Scott Belsky: Adobe's Chief Strategist on navigating the creative Cambrian Explosion

Thank you for having me.

Well, Behance was a seven-year journey. It was five years of being a bootstrapped company and two years being a venture-backed company, and all of the years focused on helping organize the creative world. It was an incredible journey. When we had the opportunity to join Adobe, the question of, 'Okay, do we want to continue to go it alone or do we think that we could achieve something bigger and better as a combined company, and would it be an amazing outcome for the team?' And the answer to that was yes. And Adobe seemed like a really good fit for us given the company was now in the Creative Cloud business and really wanted to have a closer connection with the actual community of its customers. And at the time, Behance was probably less than two million people, and now it's 55 million people on the platform showcasing their work. So I think it was the right choice. I would say that the product is better than it's ever been now as a result of all the work and ingenuity that the team has poured into it over the years. And I still hear stories of people getting found and discovered on Behance and getting hired and that sort of thing. But when I came into Adobe, I wasn't really sure: am I going to just stick to Behance and kind of play it safe and do my time in a bigger company and then leave, or will I end up being inspired by a lot of the other problems and challenges around the organization that I might be able to help solve? And that's what happened. There were just so many opportunities to build services like Creative Cloud Libraries that connect all of your assets across the products you use, or exploring early AI capabilities like Content-Aware Fill, and then later ones like Neural Filters, and then even later ones like Firefly and generative AI. And it was amazing to me how when you have the workflows that people use to create and you take new technologies and find awful ways of infusing them, you can allow people to create more like, better, and faster. It's all about time for all of us. So that's what's kept me around.

Well, it's interesting. We tend to get very motivated by our passion for the solution to a problem and what we kind of see in our mind's eye as a solution, and then we are tempted to stay behind our screens and design that exactly as we see it. And oftentimes we're 30 degrees or so off of product-market fit. And the question is why. And I believe that it's because we failed to have empathy with the person actually suffering the problem. And in some ways you could argue that empathy outperforms passion when it comes to product design. Now what does empathy mean? It means it's not just asking the customer how they do the workflows and what they need from your product. It's more so observing them at work and understanding what are the things that are triggering them or making them feel good or making them feel bad. Like what's the nuance of this product as it relates to how they appear to their peers or to their friends or to their boss? I mean, these are all aspects of a product that determine whether we want to use it or not, and yet they're not ones that can just be imagined or necessarily inferred. You have to kind of be shoulder-to-shoulder and feel the pain or the struggles or the aspirations of the customer to get the intuition to design the right thing. So now we're in this Cambrian explosion of sorts where there are just so many new models and capabilities and apps and all these things. And I feel like every few weeks orientation changes about what's the best this and what's the best that, and it's hard to keep up with. And the only thing I believe our teams can go back to is just kind of understanding where our customer is. We've learned this the hard way in some instances. What a technology is capable of and what a person is ready for are two entirely different questions. And sometimes as technologists we're like, 'Oh, if the technology can do that, we're just going to apply it.' But you know, people may not be ready for some of these things, especially with the ramp of capability right now. So I think empathy is a big part of actually driving utilization of all these new features and capabilities.

There's always a problem to solve. It's just a question of whether it's a known problem or an unknown problem. Sometimes it's a technology that solves a problem that people didn't know they had. For example, some productivity tools: you didn't actually know you were not being productive until this tool emerged and you're like, 'Oh my gosh, I was being so unproductive before I actually had this capability at my fingertips.' So I believe that products need to appeal to basic human tendencies in order to be adopted at the onset. And I actually even trace that back to the first-mile experience that we all have with products. And my argument that I've shared before is that we're all in some ways lazy, vain, and selfish in our first-mile experience of any new product. We need to be met where we are before we find a deeper value and build a relationship with a product that's new to us. So the laziness, vanity, selfishness thing — that's appealing to very surface natural tendencies and desires: we have to look good, to get more done with less time, to be very prudent with our time. So those have to be taken into account. The other thing I would like to say though is sometimes products take off because of the things that they do that you didn't expect, as opposed to doing the things you expected very well. Tesla is probably a great example where people used to talk about a Tesla having all its Easter eggs and the rainbow road thing on the dashboard when you pull the stick a few times or whatever. I mean, these are great examples. I always wonder why more products don't incorporate things that people will talk about because they were things that they didn't expect to see. If we're all trying to achieve product-led growth, which is ultimately people talking about or sharing products readily, I would imagine that's a very important lever to pull that we sometimes forget.

