Julien Martin - Why Amo's Design Hits Different

Summary

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Dive Club 🤿 — "Julien Martin: Why Amo's Design Hits Different"

Episode Date: February 18, 2026
Host: Ridd
Guest: Julien Martin (ex-Zenly, Amo)

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Overview

In this episode of Dive Club, host Ridd interviews Julien Martin—former Head of Design at Zenly (acquired by Snap) and now co-founder at Amo. The discussion unravels Julien's incredible journey from humble beginnings in Strasbourg and a chance encounter at a New York restaurant, to the creation of two of the most influential consumer design companies of the last decade. The episode dives deep into the evolution of design philosophies at Zenly and Amo, the DNA of delightfully differentiated design, and how design teams and hiring look and feel different in today’s AI-powered, fast-moving product world.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Julien’s Origin Story: Accidental Entry into Elite Design ([01:33]-[10:18])

• Serendipity in NYC: Julien moves from Strasbourg to NYC, taking an extended “holiday” working in a restaurant. There he meets Behance cofounder Matthias Correa, leading to an unexpected, immersive mentorship.
• Hustle at Behance: Works tirelessly, unpaid, for a year and a half—soaking up startup and design culture, learning basics through trial and error, and developing a respect for detail and iteration:
  • “I remember coming back home at 1am or 2am, super tired, going back to the office at 9am the day after. The real hustle.” — Julien [05:33]
• Mentorship and Craftsmanship: Matthias’s relentless focus on “emotion, intuition, craft and preciseness” set the DNA for Julien’s later design success.

2. Shaping a Sense of Design DNA ([10:18]-[13:54])

• From Messy to Precise: The shift from scattered creativity to embracing alignment, iteration, and Bauhaus-inspired structure.
• Iterative Discipline: “I didn’t understand why I had to iterate 200 times the same web banner… He was crazy about it: it has to be perfectly aligned. If this is not aligned, everything is going to look bad.” — Julien [11:05]
• Craft as First Principle: Precision and feeling become the north star, even above process.

3. Zenly: Building Worlds, Not Just Apps ([13:54]-[17:01])

• What Was Zenly? Social mapping to see friends nearby; design-forward, playful, world-building approach.
• Deliberately Over-Designed: “It felt like a sandbox for us to have fun instead of just thinking about accessibility… It felt like a game and it was really entertaining.” — Julien [14:48]
• Global Resonance: Despite no longer existing, the Zenly alumni "DNA” permeates other hit products globally.

4. Amo: A New Chapter, Blank Slate for Creative Direction ([19:05]-[21:51])

• Reacting to Zenly’s Shutdown: Amo started as the same core team sought to create a suite of consumer products, learning from Zenly’s “Christmas tree” feature overload.
• A Series of Mini-Apps: Instead of one monolith, Amo explored multiple apps—each distinct, yet sharing a cohesive “universe”.

5. The Amo Visual Language: Crafting a Unique Universe ([21:51]-[27:05])

• Designing the Atom: The fundamental creative leap was making user avatars tiny, expressive, animated—a “collage-magnet-on-the-fridge” motif.
  • “It’s not an emoji, not an avatar, but the real you, animated, very expressive... Almost like magnets on the fridge—messy, but meaningfully messy.” — Julien [24:48]
• Iterative Breakthroughs: The initial “luxury product” vibe felt cold. The team pivoted to what felt organic and “delightful,” with a collage-like, tactile brand language.

6. Principles of Delight, Gamification, and Creative Process ([27:23]-[32:08])

• Beyond Confetti: True delight is not tacked on but embedded in systemic feedback—haptics, micro-interactions, animations, and playful browsing paradigms:
  • “It’s all the little things… For example, on Bump, when you browse through friends—faces animate as they enter the center… it creates anticipation, it creates smiles.” — Julien [28:44]
• Originality as Differentiation: Not just aggregating polish, but inventing left-field, design-driven ideas is key.

7. Cultivating Creativity: Teamwork, Intuition, and Rituals ([32:08]-[41:53])

• Invention vs. Existing Patterns: Borrowing (or breaking) paradigms—like “pull to refresh”—builds addictive user habits.
• Balance of Delight & Usability: Sometimes spiraling too deep into delight can confuse users—the need for balance and willingness to roll back.
• Collaboration Culture: Product obsession permeated every discipline, fostering spontaneous, side-by-side, designer-engineer collaboration:
  • “Many great ideas came from backend engineers… we made sure this collaborative culture was open to everyone.” — Julien [39:39]
  • “You can do it remotely, but it’s not the same as sitting side by side, jamming together on the details.” — Julien [41:26]

8. Hiring for the New Design Era ([41:53]-[46:54])

• Ambition & Side Projects > Resumes: Amo prized curiosity, hackathon passion projects, and entrepreneurial tinkering over famous company logos.
  • “We don’t care about your previous experience at Meta or Apple—talk to us about this very specific side project.” — Julien [43:31]
• Survival Skillset for Modern Teams: Teams are getting smaller, “360” designers have to be hands-on, cross-functional, and deeply familiar with new tools and AI.

9. Macro Trends: The Fragmented, High-Impact Design Landscape ([47:26]-[55:35])

• Tiny, Nimble Teams: Startups are laser-focused and ultra-lean. Designers must be product strategists and doers—sometimes the lone designer for years.
  • “You have to be very fluent in AI, spend more time on tools than Figma, and sometimes even commit your own code.” — Julien [48:56]
• Big Company “Baggage”: Startups often avoid “fortune company” resumes, favoring candidates who can prove hunger and versatility through side projects or hands-on freelance/agency work.
  • “Now if you’re out of [big companies] and looking for startup jobs—it’s hard. 90% of the profiles needed are side-project builders.” — Julien [51:21]
• Blurring Roles & Job Titles: Teams want “a little bit of everything”—product, design, code, motion. Sometimes teams don’t even have language for what they’re hiring.

