Redesigning a Platform Experience at Scale

Troy Azmoon at UXDX APAC. Video: https://youtu.be/q5t45tjLt2o

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

ServiceNow and the platform as a city

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. My name is Troy Azmoon, and I'm here today to talk with you about redesigning the platform experience at scale.

[00:00:12] Before I begin this talk, let me set context a little bit. I work for a company called ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a large company that works with some of the biggest names in business, the Fortune 2000, to digitize their workflows and digitize their businesses through process automation and workflow automation. Our customers include everything from Disney Entertainment to UnitedHealth Group, several multinational banks, as well as governments: the Department of the Navy in the United States, and several others. Quite a wide array of customers use ServiceNow to run their mission-critical business applications.

[00:00:56] The platform which I'm going to be talking about redesigning is used by over 70 million people on a daily basis. These folks are often referred to as technologists, developers, knowledge workers, service agents. But ServiceNow is also used by hundreds of millions of people, including many of you watching this presentation, to do things like make a request for IT services, HR requests, customer support, any number of activities you do as an employee, or even as a consumer, in your lives every day.

[00:01:35] As for myself, I joined ServiceNow at the end of 2013 and came to the company as a product manager, later co-founding the platform product accelerator group, and then subsequently founding the design and research organizations. Today I hold the title of vice president of platform design.

[00:02:03] For those of you who are curious about what a VP of platform design does, one way I like to think about it is to imagine a city. When you think of a city, you have to think about the designer. Somebody, or some group of people, did a master planning activity to create the city: where should it be placed, is it close to water and other resources? As well as the planning of the city: think about things like infrastructure, roads, bridges, utilities; also commerce, so harbors, airports, areas of trade, urban development, the downtown section; services like fire, medical, police and security, and so forth. Thinking about all this as you design your city is very critical, because it has to be architected in such a way that over time your city can go from being relatively small to much larger, and grow in a vibrant and scalable way.

[00:03:10] Our story begins when the platform experience at ServiceNow is a vibrant, well-liked city, but a classical city. Our job is going to be to transform the experience of living in that city from one of classical antiquity to a modern major metropolis, where the existing inhabitants are not disrupted by what seems to them to be an overnight transformation, and which also attracts more population to this metropolis, so subsequent generations can continue building upon this new city of the future, if you will.

[00:03:59] It's a long story. Even though it will appear to our users as an overnight success, it involves thousands of people across ServiceNow, millions of hours of investment, and a total dedication to realizing the dream of transforming the city from one of antiquity to one of the future.

"This is terrible": first impressions of the platform UI

[00:04:22] Let's start this story where I consider the beginning to be, and that's at the end of 2013, when I took a job at ServiceNow as a product manager, assigned to work with a small team of about eight engineers led by the company founder and chief product officer, Fred Luddy. This team was located in a tiny corner conference room that could hold about 12 people total, and we got to know each other very well very quickly.

[00:05:01] I can still remember that first week I was there. I was looking at the platform UI, which I was product manager for, and I was a bit surprised, because even in 2013 this looked a bit antiquated to my eyes. It was hard to use. There was a lot of white space where it didn't need to be; things were convoluted where they shouldn't be. And I was concerned. I was very concerned for the experience as it related to people trying to be productive, working through their workflows and processes on this platform.

[00:05:42] A few weeks prior, one of those engineers had been hired, and we got along pretty well. I motioned for him to come over to my area and take a look at my screen. We're only about 10 or 15 feet away from the founder of the company, who's happily coding behind us, and I remember whispering to him as I pointed at the screen, and I said, this is terrible. He looks at the screen and nods his head and goes, I know. So I look back at him, and we're still trying to keep this on the down-low here, don't want to upset Fred, and I said, how is this company worth ten billion dollars? And he shakes his head and goes, I don't know.

[00:06:27] It was crazy, because here we had this super successful company, and there was this antiquated, out-of-date, hard-to-use platform interface to work with these automated, digitized workflows. It really confused me, because from what I could tell, these people seemed very bright. In fact, these were some of the smartest people I'd ever worked with. It just didn't make sense: how could such smart people let this interface languish in a prior age?

[00:07:06] I came up with three possibilities. One: they fooled me, they're not very bright. It's some very clever intelligence Ponzi scheme where everybody is pretending the other people are really bright, and I'm just in the middle of this crucible being fooled. Secondly: maybe I'm a super genius. Maybe only I can see what's wrong with this platform experience and how it's getting in the way of productivity, and it's very obvious how to fix it, and no one else really gets it. Or C: I don't understand the problem well enough yet.

