The Product Podcast

The Designer Behind Beats headphones' $1.5 Billion Success with Robert Brunner, Chief Designer at Beats by Dr. Dre | E230

• Product School • Episode 230

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In this episode of the Product Podcast, we're thrilled to host Robert Brunner, Chief Designer at Beats by Dr. Dre and founder of Ammunition. Robert takes us on an enlightening journey through his remarkable career, sharing the secrets behind designing products that drive billions in revenue.

We delve into the intersection of aesthetics and functionality, exploring how innovative design can propel a brand to new heights. Robert emphasizes the importance of balancing visual appeal with usability, providing invaluable insights for aspiring designers and product leaders.

Our conversation covers the vital role of leadership in the design process, highlighting how collaboration and cross-disciplinary input lead to cohesive, market-successful products. Robert also shares his thoughts on staying adaptable with evolving trends, ensuring your designs remain relevant in a fast-paced industry.

Tune in to hear about the creation of iconic products and the breakthrough moments that defined Robert’s career. We also discuss the importance of continuously refining your craft and prioritizing user experience to create beloved products.

Get ready to embrace innovative thinking, foster collaboration, and stay ahead of design trends. Join us for a thought-provoking episode that promises to elevate your design approach and inspire you to create impactful, user-centered products. Don’t miss this chance to learn from one of the industry’s most influential designers!

Key Takeaways:

Good design vs. great design: Good design is functional, usable, desirable, competitive, manufacturable, and affordable. Great design, however, inspires, empowers, and transforms. It challenges norms, fits into cultural contexts, and creates significant social and economic value.

Recognize that innovative design can significantly boost a company's revenue and market position. Strive to integrate creative design solutions that drive business success.

Always consider the user experience in your designs. Understand and anticipate user needs to create products that are loved and widely adopted. Focus on creating products that are both visually appealing and highly functional. Strive for a balance where aesthetics enhance usability and user experience.

Lead by fostering a collaborative environment that encourages creativity. Empower your team to innovate and contribute ideas that can enhance the design process.

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Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Robert Brunner

Carlos (00:01.197)
Welcome to the show, Robert.

Robert (00:06.553)
But thank you, very happy to be

Carlos (00:10.382)
Let's start with the first thing, which is how did you get into design?

Robert (00:15.278)
Well, that's a little bit of a long story. I'll try and keep it succinct. Well, when I was in high school in California, I was an above average student. And you get in California, when you get to the end of your time at the high school, you meet with a guidance counselor. And he says, you're good in in math and science, so go study engineering. Now, my father was a very accomplished mechanical engineer. He actually invented a lot of the technology in the first hard disk drives while at IBM. So I thought, okay, I'll go into engineering. And enrolled at San Jose State University. was a decent school, it was nearby and so I spent about a year in engineering and just, you know, early classes, but it wasn't, I wasn't connecting with it at all. It just didn't feel right in my gut. so my mother, on the other hand, was a fine artist and a craftsperson and an entrepreneur. She started her own children's clothing company. And so I just one day decided to go over to the art department because I thought, this isn't working for me, I'm gonna go study art in some way. And then I had always done well in art and school and drawn on my own. So I walked into the art building at San Jose State and went through the door and was immediately presented with a display case full of industrial design work. Sketches, renderings, models and I'd not known about industrial design. I didn't know it existed. I was interested in graphic design. I'd heard about it and there was some form of commercial art. And, you know, I just stood there and was amazed. Like, these are the things that I like to do. These are the things that I do on my and I go in the garage and I make things and I build bicycles and you know these are things that I so I immediately changed my major to industrial design my father was not happy at all he yeah I remember he said industrial designers are the people who specify the paint and it usually peels off is what he said and so but he you know he used to he was unhappy because he liked helping me with my calculus homework things that he turned around eventually. And it actually made a lot of sense in retrospect. The thing that's sort of an indictment of the school system is that they didn't really look at

Robert (03:16.396)
You know, how well I had done in art and shock class and things like that, those don't really count, you know, from a career perspective. In this institutional mind, it was really about, you know, looking at the core math, science, liberal arts, et cetera. So anyway, that's how I stumbled onto industrial design and never looked back. think I had, after that, an A in every class I took and just would stay up all night working on it and you know that's how I knew that it was for me because you know it didn't seem like work. It seemed like fun.

