Amplifying Human Agency

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Charlie expounds on the power of design to give everyone a voice and to help us achieve peak human agency.

Episode Notes

Charlie Sutton, Head of Design at Facebook App, talks with Jesse about key influences, product design experiences, design philosophy, and rewarding collaborations. Charlie shares how his parents--both creative people working in technical jobs--influenced how he thought of the intersection of technical expertise, art, and experience. After studying Arts and Law, Charlie quit the path to law to pursue a career with Apple. He shares stories of how his experience at Apple helped him grow into the fledgling field of product and service design. Charlie talks about moving to Nokia and the Advanced Design studio, where he used provocative design methodologies to push the Nokia product strategy, as well as his eventual move to lead design for the Facebook App.

Charlie shares his insights into building strong product teams, pushing the boundaries of effective design, and navigating a satisfying career. He shares insights into using design fiction, drawing product inspiration from other arts, and engaging in design as a means to create a shared responsibility of agency with consumers.

How do you build effective product teams?
How does team diversity improve product quality?
What design strategies can you use for improving products?
How do you design for augmented reality or virtual reality?
How do I resolve conflicts between design and engineering?
How do you make products customers will love?

Charlie shares his experiences at the intersection of art, technology, engineering, and human experience.

Guest Bio

Charlie Sutton is Head of Design for the Facebook App, looking after the 400+ person design organization. As a leader, he has grown and managed teams for almost twenty years at companies including Apple, Nokia and Samsung. He specializes in interaction design for mobile, and has extensive experience in developing for both physical products and AR/VR. Charlie is passionate about teaching and building skills in the new generation of designers, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts.

Building Blocks

In this episode, Charlie talked to us about the two-way exchange of design. He feels it's his responsibility to do great product design, but he also believes people using technology have the responsibility to learn. And he talked about learning as the source of our agency as people, and about how it's this agency that leads us to get the most out of the things in our lives.

With that reflection in mind, please consider and write down two things: #1, What you build in your job, or your hobby, or in your role in one of your communities. It can be a product, service, message, feeling, or anything you build. #2, what people need to learn to do to really get the most out of it. If you style hair, maybe it’s that you ask your clientele to go experiment with a new style you gave them, and try on different looks. If you write books, maybe it’s about the provocations and the reflections you ignite in people. If it’s in tech, well, if it’s in tech, reflect on whether you’re building for sufficient agency or if you’re maybe wrestling too much control from people who are using what you make. Think about it!

If you’d like to share, get it out there on social with the Hashtag #BreakthroughBuilders. Or, if you’d prefer to not share it publicly, go ahead and email it to me at producer@breakthrough-builders.com. I’d love hearing from you and learning from what you built.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Charlie Sutton [00:00:06] As a designer, I have a responsibility to make the performances and the interfaces clear. I do think the user has a responsibility to to be learning. I don't believe that products should require zero learning because learning is the source of our agency. When we feel mastery and we have a sense of control, that is often when we enjoy and get the most out of the things in our lives.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:44] From Qualtrics Industries. This is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal. Today on the show, How Charlie Sutton embraced diversity and creative friction to stand up successful design communities on three different continents at Apple and Nokia and how he builds teams and technologies in pursuit of peak human agency at Facebook. I am here with Charlie Sutton, Charlie, it's an honor to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Charlie Sutton [00:01:24] Thank you for having me.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:26] Charlie, you've got a really fascinating multi dimensionality. You've been a builder of organizations, of teams, of products, and you've really done some really interesting and important things to contribute to the pedagogy, to the progress of design thinking in the world. So I'm really looking forward to the dialog.

Charlie Sutton [00:01:42] Right on me, too.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:43] Well, let me start at the start, if I may. Talk to me a little bit about where you were, where you grew up and what it was like in the early years.

