35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond

Bob Baxley is a design executive and advisor who has led design at Apple, Pinterest, Yahoo, and ThoughtSpot, shaping products used by hundreds of millions. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky he covers what design really means, how to evaluate company culture, why design belongs close to engineering, tenets as decision tools, the moral obligation to build good software, and lessons from the Apollo program.

01Key learnings

• Before joining a new company, check whether founders genuinely believe in design; design-led cultures are born that way, not grafted on later.
• When changing cultures, keep your core values but re-express them in the new company's behaviors rather than carrying over old habits.
• Keep teams small when inventing something new; add people once the vision is clear, since more people slows creative convergence.
• Write tenets, not generic principles: a few specific, opinionated decision-making rules that teams can memorize and apply to resolve recurring debates.
• Wait as long as possible before drawing high-fidelity visuals, since the first picture anchors everyone and narrows the solution space too early.
• Give designers a clear brief and vision to reduce ambiguity; the more context and constraints upstream, the faster and better design goes.
• Watch real people use all kinds of software in the wild, including adjacent products, to build intuition for how humans process screens.
• Design should consider the emotion a product should evoke, since software is an emotional medium affecting billions of daily interactions.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.