The Edge of Reason

S4-E1-hero-template.jpg
 

Scott Belsky, Adobe's Chief Product Officer, joins Jesse to discuss the advancement of creative meritocracy, how to empower people to do the best work of their lives, and Adobe’s brand portfolio and product culture.

 

Episode Notes

[2m23s] The parallels and synergies Scott sees between the product development and writing processes

[6m45s] Why Scott decided to go "all in" on advancing creative meritocracy in his career

[11m03s] The opportunity Scott sees for our world to get to true creative meritocracy

[13m26s] A framework Scott counsels organizations leaders to use when recognizing and rewarding creatives

[16m56s] Scott's perspective on thinking at the "Edge of Reason" as an essential ingredient to innovating product, advancing culture, and improving diversity

[25m36s] How Scott helped drive Adobe's business and technology transformation, including his reflection on the amazing journey of bringing Behance into the company whose Photoshop software he tinkered with as a kid

[30m07s] Scott's view on the brand portfolio strategy at Adobe, including the Adobe master brand, the Creative Cloud brand, and the signature application (product) brands

[33m53s] Scott's perspective on the product culture at Adobe

[35m34s] Scott's view on the most promising broad-based technology innovations coming our way over the next 5-10 years

[37m58s] Scott and Jesse discuss the future of work, and the changing psychology, operating models, and use cases of working physically together

[40m56s] Scott offers his perspective on the future of NFT technology and the linkages between NFT, digital (art)ifacts, and creative meritocracy

[44m02s] How Scott chooses people and organizations to partner with as an investor and advisor

 

How can companies sustain product and brand innovation in the face of constant challenges? And how can they nurture creative collaboration in our new world of work while providing employees the space and autonomy to do the best work of their lives?

Perhaps no one is better suited to answer these questions than Scott Belsky, bestselling author and Chief Product Officer at Adobe. In his 2018 book The Messy Middle, Scott laid out the methods that enable people to find their way through the most difficult phases of bold projects and new ventures. In his talk with Jesse, Scott describes why it’s critical to make product decisions at “The Edge of Reason,” and discusses how his ability to bring to life a vision for the future of creative collaboration would turn out to make him a key contributor to Adobe’s well-chronicled transition to the Cloud.

Along with his reflections on what it was like to ultimately assume the next phase of growth for products he had used and revered since his early years, Scott discusses his motivations for founding Behance; the parallels he discovered between the processes of writing books and of developing software products; his transformative ideas on product culture; and even his beliefs about the future of NFT technology to continue to unlock creative democratization. Time and again, he offers us timeless guidance on how to gain confidence from doubt and nurture our ability to create without limits.

Guest Bio

Scott Belsky is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and investor (and all-around product obsessive). He currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott's passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies. Scott co-founded Behance in 2006, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012.

Alongside his role at Adobe, Scott actively advises and invests in businesses that cross the intersection of technology and design - and help empower people. He works closely with a number of venture capital firms including Benchmark and Homebrew, and is an early advisor and investor in Pinterest, Uber, sweetgreen, Carta, Cheddar, Flexport, Airtable, and Periscope (now part of Twitter) as well as several others in the early stages.

Helpful Links

+ Episode Transcript

Scott Belsky [00:00:00] When you think at the edge of reason, inevitably other people around you will not immediately acknowledge or understand exactly why you're saying that because it sounds unreasonable, it's like at the edge of reason. And it's always those edges that become the center that advantages companies when it comes to innovation. So then the question becomes, how do we stack the deck in our favor to make sure that there are people we're working with that are thinking at the edge of reasons?

Jesse Purewal [00:00:43] From Qualtrics Studios, 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.

Hello builders, I'm Jesse Purewal, the voice you just heard belongs to none other than executive entrepreneur, investor and author, Scott Belsky. In today's episode, you'll hear my far reaching conversation with Scott about the parallels he discovered between the processes of writing a book and of developing software products. His motivations for dedicating a career to creative meritocracy, his advice for organizational leaders who want to motivate people to do the best work of their lives.

His perspectives on how companies and teams can sustain momentum in what he calls the messy middle of organizational life and the product development cycle. His reflections on Adobe's brand, business transformation, product culture and opportunities for growth, and his beliefs about the future of NFT technology to continue to unlock creative democratization. Enjoy breakthrough builder, Scott Belsky.

I am here with Scott Belsky. Scott, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Scott Belsky [00:01:56] It is a pleasure.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:57] What I'd like to do today is spend some time understanding a little bit about the why and the how it was you came to believe what you believe, and the experiences that led to it and how you were thinking about the future of technology and leadership in technology companies and the creative world.

