Design has the power to create tremendous value. I probably don't have to convince you of that. And for anyone who's still in doubt, just take a look at Apple's stock price in the recent years. But design will fail miserably when it has to behave responsibly and in a predictable time boxed fashion. And that's the trend we've been seeing over the last years. So, this episode is a call to action. To stand up for the aspirational nature of design. To not settle for mediocrity. And to create solutions that touch people on an emotional level again. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is James. And this is the service design show, episode 190. Hi, my name is Marc van Tijn and welcome back to a brand new episode of the service design show. The show where we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you. Design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and of course our planet. Our guest in this episode is James Helms. James is a true design veteran. He spent the last nine years of his career at Inuit, most recently taking up the role of VP of design and product. I think it's fair to say that over the last decade, design has made its way into most companies. And that's a success we absolutely should celebrate. But underneath the surface, there is a downside to the rise of design. A lot of companies have been integrating design without actually taking the time to understand how it really works and which conditions are needed in order to get the highest return on investment. Keeping the status quo in place is what most companies tend to focus on. They have a deep desire for predictability and efficiency. Now, in order to survive in this environment, design needed to act responsibly and get in line with how businesses run. So many service design professionals have been flexing in order to make design work in this environment. Now, if we take a step back and reflect on what has happened, I think it's fair to say that design has been pushed into a corner where its capabilities have been crippled and its impact has been marginalized. And now we're hearing voices saying that design is just a hoax and not able to deliver on its promise. A harsh story for every design professional who's putting the heart and soul into their work and taking pride in what they do. According to James, it's about time we get ourselves out of this messy situation. Now, that's not going to be easy and will require some hard decisions. But the alternative is that we settle for mediocrity and insignificance. So I'd say it's what I shot. In this conversation today, James is going to help us get started on this journey by sharing how we can get executive level sponsorship to provide the necessary air cover. Why we need to keep sharing aspirational stories about how design can impact the lives of the people around us and when it's time to persevere and when it's time to actually start looking for a company that does provide the conditions for you to succeed. That about wraps it up for my introduction. Now, it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with James Helms. A very warm welcome to the service design show, James. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. You have some interesting perspectives on the state of design. As always, we're going to dive into that in a few minutes, but first we do a round of introductions for the people who haven't looked you up on LinkedIn or search you on Google. I ask chat GPT who you are. Could you give us a brief background of what you've done and what you do today? Yeah. The quick cliff notes of my career is that I actually started as an advertising art director in the very traditional space about 25 years ago when the space was ostensibly a traditional space. As the work got more and more digital, so did my roles. And so I moved first into website design and that kind of user experiences that were based around web. And then eventually moved into mobile experience design. Worked at Bottle Rocket for several years, which is a third party app developer in Dallas that was on the forefront of delivering third party apps for the Apple platform. And then spent the last 10 years leading design and product for into it first in their strategic partnership group, which focused on accounting software for pros. And for the last three years working for their platform team focused on identity, data exchange, and the design system, all shared capabilities that are used by the whole platform. And what I'm doing now is I'm actually talking to you from Portugal, which is my part-time residence, doing some freelance work, doing a lot of traveling and just kind of figuring out what I'm going to do next, quite honestly. How is that to be in that uncharted territory that you always put your clients into and now you're in it yourself? Yeah, the shoe is on the other foot, as they say. It's been okay. I mean, the good news is that I am blessed with plenty of runway to figure out what it is I want to do. I'm doing, I'm taking my own advice, which is I'm experimenting with a lot of different kinds of things. I'm meeting a lot of different kinds of people, including you, Mark. And I'm really leaving myself open to surprises and delightful coincidences to see if there's something out there that really just sort of strikes my heart with, this is what I want to do now. Serendipitous encounters, right? Aligning the university. Cool. Let's see where you end up in a year time, maybe still on a beach in Lisbon or close by. James, one of the questions that is a tradition on the show is for me to ask you if you recall the moment that you learned about service design. It's actually a fun story because I was researching design skills for the future. That was kind of a focus for the design organization and into it. And I was tasked with doing some research in terms of what were the emerging design competencies that we should be paying closer attention to investing in. And it first started that I actually even heard it mentioned from a couple of professors at Savannah College of Art and Design that they were training students for service design jobs. And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. I want to find out what that is. And so I reached out to my friend now, Mauricio, who is running the service design program at SCAD. And I said, it would be great if you could tell me a little bit more about what service design is and how you prepare students for careers. And he said, I can do better than that. Come to our service design open house and I'll introduce you to alumni and students and you can introduce yourself to them. So that was really my first entree into the space. And then I would say, really the person that sort of opened my eyes to all that it could be was one of the first service designers I hired. Her name is Liz Ball. She's an amazing design partner and probably one of my better hires. And she taught me a lot about service design and how to think about it, especially as it related to the work that we had in front of us in the shared capability space. Yeah, Mauricio has influenced a lot of people in good and in bad ways. We love you. Yeah, so thanks for that, James. But you're not off the hook yet because we're going to dig a bit deeper into who you are as a person next to a professional through a rapid fire lightning question round. I've got five questions for you. Your goal is to finish a sentence that I'm going to prompt you with, just the first thing that comes to your mind. You haven't prepared and that's exactly the goal. So are you ready? I think so. Okay. Please finish this sentence. The thing that always brings a smile to my face is... Anything that can surprise me or pique my curiosity. Okay, next one. If I had unlimited resources, I would... Travel the world, eating things. Okay. The most important quality in a friend is... Creativity. I've got the next one for you. The best day is when... The weather cooperates. My schedule cooperates. And I get to spend it with the people I love doing the things that we like to do together. And usually involves a cocktail, a sunset, and a good night's sleep. You're setting a high bar here, but it is the best day. So fair enough. Okay. The fifth and final one. And this is a bomber. The world needs more curiosity. All right. Well done, James. You've sort of succeeded for this question around. And now it's time to dig into the topic of today. I'm going to drop a bombshell because that makes it usually quite interesting. Is it correct to state that you feel design in its current state is shamed and crippled? Yes. That is true. Tell us more. How did you get to this conclusion? This is honestly, it's a piece of my personal experience combined with a lot of things that I've read from a lot of other designers. So I know that I'm not alone. But there's a lot of pressure, especially in the last, I would say, 15 years or so for designers themselves have put a lot of pressure on themselves to get a seat at the table, so to speak, which is to be involved in how a business is run, how a business holds itself accountable to its customers, how a business chooses to invest in all kinds of things. But among them, design talent, design innovation, product and technology, strategies, all these things. So there's a lot of pressure for designers to get a seat at that table. There's been a lot of arguments about whether or not having had a seat at that table, they've taken up that responsibility and really taken the seat and done something with it. We also watched an era of chief design officers, I think most notably Joni Ive, as this incredibly influential and powerful right-hand and patriot of a business savant in Steve Jobs, who transformed the vision for that company and really set a huge example for other design leaders to look at and say, oh, wow, there is so much room for design to have larger impact in a business. And consequently, I think, or I should say consequently, that's kind of collapsed on itself. And I've seen a lot of chief design officers ousted, a lot of design roles, design leadership roles removed, designers laid off in droves in ways that really sort of make me question, was design truly delivering the value that it promised to these companies? Or, and this is what I worry, was design so focused on justifying itself through metrics and participating as business people that they missed the opportunity to do what designers do best, which is to connect with our customers emotionally and inspire companies to see well beyond what's possible today and think about a future in a vision that is exciting and that happens in five-year stretches, not quarters. Now, I'm going to assume that a lot of us who are listening have mixed emotions about this. One might say, and I'm going to just name a few things, not to say things that I would potentially agree with, but just to throw it out there, one could say design needs to justify its impact on business. That's just reality.  