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- [00:00]
Anthony Manicola
The first time you have this moment of shipping a PR to production, this light bulb goes off in the back of your head where you're like, wow, I literally just contributed to the end user experience rather than creating an artifact and hoping somebody else creates it to what the vision was. Sure, maybe you've gotten the buy in from your organization, but if you're stopping there, if you're not seeing it to the end result, I think it's just a bit of a wasted effort at that point.
- [00:27]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Anthony Manicola, who's a longtime staff product designer at Shopify. So this episode is all about ways that you can make a bigger impact at your company as an ic. But before we get into all of the tactics, I want to get just a little bit of context to learn more about the types of projects that Anthony has designed during his tenure of almost eight years at Shopify.
- [00:59]
Anthony Manicola
When I first joined Shopify, I was working in an area called Channels, which at the time was all of our sales channels and apps kind of blended together and was part of a team that, that was responsible for spinning out apps into its own kind of like ecosystem. So merchant facing app experience and developer facing app experience. So we have this very large app platform today that kind of took on a life of its own. Um, so I started in, in that area, moved over to kind of a scrappy little team at the time called Garage at Shopify which focused on consumer facing bets. I worked primarily on an app called Frenzy, which was a, a marketplace for sneaker heads to get very in demand streetwear and sneakers. We did a bunch of stuff with ComplexCon. Kim Kardashian was tweeting about us. It was, it was a really fun like eight or nine months that I was working on that product. The other product in that garage area was an app called Arrive, which ended up becoming Shop App. Then I moved over to Point of Sale and worked on our Point of Sale and our retail business for about three years. After that I moved on to Shopify Inbox, which is a commerce focused tool for merchants to communicate with customers browsing their online store in a kind of one to one dm. So did that for about three years and then about six months ago after, after my latest parental leave, joined the lovely folks at Shop app and have been loving it.
- [02:35]
Rid
The design that's coming out of Shop is top of the game. It's pretty cool.
- [02:39]
Anthony Manicola
Funny enough, after my time on retail, when I was looking for something else to move on to. It was between Shop and Inbox. And so I've, you know, during my three years of working on Inbox, I've kept in touch with a lot of designers and folks working on Shop, and it's always kind of been one that I wanted to add to my. My belt during my time here at Shopify. So very excited to join the team. And just the level of and quality of work that is produced on. On this team is just really, really astounding.
- [03:13]
Rid
So a big focus of this conversation is I want to really get at what it looks like to just make an impact. And, you know, you've been at Shopify for a long time now. You've worked on, like, effectively five or six different companies within Shopify, and so you have experience, so maybe just really high level to start. How would you describe some of the main differences between being a staff designer versus more like a typical senior designer role?
- [03:45]
Anthony Manicola
One of the things we kind of define a staff designer as at Shopify is one that really starts to have impact outside of their project area or their domain area. Um, what I mean by that is starting to look kind of horizontally within the organization and seeing how you can have influence or how you can have impact. We call this broadening your T. So, you know, you might go very deep into your. Your specific domain area or project area, but as you start going horizontally, it's about looking for opportunities that might be tangential to the work that you're doing that could have impact elsewhere. Whether that's some overlap in, you know, roadmaps of teams, whether that's educating more junior designers and helping kind of level up the organization from a design perspective, and then also just being kind of like a sounding board for other people to come to with different ideas or different strategies about how collectively design as a whole can can start raising the bar and the quality of the organization.
- [04:55]
Rid
I know a lot of that comes with context and immersing yourself in the space. But for who is listening, who maybe thinks they're on like, the fringe and wants to push into this staff land per se, what does it take to broaden your tea and treat that as a muscle that you can grow?
- [05:12]
Anthony Manicola
There's a piece of it that really just comes from educating yourself about what else is going on in different parts of the business, maintaining relationships or forging relationships with different parts of the business. So that's kind of like educating yourself and trying to be within those conversations. I would say that, like, a big part of it is Just taking a step back and seeing, you know, where your strengths lie and where you can help make an impact and where you know, others might be looking to, to you to learn something. So as an example, something that I do pretty frequently is host like a Figma office hours. So I'll send a message out, say hey, is there anyone who's looking for feedback or is looking to level up in a specific area of Figma? And I have everyone from like designers to support staff to PMs to people coming who, you know, they may not be working in Figma on a day to day basis, but I can help kind of like raise that skill level.
