So this is what I'm supposed to talk about.

Eli, was just talking about something similar, and that is a very bright light.

And I honestly can say I don't know how to do this yet because I've

only been designing software for people to get their work done for a little while.

I think Eli's a bit ahead of me on that.

So I'm gonna talk about though, some general things that I know can

help get great product design done in organizations like Google.

And, I love it that he showed the, like, pimply adolescent period.

At Google, cuz I'm gonna actually show you some, some examples of that for mobile

as well that I was quite proud of at the time, so those are my pimples.

And talk about kinda what, where, at

Salesforce we're gonna go, where we're gonna

figure out kinda, the future of getting our work done and what that looks like.

And Salesforce is interesting to me.

I, I didn't know a huge amount about the company before I joined it.

I, I looked at the products when I was, kind of interviewing with the folks there.

And they seemed like they needed, that, that they were kind of stuck.

And, and it's kind of true about enterprise in general, that

the products look like one generation behind what we're working on.

And, and myself and the folks that are here

from Salesforce, we are all intent on reversing that.

Okay to, to, to make the software that we

use to get our work done, be the thing that

inspires you all to, to disperse that into the, into

the world of consumer stuff, to turn that upside down.

So it always surprises me when I see charts like this.

This is from Gartner, this is something they do called the magic quadrant.

Which is to kind of help CIO's decide what products to buy.

And when I see this its like, okay there's things going on other than

what meets the eye on the screen in terms of the quality of our products.

But I think they're, this is a vulnerable place.

I think if you look in the bottom left, you'll see some organizations

that are already well ahead in terms

of understanding product design, and understanding innovation.

And so, we have our work cut out for us.

And to talk a little bit about how I got here.

this, like, in my recent history there are three things that have just really,

kinda changed my, my, my career and my life, from a work perspective at least.

The first was at 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone.

Who remembers that day?

Like, it was like, holy cow, the future is here.

The second was, I was in a meeting at Google where, we learned that,

Facebook had surpassed Google in terms of page views on the internet.

Which was something we could see, because a lot

of people think Google is how you get around

the internet, and so they would just type Facebook

in and hit enter and then hit that link.

And, all of a sudden Facebook was ahead of Google itself, which was a big change.

And finally a third one, which is a date in the future, which

is that we lead the, the sort of, enterprise industry in product design.

And that, myself and the folks over there were intent on putting that on the

calendar at a date to be determined, mostly by you, I think, by, by our peers.

And send me an email when you think when we have gotten there, okay?

I'd appreciate that.

And I'll tell you why those three

dates are important and what happened about them.

But getting, getting through and trying to understand how to do

quick, good product design, which I still don't know how to do.

And I don't think maybe tot, collectively we have a, a, a,

a few things we can point to but it's still really hard work.

I think you would agree with that.

And then I've learned some hard lessons over the, over the years.

Particularly at Google, I came from IDO, which

thought, we all thought we had product design nailed.

Like around 2007 when I joined Google, and once I joined Google,

I was quickly learned that nothing could be further from the truth.

And so Eli pointed out some fantastic examples that I'm gonna amplify, about

how we've how we at Google sort of drove it, bumped it along to being design led.

I think that probably the most important one was that first one, the launch of

the iPhone, was kind of the irritant in

the pearl, that eventually, woke the company up.

And then the second was, building a social network and how being engineering

led turned out to be a disastrous way to approach that at first.

And then what we did to fix that.

And then the third one which I keep referring to

in the future is, how do we make knowledge work awesome?

How do we make the job of working in a call

center, where a lot of people who use sales force products

work, good, and sort of conver, confer dignity on their day

when their you know on a headset answering calls all day.

That again is in the future.

so, so I have a little playbook that we used at Google, and I

think maybe you guys can use it, if you're in big companies or maybe you already are.

and, and I think Eli kind of, kind of

nailed it already but I'll, I'll amplify that a little.

The first is, start with mobile.

We all know mobile just has all these constraints that make it such

a lovely place to kind of figure out the future of a product.