Ignoring that means that you're an artist. You're just doing the work for the sake of art rather than for impact. What's your take on that? I agree that I think that design in a bucket or in a pocket or left to its own devices or in some ivory tower somewhere is not effective because that's not partnership and that's not accountability. I'm not suggesting that design shouldn't be accountable. I'm suggesting that design has tied itself in knots trying to point to its own value at the expense of being valuable. Can you give us a story or an example that illustrates where this has happened? Well, I think one of the easiest ones to point to is, honestly, design takes all shapes and sizes, and I want to be careful to frame this in my particular experience, which has been for the last couple of years in the tech industry. In that context, there's a design process which is, as most designers are aware, non-linear. You follow the customer, you follow customer needs, you spend time immersing in who you're designing for, you spend time reveling in the surprises of things that you didn't expect to happen, and you iterate in cycles, many of them failures, looking for ways to connect value proposition, product experience, and create a real light bulb or lightning bolt moment that connects a customer with a brand, with a company, with a business. Practically speaking, the design process is laid next to something called the agile process, and the agile process is a religiously heartfelt way of doing things in the technology industry, which is we work in two-week cycles, we focus on shipping value in every cycle, we are very rigorous in making sure that we are resourced and using those resources effectively at all times, and the design process and the agile process don't work together without some serious compromises. I'll tell you that those compromises nearly always happen in the design process, not the agile process, and I think the designers have said, sure, we can make that work. Yeah, we can make that work. We can make agile work, and you know what? We can make your quarterly planning work, and we can make many of these other things that the business needs to do for the sake of the business. We can make those work, and all of those things end up taking a bite out of design's ability to have impact, to innovate in meaningful ways for customers, and it's because design has flexed in ways that other processes have not been asked to flex. Nobody's asked agile to flex for design process. Nobody has asked the planning process to flex for the fact that the designers are still out there in the woods trying to figure out what the value proposition is. By virtue of the fact that design tends to be the least structured looking of all of the things that are out there, they say, hey, why don't you get in line with this other thing? It's working for everybody else. I'm sure that everybody who works in a large organization feels this pressure of predictability and efficiency and optimization. So if you're in a context that optimizes and is optimized to sort of focus on those areas, you have to get in line, otherwise you don't get the opportunity to play. That's at least what I'm going to assume. So is there a choice? Do we have to play along, or should we just put a stake in the ground and say, no, this is not how design works? I think we have to play along in, like I said, I don't think that design can do anything on its own. I think that design in companies that respect the fact that design takes a while or design is as much about learning what not to do as what we're going to do next. While that may not feel satisfying at the end of a shipping cycle, that is actually how innovation works. Innovation is about quickly finding out what we shouldn't build as well as quickly building and efficiently building what we should. And I think that what happens is when you exert agile pressure on a design system, you force designers to validate versus approach with curiosity and a sense of skepticism. You teach them that successes are expected and check the box and move on. You don't go back and inspect them for what did we do right here to make sure that we repeat that next time. You just kind of have faith that all of the assumptions you made were the correct ones, which is why it worked and we can double down on that. And honestly, people that know how innovation works know that that doesn't work. People that know how innovation works understand that there are micro failures that are worth figuring out and avoiding and there are micro successes that are worth finding, distilling and capitalizing only on the micro success. But to go back to your question, should design fall in line? I think actually all functions should flex with some degree of understanding of what actual success looks like in terms of delivering value for customers. And delivering the approved number of story points is different than delivering what the customer actually wants, needs, and is paying for. We're really curious to hear if you have seen examples where design stood up to its core values and was able to be, I don't know for a better word, accepted, respected within the organization rather than the organization asking design to fit into the more predictable processes that are in line. So what do you feel are some success stories? There's plenty of success stories. The fact is that all great products began with great design stories, like the story of Airbnb and what was originally an experiment in can I rent this inflatable mattress in my apartment is a leap of faith concept that then extends to a several billion dollar business. What design is capable of surrounds us in experiences that we've come to take for granted every day? Uber's another one where the idea that you would climb into some stranger's car and pay them to drive you across town. That sounds insane in 2005 and now I can't live without it. So it's not that there are random stories. The story is around us all the time. I think that the problem is design is seen as a thing that is useful early. Design is a thing that's seen as when you're a very early startup stage company or when you're not even really thinking about it like design yet, when you're still just sort of testing the waters of what's possible and trying to scramble and put something together, you're operating within these principles in a way that's very non-linear and very much about finding the value and making sure that that value is delivered to customers. The problem comes when corporations, which in turn are publicly traded and have a responsibility to stockholders and have quarterly sort of expectations that they are setting for the street and things like that, they need predictability. They need to de-risk. They need some sense of we're on progress. And what I think is that in many cases, these things stifle a design organization's ability to innovate and quite honestly, that's what those stockholders are actually paying for and it's what the customers are paying for. But there's a cart before the horse thing that ends up happening, which is like predictability is more important than actually delivering massive value. You know, predictably delivering some value is better than potentially delivering massive value. And we see examples of that everywhere as well. In fact, with rare exception where you see companies that have such a belief in design that they have whole aspects of their company that are only focused in this innovation space and they are given the free reign to go spend time and treasure and effort exploring, failing, prototyping in, you know, many times in the dark. Surely Apple spent years and years and years figuring out this virtual headset thing that's out now in a quiet place where they were not beholden to stockholders and all that other kind of stuff. And they had the ability to work based on what matters and what's the hunch and how do we refine this idea. Contrast that to the Google Glass, which was released basically as a prototype that you could pay for and got there much quicker but without fully understanding what it meant to delight customers with this thing, what the use cases were, any of that kind of stuff, and brought with it a variety of ethical quandaries, social and stigma things that came up with it. An interesting idea, not perfectly executed by any means but a bold swing but a whole different approach from a design perspective in my opinion. Okay, let's go back to one of the things you mentioned about publicly traded companies and the pressure of delivering quarterly results. I was going to say most organizations are publicly traded, but that's not true. Most organizations aren't, but the big ones of course are. And most organizations aren't set up to innovate. They are set up to maintain the status quo and do it in the most efficient, cost-effective way. Does design from your perspective actually have a role there and does it stand a chance when it's outnumbered by people who have a completely different mindset? Well, I think I want to take issue with the first half. I don't know that all designs, that all corporations are set up to maintain the status quo. And I worked for a company that leaned very heavily into artificial intelligence when they understood that it was going to be a huge disruptor. Not just as they wielded against their competition but even internally. They knew that it was going to break some stuff and they wrapped their arms around it anyway. And I think there's a lot of technical innovation that's happening that's quite inspiring in the way companies in the last couple of years like the ability of Amazon and Google to turn the cloud into a product. These are fantastic innovations that are led almost exclusively, technically first. And then you sort of go and figure out what's the market and what's the value and how do you price that and how do you sell that. So just saying, I don't think corporations are necessarily set up to run the status quo. I do think corporations, for good reasons, are trying to do right by their many hundreds of thousands of employees, their customers, and their stockholders and other stakeholders. And unfortunately, I think that that has led to what kinds of things can we do to appropriately manage expenses. Then how do we turn that into an effective planning system? How do we turn that into an effective resource management framework? How do we turn that into guidance for how to make sure teams are using their resources reliably, predictably, efficiently? And that's what happens. What happens is that things that are done in the spirit of being responsible from a business perspective, by the time you get to an individual team member, their hands are completely tied. The work is, in many cases, planned months or even a year in advance. And that doesn't give you a lot of room to be wrong or to suddenly say, I mean, and again, I'm not saying that companies can't pivot. I'm saying that individual designers have a lot of trouble adding value beyond story points when they are treated as a resource that's expected to deliver a certain incremental amount of value and they play down, so to speak. There was a time when there was a lot of companies and into it was among them that spent a lot of time spending that encouraged employees to have 10% of their time spent on innovation and blue sky stuff. And at some point, I think we decided that was waste. I think at some point we decided there's like, they're really not doing anything with that time because we're not seeing a whole lot of innovation coming out of that. And so what we're going to do instead is we're going to