10. Products that Inspire: Modern Benchmarks ([56:09]-[56:56])

• Retro App, Duolingo: Cited for polish, connected experiences, consistent delight in visuals, motion, and haptics.
  • “Duolingo: everything is so tightly connected—the brand, the motion, the haptics—so good… perfect experience.” — Julien [56:37]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

Julien on Craft & Iteration:
“Matthias’s focus was really on emotion, intuition, and craft and preciseness that I wasn’t used to. It has to be perfectly aligned. If this is not aligned, everything is going to look bad.” ([11:05])

On Original Delight:
“If you’re smiling when you use this app, even after the 45 days, you know you created something really special with users.” ([28:44])

On Hiring for Modern Teams:
“We don’t care about your previous experience at Meta, you were at Apple—we don’t care. Talk to us about this very specific side project.” ([43:31])

On Team Culture at Amo:
“Many great ideas came from backend engineers… we made sure this collaborative culture was open to everyone.” ([39:39])

On What’s Needed Now:
“You have to be very fluent in AI… sometimes, even commit your own code. You will be the only designer for months or years.” ([48:56])

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [01:33] Julien’s accidental entry into the Behance crew in NYC, mentorship by Matthias Correa, hustle culture
• [10:42] Discipline and iteration as foundations of visual design
• [14:48] Zenly’s DNA: Game-like design, world-building, playful interactions
• [19:05] Birth of Amo as a suite of apps; learning from the overload and creative constraints of Zenly
• [22:23] Crafting the Amo visual language: collage/animated avatars, “messy” but intentional branding
• [28:09] Principles underpinning “delight” and design-driven product differentiation
• [39:32] Amo’s culture of inter-team, cross-discipline collaboration
• [42:08] Hiring: prioritizing ambition, curiosity, and side projects above pedigree
• [47:26] Macro market trends: smaller teams, the rise of 360 designers, demand for velocity & breadth
• [54:07] Shifting team structures; "no title" product/design/engineering roles
• [56:09] Modern apps Julien admires for design—Retro, Duolingo

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Summary

Julien Martin’s journey shows that iconic user experiences are built on obsessive craft, iterative attention to detail, and a culture that prizes original playful ideas over safe, functional sameness. At Zenly and Amo, visual identity isn’t an afterthought—it’s the seed from which every interaction, every pixel, and every team habit grows. With design teams shrinking and responsibilities blurring, today’s product designer is expected to be a world-builder, technologist, and experimenter all at once. For those building or joining the next generation of software teams, side projects, curiosity, and the willingness to jam with engineers—more than any credential—are the keys to standing out.

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Transcript

[A]

As software becomes easier to create, what does it take to truly differentiate with design?

[B]

If you're smiling when you use this app, Even after the 45 days, you know you created something really special with users. It's all the little things. For example, on Ammo, on Bump, when you would browse through your friends, you don't have to build everything to be functional. It can be great to use it.

[A]

How do you form a culture of creativity and consistently think outside the box as a designer?

[B]

It doesn't have to have confidence, it doesn't have to be to have blue colors or saturated colors everywhere. But if you always think about, hey, what happens when I tap this button? What's the reaction? What's the feedback? It's perhaps it's just a tiny animation, perhaps it's a haptic feedback that is really carefully done on your phone, perhaps it's something else happening on the screen. But it's this type of interactions and delight that will create a unique experience.

[A]

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. Today's episode is with Julian Martin, who is the head of design at Zenly, which sold to Snapchat, where again, he became the head of design. Now, eventually, Snap shut down Zenly, which led much of the core team to leave and create a new product called Ammo. Now, this is some of the most impressive consumer design that I've ever seen. But before we get into what makes Ammo so special, this episode actually starts 20 years ago in a Belgian restaurant in New York City.

[B]

When I tell the story, especially recently during, you know, at Zen Lion Amo, people just don't believe me. So we kind of made fun of this as almost like internal joke that people were discussing whether or not I was actually lying about this back then. And it's a long time ago. It was 2006. I'm from a city in eastern France which is called Strasbourg. It's a beautiful city. It's packed with history, it's packed with beautiful architecture. There's a lot of culture there, like both German and French. There was nothing, no job, especially not in the design space. I had a very small, kind of shitty experience in the graphic design. Not even web so much. So a friend of mine had this restaurant in New York, and he kind of invited me over just for three months as an extended holiday. And I was young, I was a little bit foolish, and I was actually 22, 24. Sorry. And I went there and I kind of help him. I helped him in his restaurants. So I Actually became a manager of one of another restaurants. And what happened is I decided to stay. I decided to stay as a tourist in the U.S. i think I can talk about it now because it's. I'm not really shameful about it, but it's definitely something that resonates today in today's. In world politics, in US politics. But I went, I overstayed my visa, I didn't want to go back to France actually. What's funny is that I was illegal, but I paid my taxes. And in this restaurant I was after the shifts. There was always one customer visiting me in the afternoon quietly in the corner, drawing stuff on his, on his notebook, on his modestine book. He came every afternoon at same hour for the same amount of time ordering the same thing, a waffle and a coffee and like a double espresso. And you can tell like people usually, Donald, are just single espressos, ristrettos or double espresso. It's really kind of a French or European something. It's very. Just simple, strong coffee and that's it. So I figured this guy was not from here, as it turns out. He was from Barcelona in Spain and he was co founding a new company in the same street where the restaurant was. And the company was called Behance. He's Matthias Correa, one of Behance co founder and you know, he's very nice to me and he's inviting me over to the, to visit the office space. And after my shift I visit them. I bring some pastries and stuff to say thank you. And I come over and the office is just an apartment, it's the apartment of Scott Belsky. And it's really funny because you can tell by the look, by the smell, by everything that there's something going on in there. It's beautiful space, beautiful apartments, very New Yorker apartments. And there are many huge paper sheets plastered on the walls, on the windows even. So it's kind of blocking the lights a little bit, many screens. And there are four people there, Scott, Matthias and two engineers, Dave and Henry. And they give me a quick tour and say, hey, this is what we do, this is what we built. If you want, you can come every day if you want, after your shifts and you can help us. You can ask questions, you can just be an observer if you want. And I'm like, I would love that. Thank you for inviting me over. I don't know if I can help. I would love to. And without thinking about it, I do this kind of weird thing which is I Want the full package. I want to be here 24 7. And they did not expect that either. And they. They tell me that they cannot afford me. They don't have any money for now. They tell me, hey, we cannot pay you, but if you want to come every day, we won't stop you. We can pay you lunch, but that's it. So I say, okay, let's do that. I remember something which was really scary and funny at the same time is, you know, it's kind of Wednesday night, something like this, and it's 11pm I was smoking back there. So Scott's apartment was on the sixth floor. And every time I had to come down by the elevator and go out in the streets, smoke cigarettes and go up. And I can tell this was bothering to them because I didn't have a key, there was no code or whatever. So every time I had to ring and they had to pull me over there. And so they were like, hey, just smoke by the window, smoke by the window. Just stop, you know, going downstairs. So I'm like, on the sixth floor smoking cigarettes, like this young French guy, you know, and it's 10:00pm I'm like, okay, guys, I'm done. I'm tired. I'm going home. And Matthias is like, what are you doing? Like, it's 10pm there's still much work to do. Okay, okay, what should I do? Like, and I remember coming back home at 1am or 2am, super tired, going back to the office at 9am the day after the Real Hustle. And I was working seven days a week for almost a year and a half doing just that real quick message.