And then, two really important things, like Eli talked about sitting

in, in labs and, and seeing how users reacted to things.

I think that's great and I think you gotta go and, be with the

users and, be in the world with them, to really understand what's going on.

This is obvious, I know, but I just, it just, it's just

an amazing way to help transform an organization and the people in it.

Get them in front of their users.

It's like, you know, we've been saying this 15

years and yet we don't do enough of it.

And then Eli showed that great image of

sort of, the consistency of all the Google products.

That was a project we called Kennedy in, 2011, 12, timeframe,

and just getting your CEO to say this is how everything should work, work.

It's just an amazing tonic to sort of say, hey there's

a new sheriff in town and that sheriff is design, all right.

And why is mobile important?

It let's you not bet the farm.

It like, particularly in the Google case when I was working there it was kind

of off, off the off the mainstream when I was working on it in 2007.

And then I, so I wanted to work on mobile and then to be

in even a more obscure place to kind of debug the design process at Google.

We went way out into the developing world, where no

one really cared and we could make a lot of mistakes.

And learn interesting things, and every once in a while one of those things was

interesting enough that it would come back

and find its way into a mainstream product.

For example, I went out to Uganda a bunch

of times, to work on information products for Sub-Saharan Africa.

We tried all sorts of things.

There was a product kind a, you could, kind a get

the weather, you could find out some crop prices, things like that.

And we tried all sorts of them really fast, using, kind of Wizard of Oz system.

Where we had, we set up a little SMS center, like a call center in Kampala,

and then we'd send researchers out and just say hey text

this short code and ask a question about your cattle and see what happens.

And then the people back in the office would answer 'em.

And we'd try 'em really fast.

There was no, no algorithm behind it, other than

some smart, graduate students from Makerere University in Kampala.

And, we tried a bunch.

And some, none of them were really, like, picking up traction until we did this one.

Let me see if I have volume here.

[SOUND] And here, here, is me way outside Kampala,

way out in the sticks, trying to understand information needs.

[SOUND] Sister Santukar has one

about anemia, and one about

snakebites, and we're

waiting to see what happens.

>> If she wants to see it.

>> Okay.

>> [FOREIGN] >> [SOUND]

Hey, Jess?

Yeah, we've been trying to send, queries in, for like the last 90 minutes.

Yeah.

So MTM.

They block, the sims because they were getting

to much traffic coming in to the servers.

>> Unlike the weather and the cattle and the agriculture thing, it turned

out that people had this intense need and curiosity about their own health.

And when we started telling a few people in the study that this was going on.

They quickly told friends who tried to then

se-, send queries themselves through the short code

and it, it kinda took off well before there was an actual product to support it.

So the whole infrastructure just melted down.

And that was a good thing, it's like okay, there's

the clear front runner and it cost us zero in

engineering, we just had to get some sims and some

free air time, that we handed out, to the folks.

And and for me it was like, okay, we learned

about a product but we're also showing Google how you

can get sort of insights that can drive product development

much, much more quickly, than by just reading blogs or something.

There's no blog that would ever tell us this, right.

And so the most reliable kind of way of seeing your own future, is go

find the unusual users that that you're trying to reach and, and learn from them.

Really obvious, but this was not the case at Google.

And I'll show you an example, years after

this in a minute, that'll curl your, your toes.

And you, you all probably know this example.

So, that was really good.

The health thing though, was pretty difficult to deliver.

The kinda second runner up in the thing was just selling stuff.

Like selling cell phones, cattle, bunnies and particularly cars, so we built

this amazing little sort of Craig's List for Sub-Saharan Africa which is still up.

It's called Google Trader, and you can buy and sell stuff on your cell phones.

It now has get, gotten the Kennedy treatment.

This is in like, dozens of languages

including Luganda and Swahili, and it's up in

about a half a dozen sub, Sub-Saharan African

companies countries based on that research we did.

But more importantly it, it, again it was

like showing Google, hey you know, the doing stuff

in the usability lab is good but like

getting out of the office might even be better.

