Alexey Ivanov (author, ) talked to Kostya Gorsky, design manager at the company , former design director of Yandex and author of the telegram channel "". This is the fifth interview in with top experts in their fields about the product approach, entrepreneurship, psychology and behavior change.
You just said casually before the interview: “if I’m still alive in a few years.” What do you mean?
Oh, it just kind of popped up in the conversation. And now I'm kind of scared about it. But the thing is, you have to remember death. At all times they were taught to remember that life is finite, to appreciate the moments, to enjoy them while they are. I try not to forget about it. But it's probably not worth talking about. You can remember, but you should not speak.
There is such a philosopher Ernest Becker, he wrote the book Denial of Death in the early 70s. His main thesis is that human civilization is a symbolic response to our mortality. If you think about it, there are many things that can happen and not happen: children, a career, a comfortable old age. They have some probability, from 0 to 100%. And only the onset of death has a 100% probability, but we actively push it out of consciousness.
Agree. Here is a contradictory thing for me - longevity. Here Laura Deming made a cool . For example, a group of rats had their diet reduced by 20% and lived longer than the control group...
… Only you can't make a business out of this. Therefore, fasting clinics in the United States were closed 70 years ago.
Yes. And another question arises: do we understand exactly why we should live longer? Yes, of course, there is great value in human life, but if everyone lives longer, will people really get better from this? In general, one could say that from the point of view of ecology, it is most useful to simply kill yourself. The same activists who are so advocating for the environment could do less harm to the planet if they did not strive to live longer. It's a fact: we produce garbage, we eat resources, etc.
At the same time, people work at meaningless jobs, go home to watch TV shows, kill time in every possible way, well, they still multiply, and then disappear. Why do they need 20 more years of life? Most likely, I think too superficially about it, it would be interesting to talk to someone about it. The subject of longevity is not obvious to me yet. The travel, entertainment and restaurant industries are sure to benefit from longevity. But why?
Cities and ambitions
About why: what are you doing in San Francisco?
I flew in to work with the Intercom teams here in SF. We have all the go-to-market teams here.
How did it happen that such a serious tech company as Intercom has its main forces in Dublin? I'm talking about development and products.
In Dublin we seem to have 12 product teams out of 20. Another 4 in London and 4 in San Francisco. Intercom as a start-up comes from Dublin, so historically it happened that way. But, of course, in Dublin we do not have time to hire people at the required speed. There are a lot of talented people in London and in the Federation Council, it is growing faster and faster there.
How to choose where to live?
It would be interesting to know what others think about this. I will share my observations.
First thought: you can choose. And it is necessary. Most people live their entire lives where they were born. At most, they will move to the university or the nearest city with a job. We in modern society can and should choose where to live, and choose from places around the globe. Everywhere there are not enough good specialists.
Second thought. It's hard to choose. Firstly, each city has its own vibe…
Like Paul Graham's essay on cities and ambitions?
Yes, he hit the spot. This is important to understand so that the city matches your values.
Secondly, the city can be, for example, large or small. Here, for example, Dublin, it seems to me, is a million-plus village. It's big enough - there is IKEA, an airport, Michelin restaurants, good concerts. But at the same time, you can ride a bike anywhere. You can live in a house with a lawn and be in the city center.
Dublin is certainly a small city. Compared to Moscow, where he was born and raised. Once I came to London from Moscow for the first time - well, yes, I think it’s cool, Big Ben, red double-decker buses, everything is fine. And then he moved to Dublin, got used to its size and feel. And when for the first time I came from Dublin to London for work, I just went nuts from everything like a boy from the village, who first appeared in the city: wow, I think skyscrapers, cars are expensive, people are all in a hurry somewhere.
How about San Francisco?
First of all, a place of freedom. As Peter Thiel said, there is great value in knowing something that others don't. And here it seems that this is well understood, so everyone can express themselves as eccentrically as they want. It's great, such tolerance. It used to be a hippie town. Now - the city of botanists.
At the same time, everything flows very quickly in San Francisco, many people do not get hooked, they are washed away somewhere. This is a big problem between the generation of "hippies" who have settled in this city for the last 70 years, and the nerds who are here recently.