[00:07:43] Within a few seconds I came to the conclusion that the most likely answer was going to be C. Because even though the interface was a bit of a challenge to use for regular people, there were a lot of things to like about the ServiceNow platform, and it was already very successful and well loved by the companies that adopted it. I would come to learn that the way you were able to digitize any workflow, any process, and bring it into the platform, and how easy it was, with a low level of programmatic skill, to bring those experiences and workflows into the platform, and to declaratively edit and modify some of the experience with very little programming knowledge, were strong attractors to the platform, despite the kludginess of the UI in some areas.

The accelerator years and a provocation

[00:08:38] Over the next three years I would work directly for Fred Luddy, the founder of the company. He took me under his wing and became my mentor, and that was an awesome experience. I learned so much about how to build products, and also about the platform itself, the data model, our customers, why things were the way they were, what could be better, and what made us so great at what we were doing. With this awesome core team of eight or so engineers, we started to create a successful string of products, starting with Visual Task Boards, which is a Kanban-based experience on the ServiceNow platform, followed by ServiceNow Connect, which is a real-time workflow collaboration experience, and then ServiceNow Mobile, the mobile experience.

[00:09:31] There were several different iterations of that classic UI where we did make incremental improvements, hugely valuable to understanding the way work got done on our platform and the way customers used it and extended it. This was a great time. I learned a ton and built a ton of products, all of them very successful with the customer base.

[00:09:54] At the same time, the team of eight people grew by an order of magnitude. During that process of growing the team, I spent probably half my time coming up with products, and the other half hiring. That core engineering team of eight folks was very serious about bringing good people in. That's just the way it goes: when you have a core team of highly talented people, they tend to attract more highly talented people, a virtuous circle.

[00:10:28] So now we had a team of about 80 people by the end of this three-year period. One of those individuals we hired, his name is Aaron, who's a close friend of mine, was exceptionally talented in the area of concept design, and Fred noticed this very quickly. One day he approached Aaron and said, Aaron, what would it be like if the interface to our platform was so simple that anybody could use it to get their work done? Anybody, with no training.

[00:11:10] One of the things that's so hard to do in design and product design is making something so simple. Aaron said, I'm probably going to need at least three months to figure that out. And we said, okay, that's fine, take all the time you need and come back to us when it's done. About three months later he comes back with a functional prototype, which is a total reimagining, if you will, of the platform experience for ServiceNow. This is in early to mid 2016.

[00:11:46] It's a total departure. A lot of the UI is missing. It's not worrying about technological constraints as we've implemented them, the debt around the design of the current platform, or existing customer needs. It's really purely focused on the simplest, most intuitive way to work with workflows, that a regular person with little or no training could experience to get their job done.

A vision from the desert

[00:12:13] It's in the context of this provocation, this catalyst, and the string of successful products over the past three years, that I start to think about the big picture. Having built those products, had those experiences with customers, and come to understand our architecture and our technology stack, I decided I needed to take a step back and really think about everything holistically, to decompartmentalize the knowledge I had gained and the experiences of working with all these highly talented people.

[00:12:50] I went on vacation. I took a break and went out into a very remote area in Baja California on a surf trip. I spent my days surfing, and there's no electricity or water or internet or any of those things out there. In the evening I would just stare up into the sky and think about how everything is disconnected yet connected, and what that would mean for the future of our platform, and how we bring all these disparate possibilities together.

[00:13:27] I came back from the vacation and presented to folks in the ServiceNow product organization a vision of the future, and outlined three basic visions of where we would go. One would be that in 10 years we would have hundreds of products. Today we might have a few dozen, but we'd have hundreds. Another was that everything in the world would become connected: everything from your doorknob to your oven to your car, your phones of course. Every single thing would be connected, like all those stars in the sky. Lastly, with everything becoming connected, there'd be an exponential increase in data. We'd be creating more data, more data would be coming to us, and it would all relate together to create even more complexity than we'd ever experienced before, as a result of all these dependencies and data being generated.

[00:14:27] That meant that ServiceNow was going to need a scalable platform experience to handle the multitude of products, not yet invented, that would be inside this platform. It meant we would need a platform-first approach to the way we design products, so we could scale properly. And lastly, it meant we really needed to rethink the way information was interacted with. The past was about going out and finding information, but now we had the burden of choice nearly upon us. Information that you cared about needed to come to you.