have them, first it was we're just going to have them go back and polish up things that we haven't had a chance to polish up on. And then that just turned into we're just going to get a couple more points out of every cycle. So I feel like there are good reasons why system after system after system are arranged the way they are. And what I see is that it's difficult for the design process to coexist inside these bulky multi-layered and oftentimes somewhat bureaucratic systems. And many of the people that have built those systems look at them and say they're too heavy, they're too rigorous, we're asking people to assume things and size things with no idea what they're talking about yet. They know, but it's a practical way to do it. The problem is, and then this is the other side of this, and many people that are in the marketing space will understand the concept of the use it or lose it budget. You get to the fourth quarter of your business cycle and you've got some money left over. And if you don't spend it, they're going to cut your budget for next year. Oh, you didn't use all your money. You clearly don't need it all. So we're going to take it away from you. We're going to give you less next year. Wouldn't you think that that would create all kinds of terrible behavior wasted money on half thought out stuff and little pet projects and all kinds of things that again, that doesn't sound like accountability at all. That just sounds like spend the money so we get more money. I mean, that sounds utterly unstrategic. Now, the same thing happens in resourcing where you resource a team with a bunch of engineers to go build a product and the design team goes off and comes up with, they spend some time doing some research and they come back and they say, you know what, the early results on this prototype are that it is the wrong thing to build. So we're going to go do some more research. And a product manager who's got 10 engineers under their resource to them and their value is as a deployer of resources is twiddling their thumbs and trying to figure out how to keep those engineers busy. This 10 people, all of whom are making surely $100,000 and we're going to keep them busy for two weeks. That's what Hagell does. That concerns me as a person that wants to be responsible with resources. It's like, make sure you know what you're going to build before you have resources stacked up to build it. But that's the way resourcing works. You get resources for months or quarters or years and every day they're not busy. It's a day that your money is blowing out the window. And so there's a lot of pressure on designers to validate something that we can go build right now. Give me a shovel-ready story of something that we can make this week. How do we, or what kind of conversation do we need to have with our leaders on whichever level in the organization it is to create that space to, like you said, be more messy, more mystical, be more inconvenient? It seems like quite an uphill battle. I think it is. And I think that part of it is that I think designers themselves are half bought in on the fact that they need to justify their value, that they need to spend cycles, teaching, engineers, product managers, leaders, pretty much everyone around them, why design matters. And a lot of times the response they get is, quit telling me why design matters and go matter. There's a bit of gaslighting that goes into that because designers were trying to do the work that mattered and they were being shut down as that's the wrong work. We don't need inspiration. We need shovel-ready stories. We don't need five-year narratives and journeys. We need value to customer in two weeks. And I think that some of it is that they're outnumbered. For every designer on a team, you've got one to two product managers and sometimes 10 to 20 engineers at the expense. And it is the job of designers to educate and to build partnerships and to advocate for customers and advocate for, and I'm not kidding when I say this, but to advocate for magic, not just functional specs, but emotional resonance and a sense of wonder and curiosity and fantasticness that comes from experiences that feel elegant and sort of like, how did they know that in a way that, as everybody likes to say in air quotes, isn't creepy, but feels like you know me and feels like you expected this and keep me from feeling terrified about the use of my data and all that kind of stuff. I mean, there's all these other things that are out there that are all swirling around the human experience and the overwhelming emotion that people feel when they're confronted with technology is a sense of bewilderment or fear or frustration or agony that things don't work the way they're supposed to that they have to do them twice or three times or five times. And these are products that we all respect and are proud of and sell for 10 and 20 and $30 a month. And the amount of pain we inflict on our customers, and I'm not just talking about the companies that I've worked for.  I don't understand how they work. I don't understand why I pay for a different one every month.  And I don't know what it is. But iCloud's supposed to be magic. And I'm like, but it's also terrifying. No, James, you said a part of the problem is that designers have subscribed to the idea that they need to justify their value prove their value. And at the same time, you're saying that we should explain the story. Well, I think that I think that part of it is, and this is one of the reasons why I brought this word up earlier, I think I think there's a lot of there's a lack of curiosity from functions outside of design as to how could this be more magical? How could this be more emotionally resonant with customers? That's not a question that engineers will ask. That's not a question that most business leaders will ask. And so designers say things like, shouldn't it be more magical? And then they say, well, how? And they say, that's a great question. I would love to do some research to let you know what magical feels like for this customer. And then everybody else says, that sounds like a waste of time. So the expectation needs to come from leadership, the expectation needs to come at the mission and the vision level of a company, of a corporation. And by the way, the people that are running corporations, CEOs and C staff and corporations have very, very, very big important things that they need to go solve. And I'm aware of that. I know that employee health and retention are important issues and that customer growth is an important issue. And that managing expenses and managing expectations for the street are very important. And staying close to customers for those leaders for whom they prioritize that they know that that's a huge piece of time they should spend. And looking at what other companies are doing and making sure that we are staying abreast of trends and benchmarking appropriately and all those things. So the idea of expecting more magic from your projects or from your products sounds like one more thing and maybe that's somebody else's job. And I assure you that until that expectation comes down from the top of the corporation, and I'm not sure it will, then I think that the role of designers as innovators and as conjurers of magic and emotional connection is going to be stifled. And what does that mean for the design community? I think it means that you have to either build the bridges, look for the people that will give you the cover you need to go do the work that needs to get done. And I would say that there are visionary product leaders, there are visionary design leaders, there are visionary technical leaders and marketing and sales leaders who know that our products are not living up to the expectations or wowing our customers. And they don't know what the levers are. They want that but they don't know how to get it. And so instead of shouting into the wind at every single person about how important design is and how important it is that we do the right amount of research and how important it is that we do less better, you just have to find who these people are that believe already and help them, have them help you make the case so that they can help find the funds and all those kind of stuff. But I just see a lot of design leaders that are thinking, oh, if I was just a better business, if I just had a better head for the business and the metrics, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm just saying I don't think that's the path to getting the magic in the door. I think that you're being drawn off sides by, oh, I need to conform myself to these, to weigh these other business leaders' talk and look and work or we're not going to get any design impact. And it's like, well, we'll see. But real design impact and real design magic when customers see it is quite potent. And so one of the things that I've coached teams forever to do is get your experiences in front of your customers and get it on tape and share their delight and absolutely their disappointment and their frustration in video and make those leaders watch uncomfortably as these customers struggle with our problems and struggle with our experiences or light up in the moments where we've done something right and they're like, what did they just do? What happened there? And it's like, right, shouldn't we be focused on that? Well, this is a very important part of our conversation, which is quickly overlooked, I feel by many. And that is that anecdotal evidence and stories are often disregarded as evidence, as proof. And we try to fit into the existing metrics that are in place. And often they are expressed in big numbers, in quarters. And like you said, there's probably nothing wrong with that. And it's smart to have to understand the vocabulary that the rest of the business uses. But when we ignore and neglect our metrics, and those are the smiles, the frustrations, the emotions, as you said it, if we forget to put those forward, then we're probably, we're positioned for failure because we're not showing where the true power of our skills lies. I'll do you one better. When you consider how important data has become to your average company, and there are companies like Google and Facebook and Netflix that have really defined themselves based on how well they know their customer, from the number of discrete data points they have about that customer. There's probably an overwhelming sense of, I know this customer better than they know themselves. And that may be true from a behavioral sense, from a, and then if you were to confront that customer with that data and say, this is who you are, and a piece of them might go, oh, that's really interesting. And then they might even go so far as to justify what they're seeing in that data. But the fact of the matter is that people are emotional, and they make decisions for reasons that are really, really hard to connect to rational stuff.  