Scott Belsky [00:02:14] Sounds good. I very much consider myself a student on some of those topics, but happy to take this wherever is of interest. Sounds like a plan.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:23] Since you've had a couple of cracks at the writing and done it in a way that's highly consumable and very relatable and astoundingly practical, I want to start there. By writes, for every 999 people that think they could write a book about their experience, there's maybe one who then goes and does that, and you did that twice. What is the unlock that allowed you to not only get cognitive about the processes and learnings you were experiencing as a builder and as a leader, but to create the time to go write about it and then do it in a relatable and way?

Scott Belsky [00:02:57] Well, writing for me is a great form of both cracking what I'm observing and making sense of it as well as a form of self discovery. So when I challenge myself to develop or pull a thread as it relates to how I want to build something or how something works in my industry, writing is like the best approach I've got. In doing so it forces you to do a few things. It forces you to do some research first of all, which is hard to do in our busy lives. It forces you to boil it down and simplify and challenge your own view.

Because as you start to write it, you start to wonder whether you're right or not and you start to question yourself, and it's just an incredible tool. And then of course, now in this new role in which we kind of figure everyone out before we work with them, in most relationships, whether you're trying to hire somebody, you're trying to partner with somebody, you're trying to invest in somebody, they use what you're sharing as a proxy for your interests and your expertise.

Sharing it to me always connects more dots than I ever anticipated. And so I've grown that practice of writing as something that's personal to me and then trying to package it together and get out there and see what becomes of it.

Jesse Purewal [00:04:10] What parallels did you discover between the writing process and the product building process as you went through your first book in particular and maybe how you adapted it for your second book, The Messy Middle?

Scott Belsky [00:04:23] Well, there's a saying amongst writers that I have learned to appreciate, which is called killing your darlings and the notion of all the little nuggets and plot points and characters, and a lot of it, you fall in love with all of these things as a writer, and then you have to just kill a lot of them in order to let any particular ones succeed. And I think it's exact same with product. A tendency of an inexperienced product builder is to try to put many things in and catch all customer wants and needs and head yourself with many different parts of a product.

And I think what you learn is that every additional option gets essentially 50% less usage and maybe 20% more noise across the entire product, which then translates to less successful onboardings and first mile experiences, and people don't even know how to define your product, so you have less viral growth. Everything just starts to go in decline. And when you actually start killing things, you start to get more traction on the things that matter most, same in writing.

Jesse Purewal [00:05:28] And I imagine the evidence-base is different in its volume and maybe its characteristics. As you're thinking about which of the 20 features to eliminate or the darlings to kill, I imagine you have some empirical dashboarding and reckoning you're going through to whittle down or to amplify versus de-promote. But what about in writing, the role of emotion versus maybe editorial feedback and reader feedback? How do you bring the emotion and the functional sides of the feedback cycle together when you're writing?

Scott Belsky [00:05:59] Well, for me, Twitter has been a great tool for vetting ideas, because almost everything in The Messy Middle, my last book, over a seven-year period leading up to it, I had shared a little bits and pieces on Twitter and a lot of it just got no engagement or disagreement or attraction at all. But then every now and then I would hit on a nerve and that was always a signal to me.

And the engagement I got in the community around that thought or insight or observation was kindling for that thread to be pulled further and for me to figure out who should I interview about that? What research should I try to find to back that up? And that was always a helpful exercise. So in some ways, maybe that's the equivalent of some form of user testing, right?

Jesse Purewal [00:06:45] Yeah, it's interesting. I want to talk about the creative community. You've helped that community become more recognized and more appropriately rewarded over time through Behance and other things. Where did you discover your love for creativity and in particular, the idea of the energy of a creative community? What made you decide to go all in from a professional perspective on that cadre of folks?

Scott Belsky [00:07:09] Two things come to mind, the first, maybe I should be lying down on the couch to answer as opposed to sitting in this chair, but I spend a lot of time alone as a kid. I was the first child, my sister was born with a number of disabilities and my parents were very, very consumed and focused on her. And as a result, I spent a lot of time in my basement, making things, dreaming things up. We didn't have like Gameboys and a lot of other like digital things. That was back in the day when boredom fueled creativity.

So I just had this love of making things, designing things from a very young age and I determined throughout my life that I wanted to do something in the creative world. And then later on, I started to really be humbled by just the skillset of the creative world and how everything that tells us to take action in anything is essentially touched by the hands of a creative. Marketing, making sense of the world as it happens, political movements, changing behaviors, the products that we pay more than the cost of materials, it's all attributed to what's added by a creative.

And yet these people oftentimes live their careers at the mercy of circumstance. They're perhaps part of the most disorganized community on the planet that seldom gets attribution for the work that they've done and is oftentimes taken advantage of by middleman. And so, all of that behind me compelled me to say, "I want to help organize the creative world." And I think at the end of the day, you're empowering creative people and you're probably... These days in the age of AI and everyone having more and more of their jobs taken over by the robots, maybe like creativity is the most uniquely human thing got that ultimately will make us all stand out in school, on social, at work. And that means it's a good pursuit.

