Why Design is Hard (And How Collaboration Changes Everything) with Bryan Zug

Episode Summary

What makes design hard? It’s not just pixels, software, or tools — it’s people. (Yep, you. And me. And all of us.) In this episode, I sit down with my friend Bryan Zug, co-author (along with Scott Berkun), of the book, Why Design is Hard, to talk about why good design is more than just good ideas — it’s about relationships, collaboration, and the messy, sometimes painful reality of working on creative teams.

Bryan was there in the early days of the web, hacking together sites before CSS was even a thing. He’s built products, led UX teams, and helped companies like Amazon and Zillow figure out how to make design work at scale. But more than that, he’s a community builder, the kind of guy who started hosting backyard firepits during COVID just to keep people connected.

I’ll be honest — this conversation was brutal to edit because Bryan has so much insight to share. If you’ve ever struggled with design bottlenecks, team dynamics, or just getting your ideas off the ground, this one’s for you.

What We Cover in This Episode

💡 Why great design is really about great relationships
 🎨 How designers can avoid getting stuck in “artifact culture” 
 💻 What designers actually do in the real world 
 📖 How storytelling can make or break your influence as a designer
 🤝 The secret sauce to making cross-functional teams actually function
 🦄 Why the lone “unicorn designer” era is over — and what comes next 

*Factually accuracy check at playback: Bryan informed me he misspoke at 7:11 when he said he was at Amazon when the pandemic hit — I was actually Zillow. NBD. Audio not edited. 

⏳ Timestamps

⏲️ [00:00] Intro – A Conversation Years in the Making

⏲️ [02:15] The Big Idea: Why Design is Hard

⏲️ [08:40] The Myth of the “Design Hero”

⏲️ [14:25] Why Design Decisions Happen in Budget Meetings

⏲️ [19:30] The Red Flags of a Company That Doesn’t Truly Value Design

⏲️ [25:10] The #1 Skill Designers Need (Hint: It’s Not Figma)

⏲️ [30:50] What Ignite Seattle Taught Bryan About Telling Better Stories

⏲️ [35:15] Outro – Why You Need to Read Why Design is Hard

Links & Resources

📖 Grab a copy of Why Design is Hard

Learn more about the co-author, Scott Berkun: https://scottberkun.com/
🔗 Connect with Bryan Zug: @bryanzug.bsky.social
🎶 The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin: https://ronniemartin.org/

🎵 Music interstitials by Zach Malm: https://muzach.bandcamp.com/

🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions: https://www.lemonproductions.ca/ 