And then you would have a lot of trouble being able to go, oh yeah, I can see that right here in this click or in this behavioral moment. You can't tell that. And the fact is, that's who we're designing for, where we're designing for these emotionally driven, incredibly sort of like fickle decision makers that are surrounded by a combination of magical experiences that they can't tell you why they love them, but they love them. And other experiences that they wish were as magical and are therefore frustrated and peeved and feel like hurt that you're not thinking of their expectations in this particular moment. And so yeah, I think that quantitative metrics, lagging quantitative metrics, quarterly and yearly quantitative metrics drive these ships in ways that the qualitative metrics or the qualitative and anecdotal story would be such a better sense of, this is where we should focus and this is our opportunity to triple down on a thing that matters. And I do think that the problem is you look at those big numbers and you look at an incremental lift of 0.3 or whatever it is and you're like, hey, that's pretty good.  We could literally double this business if we would just pay attention to what these people are saying. But instead, we're going to like, we're going to futz with the conversion of one particular button click by making it a different size. You think we're solving a problem with that? We are not. But it feels more secure, right? It feels more in control. And you can point to it, right? It's a metric. You can point to it. And so like I said, you've got this trap where everybody's now focused on the metrics on these quantitative measurements of what success is.  And it's a red herring for the actual value you could be adding for customers. And isn't that sort of lacking or the thing that we can maybe blame ourselves as a design community that we have done a really poor job at communicating? I wouldn't say that maybe the ambition or a vision or the problem that we can solve. Yeah, Mark, you know what? It's probably my fault. As somebody that was a VP, and I don't mean entirely. I mean, but for example, somebody who was a VP in a company who tried to pride themselves on creating air cover for creative teams to go do the right work and putting service designers and other designers in place to make the most of what I felt like was the opportunity. But I don't think I did a great job of creating the environment where those designers could in fact uncover and capitalize on that 2x value that would have then turned around and mattered to customers and the business. In hindsight, with the knowledge that you have right now, what do you feel would have been it? Was there a better strategy? Yes. Do I know what it is? No.  I think I needed to spend more time, especially in my last role with my cross functional partners. But like I said, I think the curiosity is this big important piece of the equation. And when people aren't asking, how do we make sure design is having the most impact it can? And what can we do to help? I actually was asked that question quite a bit in other roles. And so when nobody asks and you feel like all you can do is tell and show, it's a lot of pushing and it's a lot of searching for who's interested in helping. And that's time consuming and a lot of relationship building. And yeah, I'm sure it's a measure of what I would have done differently, for sure. Is that a red flag or a good indicator of success when I'm imagining that you and your role as VP shouldn't probably next to looking for the people who are curious about design also probably should have asked who people, why do you feel design is here? And if they have no clue, then it's like, okay, red flag, we need to jump ship because if the people who are sponsoring it, somebody's always, there is a PNL somewhere, if they can't tell you why you're here, then you're running off a cliff. Yeah, that's a good question. And Mark, it brings me back to another thing that we talked about earlier, which is, what am I going to do now or next? And I think that one of the things that I'm trying to figure out now is, where can design be impactful that's not in a corporate setting? Because one of the things that I'm particularly, one of my sort of provocative questions is, can design really be its best self when you have revenue and When it's crippled and shamed, James, that's the way you described it. When it's crippled and shamed, you describe it. Yeah, I guess that's the point is, but part of that is because there are so many layered processes and expectations that sort of leave very little room for design to explore. And again, I don't know that that's true everywhere and I don't know if that's true. But I'll tell you that having interviewed now at quite a few different corporate design organizations, I would love to be surprised by the one where I'm like, ooh, they actually sound like they're coming at this totally different and in a way where design is actually set up for success. And by and large, nope. By and large, they are all kind of doing it the same way. So maybe another note, it's not a definite conclusion, but the state of design is that within corporate environments, its impact is often marginalized and it's up to us to change that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I think it's up to the leaders in those companies to do a combination of things, one of which is create the air cover for those design organizations to do the right work. Don't get cowed into trying to fit a design process into an agile process. It just doesn't work. I mean, and plenty of people, I'm not the first person to point this out and I will not be the last person to point this out. Quite honestly, there's an awful lot of people out there that don't think agile is a very good process at all. They don't think that engineers think it's a good process. They don't think it's a good value delivery process. They think it's an efficient thing, but it's efficient almost for the sake of being efficient without a real sense of accountability that it's delivering the right value to customer and the right velocity, that it's making the most of the rich opportunity that things like research, experimentation, failure, and even cross-team collaboration. Agile doesn't make a lot of that stuff easy. In many cases, it makes it almost impossible. When you start asking for things like collaborating, they're like, well, I'm going to have to fit that into next sprint.  I want to ask you some questions. Yeah, I really don't have time until two weeks from now. I mean, that's insane. That's a big issue with why corporations can't get out of their own way. Again, which is why when you go back to the roots, when you get back to smaller startups, when you go back to little projects like the ones that I was working on in Bottle Rocket, and you're surrounded by people that are good at their job that are focused on a singular mission and that are tasked with building the most important thing possible as fast as possible and quality is a key consideration, you can work really fast. You know what? You can deliver the same thing that somebody in this other big company is delivering, if not better, and probably 50 versions of it, some of which were better, some of which were way better, some of which were terrible, but that's okay because you can work quickly and effortlessly and it's a big deal. And then the realities of working in these big organizations are that there's all this extra apparatus around you have to use our data model and you have to use our design system and all these other kind of things that quite honestly are like, I'm a believer in design systems. I think that once you know what it is you're supposed to be building, a design system can really free up designers to do creative work. And the second you start looking at a design system as, oh, we no longer need visual designers on the team, you've completely missed the point of a design system, which is don't second guess decisions you've already made, go design the stuff that we haven't figured out yet. And reassure your customers as they move across an ecosystem that they're working on the same with the same data and the same products and the same security and all that kind of stuff. There's all kinds of great benefits to a design system, but it's not so that you don't have to have designers anymore. Well, we can have an entire conversation about AI in this context, but yeah, let's let's leave that for a different episode. So James, we've discussed many things, agile design systems, the future of design. Now, if any of us is listening to this and we find ourselves in this corner, or we have been cornered into this position where we feel our value as design professionals, isn't respected, isn't seen as very marginal. Like, if you could give us one piece of advice, what would that be? I think there's two. You're cheating. I think there's one simple one, which is leave. And find a better place. Go find a place that does do that. Fair enough. It's a brave thing. It's not always the... And I don't mean like just quit. I mean, prepare and exit. And maybe as part of that, let your manager know and maybe let your GM know that this is what you see, that this is the work that you want to be doing and can't do here, that this is the impact that you expect design to have and can't have within the constraints and the corners that it's been painted into. But there are companies that are doing this well, and there are even companies where there are even corporations where some elements of the corporation are doing it well. I mentioned the fact that I still believe that there is an innovative heart at places like certainly like Apple, but also places like Airbnb and Netflix and even Google and Facebook and all of those places. I think that there's lots of really, really interesting work that needs to get done in those places. And I can't speak for all those places as far as the mechanics go. So if anybody wants to say, hey, by the way, that's not the way design works at one of these other corporations. I mean, I'm going by what people have told me and all that kind of stuff. So I've heard enough of this information to feel like this all sounds like it's very similar. But if you're going to stay, work with, find the right people. Stop shouting into the wind and find the right people that have the right mindset and the ability to help make the change happen. So you're looking for executive sponsorship and you're looking for cross-functional sponsorship. I don't think designers get out of this box on their own. I think designers will have to find and coax the curiosity out of non-designers. And I think that that's the lesson. The lesson is how do you find and coax the curiosity out of the non-designer because us trying and showing and telling and building and doing all these things to try to paint the picture of how design can be more impactful doesn't work if people aren't curious and doesn't work if people don't care and doesn't work if, quite honestly, I'd love to hear about that, but I'll have to schedule it into my next sprint. That's how you know you've lost when people can't even make time to have a conversation about, hey, this train is broken. Hey, I'm too busy fixing the train to talk about the fact the train's broken. Both suggestions that you give require a certain level of courage and confidence and bravery, either to sort of say goodbye and this is not the right time, not the right place, or to speak up and be confident about the value that you can create when the conditions are right. So yeah, maybe maybe we do need a little bit more bravery. Yeah, I mean, humility, curiosity, and bravery, the three tent poles of a great creative, know that you can't do it alone and know that you don't know nearly enough, ask and involve everyone, and yeah, stick your neck out.  