Oh yeah. Rent prices are skyrocketing. And this is the problem of those who rent. If you owned a house, you would only benefit from it. Rent a room and don't work all your life...
…In Wisconsin.
Well, yes. But I understand people who don't like change. There are a lot of people in SF who love change. Every time I come back from here a different person. Just .
Education
What do you write and do not write in your telegram?
Here is a dilemma. On the one hand, there is blogging. Blogging is kind of cool. Telegram inspired me, I managed to start. There is fertile soil - you throw a grain, and it sprouts by itself. I found an audience that is interested in reading me.
When you write, you try to formulate thoughts, you understand a lot, you get feedback. Somehow I re-read the posts of a year ago and thought: what a shame, everything is so naive and poorly written. Now, I would like to believe, I write a little better than when I started.
On the other hand, this is what confuses ... "He who knows does not speak, the speaker does not know." People who write a lot often don't understand much about the subject. I look, for example, at the information business - usually everything is very superficial. In general, people gush with books and courses. The world is full of shit content, there is almost no depth. I'm afraid to become the same "content producer".
There are a lot of people who do amazing things and don't write anything about it. For myself, I still can not understand how I feel better.
Maybe inspire through posts?
Maybe. But a blog is a lot of energy and strength. While here I made a short pause in blogging, gaining strength. Forces are taken away from something: from work, personal life, sports, and so on. It's all time and energy.
I also apparently have some image of a quiet master. He gladly teaches others, those who come with burning eyes. But it doesn't push.
How to be a teacher for 1-2 people?
There are very few people who really need to learn.
Thinking about the author's course?
Bang Bang also has my micro course. Some time ago I taught at the institute. The blog just replaced it all.
I don't know enough to teach others. Just started to seem to understand some things. Let the people who know better teach...
To this we can say that they, too, can think so, and this does not teach anyone
Well, yes ... Teaching is good at work. My designers, for example, I work with them a lot, help them grow, see changes, notice people who need it, who want it.
But when students turn out to be random people who don’t give a damn, why waste energy?
Since we are talking about this, I want to bring the topic of the crisis of higher education… What to do? It seems that 95% of competencies people do not get at the university.
Even 99%. I used to think that universities are bullshit invented in an industrial society, where everything is done in such a way that a student needs to cram something and give it to a professor, which for some reason is an achievement. Ken Robinson about it .
After a while, I realized that there are industries in which higher education in this format still works. Doctors, for example. Academic specialties: mathematics, physics, etc. Scientists, on the other hand, do about the same thing that students do at the institute - scientific work, publications. But when we talk about designers, programmers, products... These are craft professions. I learned a few things - and forward. There is enough Coursera, Khan Academy.
But recently there was a fresh idea that the university is needed for the community. This is the first impetus for acquaintances, for getting into companies, these are future partnerships, friendships. A few years with cool people is priceless.
Sasha Memus is here so he spoke about the most important thing that he received at the Physicotechnical Institute. It's good when there is a network and community.
Yes Yes Yes. And this is what online education has not yet been able to achieve. In general, universities are a community, they are an entrance ticket to the industry. Just like an MBA for business. First of all, these are important partnerships, future customers and colleagues. This is the most important thing.
Career in products
And what experience and competencies do the products at Intercom have behind them?
There are different experiences. Some products had their own startups before, for example. When a person went through such a school and got bumps, it's very cool. Yes, some people are lucky, some people are not. But anyway, it's an experience.
What about product designers?
Experience. Product portfolio. Sometimes it happens that people send portfolios with landing pages. Send sites for some reason. But if there are 3-4 products, or parts of large products, then we can already talk about something.
You made a great career at Yandex in five years: from designer to head of design department. How? And what is the secret sauce?
A lot of it was just luck, I guess. There was no secret sauce.
Why are you lucky?
Don't know. He first rose to a junior management position. There was a time when I had web designers. And then, for a very long time, our team did not succeed with Yandex.Browser. Designers changed, we tried outsourcing, different studios. Nothing worked. The management put pressure on my leader - they say Kostya is sitting there and doing administrative garbage. My boss put pressure on me. They gave me a team of people, and focused only on the Browser. It was a shame, I had to abandon many projects.