[00:15:02] By the end of this presentation we were so excited about these thoughts. We were ready to do this, we were ready to reimagine the platform experience under these conditions. We started the project off. We took some of our development engineers, our designers and product people as a cross-functional team, and we started building out hypotheses, testing what we thought would be the future of the experience, based on everything we'd learned and everything that we'd dreamt about.

Three false starts

[00:15:38] But it wasn't to be. Just a few months later, Fred Luddy, the chief product officer and founder of ServiceNow, my mentor, would retire. As a result, the team ended up being reassigned to focus on more incremental improvements to the platform, defect fixing and the like, and we couldn't get the resourcing we needed to really hit that flash point to push this forward. It was not going to get the investment that we had really hoped for.

[00:16:22] To make matters even more difficult, by the end of 2017 Frank Slootman, CEO of ServiceNow, another person I greatly respected, who had been very supportive of our efforts, also decided it was time to retire. New leadership came to ServiceNow, and the decision was made that the accelerator team that Fred and I had built over the past four years or so was to be disbanded. I lost my team, and that was tough.

[00:17:00] But the good news was that the new executive leadership team saw a lot of value in the way we approached creating products and working on the platform, and I was asked to build a new team, which was ServiceNow's design team. That was an awesome opportunity, from the ground up, taking just a handful of designers and building it out. We did an acquisition. It was awesome, fun, challenging, exciting, building a culture together with all these folks. The acquisition was super successful; about 90% of those folks are still with us to this day. I learned a ton about creating this organization and creating a culture together.

[00:17:41] Those were great times. On top of it, there was still the opportunity, with this new team we were building out, as it got bigger, up to about 70 people or so, to start investing in that platform idea again, because I still thought it was important for us to think about the future and future-proof the platform experience. In the acquisition I got a few JavaScript developers [?], and I tasked them with coming up with a few prototypes. We had UX architects start whiteboarding with them. With the visual design team, I really wanted to push the envelope: I sent them out on trips to go get inspired, do some wild color explorations, create something they would want to use every day. We kept the dream alive, and we started getting momentum.

[00:18:23] But a few months after kicking this project off again with the design organization, I encountered more disruption. The decision was made to bring in a global head of design, who had far more experience than myself in this role, to lead the team. As a result, the work that I'd commissioned was put on hold and people were reassigned to other projects. Those were hard times.

[00:18:53] I don't think you could fault me for wondering what I was going to do next at this point, because that is a tough pill to swallow, now three times: first with Fred leaving, second with Frank leaving and the team being disbanded, and third with the new team that I built now being given to someone else to lead. So there was some soul searching there. But the good news was, it was an opportunity for me to grow as a leader, because I still had a lot to learn. This was a time of self-reflection and developing self-awareness, and ultimately that experience was very valuable to me, to make me a more complete person and a better leader. So I'm happy for it; a lot to learn. But it was tough; it wasn't an easy experience to go through.

Rescuing the design system

[00:19:49] With the emphasis for the design group now focused on products rather than the platform experience, my attempts to make the platform redesign priority number one were basically getting pushback, with a new leader coming in. We were now going to focus on the design system. That was great news, actually, because we knew we needed a new design system for this new platform experience, so I was very excited by that. But it was a very challenging problem to solve, because the design system needed to support the creation of many products on a platform, but it also needed to support tens of thousands of products that hadn't even been created or thought of yet. We had a moving target that in most cases didn't yet exist.

[00:20:40] Furthermore, there was an infinite number of use cases. Any business could digitize their business and put it in our platform, for any type of user and any type of use case. Infinite uses, with a design system that can actually help you build products quickly, is a very tough problem to solve. The conventional approaches around being product-focused, and jobs-to-be-done frameworks, simply would not scale to solve this problem.

[00:21:07] I'd spent some time thinking about this and had figured out a solution, but initially the decision was made to take a more conventional, less risky approach. Of course, the less risky approach wouldn't scale, so in my mind it was going to be the riskiest approach of all for us to take. Eventually things came to a head where the project was behind schedule, and I was tapped to come in with a team of folks and lead that team to come up with a new way forward, to design a scalable, platform-wide design system that could create products quickly.