Yeah, there's nothing to lose anyway, the ship is going down. Exactly. I mean, you know, or maybe you learn something in the process, maybe you uncover something by being curious, maybe you uncover something that you didn't really consider or didn't really think about, that's now part of how you make decisions. I don't think this is hopeless. But I stick by my contention that there is a lot of, what were the two words that we used? Shamed and crippled. Shamed and crippled. There's some shame and crippled going on, for sure. We can fix this, we must fix this, or wait till those organizations go extinct and create a viable alternative alongside of them, right? That's plan B, or maybe that's plan A, actually, I don't know. James, you're on a journey to see what's next. Is there a way we can follow along and maybe learn more about what you're doing? I'm a pretty regular writer on medium. I have a medium link that I'm sure that you can share with everyone else, but I'm pretty easy to find there. So I've been writing observations on my journey as a leader and especially things that other designers can do. And I think a lot of them would probably dovetail well with what I've said today. And then purely on the other side of the spectrum, I think I said at the beginning that if I had all the money in the world, all I would do is basically travel the world eating. So you can find me on Instagram at Susie loves Sonoma. I would expect that that would be a call to action invite me to your next conference. That's another way. You can absolutely do that as well, invite me to your next conference. Then the only other thing that I've got that's pretty cool is that I started working with this creative collaborative called Neil. So that's a really great place. One of the things that's been striking for me is the talent that has joined that platform is universally experienced in a way that you would never see in a freelance network. It's just utterly jaw-dropping. I am the least qualified person on there by a mile. And the people that I've met are truly inspiring. And what I'll say is they're focused on the big stuff. They're focused on climate, social justice. They're focused on sustainable cities and housing and how we're going to make the best of the mess that we're in right now. And I feel like that's the call to action if you don't know if corporate's not working for you. Man, there are important things that need help out there in the climate and sustainable future realms that need design and designers desperately. We'll make sure to include all the relevant links in the show notes and don't beat yourself up too much. You at least made it onto the service design show. So that's not a bad day. James, we could talk for probably a few more hours. This is a classic thing everybody says on a podcast, but it's true. But I'm going to thank you for your time and for sharing your story here and for doing this wake-up call for the design community. I'm going to interpret this as to be more brave. That's my conclusion. I'll wrap up for this conversation. So yeah, thanks again for making the time in coming on. Awesome. Thanks, Mark. James really got me thinking about how we can be more ambitious and inspirational again as a design community. Yes, there is a risk that will not fit in with business as usual on the short term. But should we settle for mediocrity? I know my answer to this one. I'm really curious. What's your biggest takeaway from this conversation with James? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there. And if you made it all the way here and enjoyed this jet, please do me a quick favor. Click the like button. Not to feed a huge of algorithm. I really don't care about that. But to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this. My name is Mark Fontaine. I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Please keep making a positive impact and I'll get you very soon in the next video.


And I just lost 30 minutes in the morning that I could have done all the things that I'm supposed to be doing. But hey, listen, no judgment here. In the last 30 days, I accidentally figured out what has now become my most important morning principle that I think will dramatically help you and change your life. So that's what we're talking about in this video here today. Now along the lines of morning routines, one of the things I recommend is goal setting and journaling. Now I've just released a free online journaling email course. And you're also going to get notified of my actual print journal, the Master of the Day journal coming out soon. That is all in the description box there below. Click that first link for the journaling course, sign up, you'll get the seven day journaling course and be notified when my journal comes out first. Now it's funny when I first shot my first video on my morning routine, it was interesting because not only did it perform really well, in other words, you liked it. It's interesting how often morning routines come up in high performing people. But you know that there's tons of different philosophies and beliefs around morning routines, but behind all of them is one key principle. It's that these high achievers use the morning to focus on their most important task for their most important goal. So in the last year or so, I've been finally unwinding these sleep problems that I've had and they're finally starting to go away. And one of the things that I started doing, because my Wi-Fi box is literally right underneath my bed, under my head. So I would unplug it at night and the default routine is to flip through Facebook and flip through Instagram. But when I had no Wi-Fi, because I had to plug it back in and it took about 10 minutes, I noticed that I would leave my phone in my bedroom and I would go into my living room and actually do the things I was supposed to do, whether it was my morning routine or my morning goals, or just making breakfast and getting ready for the day. And then what I started doing was I started extending this by leaving my phone in my room for the first hour of the day. And instead, I used that to focus on my one big thing for my one big goal I was working on. So let me walk you through this process and how I think it's going to dramatically change your life. So let's talk about this simple morning ritual here, which begins the night before where you take out a little piece of paper, you're writing down, this is my number one goal, which for me right now is building my business continually. From there, you figure out what is one thing that may be the biggest rock that I need to push up to reach this goal. So for me right now, the big rock is I'm releasing a journaling course online and also a print journal. So I write that down, work on journaling course, then that sits on my desk. So in the morning when I get up, I have my one thing ready to go. And that's the thing I focus on.  And if you have the time, dedicate anywhere from 20 minutes to 90 minutes on that one thing. And you're going to see that your results go up so dramatically because you have the most energy, you have the least distractions, you have the most clarity at this time. And right now, all you have is the time for working on that one thing. Whereas later in the day, you're tired, you have 100 things to work on. You have all these distractions and all these schedules you've got to focus on. But now you just have your time, the silence and your one thing. So here's some ideas for what to actually focus on as your one thing. You could work on, for example, your workouts. So if you're working on getting fitter, you could do a home 20 minute yoga routine by watching a YouTube video or some kind of homework out that way. You could be working on writing your book or writing your novel. For 20 or 30 minutes, you just write and you don't edit and you see how much you get done. You could be working on planning out a certain life goal or just journaling out your goals and what you're going to do to overcome the barriers to those goals. You could be figuring out how to get fit or improve yourself. Or you could dedicate that 20 minutes to making a healthy breakfast because that's the first step in reinventing your physical body and your health and feeling good. You could focus on some of the journaling prompts that I talk about here or in the free journaling course in the description. You could focus on, this is what I want five years from today and every day I'm just going to write out a little bit or just read it over to always remind myself this is the trajectory that I want to be on and these are the little things I need to focus on each day. So if there's one thing you do that I think will dramatically change your life to leave your phone in the other room and the first whether it's five minutes or an hour you focus on the one big thing you have to get done. Now don't forget again, I've just released the free journaling email course. It's in the description box right there below that first link journaling. You're also going to get notified when the first hundred copies of the master of the day print journal are out. So make sure you add yourself to that email list there below. You'll get notified right when it's out. And again, you can get my last two videos right here and right here.


Welcome to the Everton News Daily. Everton have hired Portsmouth talent spotter Phil Bourbman as their senior European scout. That is according to reports today. Bourbman previously worked with Kevin Thelwell at Wolves. There has been a little bit of restructuring behind the scenes at Everton Thelwell doing that in terms of the scout network and Bourbman is about to come on board, like you say, as their chief European scout. Ross Barclay will miss out on a return to Goodison Park for tomorrow's game against Luton Town. He has been recovering from an injury sustained a few weeks ago, but it's apparently come a little bit too early, says Robert Woods. Albert Sammy Lacongo will also miss out for the Hatters he is going to be out for a couple of months, it looks like, with a hamstring injury, but Luton's captain Tom Lochia is expected to be fit. For the Blues, they're going to check on Michalenco, Vitaly Michalenco, who came off during the 2-1 winner Aston Villa in midweek, showing that he's leaving it late for him, but he is thought to be 50-50 for this one. Evan Under 21 is in action tonight against Arsenal at Hague Avenue. It is live on YouTube. Game kicks off at 7pm, so you can catch it, that one. If you're interested, you want to watch Evan play, why wouldn't you? Evan Under 21's Northern Ireland are going to play England at Goodison Park on 21 November in the UEFA 2025 qualification matches. That game kicks off at 7.45pm, so if you want to see international football at Goodison Park, why not? Go and check that one out. Everton's Women have signed Megan Campbell from Liverpool, the Republic of Ireland International. She's 30-year-old centre back, and you should play for Manchester City. That is ahead of Everton starting their Women's League on Sunday against Brighton.