So then Eli brought this up so I'm going to just talk about it very

briefly, which was visual consistency through visual design.

Again as a way of getting products lined up, but it's

kind of a really cheap way to say, hey, design matters.

And it matters so much that me as the

leader of the company, I'm gonna drive consistency across products.

And I, we hadn't seen that at Google before.

Everything was completely, completely all over the place.

So if we, we wind back to what I think of, I don't

know if you remember this Eli, or any other, any other Googlers here?

The rehearsal for Kennedy was a project we did in mobile we called Cyrus.

This was kinda, the iPhone was around, but at the

time, the Blackberry, the Treo Nokia phones, all had market share.

They don't any more, we know.

Except Android.

And and they all had different visual designs and I was leading this team and,

the engineers hated us because, they were

supporting all different design patterns on different devices.

And so it, it came time to fix it.

Now this is the part where I'm like, I wince a little.

Because we thought this was so beautiful at the time way back in like 2008, 2009.

But this is what we called Cirus.

This is the before iPhone version and the after.

And you probably all used this until about a year ago when it finally expired.

It was given a, a hall pass when Kennedy came through because it was solid

enough, and everyone thought sort of functional

enough, that it didn't need to be revised.

So I'm pretty proud of this.

It was a small team, Sanjay, [UNKNOWN], worked on this.

As well as Brett Lighter, and Nicholas Jitkoff, and a couple of other folks.

And I think of it s a rehearsal because Vick and Dotro was running it mobile at

the time said, everything must look this way and

I won't wanna look at any product that doesn't.

Right, so this to me is like a little,

a little preview of what the Kennedy project would become.

And we did some cool HTML5 niceties that's, what we called the

floaty bar there, that was designed by [UNKNOWN] who's now at Twitter.

And, crazy enough you can scroll that list

in Gmail and that little floaty bar will just

sit there and you can do multiple selection

on it, and we thought that was just amazing.

Looking at this now, it looks to me crazy busy.

I think we could have calm this down a

lot more, but again the, the mantra was not simple

as Eli was talking about, but to squeeze as

many of those desktop features down as we possibly could.

But in terms of consistent I think we did a good job.

So again that was Mobile First and Kennedy Next.

So then I told you the second galvanizing thing in, in my career

was that day that, the, the Facebook traffic passed Google.

And, that was, frankly terrifying.

And this is the place where like I can

kind of show the limits of engineering led product design.

About a month before this, this is in February, or actually March in 2010.

In, in February we launched a product called Google Buzz.

Which I didn't work on so I can like put blame in that direction with impunity.

And the people that built it were amazing and

many of them did come and join us on Google+

and were so sort of scorched, by the buzz example

that they were ripe for, for conversion into design-led thinking.

And as you remember here's how I

think engineering lab works, Facebook threat, what is

the the, least wasteful thing we can do to kind of quickly meet that challenge?

And at Google that meant, oh we have a contact store inside Gmail.

And if we re-move, move kind of bits of

Gmail around it'll look like a feed with some commenting.

And and yeah that should work.

And we'll just, we'll, we'll link it off Gmail.

And oh yeah, we need a social graph.

So you know people email each other and we, we affinity rank that.

Let's just make that the social graph.

And we'll make it easier for' em, we'll just

expose it to anyone who wants to look at it.

And for me at the time, that meant two women I, I was dating who I had met on

OKCupid, my therapist, and like half a dozen contractors, right?

And now, that was exposed to everyone at work.

And I, I was terrified, I was appalled and so was the government

of Canada, Germany and, several other European States.

And this is literally what it looked like, you would, you would,

you could go, navigate to anyone's

profile, and see all their closest relationships.

Or people that been emailing in the last week or two, right?

And and it just it just blew up as you, as you may remember.

It was, externally it was a, a bad experience.

Internally I can tell you it was agonizing,

it was a, a scorching experience and there

was a lot of talk about oh everyone's

relationship with the Google, search box is so intimate.