"Retro Race" https://pixabay.com/music/video-games-retrorace-108750/

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Transcript

Welcome to Podcast Awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business,
and nerdery with members of the Font Awesome team.
Well, today's episode is a special one for me, firstly because my buddy Bryan is
podcast awesome's second non -Font Awesome team member guest.
And secondly, this is a particularly special episode because I get to sit down with
somebody I've known literally for decades but have He just recently had the joy of
truly getting to know well in recent years. My pal Bryan Zug and he and his wife
Jen have become dear friends and I've come to appreciate not only Bryan's sharp mind
but his huge heart for building real community. Bryan's a designer, an entrepreneur,
and an all -round problem solver who was in on the ground floor of the web all the
way back to the mid -90s building sites, designing products, and navigating the wild
west of early digital business. He's worked at the big boys like Amazon, Zillow,
and a whole lot of different startups and across industries to make design work
better at scale. But beyond his impressive resume, he's a natural communicator and
community builder, somebody who brings people together whether through design,
storytelling, or even backyard fire pits during the pandemic to help folks stay
connected. And to be honest this episode was kind of hard to edit because Bryan has
so much good insight to share but today we're talking about his new book which he
co -authored with Scott Berkun titled "Why Design is Hard" which unpacks the
challenges of making good design happen in real -world teams. If You've ever wrestled
with messy projects, conflicting priorities, or just the realities of working with
other human beings? This conversation is for you. All right, let's get into it.
Bryan Zug, thank you so much for hosting the conversation here. This is really
exciting because we're starting to do non -font awesome interviews and conversations,
and you just so happen to have a brand new studio set up, which has been in the
works for a while. - Yes, indeed. - It looks great, man. It's an awesome set up. So
all I had to do was show up and Brian pressed a button and here we are. Like I
don't have to worry about any of the tech. It's great. And we are going to be
talking today about a book that Bryan co -authored called why design is hard.
That's what we're gonna be talking about today. Was there a specific frustration or
a problem you were trying to solve or a solution you were trying to get across to
people or at least point people in the right direction? What sort of sparked the
idea for the book for you and Scott? - I think it was like for me, being at
Amazon and be like, I wanted to get into a really big tech and just see what it
was like. I wanted to be in the belly of the beast. And I had a good friend,
folks in Seattle, no Luz Bratcher, she gets around the design scene here in town,
and she was at Amazon at the time and she said, you should really look at some of
the teams here, they've got this role of design program manager and it really, like
we need people like you. I was Okay. Cool. Um, and I ended up landing on a team
that did all the UX for fulfillment centers worldwide, talk about being in the belly
of the beast. We were, we basically were a team of 15 people and we were making
the software that everybody in warehouses uses like in a lot of them are repetitive
action. So you've got software attached to automated devices and automation and robots
and all sorts of stuff. And so people are doing like things like this repetitive
task like 10 ,000 times a day, right?
And, and I was just flabbergasted by how disorganized the entire process was when I
got there.
And it took me a while to find my sea legs. They had a project and they wanted
to do a kickoff and
team leader was out of town at the time. And so I went in to do the kickoff. And
I led with this framework that I use called the understand prototype build framework.
It says you go through at a base level in product development, you go through three
phases, understand like the problem, the people on that, prototype what you think
might work, and then build stuff. Like don't go build stuff before you understand or
prototype. And if you go through that, you're going to have like an impactful, like
you're going to have the right problem impactful solution. But if you skip a step,
you're going to be working on the wrong problem, or you're going to be working on
the wrong solution. Or if you just go straight to build, it's just going to be a
train wreck. When I got to that third point of just the build, and I had been
struggling to like get these relate, you know, figure this thing out. So I could
make an impact or we could do good work. These senior engineers just started
laughing maniacally. They're like, you just described my life. Like we get asked to
build stuff that nobody's thought through all the fucking time. Yeah. And I was just
like, okay. And that and it usually gets the most chuckles out of senior engineers
because they've gone through built stuff that nobody really thought through, but but
it had to happen and then it never ships and they've the the wasted effort is just
in the billions and billions of dollars across the industry of stuff that people
didn't really think through they wouldn't build stuff and you could have known and