From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of this year's AWS re-invent. You know, normally we'd be in the middle of the Sands Convention Center. We have two sets and 50,000 of our closest friends. We'd be geeking out on cloud. Seems like a long time ago, but the show must go on and it does. Joe Duffy is here. He's the co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. And Justin Fitzhugh is the vice president of engineering for cloud engineering for Snowflake. Welcome gentlemen, good to see you. Thank you. It's great to be here. Joe, I love what you guys are doing, you know, leading your customers to the cloud and really attacking that IT labor problem that we've dealt with for years and years by playing a role and transforming what I would say is IT ops into cloud ops with programmable infrastructure practices. So take a moment to tell us why did you and your co-founder start the company? How you got it off the ground? People are always interested in how you got it funded. You got a couple of Seattle VCs, Madrona and Tola involved, NEA just got involved. So congrats on that. What's the story of your company?  And yet from our perspective, coming from developer land, it had almost changed nothing.  They'd kind of write the code and then go to their IT team and say, hey, we need to run this somewhere. Can you provision a few virtual machines? Can you provision, you know, maybe a database or two? And so, and then we went and talked to, you know, infrastructure teams and found out, hey, you know, folks are really toiling away with tools that are pale in comparison when it comes to the productivity that we were accustomed to on the developer side. And then frequently we heard from leaders that there were silos between the organizations. They couldn't build things quickly enough. They couldn't move quickly enough and cloud native and the new public cloud capabilities just really were pushing on that. And really, you know, but the most innovative companies we kept hearing were the ones who figured this out, who really figured out how to move faster in the cloud. Companies like Snowflake really are leveraging the cloud to transform entire businesses. You look at Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, these companies that really harness the cloud to not just from a technical productivity standpoint but really transform the business. So that was the opportunity that we saw with Columi was let's take a step back. We call this cloud engineering. Let's imagine a world where every developer is a cloud developer and infrastructure teams are enabling that new way of building. Great, so you mentioned cloud engineering. Now Justin, you've done a bit of, bit of cloud engineering yourself better than your day. You know, the, the cube has been following Snowflake very closely since it launched really mid last decade. And we've covered your novel architectural approach and your cloud only mantra. Talk about that and have there been any changes in how you're thinking about cloud adoption and how that's, as that's increased and you've seen new use cases emerge? Yeah, so I think, you know obviously Snowflake was built on the foundation of cloud first and in fact cloud only our only platform our only infrastructure is based on the cloud. But, you know, for us it was absolutely key on how do you develop a platform and a product that's completely elastically scalable and really allows for kind of the pay per use and pay per consumption model. We didn't really, it would be very difficult for us to offer this and to offer a product in this way. And if you start to think about kind of from a cloud engineering perspective we don't have the typical network engineers the typical data center engineers that you might have seen previously. Instead, we're shifting our model and what we do in cloud engineering away from kind of an operations model or even DevOps model towards a software engineering model. And I think that's the, that's the big shift to cloud engineering is that we're looking to hire and we're building a team of software engineers to build systems and platforms and tooling to have the system self-manage as much as possible. Any changes to our infrastructure that we look at any changes in our platform are all through commits and deployed via pipelines as opposed to having operators log on and make these changes. And so that's the shift that I think we're seeing and that's to kind of match the overall snowflake model of cloud first and where the product is. Yeah, and like you said in cloud only, Justin you use Pulumi in your own engineering and also in your product externally is that correct and how so? Yeah, we actually use it in specifically and in our platform in order to kind of deploy to manage and just operate kind of our overall cloud infrastructure. We specifically use it more to focus on the Kubernetes and containerization side of things but that use case is kind of rapidly expanding across the organization. So I'm curious what you guys are seeing in the marketplace, Joe. You know, thinking about cloud broadly what's the impact that you're seeing on businesses? Who are the big players that you see out there? Maybe you could talk about some of the differentiation that you've noticed. Yeah, I think this notion of cloud engineering even three and a half years ago when we got started was in its infancy. We definitely saw that, hey, the world is moving it's shifting left, as Justin was saying and really people are looking for new ways to empower developers but that empowerment has to come with guardrails, right? And so what we're seeing is oftentimes teams are now modernizing their entire platform their infrastructure platform and they're looking to technologies like Kubernetes to do that but increasingly, you know, AWS, Azure, GCP you know, when we started there weren't any great managed Kubernetes clusters and now today fast forward, you know only three and a half years and many of our customers were using Pulumi to help them get up and running with EKS in AWS for example, you look at a lot of folks transforming on-prem as well. Again, many times adopting Kubernetes is sort of a if they intend to stay on-prem to at least modernize their approach to application and infrastructure delivery and that's where Pulumi really can help. It can be a bridge to, you know, hey from on-prem to the public cloud there are certainly a lot of folks doing great work in this space. You know, I think VMware has really kind of emerged as sort of a vanguard thought leader in this in this space, especially with, you know Heptio and now kind of pivotal joining the story. We see other, you know, great companies like HashiCorp for doing good work in this space and certainly we integrate with a lot of their technologies and you combine those with the public cloud providers there's also a lot of just smaller startups in the space which, you know strikes in my heart. I love supporting the startup ecosystem you know, whether that's Vercel or Netlify or Serverless, you know, really trying to help developers harness more of the cloud. I think that's an emerging trend that we're going to see accelerating in the coming years. Yeah, thank you. You've mentioned a number of interesting emerging tools companies in the ecosystem. I mean, Justin talked about Kubernetes are there other tooling that you're using that might be, you know some of your customers might like to know about? Yeah, I think, so one thing I wanted to actually follow up with what Joe said here is around kind of the multi-cloud nature of what we do is the tools like Pulumi are critical for us to be able to abstract away specific cloud provider APIs and such and so given Snowflake operates on all three major public clouds and offers a seamless experience amongst all three of them we have to have something that abstracts some of that complexity and some of those technical details away and that's why kind of Pulumi made sense in this case and has helped us kind of achieve that cloud neutrality piece. In terms of other tools that you're thinking that we're talking about. I think Pulumi is doing a great job kind of on some of these on some of the kind of that interaction and infrastructure instantiation but we're looking for tooling to kind of look for the overall workflow automation piece and orchestration. So what sits on top of say you're using Ansible using Terraform you may be using Pulumi as well but what kind of orchestrates all these pieces together and how do you kind of build workflow automation and I think there's a lot of companies and technology providers that are starting up in this area to kind of stitch all these pieces together so that you kind of have this seamless kind of workflow across your infrastructure. Got it. So Joe, I'm kind of curious you talked a little bit about your sort of background at Microsoft and you're even at EMC where you're helping people manage LUNs. This is a sort of skill set that is not in high demand today or at least shouldn't be. People really need to transform. I've said that a lot on the queue but maybe talk a little bit about the experiences that you've had in the past that informed the direction that Pulumi is taking and where you see it going specifically. I mean, I've been talking a lot about the next decade of cloud is not going to be the same as the last decade of the cloud. How do you see it? Yeah, I think I recognize a clear trend in with cloud computing. Back, I can't remember 13 years ago maybe 15 years ago when the Azure project started Dave Cutler who actually founded the NT project at Microsoft actually was one of the first engineers that started Azure and he called it a cloud operating system. And I think that vision of, hey, the cloud is the new operating system is something that we're still just chipping away at. And that was a clear trend. Having seen these transformations in the past, the shift from DOS to Windows, from Windows to mobile to client server to now the cloud, every step of the way we always transform the way we build applications. And I think where we're at now is really in the midst of a transition that I think we'll look back. You never know when it's happening, right? But you can always look back in hindsight and see that it did happen. And I think the trend that we're going through now with service meshes and just microservices and serverless is really we're building distributed applications. These