- [06:14]
Rid
What does that look like? Like people jump into a zoom or whatever. Like what's going on in those hours.
- [06:19]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, so it's, it's very much jumping into a call sometimes there's, you know, a specific outcome that they're looking for. I had one example of a PM who was trying to map out a like a roadmap type of, type of artifact and we just jumped in, we built a couple of like base main components. She was able to kind of run with it after that. And oftentimes it's just about working with people and showing them how you can do something for it to really click. You know, if you're not working the tool every day, if you haven't spent that time kind of learning those skills or understanding the different features that kind of Figma has come out with over the last couple of years, you might not be exposed to them. Other times I really feel like my, my Figma prototypes are lacking kind of the like realness or the transitions or just taking it up that extra notch on, on like the prototyping. So we'll go in there, we'll, we'll look at the different transitions, we'll kind of like polish up how that is presented and how they're communicating that work.
- [07:26]
Rid
Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. So this new product called Genway has totally changed the way that I do research. It uses AI powered interviewers to help you gather rich qualitative data at basically an infinite scale. You can even interview people while they use your Figma prototypes. Just tell the AI what you're hoping to test and it will have a dynamic conversation with each person as they're going through your prototype. You should see the quality of the follow up questions that the AI asks. It is really something. And the best part is they just introduced a self serve onboarding so you can get started right away and they're even offering two months free for Dive Club listeners. Just head to Dive Club Genway to get that special offer that's G E N W a Y book. I don't know about you, but I've never been happy with the way that I get async feedback on my designs. Whether it's figma comments, loom videos, slack threads like it's a mess. So behind the scenes I'm working on the product that I've always wanted to exist. It's called Inflight, and I'd love to show it to you before it goes live. So head to Dive Club Startup to get a little sneak peek of what's coming next. Okay, now on to the episode. I'm sure there's someone listening that has this question in the back of their mind about how the breakdown can look between more hard and soft skills for a staff designer. And my assumption is there's probably different archetypes of staff designers. Maybe you could share what are the different archetypes that you see and what type of staff designer are you?
- [09:00]
Anthony Manicola
Oh, good question. I think for myself one of the benefits of being here for a long time is kind of understanding historical context of what has been tried or what has kind of changed over time. 5 years ago if we tried to do specific things, maybe there was a technical barrier that existed at the time, maybe that no longer exists today. And so I think over time just being in those conversations and gaining that visibility in different parts of the organization, you get tapped for specific initiatives. So one example is there's a initiative right now to look at all of our first party Shopify apps to understand, hey, are we doing the same things and solving the same problems in similar ways? Is there things that, you know, challenges that we're running into across all of these different apps with regards to like management within the admin or the the sales channel surface itself. And is there ways that we can kind of up level all of our first party apps as a whole? And so there's initiative right now and I got tapped for that because I've worked on several first party apps. I've designed and built stuff for sales channels multiple times. And so that's one example of kind of being a resource that can provide some of that feedback across different areas. I think there's definitely like a design system archetype on the staff level as well. Just someone who's really like a systems thinker, has designed and shipped stuff for Polaris, maybe an icon designer. So if there's a need for something in the system or a need to extend the system to flex into different areas. They might be the person that gets tapped to help with that from a review process or just from jamming and kind of being a soundboard. And then there's, I would say like the archetype where they're much more of like a business strategy or like a, an organizational thinker from a strategy perspective, which parts of the business would benefit working together? So shop and retail. For instance, what if, you know, you walked into a retail store and within your shop app you could scan something and check out via, you know, a point of sale device in store. Trying to link those different parts of the business and really start to tie together the platform strategy across all these different parts of the business is really something that takes a lot of input, takes a lot of kind of foundational thinking to actually put forward the plans in motion and make happen. You know, it might be a multi year effort to actually get to something like that, but I think design is in a unique position to put artifacts in motion that can help start to make some of these things a reality.
