Catalyst

How Do We Move The Rectangle: It’s no secret that we think design is integral to engineering great products. This week Gina Trapani and Skyler Balbus are joined by Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, to talk about how Figma’s collaborative interface design tool came to be.

We talk about how diverse creative backgrounds are essential to building design teams, how browser-based tools leave designers at the mercy of the browser, and the ways in which constraint inspires creativity and partnerships.

Dylan also shares a tip for new designers: get into open-source projects.

• Figma
• Adobe Fireworks (RIP)
• Aviary
• WebGL
• Hacker News
• Made by Evan

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The Web is a Complex Place: Have you noticed that Track Changes has migrated off of Medium? That got us thinking about WordPress as a platform that’s changed enormously in the past few years. Front-end development has exploded. The way we use the web changed. No longer are we simply delivering pages and searching for things, we’re using the web to explore an infinite space! So how has WordPress responded to the levels of abstraction we’ve piled on to web development? Is this complexity a good thing, or a symptom of something ominous? One thing is certain: The way we think of the web has changed, and it doesn’t look like our culture of tech is headed towards simplification.

• Setting up a Development Environment (WordPress)
• Postlight’s Headless WordPress Starter Kit by Gina Trapani (GitHub)
• Front-end Web Development (Wikipedia)
• Integrated Dev Environment (Wikipedia)
• Batch File (Wikipedia)

Don’t Add Bullshit To The World: In recent episodes you’ve heard from Paul, Rich, and various guests talk about scaling, ethics, design, and engineering — now it’s time to hear from Postlight’s other leaders. We discuss the diverse backgrounds of our leadership team, how have their roles have changed over time, and how we come together to make good software while shipping great products. This episode is also the debut of Paul’s new, deeper voice, which Gina Trapani calls “a massage for your ears.”

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Tech is Giant, Monolithic, and Scary: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziademeet with Louise Matsakis to discuss how tech reporting has evolved alongside the hyper-growth of tech companies. How has the role of journalists changed? Which companies are difficult to talk to, and which are the easiest? 

More often than before, Louise says that journalists are playing the role of content moderators, forcing platforms to do more introspection and make broader changes. We touch on what’s topical in tech reporting today: What can be done to stop the culture of harassment prevalent on big platforms, how should scaling companies deal with oversights that screw people over, and how could we imagined role of the Facebook Press Secretary?

• Louise Matsakis
• Know Your Meme: Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral
• Amazon’s Electricity Subsidies, Bloomberg
• Time magazine sold to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife for $190m, Gaurdian 
• Journalists Are Not Social Media Platforms’ Unpaid Content Moderators,Motherboard (VICE)
• Elsagate
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
• Google Wants to Kill the URL, Wired
• Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web, Gawker

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Creating a Language We Can Carry Forward: People get really good at bad habits. When we talk about digital transformation, we’re talking about more than software and systems — we’re dealing with how people work with software and with each other. This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss Upgrade, our report on digital transformation. Why did we call it Upgrade? Because that’s what we’re almost always striving for. We talk about how real digital transformation happens, from idea through execution. What are you waiting for? Upgrade is available to download for free here.

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Never Going Away: It’s hard to conceive how tech giants will be destroyed. Might it be Government regulation? Another Great Depression? Genius disruption from Topeka, Kansas? This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the changeable future of tech by looking to the past. How does a company go from owning the market in a red-hot moment to a shadow of its former self? We talk about where companies like Microsoft and Xerox went wrong — and what they did right — while trying to predict what will finally undo the reigning champs.

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What Is Creative Capital, Anyway?: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade meet with Jules Ehrhardt, founder of Creative Capitol Studio FKTRY, the author of the term ‘digital product studio’, and an advocate for authenticity. On this episode, we talk about the problems with the old-guard agency model, where creatives are going instead, and how creativity is commodified and sold like sausage links. How does authenticity impact design? How are we changing the way we think about creativity by defining the language around it?

Jules — 3:15: “I think one of the problems the industry has is that people who are representing the industry and interfacing with partners and brands or clients, they don’t actually have a deep empathy and understanding for creativity.”

Paul — 5:25: “Sometimes we’re just delivering bad news to people. Like hey, that’s actually going to be hard and expensive. I hate to say it because I can see how optimistic and enthusiastic you are, but building things is really hard and it’s going to take a lot of time. That’s actually been really effective for us.”

Jules — 7:35: “There [are] enough people out there in this city, in this country, in the market who have been sold wonderful things and been disappointed. So for me, the only place to be is real, and in a world of perfect information — which we don’t live in — you will find your place and you’ll find that work.”

Jules — 8:45: “Our expertise is working with you, deploying our processes to get to a better place. You say that and it’s completely true, but then they’re going to reflect on this super-polished bullshit that they’ve just been presented by an agency. […] Yes, there’s a degree of sales if you want to call it [that], but it’s true, even in the honesty you’re actually doing the job of sales.”

