Timothy Achumba on risk taking and product at Wunderlist

Milliarden ですating Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome back. It's me again. Hello. So, the next speaker, Timothy Achamba. He is building products at Microsoft, and as I just discovered, Microsoft bought Wunderlist, which is why he is the lead designer at Wunderlist. And he is quite the creative genius, and he captures beautiful moments with his camera. So without further ado, help me welcome Timothy to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. It's all good. Maybe it will help my talk a little bit. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. Hi. Hi. Hi. Thank you all. We were pretty young back then. Thank you. My talk is also called System Failure. No, no. Hey! No problem. When I was younger, my mother, she was a pharmacist and she used to work on the weekends. And I would often go with her to her office. And frankly, I would have much rather spend my weekends playing with my friends outside. But I spend most of my time inside a room, often not heavily air-conditioned. But one thing that was really cool about this room is that I had a computer. This was like a state-of-the-art computer back then. Now it's probably a piece of shit. But at the time, I started exploring things like MS Paint. I guess that was the first sort of entrance into computers and actually creating things. And yeah, I guess that's when I really fell in love with design and the thought of actually making something that doesn't exist already. And when I was 15, my mother, she died. And it was quite difficult. When I noticed myself now looking back, I sort of closed off myself and ended up spending most of my time in front of a screen. And I guess I sort of realized now that this was sort of my way of trying to stay connected to her. But at the same time, I ended up building this passion and this love for making things. Fast forward a few years later, I thought I would become a designer and decided to go to university and study software engineering, as most designers do. I quickly realized that I hate math. So one day after I started, I switched my course to web designer technology. And I had already been freelancing before that. So the course was sort of like a 101 entry into web design. And it was very boring. I mean, I... I had freelanced already, so I sort of knew how HTML pages worked and how to render all this stuff in the browser. And I was really bored and I felt like I wasn't learning anything and I wasn't growing. So I wanted to really quit. And I was approached by an agency in Manchester where I grew up. And they asked me to work for them. And I'll be honest, I thought I was a shit. I thought, okay, not even finished school yet, not even got a degree, and already people wanted me to work for them. And... And I said, sure. I took the job, told my dad that I would one day go back to university, basically lying, but he bought it. And it started. It was started really well. I was loving it. I was having fun. And I didn't realize the pace of agency work. I was a freelancer. So freelancer really meaning that I would often make things for family and friends, make things that they... Then go and dribble. It's not really quite freelancing, but I was young, practicing, learning, and all on my own pace. So I never really experienced the speed, the pace of an agency environment. So frankly, I couldn't handle it. I sucked. And about three months into that job, the boss pulls me aside and says, hey, Timothy, we can't keep paying you this amount of money. The work you're creating is just not good. It's not good enough. A lot of stuff you're doing has to be redone by another designer, and it's costed more money than we thought. So basically, they reduced my wage. And at the time, that was my first job, so I didn't really know if that was cool or if that's normal. But it was difficult. I've never really experienced something so jarring. I was 18, 19 years old, first job, and already off to a really terrible job. And I guess that was the moment where I almost decided I would quit forever. I thought, I can't keep doing this. I felt paralyzed, the thought of making something again and it being told, oh, sorry, that was actually it went too, too far. Okay. I'll leave this here. Yeah, I felt paralyzed by the thought of, oh, I'm going to quit forever. I was just sort of creating something new and then it being shut down. But one day at work, I was approached by Christian Reber, who he's the CEO of Wunderlist and out in Berlin. And he emailed me and said, basically, hey, do you want a job? They had seen some of my work that I did prior. I was working on a Dribbble Mac app. I think a lot of us, how we get into design, we try and mock up what a Mac version of Dribbble would be. And so I was using Wunderkit. Maybe some of you have heard of Wunderkit. Anyone? Wunderkit, great. Yeah, that didn't work, go really well. We, so that was like this. We tanked that completely. So when I joined that, I spent two weeks working on Wunderkit and two weeks into it, we said, okay, let's kill it and move back to Wunderlist. Anyway, back to my story. They saw my work and they said, yeah, do you want a job? And I was, yeah. And I was, had two feelings. I was excited. Like, okay, a new opportunity, Berlin, like never been to, I've never really been out of the country before. But at the same time, I was like, wow, okay. I mean, I left university for this agency and I didn't have to really travel so far and I wasn't doing so well in the job. So it's okay. Like I can go back home. Like