Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with designer Khoi Vinh, who is currently the director of product design for mobile at Adobe. They trace his career from his early agency years in New York City, to his years as design director of nytimes.com, to his current work at Adobe, and they discuss everything from process, to scaling, to how to build a great design team.
Rich: It’s such a badass name [Khoi Vinh]. Can I mention that?
Khoi: Is it really?
Rich: I think so. I mean, it’s a product of design itself.
Khoi: I wish you could go back in time and tell the seven-, eight-year-old version of me that it would one day turn out to be a badass name.
Rich: My blog — it’s starting to break.
Paul: This isn’t about your blog.
Khoi: I’ll tell you: one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the past five years, having been in start-ups and been in pure software companies, is in contrast to the way I thought about products when I was at a design studio before, basically the little agency, or a big agency, or at a big company. It’s very difficult to pre-determine what a product is going to look like or feel like or even do from the beginning. And maybe the biggest truism that I’ve discovered about software products is they are the direct result of the people who work on them in the beginning, those very early formative stages.
I think a lot of companies, especially big companies that say, ‘OK, we need a social network to do this,’ or, ‘We need a big app that does this’ — they don’t understand how important the people are, and they will write out a list of goals for the product and then just go and find whoever’s going to sign up to do that, and essentially it’s a bit like trying to determine the outcome, to use the metaphor you used a moment ago, Rich, of a relationship. Like, you can’t know where two people are going to go, or three or four people are going to go, in the way they relate to each other or what comes out of what they do.
Rich: I want to close this by asking Khoi what he does really badly. That he’s really ashamed of.
Paul: Oh yeah, what are you terrible at?
Rich: Yeah.
Khoi: What do I do really badly that I’m ashamed of…?
Rich: Do you have like, lower back problems?
Khoi: I definitely have lower back problems since having children.
Paul: That’s just being a dad and lifting babies.
Khoi: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: How’s your singing?
Khoi: My singing is terrible.
Rich: All right! Cool.
Paul: OK, that’s good.
Khoi: My singing and dancing and ability to play musical instruments is terrible.
Track Changes is the weekly technology and culture podcast from Postlight, hosted by Paul Ford and Rich Ziade. Coordination, research, and management by Elizabeth Minkel, who also prepared the summary of this episode. Production and editing by Tom Meyers. Podcast logo and design by Matt Quintanilla of Postlight. We record with Paul Ruest at Argot Studios. Listen to more episodes here.