- [11:54]
Rid
What I'm hearing is that regardless of like how craft oriented your role as a staff designer is and what archetype you are, it really kind of just comes down to altitude and the ability to see the bigger picture.
- [12:05]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, for sure. I think for myself too, like I'm a designer who likes to be in the technical details is something that I've been working on. And this goes back to kind of like broadening your tea, is it just really trying to understand engineers, understand the front end, understand how things work under the hood. And so one of the things that I really started doing when I joined the Inbox team was carving out time each week to sit with front end devs to understand how the code base works, whether that's running code locally. Being able to top hat features, which is it's our term for QA, so being able to actually like run branches from GitHub locally. We don't have a dedicated QA role at Shopify. It's kind of up to all of their project teams to kind of thoroughly test their own features. And I think that design is in a unique position here and something that people don't often talk about is just really being in the details. So much so that you are testing and refining the thing that's actually being built. So after you've kind of designed the thing in Figma, working with engineers, pairing with them, in many cases actually shipping polished PRs or making some of those Tweaks to help fix visual regressions. Like over time, you know, different changes to different parts of the code base could introduce visual regressions. And so having the autonomy to just go in there and, you know, fix a corner radius or tweak some type styles is really empowering, I think, for designers.
- [13:43]
Rid
All right, a couple of context questions on the code piece. One, before you sat down with that first front end engineer, what was your familiarity level with code?
- [13:52]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, so I've dabbled in HTML and CSS, little bit of JavaScript over the last 10 years. That's really been my basis understanding. And so I can tweak values and I can understand markup enough, but I didn't have any understanding of React Native or really a lot of these newer frameworks. And so that was part of the impetus of wanting to pair with engineers to understand not only like the structure of how to think about things a little bit differently, but it also helped me hear how they think about writing code and also our strategy to styling certain things that I could then connect to, you know, HTML markup or specific CSS styling that really made it easier for me to kind of pick up and run with.
- [14:43]
Rid
How common is it for designers to write code at Shopify?
- [14:45]
Anthony Manicola
I wouldn't say it's very common. Again, it really depends on where your focus is of, I guess, that broadening of your tea. I will say that it's very encouraged for everyone in the organization to write code. So whether you're a content designer, whether you are someone in support shipping an update to our help docs, there are a ton of resources and tons of encouragement to level up every discipline to be able to contribute to writing code, which is amazing.
- [15:19]
Rid
It's really cool. I know not everyone listening works in that type of org, but man, there's something so fun and fulfilling about a polished PR and working in a place where you can get that set up.
- [15:31]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, I think like the first time you have this moment of shipping a PR to production, this light bulb goes off in the back of your head where you're like, wow, I literally just contributed to the end user experience rather than creating an artifact and hoping somebody else creates it to what the vision was. You know, something that I, that I've been saying over the last couple of years is that quality only matters in production. And I think that's like an oversimplification. But really, if you are a really good designer who has high craft, who understands the fundamentals of typography and layout and all of those things, if what you are designing and your intention for that design doesn't make it to the end user, doesn't make it to production, then your efforts are kind of wasted. Sure, maybe you've gotten the buy in from your organization, but if you're stopping there, if you're not seeing it to the end result, I think it's just a bit of a wasted effort at that point.
- [16:28]
Rid
I couldn't agree more. And also being able to do something like a polished pr, it reduces so much pressure from that handoff experience. If I know that I have to check every single box, dot every single I across every single table, you like feel it a little bit. And yeah, you can like ping an engineer or drop a comment in GitHub like, hey, can you like fix this border radius? Or you know, this alignment is a little bit off. But there's like a social cost to that where when I work in an environment where I'm just like, you know what, I'm gonna throw this ball really, really far. But I know that that final 3% I can contribute to, it makes the whole process feel lower pressure for me.
- [17:07]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah. Something I've found too is that having the agency or the willingness to take on that ownership increases your trust with engineers by tenfold. You want to understand their day to day. You want to understand what are the things that they focus on or what are the things that they want to, you know, spend their time doing a polished pr is probably not it the smaller visual issues that you can kind of take off their plate to reduce that backlog, they're going to praise you for that.