Charlie Sutton [00:01:51] I grew up in a part of Australia called Far North Queensland. So it's it's tropical rainforest, pretty small towns. So for a young child, it's a pretty amazing place to grow up. I think the town I was in might have had, you know, two hundred people, max, and it was on the foothills of a rainforest and a super interesting part of the world. So it was a really free kind of rich place to have your early years. So I was really grateful to kind of spend first sort of 19 years of my life up there.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:26] Charlie, tell me about the first memories you have about fascination with technology or with design.

Charlie Sutton [00:02:32] It's interesting because it's an object and I have a very clear memory of it, which was the apple to see computer had the Snow White design language. It almost looked like a laptop with a little monitor attached to the top. And it was just a beautiful object. Like even when you didn't understand the technical side, I, I remember thinking as a as a thing, it was desirable and it must have been a really big purchase for my family. Like looking back on it now, I'm amazed. I'm amazed they did it and I was given full range to play around with it, you know, like try to do a little bit of programing and logo play games. So that had a pretty profound impact on me as an object of desire, but also something that was clearly an object of technology as well. So that was probably my formative moment when it comes to fascination with technology and design.

Jesse Purewal [00:03:27] And I think on on the design side, you also had some people all around you that were fascinated and compelled by and devoted to the artistic pursuits, correct?

Charlie Sutton [00:03:38] Yeah. Looking back on it now, again, another really extraordinary thing about my childhood is that both my parents were professionals in fields that quite technical. My dad was a plant pathologist, so studies the diseases of plants. And my mum, I think at the time was a journalist part time, but they were both very creative. And my mum had gone to art school, so she continued to do fine art. And my dad too was sort of expressive and in painting and drawing. So the whole house had their creative works on the walls. And it was a really natural thing to see people who were doing a job that wasn't creative but could fully express themselves in the art. If I look at my own career, I guess the similar fusion has occurred. So I'm sure that played a part in how I view the world and art and design as well. I guess it's always good to contextualize the time as well. I think in the time I was going to university, which is the early 1990s, it was a maybe a different time for design and the arts. And my parents never put any pressure on me to follow a particular path. But when I was around about 10, we moved to a big city by Australian standards, and I was really lucky that my parents invested in and sending me to a school that was very academically forward. So I think it was really an expectation then that at that school you would use your good marks to go on into law or medicine or really traditional white collar jobs. And I didn't have any pressure, but I was always a talker and I was always a debater and someone who loved arguments. So I gravitated towards the law. So I did law and I also did art. So I probably was a lot more interested in the philosophy and the sociology and the the art side of my dual degree by this time. But actually move to Sydney. And I had just started a job with Apple, which was like a dream job for me. And to finish my law degree, I would have had to have listened to taped lectures, typed that those were the days on maritime law. And I just remember thinking, I don't think this career is for me. So I have a 99 percent useless law degree, but I think I took a lot more away from my arts degree.

Jesse Purewal [00:06:05] In the end, someone who's listening might make the assumption that here is this sort of renaissance education happening to a person who's becoming a scholar of the world and of, of course, the fusion of technology and design. So, he lands at Apple, but it wasn't quite that simple in terms of how you found your way there. Correct?

Charlie Sutton [00:06:22] I feel like whenever I say Apple, people have visions of me in Cupertino chilling with John and Steve. But what actually happened is I needed money to pay the rent. So I got a job at the local technology store inside the university, which actually sold computers to students, but also to the departments. And at the time, Apple was huge. In education, you could argue education was along with desktop publishing. What kept Apple alive in these kind of relatively dark times in its history. But this is in Australia in the early 2000s. So this is pre iPod. And my job was to actually design or to kind of build a business around services. So nothing to do with product design or at that time, interface design. As much as it sounds glamorous, it was going to little schools in Australia and convincing them to maybe get some services along with their computers. So I should be real about my early Apple experience. It was it wasn't super glamorous, but I'm very thankful for it.

