Speaker 1: Hey there, product lovers. Welcome to the Product Love podcast, hosted by Eric Boduch, co- founder and chief evangelist of Pendo and super fan of all things product. Product Love is the place for real insights into the world of crafting products as Eric interviews founders, product leaders, venture capitalists, authors, and more. So let's dive in now with today's Product Love podcast.

Eric Boduch: Welcome lovers of product. Today I am here with Shannon McGarity and Jim Dibble. They're the co- directors of the Design Practice at Pragmatic. So Shannon, why don't you kick this off by giving us a little overview of your background?

Shannon McGarity: Okay, Eric. Without going into the ancient history, so I have inaudible in the design industry. I have done a bunch of the design jobs. I started out as a junior designer of creating websites back in the'90s, and ultimately over time, I got the chance to work in a lot of different ecosystems and different verticals throughout my design career. So tech and entertainment, art, e- commerce, health, marketing, and ultimately worked for myself for many years running my own small studio. And so basically helping solve problems for organizations with design. And most recently worked at a company that did education, a line of business for a strategy consultancy called Designit, and then ultimately moved to Pragmatic Institute where we had the opportunity to help start a new design practice there. And right now, Jim and I are working together to ultimately help support product managers in utilizing design and leveraging design more strategically in service and product development.

Eric Boduch: Thanks, Shannon. Jim?

Jim Dibble: Yeah, thanks Eric. My career trajectory has taken me through engineering, technical education and design. So I started out as an engineer and found my way to human- centered design. In the design field, I've worked as an in- house UX designer, both in tech startups, smaller tech startups, and also in large enterprise companies, including Sun Microsystems and Oracle. And I've also had the chance to work at design consultancy, so I worked at Cooper and then Designit as a strategic design consultant and then as a design director leading client engagements. I had the opportunity there to work in multiple different verticals with specialization in enterprise technical infrastructure, but also healthcare medical insurance, finance and fintech education and consumer electronics. So right now, as Shannon said, we're working together in education at Pragmatic, adding the spice of design to the Pragmatic offerings.

Eric Boduch: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I've known Pragmatic for years, when they were Pragmatic Marketing, now obviously Pragmatic Institute. And as they've now broadened out from what was really focused on product management with a smattering of product marketing to a much broader offering, right? So talk to me about Pragmatic as it exists today, and then go into specifically what you guys are doing there around design practice.

Shannon McGarity: Sure. So, wow. I think Jim and I were blown away at the way in which the Pragmatic Institute had supported product managers in truly bringing in outside- in approaches to the work that product managers do, creating products and services. And it felt very much cohesively connected to the work that we do as human- centered designers around making sure that we solve for our users problems and their pain points and as designers understand their goals. So it felt like an amazing connection and opportunity to truly partner and make sure that product management and design, these are practices that had been evolving and parallel for a really long time, and they share a lot of amazing synergies. And so how do we actually leverage those synergies and make sure that we're able to more strategically develop products and services kind of using a more collaborative approach?

Jim Dibble: Yeah. And we're really excited about that. Looking at ways that those different teams can collaborate together and kind of forging solutions for that, that kind of verticals that Pragmatic offers already are product management and product marketing. And then also data science was added within the last couple of years. And so design is a new vertical. So looking at ways that we can reach out to professionals in each of those verticals and help them progress their careers. And also now the possibility of helping them collaborate together even better so that they kind of supercharge their work is what we're looking forward to.

Eric Boduch: I'm a big fan of having good relationships between product management and design. I mean, I think it's essential that they work together, work tightly on the same teams. I'm sure a lot of us have been involved in companies where they're separate organizations altogether, where it seems like people were throwing things over the wall to each other, and that doesn't lead to the best outcomes, I don't think. Now, as you're starting this design practice, you must hear a lot about people wanting to know how they can advocate inside their companies for better relationships between product management and design. What are some practices that teams can put in place so that PMs and designers work better together, understand each other better and inevitably build better products?