- [17:34]
Rid
I think learning how to write some of the basic code is the easy part. The challenge or the friction really does come from effectively assimilating into engineering workflows and getting to the point where they're not just pissed off that you're in GitHub or getting your environment spun off. So can we just go like a little bit deeper into that part of the equation? What did it take for you to get comfortable plugging yourself into these workflows.
- [17:59]
Anthony Manicola
If you're upfront in your transparency about wanting to learn? In my experience, I've found that engineers are actually very much willing to give you their time to help you kind of level up in those areas. But I think too it's a two way street in bringing engineering along to the design process and helping expose them to the things that you're thinking about or understanding the technical constraints that might exist today, pushing them to think about how can you break through some of those constraints or or challenging them on the what ifs. Just bringing them along in that journey really helps kind of build that foundational trust with your team and ultimately helps them understand what you're trying to get out of that relationship. And if you can make it a mutually beneficial time exchange, then nine times out of 10, they're willing to give you that time.
- [18:53]
Rid
I love the idea of Two Way Street. It reminds me of a very specific relationship I had years ago where that was kind of our trade, where it's like, hey, teach me how to start contributing to code and I'll bring you into some of the like pre pixel Figma explorations and help you create an on ramp to contribute to product strategy. And there's probably a lot of engineers that want that.
- [19:13]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, definitely.
- [19:13]
Rid
All right, last little piece of context question. How much of LLMs contributed to your coding journey as of late? Is like that something that you're using? Are you in cursor or not so much?
- [19:23]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, I'm playing around with it. I have started using it at work, which is great that we have access to that. So again, trying to carve out time each week to just explore, experiment, see what is kind of coming to the forefront with, with regards to technology and trying to stay up to date. I mean, things are moving so fast nowadays that it's a little bit hard. But I have used it. I really, really enjoy using it. But I would say that, you know, all of my time primarily on Inbox was just time understanding, sitting down with engineers, seeing how we've kind of like written code, being able to use that to apply it to another situation where I can say, oh, okay, this was actually a transition that we used on this component. I'd love to bring that to this piece of the design to kind of carry that over, make it a little bit more consistent. But now with, with things like Cursor with LLMs, I think it's starting to really unlock explorations and prototypes at the code level rather than, you know, prototyping in Figma or even in Origami. Shop Web. So the web based version of Shop uses Tailwind. And that's something that I've started learning a little bit more about is like the syntax of how Tailwind is written and classes. And when you first, when you, when you've known or written CSS and you first look at Tailwind, you think it's the dumbest thing ever. But in practice, when you're actually seeing it work, you realize how powerful it can actually become. And I actually used V0 recently to prototype a card animation where there's these three overlapping cards and when you hover over them, it kind of like fans out. And I could have done that in figma, but I think just having that curiosity and especially knowing that like web uses Tailwind and a lot of V0, you know, uses shad, CN and tailwind classes on top of that, it was something that I just wanted to experiment with and see what, what it could produce.
- [21:27]
Rid
I love that shift, like moving beyond the polished PR to like, hey, actually I'm going to create something from scratch and use code to explore ideas. That's like a really interesting unlock with LLMs. Before we move on from this chunk of, you know what it means to be a staff designer for you, is there anything that you've built in code that you're particularly proud of that you want to talk about?
- [21:45]
Anthony Manicola
Right before I left Inbox, the Inbox team had actually kind of like moved into the core business and was, was part of our customers team. We didn't have our own design system, it was very scrappy. But there was a push to kind of make Inbox a lot more in line with Polaris 12 and what was coming out of the admin, our new kind of design language that shipped recently. And one of the things that I ended up doing over the course of like two weeks is grabbing an engineer and just aligning some of the styles that came out with Polaris 12, shipping a bunch of PRs, a new font stack, updating our border radius, and we just kind of like divide and conquered that work. And that was actually really freeing just to be able to contribute to like a feature branch and update some of those styles. In reality, like the impact is very low, but having the agency and the ownership to go and do that was, was really awesome.
