Notes from Sir Jony Ive's interview with Patrick Collison
Take care in what we do to advance the species
A shorter newsletter this time. I was fortunate to attend Stripe Sessions this year and see Sir Jony Ive’s interview live. Say what you will about Apple, but there is no doubt that he has had an outsized impact on society. I was very impressed with how thoughtfully and eloquently he spoke. In this post, I share some of his points that really resonated with me.
People know carelessness
The corollary being that people know and appreciate care in things we build. He gave a great example of spending Sunday afternoons designing seemingly trivial: cable packaging! Yet there is great satisfaction in knowing that so many consumers interact with it and can tell designers put thought into it. Some of this is not obviously visible to users, but they can still tell.
I see this as caring about our craft as engineers. Our architecture should be extensible to support user needs. Our system is explainable to ourselves and our users. Our code is clean and elegant. We have robust tests and CI/CD pipelines to ensure we release quality products to users.
Going beyond function to beauty
Ive talked about the anti-pattern of "Solving a functional imperative and we’re done". This feels very commonplace at least in the software industry. We talk a lot about Minimal Viable Products, and unblocked users to do whatever they want. However, this is not the same as building something that is truly enjoyable.
Having been part of the Stripe API review process for a while now, I have seen and experienced the tension between wanting to just get things done versus being considerate of every API design to ensure consistency, extensibility and explainability. Hearing Ive talk reaffirmed to me how important it is to take the time to care and make products that are'beautiful'.
Teamwork - Building for each other
Ive shared a ritual his design team uses - every Friday morning, one team member cooks breakfast for the entire team. It didn't matter what the breakfast was; it was about doing something for each other.
Ive also talked about building with a joyful mood (or instead designing with a non-joyful mindset, likely resulting in a poor design). I related these two points together - being happy at work, including bonding with team members beyond just the task at hand, leads to our best work. As senior engineering leaders, it is up to us to encourage this.
Taking responsibility for advancing the species
Many of Ive's responses had a common theme about advancing the species, and showing our gratitude for our existence. This felt like a strong guiding principle to live by. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to be an engineer, and it was a great affirmation to hear this message repeated.
One interesting discussion was how to think about the unintended negative consequences of our work. Our industry has a habit of breaking things (and he made a point about not doing this for the sake of it), and he responded that we need to take responsibility for these consequences. We need to take the time to understand why and work on addressing the problems we create.