you could have done stuff fast we're not talking about analysis paralysis or anything
and so it was at amazon that I really started to kind of go, okay, this is not,
I thought the enterprise would be way smarter than I imagined. And I thought that
it would have processes at scale that it didn't have. And so out of that,
like Scott and I would always be chatting, we've been friends since 2005.
And we had always sort of talked about these themes and he's always sort of taking
notes and saying, "No, we should do, you know, a project together sometime." I was
like, "What does that mean?" Well, then the pandemic hit and he had a health scare
and the health scare basically kicked us into hanging out two or three times a week
and we would get together every Wednesday usually at Chuck's Hop Shop here in
Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle and have dinner. And we just started talking about
these scenarios. And it was, you know, I was at Amazon when the pandemic had hit
and he had his health scare. But we just started talking about these themes because
it was just the biggest thing that we could see in, you know, this kind of work
that we do.
And that's when he's like, we should read a book. And I was like, what the hell
does that even mean? I'm a really slow writer 'cause I grew up in a family where
I was required to be a perfectionist and I have a very hard time in certain
circumstances and public writing seems to be one of those circumstances where one of
the reasons I wanna do conversational video stuff is it's easier for me. But like
writing, I'm just like totally, I can't get that should I first draft out you know,
the Anne Lamont terms. It is a thing. Yeah. And so, you know,
I said, hey, like, what does that mean? I write really slow. And he's like,
well, that's great, because we've been taking notes, and we've been whiteboarding and
writers rooming this whole thing, like he's our Hindu city first draft real fast.
And that's kind of where the book was formed. And we, we had an original,
originally, it was called the design hero manifesto and make it a short manifesto.
But it was the arc of it was problematic. It didn't test well. And then we ended
up changing the name just like, what's it really about? Well, this is about why
designs are.
Yeah.
So do you think that there is like a common misconception about design work that
you think the book helps to debunk.
- Yeah, I think that, you know, I've got this sort of thing that I,
the way that I frame it a lot of times is, this is not the job, this is the
job, right? And like, the book is really about that quite a bit, right?
And like Figma is not the job. Like there was a billboard kind of in the Fremont
neighborhood that Figma put up a big billboard. It's right between like Amazon and
Google and Metta and Adobe and kind of all these tech,
Tableau and stuff. And then had their new branding and it said,
"Make, believe." And like, I'm like, well,
that's not how it works, but that's how we train our designers a lot of times.
- Yeah, tell me a little bit about that. What do you mean? - So like, we are very,
the book addresses this culture that we have, which Scott and I have called artifact
culture, right? And so we train people to use tools like Figma or to do some kind
of like user journey process. And if I make this artifact, right, and I really
think it through, and I deliver it, the world will change, my ideas will get made,
I will have an impact, right? What's missing from that is, I don't know what to
make, right? I've got ideas, but I have to check them with other people in a cross
functional team in order to make things that are impactful, right? And so the book
primarily, the big theme is like getting away from that artifact worship and getting
into relational reality of how you do that sort of stuff.
One of my favorite, one of my favorite books about design is an information
architecture book that never mentions the word information architecture, but it's
called How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert and that's the job.
We're always going to have messes, we're always going to have problems and a lot of
the messes are going to be way bigger than we can do by ourselves and that's
basically kind of another way of looking at the thesis of the book. Yeah again it
goes I mean there's that thread that common thread all the time it's really about
healthy, good relationships where there's good communication and you're defining the
problem in human center terms and all that. - Well, and it's good communication,
but it's also like, I mean, ethnography is like a big high -falutin' word.
You gotta sit with people for a while. You have to be in a relationship with them
and you gotta understand and be genuinely curious, you know? And If you come from a
school, and most of our schools did not train this into folks that like
the relational aspect of all this stuff.
Yeah, it's very difficult. And you end up getting burned out, frustrated.
And a lot of people end up like not advancing in their careers the way that they
want and making the impact the way that they want. - This is making me think of a
conversation that I had with our co -founder Dave recently where he was reflecting
on, he was a coach for a Lego league for kids, for his kids and another group of
kids. And part of their grade, when they would put out a project, was how well did
you work together? You have to learn how to work well together. 'Cause if you
