Bob Baxley

LLMs can act as a powerful mirror for self-reflection by identifying patterns in your thoughts that you haven't yet verbalized.

"I just went to ChatGPT, start a new project and said, I want you to be my life coach. I want you to ask me five questions a day for the next five days... it was statistically reflecting patterns back..."

Moving between strong company cultures requires a 'recalibration' period to shed old behaviors while retaining core values.

"I left Apple on a Friday and I started Pinterest on a Monday. I didn't give myself time to recalibrate to the Pinterest culture. I think at some level, a lot of the challenge is that Apple, and it's n..."

True alignment isn't just 'buy-in'; it's getting cross-functional partners to emotionally invest in the product's success.

"I knew that design can't bring you this stuff into the world on its own. We can't raise this baby, we need the village, and we need the village to fall in love with the baby. And so until that happens..."

A robust design system allows teams to separate conceptual 'heavy lifting' from visual production, enabling rapid high-fidelity output.

"Once we locked down on the block frames, we could send it to an agency and they could do the full high-res comps in a day, because they knew exactly what they were doing. And so the PMs were always li..."

Design culture must be an inherent part of a company's founding DNA rather than a function added later.

"Saying a company is design-led does not mean it's designer-led. I've never seen somebody graft it on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or doesn't exist."

High-level executive roles are precarious, and 'bouncing off' a culture is a common experience often masked by survivor bias.

"I think the people falling off of these jobs is the common use case. That is the common story. We have a bias towards survivors and we all talk about how it looks like they made it to the top, but eve..."

Effective tenets are 'this over that' choices that eliminate recurring debates by setting a permanent direction.

"Tenets are really decision-making tools and it's sort of like... A classic one is paper versus plastic. It's just too complicated to reconsider that every time you're at the grocery store. So you sort..."

Integrating design directly into the engineering workflow ensures technical feasibility and higher shipping quality.

"I think that design is most successful at impacting what ships at the end if design is considered phase zero of the engineering process, rather than a by product or a part of the product process."

Healthy collaboration requires clear boundaries where Product defines the 'what' and 'why' while Design owns the 'how.'

"I'm like, you guys tell us what you need us to do, what the features need to be, when they need to be delivered, what the issues are, and then give us the time and space to come up with a solution to..."

A powerful vision statement acts as a behavioral signal that guides every employee's micro-decisions.

"Disneyland, still the best vision statement of all time, which is the happiest place on earth. So once you tell an employee this is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, then you're signaling al..."

Product managers should provide the 'script' (problem and constraints) rather than the 'sketch' (UI solution).

"I try to encourage the product managers to what's the problem with the thing? And then let us solve it. Don't jump to it and tell us... Don't tell us this is just exactly what we're supposed to do."

Developing product intuition requires observing humans interacting with technology in the wild, outside of controlled lab environments.

"Go observe people going through self-checkout at Target... then go watch it at some other grocery store where it's not as great and really notice what happens with people... Just go watch somebody ove..."