[00:21:48] Like the cavalry coming over the hill, we got there just in the nick of time and turned the design system project around. We ended up solving for design system outcomes with a 400% increase in efficiency, meaning one engineer can now do the work of four, one designer the work of four. It used a modern UI tech stack, and it really helped my team's reputational credibility, as well as my own. That was going to be very important, because I was relatively unknown to the new leadership team, and pulling off something like this at the 11th hour, with a low probability of success, and ending up very successful with it, gave me the capital that I was going to need to pursue bigger dreams, bigger accomplishments and outcomes at ServiceNow in the future.

[00:22:40] Because with this design system we could do more than build products. We could do things like build a new platform experience. Through all this time, and I think now we're about four or five years into my ServiceNow journey, I hadn't given up the dream. I was still dreaming about redesigning the platform UI, ever since that time out in the desert, coming back and saying, this is what the future is like, we need to prepare for the future. I was putting together a manifesto, sitting with UX architects when time permitted. There were still people working on prototypes in off hours. This thing had to happen, and we knew it had to happen. Getting the design system done, and doing it in a way where the work was really recognized and appreciated, was critical to future success. The design system outcome was promoted, and it was very helpful with my reputation and in being able to drive us towards this outcome.

Project Fusion

[00:23:45] Finally, after all this work and with the design system done, some of the things that I predicted would happen in the future started to happen. The future was manifesting itself over time, as it does. We were building lots and lots of products with the new design system, but at the same time customers were starting to get frustrated with the products and the product design. I was going out to see customers, talking with customers, and I was finding, more often than not, that it wasn't the products per se that were frustrating, but the platform experience: getting to the products, finding the products, working with these brand-new products in the context of an old platform UI. It was just driving people nuts. I started documenting all this, working with research folks on the team, making sure we kept a long list of the grievances and issues people were frustrated with, so we could use those later to support our assertion that we needed to improve the platform experience.

[00:24:40] At the same time, I'd been working closely with the largest division of ServiceNow, the Technology Workflows division, and they wanted a unified experience for their multitude of products. They had a great many products in their portfolio, and the general manager came to me one day and said, do you have any ideas on how we could bring all this stuff together? I basically said, it's funny you should ask. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we do have some ideas. If you could support us spinning up a team to solve your product unification problem, I think we can come to a solution that your customers will appreciate. He said, that sounds great, just tell me what you need.

[00:25:28] Then I went back to the team and I said, guess what, everybody, we've got a new project that I want to call Fusion. It's about future-proofing the platform, improving our visual design, and bringing all the experiences together, old and new, for all customers. So we called this Fusion. It's going to solve the problem that the Technology Workflows division needs solved for their products, but it's also going to solve all the problems across the platform. The GM said, yeah, that sounds good. As long as it solves our problem, if we can solve more people's problems, that's even better, so let's do that.

[00:26:07] I called up Aaron, the guy who had worked on the initial provocation, and I said, hey, I'd really love for you to get involved in this with us, because we're going to push the envelope, but we've got to bring it all together, and I'd love your point of view. I talked to all the leaders of the teams and said, this is our moment, this is our time, we're doing this, this time is the time.

[00:26:27] We all started working together. The visual designers started working on new visual design ideas, with influences from film noir and lots of cool video games that people had been playing. There's an awesome movie that's a master class in jewel tones, In the Mood for Love; check that out. The UX architects were doing a lot of whiteboarding, burning through magic markers, humming and hawing, prodding at everything. Researchers were doing sentiment analysis, qual and quant. Everybody was working in parallel, knowing, hey, there's a huge possibility here to pull this off. We'd put a lot of time into thinking this over the years; let's make it happen. It was a very highly motivated, excited team that had been dreaming about the opportunity to do this. It's a rare treat, and so we had all those streams going in real time.

The navigation impasse

[00:27:18] But there was one problem as we made progress, and this problem took us a while to figure out. It was the navigation system. Our navigation system was this left-hand navigation, which you saw at the beginning of the presentation, and it was pretty clunky, but existing customers loved this thing we called the left nav filter list UI. I think as a general rule, any navigation construct that you need five words to describe is probably pretty hard to use. But it was very powerful, and as people got used to it, they sometimes tended to like it. Our existing customers had gotten used to it; they'd built experiences on top of it, and so forth.

[00:27:57] Meanwhile, you can see where this is going to go: new customers didn't like it. It was ugly, it was hard to use, and it was one of the things they were constantly complaining about. But with the new platform experience that we were imagining and wanted to redesign, we needed one solution to both problems. I'd seen a lot of other companies create a classic view and a modern view, and I viewed that as a failure on our part. It wasn't acceptable to me to go down that road. I found it to be a lazy solution, and it was going to cost us, as well as our customers, a lot of money to manage the change management for it over time.