It's more intimate than your relationship with,

with even your spouse or your loved ones.

Because it's like, what is this rash, you know.

And, an that.

>> [LAUGH].

>> And then to put a, and to put a

social network, anywhere in the same vicinity, in the same state.

Was in fact going to potentially destroy the company, right?

At the same time we saw the internet

just being absorbed, sucked up by Facebook, right?

And they were doing things that looked not internety.

They were building, basically rebuilding the

entire thing, inside their firewall, right?

So we were, where there was this horrible dilemma.

And then, yeah, and so you saw, this right.

So then so then though, a few of us decided, you know against

all that kind of headwind that we should wade in, and we tried again.

And we called that project Emerald Sea, and there were a few

of us that started it, I wasn't there at the very, very beginning.

I was there about the second week.

In the first week it was a couple

guys from the Aardvark acquisition, Bradley Horowitz, and

a few of the people that had been

you know, gravely injured in the Buzz incident.

And this was a weird place for Google, right.

We, everyone thought Buzz was gonna be fine and kind of be the

bulwark, the sort of firewall against sort of Facebook taking over the world.

And so, now though it's the opposite, we're feeling pretty humble about it.

And like as the guy leading design everyone's saying, well this

thing we did didn't work so just do exactly what they did.

You know it's like how Burger King just builds

down the street from McDonald's and it'll be fine.

And that's a hard thing to motivate a team of designers to do is just rebuild that.

Right?

So one question I heard at dinner last night is, like how did you move past that?

And the way we did it again is with research, right.

It turns out if you talk to anyone, and

there is a lot of quantitative research about this.

Facebook was coming up in surveys of you know, sort of revered organizations.

You know, kind of on par with the IRS and not as good as your dentist.

Like, you know kinda, not great.

So there was, it wasn't like we, copying them

was gonna get us in a good place with people.

We, we needed to do something different.

So we started to look around and the

differences you know, and I'll talk about them.

But before that, that engineering culture was still hanging on really tight and

it was like, what platform are we going to use to do this?

Are we going to use Gmail again?

What, what other [UNKNOWN] parts are kicking around here?

One of the really serious contenders was iGoogle, right?

And we from mobile were saying hey, let's just do

a mobile project, let's start with some of that stuff.

Taking a page out of my playbook, you know, let's, let's

go to the low-risk place, where there aren't as many users first.

Debug it there and see what would happen.

And as we were making these decisions we all moved into the

1900 building on the Google campus, and started to have these conversations.

And all sorts of new people showed up like

the entire iGoogle engineering team lead by Marissa Mayer.

And they were really pushing for iGoogle to be

the new kind of inspiration for this social network.

And it's, it's possible that if she had had her

way and that this is what Google+ might have looked like.

Because it was, it was the contender for a week or two.

the, the challenge here though is this is the

infrastructure here I believe is all built in C++, and

we wanted sort of the standard java libraries that

run most of Google to be the underpinnings of it.

And so both that that infrastructure and Marissa, kind of were, were not you know,

sort of pushed aside in favor of the team actually that had engineered buzz, right.

And so then there are other things like

well, what kind of social graph should we use?

Should it be a friend friend graph like, like like you see on Facebook?

And there were a lot of people including, I believe

Sergey Brin, was extremely keen to go exactly in that direction.

And then there were folks that were like no Google is about content.

Maybe it should look more like Twitter kind of asymmetrical follower

model, and in the end we decided to do the complex thing.

From a design perspective this was I was actually on the side of this.

But it was a dilemma for me and I still think

it was the right call, because of its differentiating appeal against those

other two which is an asymmetric graph that you can scale from

two people, all the way to public blogging with the same infrastructure.

Right, and that's, that's how we came up with

circles, is that was how it was going to be.

And that was made, made concrete by some really cool work that

Andy Hertzfeld built this Circles UI, which tested terribly.

No one could understand it no one used it, and

yet it became kind of the hallmark of the brand.

And I will get to sales force in a minute.