Raked?
Yes, but for some reason it worked out. There was a big launch. We were on the same stage with Arkady Volozh - this has never happened before in the history of the company, so that during the presentation of the launch of a new product, a designer would take the stage. Although, probably Tigran - the product manager - just dragged me onto the stage, thinking that maybe I'd better explain what's wrong with our design. Then I even starred in an advertisement for the Browser.
A couple of years later, we went crazy with the guys and made the concept of the browser of the future. It's more about strategy. This story also increased my karma.
I heard a version that you had such a cool attitude, because you are an ideal example of a carrier of DNA, the culture of Yandex.
Maybe so ... Well, yes, the values and ideals of Yandex are close to me.
I was also very lucky with Intercom. I get pleasure, I share and broadcast the values of the company. In general, then something happened. I always drowned for Yandex, and now I am happy when something new comes out.
I heard a lot of talk about the "old" and "new" Yandex. What do you think?
In short. Adizes has a theory of organizational life cycles. At first, the company is tiny, peppy and uncertain - complete chaos and waste. Then growth. If everything is cool, then scaling. But at some point, the ceiling may meet - the market ends or something else, someone forces out. And if a company cannot overcome this ceiling and gets stuck, then its administrative part and bureaucracy begin to grow. Everything is shifting from turbulent movement and growth to just maintaining what is. Conservation is in progress.
Yandex had a risk of being in this stage. Search was already understood as a business. At the same time, there has always been a difficult competitive war with Google. Google, for example, had Android, but we don't. For a long time, no one has come to www.yandex.ru to search. People just search right away in the browser or even on the phone's home screen. And we couldn't put Yandex on people's phones. People had no choice, there was even an antitrust case.
Yandex wanted to move on. The Russian market was quickly saturated. New growth points were needed. The then CEO Sasha Shulgin singled out business units in the company that could pay for themselves, and offered them a lot of autonomy, they even directly stood out as separate legal entities. Do what you want, just grow. At first it was Yandex.Taxi, Market, Avto.ru. There the movement began. For Yandex, these were new centers of life and growth. People who like it began to leave the rest of the company for business units. The company provoked further growth of independent units. Yandex-Drive carsharing, for example, is like this. But besides them, there are many more points of life where Yandex businesses flourish.
And then you moved - from the role of design director of all Yandex to the role of design lead at Intercom.
Yandex is the CIS team. I wanted to try to play for the national team of the world. I was reading Intercom's blog and thought - that's how cool people understand products. I would like to work with them, see how it turns out, and if I can ever be at that level. Curiosity won.
Recommend curiosity?
Well, if people are not afraid ... Dementia and courage, as they say. Now I realized that I risked many things. But then he succumbed to desire.
Recently with Anya Boyarkina (Head of Product, ) in an interview they talked about dementia and courage. She drowns for courage and balance.
A drop of reason is definitely needed. But I seem to be lucky, and I really like it. I lead a group of designers, we are engaged in various projects.
What three pieces of advice would you give to ambitious and capable designers?
1. Pump up English. Number one thing. A lot of people get cut off by this. Many people wrote to me about vacancies at Intercom, I called up a lot of people, did micro-interviews. At some point, I realized that I was wasting time. If the level of knowledge of English in a person is intermediate, then go learn the language, and then we will return to the conversation. The designer should be comfortable explaining thoughts and ideas and understanding other employees. We still need to constantly communicate with carriers. There are many people from all over the world, but the products and managers are mainly from the States, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia. It is more difficult to communicate with them in English if you do not know it at a sufficient level.
2. A clear portfolio. See what a normal portfolio of a product designer is. Someone is too detailed - writes case studies for 80 pages for each work. Someone, on the contrary, only shows dribble shots. For a good portfolio, you just need to collect 3-4 visually good cases. Add to them a small but clear story: what they did, how they did it, what was the result.