Jesse Purewal [00:09:01] And when you started Behance, you talked about the lack of transparency and inadequate or improper attribution for creative work and how those challenges were costing creatives opportunities, costing them money. Looking back over the past decade and a half or so, what do you think has been Behance's contribution to addressing some of that inequity and how significant is the work that remains to be done?

Scott Belsky [00:09:26] Well, in some ways Behance has flattened the world of creative. Before it was impossible to really know which motion graphics artists or which animator or which masterful illustrator somewhere in remote central Eastern Europe actually did the campaign for that small agency, who did the work for that big agency who did the work for that global brand. And now a lot of that is traceable, sortable, searchable, which ultimately yields opportunity for the end creator and gives that person a little bit more leverage and how they're paid and their career opportunity.

We had a group in our design organization that went to China two years ago for research and they met a team at an agency there that has said that they felt Behance had accelerated design in China by 10 years. Because they felt like it had been a very insular culture as it relates to design and that making it suddenly a global theme that anyone can plug themselves into and see the creative world at work and really elevated design within that entire country.

And then you will look at the creative world, the last thing I will just say is that we know now in Behance that everyone is on average following other people in more than three different disciplines. In other words, photographers aren't just following photographers, graphic designers aren't just following graphic designers, which seems obvious. But actually what it really tells us is that creativity feeds itself. An interior designer gets inspired by emotional graphics artists, he gets inspired by a landscape architect.

And so by having this world connected, I think that's actually what advances creativity in each field.

Jesse Purewal [00:11:04] You're opening up an aperture for people to listen more, to be in dialogue more, to understand each other more deeply, and I think that's wonderful. One might've made the assumption a few weeks ago or a few months ago prior to us seeing the end of the tunnel on the pandemic that wow, we'll snap to a remote everywhere and truly democratize, not only creative points of view, but the ability to contribute. But maybe that's a temporary phenomenon.

And in some ways I have a fear that we snap back to the things that we were used to because we all go, "Oh, we want to go back to something collectively."

Scott Belsky [00:11:39] Well, two thoughts on that. Number one is, there was a time not too long ago, where when you were the best in your field, you worked with some company, you had a full-time role within a particular or agency. And now actually it's sort of the opposite. If you're one of the best motion graphics artists on the planet, chances are you are your own solo practitioner, you have your own firm of one because you don't need to have that shingle anymore to get the opportunity and to command the pricing premium that you deserve.

And so that was actually a trend that started before the pandemic and certainly has been accelerated. And that's really exciting to me because that's an inch towards creative meritocracy. And that's my second point, which is what is creative meritocracy? It's the best opportunity getting matched with the best talent and these folks finding one another as opposed to never find each other because of all the people in the middle that are controlling the outcomes and who gets to meet who and who knows who did what et cetera.

I think creative meritocracy is happening in those different ways and we're not there yet for sure, but I believe we're inching closer. And the next big step might be to facilitate the way these people work together. And now it's easy to find who did what and to admire someone's work regardless of where they are in the world and even contact them. But the project management aspect of that is a really interesting question and creatives don't want to be managed.

In fact, they wear their pride of honor in not being too controlled and being independent, doing things their own way. And so you can't have everyone confined to one masterful system. It doesn't really work that way, and I think that's one of the challenges to crack in this whole creator economy.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:26] Well, they may not like to be managed and many times they may not like to manage, right? Where you say-

Scott Belsky [00:13:31] Correct. Absolutely.

Jesse Purewal [00:13:32] "Hey, you've gotten to a certain level, are you ready for people leadership?" And they'll say, "Well, I'm ready for mentoring," but when you throw the people leadership, which I want to ask you about. What counsel do you have for people who are leading creative teams as they're growing creatives, designers, graphics, folks, verbal branding experts, people who are creating these experiences?

And you get to a certain level and you want to unlock more of that tutorial role, that mentoring role, that growth role, but you don't want to subtract any level of the goodness and creativity that they're bringing into a company or to an organization. How do you think about that challenge from a leadership perspective on the people side?

Scott Belsky [00:14:13] First of all, organizations shouldn't reward and try to retain talent by giving them more people to manage. I think that that's a traditional old school, corporate America way of looking at career progression. I think people should be able to get paid more and given more opportunity and more responsibility and more influence, not necessarily having to adopt a skillset that they may not even want to develop, which is around people management, number one.

And number two, it's always back to the question of how do you make sure that each person is doing the greatest work of their life? That's sometimes the question I ask people when I'm trying to mentor them in our organization is, are you doing the greatest work you've ever done? And if not, why? What's getting in the way? And if it's a resourcing question, that might lead to them having a bigger team, or it might lead to them focusing on fewer things and making a greater impact. So I think it all stems from that question and the organization has to serve that outcome from each of us.

Jesse Purewal [00:15:14] And when you ask for their opinion on greatest, are you thinking of it in terms of an output or how they reflect on whatever it is the creation is relative to whatever need they might have at that stage of their life or their career?