[A]

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[B]

It's like a movie.

[A]

Like everything that you're saying. I understand why people potentially make fun of it or question the lore is because it literally sounds like a startup kid movie. Even the, you know, the young French guy hanging out the window of the late night grind. It's too funny.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. But you know, Matthias was definitely my mentor. Like there is no other world. Like he told me things like, hey, you know, Behance back then was just a blog. It was just a blog sending some paper stuff like, you know, notebooks. Notebooks with the action items. They call this action method. So we'd have action items that you could just a to do list, paper to do list, high quality paper. But you know, it's just, it's just paper. I mean it's crazy. And there was this productivity tips on Behance blog and they were just getting started on the Behance network to what it is today. Like this huge creative, professional social network. I didn't know anything about web, so this Matias guy is like, hey, can you wireframe this for me? Can you design this view for me? The screen, whatever. I'm like, wait, I don't know how to do that. Just do like you think, go, go ahead, just do it. I will let you know if it's bad or not. He asked me to design these icons in the Behance editor. There is an editor when you design your own portfolio there and projects and there's kind of this plugin text editor with, you know, the icons, link icons, bold, italic, indent, you know, all these, you know, typical things. And it was using an open source thing and it didn't play very well with the overall design of the first Behance network design. So it's only to redesign all the icons to match the design. But I didn't know how to do it. So I went on Photoshop and I designed square by square, pixel by pixel icons, hoping this would look great. But it didn't look great. I didn't even know what was a vector, vector shapes or so on. So it looked very pixely and eight bits. So it didn't work like, this is shit, go ahead and do it all over again. I remember spending a week designing icons without knowing how to do it. This is where I discovered Illustrator. Photoshop also had vector shapes back Then, but I didn't use them. And, yeah, slowly but surely I was getting into this and learning everything that was really exciting. Like icon design and web design was my first love, and it kind of evolved into many new things afterwards.

[A]

You definitely didn't realize that you were becoming a designer at that point, I'm sure. But you also probably didn't realize that you were surrounded by future industry titans. I'm wondering if the early experience with that group of people shaped you in any way that you're able to identify. Like, did you pull from different lessons there or even just things that you would observe in somebody like Scott that you think had an impact on the rest of your journey?

[B]

For sure. I always consider myself a very messy person. When I was a kid, my room was always messy. Like, I was always all over the place, thinking about many things at once, doing many things at once. Ultimately, because I was doing many things at once, everything was messy. And when Matthias came up and kind of taught me about everything in design, his focus was really on there was a lot of emotion, there's a lot of intuition and a lot of craft and preciseness that I wasn't used to. Why does it matter that this is not aligned? He was crazy about it. It's like, are you serious? Like, you cannot say that. It has to be perfect. It has to be perfectly aligned. If this is not aligned, this is not going to be aligned. And then this is going to look like shit. Everything is going to look bad. And all these very basic principles of design was all new to me. And I didn't understand why I had to iterate for 200 times the same web banner. Like, I had to design a banner, vertical banner for. I don't know, I think it was for Dig back then, something like this. And there was a vertical banner. And, you know, it was just a simple thing with a couple of walls, the Behance logo, and a photo of this book notebook we had. And it's very simple. But it took me, I don't know, three days to do it because he wasn't happy with how I aligned things. It didn't look really balanced. I think it came from a very structured, kind of almost bowhouse kind of, you know, methods. And his father is actually a very prominent. Was a very prominent, very successful architect. So I kind of took everything in, in a way. And this is visual design. And craft was really the first. My first entry, my first door into the product design space. And I think it shaped who I am. Like, it shaped what I became. It Shaped what I am today and became kind of one of my strengths when it came. Like when I have to create new products and new experiences, new worlds and so on. I really think about everything. Like how does it look like at the end from a user standpoint? I don't go to too much processes and it's really just about feeling it. And it can be. We have to say that today, but this is always how I work. This is always how we will work in the future. And he kind of taught me this. This is why it was really closely related to pace and speed at Zenly and Ammo to just go fast and very messy space and then narrow it down to something that is just cool or resiterating.

[A]

Well, this is definitely one of the more life changing inflection points of any one story that I've ever heard. So I kind of want to keep playing it out and talk a little bit about where this went from here. You mentioned Zenly and Ammo. Give us a little bit of context for how you ended up at Zenly, what you all were working on. I know a lot of people put it in this bucket of really well designed apps, but they don't really understand it, especially people listening in the US So can you share a little bit more about.