don't, you're not, it's gonna you're really hard to come up with solutions that are
gonna work. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And then, and really looking at where,
where do things like mentoring fit in and coaching and like,
how do you learn to do this stuff? Like the number one thing that I get asked,
you know, probably a month or two after I joined a team is two or three younger
folks like that are early in their career paths will like come and say, Hey, can
you mentor me like, like in a structured way? Because I want to learn how to do
the things that you're talking about. And I'm really intrigued. And I've never
encountered it. And like, I've been to school, I have a lot of like, educational
debt. But I never learned these things. Nobody has ever said these things are
important to concentrate on.
So, in the book, you argue that designers will primarily, they advise rather than
making decisions and how can designers learn to embrace that reality instead of
getting frustrated like they're hitting a wall all the time. So there was, I was, I
was at, so IXDA is a big kind of UX organization that had their 2019 conference
here in Seattle. And John Mehta is a really kind of well -known UX designer guy.
I think he headed up MIT Media Lab for a while, maybe at the RISD School of
Design. I can't remember. But he did a talk that was really memorable called Doers
versus Talkers. And What happened was when he was actually doing design He had a
lot of respect in among his peers and in industry and stuff But as soon as he
started to move into leadership He started getting sort of trash -talked of like,
oh Well, you're not really a doer now you're a talker and And that's another big
theme that we deal with in the book is that a lot of the design decisions of
what's actually going to ship happen in budget meetings. They happen in product road
mapping meetings. Things that a large portion of us as designers and UX folks,
those are not things that we're naturally interested in. We don't gravitate towards
those things. And a lot of it is we feel like, oh, well, that's not my or,
or that's a sellout, or I don't want to do that kind of work. And what's done is
it's collapsed the top and the bottom. So if you are a director of above, it's
nearly impossible to find a job. What a good friend of mine, the most talented,
like design executives I've ever known, had has been looking for you over a year.
I found nothing, right? He's contracting, doing some stuff right now. Same thing,
talking to people early in their career path because they do a lot of mentoring,
there are no jobs for them because everybody that's been laid off that is sort of
a already in the industry or up to mid -level, they're taking kind of those jobs
and taking that downgrade of salary in order to stay in the industry and stay in
the work. And so we're seeing that sort of compression layer and a lot of it is
we are being confronted as UX professionals really like circumstantially just like the
reality of the environment is if we just sort of stick into our figmas or our
murals or our mirror you know our flowchart software and user journey software we're
going to be out of the loop where those decisions are made and we might not have
a job. And so this migration from being kind of a UX person to being a product
manager is something that a lot of UX folks are doing because that's a lot of
times where the decisions and influence are made. And is it a sellout? Am I really
a designer anymore if I become a product manager. Yeah, right.
Like that. It's like, I lose the title that like, I have built a lot of affection
for in my life and in my community. Yeah, sounds like having to learn a different
skill set and put yourself right in there, you know. Yeah. Yeah, man.
So you have worked in a lot of different industries, like you've covered a lot of
ground. And is there a time that you can think of where design thinking helped you
Break through some hard organizational challenges. Oh, it's it's hard to think of a
time when it hasn't It's just the way that it's just the way that I operate, you
know, it's like it's like hey, we're you know one of the one of the big things
like for me One of the reasons people bring me into their teams is they've got a
lot of ambiguity, right? And so I'm at, I'm what's known as an ambiguity specialist,
like throw me into the ambiguous end of the pool, right? And I can bring structure
and flow to a total chaotic, like ambiguous environment, right? And it's through,
like, understanding, like the basics of design thinking is like, okay, we're going to
go on discovery. And then we're going to discover a lot of stuff that's really like
confusing and frustrating and contradictory. And, and, and then we're in the messy
middle. And then we got to figure out what to do with it. So then we're going to
hone down like out of that messy middle. And then we're going to go into like a
refinement phase and like maybe we're prototyping something. And so we're going to
again, go into that a second sort of stage of messy middle. And then we're going
to hone it down and then we're going to ship something. Right. Um, same thing with
that understand prototype type build, like kind of framework. I think for me,
it's been, it's been very interesting to see the UX industry apply design thinking
to the way that it does its work. And that's the whole rise of design program
