Clocking Back In… at InVision!

As a designer, I owe my entire livelihood to tools.

Some people survive on talent, vision, persistence, or a host of other superpowers, but to make up for what I lack, I’ve always been a tool nerd.

Whether it was messing around with Print Shop on a Commodore 64 when I was 10, teaching myself Photoshop 3.0 in my teens, or learning HTML via “HoT MetaL” while most designers were only doing print work, aggressively learning the tools of the near future has been one of the only consistencies of my career.

For that, and other reasons I’ll explain below, I’m incredibly excited to announce that after a refreshing two-year sabbatical from work, I’m joining one of my favorite companies — InVision — to head up Partnerships & Community!

We are entering a golden age of product design tools right now, and I’ve seen first-hand what introducing great prototyping and collaboration software like InVision can do within a company. It breaks down barriers between different groups and gets everyone thinking about user experience. It demystifies what product design actually is. It replaces 50-slide presentations and exhaustive spec documents with quick-to-create working demos that everyone can hold in their hand. More showing, less telling.

As my friend at Google, Darren Delaye once told me, there’s no better way to communicate a product idea than pulling out your phone and saying “Hey, wanna see something cool?”

When Clark and I first started talking about working together a little while ago — and about this role in particular — I’ll admit I had some question marks. In particular:

1. InVision is a fully distributed company with no offices.

A lot of people probably view this as a positive, but the thing I miss most about my last job at Twitter is being around my team and all of the other great people there. I’m an extrovert, and even if I have to brave open-office plans and commute times, being around teammates has always been important to me. Video calls, in fact, have always felt like a burden because face-to-face is the default mode of communication at most companies.

I had a really tough time evaluating what working remotely would be like, but in talking to Clark, Stephen, Aarron, David, Hilary and others at the company, everyone says exactly the same thing: it sounds like it’s going to be awkward, but after a couple of months, you never want to work any other way again. It’s great to be able to spend the first few hours of your day working from your couch, then go on a run whenever the weather clears up, and then spend the rest of the day working from your patio or your local coffee shop… all without ever getting stuck in traffic! InVision even gives you a $100 coffee & tea credit every month to encourage you to explore new surroundings.

It seems that when everyone is remote, the working dynamic changes. You aren’t sitting in a room with 10 people and then figuring out a way to dial in your poor London teammate with a choppy internet connection. You aren’t keying off of all of the social cues in the conference room and losing nuance from your one teammate in India. When everyone’s in the same boat — even if it’s a metaphorical boat held together by thousands of miles of fiber — something apparently changes.

I am now looking forward to this social experiment in telepresence, even if it means I have to remove the Zuck Tape covering my laptop’s camera. I think InVision is correct that this will be the new normal for a lot of companies over the next decade, and if you are a designer who doesn’t want to (or can’t) live in San Francisco, this seems like good news for you too. Either way, I will report back in a few weeks to let you know how it’s going.

2. I’m used to working on consumer products, as opposed to products that help people make other products.

Whether at ESPN, Newsvine, NBC, or Twitter, most of my career has been spent building things that consumers use. In evaluating each of those opportunities, I’ve tried to ask myself “what kind of impact is this going to have on the world?” This opportunity is a bit different because InVision doesn’t really touch consumers directly, but rather, it touches the designers, engineers, PMs, researchers, writers and others responsible for making the products that touch consumers. In that sense, it’s hard to trace the social impact of your work because you aren’t even aware of all the products that are being built with it. Having used InVision regularly myself, however, I am confident of three things: it tends to raise the profile of design work inside of companies, it facilitates a more inclusive product development process, and it ultimately helps create better user experiences. All great things.

You may say to yourself “but I like another tool better!” That’s totally fine. Any of the options available today are light years better than what we did ten years ago when we emailed JPEGs back and forth. I happen to think InVision is the best set of tools out there for entire organizations to use (with more products and capabilities on the way), but a world in which designers have several great options to choose from is a world I want to live in. Competition breeds excellence, and there is a lot more work for all of us to do.

One last note on tools and their impact: even though it was over ten years ago now and it started as a fun little hack, sIFR is still one of the projects I’ve enjoyed working on the most. None of us ever made a penny on it, or even tried to, but watching that little tool help people beautify typography across the web was really fulfilling. Seeing the need for it slowly disappear with the advent of TypeKit and proper web fonts was just as satisfying. It’s great to work on things that inch the world forward and make other people’s work better, and I look forward to doing that again in whatever ways I can at InVision.

3. The output of my work will, for the most part, not be directly within the product.

The role I’m taking on at InVision is not within Product, Engineering, or Design, so I won’t actually be working on the products themselves (but you can be sure I’ll be in people’s grills with ideas and feedback! 🧐).

Instead, I’ll be doing the following:

• Working with hundreds of companies and design teams around the world listening to how they currently develop products, how they want to develop products, and how we might be able to help.
• Keeping an eye on interesting new products and teams in the design software space and working on acquisitions when it makes sense.
• Designing and executing product integrations that bring the functionality of InVision to other platforms, and vice versa. InVision is already integrated with the largest platforms that drive digital product success, including those from Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox, and Microsoft, but there are still a lot more nodes in the digital product ecosystem to connect. The goal is to make the workflow of product design as seamless as possible, no matter what assortment of platforms a team is using.
• Emceeing InVision’s Design Leadership Forum, which hosts private events for design leaders from around the world. Its goal is to advance the practice of design leadership by creating a community where leaders can learn from one another.
• Further building out InVision’s programs within the traditional and continuing education spaces.
• Working on inclusive ways to bring the design community together, both online and off.

It’s a different sort of role for me, but at the same time, I’ve actually been doing a decent amount of exactly this sort of thing during my time off.

In some ways, this seems like the perfect opportunity at the perfect company right now, and yet, in other ways, I’ve never done anything like it! One thing that feels palpable already, however, is that this is a company driven by producing great experiences — for its customers, its partners, and its employees — and for that reason, I already feel at home (also, I *am* at home).

I’m not sure what my hiring plan is just yet, but if I’ve ever worked with you in the past or if you see anything you like in the 71 positions posted here, feel free to reach out to me directly! If you’re interested in helping power the next decade of digital product development from the comfort of wherever you choose to work, now is a great time to be joining InVision.