Scott Belsky [00:15:28] That's a good question because they definitely or they should be correlated. If you're doing things right, then the impact that someone is making through their work should also be feeding the gratification that they're gaining from doing the work. But that's not always the case. I think there's good examples I can think of of incredible designers who are killing it in their particular area, but they want to learn different skills. They actually want to be stretched in a new way.

But maybe that's another way of saying that they think they could be doing better work in their lives, so by adopting a new skillset, having a new set of responsibilities. So having that conversation more often is something that I challenge myself to do. It's not natural, it's interesting as a leader, sometimes the perfect day we think is when nothing goes wrong. No one steps out of their bounds, everyone's just doing their thing, everything is on track. And in fact that is a status quo organization.

If no one ever says, "I want to do more, I want to do something different," you can expect nothing more than what your organization is and has done. And so I've tried to challenge myself, it's not always easy. But when people come up for air and say, "Well, wait a second. I actually want to be trying to stretch myself this way, do something different, switch it up, move around," to maybe even sometimes preemptively challenge people to take a different role, even if it creates a void that you're going to have to fill a heyday, just because that's what keeps it as a learning organization.

Jesse Purewal [00:16:55] Scott, I want to ask you about differentiation of thought versus velocity of growth. And I'm not sure if this is a paradox or a trade-off or if it's just a two waves moving the same direction. You write a lot to the audience of company builders, of product builders, early stage companies very often. And you write that the differentiation of thought is a function of variance in personality, gender, ethnicity, and so on. It strikes me that early stage companies in particular have maybe the biggest opportunity to optimize for variants in thought, because as they constitute these new roles, they're going from zero to one.

But because of that, they might also have the biggest challenge because they want to get somebody in the door quick and get building and get going. How do you think about that seeming paradox and how can builders at companies of all types do the right thing for people and for their organizations?

Scott Belsky [00:17:47] Well, I'll track that back to the idea of where innovation comes from, which is any new product, especially, but also a new product or re-imagined products within the big company. It's all about innovation at the end of day, which is a buzzword. What does it actually mean? Well, it means people thinking at the edge of reason. And when you think at the edge of reason, inevitably other people around you will not immediately acknowledge or understand exactly why you're saying that because it sounds unreasonable. It's like at the edge of reason. And it's always those edges that become the center that advantages companies when it comes to innovation.

So then the question becomes, how do we stack the deck in our favor to make sure that there are people we're working with that are thinking at the edge of reason? Well, if you're only working with the same three people that you went to the same school with, they have the same background, that look the same and talk the same, you're likely to all have a similar view of what's reasonable and unreasonable and no one's ever going to be really thinking at the edge of reason. You're going to stay within the center.

But if you bring some folks in that are completely a different group of extraordinary people, you are likely to have some other folks who say something that at first strikes you as totally unreasonable. But since you have so much respect for them, you actually socialize yourself to their view to the point where suddenly it's like, wait a second, we are onto something here. Let's do it that way, and that's going to where the puck will be, right?

That's in one sentence, the optimizing towards socializing, the edge of reason is the argument for diversity when it comes to innovation. That's what it's all about and when you're starting in a company, to make sure that from the beginning, you have that diverse group of people, extraordinarily different, extraordinary people.

Jesse Purewal [00:19:35] And in follow up to that, I want to ask you about the human analog to the organization that you write about in The Messy Middle and the process of building and that's, what do you believe or what have you observed in yourself and in others around you is the relationship between a product or a company's journey along the messy middle trajectory and the emotional journey of the person or people that are going on it?

Like if I took an MRI or did a wellness check on you or on a team at various points of your journey, would your emotions and feelings lag or lead as indicators of what's going on in the company's messy metal? How have you observed that?

Scott Belsky [00:20:17] Strongly correlated, strongly correlated. The reason a lot of us opt for a very straightforward job with a weekly salary and constant stream of rewards and validation is because it's a hell of a lot easier to build a product and to navigate challenges with all of those forces. We're indoctrinated with the need for short-term rewards from the day that we are born. To unplug from that, when you're building something brand new, whether it's a startup or whether a new product or service that doesn't exist within a big company, you are unplugging from all of that.

And while the vision and the excitement of what could be years from now might be enough to take that risk in your career, it's not enough to sustain your day by day. And so what ends up happening is we start to lose hope, we start to feel like we're working amidst anonymity, ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, and it's very easy, especially with all these headlines being thrown at us of other companies succeeding and reaching milestones, we really quickly actually start to believe that we have an endless off-track journey ahead of us.

And so two things important here. One is recognizing that maybe one of the dirty little secrets about successful product teams innovating is that just sticking together long enough to figure it out, maybe the competitive advantage, and how can you achieve that through hacking the culture and building genuine relationships with one another, and transparency around progress. Which leads to number two, which is just merchandising that narrative along the way. Reminding yourself of you're the leader of people.