management and design ops. There was a, there was a conference in 2017 put on by
Rosenfeld media called the first it was the first design off -summit and it was at
the Academy for television arts or something in New York And I went with some
friends from Amazon and it just blew me away Because it was the first gathering of
professionals who are doing this There were like 200 or so of us there from around
the world doing this around the world But what we're doing is we're applying design
thinking to how UX organizations do their work. And then to begin to see how that
was received in the next two or three years,
I was leaving Amazon and I didn't have a gig yet. And Zillow like said,
hey, we heard about you. Heard you know a lot about design ops. We're thinking
about spinning up a design ops team. We think we need one, but we're not sure why
can you come and talk to us. And I was like, sure. And so I went in and did my
spiel, a lot of the same stuff I'm talking about here.
And they ended up saying, okay, now we know why we need it, you want a job? And
so we started the design with a friend of mine,
I co -founded the design ops group, the very first one at Zillow. And that was in
2020, a few months before the pandemic hit. And we grew it to,
I think, like 11 or 12 people by the time I left. Yeah, a year ago.
And a lot of that was really the enterprise coming to terms with the fact that
they had to work on how they work within UX teams and my boss ended up being,
I got a funny story, I got a call like the Monday or the Saturday before I was
supposed to start at Zilla back in January, 2020. I was like,
I don't want to call from the recruiter on Saturday before I'm supposed to start
and I pick it up and Carly was great. She's like, hey, everything's fine.
Don't where you're just not going to be reporting to the person that you were
reporting to. And I was like, what, is Andrew still there? Yeah, Andrew's still
there.
But Kristen Acker is going to be your boss. And I was like, okay, who's Kristen
Acker? Co -founder of Zillow. Yeah, that's fine. That,
that, that would be great. And I got to know Kristen really well. And she's one of
the sort of uncredited co -founders, flies under the are one of the best like
leaders and managers I've ever worked with. And under her basically it was her
decision to bring the two of us that were design program managers to be a part of
the senior leadership team. So we were there with the five other sort of director
level people. That's how important it was to get this right. And then we've seen
that paid dividends in the industry like at large. Yeah, there are other
organizations that I'm familiar with that just have really deep chops and until they
transform the way that they make things.
Can you think of some red flags that might be a clue that a company doesn't truly
value design, even when they say that they do, it's sort of like,
oh, we're people first. It's not an HR manifest or whatever. But you know, yeah. So
you want to look for in the industry, we call it pixel polishing or production
design, right? So there's all sorts of ways to tell like when like the product
manager just really wants you to theme their business plan, they don't want any
input from you. They just want you to like put a new, give me a dark mode on my
business plan or give me like, give me a shimmer mode or whatever it is, you know?
Give me a font, give me font awesome mode. - Yeah, yeah.
- And that is like, that's just like the number one red flag and it usually
structurally it is also, there's a great book about like how to structure UX teams
and big enterprises. It's called Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Mehrholtz and
Kristen Skinner. So in this book, Peter and Kristen,
they talk about different org designs and sort of the red flags that you can see
by the structure. Like so, you know, you've heard the term maybe shipping your org
chart, right? And so if you have designers who are reporting to people that are not
in their discipline, that's a red flag. They are usually going to be people that
have, don't have a lot of career path like in front of them because they're
reporting to people that are not in their discipline or their chosen career path so
they can't be mentored or coached very well. And then a lot of times that structure
is implemented just so that you will do what you're told or asked and not ask
questions, right? And so that's the number one thing, like look at the org chart
and see how it's structured. The model I like is the one the book goes after,
it's called centralized partnership. So it's like, you have all the disciplines
reporting up to, like people in the disciplines, so researchers report to researchers,
designers, report to designers, DPMs, report to other design program managers.
But then they are dotted like connected in pods to the group, to like a product
group along those lines. And so you have that sort of, you know, shared cross
-functional thing where you've got like three to five different disciplines that work
together. And the question is too, you can have that and still not get into the
act of co -creation where you're doing it as equals and peers. The other question is
process wise, like when you're doing your annual planning, how easy is that to do?
What are the stress points? And are you getting pulled into those planning
conversations. Is there an opportunity? Are you pulled into it? And if you're not