Well, consumer products are very psychological, whereas I think that building products are very logical. If you can automatically screen your code for errors and automatically improve them, like who wouldn't do that? Spell check — very few people turn off spell check. They want it. I think that tools for builders, creators, writers, that sort of thing, AI is just amazing for that world. And I think we're still in the early stages. Applications will be developed with natural language. Essentially any software capability can now be generated by all of us just by describing what we want. It's pretty wild. But I haven't seen as many consumer applications beyond just chat ones that are just leveraging LLMs really work. I've seen a lot of apps for example where you have conversations with AI for various reasons, whether they're coaching or tutors or social apps where people kind of comment on your content but they're all fake people and whatever. And I just can't help but wonder that we want to feel like we are having an engaged experience with a human in consumer products. You appreciate a movie because of the story behind it, because of the actors behind it, what you know about their lives. I mean, there's so much that we maybe don't readily realize or admit but makes us resonate with something because of the story and the craft and the meaning behind what we're doing. So a lot of these AI consumer apps lack any of that. They just don't have any human story or craft, scarcity, real meaning. And they're made to sort of be like novelty or AI-based engagement products, but for some reason there's something missing, I think, for the consumers that's making them really click. It's something I'm thinking about. It was just an observation. I haven't seen many new consumer apps emerge as much as the building the picks and shovels.

The best teams that I've ever worked with had what I've come to call collapsed talent stacks, where you have tighter conduits in the form of an actual brain that does two critical functions: engineering and design, or design and copy, or whatever. It just breaks down any of the lines in the process. And finding those people and empowering them to do their greatest work is one of the best things you can do as a leader of new product, especially. You're right, as companies scale, their departments and all sorts of things happen that make it harder for people to work super tightly together. I do think that modern companies have come back with this notion of the squad: finding a very tightened group of people who are all the functions represented on a tight squad, and they operate together, hopefully they sit together, hopefully they get to know each other really well, that sort of thing. There's also a cultural thing about whether companies, specifically for design, are willing to be design-driven or design-led or not. And what that term means to me is three things. Number one, basically the ratio of designers to PMs and engineers is healthy. Number two is that designers are always present at the table and ultimately put their stamp of approval on anything that ships at a leadership level. And then number three is that the design work, the prototype, leads the process. A lot of the design work is done up front. It's not like an order to do this and then it's just handed over and built. It's design is done up front, but then it's constantly the standard for what we're trying to build, and ultimately it's the bar that the actual product work has to clear. That's just the best practice that many companies struggle to employ. But to your point, having these folks work together tightly, that's a hack. And how can you achieve that? Squads is the best way I found in big companies. Collapsing the stack as much as you can always helps in smaller businesses as well.

I think it's hard to have a mastery in all of these skill sets that we're discussing, but to be able to speak the language of them, I think, is really helpful and brings you half of the way there. An engineer that can actually design and has some basic design skills, has empathy for their colleague but also has just natural intuition, that will really serve them in their role. Being a great writer — designers I've worked with who are also great writers, it's an amazing thing when some of the intuition around what the copy should be happens at the moment of the design of the experience, because it's part of the experience, it's part of the design. Why should it be done by somebody else who's out of the moment without the context of where the user is? What I would want to advise someone entering their career is, first of all, develop a curiosity for the different disciplines of making. Try to take some basic classes or online things that give you some sort of introductory to basic principles so you can speak the language of whether it be coding, how a stack is sort of architected for a technology product if you're going into that world. Developing some good writing skills, becoming interested in that space. I just think that these are really helpful practical skills that allow you to get those benefits that we're talking about.