That they are in the backseat of a car with the windows blacked out and they have absolutely no idea if they're sitting in traffic for three days on end or if they're making progress in the journey cross country. And if you narrate the journey for them, they won't go crazy. But if you don't, if you forget to, which most leaders do, because they're like, "Hey, we're just going to keep working. Everyone's got to do their job and we're going to get there." It's just not enough for a journey through that messy middle.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:24] It strikes me that if you're thinking at the edge of reason, and that's how you're thinking about innovation, every half step you take closer towards the cliff of reason will earn you hundreds and then thousands more skeptics, right? That if you have one toenail on the cliff of reason, you're going to have a billion skeptics. If you back off even just one or two steps, maybe it even goes down to 100.

But that's an interesting balance for me to think about in terms of where do we go to precariousness and foolhardy risk and need to listen to the skeptics and channel it versus where do we say, "You know what? There's been skeptics going back to whether we should move away from inkwells to get a printing press." So we've got to innovate somehow.

Scott Belsky [00:23:07] 100%, which is why I always like to say that we have to learn at some point in our careers to gain confidence from being doubted. In some weird way when we are to tiptoeing towards that edge, we're going to get, to your point more and more skeptics. That doubt should also give us confidence that we're at least onto something, and that's crucial, it's like a flipping point. It's like you almost seeing the matrix in the world of innovation when you can learn to gain confidence from doubt.

Jesse Purewal [00:23:36] My COO often sends checks me by saying, "This isn't scaring me enough the way you're framing it." Or, "This one's feeling maybe a little too..." There's almost that sense that if it's scaring us just a little bit, that it's right on and that's an intuition and a heuristic. But to your point, a very diverse group might have respectful disagreement on. One person's too far, maybe another person's not enough, but that's where you force the conversation and say, "Well, what's really best given the empathy that we're trying to extend to an audience versus just what the five of us inside the room believe?"

Scott Belsky [00:24:09] And maybe that's why this is so hard in a big company, just to get exponentially harder to do something really innovative, because more and more and more checkpoints and groups of people who express the doubts. And at some point it becomes so hard to overcome that you give in and you end up compromising and shipping the lowest common denominator that everyone can get aligned around as opposed to really pounding the table and pushing people to see that edge of reason that is the future.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:42] Hey, it's Jesse. If you like conversations with big name leaders in tech who were behind some of the world's most incredible products, brands, and experiences, check out one of our past episodes. My conversation with Cisco's head of security and collaboration and former chief product officer at Box Jeetu Patel. Jeetu and I talk about the role of hard work and curiosity in a career, the value of coaching and mentoring, the importance of deep customer empathy and designing and continuously improving products.

Changes he's made to his personal leadership style to accommodate more diverse viewpoints and why the decision to leave Box and join Cisco was one he made with both his head and his heart. The episode with Jeetu is episode six of season three. You can get it wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you're enjoying Breakthrough Builders, please drop us a rating and a review and tell your friends. Now, back to the rest of my conversation with Scott Belsky.

On the big company front, Scott, you got to become part of the Adobe family when Behance became part of the family. I want to ask you about how you experienced Adobe's transformation to the cloud. It's a story that's well chronicled. It's a story that's in my mind, one of the most relevant case studies of business transformation and digital transformation over the last decade. And what I love about it is that it's typically told as an honest story around all the skeptics that were there and the fear and uncertainty and doubt as well as the optimism.

How did you personally experience the transformation, and in particular, how do you think you grew as a leader as a result of helping to steer Adobe along its journey?

Scott Belsky [00:26:16] Well, the decision to go from the perpetual business model to subscription, I came in around the time when that decision was made, but there was no real set of services and inarguable product value to back it up out of the gate. But it was like a blue sky opportunity. It's like, wow, we have this direct connection with our customers now. We're no longer relying on people out little cards in their desktop software packages, and then maybe shipping them back to us so we can know who our customers actually were.

It was just an entirely new world, and then the question was like, how do we build on this? How do we prioritize certain services? What are the things that are really going to move the needle? And then thinking about that, both within our products and then everything between our products and then anchoring on where the creative world was going. So, my goodness, what a journey.

Behance came in because we had a community of millions of creative professionals and I think that Adobe with this transformation recognized at the end of the day, that relationship with the creative community was essential towards paving this path. And that's what we've been doing ever since. Again, a lot of the stuff that we discussed in this conversation was directly relevant and paving the path and the roadmap for Creative Cloud.

Empathy with customers, reducing a lot of the ideas in this conversation was directly relevant in paving the path and the roadmap for Creative Cloud. Empathy with customers, killing some of those darlings and actually focusing on a few things. One of those first things out of the gate for example, was this thing called Creative Cloud Libraries. And this was a simple vision that in every desktop or mobile product of Creative Cloud, you would have all of your assets and your team's assets at your fingertips.