getting pulled into it, is there resistance if you try to get involved there? Right?
So those are, those are the two things. If there's resistance, then it's going to
be pretty clear that you're just going to be a pixel polisher. You're not really
actually going to be solving problems, which is that's what the whole UX industry is
about. It is like, okay, do you understand people, humans? Do you understand the
problems they really face and can you prototype solutions that actually make an
impact and solve a business problem or solve a real human problem in a sustainable
way that can create a business out of it. And so those are the red flags I look
for is kind of isolation, reporting to folks that are not in your discipline and
then pixel polishing in general.
So because you've been around for a while, are there mistakes that you see designers
making over and over again in their careers they can maybe avoid?
- You know, there are a lot of different personality types within like UX and
design, but one of the things that we tend to do is we're sort of shoe -gazy.
Like, we kind of, you know, like we like to be into our own thing,
you know? - Their offices look very cool and very tidy. - Yeah. - It's a vibe,
it's a vibe. - And so, you know, the, that personality type of just like not
getting out, like, you know, it's like you, you have a choice to eat lunch by
yourself or eat lunch in a way where you can bump into your engineering team or
your product management or your product marketing team or your brand team or the,
the designers and the engineers over in your design system team. Right. Um,
a lot of times I'm an introvert and my number one thing is like, I don't really
how I can do a lot of people by default, like at all. So I have to manage this
discipline to put myself out there, and then also learn this discipline of back to
how to win friends and influence people, be in a conversation and be genuinely
interested and really listen. And those are the things that I see as sort the,
the kryptonites and superpowers like two sides of the same coin. Yeah,
I can definitely see that. I think that's, uh, I can see that among like writers
and creative folks in general. You know, they just, they love their craft. They kind
of want to be left alone to do their magic, um, and have people come to them and,
and, and solve solutions for people. But, but sometimes there, there is sort of this
just kind of like, just kind of leave me alone and give me space, you know? And
you have to really work hard to kind of get beyond that, you know?
Neil Stevenson has this great riff in his novel, Cryptonomicon, where he's talking
about engineers who can do that sometimes as well. And he, he likens them to the
dwarves in the minds of Mora, like in total isolation under the hill and like,
you know, just leave us alone. We're going to work for a long time. Then we'll
come up with this. Oh, here's a ring that might do stuff.
What
role does story play in making design more inside of the organization.
- It is everything. It's everything.
I'm always sort of spouting off all the time. People get sick of it. The
storytelling structure, the simplest one I've ever come across is,
here's the basics of story. Setting, character, conflict resolution. In the classic
sense, there are only three resolutions. Comedy, everybody gets what they want. Drama,
you only get a little bit. Tragedy, you don't get shit. In that pattern is
everything that's made you laugh, cry, be frightened,
be terrified, be hopeful, be joyful in that pattern.
Outside of that pattern, who gives a shit? Like there are no stakes,
right? If you don't have the possibility of getting everything you want or losing it
all, there's no stakes, like why play, right? This is why sports is so interesting.
You don't know what's going to happen, right? And that in storytelling is when I'm
pitching a design, I need to capture the attention part,
you know, especially in an executive audience. These are busy people. They're
overloaded with communications. If I don't know how to understand what their
incentives are, their motivations, what their pain points are, if I can't speak to
that, they're gonna go, who gives a shit, who cares? This doesn't, like, how does
this matter to me, right? And so I think that, well, like, one of the number one
things that we can do is train designers and UX folks in storytelling.
That's one of the things that I did at Zillow was,
in our team meetings, my little team of three people, four people,
We always got the most laughs and like people remembered what we were talking about
because we followed the storytelling structure stuff and what we did. And then we
got asked to be in charge of all the team meetings. And then we like, "Hey, can
you teach storytelling for business?" So we had, we, my friend James and I,
we created a standing office hours every week called presentations change things.
Yeah. Right. And that a lot of us are just going through the motions and doing
presentations that don't change anything. Right. And just unlocking that power of like
the basics of understanding storytelling and how some stories are sticky like the
book made to stick by cheap Chip Heath and his brother. Just some of the best like
business telling resources have ever come across. And anybody that I know has,
has worked on that has had a bigger impact. I remember a friend of mine was
presenting to the CEO and one of the co founders of Zillow. And with these,