Jules — 11:20: “The perception of this space [as an agency], there’s definitely a contagion effect from the worst practices of the industry.”

Jules — 13:05: “That was one of the miss-steps of the add-on marketing industry of pretending to do digital product work by just basically redressing case studies. In fact, rather than building product teams and product processes and getting away from the creative director model top-down, they’re going bottom-up.”

Jules — 17:45: “You’ve got tech companies providing a compelling alternative for creatives and people are increasingly going tech-side for better salaries and different conditions.”

Jules — 19:27: “I’m pushing something called ‘creative capital’. You can raise venture capital or you can raise creative capital. So for me, creative capital is a subset of Sweat Equity. What you do and what [teams I’m building] are capable of doing is making a pivotal impact upon a business.”

Jules — 21:05: “We [the creative class] need to understand how angels work, how VCs work, how investors work, how pension funds work, and everyone else — we need to understand their language, their business models, build relationships and understanding so we can build and forge these new models where it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s a game in which we can all win.”

Paul — 29:30: “The model is [to] name it, make a market, prove it’s real, and the rest of the entreprise — at it always does — will see it and go, ‘oh, that’s working, we should do that so we don’t get too far left behind.’”

Jules — 29:45: “I believe that we in the creative class should be exploring the intersection between creativity and capital.”

• Track Changes: Are You My Digital Product Studio?

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

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Design is Not an Add-On: Why did it take so long for design to come back into the conversation? This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about Digital Transformation and the marriage between Design and Engineering. We talk about how how the importance of design is often misjudged when it comes to Digital Transformation (hint: it’s crucial), and how what may be common sense to designers isn’t always common sense to others. What are people risking when they forgo good design?

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Rich — 1:35: “The days of just getting a technology project up and running isn’t enough that you have to think about your whole business in terms of the world [having] changed, technology is part of everything and it needs to be part of how your business works.”

Rich — 2:20: “People are fully digitized in terms of how they interact with the world, and that’s how they need to interact with your business.”

Rich — 3:10: “This is something different. [Digital transformation] is about literally dismantling process as it exists today.”

Rich — 6:30: “I’m old enough to remember when it was really hard to sell User Experience services to big companies. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t want to get it. It was just too bizarre.”

Paul — 11:05: “I would say that without strong sea-level leadership, don’t do [a Digital Transformation project].”

Rich — 12:25: “Probably one of the biggest public failures of a massive technology mandate is the Obamacare debacle.”

Paul — 13:10: “That’s why Open Source is really good. Why are we building things for the government in secret? There could have been a collaborative public presence driven by a small team where that code was going right into the Commons.”

Rich — 13:35: “The truth is, if you’re not able to transact on the web on your phone, you’re kind of screwed. You have to get there.”

Rich — 17:45: “I think the way that they’re thinking about it is that design isn’t a phase or a discipline, but actually it’s no different than [somebody] saying I’m going to go ahead and build this sky scraper, but I’m going to skip the architect.”

Rich — 21:25: “We don’t call them ‘designers’ at Postlight […] we call them Product Designers. The spirit behind it is that the designer is not peripheral. They’re key to the quality of the product, to the definition of the product, [and] how the product is going to be differentiated.”

Paul — 22:00: “The engagement will fail if design doesn’t lead.”

Paul — 28:35: “Design is about making that least possible effort — my god, don’t just throw a bunch of candy corn on the floor and call that dinner.”

• Chili’s To Go
• Digital Transformation
• Obamacare and Health Care Design
• User Interface Design
• Amazon Web Services
• IBM

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

Making the World a Better Place: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss how the ingegrity of platforms like Facebook and Twitter has been compromised by their growth. We talk about Facebook as a company versus Facebook as a system, and why they are crumbling. Was the company ignoring user concerns or just waiting until it impacted their profit? 

Rich — 2:00: “People deciding that the governors of the Facebook world weren’t taking care of it well enough such that they’re emigrating out of it is a very big deal.”

Paul — 3:05: “It’s not slow growth — it’s departures. The Pew Foundation did a study and they found that [like] 1 out of 4 humans are taking a break [from Facebook].”

Paul — 5:15: “Let’s be clear: Platform companies only have transactions and metrics in order to understand how they’re performing. They have no sense of individuals, and if the numbers are down it’s like everyone is running around on fire.”

Rich — 13:45: “You could make the case that these were just selfish people just foaming at the mouth to make money, but you could also make the case that they were just optimistic about how humans were going to be when you put 2 billion of them in a very nice place where the gestures are, ‘I like you,’ ‘I love you,’ ‘I’m crying for you,’ ‘I’m laughing at the funny thing you did,’ — it’s all optimistic. There’s no middle finger.”

Paul — 14:10: “God, save the world from rich people with good intentions.”

Rich — 14:40: “It’s the exact same narrative around Twitter. Twitter said, ‘[…]We’re going to make everybody a publisher. Everybody’s a broadcaster,’ […] and it’s a cesspool.”