Shannon McGarity: Yeah, I think you got it. Something super interesting about finding moments of collaboration. They're like transcending handoff, right? Like making sure that we figure out places across the whole entire product life cycle where we can bring together design and product to better understand the customer. So if you think about inaudible, nothing interesting happens in the office. The work that product managers do to go out and understand market problems. Designers, human- centered designers, are also doing research around goals and pain points of users. Bringing those two kinds of sets of activities together, it's kind of a win- win. How do we make more places for that work to connect and overlap, but also throughout the product life cycle? Making sure at the very beginning to be intentional about where that overlap happens and who is going to have responsibility for different parts of the product life cycle. Where are product managers going to enable an activity? Where are they going to participate in an activity? Where are they going to lead an activity and vice versa with designers? So I think there's something about communication and being really intentional about setting up communication points that will help to make this collaboration more strategic. How about you Jim? What do you think?

Jim Dibble: Yeah, I would say in addition to that, we really want to encourage curiosity on both sides of like, how does the other's process work? We're in the midst of creating a course for product managers on design and did some research, some market research there, talking to product managers and talking to designers. And there's really curiosity on both sides of that as to how does the other person do their job? Or what is their process? And so getting curious about that, asking questions, having conversations about that, because as Shannon said, they're both in their best state, they're both outside- in approaches where we want to better understand the market. We want to better understand the user before we go and build something for them. So how can we combine that desire to be outside- in, but to understand the subtle differences in the way that we approach that as designers or product managers so that we can figure out how to use that impetus and work together is really important.

Eric Boduch: What about organizational structure? I mean, I know at Pendo, we have a chief product officer, which definitely he has a design bent to him and then both design and product management organizations report up obviously to him in this case. Do you often see structures where design and product management report into the same person? Do you see them as kind of peer organizations? What do you think is most effective?

Jim Dibble: I think, we've seen a variety in our work as consultants and also in the research that we've done for the course that we're building right now. It really depends. I mean, I love the way you've described the way it works at Pendo, is it's all under one umbrella, but the person who is in charge of product also has a strong design bent and is very curious and interested in design. And I think that helps lot because there's a lot of confidence probably within your organization on both for the designers and the product folks, because there's this person in charge who's interested and curious about both of them and the way that they interact. And so if it's going to be under the same umbrella, I think it's important that the person in charge have some skills in both those areas and some interest and curiosity around them. But I've seen also, where they're under separate leadership, and then I think it's important that they establish a partnership. That they need to succeed together. And I've seen in organizations where it's not set up that way, where it feels a little more competitive or confrontational, it doesn't have to be that way. But if they don't go in aligned on, we're going to be partners in this, it can lead to problems.

Shannon McGarity: And I think that's where Pragmatic is really well positioned to understand those different perspectives and help forge transformation and inaudible around processes or mindsets. So I think that's what's been really exciting to us is that we are actually living in a space that we can help facilitate that partnership.

Eric Boduch: And then when you think about team structure, I think at Pendo we have generally on a team, and there might be multiple teams on a particular product, but generally on a team we'll have one PM, a designer and then a group of engineers and maybe an engineering team lead, maybe an engineering manager, that structure is a little bit different. But we usually will have a designer and a PM assigned to each individual team. Do you see that as kind of the norm?

Shannon McGarity: Well, we actually did a bunch of research in advance of the work that we did developing this design course for product managers, and we saw a number of different ways that organizations structure that relationship. So there's that agency model where designers are actually not dedicated to a project, and as a product manager, you only get a designer allocated to your project for maybe two to three weeks at a time. That is very different than what you're describing, which is, ah, we've got an embedded team member working on a particular product or a part of a product. And we saw that those were pretty equal in terms of the representation in the research that we did. Listen, there are also other organizations that have to rely on outside design resources as well. The smaller group of people. Smaller is, ah, there are product managers that don't have design resources. So we really needed to understand a broad swath of what the needs and goals were of the diversity that happens in organizational structures.

