Web Development And Frontend Practice: Mike Hall Interviews Bill Scott | WebVisions 2013
Meet Bill Scott, a user interface engineer at PayPal with a passion for design and a background in both Netflix and Yahoo. Learn about his involvement in the acquisition of Braintree and his work on a new book on lean engineering. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the most innovative minds in the tech industry. #webdevelopment #frontendpractice #leanengineering #userinterfaceengineering #billscott
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at WebVisions 2013 sitting down with Bill Scott. Bill, can you describe what your title is at PayPal?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
I head up user interface engineering at PayPal. My background is I came from Netflix where I was head of UI engineering for four years, and before that Yahoo where I built the Yahoo Design Pattern Library. I also wrote 'Designing Web Interfaces' for O'Reilly—the book with the cock-of-the-rock bird on the cover!
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Obviously you have a broad depth of experience, but what can you tell us about PayPal's acquisition of Braintree here in Chicago?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
The acquisition of Braintree is a huge step in our evolution. Braintree has moved at lightning speed with awesome APIs, Venmo, and mobile talent. David Marcus, our president, is a serial entrepreneur, so it's very important that we let Braintree continue to innovate while giving them broader financial support within PayPal and eBay.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What is Lean UX and how does it apply to large organizations?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
Lean UX, following Jeff Gothelf's work and Lean Startup principles, is about delivering experiences collaboratively with engineering, design, and product together—breaking down silos. At PayPal, it used to take six weeks to change words on the site; now we're down to 5 minutes!
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
How different is that from minimum viable product (MVP) concepts?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
It supports MVP directly because you use a rapid prototyping stack. I'm actually writing a book called 'Lean Engineering' for the Lean Startup series about engineering for learning and prototyping. We use Node.js and JavaScript templates so prototype stacks match production stacks, allowing Lean UX Scrum teams to feed right into Agile Scrum streams. code okay so that's interesting so you have these two teams that are running in parallel or near parallel yeah a little bit off from each other and using two slightly different methodologies for or for delivery what was what was the reason that one was using the Scrum methodology and the other one was using well they're both they both use sort of a Scrum methodology you know the lean ux doesn't so Agile you know Agile Scrum has a lot of they like to come serve on machine right the stand-ups the weekly iteration right so there's still there's still the concept of stand-ups you know in the lean ux Scrum team uh but there's not like a lot of stories in the backlog it's very simple it's much more hypothesis driven you're much more you know rapidly sketching or creating a design getting in prototype form and then getting it usability testing so you learn from it and then what comes out of that you know feeds out of that is stories from the backlog of Agile code that you can actually reuse because you develop the ui to a to a fairly you know rough state you know it's uh got the happy pass and you've got uh some of the application build too so that you can take and harden it and what we like to do is flip engineers between the name and the angel so they are always like you're on the customer set up so this much more customer yeah yeah that's very interesting because it's it makes me to get like the spike into uh production uh kind of uh yeah you just build something that's just good enough yeah and just clean it up and put it into yeah the production code base yeah so i think of this i've heard somebody you know on the design side use the same you know engineering say cicd you know continuous integration continuous deployment but you can think of continuous innovation continuous design you know right so the design is always a model um
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Looking back at some of the big companies, trying to bring in Agile methodologies in traditional organizations—has that been something openly embraced from the bottom up or pushed down?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
It's been bottom-up, top-down, and outside-in. The best change models combine top-down support, bottom-up passion, and new DNA from the outside. Big organizations get static and do stupid stuff because of organizational antibodies. Coming into PayPal, I knew what it was like. Technology, process, and design needed a customer-centric perspective. When you deal with 120 million customers, algorithms handle risk, but if algorithms freeze accounts, people get angry because money affects them personally.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah, you're right. I see constant stories on Reddit about Kickstarter or charity accounts being frozen.