- [22:43]
Rid
All right, so I want to zoom out now and kind of plot our next path because we've talked about this like mentorship bucket, building relationships with younger designers, we've talked about the coding bucket building relationships with engineers. We've touched on this like working cross functionally bucket a little bit. But maybe we could talk about the relationships piece there for a second. So when you're in this realm of trying to connect the dots across teams, what are some of the relationships that you're building there and what does it actually look like as a staff designer to foster these more strategic relationships at a company like Shopify?
- [23:20]
Anthony Manicola
Every discipline is a little bit different. The relationship with product management is really trying to understand how product leaders are thinking about the long term strategy of the product. I find that PMs have this really innate ability to understand like macroeconomic trends that are happening in the industry and in the world and start to understand like where their product can shift to start link some of those needs for our customers. Something that I try to make a practice of is in those conversations with PMs or when I hear a subject or a topic come up that maybe it doesn't exist on our roadmap today. Maybe it's, you know, something that is six to 12 months out. I have a scratch file that I just keep and will kind of keep a topic list. And the more that that topic keeps coming up, I try to carve out a little bit of time to start thinking about what, what could that look like, how could we unlock that for our product? It starts to build this muscle of when the time actually comes to need to think about this more deeply. I've already started developing an opinion in this area of how it could potentially come to life. And I think that at least for my brain, I need to start training and start thinking about it in the back of my head, even if it's not in my day to day you know, work. When I'm out in the world, when I'm experiencing different products, when I'm seeing things that are out there, I kind of file it away in my brain for later of, hey, this idea might work really well for this specific thing that we talked about in passing. Starting to develop like that muscle, I think is really an effective way for designers to start helping product folks realize a vision. Especially if that's a lot more like a long term vision.
- [25:17]
Rid
A theme that's definitely coming through is just proactively doing things that aren't explicitly asked of you. And maybe we could drill into that little scratch pad as an example, like let's say that something's on there that you've heard a few times, you've subconsciously been designing over the last few months or something like that, and you have an idea that you think has legs. How do you make time for that? More vision casting work?
- [25:44]
Anthony Manicola
One of the practices that we have and the processes that we have at Shopify is this process called gsd, which stands for get shit done. But it follows a product process which is proposal, prototype, build, release, and so on the proposal stage. This is where a lot of those kind of like ideas that are building over time start to get legs. A designer might be the one who's actually writing a proposal for something, kind of getting a screenshot or a quick prototype Together and sharing that more widely within, you know, a written proposal, starting to communicate that more widely and get feedback from other parts of the business is really how projects start to take shape. Is. Is it the right time to build this thing? Do we need more feedback? Do we need other parts of the business to weigh in here? Do we need other parts of the business to align parts of their roadmap to help kind of unlock this thing for us? Those are the types of things that I think over the long run, have a lot of impact to the business. And, you know, if you want to use the term seat at the table, I think that designers have this innate ability to make the intangible tangible and to help communicate an idea further than, you know, a document. When you start to feel something, when you start to click around, when you start to see how could something like this actually come to life, it gets people excited about the things that are possible within your domain area. And I think that's really powerful.
- [27:17]
Rid
All right, I want to double click on the proposal a little bit and talk about what makes a good proposal. Like, are there guidelines that you have or best practices that you've learned? Maybe you could just walk us through your process of figuring out how to craft the right proposal based off of what you are trying to get momentum behind?
- [27:36]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, I think it. It depends a little bit on what it is that you're proposing. If it's a very complex topic, then it could go fairly deep. But even if it's just a design idea, I think a good proposal should answer the questions of, you know, what problem is it actually trying to solve? Why does it make sense to solve that problem right now? What is some evidence of this thing that's actually a problem? You know, in our case, are merchants talking about this? Is it a big friction point? Do we know that it could unlock value for different parts of the business or different parts of our customer base? Starting to kind of make a case for why something should be built is ultimately what makes a good proposal.
- [28:22]
Rid
I want to go one level deeper on, like, the timeliness piece.
- [28:25]
Anthony Manicola
Sure.
- [28:26]
Rid
Help people understand what could potentially go into that. When you're trying to make a case that now is the right time to do this, what goes into that case?