Eric Boduch: Do you like that model? I mean, do you like the model of the two to three weeks at a time? I can understand shared design resources, like in a lot of cases, especially smaller teams, smaller projects, there won't be a dedicated designer that will be a hundred percent on a team, they'll be split across a couple of teams. What I worry about on the agency model, the two to three weeks is it's like, product's built, okay, throw design at it for three weeks, make it look pretty, because they're not involved in the whole process. And I hear that a lot, or like, oh yeah, designs are there to make a product pretty. I'm like, that should not be what design is there for.

Shannon McGarity: Teardrop rolls gently down the cheek. We've all had that life, right? And it's sad-

Jim Dibble: I mean-

Shannon McGarity: So I... Oh, go ahead, Jim.

Jim Dibble: I was going to say I think that that partly comes from just not enough investment in design. So you don't have enough designers for the amount of work you need to do, and so then the design team just ends up taking on that agency model because that's the best they can do under those circumstances. It does lead to problems with continuity on projects and designers not feeling like they're grounded in the work that they're doing. That they're jumping in, as you say, having to make it pretty because that's all that they can do at the point that they're brought in and then leaving again. And it's really hard for those designers to feel like they have enough context around the product and also around the target users and what it is they're trying to achieve. So it makes it hard for them to do great work. And it also can lead to, in some circumstances, those designers really kind of, because they don't have enough context, falling back on, well, let's just use design best practices. Anytime the product manager asks for something, then the designer's response might be," Well, I'm just going to go with design best practices because I don't have enough context around the user to actually argue anything differently or to push forward anything different." I think an advantage of the consultancy model is that you've got all the designers kind of working on one team and communicating together regularly. So if you don't have an agency model, you have to find some way to create that cross product, cross project designer camaraderie, so that they're not stuck in the churn of putting out product all the time, but not talking to other designers.

Eric Boduch: Yeah. And how do you do that, Jim? Is that a matter of design reviews? Like you're having a design lead, maybe working with some of the designers doing design reviews or having peer level design reviews. How do you make sure that they're getting that cross design comradery, especially in groups where there might be six or eight designers inside the company or more?

Jim Dibble: Yeah, I think design reviews are one great way of doing that, but I think it's allocating time for designers to be together. Part of that time is kind of reviewing work in progress. Part of that time is being strategic together about where they want the overall design to move. So it's not about reviewing current work, it's about making plans for where they want the overall brand implementation, the overall interaction and the overall supportive structures for design, how they want those to progress within the company. So-

Shannon McGarity: Yeah. I was just going to say that I think that the phrase for that would be practice development. So making sure that there's a space where not only doing all the things that Jim said, but also being inspired to create consistency about the way that design is deployed in an organization, so that designers aren't doing things completely differently in those different teams so that it feels like, ah, we are all working together to develop a way of designing at the specific organization.

Eric Boduch: Okay. Let's talk about design and data. I'm a big fan of using data to inform decisions. What data matters for designers and how does data help designers build better products? Shannon, do you want to start?

Shannon McGarity: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I can dig in. So I think that data, we're swimming in it, and data can benefit designers by, first of all, leveraging data. We do research to better understand our users, and so a lot of times as a human- centered designer, we do qualitative research. But it's also helpful to draw upon quantitative research and data and make sure that we may talk to 20 people to better understand this particular set of users, but let's make sure that we use data to make sure that potentially we're sizing and understanding how much of our audience has these needs and goals, et cetera. So making sure that we can validate with data. But I think designers are also often like this arbiter of data and making sure that we determine what is enough to tell the right story and to tell the story right, and make sure that it lands for people. So that might include information visualization, interface design and designing dashboards to better elicit the right kind of story that we feel that we must tell for our products. So we can use data both in the work that we do, but also we are tasked with arbitrating data for people in our products and services.

Eric Boduch: So Jim, adding to that design and data, what data is important for designers in your opinion, and how should they be using data?