Jesse Purewal [00:07:30] Well, and that's reflected at the company level, too. You joined in two thousand. It wasn't obvious then that Apple would become what Apple in twenty twenty has become. Describe for me, reflect a little bit for me on the ethos and in the spirit of the company as you experienced it in those early days.

Charlie Sutton [00:07:48] Yeah, it's interesting what is change, but also what is I think from knowing people who work there still was very consistent. So for sure it felt like Apple was a underdog. It really was close to the death of the company. But even despite those circumstances, there was an incredibly strong belief inside the company that we were making the best products for the right reasons, for the things that mattered, which was education and creativity. And there was an outsized ambition and an outsized relative to market share, an outsized belief that we would succeed. And I think that strength of belief, it has been constant the entire way, and maybe it came from the crucible of having to believe.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:42] Did you feel that that gave you some some fuel to kind of move through the rest of your career, that conviction and that sense of purpose?

Charlie Sutton [00:08:49] Something that has stayed with me. I'm very grateful for from working at Apple is standards. Even in the little back alley where I was working, there was an obvious belief in standards of doing a job well. And even though I wasn't doing a design job, it was expected at the time that, you know, my slides would be on point crisp, that communication would be clear that the things that we were developing would be useful and tight and well executed. So. I really do think Apple's set a standard for me in my career around execution and care because that that was for a long time what distinguished them from everybody else. And maybe one other lesson, which is intensity. It was and is a very hard working, very focused long term thinking organization. And it tells it with a real fire, a real fervor. And I have tried to always manifest that same level of intensity around the things that matter in the work that I'm doing.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:05] So talk to us about who who recruited you over to the UK and what that transition was like.

Charlie Sutton [00:10:10] When I was at Apple. I had been doing a fair bit of extra work inside Asia Pacific. So going to Korea and Singapore and and trying to do what we done in Australia on a on a larger scale. And then I was really lucky that my boss at the time, so there was an opportunity to go to London so and do the same thing for Europe. And so for a couple of years I was with Apple Europe, but more an education to work with people from France and Belgium and Norway and Spain. So about a year or two in someone who had worked at Apple with me had moved to Nokia, which at the time was. The 800 pound gorilla of phones, and they had 40 percent plus market share, and the offer I had was to continue doing what I was doing around product development in this area, but to do it for a global scale. And so I guess the the desire to travel and the desire to kind of have a bigger scale kind of prompted me to move to Nokia.

Jesse Purewal [00:11:20] So within a couple of years, though, you are kind of living the high velocity life and the. All right. You're heading up design reviews, leading UCS. You're clearly working in an area of of passion. But talk about what that experience was, was like.

Charlie Sutton [00:11:37] You know, every job I think I've had has been about building something new. So when I started in Apple, Australia, we'd never done professional services before. We'd never done at scale what I tried to do at Nokia. So I think I'm attracted to new things and the romance of change in culture and proving things can be done. So it was exciting to me at the time inside Nokia to say, hey, we can build a new line of business here around services. And I had a lot of energy for that. There are a lot of really interesting people joining Nokia at that time. And one of them was Pauline Trillanes, who joined us, VP of UX, I think one of Nokia's first VPs in that position. And she was also an example. And she offered me a job to join her team to start to build a singular user experience practice at Nokia across design. And so that's where I really was moving into design proper. And so very grateful to her for that opportunity.

Jesse Purewal [00:12:47] And eventually you get a really remarkable leadership opportunity with Nokia in in the US. You you head to California, where you lit up a studio and lean into design fiction. So, Charlie, tell me about that opportunity when you first came to the states and also talk a little bit about what what design fiction is and why it's so important for imagining the future.