And it was actually Sergey, who said, hey if we mash up circles, and

the Google Talk video, we'd have something really awesome.

And like the team in Seattle that did this,

they like, they pushed the two things together in like

a couple of, I think it seemed like a

day or two, but it was probably a couple weeks.

And, and when we did this, this was just awesome.

We're like, holy cow.

This is not driven by any research.

This was a totally engineering thing, which was

like yeah, let's smash these two things together.

And in this case it worked out really well.

There's some, there's another story about things we needed to do to make this

palatable to people, which I'm not gonna tell today, I'll come back next time.

So, so, another super important date, and this is where the Kennedy thing ties

back, is April 4th, when Larry became CEO in 2011.

And really one of the first things he did, now I was here in New York when he did it.

And some amazingly talented visual designers from

the Creative Lab here in New York had

built him a couple like, here's what, like

four different futures that Google could look like.

And he picked on that was called Kennedy, which is the

one us designers love the most, cuz it was the most simple.

It let the content come forward and, and

he just said all products should look the same.

Right.

And I think, I think it's it pre, it pre-stages some

of the nice flat things that are happening in the world today.

When you look at these icons, they just

have some, just a beautiful simplicity to them.

And really simple design guidelines, like every product

gets its one hero action in red, right.

That it looks like it's eroded a little bit and the,

the, it just showed that okay, design means something at this company.

Like, like Eli was pointing out.

And I think if you play that forward, I

don't think that maybe, five years ago you would

have seen a kind of personification of a bit

of a UI and a celebration, like Mr. Jingles.

Which is the new kind of notification avatar guy back then.

And I think, and this to me really is an example of that the kind of delight

that Google is now going for, and doing it in a way that isn't too, too over the top.

so, so with all that experience, I thought, what would it mean

to do this for people at work, like people looking at software all, all the time.

Which led me to Sales, SalesForce, and here's the place where I, I

kind of need all of your help, cuz we're, we're working on this now.

This story isn't finished, as I showed at the beginning.

But I'm going to use the same playbook, and you're going

to hear more about how we're doing that and, and it wasn't

that I brought this to SalesForce, in fact they were already doing

this, in, in the, the ways that I've described when I arrived.

And you're gonna hear more about that tomorrow from Brad.

And then, I think the work's amazing.

So tune in for that.

But, we're gonna start with mobile.

We're gonna go out and find out some stuff for ourselves.

And then we're gonna drive visual design from top down.

And here's what I want to find out, did you know that

75% of the workforce will be Gen-Y in about 11 years, right?

And I think, Gen-Y, probably a third of you in

here are Gen-Y, have radically different understanding of how technology works.

And if we put like a kinda, current-era CRM system in

front of them, that they will go find another place to work.

So, again, we need to, we may, need to make the

tools that we make for work, the kinda things that Eli and

I, and the folks in this room that all do work

on, amazing and inspire the consumer world, not the other way around.

And we need to change this quote, to something different, where.

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Where the experiences takes a front seat, and that's what we're gonna do.

Just a little preview of how we're doing that.

On the visual design front, this is a, just part of our little mobile UI kit.

Salesforce probably has over 25 products, and

we're gonna, we're gonna get them all consistent.

Brad's gonna give you an awesome tour of all this.

So again, heres how you do it.

Just start with mobile first.

It's just, it's like chefs using butter for design work, it's just awesome.

Get out there yourselves.

Find those extreme users.

And then drive visual design from the top.

If you aren't the CEO, get the CEO to buy in on it.

Hopefully he'll have good taste.

All right, that's part of your job too.

And then a couple more things that just have

helped me in my career, just always think big.

And this is something that was drilled into us at Google, and also at Salesforce.

But it's super important.

And then with all of the stuff you're gonna make a

lot of mistakes, you're gonna make, break a lot of things.

Kinda some of the stuff that is

described and just ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Like, start with a posture of action.

Thank you very much.

It's great chatting with you.

[SOUND] Keep changing the world.