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
Exactly. What we do is watch Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter. As soon as we see something like that, we go fix the problem and look at policy changes. When money comes in really fast for a conference or campaign, risk algorithms trigger. But if support teams aren't empowered to fix it, it creates a double whammy.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What measures do you take to ensure that your support team is empowered to fix problems?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
We have a system that enables support teams with 'goodwill tokens'. If they take one of those tokens to fix a problem for a customer, they can't get in trouble or fired if they make a mistake. It empowers them to do the right thing for the user. There's a little bit of spending involved, but you have to use it wisely so you don't go back and forth willy-nilly. You think about it, and you know, this is obviously two weeks, you know.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Can you give an example of how this system has worked in practice?
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
Sure. A funny story I'll give you is from early this year. There was a story on Hacker News about a kid who created a JavaScript library animation. He's a junior in college, and I actually went to Kentucky University. PayPal had locked his account because he made a tremendous amount of money in a very short period of time. He got on Hacker News and said something like, 'I made about two hundred thousand dollars, and people's locked my account.' We saw it, and we even went to work to unlock his account. We hired him, and he came in and did amazing stuff for us. He was one of the best interns I've ever had. He's coming back, and he's joining some more stuff. We made him off, and he's coming back next year. We're about to do a bunch of articles about that, and I really love doing that because you know, PayPal has been in the dark ages, right? Right, and it was so refreshing because you know, really, in the charge on Node, we're one of the leaders in that space.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
The companies that's actually we're about to open source a bunch of new frameworks but you know we brought a bunch of people from the outside to other companies we also had some great people inside that were already there and we're changing i kind of like that story that's a fun story for me is you know how do i get engineering design work together how do the great technology and frankly i'm having no trouble recruiting at all i'm getting some really great people because you know people at the end of the day engineers and designers whoever what you're going to work on is really important and powerful so we got that who you're going to work with so i brought some great people in from lots of good companies that's important and how you're going to work that's this lean ux lean style of working is critical if you get the who how the what down right yeah of course you got to pay decent have good maybe good location helps well but those are all those are all you know they're not the main thing right people make all kinds of sacrifices to get the how well i mean it sounds like you one of the thing one of the things when you hear about a story like uh the young man who made two hundred thousand dollars off his library is he's got some decent seed money that he could spend and think about the next thing yeah but convincing him that you obviously had to bring something other than just pure money yeah to him and say yeah you're going to have this environment where you're going to be have some latitude yeah freedom to do something interesting well for you know fortunately at the same time i've hired a friend of mine who he used to have a search at Netflix he'd gone on to be the cto of mobile at zynga previously he had been at amazon helped build the initial cloud and even the early days of mac os the guy's well traveled yeah he's a wonderful guy so uh we were able to bring emmanuel the intern in and worked directly with rod so he got to work the best clients around and uh and that's not just money that's more of them right yeah right and then of course jeff harrell on my team is just really brilliant another guy eric that i brought from Netflix and a few other folks have been from Netflix are just really smart awesome guys who get the full package of not just it's not just engineering but it's design it's customer centric and that's what drives someone like emmanuel right of his intern is in the day he's passionate about creating best experience possible he would he would sit there and go you know when i do this because he was building an html file equivalent during the native app and
Bill Scott
web development and frontend practice
▶ Speaking
...
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
In daily infinite scrolling, doing all the crazy complicated stuff, and he's going like, look when I move this, you know? And I could see it because I'm a pixel maniac too, right? But some of the people team couldn't see it. Every once in a while, jigs by one pixel that just drove him nuts. Yeah, he's going to get that right and I love that attention to detail. Uh and of course, I have that too, so I think he enjoyed working with me because I would come back and say, you know, the friction is not exactly right. You know, the physics is not exactly right on this issue of five experience versus the native and so how so and I show him, you know, I say, no, you notice that you know how the ease out of the very last you know a little bit slows down and so within about an hour he came back, check this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah and he loved that you know being challenged like that so yeah and knowing that he's working with people he can respect yeah yeah you know that I mean it's not about that you don't respect who you're working with but somebody who's you want to be challenged yeah he's going to push you and like somebody who's been there yeah yeah well thank you very much for yes I really enjoyed it. It's great to meet you. Likewise. Thank you.