Charlie Sutton [00:13:07] Yeah, there had always been a part of Nokia design that was concerned with alternatives or different ways of doing things. It was called advanced design and particularly in industrial design. And it it was trying to, I think, provoke within design and also within the company to say there are different ways of doing things. And it was almost like a countercultural force within Nokia. So one of the tools that was often used inside the studio and really pioneered, I think, by people who are at the forefront of design fiction. So someone called Julian Bleeker was to construct narratives about these alternative futures, to be provocations. But rather than being the shiny rended views of the future, where everything is clean and there's no broken chairs and there are no cables, I think the the wisdom that Julian and other designers in the studio had is that it's more interesting and compelling to use the techniques of science fiction and of other narrative fiction to show the future as it really is, which is a bit broken, very mundane. We take it completely for granted, and that is a much more compelling way to tell a story about how technology will evolve in the future. I really felt like design fiction in its storytelling capability was an incredibly powerful tool and I was really lucky to be probably at one of the Centers of Excellence for where that technique was being developed. And we'd often find that was very difficult because we'd have scientists who would come to the studio and say, we've got a patent for this particular waveguide technology, we really want to show it off at its best. Can you do us a beautiful render of someone wearing imaginary glasses? And we'd say, you know what, this is just not going to be compelling. But you know who needs it? People who ride motorcycles, they're already wearing a big plastic or glass screen on their head. And the technology would be really useful for them. And what happens in motorcycles? You have accidents and it's dangerous. So let's show you the gritty reality of riding a bike and why augmented reality could be incredibly helpful to someone. And so we would use those tools of design fiction to try and make an argument that this was the way to go.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:41] Charlie, talk about the nature of the way that you and the team at Advanced Design got to breakthroughs, I think, about Brigg. As being both incremental and monumental, and I wonder if you had that experience as well, that in order to get to something new and big and transformative, there's a thousand steps along the way or whether they tended to happen in more big chunks and sort of serendipitous next steps in the thinking.

[00:16:13] One thing which we use in the studio, which was very helpful in creating a conversation around new products, was the tools of Hollywood, were incredibly talented designer in the studio. Nick Foster is now at X at Google. Leading up design there would often make this collage videos. He would go on to YouTube and Vimeo and find all the places where somebody used a Mac from Indiana Jones to Blade Runner or wherever in fiction maps we use. And he would create these collage videos of all of these moments. And what this would do is sort of pick up the idea that for a map there is an archetype, there's a thing underneath the objects that is often resonating with us that might tell us how to produce an object of that nature in the future. What I think Apple was so good at that could find this core archetype that we all kind of recognize and maybe we thought is desirable or refined and then they would build a product around that archetype. My favorite example is the iPad. I think the archetype on the iPad is just paper then making a better form of paper and they can keep doing that. For 50 years, everyone else was making tablets. Apple was trying to reinvent paper. So I think this idea of finding the underlying archetype is a really powerful tool for making great products. But to get there, you often have to go in very indirect fashions. And I learned from a lot of people in the studio that getting those indirect influences and the subtleties and the weak signals from culture was a way to find that archetype and then be on a really pure, interesting path for making products.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:02] And you talk a lot in that response totally about the nature and the types of outside inspiration that you take in the creation process. Talk a little bit about as you developed your mind as a designer, what what sort of principles did you develop, if any, that you that you stuck to, that you said, I've got my outside inspiration, but then I've got core beliefs and philosophies that are going to be inside out. They're going to inform by design. They're going to inform my approaches are are the things that you stick to as core principles as you have built over your career.

Charlie Sutton [00:18:41] There are definitely a few notes that come to mind. One is around the power of the studio model. I think there's something about the studio model that is like a melting pot of. Ways of doing and I really believe in that culturally, as you're building culture, the diversity and the inclusively of your design environment is one of his great powers, because the more homogenous or the more similar your design culture is, the more you miss out on those weak signals, those those little pieces of magic that often make a design talk to people. So I really am a believer in making sure that very varied backgrounds, nontraditional backgrounds, because often in the fusion of all those different perspectives, you get the best work. And then the second thing that has probably it was maybe always with me, but it really came to the fore when I was in that studio environment is really trying to be a servant to the design process and the people in the studio and probably that came from just not being as good as they were. I was I couldn't add a lot of value in my technical skills, but what I could maybe do is be an amplifier for them and to be a servant for the protection that they needed. So I became a very fierce protector of the studio and that has stayed with me as well. I'm a real believer and as you become more senior, it becomes servant leadership.