Carlos (03:58.455)
Well, you have designed some products that been used by millions of people. So hope also some family members included. So I know you gave two talks at ProductCon, our conference, both in San Francisco and New York around the principles behind designing great products. And obviously our audience are mostly product leaders. And maybe they don't come from a design background. So if you were to summarize those principles, like what are those and how can non -designers apply.

Robert (04:32.12)
Yeah, well, it's a fairly, well, it's an interesting thing because I started looking at this idea of, know, I've worked on a lot of things over my career. you know, and sort of this thing that, you know, and most of the things that I've worked on and my company works on turn out good, right? It's good design. And that's the, you know. In fact, almost everything we do. so I look, you know, but I started asking this question, there is these number of things, you know, 15, 20 % that are great, that turned out really amazing and having a huge impact. And why is that, right? What is it, right? So, you know, if you look at good design, and you know, I would describe good design as doing the job well, right? It does what it's supposed to do. It's usable, right? It's useful. It's desirable. People want it. It's attractive, functional. It's competitive in the marketplace. It's manufacturable. It's attainable to people. They can afford it, right? It's at the good price. And, you all those things that make it good, you know, the things that you need are, you know, understanding the opportunity, right? You need the talent to be able to execute on that.

The proper tools, the proper process, the right experience, right? Those are all the things that you need, To have good design. And that's important. That's really a foundational thing when you're approaching the design of something, anything, but especially a product. But when you look at, when I began to look at what made the really great things, the sort of things that happened we're very different above that right? It's you know when I think about great design and something that you know moves the needle That creates change that really you know whether that's change in society change in the market Change in behavior or something right no think those things are inspiring right they inspire people They're empowering right they give people the ability to do something they haven't done before and many times they're transformative and that could be transforming someone's life, transforming someone's day, transforming someone's outlook or transforming a market, a company, right? That they create this sort of change. And when I start to look into that, what are they doing? Well, they're challenging norms, right? They're challenging what people expect or what the average is or, again, what good is, right? They tend to be culturally relevant.

They fit into a time and space in society and really make an impact. They tend to be a portal to something bigger. There's the product itself, the object, and what it does, but many times it's extended into a service and it does something that's even bigger than that. They tend to be socially positive. They're creating positive change and value. They're creating value in the world and high value beyond, know, they're single products that have created enormous economic value or enormous social value, that change. So those are the things that I, you know, I began to see that that's what great is about, right? And so what it takes to achieve that, though, is a different set. If you remember, before I was talking about opportunity, tools, process, et cetera. Well, what great requires is a world view. You need to look at the bigger picture and understand the world around you in this product and society. It requires a lot of empathy. To do great design, you have to really put yourself in the lives of others and really understand what that means and how something will create this positive change. It requires a clarity in vision and commitment and tenacity. These are things that when I looked at these projects, there is always this leadership, right? And not just the leadership that I or my team would provide, but the leadership with the people we were working with or partnering with, right? There is one or two people, maybe a small group, that had this clarity and commitment and tenacity to make something great. It really was sort of like, we're going to make this great. The secret to making something great is really being committed to it. And then this thing that's really interesting that I became fascinated with this idea of fluid intelligence. That is your ability to be able to very effectively morph and understand and move around a problem and solve it in a very fluid kind of way. Instead of being very rigid, this is the only way you do it. And so those are the things that make great. And it's a complex thing. It's not simple. But I always boil it down to leadership, really. Leadership that happens at a variety of levels.