[B]

Yeah, of course. Zenlin was a social consumer app based on map on a really at first a simple map where you can see friends around. And it might not sound interesting today, but what was interesting back then is that beside the first, I don't remember the first Sam Altman company in the early 2010 and Live 360 that already existed back then there wasn't really something really special in the consumer space. Find My wasn't even standard app in iOS back then. We came up with this really functional app that didn't drain your battery like crazy. So it was very energy efficient and with phones from 10 or 12 years ago it was really something really cool to have. And we came up with how about you just create kind of a nice experience using this app with funny things that younger audiences will love and with cool dedication. With the logo that is crazy and colorful that didn't make any sense but was still really crazy like this colorful ice cream. So we went all in with this. When I say all in the screens were blue. Like all the chat was blue, the settings, your profile view was blue for no reason. Just because why not? We did crazy things at this but we it almost feel. It felt like it was just a sandbox for us to have fun instead of Just thinking about, hey, how about accessibility? How about, you know, of course we kind of cared a little bit about accessibility. But reflecting back, not so much like we, there were crazy things that definitely wouldn't pass the bar today in our today standards. It felt like a game and it was really entertaining. Every time you would open this app, it would welcome you with nice mood message that is sometimes a bit, you know, a bit ballsy, a bit, a bit tacky with you. Sometimes we would say, hey, you look great, you look better yesterday. But you know, it's funny to see you again. Today is rainy or whatever. Even though it wasn't raining, it was middle of July or so. It's always a bit over the place. Some might say it was a bit over designed. And yes, at some point it was definitely over designed, but it definitely participated in how popular we became in some countries, strategic countries like Japan or South Korea or Indonesia, even in Europe, Eastern Europe, Ukraine in Russia back then was really popular as well. On Zemi, we kind of crafted a proper DNA, almost a game DNA, a world. There was a world that we applied through everything. All the pixels, all the crafts. Like any transition we designed or anything was really carefully thought about. There was no randomness, I would say this kind of became a DNA as I mentioned, and I think our users really loved it.

[A]

Even as somebody who has no real relationship to Zenly, the DNA piece really stands out to me because even if I'm scrolling through Twitter and I come across somebody and they have like X Zenly in their bio, it stands out. Like, it's like, okay, you know, you are capable of a certain type of design that actually is quite rare.

[B]

It's been four years that it got closed down. It still sticks somehow. People, I'm here talking with you about Zeni. So I'm really proud of this and I know the whole previous team is still very proud of this. And the lessons we learned back then were applied at some extent at AMU as well when we created Amo Moving forward. And all those Zenly Mafia Zenly alumni in all their actual companies where they work today, they still, you know, apply everything we we learned. And it's, it's whether it's Photo Room Prelude, there are many companies today that there's a lot of Zeni people there now and Ammo people as well. So it's really, I think he definitely created some great standards when it comes to design and immersive design, I would say. But not just that there was of course a very, very talented engineering team like hiring Engineers at Zenith AMU was definitely challenging, probably more than product designers, because of how much we, we asked for them. We had to make sure they were really on the product side, understanding why we cared so much, why you would sit with us, with me on the table, on the desk for five hours straight, just fine tuning some things that might not be important, but we turns out, well, very important.

[A]

Okay, so you create Sendly, there's a lot of success. You mentioned like 40 million users. You sell to Snapchat, Snapchat eventually shuts it down. You try to buy it back, you can't. So it sounds like a lot of the core group of people were responsible for act two, which is Ammo. I'd like to go deep into that chapter because on the surface there are a lot of similarities. At a high level, you can tell that that core DNA is responsible for it, but you also kind of get this blank slate to push things a little bit further or try something slightly different or maybe innovate on that one thing that you know has been legacy decisions. So when you were first starting off with Ammo, what were some of the initial ambitions with that project?

[B]

Ammo was created as a reaction of the announcement of Snap closing down Zenly. We kind of knew we wanted to create another very staple European company in the social consumer space. But very early on we knew we wanted to design some kind of suite of apps instead of just one standard of apps. Something that kind of was a bit frustrating at Zenly back then is then there was a lot of future creeping. At some point we kind of internally compare the app sometimes as a Christmas tree, all these shiny things all around, all the call to actions, competing with each other. The map was dynamic. There was already so many colors, different colors and so on. So it was kind of overwhelming. And we kind of struggled every time to tone things down and rework. This is why there were so many redesigns in a way. So Ammo, because let's start over with new apps tackling different problems. But you would be able to tell whether you are in the first app, the second one or the third one, you would be able to say, oh, this is a Namo app. One was this creative canva that felt like experimentation between MySpace, Pinterest and, you know, a little bit of YouTube in the early days when you would be able to customize your own hero image and so on. The second app was a camera app, something that meant, it was meant to be very simple, but it's really delightful to do when you would use it in Many ways it felt like what Andy Allen did recently with this new app, you know, camera, you know, very branded, very feels like a toy a little bit, except it wasn't in 3D. But the third app would be kind of a cherry on the cake. Was. Would be a thank you to all our early believers in at Xenlian saying, hey, we have to release this location app. And even if it's very simple, it doesn't have any chat in there, it doesn't have any functionality besides just being able to find friends. We released these three apps one after the other, and from the start to the period we shipped these three apps, we went crazy on iterations, on creating this universe from scratch again, creating the look and feel of all these apps. Making sure that AMU brand would sweat through the details on each of these products was definitely challenging. And some failed, some were pivoted along the way. There is the third app, which was supposed to be kind of a side project that came out to be the main app now at Amo, which is great, but we knew the recipe in a way of Zenly, so it's called Bump and it's going very well. And it's different than Zenly in many ways, but you can, you can still tell there is a DNA of Zenny in there.

[A]

I want to go into the DNA piece really quickly though. Can we talk about the initial creative direction for the universe that you were building? Because I think most products right now, when they think about a suite, it's like, well, we'll share an icon style or we'll share this gradient. You know, it doesn't really mean that much. But you were able to create a visual language that. I've never seen anything like it before. Like when I first downloaded, I guess it would have been id. I mean, I had never seen anything like that. So how did you arrive at that language for the universe?

[B]