cloud native applications are distributed applications. And that was the trend that I recognized. I also recognize another trend, which is, we spent 30 years building great tools, IDEs, test frameworks, sharing and reuse, package managers. We figured out static analysis and how to fix security problems in programming languages that we've got today. Let's not go rebuild all of that. Let's leverage that. And so that's what Eric and I said on day one. Let's stand on the shoulders of giants. Let's leverage all this good work that has come before us. And let's just apply that to the infrastructure domain and really try to smooth things out, give us a new sort of level playing field to build on from here as we go forward. I'm excited that Pulumi gives us that foundation that we can now build on top of. Great. And Justin, of course, we're covering AWS re-invent. You guys, that was kind of your first platform. It's your largest, the largest component of your business. And I've been saying a lot that, you know, the early days of cloud is about infrastructure, S3, EC2, throw in some database, but really there's a new workload that's emerging. And you guys are at the heart of that where people are putting governed data, giving access to that data, making it secure, sharing that data across an ecosystem. So that new workload is really driving new innovation. I wonder how you see that, what you see the next, you know, half a decade or decade looking like in terms of innovation. Yeah, I think it's a valid point, which is it's less about infrastructure and more about the services that you're providing with that infrastructure and what value are you able to add? And so I think that's at Snowflake, the thing that we're really focused on, which is abstract away all these tunes and all these knobs and such and how much memory you have on a specific in a piece of infrastructure or disk or anything like that. So what's the business value and how can we present that business value in a uniform way, regardless of kind of the underlying service provider and maybe to a different class of business users, someone who wants to load data and just do analytics against it. They really don't want to understand what's happening underneath. And I think that's where this cloud engineering piece comes in and what my team is doing is really focused on how do we abstract away the kind of lower level infrastructure and scalability pieces and allow the application developers to develop this application that is providing business value in a transparent and seamless way and in an elastic way, such that we can scale up and down. We can, we have the ability obviously to replicate both within regions and clouds, but also across different clouds. So from a business resiliency and an uptime point of view, that's something that's been really important. And I think also how do we, security is becoming, is obviously a huge importance given the classification and type of data that people are putting within our platform. So how are we able to ensure that there's a pipeline where developers have reviews and commits of any kind of changes going into the system and their arms length away and can be fully audited for various compliance and regulatory needs. And that's something that kind of this software engineering, cloud engineering concept has really helped develop and allowed us to obviously be successful with various different types of industries. Joe, we're almost out of time. I wonder if you could bring us home. I mean, some of the things Justin was talking about, I mean, I definitely see a lot of potential disruption coming from the world of developers. He was talking about consumption models, different than many of the SaaS pricing models. And how do you see it? Developers are kind of the, really the new source of innovation, your final thoughts. Yeah, I think we're democratizing access to the cloud for everybody. I think, it's not just about developers, but it's really all engineers of all backgrounds. It's developers, it's infrastructure engineers, it's operations engineers, it's security engineers. Justin was mentioning compliance and security. These are really critical elements of how we deliver software into the cloud. And so I think what you're going to see is you're going to see a lot of new, compelling experiences built thanks to cloud capabilities. You know, the fact that you've got AI and ML and all these infinitely scalable data services like Snowflake, and just an arms length away that you can use as building blocks in your applications, application developers love that. If we can just empower them to run fast, they will run fast and they'll build great applications. And infrastructure teams and security engineers will be central to enabling that new future. And I think you also see that, you know, infrastructure and cloud services will become accessible to an entirely new audience. You know, kids graduating from college, they understand JavaScript, they understand Python. Now they can really just harness the cloud to build amazing new experiences. So I think we're still, you know, still early days on the transition to the cloud. I know we're many years on this journey, but we've got many, many years, you know, in our future and it's very exciting. Well, thanks you guys. Joe and Justin, I really appreciate it. Congratulations on your respective success. I know as Joe said you got a lot more work to do, but I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Awesome, thank you, Dave. You're welcome. All right, so we're here covering re-invent 2020, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. We're unpacking the cloud and looking to the future. You're watching theCUBE.


Anchoring bias is people's tendency to fixate on the first piece of information they receive, especially when it concerns numbers.  Because of that, people base all subsequent decisions on this anchor. For example, initial offers have a stronger influence on the outcome of negotiations than subsequent ones. Framing effect refers to our tendency to make decisions based on how the information about the decision is presented to us. In other words, our response depends on whether the option is presented in a negative or positive light. This means that the same information can be more or less attractive depending on the wording or what features are highlighted.


You're at Walmart.   I've been black Friday shopping before I probably never will again because this is literally a madhouse But hey y'all do you and also happy Thanksgiving? I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving yesterday I'm not gonna lie. We have not had ours yet It's tomorrow and I know it's weird because y'all are seeing this and you're like wait today's Friday But I'm filming this on Wednesday, so we're kind of we're kind of all backwards right now But Thanksgiving is over for y'all that means that Christmas is now in full effect And nobody can feel bad for you putting up Christmas lights now I know a lot of people give people crap like us that put our Christmas stuff up like first day in November But honestly like Christmas is the best most happiest time of the year. I'm thankful on Thanksgiving, but Christmas you can't beat it regardless I know I'm going on this like holiday tangent right now. I want to see the hashtag team bill in the comments I know y'all love Mariah. I know y'all love Mariah every time I'm on live stream all the comments I'm always seeing Mariah Mariah Mariah Mariah Where's the team bill love like I want you to know it's okay to go back and forth if you like this video Hashtag team bill in the comments Please because I feel like team bill does not get the credit that we put in and then you know what whenever Mariah makes another video Y'all can just go hashtag team Mariah and then I'm not gonna hate. I'm not gonna hate at all I just I feel like y'all need to like team bill like let's go let's ramp it up Let's get this girl because low key Mariah has the best reactions like that's without a doubt Her reactions are not as good as mine because she's more gullible person Which is why y'all are clicking in this video right now today It is not just a one prank and done it is a I would say two two pranks and done But legit our wedding is in three months three months Marvel Squad and today I am going to be getting in an argument with my fiancee you think that would be bad enough But after we're already in an argument after we you know yelling at each other going at it You know she's like get away from me You know blah blah blah. I'm gonna tell this girl that I wish I never Proposed to see her reaction Remember she's already we're already in an argument. She's already pissed. She's already super mad and then on top of that I'm telling her I wish I never proposed one of the biggest days in a person's life and Literally the biggest day in Mariah's life when I proposed her words not mine I am going to be taking back and say you know what I wish I never did that in Hawaii I wish I never flown you out. I wish I never proposed and I wish I didn't have to do this prank on oh my gosh She's gonna freak out bro. She's gonna be so mad. I'm scared. I'm nervous I'm very nervous with this video because you know I like I don't mess around with like the proposing stuff I really planned it out for months and I'm gonna be taking it all back Marvel Squad what you got me into you need come on hashtag team bill at least for this video like y'all show your love I know we have a lot of team bill supporters But let me see all y'all even if your team Mariah just wait for her to do another video or whatever And then you guys can go hashtag team right by the way biggest thing y'all are wondering why I'm screaming I am hiding literally in the deep dark deaths of my closet Mariah is across the house in her vanity room getting ready and I have Christmas music Blaring in our bedroom, which I don't know if you can hear or you can't hear but regardless She thinks I'm getting ready right now, which I should be doing because I'm still in my PJs And I gotta wake up. I gotta do my hair. I gotta get ready. We are going to get my suit today I think I don't think we're gonna have to do anything else unless they have to do like last-minute alterations But we're gonna be getting picking up my wedding suit Which is another perfect reason to do this video because we're already gonna be in the wedding Spirit today, and I'm just gonna crush it.  