Jim Dibble: Yeah, it's definitely a mix, a blend of quantitative and qualitative data that's important to designers. Qualitative, especially understanding the user and their contexts, what's their situation? What are they trying to achieve? And we have so much more quantitative data available now. I think understanding how users are currently using products, especially if you're updating the design for a product, having a lot of data about how it's currently being used, what's working for people and what's not. And we can collect a lot of that. I think one of the concerns in the design community is that sometimes design can be forced to be overly driven by the quantitative data. So always reaching for that. What do we need to change to get people to click on this more to get to that target that we want the business to achieve? And I think that that can be really frustrating for designers because it's not necessarily trying to help the user at the same time help them achieve their goals, or it feels not that way. And so an over reliance on quantitative data and using that to force the hand of design can be quite frustrating for designers. So figuring out that right balance of when can we draw from that quantitative data and what's the right quantitative data to draw from in order to make decisions in the users and the business's interest.

Eric Boduch: And I talked about this term better products, but what does that mean? What does that mean to you, Shannon?

Shannon McGarity: Better products? Well, they have to be products that people want to and need to use, right? And so we think that it's really important to utilize those outside- in approaches. Better products are the ones that pull on your heartstrings, that feel like you're being empathized with, that connect with a goal you need to accomplish. And then ultimately keeps you there and is sticky and connects you to that product and helps you get work done over time or helps fulfill a need that you have over time. So I think better products, they are products that we want to and need to use, and hopefully they've been developed with us people in mind.

Eric Boduch: Yeah. I like that. I like this idea of emotions tied to products, right? That even on the business side, products don't have to be something that are sterile, right? They can be fun to use, even if you're building and selling a product to the business.

Shannon McGarity: Well, sometimes that's the only way they differentiate themselves, right? When I speak passionately about my SodaStream, I love that thing. It connects to my values in terms of being more eco- friendly and getting the thing that I want. And it's customized just for me. I get the level of fizziness I want, and somebody thought a lot about that. And they thought that, oh, this person actually doesn't want to connect it to a power source. She can do it herself. I mean, I could go on far too long about love of a product and it's because they appeal to me and connected with me and will hopefully continue to create a conversation with me over time.

Eric Boduch: Now Jim-

Jim Dibble: I was going to say, and I think that there's an imperative for business products that as the users of business products are also using consumer products in their own life, they're using apps on their mobile phone. They're seeing what can be done and the kind of emotional attachment, they can have two things in their personal life, the products that they use in their personal life, and they're expecting to start seeing those things in the products they use for their work. So it's imperative to us as designers of business products to take on that challenge of making those products just as enjoyable to use as consumer products are.

Shannon McGarity: A great example of that actually is Mailchimp. Think about if you've ever used email marketing software, the animations that they have when you're about ready to send an email campaign where you've got the Mailchimp's hand kind of wavering and sweat pouring off him, it feels like they understand what you were going through at that moment of having to press the send button, or giving you the high five when it's been sent. They're actually connecting with you because they're showing that they understand how you feel. And it's playful and fun and it takes a little bit of the nervousness out of doing that kind of work. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to continue to explore emotion in designing.

Eric Boduch: Yeah, I think the Mailchimp's a great example of trying to move more fun into a business product. And also to Jim's point, when I think back from business software for 20 years, maybe 30 years ago, it was pretty ugly and that was okay because people were forced to use it. But I think one of the big things that happened was the iPhone and then other technology. Users got exposed to how things could be and they kind of expected that in their business software. This whole consumerization of the enterprise where now business software experiences are a lot closer to the iPhone than maybe these horrible interfaces that had every single thing you could possibly want to do on one single screen. They were just sensory overload. And I can remember some screenshots, still seeing them from a long time ago and I was like," Wow, did we do that? Did we actually build products like that?" It's kind of embarrassing to be honest as a professional in this space, and I might've been guilty of a little of that myself, so let's move on.

Shannon McGarity: We all have. Let's forgive ourselves.

Eric Boduch: Yeah. Well, let's talk about human- centered design. So I have a lot of PMs that listen to this podcast and not all of them might have as much of a design background. So tell me, what do we mean by human- centered design? Maybe Jim, you can go first on this one.