3. Be prepared. To all. To move, to leave the comfort zone. For example, before Intercom, I had never moved from my hometown. And almost everyone with whom he spoke in Moscow came from somewhere. I envied. I thought I was a sucker for not moving anywhere. I like Moscow, maybe someday I will return there. But the experience of working abroad is very important, now I understand much better how everything in the world works. I saw much more.
How is it that Intercom has such awesome product posts?
You have to ask those who wrote these posts.
Several things come to mind. In Intercom, sharing knowledge is a great value. Blogging is cool. For example, we have very frank speeches at conferences. We honestly talk about stupid things, mistakes there, we do not embellish the results. Honesty and authenticity. Not to seem like someone, but to say how it was. Maybe it had some effect.
We also have awesome guys. Type , SVP of Product. I always listened to him with my mouth open. When he talks about something at a grocery meeting, I think how lucky I am to be in the same room with this person. He knows how to explain complex things simply. Thinks very clearly.
Maybe that's the point of blogging?
May be. In fact, we have a lot of cool authors. , co-founder, several gold posts. , our design director, broadcasts very well.
Artificial intelligence and automation
What do you think about bots and automation? For example, when I ride in an uber, I can’t get rid of the feeling that drivers have long been like robots…
With bots, an abnormal wave of hype initially turned out. It seemed to many that bots are new everything, that these are new applications and a new way of interacting. Now I have to almost apologize for the word "bot" from the stage. The wave has passed. This is a so-so situation - when something is overheated. Haters appear, and then you have to prove that you are not a camel. I suspect something like this is happening with cryptocurrencies now.
Now it’s clear that there are several use cases where bots work well. In general, the history of the development of technology is the history of automation. Once upon a time, cars were assembled by people, and now Tesla has fully automated factories. Once upon a time, people were driving cars, soon the autopilot will drive. Chatbots are, in fact, one of the branches of automation.
Is it possible to automate communication?
For some situations, this works, and it works best where there are a large number of similar cases. It is important to understand here that no matter how smart the platform is, it needs to be able to transfer the user from the bot to a real person in time. Well, and more simple things: you don’t need to try to make the form for entering a bank card in the form of a conversational UI, just insert the form into the chat.
With automation, there are simple and complex situations. Take the example of passport control at an airport. In 99% of cases, everything is clear and simple here: it is enough to scan a passport, take a picture of a person and let him pass - this can be done by a machine. In Europe, this already works. A person is needed for that one percent, when some kind of non-standard case. A person can understand the documents. For example, when a tourist, having lost his passport, enters with a certificate.
With support, too, so many simple automated questions. Better a bot that will answer right away than a person who will answer sometime later. In addition, large call centers are expensive and time consuming. And to be honest, the employees there are also almost like biorobots, answer according to templates ... Why is this? There is little human in this.
That's when the issue of support is difficult - you need to switch to a person. Let him not today, but tomorrow, but he will give a normal answer.
Few people now make machine-human communication, when machine and man work hand in hand. Facebook, for example, rolled out its assistant "M" - they tried to mix everything up, hide everything behind the avatar of the business. It doesn't matter who you're talking to right now. But it seems to me that this is fundamentally wrong - you need to always be absolutely clear whether you are talking to a robot or a person.
Yes, there is such a phenomenon about “pretending to be human” - the more something robotic looks like a person, the more terrible it is for people to interact with it. Until it becomes absolutely identical with the humanoid, and then again the norms.
This phenomenon even has a name: , "uncanny valley". Boston Dynamics still has scary robots, no matter how hard they try to turn them into dogs. When something is a person and not a person at the same time, it is very strange, we get scared. With bots, you need to form the right expectations. They are stupid: the machine may not understand you, so there is no need to form the wrong expectations.
Have you noticed that requests to Google or Yandex are written in teams? People don't say in normal conversations, "Stranger Things season XNUMX when it comes out." So with voice assistants, even children quickly switch to a commanding tone, ordering sharply and in simple words what to do.
By the way, about orders and gender prejudices. There are many studies that show that a voice assistant has a much better chance in the market if it has a female voice. What business would give up 30% of its revenue to fight for gender equality?