- [28:34]
Anthony Manicola
This is where, like, the understanding of the business really comes into play. It could be that a bunch of time is freeing up, or maybe it's the end of year and you have, you know, a couple of weeks to pull someone in to help you tackle something, or maybe it's a project. Is Finishing that actually helps unlock this next thing. Starting to think in kind of like those phases is really what I would say makes a proposal successful and attributes like the timeliness aspect of it.
- [29:04]
Rid
How often do these proposals have semi high fidelity prototypes in them? Or is it more words? I know the answer is it depends. But when are you reaching for these different types of artifacts based off of what you're trying to achieve?
- [29:20]
Anthony Manicola
As a general rule of thumb, if it has a UX piece attached to it, it should have some sort of prototype to go along with the proposal. It just solidifies the idea. It helps communicate what is sometimes hard to digest with a Word document. So it brings those things to life and it actually helps move things along quicker in my experience.
- [29:43]
Rid
Okay, so let's say you have a proposal that you're excited about, you have your little prototype in it, you've thought about the timeliness aspect of it. Nothing matters unless you effectively circulate that proposal and get the right people excited about the idea. So where do you go from there?
- [29:58]
Anthony Manicola
Understanding the decision makers in your organization, understanding who this decision affects, getting those people to weigh in on, on the proposal and getting visibility from them is ultimately going to make that thing move faster. You may not know who that is. You know, in a large organization we have this kind of like ping pong effect where you ask one person, they might send you to another person, that person might send you to another person. Sometimes this can feel frustrating because it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack within a large organization. But it's a bit of an art form and once you do it enough times, you start to understand, okay, who do I need to talk to in this specific area? Again, being at a company for a long time also helps because you know which people you've worked with previously who are still here, have, are working in other parts of the business. And so you can tap on them and you can start to find that person a lot quicker rather than going through that chain.
- [30:56]
Rid
This is going to sound like an absurdly specific question, but like let's say you found that person. What actually is the ask of that person? You're pasting in some kind of a link. What is the text that you were writing around that link?
- [31:11]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, it could be very, very off the cuff, like, hey, we're starting to think about X, Y, Z. This is an outcome that it could have, or this is an effect that it could have on your area. Would love to get your thoughts on it and start to think about how our teams could collaborate or would love to get your input on things that you're hearing about, problems that you're hearing about in your area, things that we should be thinking about that maybe we haven't considered yet. Those are really the types of like questions or the framing that you would go into kind of sharing this a little bit more broadly. Because in your proposal, maybe it's, maybe it's a lot more lightweight than that. But I think from a consideration perspective, the more people that you circulate that to, maybe there's more considerations that you have to put into it and that will lead to further iterations of that prototype or different workflows, or maybe there's something happening internationally that you know needs to be accounted for. Those are the types of things and the types of framings that I would use.
- [32:07]
Rid
Perfect. Thank you for humoring me on that one. I want to talk a little bit more about your process, but really quickly just to kind of make sure that there's nothing else that we're missing. Is there any other advice that you would have for a designer who wants to work towards this level of altitude you have where you're actively contributing towards product strategy and not just waiting to be assigned that next thing to design?
- [32:31]
Anthony Manicola
As designers, we really need to start thinking about, like, what value can we create within the organization? A large part of our job is creating these artifacts that help create tangible outcomes. And so we're in a unique position to create those artifacts and to help kind of circulating those ideas. The more you start thinking about that and being proactive in those areas, the more people are going to look to you as a thought leader, as a partner, as someone who is kind of two steps ahead, someone who doesn't need a lot of direction in terms of what they're, they're being asked of. And I think the more that you can kind of go above and beyond any given ask or start thinking, you know, a few steps ahead, that's really going to make you visible as a designer to a lot of the leaders around you.
- [33:23]
Rid
I really like that. And I think it does come down to the fact that like, no one's ever gonna be like, stop sharing so many ideas. You know, people are hungry for ideas and you have the ability to visualize them. So I want to drill into your process for a second again. Maybe coming back to that scratch pad, you have this like pretty open ended opportunity. You don't see anything specific with real clarity, but you know there's something there. What are you doing to untangle that complexity and Start to get momentum in your own mind about what something could be.