Yeah, that book was done really around a lot of research of especially productive creative teams. And what I was interested in is why are some teams so prolific and so productive, and other artists or creative teams really struggle to get anything out the door? I don't think it had anything to do with the quality of ideas or the creativity. It had to do with something else. And there's a lot in there about the actual structures and processes, or divide-and-conquer partnerships. There are all just sorts of different mechanisms, but the common theme of these especially productive creative teams is that they really valued organization, and they kind of recognized that organization times ideas equals impact. And if you have zero organization and all the best ideas in the world, you'll have no impact. If you tinker the equations a little bit, even if your ideas are not as good, if you have some really good organization around them, you can really have quite an impact with your ideas. And that really struck me. So I went out to start to understand what the culture of taking action and having a bias towards action meant within creative teams, how they would practice that, the tools they would use, the mechanisms that encouraged people to feel accountable. People often times they don't know what to do first every day, and leveraging this tool of merchandising to get people to focus on the things that matter most. It's funny, we all spend money on marketing products to get people to buy them and use them, but we don't really use the same tools to get people to do things in our teams. Things are hidden on spreadsheets or on lists somewhere, but merchandising is actually a very effective way that a lot of these teams would get people focused on the few things that matter most. Anyways, long laundry list, but organization I think is a competitive advantage of creative people that ultimately are successful, and I think that needed to be discussed.

There are many. And that book was written quite a while ago, but I remember chronicling some artists or writers like James Patterson. This is someone who has written so many novels. He runs a factory of writers. Maybe an example of someone who's maybe compromised a little bit on the genuine new idea front but has over-indexed on organization and yields a tremendous impact and outcome. If you're a literary critic you might have opinions of the work, but nevertheless, prolific without dispute. And how does this person empower his team and have a cadence of being able to impact the plots and the sort of general outlines but have support over the execution? There were some people like that where I was like, 'Wow, that's unlike anything I've ever seen.'

The simple metaphor was, if you're working on a particular project or task, if I put a Post-it note on your computer screen every single morning with that one task I hope you complete, you're more likely to complete it, because it's intrusive and it's big in your face and it's coming from one of your colleagues. I think actually that the mechanism of prioritization by natural selection — the things that we nag each other about, the things that we surface to each other — actually has a purpose in prioritization in an organization. In a healthy organization, some might call that nagging, but it actually is helpful to have people around you, especially as our creative whims go down tunnels that aren't necessary or lead to nowhere or aren't productive. That mechanism of a culture of people around you kind of nagging you a little bit — a lot of people swore on the benefit of that, which I thought was interesting. And it relates to this notion of merchandising, but also just some of the best program managers, the people who are just helping things move, they'll devise mechanisms, whether it's a daily email with funny stuff that people actually read. There's all kinds of tools you can use to get people to actually focus on the work that needs to be done and where you're actually at in the process.

It's all about a balance. I like to kind of boil it down to the doers and the dreamers, even though that's a very blunt generalization of anyone. But in essence, we all have a bias towards either doing or dreaming. And these people can sometimes be at odds. The dreamer goes to bed at night thinking about what new things they can introduce to the project or the piece of work or whatever the next day. The doer goes to bed at night hoping that there's no surprises and that nothing comes up that isn't already planned and expected. So they're already diametrically opposed to one another. And then there's a process where the doer and the dreamer are kind of challenging each other and getting the right amount done. If you have an organization that only empowers the doer, then the dreamers quit or they never actually can materialize what they have in their mind's eye. I think the healthy thing to do is to have an immune system in every team that is on a regular basis managed by the doer, but on a periodic basis suppressed for the dreamer to take hold. Much like an organ transplant, the doctor suppresses your immune system so you can take on literally a new organ. And so that's a pragmatic way of thinking about it. The doer needs to be managing this immune system because so many ideas can get us over budget or off track and can really compromise our impact ultimately. But there are times when you're problem solving, when you're coming up with something new, where you have a cycle where the doer needs to be suppressed and the dreamer needs to be able to do their thing. It's managing that chemistry that is the puzzle.