Jesse Purewal [00:20:23] I want to ask you about a particular move that that you made. And in that said. When you had been with Nokia in California for a couple of years, the company decides it's no longer going to be in the hardware space, the studio is shut down. Your first instinct is not to run to a safe space. Your first instinct is to go to bat for your team. So talk to me about how you did that and how you finally found the energy to do that.

Charlie Sutton [00:20:52] I was a believer that if this studio could stay together, it would be an enormous asset to any company. And so often when I was talking to recruiters personally, I was saying, you know what, it would be better than me would be all of us. And we did actually go as a collective into some of those conversations. I think in reality, a lot of companies weren't ready for that. So it's probably a bit naive, to be honest. But I was I really wanted to make sure that as a as a group, we could take advantage of what we built together. And in the end, run was, you know, I think went their own ways. And they ended up at amazing companies using Twitter and Google and Facebook and Apple. So I also wanted. I really wanted them to be able to get acknowledged for the talent that they had and, you know, in retrospect, it's been really clear that they were a super talented group of individuals. And I'm glad I could help a little bit in, you know, just in small ways, to be honest, and then we'll finding happy homes.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:01] The observation I have, Charlie, is that you regard design people as members of a community and that you you might wear a certain badge. You might carry a certain business card at times. I know you invest a lot of time in teaching. Clearly, you're invested a lot in other people. How how do you think about being part of and helping drive the conversation with the design community?

Charlie Sutton [00:22:27] My observation after being in the technology industry for more than 20 years is. Most of it goes into landfill. I mean, literally, it's either goes into physical landfill or it goes into the equivalent of digital landfill. And the best illustration I have is an interaction designer today has to kind of scrap a lot of their portfolio after a certain amount of time. The visual language has changed so much, the design patterns have become different. And I realized that after all this time. And having some products I worked on for years get canceled like in the factory, one of the things I was most proud of working on was in boxes in China and it was canceled. And what was left of that was the people and the community. And I'm increasingly convinced that that is maybe one of the most important things in design, is to acknowledge that the persistent. Value that we bring is the design community, because in 15 years time, we will not be reminiscing about a more efficient checkout flow for a delivery app. We will be reminiscing about the people we worked with and the communities that we built. And I know that sounds trite, but when you've gone through a couple of heartbreaking product cycles, you begin to realize that is often the value as a leader that your instantiating in the world because even the most successful product ends up in landfill eventually.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:07] And Charlie, you talked earlier in the conversation about how maybe sometimes there were people around you that you felt lucky or happy to be with because their skill sets eclipsed yours in some meaningful way. Talk about how you have surrounded yourself as a builder with people who can push you, help you grow, help you learn, help you be better.

Charlie Sutton [00:24:31] I think there's a natural tendency we all have that we want harmony and we want to see ourselves reflected in the people we work with because it feels easier. But maybe it's a product of being someone who's now worked in different countries. And I've been a transplant in most of the places I've worked. Have you ever been the youngest or have been the only Australian or being the only person from this background and that friction of being different? Is actually being one of the best ways of learning, and so I think maybe one thing I would offer to leaders in people building teams is that the friction is good of a different background, of a different way of speaking of a different design mindset. And a lot of your art as a leader has to be about making those frictions positive. But if you're good at navigating how those edges of friction come together, you get amazing results. So not being afraid of people who talk to you when they talk a certain way or not being afraid of being vulnerable with people to express where you are struggling with the differences. I honestly think those creative and personal frictions, if they're dealt with the right way, is the secret to building great design communities. And it's not easy. So I think embracing the friction and then learning to become adept at managing those points of friction I think is really important.

