to be at least two seasons.

So far, Star Wars television shows have not quite done it for me. The Book of Boba Fett was a mess and Obi-Wan Kenobi was underwhelming. I like the Mandalorian, but the same way I like watching a friend play side quests of an open world video game. All the shows have great visuals, moments, and fan service, but lack world building and storytelling. Andor seems to have the potential to open the world beyond space wizards, laser swords, and one Skywalker family that constantly gets woven in. My hope for Andor is that it doesn’t do fan service for the sake of fan service, but in order to move the narrative forward. Tony Gilroy, the producer of Andor and who directed Rogue One has said there won’t be any fan service.

The point of having a vast universe is to explore it—take risks and tell new stories. The cartoons and comics have done this, but not really in the TV show. The biggest touch on this is the aforementioned fan service, letting people know by showing an easter egg to let people know, “hey, this exist” in the universe.

I read that we likely won’t get Season 2 until 2024 due to the production time. As much of a bummer it is, much of the scenes are shot on sight with practical effects. Though there are scenes shot with The Volume, I’m glad Tony Gilroy’s team isn’t leaning entirely on it.

The cast is also great. Diego Luna all the things! Stellan Skarsgård joins the Star Wars universe as Luthen Rael and Adria Arjona as Bix, who I bet will have a performance here that will make you (and her) forget she was in Morbius.

There are 9 more episodes to go so I can’t give you full opinion yet, but so far I like Andor much more than any Star Wars television show, including the Mandalorian. As much as I love Mando, they need to kill off Baby Yoda and let the world breathe a bit more—too much fan service. If Andor was in The Mandalorian, you know he’ll shoot Baby Yoda if he needs to. Hopefully Luke Skywalker doesn’t randomly show up in Andor to ruin the ambition, but this is the Star Wars story I’ve been hoping to see for a long time.

Analog reads with Printernet

I get migraine headaches from blue light and try to keep screen time at a minimum. As a result of this, my favorite mode of reading is physical paper (e-ink is great though). Printernet is an awesome experimental project that curates reads you may enjoy. It’s like an RSS feed on physical paper. They are so thoughtful about the curation and include a page on why the essay was selected for you.

I’m certainly going to print more issues and encourage you to give it a try!