Yes, Siri also has a female voice by default. And Alexa. In Google, you can choose the gender of the assistant, but the default voice is female. Only in Space Odyssey did HAL 9000 speak with a male voice.
Speaking of fantasy. Cooper Design Consulting has a dude named Chris Nossel who is confused in science fiction. It's cool to see the connection with interfaces in real life. A lot of things were borrowed in all directions. There was, for example, the film "Journey to the Moon" at the beginning of the 20th century - and there were no interfaces at all in the spacecraft. And in the films of the XNUMXs there are already pointer devices in computers ...
Self-development and behavior change
How to develop yourself, Kostya? What strategies and practices would you recommend?
Two phrases: 1) choosing an ambitious direction and 2) small achievable goals.
And about the second, that is, about the goals, you need to constantly remind yourself: re-read the list. I try to read mine once a week.
I have a text file, all the main goals are written there. I composed it in such a way that it has several spheres. For each, I figured out how the reality would look like, in which everything is 10 out of 10. And I gave each one an honest assessment of which number out of 10 I am now.
It is important to understand about self-development that at any given time you are not just in one place or another. You have come a long way there, and from this place you see some peak. But after each vertex there will be the next one. It's an endless process.
Many people rate their alignment in life at 7/10. The main thing is not how much you give yourself now, but what you say about your “top ten”. The goal is not to jump from 7 to 10, the goal is to climb one step higher. Just for one. Simple little things, individual actions.
I reread this file often. This is the main magic - to reread it, to remind yourself. There is such a feature among people: if you read a text 40 times, you learn it by heart. This is how we are. After so many readings, you subconsciously remember the text. It’s the same with goal setting: it’s important to repeat.
Do people need attention hygiene?
This is where I'm freaking out, to be honest. On the one hand, there are social networks, notifications - this is understandable. It can be seen that the deep psychological mechanisms make us stick to it all, you can quickly get hooked.
What I can’t understand is where the healthy balance is. Refusing social networks completely, “going into the cave”, in my opinion, is also not very correct. I found all my two interesting works - both Yandex and Intercom - in social networks. For example, Kolya Yaremko (a former product manager at Yandex, one of the company’s old-timers) wrote about a vacancy at Pochta in Friendfeed, Paul Adams rummaged around on Twitter that they were looking for a design lead…
I do not understand how to look for the next job if I want it. I'm not ready for this yet, but anyway - what if I get drunk from social networks and remove all notifications? Some kind of healthy balance is needed, but what exactly is unclear.
It is very visible in children. If you don’t control it at all, then it’s very difficult for a child to break away, he goes to Instagram with his head, just sits down.
Remember a dude named Tristan Harris? He talked a lot about attention hygiene while working at Google, and now even created an NGO for research in this area.
Yes Yes Yes. I about his first presentation - when he first made slides about ethical design (ethical design). He was working at Google at the time and he talked about how we kind of want to create a bright future, but in reality we just grab people's attention. Much depends on us, food people. He drowned for not only talking about engagement metrics. And then, in 2010, it was super-revolutionary. Many then began a debate in Google about this.
It was at the same time an awesome example of a viral presentation that you want to share and discuss with someone. Written in simple language, everything is clear, clear ... Very cool! If he had written it by letter, it would have been much less resonant.
At Google, he was eventually appointed design ethicist, and he quickly merged from there. The leadership set him as an example to everyone - like, well done, here's an honorary position for you ... In fact, they legalized him, but did nothing with his arguments.
I know you were at Burning Man. What is it for you?
This is such a quintessence of free creativity. People make crazy works, art cars, and then they just burn most of it. And they do it not for the sake of popularity or money, but simply for the sake of an act of creativity. Looking at all this, you start to think differently.
What three skills would you like your children to have?
- Freedom of thought. Freedom from stereotypes, from imposed ideas, from thoughts that someone needs something.
- The ability to independently learn anything. If the world continues to change at the same rate, we all will have to do it all the time anyway.
- Ability to take care of yourself and others.
Any last words for readers?
Thanks for reading!
Source: habr.com