Jesse Purewal [00:26:07] And Charlie, talk about some of the cross-functional collaborations that you've driven. I mean, another angle on design community and design collaboration is thinking about within a high tech organization, the role of product, the role of engineering. Sometimes there's a friction between those groups around what to lead with and and why. And I think some of the precepts that you live by and some of the tenets that you speak to, like getting close to the metal and respecting the work of engineering, suggests that you get into a more collaborative ethos than maybe some of the more siloed approaches some people often fall prey to.

Charlie Sutton [00:26:48] I do think sometimes we forget that we come from technical disciplines where our role is to bring our technical arts to its pinnacle and then through collaboration, form an idea around the product. And I see a lot of tension because basically everyone's trying to be a product manager and what that means sometime is we forget where we really can make a difference, I think design is incredibly powerful in technology as an industry, because we can clarify we can translate very ambiguous and complex ideas and render them understandable, which is a great way to ensure good collaboration, every discipline. Needs to bring the peak of its technical arts to the table, and sometimes that means respecting other people's technical art. I'm an I'm an organized guy. I love a good spreadsheet. I'm not a good product manager. I've read all the Ben Thompson articles. I've read little village articles. I don't know how to sequence the roadmap. As good as a master product manager does, I have made some terrible mistakes by not respecting the technical art of my compatriots. I remember one product we made design, changed its mind, said, you know what, this isn't going to be a photo focused product. It's going to be a video focused product. And for us, that was pretty easy. We change the locks, but for engineering the like, you know, the sensor will literally overheat like it's physics. We can't do the thing you're talking about. And if you had told us this great idea a couple of months earlier, we could work with it. But now you've created a physics problem for us. And so I've been on the wrong side of the law when it comes to design, not respecting the technical art of its compatriots. So I need a little collaboration. While it is about equity and a voice at the table, it's also about respect for other disciplines, capability. And I still got a lot in industrial design when you when you see the incredible collaboration between a mechanical engineer and an industrial designer doing thermal simulations on a trigger inside a camera, you realize the trend isn't going to solve everything. And when you see masterful collaboration between engineering and design, you you do anything you can to foster and make that better.

Jesse Purewal [00:29:22] You also seem to have a compass around what you call designing for agency, amplifying human agency. And then everyone should look out before they look in and say, who or what are we designing for? Can you talk specifically about what you mean by human agency and why designing for a human agency is the best path forward for us?

Charlie Sutton [00:29:43] I'm very inspired by architecture and the way that over probably thousands of years it is acknowledged that great architecture is a conversation between the building and the space and the people who inhabit it. And I believe that in the products that I'm making in general in modern product design, what you're doing is having a conversation with people. And I do think a lot of products are effectively one way conversations where they assume what the other person is going to want to say or they remove the agency from somebody. And I think, like all bad things, it started out with really good intentions, I think, in modern. Digital products, we think efficiency is the most important thing, get me to the checkout screen as fast as possible, take away friction, but I think that removes people's agency. And when you remove the agency, the conversation is pretty much one sided. And the negative consequences of that, depending on the product you're making, can be severe because then you have a mute participant in the conversation or you're not hearing what they're saying. And then the person who is quiet increasingly doesn't take responsibility. I think great products, as well as being a dialog between the user and the maker, they rely on responsibility on both sides. Yes, as a designer, I have a responsibility to make the performances in the interfaces clear. I do think the user has a responsibility to to be learning. I don't believe that products should require zero learning because learning is the source of our agency. When we feel mastery and we have a sense of control, that is often when we enjoy and get the most out of the things in our lives. Agency is about a sense of responsibility and a sense of mastery that you're building with the user. So I so believe that's the the source of great design. And my favorite little illustration of that is the magsafe adapter in the previous generation of laptops from Apple. It's lovely, it's efficient. But remember, when you get it right as a user, when you just snap that thing in perfectly, you have a sense of mastery and agency. I can kick it out accidentally, but I can also be really good at getting that connector in. That is to me a great dialog between the maker and the user. But it doesn't imply the user doesn't do anything or that they never have to think at all. It it implies we amplify their agency.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:37] So to talk about the importance, particularly as you have started to spend more time in your career on augmented reality and virtual reality, how immersion specifically is an expression for you of this human agency and designing for it?