[00:28:33] Aaron and I in particular had a lot of discussions about this. He had the opinion that we should just make a clean break with the past and do a top menu navigation system. I was much more concerned about the existing customers. Having launched several products in the past where ServiceNow made a few changes without asking customers, I'd been locked in conference rooms with angry CIOs, having to explain myself, and I didn't want to relive that. I didn't want customers to relive that. So we were at an impasse, and the conversations got heated. This meme is a pretty good summary of the kind of discussions we had; I'm the individual with the handlebar or horseshoe mustache here.

[00:29:16] There was a lot of discussion and a lot of energy. We knew how important it was to make this thing look and feel awesome, but we also knew how important it was not to disrupt our legacy customers. Making a change that impacted them could cost them millions of dollars in training and re-architecture of the instances of ServiceNow that they'd customized. We spent a solid, I want to say, two months going back and forth on this problem, coming up with a lot of different prototypes, trying to figure out a way to combine this left nav thing with non-left nav so it becomes a little less confusing. A lot of different ideas were thrown around. Here's one where we're turning on [?] the top menu system, and Aaron's like, I need this in my life, and I'm like, well, we still [?] need the left nav, so that's got to stay there. We weren't happy with any of these solutions, and we weren't really making a lot of progress.

[00:30:11] It's at about this time that I decided we needed to talk to somebody who's a power user of ServiceNow, who really loves the left navigation system and has a lot of time invested in it, and get their perspective, figuring that if we could convince them to move away from the navigation system of old, then maybe we could just forget about the left nav and do the top menu system that looks so much more modern and clean.

[00:30:40] So we head over to ServiceNow's main engineering building and sit down with ServiceNow's CTO, Pat Casey, and we have a few sessions with him around this tiny table, talking about the navigation system to see if we can convince him. I figure if I can convince Pat Casey to move to this new menu system, we can probably get it by our users, and they'll probably be fine with it overall. But the talks don't really go in the direction of, okay, let's go with something new. He brings up a lot of good points: that you can very quickly type commands into this navigator, and if you have thousands of things in the navigation system, which some people do, you can find them much more easily.

[00:31:22] After a few sessions with him where he's exploring the virtues of the classic left nav list UI filter navigator, Aaron and I are sitting across from one another, and I look over at him, and he has a flash of insight, and I have a flash of insight as well. We're just looking at each other right there, and it's happening, there's a spark. We kept pushing on it and we figured it out.

[00:31:48] The meeting ends, and we thank Pat, because he did a great job of representing our current customers, and we walk back to the design studio. On our way back, it's Friday afternoon, and I turn to him and say, Aaron, I know you've got an idea on how to fix this problem. I've got an idea too. Why don't you think about it over the weekend, and I'll think about it, and then on Monday come to my office and I'll show you what I've come up with and you show me what you've come up with, and we'll just see what happens. We'll have a synergy, surprise each other, and maybe come up with an even better solution. He says, okay, that sounds good. So we head home for the weekend and ruminate on it.

[00:32:32] He comes to my office on Monday morning with his laptop, spins it around towards me and plays me a prototype he'd put together. While I'm watching it, I point at my whiteboard without skipping a beat, and he walks over to it and sees the exact same design on my whiteboard. We both solved the problem the same way. What it was was a pinnable navigation system that allowed existing customers and users to keep the UI they'd become accustomed to for as long as they liked, while also allowing new users and customers to use a much more modern set of affordances. But the real beauty here was that it was dynamic, meaning any user at any time could change the way they're working with the menu system, depending on their need or on the product they're using. So it was really maximum flexibility with absolutely no usage experience overhead.

Winning buy-in, then COVID

[00:33:27] With this solved, we were super confident that we were ready to present our work, not only to the GM of the Technology Workflows division, who was fully supportive, but also to our chief product officer, CJ Desai, and his staff, saying we have identified the problem and now we've solved it, and it was time to tell the world about it. So we set up the meeting with the chief product officer and staff, and I level-set the conversation: the future ServiceNow user will be able to use all these different utilities for the new experiences, but it'll be a unified experience, and it's going to be better than ever before. You're going to fall in love with how nice this thing looks, and it's going to be more productive and smarter.

