Interview with Bill Scott

User groups with lots to say, interviews and more, no way, sharing great ideas in the tech community. Fascinating conversations, a plethora of information, find out for yourself today at ugtastic.com. Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m still here at the Web V isions 2013 here at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. I’m sitting now with Bill Scott. Bill is somebody who was recommended to me by more people than anybody else today. Somebody I should sit down and talk with. Bill, you work with PayPal, but can you describe what your title is? Because it was a little bit more than I could. So I head up what I call user interface engineering. So think of it as the front-end development, front-end engineering. All the web technologies. So my background basically is I came from Netflix. Before I came to PayPal, I was the head of UI engineering there. Closely with the design team for about four years. Built that team up, the engineering team. And then before that I was at Yahoo. And there I did the Yahoo design pattern library. I was also the AJAX analyst at Yahoo. And my passion is really around design engineering. So a few small companies. Yeah, a few small companies. So a book with O’Reilly called Designing Web Interfaces. It ‘s strictly a design book. So I’m one of those weird hybrids that can do JavaScript engineering, but also do design books. What is the animal one? Mine is the most amazing one possible. So the design books have birds, right? Yeah. So mine is the cock of the rock. I’m the only… I didn’t pick it. They picked it. Okay. That’s always fun to find out what the animal was. Yeah. I had to get a picture of it. Because the one in my head is not… Yeah, it’s TMI. So, okay. So, I mean, obviously you have a very broad depth of experience. And there’s one thing that’s in particular interesting that ‘s just happened with PayPal here in Chicago, and that is the acquisition of Braintree, one of our major… Yeah. …financial credit card service companies that are funded by PayPal. Yeah. Do you have any insight into what happened? Well, I know the arc that it ties in really well with what I even talked about at the workshop and the day of the talk . We’ve been on a journey to transform PayPal into an innovative company. Right. PayPal has been a very good brand and very successful in the amount of money it’s made and those sort of things like that. Right. When I was leaving Netflix in 2011, it was pretty obvious that PayPal wasn’t really on my radar as a company, but I knew a few key folks there who were the CTO. And I have a lot of respect for them for the previous things they’ve done. And so they’ve been talking about coming. And we started a journey when David Marcus became president in April of 2012 to transform PayPal to be a very lean, net -based startup against the use of Lean UX. So the acquisition of Braintree really is… It’s another step in that evolution. It’s like, here’s obviously an incredible company that started up, has moved at lightning speed, and is making a huge impact on the Amazon industry. Definitely a strong and developed company with awesome APIs . Also they have Venmo, they have New York, which is a great mobile app. So they’ve got mobile talent, API talent. We are already transferring our APIs. This just kind of takes us to the next level, really. And one of the cool things we’re going to do… David is a huge, he’s a serial entrepreneur, our president. Until PayPal, he only did startups, right? Until he got acquired by PayPal. So he’s going through the acquisition stage. Now he’s… Right, now he’s acquired. So it’s very, very important that we let Braintree continue to be the innovator it is. And still be called Braintree, be able to not really change anything other than give it a great, broader breadth. And much more financial support, and the larger eBay family . And it fits really well with the whole eBay family. We’re really excited. In fact, I met Michael Wilkie, who’s here as one of the product designers, product managers. He’s actually in my talk. You’ve got a quick chance to chat with him. And Braintree, I know, and I’ve actually interviewed one developer from their new testing. And just extremely well-versed. In Chicago. So that’s current events, but I’m interested in your book, and also the concept of Lean UX that you’re teaching. And what does that mean, obviously? Yeah. So if you’re familiar with Jeff, God helps book Lean UX, which follows on… I’m more on the dev side, so… Okay, cool. Yeah. So if you think about Lean Startup, Lean Startup really is about, you know, how do I get to customers as quick as possible? How do I validate my risky assumptions? How do I… You know what, pivot, do the right thing. Or the Lean Startup. Lean Startup. Sorry, I’m sorry. That’s okay, no, no. Lean UX follows on to that. So Jeff God help actually wrote a book on Lean UX, and we started using those same ideas. What Lean UX really says is, hey, if you’re going to be doing design, you know, it’s not really about delivering documentation. It’s about delivering experience and doing that collaboratively with engineering, with design, with product , all together. So closing some of those loops. Yeah, break those walls down. Be very clear. Be very collaborative in nature, as much as possible, and either live in the same room, the same space together, and operate like a startup. Like a startup. And so this is very apropos to a large company like PayPal that had, you know, from an innovation perspective, had obviously stagnated. Coming up to 2011, it just took, it could take six weeks to change those words on the site. And so now we’re down to less than five, actually, just based on… We wait five minutes to check the web. You know, the web we’re going to get. So it’s, you know, we’ve been transforming the technology stack. I talked about that yesterday in the workshop a little bit. All with this idea in mind of, how do you get engineering … So I’m actually writing another book right now for the Lean Startup Series called Lean Engineering. Okay. And the idea of Lean Engineering is, if you think about engineering from the perspective of enabling learning, what do you do different in engineering? Well, one of the things you do different… Well, one of the things you do different… Well, one of the things you do different… One of the things you do different is you actually engineer for prototyping. You don’t think of prototyping as a separate activity. You actually think of the product should support prototy ping. So we’ve actually engineered our architecture now so that the prototype stack is the same as the production stack. We use Node.js. We use some JavaScript templating on top of that. We can run that on our Java stack or our Node stack or our C++ stack, you know, our templates. So what we do in prototyping on a weekly or every other week basis, we can feed right in the Agile stream. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. We can run that on our Java stack. 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