- [33:57]
Anthony Manicola
I try to consume a lot of different things out in the world. I like to try out apps, I like to try out services. I like to see how different people are solving things from like a UI perspective or a flow perspective. Those to me are kind of like a Rolodex of ideas that could potentially be applied to any given area. But I think that from a process perspective, it's really just, it could be sketching something out, whether that's high fidelity, whether that's on paper, you know, thoughts can, can happen at any given time. So sometimes it's after working hours, sometimes it's, you know, during, during the workday. Sometimes you need to explore 10 things to actually unlock or have that aha moment to really get you to that outcome that you're looking for. But I'm definitely of the mindset of trying a bunch of different things to see what works best and help kind of train your mind to rationalize why it is the, the best solution possible. For me, the longer I help my brain kind of process that over time, the more natural the like rationalization of thought becomes. And I've had co workers say to me like, you're so good at explaining your rationale of things. And that's literally because my brain doesn't shut off when I'm thinking about these things. And so if I've tried something and I know it doesn't work, I know why it doesn't work and I can articulate that that's just a muscle that happens over time. And I think the longer you train that muscle and you're working towards that, the more beneficial it is in your process.
- [35:32]
Rid
When you're doing all these explorations, do you really get to the point where you're like, oh, wow, that actually works? Like, are you able to truly see this? Probably won't work. That might work. And is that the moment where you then loop other people in and show something? Like, how do you even figure out where that line is?
- [35:49]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, I think sometimes that's the case. There's definitely like check ins. So it might be midday, it might be end of day, it might be after a few days, depending on like how fresh of a thing that you're exploring is. But I think training your brain to start having these explicit check ins of like, okay, this is starting to feel pretty good. I've explored a few different things that I don't think works necessarily well. But from like a taste perspective and from a just like a gut Feeling perspective. Once you start getting it to a place where you're, you're pretty happy with it, that's when I would start sharing it. You know, if you shared every, every single exploration, it would start to become noise. But I think for every team and for every organization that Cadence is, is going to be different. I definitely try to err on the side of speed and, and, you know, sharing something at least once a day with the team, or even just sharing like a sketch of a prototype, throwing it in a channel, getting some feedback, or at least just like a pulse of like, hey, is there like appetite here? Is this idea that I have crazy? Or is there something here is really just kind of like a litmus test of are you on the right track? Is there something else that you could think of? Is there something that maybe you thought of that you thought, like, wasn't very good, that somebody else is now bringing up and you can actually say, hey, you know what? I explored that previously. Let me bring that back in and see if there's something there that's definitely happened before where, you know, maybe you go on there, off on a different track and you have to kind of like pull in some, some previous explorations. I think that's why I generally like to go wide and start to see, you know, is this really the right solution for what I'm trying to solve.
- [37:30]
Rid
How broadly are you doing those daily shares? Is that just with the design team on shop or is like the full shop team? Like, how do you think about who you're sharing with?
- [37:40]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah, I think most frequently it's with the larger design team within our, our specific product area. We have a weekly crit as well. So it might be something that I'm sharing at Crit, it might be something that I've shared at Crit. I've gotten feedback and then I want to communicate that back with the wider design team for a bit more broad feedback. It might be sharing with the project team of, hey, this is kind of like a, where I'm at with this exploration would love, you know, anyone, you know, engineers or PMs, like, how are we thinking about this? How is this starting to feel? Is there something that I, I've missed on the requirement side of things or something that I should, should be thinking about that I haven't thought about yet? I think the more that you, like, train that muscle, the better your outcome ends up being. And, and the quicker you end up getting to that end result because that feedback loop is just so quick that you end up getting to your destination a lot quicker.
- [38:34]
Rid
I love even that baseline of questions to ask. It's super helpful. Hey, it's rid. I'm constantly asked about my favorite product, so I'll take just one minute and give you a quick rundown of my stack. Destin is how I ship design changes without having to code. Framer is how I build my websites. Genway is how I do research. Jitter is how I animate my designs and Play is how I design and prototype mobile apps. Visual Electric is how I generate all of my imagery and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies to partner with me so that I can do these episodes full time. So the best way by far to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club slash Partners. Okay, now on to the rest of the episode. Before we kind of move on from Shopify land, want to give you a chance to reflect on the larger journey. So what's a skill or maybe a piece of understanding or even something that you observed in a colleague that you think created an inflection point in your time at Shopify?