Jim Dibble: Sure. Human- centered design is a practice or set of techniques or mindsets, so that's a lot of different things, it doesn't have to be a process. But a way of approaching problems, either as an individual or with your whole team in which you're making sure that you're keeping the end user as kind of the hero of your story. That you're focusing on what it is to be them, what it is to be in their shoes, when we think through solving problems for them. So it's really easy I think for organizations that are hurrying up to release the product to market to just focus on what are the steps that we need to do to crank out a product and get it out to market? And I think that human- centered design allows us to kind of slow down and insert tools and techniques that help us think through who is the user? What is it they need to do? What are different ways that we could solve the problem for them? And then let's evaluate that against what we know about the user. So just forcing us or encouraging us to keep our target user front and center in all the work that we do. And the tools and techniques are really enjoyable. I mean, they're great to use with your colleagues as a way to think through problems. And so it's fun.

Eric Boduch: Now you had one word there that probably scares some of the execution oriented PMs out there, and I think it was slow. So how do you advise people? And I'm not saying that human- centered design is slow, but I think you said slow down the process or something to that respect and that comes up, right? A lot of people are like, yeah, I wish I could get more data, spend more time with data, but I have really this huge time constraint for launching this product or this budget constraint. How do you advise people at Pragmatic when they come back and say, well, it would be great to do this. It'd be great to spend more time on design, great to have more data there. How do you advise them when they're thinking about this from a time, budget, restrained or constrained product management process?

Jim Dibble: I think one of the things that Shannon often says is slowing down to speed up. So finding a way to insert just some of these tools as a way to kind of realign our perspective, but not, we're not going to do a big human- centered design, we're going to change our process kind of way of thinking of things. But instead like, we're going to insert this one tool here because we think it will help us derisk the release of this product to market. We'll feel more confident that this product that we actually spent all this time to create, whether we sped it up or slowed it down, it was worth spending that time because the market's going to accept it. So I think really finding a way to just insert certain tools to help change our perspective can really speed up our process. And that means we haven't wasted time producing a product that the market doesn't want.

Shannon McGarity: Yeah. And I think too, you can prototype this within your organization. So process competition is real, let's not pit different processes, design process against a product management process. Let's find a piece that seems really interesting and that might contribute within the timeline and try it out and let's see what happens. Let's do a cross- functional ideation session together to bring in cross- functional perspectives. To derisk with the ideas that come out of the session. Or like, before we go too far down a path, let's make sure that we talk to some users, and maybe it's just five of them, and show some in- progress work to get a better understanding of how people might respond to the solution you're working on. So you don't have to commit to a huge process. It's kind of why we're process averse, like in terms of saying process, it's really got to be about mindsets and tools and activities that you start sprinkling in. I think that's exactly crosstalk-

Eric Boduch: Yeah, I like those examples. What are some other examples in ways maybe product managers can incorporate more design thinking into their products and into their decision- making?

Shannon McGarity: Yeah. So let's see here. There's of course ideation and bringing people together, evaluation is another part of that. So bringing those same people, the same cross functional teams together to not only come up with ideas, but to help to evaluate them together and have conversations about what the strengths or weaknesses or perceived excitement of these groups is around different ideas that they might want to pursue prototyping and testing across the process. So that might mean concept testing, testing a concept before it's actually become a thing. And then ultimately doing design work and then testing that design work. I feel like I'm a little all over the place there. So maybe I'll give Jim some time to kind of focus.

Jim Dibble: There's lots of options. I think inserting stories, and stories can be an overrated term, because it can feel like Agile owns them. User stories are little small bits that express functionality from a user's perspective so that engineers have a better sense of how to build them, but we can also think of stories at a larger scale. So if you think back to Mailchimp, what is the story about how a marketing person sends out an email campaign and then chucks the results afterwards. If we do sit down and kind of think through that story from the marketing professional's perspective and tell the story of how they're going to use the product, it leads to a better product. So it could be the product manager putting together that story, it could be a designer putting together that story, but just the act of putting together the story and sharing it with others in the organization, kind of amplifies everyone's ability to see what it is for the user to use this product and what are the key points that we can work on to make it better.

