The Importance of Being Earnest
The author and his wife.
Three weeks ago I gave my notice to Deloitte Digital (née the late, great Übermind) that I would be leaving the fold.
A lot of people have asked me if I was planning on going out on my own, doing freelance consulting or joining another big company. Just what am I going to do?
Today I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined the founding team at Yabbly, a Seattle startup focused on turning the crummy experience of making all sorts of product and life choices into something that rocks, as their Lead User Experience Designer.
For anyone who knows me as a designer this is an incredible fit. First, because it offers me the opportunity to focus on building a product directly and secondly, because the Yabbly experience that has been created thus far is all about sincerity — something I care deeply about.
Lately, a lot of pixels have been spent discussing how irony defines the millennial generation, but I’m more inclined to believe that the true sentiment for the current era (speaking in admittedly gross generalizations) is honest-to-god, earnestness. It’s a case that has already been well-argued by others, but as a member of this New Sincerity cohort it’s something that I feel genuinely in my bones.
I like The Head and The Heart because their music feels true. It has both honesty and quality. Irony would be enjoying them because they are actually modern twentysomethings with iPhones and Instagram feeds who are snickering at the concept of “folk.”
From my perspective, the search for honest connection is what drives people to seek hand-crafted products designed as they might have been 90 years ago, to shop at farmer’s markets and to seek to rebuild the real-life social networks that unrepentant irony seems to have frayed during the last 50 years.
That genuine gut-level resonance with quality is what gets me out of bed before the sun is up on a cold January morning, and that’s also why leaving the nest is so bittersweet. Übermind was — and somewhat still is — a place where the people on the ground care sincerely about quality. I once heard it appropriately described as a mobile agency that thought it was a product company.
There will be a lot of people who read that statement and scratch their heads and ask, “Why leave a place that shares your values already?”
The pat answer is that I’m ready for new challenges and a clear path forward. The complex answer has much to do with all that I’ve learned in the past four years.
I’ve been a hired gun for big and small companies through my last two employers, and that has taught me a tremendous amount about balancing the design needs of users with the technical constraints and a business’ objectives. Managing stakeholders is now second nature, and it’s a job I relish. Nevertheless, even in the closest client relationship there is still a lack of ownership and a layer of distance from the product. Within consulting, I’ve seen how increasing one’s seniority seems to widen that gap. That’s understandable because being a consultant is fundamentally about having the distance to provide perspective, but ultimately it’s not the right path for me right now.
Today, I want to keep my hands dirty. I want to build something myself.
It’s been an honor learning from some of the best in the game when it comes to technology. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a world-class cross-functional team and it has been a joy having developers, PMs, visual designers, QA engineers and most incredibly a brilliant cohort of other UX designers match me beat-for-beat or often exceed me in enthusiasm. To all of you I say, “thank you.”
Sincerely,
Steve
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