I lived at home still, but to move to another country and take this risk. And what if it fails? What if they realize that? Actually, I'm not as good as my dribble profile says I am. And I'm basically a phony. And it took a while for me to decide, okay, maybe actually let's take a leap of faith. Let's try. So I flew out there for a week. They wind and dined me. It only took one dinner at some awesome steak house. I was like, I'm in. I wish they took my time. I'd like to have my dad there because he was super against it actually took a month before my dad said I could actually go. It was often the case. Christian Meebo had to call my father, have a one-on-one conversation, practically begging him to let his son move to a foreign country and work for this eight company that basically has no name. No one knows it really. And he was 26 at the time, Christian. And my dad's like, I don't know, like in his late fifties now. So I'm sure that it must've been an interesting question. conversation. But he must have said something really cool because my dad said yes, and I moved to Berlin. And when I moved there, I sort of stepped back and thought, going into this new environment, going into this new job, I don't want to experience the same thing I experienced where I would feel paralyzed to actually create. Like, I don't want to walk into a room and feel like the work I was doing was no good, also feel like I was no good. So I started questioning, how do I make sure that doesn't happen again? And the solution isn't to say, well, I won't do anything again, or I won't try again, but it's to actually say, well, maybe the stuff I'm doing actually has nothing to do with me. It isn't about me. So I started thinking, okay, if my work isn't about me, if I'm not attached to it, if it's not my identity, then what is this work about? Why do I do it? What's the purpose of it all? So I started exploring this, and I came to sort of internal realization that actually the stuff that I'm creating, design, the stuff we make is actually all about people. And then I thought, okay, what kinds of people, who are these people, and what are their motivations, and what do they need? So I came up with two people. One was the people you're doing it with, which I mean basically the people you collaborate with, your friends, your colleagues. And I want to tell you three different points that sort of helped me to kind of come to this realization that it's really all about the people that I'm doing it with. So about communication, collaboration, and also learning. Communication. We had one project, if I remember correctly, and it was basically we were working on a sidebar of Wunderlist, and we had these really nice designed pictograms that one of our designers created, and they were beautiful. But we wanted to try and bring more life to the UI, so we thought, why don't we actually make them colorful? We filled them in with shading, and we had color to them. And we thought, well, that's a really simple implementation. It's just like, add a color to this icon, or you replace it with a new SVG icon, so it's not even a debate. But we realized actually the whole team had an opinion on this thing. We thought it was just a simple change, but the whole team wanted to share their thoughts, and felt so passionately about what we were doing. And we would end up in endless Slack discussions about why this is not good, and why it looks weird, and why it's awesome. And we quickly realized, or at least I realized, that this whole process, we never actually shared our thoughts, shared the reasons. We shared the process with the rest of the team. I just don't mean only developers, but also our marketing team, our sales team. And sense of collaboration, sorry, communication was missing. And we tried to figure out really a way to solve that, and we started this thing called Open Design Review. Basically, it's where we sit together with the whole team. It's an open invitation. You can come and watch us present. working on. Often things that are in work in progress, or even ideas that haven't even been realized, sometimes dopey ideas. And we will allow developers to share their thoughts, share feedback, marketing team as well, and QA engineers, and everyone really from the office manager who can come in and actually share what they're thinking about it. And what I came to realize is that as developers, we have this amazing power, and I almost think it's a great power. We also have a group on the Microsoft Yard called Active 생각. Yes, it's also more of a Whatia y deck but also the marketing team. So, we launched One on this 2 in 2014 at Christmas time, which is the one word of advice, never launch anything over Christmas. We, basically the whole launch tanked. The server was completely down for about two weeks, no one could sign up, no one could log in. Basically it just wasn't working. And we spent like nine months working on this awesome new app, all native clients. It was the big reveal and nothing was working. We had great designs, great front end, great clients, but if you can't log in, what's the point? So, over Christmas, I mean, I'll be honest, I felt sort of pissed off, like, okay, I spent all this time designing this really cool thing and now no one can even use it. Guys, you had one job. And, so, and I quickly realized actually that's such a selfish way of looking at it. The parts that they play and I play, actually, are just as important as each other. It's not my place to say, well, I'm a designer, I create this thing, now it's up to you to make it work, you