How we shaped the design team at AMO was very360. There were two design co founders, product design co founders. There was Nicola, Nicola Falu and myself as the two product designers from the core team. And one of the first hires at amu, actually Valentin Fougere is I think was the first actually hire employee of Amo after the co founders. And Valentin and I were really responsible, of course of designing products and features and so on, but mostly as well at first on creating this new universe. So you could say it's both visual and brand as an extension of our products. But Valentin has this really great taste as well. So my role was to Give a vision and direction and iterate together with them so something. But the first direction and vision I had was not the right one. I went all in on crafting kind of luxury products. It felt very polished. It felt almost like tapping buttons would almost feel like you would tap a gem tapping some kind of onyx stone because it was black and a little bit shiny and so on. There was like some kind of oily reflections around it, depending on how you would tip the foam. We didn't ship this one. It was very cool. It felt nice, but it wasn't funny. It was cold, it was not warm, it wasn't delightful. It was miles away from the fun we had at Zenly. So after I think four months, we're like, this is not the right one. And I had to go back and say, okay. My role right now is say, okay, this is cool, but people will not expect us to do that. It's not on the quality level, it's not on the taste level. We are right now. So we have to raise the bar even above and above. And always like to talk about Halo effects. In many ways, the Zenly designs were created based on just a logo and a first set of icons, UI icons. They were very bouncy. The logo was very colorful and delightful and it created this hollow effect into the ui, into the product, the vibe and everything. So we had to find what is the core piece, the atom that will create this ammo effect. At amu, we found it through designing the avatars, the profiles. How do you represent yourself in ammo apps? How are your friends being represented in ammo apps? So we kind of sit down, we sat down on iterating on how does it look like? And we came up of saying, this is going to be very essential across all ammo apps. That it's the real you. The. It's. It's not an emoji, it's not an avatar, it's not a bitmoji. It's actually you, but it's you being animated. It's had to be very expressive. And so we kind of with these tiny avatars, almost like GIFs or live photos in a way. It was before animated stickers from Apple. So we were very proud of this one. And from this point, it felt like every time you would create, we had this cool experience, kind of weird experience of creating your motion while it was being recorded. And then you would see yourself within this pin on a map or in this ID space around as a spiral and people saying, hey, it looks like a collage. Of yourself just being slapped like this and animated, like almost on the fridge. So we came up with this fridge idea of saying it's almost like magnets. It would stick on the fridge, but in a messy way. If you look at fridge, fridges, doesn't look good, it doesn't look great, but people put paper on it, post it, magnets and so on. So we had this idea of creating a collage brand based on that without being very careful about the design. So sometimes you must cut, you know, pieces of text, pieces of photos, pieces of art and so on. All of this mixed together in a very messy way. But always thoughtful position by Valentin and so on. It feels like, okay, I think we have something really cool and unique and we created all the apps based on that. Even today, like when you select friends in bump, when you interact with them, when you send items to them, emojis or whatever, it feels like it's always a piece of stickers, a piece of paper or something that you throw at them in a way. So this is how we came up with it.

[A]

I love when there's just a little kernel of an idea. You know, you have one little breakthrough, it unlocks one little motif and then everything spirals out of that place. And being someone who's interviewed a lot of my favorite products and learned the stories behind them, that is a very consistent theme where you just have this one moment of breakthrough that creates the strand for basically everything.

[B]

I just love this. It's very organic, it's very chaotic. It's always. It has to go crazy all around. And ultimately you would just extract the. What's very essential about it, like the core thing that is really special and delightful about it and you just exploit it. You just. You're going crazy with it.

[A]

I think a goal for me from this episode is to try to extract some of the core principles that went into Zenly and Ammo so that other people listening myself mainly can reverse engineer it. Right. And I think a lot of times when people talk about delight, we think of confetti that is slapped on at the end of a flow. And when people think about gamification, we think about a badge and leaderboard system. And it's very clear that you have been able to push past that and think about delight and game feel as like a core part of the product strategy and UX talk to us a little bit about what it takes to get to that point.

[B]

You don't have to build everything to be functional. It can be great to use and delight when it doesn't have to have confetti. It doesn't have to be to have blue colors or saturated colors everywhere. But if you always think about, hey, what happens when I tap this button? What's the reaction? What's the feedback? It's perhaps it's just a tiny animation, perhaps it's a haptic feedback that is really carefully done on your phone. Perhaps it's something else happening on the screen. But it's this type of interactions and delight that will create a unique experience. And people will, even though they can perhaps not, point things out on why they love this using this app and why this feels great, but it participates unconsciously, I think, on how you perceive the quality of a product you use every day. It's all the little things. For example, on Ammo, on bump, when you will browse through your friends, it's the traditional way, or perhaps the first mechanical way you would design it is just, I don't know, panels or carousels. Perhaps it's a view, a panel that just folds up and then you have cells just like contact lists. You know, the standard way of doing so. And this is how find my work. This is how live360 work. We decided to just go and use existing paradigms and existing components that are more tactile and more physical to use like this old phones and old business cards. 50 years ago or so, they. They had this huge Rolodex thing on the desk which plays as cards, business cards. You will quickly be able to go through all these old phones with wheels. We kind of came up with this idea of having just like ipod way of browsing your friends as a wheel. You just go through a wheel and just make fun because when they go like this, as a knock, when you browse your friends at the bottom of the screen under your thumb, you would see all these faces getting animated when they enter the center of the screen so they were not played. And then when they reached the center of the screen, you would see your friends being animated and doing crazy things, recording things. It creates really nice anticipation. It creates smiles every time you use such app. If you're smiling when you use this app, Even after the 45 days, you know you created something really special with users. This is how we would think about as a whole. The whole experience is one thing, but then all the tiny things inside is another one. But it takes time. Definitely today, like people say, you can build things with two days and go crazy and ship it. But I think if you spend just two more days instead of two, like spend four days instead of two days and the quality will be on top, the bar will be raised and you will have greater chances to just create very delightful product. Or perhaps it will be just 2% or 3% better than the competitor. I think it's fine, it's fine. But because you went to this extra mile of creating great experiences, or because you really wanted this gradient to work, but someone told you, hey, who cares about your gradient? Just ship it. I think this worked 10 years ago, but it doesn't today.

[A]

And who knows, maybe the models do get incredible to the point where some of the quality bars that you're talking about are able to be hit by the masses. But what you were able to do with Ammo, that is design differentiation, right? Like that's differentiation not necessarily through executing the aggregate of small details. It's differentiation through very creative ideas that are design driven and truly exist out in left field compared to the sandbox that everybody else is playing in. I'm curious if you have any thoughts reflecting on your journey with ammo around? How did you get there? Like what does it look like or take to cultivate this atmosphere where those types of ideas can grow and thrive?