And so it would be a service that just everything is always in sync. Fast forward, today we finally have a real chunk of Creative Cloud customers relying on the service that took many years to really get it to where it needed to be. It's tricky stuff to lead a transformation of that magnitude and how much has to change in the company to really deliver on it.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:25] When you're going into an organization whose products you were using when you were much younger to tinker and illustrate and have some fun, what was it like to enter in those first few weeks, in those first few months?

Scott Belsky [00:28:37] When I first came in, I was only still overseeing the community efforts, which was Behance and maybe a few other things. A year or so in, I was asked to take on the mobile and services strategy of Creative Cloud, which was nascent and had no connection with the desktop... There was no underlying service or platform capabilities behind any of this stuff, so it was really building up from scratch. And I think on the one hand, what an honor?

I was using Photoshop at the age of 13. I'm not quite sure how I bought it, but it was like unlock of creativity for me. It was just like, wow, this is all possible. And to suddenly have an impact on the future of these products at the time on mobile and things like that was pretty awesome. I also realized just how many experts in the company who had devoted 20 plus years of their life there were around me.

And how do I engage those folks on some of those things that are at the edge of reason that we were discussing earlier, but also honor the customer needs and where the customers are? And that probably is one of the greatest challenges as chief product officer overseeing all of these creative products and services. How do you balance acknowledging the legacy of these products and the things that the customers expect should never change alongside the needs of new customers, the next generation of customers that come from different standpoints that care more even in some cases about collaboration and performance? How do you balance those without trying to please everyone always and chipping nothing great?

Jesse Purewal [00:30:07] Let me ask you about that balance in a brand context, if I might. With the shift to the subscription model, you have this multitude of really strong application brands, obviously like Photoshop and Illustrator starting to give way, even if just a little bit to the Creative Cloud brand. And so internally, you've got some challenges there and then externally you have millions of creators ostensibly, emotionally invested in those brands.

So now there's a question of how do you maintain the brand love from the application level and use it as a foundation of growth for the Creative Cloud business and brand and of course the Adobe master brand as well? So talk to me about your reflections on that.

Scott Belsky [00:30:48] The product brands are really important to our customers, and so we've actually only tried to strengthen them. And even when you look at our social accounts, et cetera, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Lightroom, Nissan, they are their own centers of gravity with their own marketing and social media efforts. Many of them are communities in and of themselves. When you create a new brand like Creative Cloud, you have to ask yourself, what does this brand mean? And what do we aspire for it to mean to our customers?

Creative Cloud should they all this stuff work together. When you want to work creatively, collaborate creatively, Creative Cloud should be how you do this. When you want to have these products as a family like creative college to bring that to you. And also now that we're exploring the future of creativity on mobile, but also on web. And we're realizing that Creative Cloud has even more value and will have even more meaning in terms of how all this stuff works, how people work together creatively.

The trickiest part about this though is growing into it. That's one thing when all of these things are lit up and adding customer value, and it's sort of obvious to people. But it's harder when in the early days you proclaim the vision to your customers, you transform the business and the way you're going to deliver products like we did with Create Cloud, and then you have to grow into it. And you have to continue to trust the customers, hearing their feedback and tuning into those customers that are less cynical ones, but the skeptical ones.

Again, to our earlier point, they're really crucial to this because you have to hear their feedback, you have to make the products better. And that's what we've been holding ourselves to in our dashboards and all of our customer research groups and beta groups, everything else.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:34] I love that systems thinking and I'd love to know in the context of customer empathy, you've incorporated the voice of the customer, in not just the product side, but in the messaging and the calls to action and the experience that you create around Creative Cloud as a brand as you've evolved it over time.

Scott Belsky [00:32:51] Well, this might be specific to creativity and I'm not sure, but in the creative world, it's the collisions where creativity comes from. The whole point of the original Creative Suite and making these products work together was to enable creative collisions and interoperability that yielded outcomes we can't even imagine. And so Creative Cloud needed to bring that. In some ways, you could argue that Creative Cloud is just the new version of the Creative Suite.

It's all these products and how they work together. And so if you ensure that the messaging around Creative Cloud fosters that sense of the source of creativity, collaboration, collision, products having interoperability, things like the Creative Cloud Libraries feature that I described to you, and now Cloud Documents and everything else. I guess the point is, is that as you build out a new brand, and yes, for leveraging or maybe even pulling from the sub brands, it has to map up to or ladder up to a core value that your customers want and need.

Otherwise, they feel like you're imposing something on them. And I think out of the gate, we had to work our way up to that.

Jesse Purewal [00:33:53] Scott, talk to me about product culture at Adobe. What would you say are the key tenants of the product culture at Adobe?

Scott Belsky [00:34:01] One of them that I'm enjoying actually today, because there's a big sort of Slack discussion around testing and incremental improvement of our product versus when we need to just take a leap with conviction on something. And I was sharing the idea that you can chisel a gem to be more precious, but you can't chisel a gem out of nothing. So the chiseling is the iteration and the testing, and we should know something that has a clear set of KPIs and exists we should test and make better and optimize.