to make it function, but actually, I should have thought, okay, how can I, in the work that I do, make the work that they do much easier? How can I empower, equip the developers? How can I communicate to the marketing team that the work that we're creating, so they can actually find a really nice way of sharing it with the world, telling the story that we're trying to tell? So, collaborating, for me, sort of changed the way I thought about design. I mean, I was, like I said previously, I was at home in my bedroom designing stuff, often not only for Dribbble, because I didn't have many clients, but I never had discussions with people about the business goals or how it would affect the users, or even technical feasibility. Like, I didn't have these conversations. I just thought, well, this looks cool, and I'll post it. So, this was a big learning curve for me, to actually understand all the parts, all the time and effort it takes for each component to come together, to actually create something, and then, to actually create a great experience. It's like a restaurant, right? You often rate a restaurant not just on the food that you can eat, but also on the service, the aesthetics, sometimes the website, or the ... I mean, Foursquare ratings isn't just based on whether it looks cool. It's also a combination of many different things. And I think product design, or creating products that people really care about, that people really love, is about, it's similar to a restaurant. rate it on many different things, and I think, you know, each part plays a role. I wouldn't often go to a restaurant if the service was bad, even though the food might have been great. And that brings me to my third point, and it's a story of a friend of mine who is in this room today. I'm gonna point him out. He's over there. He's called Dom, and he started working at the company as a part-time support on the support team. He would often answer emails of really annoyed, annoyed users about why things aren't working, would have to tell users about features that we were never gonna build. And he sort of had the, we would create something, we would take a hand off it, and he would have to deal with the blowback if there was any. And I think, honestly, I would feel, I think he got frustrated with us not being able to implement the things that the users were requesting to fix the bugs fast enough. So he decided, actually, I'm just gonna learn how to design and do it myself. And he lived with a colleague of ours, and, you know, he basically taught him how to design, how to use Sketch, how to create these things. And within six months, he was a full-time designer. And now he's designing full-time on our team. And it's a crazy story I've actually seen, and it didn't stop there. He then was designing stuff for Android, and realized Android team was super slow. Like, they're taking too long to build stuff. I'm just gonna learn how to code myself, and I'll build it myself. And he basically did that, too. He was creating, pushing code to our Android app, which is unbelievable. And I learned so much from that as a person, to not let any limitations that you see stop you from actually doing the things you wanna do. And he's super inspiring. You should talk to him later. So, just kind of briefly onto my second point a little bit. The other kinds of people that we design for and design is about. It's about the people we do it for. Dom had an insight. and what they were feeling, and the pain points they had. And this insight, I think, helped him a lot in the work and the design work that he did. So, there's two points I wanna kind of touch on with designing for people. First one is identity, and then purpose. And I guess these are probably two of the, I guess, biggest points that I struggled with a little bit. In my previous story, I spoke about how I was sort of told that the work that I was doing wasn't good enough, and they couldn't pay me. But what I heard, what I sort of took to heart was that I wasn't good enough. And the things that I was doing isn't worth anything. And this struggle, I think, is something that we, as designers, go through a lot, because we put our heart and our soul into the things we create, and we should. I mean, it's sort of an extension of ourselves. But we have to figure out and navigate how to disconnect our identity from the work we're creating. And I was super depressed, and I was, I struggled a lot with this. But being part of this one of this team, and seeing how the work sort of left the door and actually went into the hands of real people helped me detach myself. And this detachment actually freed me from this sense of, from being paralyzed to not ask for feedback, to not share my work. And I was able to learn and grow at such a fast pace. I was not afraid to just say, hey, this is something I thought of. I don't know if it's good, just look at it, what do you think? And that sort of attitude really helped me become better much quicker. I was then also gained like a new perspective on design. I saw things from multiple different approaches, from different sorts of people, in different contexts, and now Microsoft, that even plays a bigger role, because I'll basically say, one of the less is not the most accessible application that exists. And working for Microsoft, there is a bigger challenge to try and reach hundreds of millions of people. And we have to take into account way more things now than ever before, even just the colors that we choose, and the typefaces, and all these different things play a big role if a