[B]

It's really interesting question and I think it goes both ways. I think sometimes you create something so special and so unique as a usage, as a, you create new patterns sometimes that you know are very effective that people will think about you for this. If you remember Lauren Bristow from 15 years ago who created the pool to refresh all these kind of patterns and we kind of came up with something similar with patterns actually the edge zoom on zenly and bump when you have to pull your thumb along the screen, it's kind of hidden, but once you're getting used to it, you cannot use another map the old way. Every time I open Apple maps or any new map on my phone for something, I keep going above and rows like there is a sidebar on the side, just like a web view basically. It's crazy, it's so simple. But it's this type of experiences that really stick. And we always think about how would we use it. Do we borrow existing patterns or do we create new ones? Just like a game. There are infinite games out there. But the UIs, the way you use them, the way you interact with the map, the way you interact with characters, items, guns or whatever is always different. There are existing patterns, but they are infinite of UIs and UX. And this is how we think about how we design Zenly, how we design bump ID and tilt. And so on. And sometimes it can go wrong. Sometimes you can ship something. Like, there are many things that Ammo or zenly that people just do not get. They would download it and they would be like, what's happening? I don't understand what's happening. So I think it's great to create new experiences and new designs and delightful stuff. But sometimes you're getting lost into it, you're going too far and people are lost and you're losing the points and your users won't understand what's happening. So you have sometimes to go back to step back a little bit and adjust. And sometimes you will brute force your way into it saying, yeah, this is how we do things. This is our DNA. We just ship it and let's roll with it. And no, if your users won't use it, won't do it, or won't pay for it, so you know you're doing something wrong. So it's always kind of. It might feel crazy to use Ammo products, for example, but it's always a game of balance. I think ultimately it's always how you balance things out and always arbitrage between. Is this delightful enough? But wait, did we, did we lose in usability? Do we just, you know, have a consensus and go back a little bit? We also think about the word of mouth a lot. Like, does it have obviously a way to passively attract new users? Because this person, we screenshot it, screen record it, or show it at school, you know, outside and say, wow, this, this is amazing. What did you do? Like, can I try? Like, what's the app? What's the name? And we never underestimated this for sure.

[A]

I've been designing products every day for the last 15 years. But in the last six months, everything has changed. With AI in the mix, I'm cranking out ideas faster than ever. But none of that matters if I can't get the feedback that I need to get the team aligned. And right now, getting Async feedback still kind of sucks. So I'm building the product I always wanted and it's called Inflight. I use it every day to share ideas and get feedback from the team. It's totally changing the way that I work. So I'm excited to show you. Right now I'm only giving access to Dive Club listeners. So head to Dive Club Inflight to claim your spot. I want to toss a hypothetical your way. Let's say that a series A company company brings you on. Maybe they're like a prosumer product. It's not like Enterprise SaaS or anything like that. And they say, julian, we want to rethink the way that we collaborate. Everything's on the table. We want to tap into this creativity. We want to start winning with design, viewing it as a competitive advantage. What would you be drawing from at Ammo and your experience around the way that you all collaborated, the way that you pushed each other, the rituals or processes, anything that you had in place, what would you be drawing from that would influence the opportunities that you would look for as a consultant in this new company?

[B]

It's funny you say that, because I was in the position this since I left Amo or I was brought into more advanced companies, French and, you know, international ones. And they are so obviously for good reasons. They are so into their own culture, their own ways of designing things, of thinking about what the product looks like and how this works and so on. That from an external point of view, when I join this team with the fresh eye and so on, your first reflexes is to destroy everything there is. Hey, can I just destroy and detach everything? Because right now I just cannot evolve into like, hey, here is the design system. Hey, I don't need any design system.

[A]

I'm sorry.

[B]

If you want to go back from scratch and create new expenses, ultimately, I think they brought me for this reason. Can you bring a fresh eye and challenge us and do something crazy about it? Like, we have brand, we have a product that is so serious, so boring, so 15 years ago, can you do something about it? And I tried to do things. And sometimes you will have conservative people on the other side saying, yeah, this is going too far. This doesn't work. But sometimes you will also have someone that say, this is what we need to go. Thank you so much. Let's. Let's roll. Let's piggyback on this, and let's create something new. It's the same product, but is different, and it will be appealing for just a wider audience than just your mom and dads from 45 and 50 years old. This is exactly the type of work that I love to do with these companies because when you join them, you have to come up with a fresh eye. And it's. I think it's both a design, product design role as well as a sales world a little bit. People like, yeah, but data, you know, data like this, this, we. We have to use data. I'm like, but there is no data right now with this. So unless you try it, like, try this and let's say, let's see and Then you, you just have to pray, cross your and say, okay, I hope this is going to work. My reputation is at stake. There's so much about intuition and feelings, like gut feelings is very important. And it was a word that we used extensively when we created Ammo because from one day to another we didn't rely on six years or seven years of data like Zenly. We worked our heads down for almost a year and released three apps from one. Of course we run user test internally and so on, but it's not, it's not enough. Have and you release this and then you watch this, the data coming up, all the metrics and so on and you're like, okay, this one is great. This is such a failure. This. Okay, this is not going to work out very well. And you always have to start somewhere. And the somewhere is a mix of expertise and knowledge based on your previous experiences and data you learned along the way. And gut feeling, you have to go with gut feeling. If I would start a product from scratch today, it would be 100% gut feeling because this is who I am. I'm really into this, but I know this is not the right way to ship a product nowadays.

[A]

I do want to learn a little bit more about how you all worked and what collaboration looked like at Ammo. Because the output's so unique. I'm wondering, was there anything about the way that you all explored and shipped together that was also unique?

[B]

Yes, it's definitely part of something that is essential. And even to this day this is something I miss deeply. Like collaborating with the, not just with the design team, but as a whole. Like there is such a deep connection between all the teams. Everyone was just very product driven. It's from HR team, from engineers obviously, but not just the software engineers. Even the back end engineers, you might say, you might think they are not really involved in shaping the experience of the product, but turns out that many great ideas came from the backend engineering team and we were very careful about to make sure that this is a culture that is open to everyone and collaborative. And the design team, when we hire new talents, there is always a bit of protective sense of saying, hey, this is my scope, this is my jam, this is my thing. And we always encourage people to say, hey, sit down with this engineer from this team, spend the day together, have lunch together, sit down after lunch with the coffee and take your laptops, go in this room, go in the couches or whatever and just make it happen. And for some it's just unnatural. Sometimes you just want to sit all by yourself all alone and do your stuff in a tunnel and say, hey, I'm done. And then someone will come up to your desk and say, what, what is this? Like, I wish we had the discussion together before you wrap this up. Like to me this is. This is problematic. You can do perhaps much better, or perhaps you can and have a different view about it. It starts to become a reflex and a habit to just do it, just create better products. Ultimately, this is one thing I always love to do. Again, you can do it remotely, of course, but it's not the same when you sit down next to each other and you create expenses together. We have this huge sandbox of the states of map, interactions with friends and so on. And you will go into the details and saying, hey, can you actually adjust the speed of this animation? It doesn't feel right. You don't have to wait to someone that just. Just ship a new build to come up to try this new feature. Just do it side by side, like, give me a preview. Let's jam together. You don't actually let me close down my laptop and my Figma file or my whatever. Either you show me how I can do it with cursor or whatever, or we can do it together and let's do it.