But when we're trying to really solve an old problem in a new way or build a new product let's not get too obsessed with testing everything. Let's take more swings. And what I love about our culture is that we're having this raging debate right now in this Slack room around this very question. Another thing that's really unique about our culture in the product organization at Adobe is that a lot of the people that are here, they could have been hired by any big social network or platform that wanted to hire an imaging expert or a video expert.

But they're here because they really deeply care about that segment and they want to be at the forefront of what's absolutely possible within imaging or video or whatever their particular interest is. That makes Adobe very unique in that regard. And we have people who are here based on their passion, and those are really fun people to work with. You just learn so much from people that are obsessively geeky about one particular area.

Jesse Purewal [00:35:34] And looking forward then, what do you think are some of the technology innovations that we should not be surprised to see make significant leaps in availability and mainstream GA over the next, say three to five years?

Scott Belsky [00:35:50] Well, I think about, let's talk about a medium term and a little longer term. Medium term, I think collaboration in the world of creativity is going to accelerate by a step function. And I think we're going to be able to do things together in ways we never anticipated. And that's really exciting, whether it be things like co-editing documents together, leveraging each other as assets in interesting ways.

And it's funny, one of the most common search terms in Behance has always been the term free PSE. Everyone wants to use other people's Photoshop documents to start with or to pull something from and why isn't a creative role at work also like a GitHub of design, if you will. Why isn't everyone leveraging each other's stuff more readily? So collaboration can mean many different things. A little further out, I think AI is going to really start to remove a lot of the mundane, repetitive labor from creativity and allow us to focus more on the genuine creative part.

So if you're in one of our products, whether it be Premier Pro or After Effects or Photoshop and you're doing something, and you've done like three or four things, and we know that in all likelihood, you're likely to do the next 12 things. Why can't we show you a thumbnail of what you're likely to want to accomplish so you can skip those 12 steps. And then spend more time on trying a different direction and comparing. That's where creativity is a mistake of the eye being pursued, comparing that to the previous version and deciding which is more interesting.

I want our customers to have more time for that stuff. And that requires a tremendous artificial intelligence effort under the hood and a ton of data and machine learning to accomplish. And then one last thing is further, further out, you have the medium of three in immersive. I think that's going to change everything. Adobe has always played a role in helping people go from say, graphic design to web design, web design to mobile design.

And I think that the next great media is certainly on the 3D and immersive side. And that's just an incredible opportunity for creatives, and I want to make sure that Adobe helps them get there.

Jesse Purewal [00:37:58] So the world in Q2 of 2021 is not shy on a high volume of perspectives, talking about how we shouldn't be able to wait to get back together to collaborate and create things in-person. And what you're laying out here actually is a view that says, "Hold on a second, we shouldn't try to snap back to things for their own sake. Actually, we should figure out how we can lay the track for this future that we're all building and then go take advantage of it."

How do you counsel people who have questions for you around, okay, I have a team of 25 or 30 creatives, do I bring everybody back? Do I have office hours for creation? Do I make it all remote? What's your best advice as we look into the future of collaboration?

Scott Belsky [00:38:46] Well, I hope none of us just revert back to the way things once were. Otherwise, we would have gone through this for nothing. I do think that time together will be used with more intention than ever before. I think we are actually always took for granted the fact that we have people physically around us, that our team was physically together and you would still just hide in our screens and use Slack and other things to communicate with people that are 30 feet away from us. That's the old world,.

The new world is, when we're physically together, it's used very thoughtfully that time. We use it for cracking the right questions and brainstorming and challenge and emotionally charged conversations taking place and that sort of thing. Otherwise, when we're not needing to do that, we work all on our own best and preferred terms, where we want to be, how we want to work, what time do you want to work? And there is no more concept of FaceTime or anything of that nature. That's the future that I'm hoping for.

We have a number of meetings in our company that used to be major checkpoint meetings with 60 plus people from around the world. And a lot of people that were local, we're all squeezing in a room and it was very strange. Now those meetings are completely virtual, everyone feels like they have an even playing field and an equal voice. I don't want that to ever change back to the way it once was.

Jesse Purewal [00:40:04] Hey listeners, taking a quick pause in the discussion with Scott to talk to you for a second. One of the things I love about hosting interesting people like Scott is that in the process of prepping for the show, I often discover wonderfully cool things I would have had no idea about from that person's work or their books or their reputation. One of the things that fascinated me about Scott as I learned more about him was his professional and personal interest in the rise of crypto art, one of a kind digital artifacts that are created and exchanged in a virtual marketplace made possible through NFTs or non fungible tokens.

Scott is a crypto art owner and advocate. He's also the owner of some pretty fun crypto art, including the one and only Furry Lisa. Yes, that's right. Not the Mona Lisa, the Furry Lisa. Look it up. Here's Scott making a compelling case that NFTs are upleveling art in meaningful and far reaching ways.