So getting back to your question about product management, think there is part of developing and delivering something, there needs to be these higher level goals of creating impact and understanding what that is. And it's not something you can entirely build into process, but it is important that everyone's sort of clear on this sort of goal of what they're building what I find problematic is that many times the efforts of program and project management are entirely focused around delivery within a certain time period within a framework. And of course, that's, but it's, but that actually can limit things.

Carlos (10:53.901)
That's one of the challenges that I also notice with design teams. They tend to be under a product team. It's very rare to see a chief designer. You typically see a chief product officer, and a chief product officer oversees product management, design. So typically the highest ranked person in design is the VP of design. So curious to learn more about the rationale behind Beats to have a chief designer at the C -suite.

Robert (11:22.99)
Well, it's yeah, so that was you know when I helped start beats almost she's 18 years ago right that I've been working at with the brand since then you know in my capacity as the founder of ammunition, but you know it just I was there at the very beginning with Jimmy and Dre and To them design was very important. Especially Jimmy really understood this idea that you know he had he had worked with Steve Jobs he understood how important the physical embodiment of an idea was and the iconography that you can create with design. So we launched the company, we did a series of projects, the company was growing and the idea of Chief Designer wasn't so much you know, a specific title fitting in a framework, right? I was, you know, reporting to Jimmy at the time, who's CEO, and Luke Wood, who was president, and a very direct relationship, and that's something that I found to be very important in all the work that we do is sort of really working with the individuals who are really driving the enterprise, right? And really, so, you know, the notion of, what am I? you know, didn't make sense that I was a VP. It didn't make sense that, you it was more that you're in charge of design. You're making things, right? You need to have the ability to drive this idea through not just the company, but the partners they work with and so that was the notion of chief design, right? Chief designer. It's not chief design officer in that I wasn't part of the C -suite. That's a different title that occasionally occurs because I was not actually an employee of the company. But the idea that beyond a vice president or beyond, wasn't so much around that. It was more about what are you doing, right? And what are we empowering you to do?

Robert (13:30.158)
Chief designer think it's, know, it titles matter within a corporation, but in some ways they don't, right? You can have a title and, you know, still not be effective. It's really about outside of the individual, what are you saying about the role of design? Right? And that's what I think becomes very important because design, you know, especially creative design within organizations is very easy to place misplace that because it's not always understood right and and so if you're not if you don't have design position in the right way in a company to be able to really effectively create something great it won't happen so you know recognizing supporting and positioning the idea of design within it within a corporate or social structure is really important and so giving it that weight that it needs is, I think, very important.

Carlos (14:33.333)
And I agree, it's not always well understood. And I think the question I'm going to ask you comes from two ways. One is from the product perspective. How can a product manager who doesn't come from a design background can develop more empathy and appreciation for the value, for the business value that a design team can bring?

Robert (14:53.665)
Yeah, well, you know, there are a number of things. I think the first most basic thing that any product manager can do is really educate themselves on the design process. You know, there is an aspect, you know, sort of, there's the path that you follow and the deliverables and the benchmark and all these things you line up on a, you know, Gantt chart to create a schedule, right? But you need to get beyond that and understand, you what is important about each area and what is important that occurs? For example, in the research phase, what is it that designers need to uncover or the data that they need to start to build a framework for the product and figure out what's worth designing? In the concept phase, what is the appropriate amount of time and when do you know when you're done? Right? Because just because you say, okay, you've got eight weeks to develop a concept, you can follow that path and not be there or not have uncovered the right thing. So it's also just understanding, right? When is it that we have a design concept and what does that mean and what does that look like? And then as you get into development, into engineering development, what is it that needs to happen to maintain that design concept, right? Just really begin to understand the process from a design perspective so that, you know, that can be better supported and understood. So that's something that's very important. Also just knowing how to communicate with designers. It's really interesting when I first started at Apple, I realized that Manitra, the design team, didn't know how to really communicate with engineering and marketing. They didn't speak the language. They spoke their own language of design. So I spent a time saying, look, you need to contextualize this in a language that people understand, not just say this speak in superlatives and adjectives and you know it's so but but it goes both ways I think as from a development point of view understanding the language of design and what people mean when they talk about a concept and talk about its integrity and and talk about its impact all these things you know it's it's it's it's sort of building bridges you know with with different cultures and organizations.