Charlie Sutton [00:32:52] Yeah, it was a real eye opener in our VR. That agency was more important than resolution. I think there's a belief in sometimes in in the sort of augmented and virtual reality worlds that we just got to perfectly replicate the human visual system. And we have to have everything at a Katy Perry resolution. But there's a lot of good science and there's a lot of good intuition that tells us input is more important than resolution. If you feel like you are affecting the world, your brain does the rest. It's very similar to dreams. Dreams are not perfectly realized. Facsimiles of the world. They have blurry edges and only bits to them makes sense. But if you feel like you have agency in a dream, think about lucid dreaming or other moments where you remember what it was like to have input into your dream, then that is when you are immersed and that's when you are in a flow state and when you get a sense of satisfaction and self immersion. I think it's an example of peak agency. A really good example. I remember from I think it's the Stanford lab is that we're trying to get people to become more ecologically conscious. They got people to cut down a tree in virtual reality. And it was pretty rudimentary, is like a little machine with a lever and you would just do the sawing motion. And empirically, they were able to see that those people had a much more sustained sense of environmental awareness because they had themselves cut down a tree. So to me, what I want from the world of immersive design and spatial design is. Input matters more than anything else because input is your expression of agency. We just need enough information to get you going. And then as long as you have a sense of control, you can do the rest.

Jesse Purewal [00:34:52] Charlie, after the time you had spent at Nokia, you started to lean a little bit into augmented reality. You'd done a little bit of that advanced design. And around the time you transitioned out of advanced design, there was a surge in R and VR, a lot of startup activity, a lot of acquisitions happening, a lot of organic growth as well in the space. What what did you see at that point in time, particularly in Facebook, either in their strategy or in their talent or in their vision that made you want to bet on them as opposed to, say, going back to Apple or going to work on Holo Lens or going into Magic Leap, for instance?

Charlie Sutton [00:35:32] I think I was a believer that what makes VR and are interesting is the relationships that they can foster. And I do think the current mantra inside the part of Facebook Inc that works on are in VR is to defy distance. And I do think there's something really lovely and human about understanding the value of VR is to not just take you away to magical worlds. And, you know, there's sort of the Ready Player One fantasy that often underwrites a lot of people's thinking here. But I remember a feature we built in a product called Facebook Faces. Facebook's status was actually really mundane, but a great expression of that is that you could give someone a high five. And when you have your virtual hands touched, the haptic controllers would vibrate very low resolution. But it felt amazing to reach out across potentially thousands of miles and feel someone else's hands. And my brain did the work like I knew it wasn't real. But that to me was such an interesting part of our VR not creating these facsimiles of the world or not just purely being in fantasy, but to deepen a connection with the community or another person through that technology. And I really am a believer in that. So I guess that's why I was drawn to the mindset that I saw Facebook is that it's about. Define distance or letting people express their identity in ways that maybe they couldn't in the physical world. That's where the magic wall. So I'm a real believer in that.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:22] Charlie, what is it in your life, in your career that you'd say you are most proud of?

Charlie Sutton [00:37:28] Ultimately, I'm proud of maybe giving opportunity or giving voice or finding spaces for people in my teams and watching them be way better at what they're doing than I am. I do think that's the stuff we all remember. And I think maybe in relation to that, I'm also proud of the very, very small contribution I've made in teaching and educating, because I sometimes one of my students will, you know, tell me they got a job at Dell or tell me they've just become a creative director for an agency. And they might send me a message and say they remembered something from one of my classes. And that is just the loveliest thing when that happens. So I'm very proud of them and the small part I played in their education as well.