Scott Belsky [00:40:56] The NFT space was really an underlying technology that allows a digital creator to create something that is both scarce and has provenance and can't be counterfeited in the sense that the rightful owner is always clear. And I think of that as a superior medium for creative expression than the physical world where anything can be counterfeited, it's unclear. There's people in the middle that are misrepresenting things. You can't always see the provenance of an object.

So if you look at it from a purely technical perspective, the NFT model is superior. Now, some might say, "Well, you can't put it on your wall and you can't touch it." And I would argue that you actually can put it on your wall with digital screens, if that counts. And then soon we'll have augmented reality glasses and we'll see all around us and that we'll actually be able to also see the provenance of the digital staff. Whereas the physical stuff will always be looked at in question, you won't really know if that actually is the real Mona Lisa or not.

So I think that that's just an adoption curve that is likely still ahead of us. And I think that we're going to live in virtual worlds as much as we live in physical worlds in the future. And NFTs, they will be the new flats, if you will, for art collectors and any other form of collector.

Jesse Purewal [00:42:16] Scott, to what extent do you see the NFT unlock as something that can hew to this ethos of inclusivity and democratization of creativity? On one side, I could argue that it could turn into a market where a select group of hyper literate, technical-oriented creativity corners the market. On the other hand, it could look more like the original eBay ethos, times seven billion, where everybody gets to participate. So how do we make sure it looks a little more like the latter than the former?

Scott Belsky [00:42:46] Well, first off the most exciting part of this whole NFT world is that I've seen digital artists that I've admired for many years, not over a decade on Behance who always did commercial work and were always kind of hands to the mouth in terms of having a successful career, suddenly be able to mint art and be collected by serious collectors and have entirely new revenue stream. One artist I was talking to was saying how he has this now secondary sales stream that he believes will be able to pay for or subsidize his next generation.

Almost be like an annuity that his family can have in perpetuity now that he would have never had as an independent commercial artist. It's just a very liberating thing. Your question now is, how do we make that available to all? And what's really exciting about this whole world is that there are so many new platforms blooming for NFT creation and collection. Whether it's product companies like OpenSea or Foundation or SuperRare or Nifty Gateway, the list goes on.

Some of them have specialty niches, some of them are open to all, some of them are more select invite only. So I think this is the right technology for the question you asked and it's just going to take time to mature.

Jesse Purewal [00:44:02] Let me ask you, Scott about some leadership perspectives. As an investor and as an advisor, how do you determine who you will partner with? What has to be true? What conditions have to be satisfied by individuals or teams to get you to want to invest your time and energy with them?

Scott Belsky [00:44:18] Well, on the product side, there's a lot of the product I have to be able to feel and believe in in terms of the object model and how it works. I always believe that when you look at a product, even a prototype, it's a very efficient expression of the team's values. You can tell whether a design is empowered or not. You can tell whether the first mile, the new user experience, whether it has empathy or not. That's one area that I look at.

I also look to work with people with whom every conversation is a step function more interesting than the one before. Sometimes when you have three conversations with somebody, they all feel the same at the same level, and sometimes they really build upon each other. And when they build upon each other, that's a proxy for the way that they will be with their teams. I also look to work with people who aren't overly promoting anything and trying to obfuscate anything back.

Because also every team goes through this messy middle and either a leader will bring that stuff to the surface with her board or with her team, or will obfuscate it away and pretend it's not there. And you definitely want to work with the former because the latter just never succeed. And there's various ways of distilling that, I guess when you meet people as well, but you want the, I like to call them the pragmatic optimists, the people who are optimistic about the future, but pessimistic and pragmatic about the present.

Jesse Purewal [00:45:39] My last question for you, Scott would be for the builders listening here. If you could offer one piece of advice, given the world, as you've experienced it and the world as you've helped build it, what would that advice be?

Scott Belsky [00:45:52] I think everything we do, we should try to just get closer to our genuine interests. I get asked a lot about career advice from friends, determining whether they should take this job or that job. And my answer is always, hey, listen, you want to be working in the overlap of an opportunity that presents itself, the skills you have or could easily possess and learn. But most importantly, the things that you can... And you want to keep your eyes open at night manually just to keep reading about, because you're just so genuinely interested in those things. Those are the people that end up changing their industry and building things that surprise us.

Jesse Purewal [00:46:26] Scott, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for being with me today on the podcast and look forward to seeing you again soon.

Scott Belsky [00:46:32] Absolutely. It is my pleasure.

Jesse Purewal [00:46:40] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You could 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 people find us. And please tell your friends.

Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod Media in San Francisco. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod Media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku Wood. Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak, website by Gregory Hedon, photography by Christy Hemm Klok.

Special, thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 4Jesse Purewalscott belsky, advice for product managers, creative meritocracy, adobe, chief product officer, innovation, advice for authors, product experience management, the messy middle, cryptoart, behance, nft technology