Carlos (17:30.533)
That was going to be my other question. It goes both ways. So it's also important for the designers in this case to learn how to speak that business language and somehow better quantify or explain the business outcomes here, right? In a world driven by OKRs and tight deadlines and budgets. We're curious if you've found specific examples on how design can be better explained to a non -designer.

Robert (17:39.817)
Yeah.

Carlos (17:59.381)
So it can be truly prioritized.

Robert (18:03.65)
Yeah, it's very, very important. think that there's also a challenge with designers that, many designers have an inferiority complex. Because they're doing a creative enterprise, they went to art school, they're working with MBAs and people with doctorates in engineering. They're sort of this, I'm just a little artist. What do I know? and that can be really, really detrimental. I think it's very important that as a creative person when you're working with other organizations that you have confidence in what you're doing because it is important. And because that energy, as you're working with a team, is very important. If you feel subservient, you will be subservient. If you feel like you're a partner, an important part of the process, you will become an important part of the process. It's really a sort of self -determination thing. you know, a lot of times I just, I found early in my career where, you know, you know, I just did things and said things I wasn't necessarily supposed to, you know, but, you know, what that did was that that created confidence and trust in me as an individual with other organizations, right? And so I think it's really important for designers to get the tools they need to know how to communicate and be very confident in the value of their work. Because that in itself is a path towards doing great design.

Carlos (19:44.115)
And there's another group of individuals that are very involved in design and product, the researchers, right? And I know that you have a hot take on the intersection between research and design. How do you think about?

Robert (20:00.69)
Well, I think research is important. I think it's sometimes, know, it, you know, I used to joke, know, and really I would say this to get a reaction was that, you know, if there, if great design was born in research, there'd be a lot more great design. Because, you know, researching something and gaining data is almost something anyone can do, right? It's not, it's not the research that matters, it's what you do with the information and what you learn from it and what you choose not to use, right? These are very important things, right? Because you can go out and research something and find out what people believe or what is going on today. But what you're really talking about is doing something that will be out in two years and really something that will in many ways, you want to focus on where people are going five years from now. So again, I think research is very important. We do a fair amount of research. We've characterized it by this question that we use to guide our early work, which is what's worth designing in the first place? Because to design and develop and deliver a product is a very expensive enterprise. takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of people. It takes a lot of natural resources. So you really should understand before you dive into something what is really worth designing. And so the answer to that question has a lot of levels about market value, impact to people, impact to society, all these things. You start to ask these questions. What is really worth? spending five, 10, $50 million on. What is really worth taking two, three, four years to develop? What is really worth using an incredible amount of natural resource? And it causes you to really focus on understanding the framework for success, right? And I think in many ways that's how, from a design point of view, think research is incredibly important. It's uncovering things that can lead to success and lead to impact. again, so it's not so much about just researching per se, it's about gaining the information and figuring out what to do with it.

Carlos (22:30.973)
Creativity is a word that comes to mind as I think about design and kind of the unstructured part of the process, if you will. How do you teach creativity?

Robert (22:44.939)
That is a very good question. know, you can and you can't, right? I think there's things that you follow to support creativity and approaches and processes. And honestly, some people just aren't creative. Some people have a difficult time in visualizing something that's not there, right? They really want to here and now or the past. And that's very common. I think what in teaching creativity, you're really teaching people to let go of bias, let go of convention, let go of all these things that hold you back and allow yourself to look at something openly and freely and then be willing to spend time to explore those things and iterate on them and play with them. It's something that I think is really important that, and this goes back to product management, design needs time to explore and play and fail. Failure is something that people don't like to hear. It's a word that scares people.