person can actually use your product. And that sort of, thought process now, was an afterthought, but now we're trying to figure out how to make it part of the process. How can we make sure we always create inclusive design? So, by removing myself from this focus of this work, I was able to actually focus more on the things that I was creating, focus more on creating excellent work. It wasn't based on whether I thought it was cool, or whether I felt good by looking at it, but more if, it would actually help someone. And that sort of brings me to my next point. Purpose. No, that's identity. That's purpose. You know, I started designing as a way to escape the truths about life sometimes. I started designing to hide from facing problems, and facing hard facts, basically. And it was a very, although, might have been, it was my way of coping with things. But it was, maybe not the most healthiest way. And I put design as a sort of my mask, and . I basically designed because I liked it, and I wanted to do it, and I wanted it just to be me, and not think about anything else. But, I think as I grew older, and I, as... as I started seeing the work that I was making end up in the hands of millions of people, I started thinking really, is that all that it will be about, about just enjoying it? Like some days I'm not gonna come into the office and I'm not gonna wanna do anything. And let's be honest, there's days where we just don't wanna work and that's okay, that's fine. But how can I stay motivated? How can I stay focused? How can I keep doing great stuff even when I don't feel like doing it? So on those days I would often look at different emails we would get from our users. We often get feedback emails and there's often stuff posted in Slack from users saying, hey, we love one of this and it's super cool. But there was one that really touched me and one that really stood out to me and I wanna read it to you guys. One of our users, he just sent an email and told us how he's been using One of List just to change his life, to better his life. So, dear One of List support, first off, I'd like to thank your company for developing this wonderful app. Last year, I've been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. For that, for me, that shows up as a big lack of memory, trouble with keeping an overview of the things that I need to do, trouble in meeting deadlines, and trouble in spending time efficiently. Since this diagnosis, I am being guided by a coach who helps me become more effective with my time, really trying to drill problems down to their root and then helps me find a solution for those. And one of those solutions, my girlfriend found for me, your Android app. Now, one of this is a big part of my life. I use it every day to keep track of things I need to do, both professionally and also with household to-dos. In addition to not only keeping an overview of myself, I have, all have now, a shared list with my girlfriend so she can keep track of the things I have or haven't done. I can point out where I'm about to forget something, on added new tasks for me to do. Like I wrote before, I'd like to thank your company for developing this wonderful app. Please feel free to share this email with your colleagues. And, you know, this story changed the way I saw the world. You know, the work that I was doing, actually forever. Searching for a deeper meaning in the stuff that we do, I think, is a natural progression of life. We want the things we do to matter. And I think by doing that, by trying to find something that extends the work you're doing and finding something that actually is bigger than you, I think actually helps us to get more out of the work that we do. Yeah, I mean, now at Microsoft, we have now a much bigger challenge, and we're not just trying to reach, like I said, a small group of people. We're trying to reach way more now, and they have such a widespread of technologies and apps in different areas, from VR to sort of conversational spaces, and there's so much more tools and so much more awesome resources we have now. And I think as makers of this, in this century, in this digital age, the stuff that we do does impact a lot of people, and I do feel like it's a responsibility to stop and think of how can I make sure that the stuff that I create ends up not being about me, but about other people. I'd like to say a huge thanks to One Day Out guys, Casper, for allowing me to share some of these thoughts and sort of my journey. And thank you so much for having me as a designer, and you can find me online, and yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Timothy. Any questions? I'll answer one question I think some of you probably have. We can, we're allowed to still. We'll use Macs at Microsoft. I know some of you are thinking about that, but yeah, it's all good. Thank you for sharing your story. I can definitely recognize some of the things that you've experienced. I can definitely recognize the fact that you go to work, and some days it's great, and you're all motivated. Some days it truly is not. Yeah. And that's where you need to like, I find that hard at times. But reaching down to what matters, and kind of, you know, this is a cliche, but the difference that you perceive that you're making, that's important. So thank you for sharing that. All right. Thank you. So now it's not Braham, as I said. That's a typo. Now there'll be a break. So go out there, get some coffee, do whatever you want, and then we'll be back a bit later. Thank you, Braham. Bye. Bye, all right, guys. All right. Bye-bye.