I could actually do it, but the best day at the same time I hope y'all love this video stay tuned for Mariah's reaction and without further ado, let's go get her enjoy What is your mobile squad? Welcome back to our channel. Today is a really exciting day. What are we doing, baby? This is actually like has to do with me. Yeah excited for me His custom tux is finally in and we are going to pick it up right now Literally like we're going to go get my custom tux. So we went to the store We were looking at like, you know rentals and stuff because like I don't know if I'm gonna like you know I didn't really like mine getting a rental or keeping it forever or whatever But they didn't have anything literally nothing good at all So we went the other route where this super nice manager guided us through making a custom tux Yeah, and literally down to like the buttons the way it laid out. We had to like design It was like almost building a house. You know what I mean? Like you have to pick every little thing Yeah, we have a little like, do you have embroidery in it too? Oh I forgot we had my name embroidered and I'm like we have my name embroidered and like the wrists too or something I forget what else it is, but but I have never This is a second YouTube video you've done that in a row. I know I can do that in our last one or this one every single one since But I have never tried this color on that we got I've only tested out with like black suits So this is gonna be the first time I'm seeing this in person Not on like a digital model and the first time wearing it should I give y'all a sneak peek I feel like I should I feel like it's not not as much as like a dress I'm gonna show them from like here up. No, so they're gonna know what it is. Nope. Well, they know it's already They don't know that they don't Okay, okay, we beefed it out. We I don't think you guys know what color it is, but I'm gonna be surprised. I'm gonna down below what colors you think my custom tux is it is not a traditional color that much It's what it's not like orange. Okay, don't don't be commenting like gold orange like hazel Dad did it and that's why he wanted to do it not because his dad did he want to do he wanted to do it You know because he actually wanted to but like knowing that his dad had certain tux it kind of means a lot to you Right. Yeah, it was like weird because I actually liked it and had nothing to do with him wearing it But it was cool because he wore kind of a similar color But we are on our way there right now or about 15 minutes 15 minutes from trying it on and I cannot freaking I Don't have to keep talking. This is my video man. Calm down. Okay now. I gotta redo it Stop let me talk Let me talk you're being annoying.   I'm super excited.  How old are you? How old are you? How old are you five?    No today I'm ending that you're in the wrong right now. Just let me film. Let me do my thing We've been filming for three minutes, and it only takes 15 seconds To say what I wanted to say Why am I here then like I can't show any of my excitement me saying I'm excited You're gonna make me I need to pay attention to the road. Okay. You're distracting me. Okay. You're distraction All right, you're blurred out sorry You're blurred out because you're not making the video any better Okay, I didn't mean that that was a little that was a little touchy. All right, come on. This is good lighting Oh, okay. This is good lighting. We got to get back to it, but we are almost there We are literally 10 minutes away like we're crossing the bridge right now, and we're actually we're actually over water Look at this guys. Do you see the water? Can I see it? There's an ocean there. This is why I love living in Florida. That's literally the ocean right there This is this is where we live. Hold up. I'm just keeping this in sorry for my being rude It's You know what she's She was talking to me earlier now. I know why she's being a little butthead. She's three days away from her period So she's just gonna be yapping. Okay.  She'll be yapping in this video Oh, no, they're gonna be like oh dang bills on the right they're gonna be like Okay, don't bring our wedding into this You don't bring our wedding into fights. Okay, first of all second of all mute yourself, please This is I treat you good. I treat you good. You don't tell anyone anything other than me You good. Okay, and if I hear anything other than that, we're gonna have issues Now can I please say five seconds of words and then you can yap all you want All right, this is I'm laughing because it's it's you know, it's just it's like a laughing matter I need to cut all this out. All right, but mama squad. I hope you enjoyed this video comment down below What do you think about my tux? I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek I'll give you like from the neck line up. No, what nothing? No See party pooper. Can you stop now me? Stop? I'm done.  I don't care to be on camera. Why are you angry? She's an angry. Oh stop recording Take the camera off really you're just gonna take the camera We're not posting this to why we need to film it. You're still fighting with me. Okay. This is you I'm in a good old mood.  You're the one saying like I'm You want to bring our wedding into this that was you so do I know what I have to say to that I wish I never proposed You just said not to bring in wedding stuff Why would you say that because you're the one that brought it up? So you think it's funny I wish I never proposed seriously. Yep If if you want the solid truth, I I honestly I feel like I would be happier Back before I proposed we can still date, but I feel like I wish I never You're the one This was a test and you fail the test and this is your fault. This is why I never wanted I'm not saying I'm gonna Unproposed I'm saying I wish I never what test did I fail you just fail the test so I don't I wish I never proposed I just wanted you to know that, you know Like then don't propose don't throw the proposal into my face because you're freaking mad at me for being upset No, that's like ridiculous. I've never said oh, I wish never put like what are you laughing? It's not funny.  It's not funny. I'm not You're not taking what you're not my feelings aren't mattering to you right now. I'm not sad. I Can't I can't do this I Can't do this anymore I'm done We're over We're over with this Baby, I'm not being serious You don't want me to propose you wish I haven't Maybe it was a prank I'm sorry Come here. I'm sorry. It was just for mom's cause And to laugh at you it's just this also say that he was a little better It was a joke But I had to give you an argument before Don't do it again. You see how easy this girl is to argue it. I love it No, no, I just Mariah Mariah is the biggest Sometimes and she literally starts all the arguments.   I was but I want you guys to know that okay I really don't know where we're going Clearly I've been focused on I'm like, hi camera road camera road Is it? Yeah. Oh, yeah, we're here All jokes aside, I am so excited to try this on you're sorry to me. I'm sorry. I already said, I'm sorry I love you, baby. Come here. I know how much I love you know how much I appreciate you, right? And of course I there's never been a thought in my mind That I haven't wanted I'm sorry, I'm done joking I know This girl's dirty guess what she did what she worked out in this shirt today now. She's been wearing it the whole Dirty Moderation, and I'm only doing it to get a base tan for the wedding. I don't want to be I don't want to spray tan like I don't I don't want any of that And wait before we get everyone in the comments like going like oh my god tan beds are so bad We know they're bad and that's why I'm really doing it Goes in the bed listeners for seven minutes at a time She's gonna go like maybe two or three times a week for seven minutes So she is not gonna be one of those people that goes in there all the time for like 30 minutes Plus no, they only want you to go in there for 12 minutes anyways, and once I get that base tan Like I said, I'm probably only gonna go once a week to kind of keep the tan there. Yeah, but mom was gone I think I'm gonna end up the video right here I really really really want to give you guys a sneak peek of the tux the place is literally right That's the building right there. Yeah, that's the building right there that we're going to I really wish I can give you a Sneak peek, but I kind of want it to be more of a surprise at least when it comes closer to our wedding time Maybe you'll see the videos before no or just the wedding video. Oh my gosh Hey, but y'all don't have to wait too long. Okay, we're all we're getting married in like two months three months December January, February Three months or December we two months. Oh my god It's sick make sure to turn on your post notifications So you get notified every time we post and you're prepared and ready for our wedding content because in three months Y'all are gonna see mr. And mrs. Ritter To life Chapter She's she's been having nightmares that the wedding is gonna be like there's something's gonna go wrong Which I understand like that's like there's a million things that has to go right in a wedding So like you already know some things are not gonna be perfect Yeah, I don't think perfect, but they're like nightmares where like things are not even like like your wedding planner like didn't show up Or yeah, I didn't walk on the aisle till 730 my dress was not the right dress so many different Nightmares I just been having dreams. I've been dreaming over It is a big time all jokes aside There's a lot going on a lot plan and I we honestly cannot wait to show you guys and girls our wedding coming up It's gonna be like just amazing like I said, it's gonna be a new chapter on our channel I know that has been tuned with our channel and everyone had his new with our channel like thank you all so much for watching I cannot wait to show you all that and also get ready because we're gonna be doing a giveaway in December So stay tuned for that We just shipped out our giveaway for the Apple Watches for hitting three mil and they all got that by the way all of them did Oh, they did they all responded. Yeah, yeah So all of you that won an Apple Watch all of you that didn't win an Apple Watch regardless Thank you so much for following along with our channel and we will see you guys in the next video But until then peace. Love you guys