You know, I often say, you know, one of my things I love to say is risk is not a four -letter word, right? Because risk is something you have to take to innovate and you have to be willing to have failures. Now, you don't want to have big macro failures, right? The micro failures are the ones you're looking for where you try something and maybe it didn't work out, but you learned something. And that is a big part of creativity is being able to experiment and play and have a mind that supports that idea. And it's something I found to be really important in our studio is that people feel safe. safety is a really interesting word. It's in some ways misunderstood because it sounds sort of boring and conservative and making things safe. safety is a foundation of self -expression. When you feel safe, you can be who you are and I find that with design, know, creating an environment where people feel safe to play, feel safe to experiment, feel safe to take risks, feel safe to, you know, I know that, okay, if this blows up in my face, I'm not going to lose my job. You know, maybe if it happens over and over, but not, you know, not in one particular situation. so I think those, those are all very important things to creativity that aren't really understood. And it's something that can be learned, but many times it also just comes from an internal impetus where I have this sort of notion that if you're really good at design, in many ways, you're able to literally project yourself in the future and come back. If you start to understand, I won't get too far into this, but if you start to understand how quantum theory works in time, there are different channels happening at the same time. And I think in many ways, a really good designer is able to project forward and come back and have the openness to think that way. And so we, you know, it's something that I'm always very, you know, and it comes back to the research, which, you know, when we collected data about today, said, look at you, okay, that's great. We understand what's going on today. What's gonna happen? To five, 10 years from now, right? Where do we think that's going to be? And start to understand those ideas and put that as an influence in our work. And it's, think, what allows you to keep moving forward and stay very creative.

Carlos (26:38.305)
So how do you connect that now with the process? am really curious to know what is your design process and how you actually work with so many different brands as part of your studio.

Robert (26:49.16)
Yeah, it's important because I mean, I've said this recently that, you know, in many ways, we're paid to execute excellence, right? It's not just being excellent. You have to be able to execute that on that because ultimately what we do has to get out into the world to be effective, to create economic value, create the change I talked about earlier. So you have to be focused on what does it take to actually deliver. And that's what I find with a lot of organizations is they may be very good at creating and coming up with new ideas, but don't have the discipline or understanding to actually deliver that in a way that can get out into the world. And there's so many things in that world. It's not just about time, not just about cost. It's about resources. It's about understanding the process. It's about understanding the culture of an organization, all these things. So getting back to your question, it's very important that a designer and a product manager understand of course, the timeframe that they're working in and what they need to do to be effective and to get this thing out into the world and constantly monitor that through the development process. Now, the one thing that I think people have to embody and get comfortable with is things are not always linear. In many ways, they shouldn't be. You would like it to be linear. You would like it to follow the Gantt chart but many times aren't. So you have to sort of build in the ability to be nonlinear and, you know, and allow for discovery. And when discovery is made, allow for a change in course and always keeping an eye on where you need to be at a certain point in time. But, you know, ultimately to some degree, you know, content of the work should be more important than the timing, right? Of course, if you have a market window where you have to deliver this thing in 18 months and you say it's gonna take four years, that's a big decision. But if taking an extra four months or three months or whatever it takes onto something that is much more valuable, then you have to be willing to support, communicate, and at least explore that path, right? So I think it is embracing the idea of non -linearity. It's actually one of the things I think is as a human being in life, you know, and being happy is to be comfortable with the concept of uncertainty, right? If you, go ahead, please.

Carlos (29:42.509)
Absolutely.

No, no, I was just going to say that I resonate with that because that's a major difference between project managers and product managers. People misunderstand as product managers, glorified project managers, and that's not the case at all. We are also driven by outcomes, and we also try to stay flexible as understand that sometimes it's just really hard to put everything on a roadmap, and a roadmap is not just a timeline. And there's a lot of discovery that goes as you build.