Eric Boduch: So we're moving into a world that I feel becomes more and more product led. Right? Talk to me about design skill sets. In today's modern software companies, what types of skills does a designer need to better operate in those environments? Maybe you can go first, Shannon.

Shannon McGarity: Yeah, sure. The first thing that comes to my mind is curiosity about the bigger picture. So we're seeing a trend, certainly in my career too. I started out as a visual designer, then became a user experience designer and then started doing work around service design. Services are made up of lots of different products, and to understand how those products connect and interrelate to serve a larger brand, that can be really helpful. So I think using service design mindsets can kind of up designers games in terms of better understanding, holistically, how a product fits within an organization's suite of offerings.

Eric Boduch: Anything to add, Jim?

Jim Dibble: I think that it's really important for designers as well to work on their soft skills of kind of communication feedback, facilitation especially. I think it's important for designers to be able to help bring together those cross- functional teams to work together and have the same understanding and vision of where they're going together. Now that can be something that the PM, the product manager takes on instead, but it's a great toolset that designers can take on so that they can be that trustee right- hand for the product manager to help corral a cross- functional team and, not corral, but just also pull in all the great ideas that the cross- functional team has and in workshops, in ideation sessions, so that the team as a whole is more bought into the product and creates better products.

Shannon McGarity: One great word for that too, facilitation. So creating experiences, collaborative experiences that really harness the thinking of cross- functional teams, that's a great skill to have.

Eric Boduch: What about working with crosstalk-

Jim Dibble: It's interesting because you're not just designing the product, you're helping to design the way we're going to work together as a team. So designers kind of bring that to the-

Eric Boduch: crosstalk if you're working with engineers, right? I think when we talk about teams that are working together, it might be design product engineering, is that kind of approach help collaboration better with those technical people, with those engineers too?

Shannon McGarity: Absolutely. Because hopefully we're folding engineers earlier into the process as well. Engineers also don't want to be handed something and say, go make it. They want to see themselves crosstalk solution.

Eric Boduch: Yeah. Here's the design, here's the crosstalk make it work. Yeah.

Shannon McGarity: Yeah, exactly. That can be super frustrating. So to be able to facilitate multiple conversations with workshops that have different perspectives in the room and navigate those perspectives and align those perspectives, wow, that is a super muscular skill set, and one that certainly Jim and I have enjoyed developing in our practices because we've seen the power of it. An example, I've worked with an organization where engineering had come up with the ideas, right? And then built them. And ultimately the organization decided to pivot to something that felt more cross- functional and use a design thinking approach. Ultimately, we did workshops with them and brought in all of these cross- functional perspectives, and what I had later was engineers coming back to me saying, oh, this is amazing. We love not just designing this thing that's technically possible, but to be able to have a conversation about what the business needs are, what the user needs are and get a more holistic perspective. Engineers want to know that too. Designers want more context, engineers want more context, and they want to be able to buy- in at a much earlier part of the cycle.

Jim Dibble: Yeah. And that context helps them do their jobs better, right? And feel more confident in what they're creating.

Shannon McGarity: Yeah. And that's super rewarding because designers and engineers also work together pretty tightly in a number of organizations. So this is an opportunity for them to improve their relationships as well, much earlier in the process.

Jim Dibble: We have a colleague who recently joined us at Pragmatic, who was saying the other day at her last company, she's a product manager, and the thing that really helped her bond with the designers and engineers on our team, were those ideation sessions. Those places where you could come up with off the wall ideas, but then distill them down into what we want to do together. And so it not just helps come up with a better product, but it helps create a better team.

Eric Boduch: Yeah. I like that. I mean, I'm all for having product design engineering involved throughout the process, which includes early on. Which some people are like, yeah, they're throughout the process, once things are established. I was like, no, that's not throughout the process.