[A]

Can we talk a little bit about the hiring piece? Given the culture, the nature of the products, the level of design differentiation, what were the main signals that you were hunting for when you were having those early conversations with the of it?

[B]

It's definitely something that is very important because we didn't look, of course, track record experiences, previous experience, experiences are really important. But the main thing would be ambition, which is, I think everyone is looking for. Like everyone wants to hire someone as ambitious ultimately. So there's nothing special to say about this. But then we will be very careful about side projects. I think side projects are more and more. They. They were very underestimated back then, but today I think it's the strongest signal you can get when you hire someone, whether it's in the design space or anywhere else. It's what do you do in your free time? What do you do after work? What do you do at work? Do you have side project at work? Actually like something that you came up during a hackathon or something like that, it just ticks all the boxes. It basically shows that you're very curious that you're doing your homework because you know all these new tools you can use and leverage for your own craft, for your own products and ideas. So it's great. You'll know exactly what's happening in the world today, in your space. You can leverage your own creativity. So. And it brings this, you know, entrepreneurship mindset that is very important in startup, especially early stage. So when we look at someone applying and it's like, wow, you shipped this and this within six months. Okay. Just for fun. Oh, you don't have any user. It's okay. It's okay. You don't have to be great at, you know, marketing or distribution or perhaps you have. Exactly. You don't tell us about it. Like, we don't. We don't care about your previous expenses. You were at Meta, you were at Apple. We don't care. Like, talk to us about this very specific side project. It's funny because 15 years ago, when I got back from New York after Behance and I didn't talk about the jail part, but I ended up in jail. I got deported from my mistakes in New York ultimately, and I couldn't go back to the US for 10 years. I got scouted and interviewed for Google and Facebook and Dropbox in 2010 and 2011, which was really cool back then as a designer to join. There was many of my design heroes working there, like Tim Van Damme, Sebastian the Wiz, and so on. And I interviewed them and always at the fourth or fifth steps, I would tell them, hey, I'm actually banned from the U.S. can you guys do anything about it? And it never worked, but at least I tried. It was really frustrating. But every time these guys would reach out, they found me. Not because I had this BN experience, but because I had cool side projects. Back then. I had apps that I worked on, very branded apps. Like this ringtone app feels like a real tape that you can browse back and forth with a wooden kind of texture around it and LCD screen on top. And they will be like, hey, can you tell us about this app? I'm like, wait, I can tell you about Behance. And we don't care about Behance. Talk to us about this app. And it was always kind of a Trojan horse to all these new cool companies. So every time, it's always the same speech, like, people work on your side project. Especially today, it's so important.

[A]

Ten years ago, that did feel like a slightly more minority perspective. Like, people did care about, like, the resumes and the previous companies. And I feel like, at least in my experience, more than ever before, companies want to see side projects. Because what you're able to do on your free time with no constraints I mean, you can go a lot further for a lot of people that are working on more like legacy B2B products, you know, like you can go so much further on your side projects with these new tools and being creative and trying things and experimenting. I do feel like there's this moment in time right now where there's a lot of alpha inside projects, like a lot because the hiring managers want to see them. And there's an uptick for sure, like more people are experimenting and tinkering, but there's still like, my gosh, you can stand out in a very real way with something as simple as just having a little experiments tab on your portfolio. That's a slam dunk for people who are looking for the next thing.

[B]

Absolutely. I 100% align with this. I met this great talented guy from Bay Area recently who just ended his 10 years experience at Microsoft. And when I asked him how does it feel, why does he want to go back to the trenches into early stage companies and startups? I was worried about, you know, this corporate America, you know, on the resume. And he mentioned to me, I left in September and since then I've been shipping this, this, this and this. Yeah, John with AI designed this and this. I'm like, okay, perfect, you'll be fine. Yeah, you'll be fine. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. And this is exactly the right mindset. This is, you know, the guy is so hungry and 10 years of Microsoft, you know, went out and found frustrated and saying, okay, now I'm going to go all in and do this.

[A]

Let's go deeper on this topic for a second because this is something that you've been playing a lot with recently. You have off market, you're kind of helping this hiring process, working with candidates and companies. Given your kind of macro perspective, what are some of the things that you're noticing like how can we help people listening understand what you are seeing in today's job market and how that might impact the way that they would kind of strategically position or approach the hiring process or anything like that that you think people listening could learn from?

[B]

I think the main thing I've been witnessing, and this is very early still, but four months later with off market, this matching thing is how the topology, the setup and how teams are getting formed up at the beginning and how they scale is completely different from 10 years ago. There are many teams I'm working with right now that, that you know, say publicly and officially say, hey, we will be a billion company very fast, but will only be Seven of us that we won't be, we won't be a hundred, we'll be just seven. And we'll be seven for at least three years. And they have a very clear roadmap of why there will be seven in three years and why there will be perhaps 15 on the fourth year, but not more. This is why I keep saying to the designers I meet, I say, hey, if you want to have a chance to join these companies, you have to be 360. The founding designer role, in my opinion on paper is the perfect role if you want to do anything you want to do, participate in the strategy and the vision, you want to be very operational and hands on, crafting the product, iterating and shipping cool things. But you also have to Design or leverage AI to design your new LinkedIn banner or whatever, I don't know, something like this. And chances are you will be the only designers for months or years to come. There will be no one else. You have to work on your own or perhaps there will be a very small design team, but not much more. And sometimes it kind of comes up as it's very brutal in a way.

[A]

It's.