Robert (30:13.388)
No, it's true, it's true. And some of the more difficult relationships with product managers I've had have not been having a lack of flexibility or as I said, not being comfortable with uncertainty. They want everything locked down now, right? And as opposed to, let's agree on how we're aligned and where we wanna get to and work together throughout the process to get there. so I think that concept, as a product manager is really important. Again, you have a job to do, have responsibilities, have people above you who have requirements, those are important, but being comfortable with the path being non -linear and uncertain and managing that, I think is one of the important things that makes a great product manager.

Carlos (32:58.455)
So now I'm asking you as a CEO, sometimes when people come to me, it could be a designer, it could be a product manager, could be someone else asking for an adjustment to the original plan. There are two things that work very well. One is when they scare me or when they make me greedy. If we don't do this, we're going to die. Or if you wait, this is going to be extremely amazing. So I'm curious to know as a designer, or especially now as a founder of your own studio, when you work with different brands and you come back with a suggestion based on your findings, what are some good ways to get alignment?

Robert (33:06.388)
Well, I tend to focus more on the greedy side, As you know, there's an opportunity here that's important. But then do it in a way that people can... I mean, I don't really want to scare somebody, right? Because even if you present someone with an opportunity, they can get scared, right? It's all of sudden, no, this is something new, this is something different, this is something we haven't tested. So it's creating the framework for it. This is a big opportunity and this is how we're going to do it, right? And this is what we'll do to make sure it works. know, once in while the fear thing comes along where, you know, there's bad decision making happening and you just have to say, if you do that, we're gonna fail. This product is just not gonna be successful and here's why. You you have to do that sometimes because you know, there can be a lot of dumb decision making that's, again, based on some very micro thing. used to joke that, you know, Excel is the enemy of design, right? Because any good analyst could put together a spreadsheet that would show, with the life of this product, if you do this now, it's gonna cost, you know, $10 million, you know, but instead of, if you do this now, it's gonna create $100 million of opportunity, right? So, it's very, I think it's very important that you walk the line of both that, again, if there's some dumb, if people are making a dumb decision and it's gonna create a product that will fail, you have to make sure they understand that and why. But if you've uncovered an opportunity that means a change in course that's going to cause you know, some discomfort because there's again some uncertainty or unknown there, you have to sort of say, okay, this is how we're going to do it and this is how we're going to understand it and this is what it's going to cost, et cetera, and let's go. I think it is an important thing though to understand.

Carlos (35:18.655)
We have to talk about AI, otherwise it wouldn't be a good podcast. How are you thinking about the impact of Gen AI on the work that you do?

Robert (35:23.95)
Okay.

Robert (35:30.666)
I get asked that a lot and it's an interesting one and I have this viewpoint that is becoming a rare and I'm going to date myself but I've been doing this for over 40 years and I'm not going to pull the, you know, when I was a young designer, blah blah blah stuff. It's just what I've seen is many, many changes in how we work based on tools and technology. The first products I designed, the only automation I had was a HP calculator. I used pencils, pens, a drafting machine. That was it. And yet the work was good. And it was successful, and it won awards and everything. And then I look at what we do today, and I've seen, first it was 2D CAD, then 3D CAD, then advanced surfacing, then visualization techniques, 3D printing, and then now to generative AI. And every time what has happened is that on a high level that what it's done is give people more time to think and more time to be creative. When I was back crunching numbers on my calculator, I had to put an enormous amount of time to do that. And then all of a sudden that burden was lifted as soon as CAD came into play and as soon as 3D servicing came into play, the ability to describe geometry became much more simple. All these things started basically taking the burden of calculation, the burden of work off designers to effectively allow them to do more. Same thing with 3D printing. We used to spend, while I still think it's important that people build models themselves with their own hands, the iterative process of using 3D printing, again, takes a lot of time that we used to have to do that by hand or lesser degrees of automation. now it does. So when I look at generative AI, right now the same thing is happening. It's a simple example.