Paul — 16:15: “What you’ve got is a very very serious product problem and your product is at a scale that it interferes with things like the governance of the world and the way that human beings act and behave.”

Rich — 17:40: “It’s a real investment to take care of the integrity of the platform. What they didn’t anticipate was all these other sort of dynamic things that can take hold that are much more subtle and much more insidious.”

Paul — 18:00: “As far as they can tell, they were doing everything right until they weren’t. What happened is they created systems that were unbelievably easy to game. They actually had lots of good warnings, […] and they ignored it because I think they were getting so many other messages [that were] positive.”

Rich — 22:25: “The terms in the code of conduct that are easiest are the ones they can most effectively enforce. If you are threatening violence on someone, that’s very explicit, because what they want to do is avoid the perception of subjective judgement of what’s on there.”

Paul — 23:15: “You don’t have a congress that is truly ready to create a regulatory framework in the interest of the Republic and the world right now. We just don’t have it.”

Rich — 28:30: “I think the point we’re making is that this turned out to be way bigger than a startup and that the people at the wheel — I don’t think they’re evil — I think that their mandate it to squeeze maximum value for investors and not break the law.”

Paul — 30:00: “Facebook says it serves but it doesn’t really know who its master is.”

• Mark Zuckerberg Makes Brisket
• Randian Objectivists
• Pew Research Center: Social Media Use 2018
• A Conversation with Robyn Kanner
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Code of Conduct

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trusting Your Gut: This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade are joined by Michael Shaoul, the philosopher-manager of Marketfield Asset Management and expert on business cycles and the convergence of world events and geopolitics. Is the cycle of commercial real estate on its deathbed? Are shoes the only thing immune to downtrodden cycles? We discuss what happens when people tell you that you’ve got it all wrong, and exactly what you should do if you see a volcano at the company party.

Michael — 4:15: “There are multiple cycles that you learn to pay attention to. One of the things that I say is that when you look at cycles across decades or centuries […] the nouns and the verbs are always changing. It’s always something different, but the adjectives and the adverbs stay the same.”

Michael — 5:40: “Clearly we’re here in the middle of a great technology cycle. When it’s gone over its skis, when it’s no longer investible, when it’s outright dangerous, it’s a hard thing to notice. But if I went back to the early 1990s, language starts to change. Evaluation metrics start to change. You start valuing eyeballs rather than revenue.”

Michael — 6:45: “I don’t think I need to apologize to my children for not owning Bitcoin, but to me that’s what the end of one of these investment cycles looks like. You look like a moron for having not put an indiscriminate amount of cash to work in the space and everybody on the outside is kind of laughing at you and trying to pull you in.”

Michael — 8:20: “When I read your article on Blockchain, one of the things that really pulled it home to me because you were going back and talking about the late 1990s is how little fun is had towards the end of a cycle. It’s just miserable. There’s nothing genuinely creative going on, it’s all about the bottom line or the top line. Everybody’s expectations go beyond what is possible. It’s just a lot of stress and aggravation. Good luck keeping employees.”

Michael — 12:40: “I always say to people it’s okay to do something stupid and reckless with your money as long as you follow two rules: One is you put a small amount of money […] in it. Number two is you remember that you’re doing something stupid and reckless. The mistake people make is they think that they’ve found the answer and they overcommit.”

Paul — 13:00: “The people we know who are very into Blockchain who are kind of rational about it basically are like, hey, you’re going to the track. See what happens. But you don’t put your kids’ college funds in it.”

Michael — 16:50: “I publish my weekly thoughts on markets. […] I put together a sort of chatty weekly piece, just saying look, this is what’s happened in the last week and this is why it matters or this is why it doesn’t.”

Michael — 17:25: “[Macro] is a funny term. It’s like saying what does ‘technology’ mean? It’s a very broad term, so the way we look at it is we think at any given point in time [it is] the things which are worth focussing on. Obviously I’ll always talk about the S&P 500 in my job because that’s the starting point for whether it’s been a good week or a bad week as far as most people are concerned. We’ll focus on a particular sector we think is really in motion […] and ignore things that might be interesting but we feel 25 people have already written about.”

Rich — 19:45: “Technology is seeping into — or the world is seeping into — […] the formulas around valuing technology that come from really dramatically different places like foreign policy and security. If you had told me that 15 years ago that global geopolitics would affect Microsoft Excel…”

Michael — 24:20: “Gatsby is still, to me, a great book about cycles. It could only get written at that point in time, it’s another cycle on top of everything else.

• Marketfield Asset Management
• Business Cycles
• “Bitcoin is Ridiculous. Blockchain is Dangerous” by Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek
• S&P 500 Index
• The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street’s Bullish 60sby John Brooks
• Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber
• A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homey and Richard Sylla
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Production, show notes and transcripts by EDITAUDIO. Podcast logo and design by Will Denton of Postlight.