Shannon McGarity: Well, that's one of the thing we have to make time for, right? When engineering is working on a very specific thing, it's hard to bring them away from that build mentality and pull them up earlier because you've got them focused working on a thing that needs to go to market. So you're actually having to be very intentional about making space for people to have this connection.

Eric Boduch: Yeah, no, absolutely. But I think doing that right you have less turn, right? You have less iterations in the middle and it goes back to that maybe slow down in the beginning to speed up at the end kind of thought process. Things get launched faster and better when the process has all the people involved right from the get- go and involved in the decision- making process, not just having things tossed over the wall to them.

Shannon McGarity: Yeah.

Eric Boduch: So talk to me about the future. Maybe you can go Jim first. What do you see about trends in design and product into this next year? Here we are in January 2021.

Jim Dibble: Well, and because we're in January 2021. I think that looking at the way that we work together has gone through such an evolution in the last year because of COVID and the pandemic, people working from home, I think it's given us permission to rethink the way we collaborate. And so I think it's important, when we get to the point when we're back in the office, or it's a hybrid model where sometimes we're in the office and sometimes we're not, to kind of examine that. We kind of have permission now to rethink the way that we work together. And so what's going to make sense for the way that product and design and tech work together in order to create a product? What can we take that really worked from when we were all working remotely and use it to switch out the way we worked together before?

Shannon McGarity: Yeah. And we're also using a lot of new tools, which has been interesting and exciting. I think if you're working in a product led organization, you're probably working with infinite canvas tools and figuring out ways, new ways to use old technology to actually co- create together. So I think about software tools like Miro and Mural that help bring people together remotely and to truly communicate in visual ways. That's a thing that we didn't think was possible, truly, before we were all forced to work remotely. So I think toolsets will continue to evolve. I think we're at the very beginning of that evolution.

Eric Boduch: Well, this has been fun. So I'm going to wrap this up with a couple of questions about you two in particular. I would love to know what your favorite product is. Maybe Shannon, you can go first.

Shannon McGarity: Gosh. Okay. So we were just talking a little bit about infinite canvas tools. I am a bit of a Miro fan girl. It's really actually changed my game and the game of teams that I've worked on in terms of being able to collaborate remotely to hold workshops and make sure that we integrate other people's perspectives in a way that we thought could only happen in person. So I love Miro. And on top of that, I love the fact that they're constantly evolving. Just when you think something is broken or it doesn't work exactly the way you want to, they are changing the game and making sure that that bouncy timer stops bouncing when you mouse your cursor over it. It's those little things where I feel like I'm being cared for and thought about as that product evolves, so I'm a big fan.

Jim Dibble: I mean, I love that. I have a second thought. I taught a workshop recently in Miro and I was thinking, boy, I really wish there was some way to kind of bring everyone to me at a certain point and then let them go off. And in the middle of the workshop, it was a two- day workshop, suddenly this new feature appeared where you could bring everyone to you. It's like they were reading my mind. They're doing a great job.

Eric Boduch: Awesome. Awesome. That's great. And we were all users of that product. Well, one final question, maybe Jim you can go first, three words to describe yourself.

Jim Dibble: I would say thoughtful. I would say curious. And, can I say big picture? I don't really know what's the one word to say that.

Shannon McGarity: Systems thinking or system thinker.

Jim Dibble: Systems thinking, that's two words again. Yeah.

Eric Boduch: I like big picture. I mean, we don't have strict three- word rules here. You can have crosstalk, so...

Shannon McGarity: crosstalk do threes.

Eric Boduch: Yeah, absolutely.

Shannon McGarity: Awesome. So Jim stole one of my words-

Jim Dibble: Oh, I'm sorry.

Shannon McGarity: I'm curious. I think designers have to be curious and to want to know about other people and products. I'm playful. I love running workshops and using improv to facilitate different ways of getting work done. And I've got the energy, I'm energetic.

Jim Dibble: That's for sure.

Eric Boduch: Well, thank you guys. This has been great. I greatly enjoyed it.

Jim Dibble: Thank you, Eric crosstalk.

Shannon McGarity: Thank you. This was a great opportunity. Thank you so much.