Jesse Purewal [00:38:18] And Charlie, one final question for the builders listening here. If they wanted to know what the most important piece of advice they should take from you, given the world as you've seen it, the world as you've experienced it in the world as you've helped build it. What would that advice be?

Charlie Sutton [00:38:35] Maybe two pieces of advice. The first one is, as leaders, I believe your willingness to be vulnerable is your strength. If you can be vulnerable with your lack of knowledge, your lack of understanding, that creates the bedrock for teams to be diverse and inclusive and to have those positive frictions that I spoke about. And the second piece of advice which is maybe applied to it, is we have to be more compassionate about each other and about the people we serve with our products. That I'm a I worry sometimes that they don't get them change. The world kind of thing that permeates our industry means that we're not very compassionate towards each other or towards ourselves. And then I think that's a little bit of a rot that will eats away at you and your career and it will eat away at your team's compassion is very hard to cultivate for yourself. We can be very hard on ourselves as leaders, but if I was to give two pieces of advice to anyone who's trying to build organizations and products is don't be afraid of being vulnerable and your ignorance or in your learning or in your missteps as a leader and above all, be compassionate to yourself and to your team and for the people that you're trying to serve because. That's the real source of strength as well, so that's maybe what I've taken away when I think I've done a great job in my history. I've been coming from a place of compassion and I have been willing to be vulnerable. And when I've done a terrible job, I've been hung up on anger and fear and reputation and money. So I know for me that's where my center of good work comes from. Boy, it's hard to keep it. Every day is a challenge and I get it wrong all the time. But I'm convinced after 20 years plus, that's when I did my best work and that's when my teams did their best work. So I try and cultivate both those things.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:43] Well, Charlie, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I certainly learned a lot in the conversation, really enjoyed our time together and looking forward to doing it again sometime soon.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:53] Right. Thank you for having me, Jesse. I really appreciate it.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:06] Hey, everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Charlie Sutton. He's such a wide ranging and gifted thinker with an incredible stewardship of craft, and he's an incredible teammate to and collaborator with everyone that comes into his orbit. Check out what some people say about him on LinkedIn. It's really amazing to see someone so respected on so many levels and to talk to someone who has such a provocative and pragmatic perspective on the future. Supercool.

Jesse Purewal [00:41:32] Now, one of the things we do after every show, since you all are breakthrough builders, is to lay out some building blocks. A building block is an action that I want you to take that's inspired by what our guest on the show has shared. It's a way of taking some core element of the conversation and making it work for you. In this episode, Charlie, talk to us about the two way street of design, he feels it's his responsibility to do great product design, but he also believes people using technology have the responsibility to learn. And he talked about learning as the source of our agency, as people, and about how it's this agency that leads us to get the most out of the things in our lives. So for this week's Building Block, here's what I'd like you to do. Write down two things. Number one, what you build in your job or your hobby or the role you have in one of your communities, a product, a service, a message, a feeling, whatever it is you built. And number two, what is it that people have to learn to do to really get the most out of it? If you style hair, maybe it's that you ask your clientele to go experiment with a new style you gave them and try on different looks. If you're an author, maybe it's about the provocations and the reflections you ignite in people. If it's InTech, well, if it's intact, reflect on whether you're building a sufficient agency or if maybe you're wrestling too much control from people who are using what you make. Give it a thought. If you want some templates and tips and tricks on how to get started, check out the show notes right here in the app. You're listening to this episode on or over on our website, Breakthru Builders Dotcom. That's Breakthru hyphen builders dot com. You can contact us through the site, too, if you want to go ahead and share any of your reflections. I'd love to hear from you. Take care, breakthrough builders and bewell.

Jesse Purewal [00:43:31]Thanks so much for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other listeners find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a production of the Industries Team at Qualtrics. The show is written and hosted by me, Jesse Purewal. Mastering by Nate Crenshaw. Post-production and music by Clean Cuts Audio, part of the Three Seas Collective. Design by Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon and photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Jeremy Smith, John Johnson and Kylan Lundeen.

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