[B]

There are some designers that were used to huge teams, huge squads. All of a sudden they are very attracted to one of two companies and I tell them, well, they want to meet you, but you have to know first that it's going to be very challenging. It's going both in terms of responsibilities, pace and scope. Like everything is so different and it changes very fast. You have to be very fluent in AI. You have to be very iterative using like you, you won't spend this much time on figma, actually you will spend much more time on all the available tools you have. And you would. Chances are you will actually commit your own code and changes directly in the code base days and no one else would do it for you. This is something that is widely searched in terms of talent right now. I have a close friend of mine that just signed in very insane companies in Berlin here in Germany. And you know that when I asked about how he does after two or three months after he joined the company, they told me this guy is insane. He's going super fast. He's two days after he already had a working prototype in hand. This is far more than we expected. This is really great. This is the perfect match. And this really warms my heart because this is exactly why I think this guy was great for this company. So I think I did a great job on this, but I'm Also, you know, I want to do the same now. I want to build my own stuff and be very fast as well without sacrificing taste and delight.

[A]

There's always been this gap between, you know, the, the founding designer experience and somebody that's working at, you know, a very large design org in this established company. But man, that gap does feel like it is an order of magnitude larger than it was even two years ago. And yeah, I don't know, I guess I kind of just wonder how it all shakes out, you know, because as more and more teams do get lean and as more and more companies are created, what percentage of the job market for design is allocated towards smaller design orgs. Where previously you had these massive design orgs that were commanding so much of the talent, there is this fragmentation that is happening. And I don't know, I think a lot about like, what are the second order effects of that for your everyday candidate? Who's listening to this?

[B]

You know, 10 years ago when you came out from just like this Microsoft guy story I mentioned when you came in from Meta, Apple, Snap, all these cool consumer companies on paper and wow, you're from this world. Now if you're out of these companies and looking for startup jobs, it's hard. Like really hard. It's like for me, like I try to sell these profiles and I try to be very transparent and bold about this when I present profiles with great track record in these companies and I try to leverage everything I can to please come and say, hey, look, money isn't the primary driver with this profile anymore. First he will join because he deeply cares about the mission, the product and the team. I think you should talk to him, to her, go ahead. You know, and he's like, no, no, no, it just, I don't want anyone from these companies. I want someone that has either freelance background or agency background or startup background, but, but with side project and so on. This is 90% of the profiles that are needed right now. At least on my very modest portfolio of companies, this is exactly the type of profile that is needed.

[A]

I'm seeing the same thing actually too, where I have a decently wide spectrum of terms of the companies that are hiring some bigger companies and a lot of startups, but even the bigger companies, they come to me and say we want to operate more like startups on.

[B]

The other side too.

[A]

You know, like everybody's trying to at least trick themselves into believing that they are more nimble than they actually are, you know, and obviously it requires much larger organizational changes and you Know, you don't just get that overnight as a big company, but that is the desire, like, the desire is to behave more like a startup. And if you come from a very big company, you can totally succeed. But yes, there's something in hiring manager's brain that's like, you have to show me that you're not going to bring that way of working with you. You have this hurdle that you have to overcome out of the box. And I, I've seen it now enough times where it's like, okay, this is, this is a pretty clear trend. And it feels weird to even say, you know, like, a lot of people are in that situation. But, like, that is the reality of the market right now.

[B]

Definitely. You know, all these old ways of, like building huge headcounts, you know, chasing headcounts was actually a metric of success. It's like, hey, my team is like 50 people now. Because you have one product design role that is double, triple cross. It's the old ways of building teams. And then three years later, you have 1500 people getting laid off because it doesn't work anymore. Like, I can see how this is all going to be. It's, it's shifting. It's definitely shifting.

[A]

Another thing I'm noticing is that some teams don't even have the language to describe the roles that they're hiring for. Like, I was talking to somebody yesterday, and it's a startup that I bet most people listening to this have heard of. It's a very cool startup. And they're like, yeah, we, you know, we want. It's a designer, it's a product person. But, like, we definitely want them to be living in the code too. And, like, we hope that they could be kind of comfortable exploring motion and some, like, animation stuff. And it's like this person they're describing is straddling basically every discipline of how we traditionally thought of the engineering, product design triad. Like, they want a little bit of everything, and there's not even a, there's not even a word for it. They don't even have a title for the role that they're hiring, you know?

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And I was just kind of sitting there smirking to myself because it's such an interesting reflection of the state of the market where, like, people don't even know what they want. They just want somebody to be able to come in and make an impact.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, I want everything. Like, bring me someone everything. I want. Use tactical. The one want, you know, motion design, 3D design, product design. I want everything and I want this person to be able to code as well. And yeah, it's definitely. I can see that more and more. And I think it's part of our job, too. And I know it's your job, too, to, when you screening new candidates and new talents, to say, hey, this is where you're getting very strong at. And this is. I have the perfect match for you, the perfect company. You need to talk to the them.

[A]

All right.

[B]

We.

[A]

We covered a lot of ground. I have a random question before I let you go. I'm curious. As somebody who has good taste in terms of consumer products and what. Who's pushing the envelope in different interesting ways, is there an app or some kind of a product that you've come across in the last, I don't know, year or two where you're like, oh, that is interesting. That did something for me. Maybe that even tapped into something that feels familiar to the DNA that you kind of grew up with in this Zenly and Ammo era.

[B]

Retro app is really great in terms of polish. In terms of craft, it's not crazy, but there are all these tiny touches that feels like a great app. The ability to send cool postcards. Almost all the design team from Ammo using this app on a daily basis, and I'm dragging behind a little bit. I love duolingo from what they do every. Like the. The craft, the bar is really high. The design team there is really, really good. And everything is so tightly connected together. The brand design, the motion design, the. The haptics. Everything is so, so good. So for me, it's perfect. The type of product that is perfect in terms of experiences, in terms of visual design, of how I feel when I use it. And I have many more that I cannot talk about right now.

[A]

I love it. Well, I've definitely had fun with this conversation, Julie, and I appreciate you coming and sharing. The story is so, so interesting and also just a big fan of everything that you've had a hand in making over the years. So I'm excited to see what's next, and I appreciate your time today.

[B]

Thank you, Reed. Thank you so much for having me.

[A]

Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm kind of constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.