In our studio over the last 10 years, we built an incredible skill in Photoshop, right? That we could create mashups of CAD renderings and photographs that people could not tell they weren't real. So it allowed us to present ideas in context and be very powerful. All that work is now being taken over by Firefly and some other things, right? So we don't need to invest as much in that, right? And so that's starting to occur. We're using ChatGVT and others for exploring concepts or automating research. If I look at the tools that we are using right now, it's really around increased automation and research. We're using GenAI for more speed and accuracy in creative and technical efforts. We're starting to use some concept creation, but it's really an augmentation. The challenge with the tools that we're using right now is that there's not enough control. So we almost use it as an adjunct to brainstorming and then what's starting to happen and will continue to happen is more automation in development and refinement. So what I think really is happening is where the designers role will continue to accelerate is you're moving towards this idea of producer, director, and editor.

Robert (39:30.754)
You know, more time to really think about the product itself and focus on producing, you being very skilled at directing and editing, right? But, you know, the big question that's out there, right, that I think more many people are afraid of is that this notion that, you know, am I going to be out of a job, right? Is generative AI going to allow companies to use tools to actually create designs for products and use them to deliver in the world and sort of take the human element completely out of it. And I think some of that will happen, but this is where I have this sort of, go back on this 40 year history and that I think there's something about design that is a decidedly human thing, the idea of creation of things. There is a very unique relationship people have with things, objects in their lives, that's entirely emotional. We, in many ways, define who we are to the things we possess or the things we wear or the things we drive or the things we live in or sit on, right? Those are things that are expressions. And what I find very consistent is that people like to feel connected to other people through design. feel that connection that someone has created something and delivered it into my life to improve my life, right? Is a very special and unique thing that I don't think that it will be replaced by Gen. AI, right? I think there always will be a human role in successful design and development. And it's, you know, I'll tell you a quick story, which I think is important. So,

Robert (41:39.374)
One of my good friends, a graphic designer named Paula Scherr, she's a very, very famous graphic designer, works at Pentagram, and I was at Pentagram. And when I was at Pentagram, we were working with Citibank. At that time, was Citibank was merging with Travelers, and she was hired to develop the identity. And I was working on some of the software aspects of it. In the first meeting we had, Paula sketched out the logo, right, which was integrating the traveler's umbrella with the city and then went away for a month and came back and presented that single idea. And the people, the client was like, well, wait a minute. We saw you sketch that in the first meeting. And we're paying you all this money, and you come back with that one idea. And Paula, I wish I could throw a rant like Paula does, but she said, you're not buying my time. You're buying every movie I've ever seen. You're buying every painting I've ever created. You're buying every building that I've ever been in. You're buying every experience that I've had up to this point in my life to come and shape who you're going to be. And while you could say that, of course, you could write software that would go out you know, find all this information and pull it back together in a way that would support a design. That's certainly possible and probably will happen. But I don't, I just have this strong belief that emotional editorial that designers have and that emotional framework that they put together to deliver something that connects with people will always exist and our roles will change and our tools will change like they always have, but I think I'm not worried about my job.

Carlos (43:45.068)
That's a great way to put it. And I have seen the same with product people. They would ask me, hey, what is the impact that this would have on someone's career? And I also agree. don't think AI is what's replacing existing PMs. In my case, think AI PMs or PMs that understand how to leverage AI are the ones who are replacing the ones who do not embrace this type of opportunity.

Robert (44:08.526)
Yeah, absolutely.

Carlos (44:11.946)
Robert, it's been a pleasure to spend this time with you, learn more about your own experience and thank you for bringing more light into what it to build great products from a design standpoint.

Robert (44:22.725)
thank you. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it.