whenever you're whenever, whenever you're presenting the co founders, like,
it's just really dicey. And he He was really great. He followed the story structure
and he's like, "So we did this and we did this and here's how it impacted the
money." And he said it just like that and he showed the numbers. - That's a story,
right? Hey, Brian, is that a story? - Like if we don't make the money, we're not
gonna be in business. If we don't make the money, there are gonna be layoffs. Those
are the stakes, right? That is behind the, like, you know, there are, you know,
we will not, we will not put past us late stage capitalisms,
downsides and other like things in the motivations of like businesses and stuff. But
those are some of the like the realistic things. And I'll never forget the CEO.
We got to the feedback portion like 10 minutes in, he's like, this was my, but
This was my favorite presentation ever from a UX person 'cause you talked about the
numbers and I'm always asking you guys to talk about the numbers. Like the CEO lays
it out. He's like, please frame it this way. And if we think that it's gonna have
an impact but we can't kind of make that connection, let's talk about it out loud.
Let's not just sort of sweep it under the rug kind of a thing. Like there are
some things you can't measure very well, right? That we should do, right? Like
accessibility and like building things that are, you know, all of our neighbors,
no matter what their ability, you know, site and mobility and everything that they
can all use.
Those add to the bottom line, but not in a way that's like whiz bang kind of
thing. So you've got to thread the needle in a different kind of story. So like,
maybe it's like, Hey, we're going to make some money on this. But, uh, isn't this
the right thing to do? What do human beings owe to one another in software
development? Right. Isn't this a great experiment in what, but maybe, maybe I don't
owe anything to, uh, the 10 % of the community or 20 % that is, Um,
you know, just struggles with some kind of impairment, um, either permanent or
temporary, you know, um, that sort of thing. So storytelling is just like, yeah,
it's, it's the be all and all. Like it's the number one.
So you've talked a lot about storytelling, you're a great communicator, you can get
complex ideas across in simple ways and you are a part of Ignite Seattle.
Yes. What is Ignite Seattle and just tell me a little bit about that.
It was December 2007 and basically my friend Um,
and another friend, Bree, uh, were putting on this nerd variety show and they had a
lot planned, but the only thing that, um, stuck was they were doing five minute
talks with, uh, 20 slides that auto -advanced every 15 seconds that that's the gist
of it. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I showed up, uh, we published the video,
recorded the videos, published the videos and and they went viral, they like, we
started getting requests of like, hey, can we do Ignite's and Boulder and Phoenix
and all sorts of different stuff. And so that's the gist of it is everybody's got
a story to tell. Can we come up with an event that helps people tell the unique
stories that are theirs, right? And so early on it was mostly nerd topics because
that's kind of where everybody was coming from. We have talks about like AI cat
doors that prevent that it closes if your cat has a dead rat or a bird in its
mouth. Things like that. It's a good problem to solve. United States of Starbucks
that actually statistically it was like these are the places where the Starbucks are
the furthest away. Solving problems for - Yeah. - That's awesome. So if somebody wants
to know more about Brian's, where should they go? - I'm too old. So like all my
WordPress sites that I've self -hosted over the years have all gotten corrupted and
like I haven't been able to like bring them back online and like it's like, all
right. And so it's probably bryanzug .wordpress .com.
That's sort of the landing page. Where you can find my stuff like around in
LinkedIn and stuff like that. But yeah, it's mostly that and Blue Sky.
So Blue Sky is the place usually to to find me. And then from there,
like Instagram. Yeah, those are great. Thanks, Brian, for taking some time and for
hosting in this awesome space. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. All right.
So what I tell you I knew this was gonna be a great conversation and there you
have it Bryan Zug dropping some wisdom on why design is hard Why relationships
matter and why good work is never a solo endeavor and I knew this Conversation was
gonna be great, but honestly, I still wish we could have kept every single word And
if you're a designer a product thinker or just somebody who's trying to solve some
big problems. Do yourself a favor and go get a copy of why design is hard.
You'll thank me later. A huge thanks to Bryan for hosting me in his new studio and
for sharing his time and insights. And thanks to all of you podcast awesome
listeners. You know the deal. If this was informative or helpful to you in any way,
why don't you copy the URL right now and share it with a friend. Maybe you could
leave us a review and all that jazz. And as always this podcast was produced and
edited by yours truly Matt Johnson. The podcast awesome theme song was composed by
Ronnie Martin. The music interstitials were composed by Zach Malm and audio
mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions. And you know the rest