[00:34:15] That was a bold proclamation, and we were obviously making big changes overall to the look and feel of the experience. To help everybody on that journey, to go from thinking of this as high risk to low risk, because the biggest risk of all would be to stay static in a dynamic world, I gave some examples: Apple and Microsoft, two great examples of companies that had evolved the experiences on their platforms over time. We weren't doing anything radical here; we were doing what we needed to do to continue to evolve and innovate to stay relevant. At the end of the demo everybody was on board and super excited for this new project. Nothing could stop us now.

[00:35:02] Oh, wait, something could stop us now. Just a month after presenting this demo and getting major buy-in from everybody to make it happen, COVID-19 started up, and that was disruptive, to say the least. Furthermore, just two months prior to this, a new CEO of ServiceNow, Bill McDermott, had joined, and I also had a new boss myself: we had a new global head of design join the company. It's in all this disruption that one of my most trusted employees approached me one day and said, Troy, do you really think you can pull this off?

[00:35:51] My answer was, absolutely. Because in a time of uncertainty, certainty pays a premium, and we were 100% certain about what we needed to accomplish with this project and why. I laid it out to everybody, up and down, left and right in the company: the new platform experience would create a cohesive, more productive experience for users. It would look great, using the latest technology for engineering teams. It would be personalizable and contextual, and it would work for all customers, old and new. Everybody comes along for the ride. Since we knew exactly what we were focused on doing, and we knew how important it was to our users, there was no question we would make this happen. And of course, after going through so many false starts and holding on to the dream for so long, I was willing to put it all on the line to make it happen.

Polaris: a design-driven initiative

[00:36:57] From there we mobilized ServiceNow at scale, in a new environment, in a remote world. The project would eventually come to be known internally as Polaris, our North Star. It would be the biggest project ever at ServiceNow. It garnered support across the organization: our best program managers, our best engineers, best designers, best people in docs. The very best people were all clamoring to be part of this clear vision of what we were going to set out to do and why it was so important. Even people from that original accelerator team, whom I'd last worked with five or six years in the past, were coming out of the woodwork, getting involved and making huge impacts on building this experience into a reality.

[00:37:46] This was going to be a "design-driven" initiative, and I put that in quotes, because when we say it's a design-driven initiative, it's not just about the design. I want to share with you really quickly this project plan I put together at the end of 2019, which I think really goes to show that it's not all about design here. This was worked on with folks in engineering and folks in product management. I created this not because I knew it would be the final output, but because it established a bridgehead, talking with people in a way they understand. If you're going to drive, you have to drive in a way that has common currency. Putting this in here, sequencing the work, assigning it to engineering teams at a high level, getting feedback from engineering, from program management and from product management as a roadmap, establishes a bridgehead for all the different parts of the organization that would be necessary to make the dream a reality.

The Next Experience launches

[00:38:50] By the end of 2021, as we got into 2022, we launched our new platform UI. This marketing video is just kind of mind-blowing to me, because here we are showing off a platform as if it's the coolest thing around, which is awesome to me. In addition to getting the platform redesigned, we also took on work creating over two dozen new product applications that integrate completely with the new platform experience.

[00:39:27] All together, we released this at the beginning of 2022, and we call it the Next Experience. It's a new platform UI experience from ServiceNow. Customers really love it and are very impressed by it. Here are some of the things customers have been saying. They're in awe. They think it's a huge improvement. They want to throw money at us because of the platform update; how often does that happen? And this last one's Australian; I'm told it means very good job, keep up the good work.

Takeaways

[00:40:05] That's the story in a nutshell. As far as takeaways, I think it comes down to just a few salient points at a high level. The first one is that genius, the idea, is just one little piece. 99% of this is hard work, the willingness to take your hits, learn along the way, and keep making progress. Platform innovation is a marathon. Taking a good product idea and making a great product is very hard to do; to do the same thing with a platform is harder yet.

[00:40:45] Great outcomes are a team sport. You can do good things by yourself, but if you want to achieve great things, you've got to work well with other people to deliver. And of course that requires working with shared currencies: you need to build those relationships and see things from different points of view if you're going to create outsized outcomes.

[00:41:08] And lastly, every failure is a step towards success. When we set out to build this modern metropolis, it wasn't built out of aluminum alloys. We used a special material, which we'd found in abundance over the course of this project, and that material was our failures. It was through all those failures, all those learnings, that we were able to take that material and transform it into the success that we've realized with the Next Experience UI. I hope that this talk was useful to you and your efforts, and I wish you well in creating product and platform experiences that your customers love. Thanks for watching.