- [39:42]
Anthony Manicola
Ooh, good question. I've experienced both in person at this company and then obviously post Pandemic, we were fully remote and I think just the skill at creating async updates, whether that's recording a video, whether that's being able to communicate your ideas in a clear and concise manner that isn't like a 10 minute long video is really a muscle that is that you need to consistently work at. I admit that I was pretty terrible at this when we first started off. I think everybody was. That part has been really interesting to see how others across the organization kind of communicate in different ways or like present their work in different ways. And I've definitely taken like bits and pieces that I've seen that work really well, or just ways to kind of step through work that makes it really clear and concise.
- [40:39]
Rid
I have a smile on my face because that was literally what I was doing right before we started this call. And I was like, I'm just gonna make a 90 second loop and it's like. And it's five minutes long. Like, dang it, how did that happen? So talk to us a little bit like, are there clear ways that you have refined that practice of how and what to share?
- [40:58]
Anthony Manicola
I've gotten in the habit of creating a quick script more times than the not. It could be general headings, it could be, you know, bullet form points of What I'm trying to communicate. That also helps kind of build a level of flow of, like, if I'm walking through figma, is it something that I can get away with just showing a static screen? Is it something that I need to articulate within a flow or a prototype? What do I actually want to communicate? What is the feedback I'm actually looking for? Is it just a status update? Or is there something specific that I'm asking of people when I'm sharing this thing? That's definitely a good question to ask yourself when you're, you know, creating an artifact like that.
- [41:43]
Rid
It's a fun topic that you're right. Just became so relevant for so many people all over the world in the last few years even. And I guess if someone would ask me that same question, maybe my answer would be the same. Because there's like, a lot of little things, like, I was working with Yuen Wang actually, and she did something where she wrote out the feedback that she wanted at the end of the video and shared that as the first slide. And it, like, gave people context, like, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be thinking about while I'm listening to you talk. And like, I saw that one time and I'm like, oh, my gosh, that makes so much sense. And so there are, like, little things that I'm sure you are just picking up, being exposed to different people on the team.
- [42:19]
Anthony Manicola
It's funny you say that, actually. I created a resource a couple years ago called the UX Review Template. I think it's up on the figma community still. But asking for feedback up front is actually part of that template.
- [42:31]
Rid
Cool. Well, we'll. I'll drop it in the show notes, then maybe we can use that as a segue to just get outside of the bounds of the Shopify figma team for a second. What else are you working on on your own?
- [42:41]
Anthony Manicola
I became a cyclist, or a more avid cyclist over the last couple of years, started using Strava to track that activity. Really started, you know, getting closer to both the cycling community and also being more exposed to the running community as well. And I've noticed that people were sharing their Strava activity or their, like, health data in ways that just seemed, like, really inefficient. So taking screenshots or putting it through, like, a background removal process before sharing it to, like, their Instagram stories. So I'm actually building a little app right now with Adam Witcroft called Athlete Studio that makes it easier to share your Strava data to social media media. It plugs into your Strava data, basically helps you create like a story or a shareable image with the data from Strava. So managed to convince Adam to help me build it and we've been having a ton of fun. It's always good when your technical co founder is a great designer as well.
- [43:46]
Rid
Yeah, I was about to say that definitely helps.
- [43:49]
Anthony Manicola
Yeah. So be on the lookout for that in the next.
- [43:51]
Rid
Next.
- [43:51]
Anthony Manicola
Hopefully a couple of months.
- [43:53]
Rid
Cool.
- [43:53]
Anthony Manicola
We're just starting to get feedback on the test flight right now, so.
- [43:56]
Rid
Awesome. Well, I'm very excited to see that out in the wild. And Anthony, I appreciate you coming on. I feel like we've covered a ridiculous amount of ground and I appreciate you letting me just like poke at every little thing trying to get inside of your brain. I'm sure this is one of the more practical episodes and means a lot. You're making the time.
- [44:17]
Anthony Manicola
Thanks so much for having me, Red. Appreciate it.