Name: Bill Scott
Uploaded: 2022-01-07
Description: Recovered from WITC metadata archive (Interview with Bill Scott___D8KqeuEBhvc.json).

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm still here at the Web Visions 2013 at the Jane Siskel Film Center in Chicago. I'm sitting down with Bill Scott. Bill is the—well, somebody who was recommended to me by more people than anybody else today, than somebody I should sit down and talk with. Bill is a—well, you work with PayPal.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yep.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

But can you describe what your title is? Because it was a little bit more than I could—

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah, so I head up what's called—what I call user interface engineering.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And, uh, so think of it as the front-end development, front-end engineering, you know. Uh, all of the web technologies, mobile, desktop, all of us. Um, you know, so, so my background basically is I came from Netflix before I came to PayPal. I was the head of UI engineering there, more closely with the design team, uh, for about four years.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Built that, uh, team up, the engineering team. And then, uh, before that I was at Yahoo, and there I did, like, the Yahoo design pattern library. I was also the Ajax and Agilist at Yahoo.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And, uh, my passion is really around designing engineering.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

So a few small copies.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah, a few small copies. And I also have a book with O'Reilly called "Designing Web Interfaces."

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

It's strictly a design book.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So I'm one of those weird hybrids that, uh, that can do JavaScript engineering but also do design.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

What, what is the, uh, animal on there?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Mine is the most amazing one possible. So the design books have birds, right?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So mine is the cock of the rock. That's, I'm the only, yeah, anyway. Yeah. I didn't pick it. Yeah, yeah. They picked it, so.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay. Yeah, that's always fun to find out what the animal was.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Um, I have to get a picture of it. Uh, the, uh, cause the one in my head is not. Yeah, it's TMI. Uh, so, so, okay, so, I mean, obviously you have a, a very broad depth of experience. Um, and, but there's one thing that's in particular interesting that's just happened with PayPal here in Chicago.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Uh, and that is the, um, acquisition of Braintree, one of our major, uh, financial, um, uh, credit card services. Uh, it's kind of partnered by PayPal.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Uh, do you have any insight into what happened?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Well, I know, I know the, so the arc that, that it ties in really well with what I even talked about, uh, at the workshop and the day of the talk. Uh, we've been on a journey to transform PayPal into an innovative company.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Uh, PayPal has been a very good brand and, and very successful in the amount of money it's made and those sorts of things like that. But when I was leaving Netflix in 2011 it was pretty obvious that, that PayPal wasn't really on my radar as a company I went to. But I knew a few kid folks there who were the CTO that I had a lot of respect for from the previous things they've done.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And so, they've been talking about coming. And we started a journey when David Marcus became president in April of 2012, uh, to transform PayPal to the very lean network startup.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Hence the use of Lean UX. So the acquisition of Braintree really is another step in that evolution. It's like, here, here's obviously an incredible company that started up, has, uh, moved at lightning speed and is making a huge impact on the payments industry. Uh, definitely a strong development of awesome APIs. Also they have Venmo, they have New York, you know, which is a great, 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, I believe. And one of the cool things we're going to do, because David is a huge, he's a serial entrepreneur.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Our president. Until PayPal, he only did start us.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Until he got acquired by PayPal. So he's going through the acquisition system. Now he's...

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right. Now he's acquired.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. So, it's very, very important that we let Braintree continue to be the innovator it is.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

You know, still be called Braintree, be, you know, be able to, uh, to, to not really change anything other than give it a great broader breadth and, uh, much more, you know, financial support in the larger eBay family. It fits really well with the whole eBay family.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

We're really excited. In fact, I met Michael Wokey, who's here, is one of the product designers, product managers. Uh, he's actually in my talk and we've got a quick chance to chat with him.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. And, uh, and Braintree, I know, and I've actually interviewed, uh, one developer from the UTSA, and just extremely well perspective of the development community, uh, in Chicago. Um, uh, but I, so, that's current events, but I, I'm interested in your book, and also the concept of Lean UX that you're teaching.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

And what does that mean?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

What did you say? Yeah. So, uh, if you're familiar with Jeff Goddorf's book, uh, Lean UX, which follows I'm more on the depth side, so.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay, cool.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, if you think about Lean Startup, you know, 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 pivot? Either way.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Or the Lean Startup.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Lean Startup. Sorry, I'm sorry. Lean UX falls under that. So, Jeff Goddorf actually wrote a book on Lean UX, and we started using the same ideas. What Lean UX really says is, hey, we're going to be doing design. Uh, 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.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Break those walls down. Be very collaborative in nature. Uh, as much as possible, if you live in the same room, the same space together. And operate like a startup.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Like a startup.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And so this is very aproposal to a large company like PayPal that had, you know, from an innovation perspective, had, uh, obviously stagnated. Uh, coming up in 2011, it just took, uh, it could take six weeks to change those words on the site.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And so now we're down to less than five minutes, aren't you? Just based on, 'cause we wait five minutes to check the web, you know, uh, the web we're gonna get. Um, so it's, you know, we've been transforming the technology stack, and I talked about that actually in Photoshop a little bit, all with this idea in mind of how do you get engineering, so, so I'm actually writing another book right now for the Lean Startup series called Lean Engineering.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And the idea of Lean Engineering is if you think about engineering from the perspective of enabling learning.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

What do you do different in engineering? Well, one of the things you do differently is you're actually engineering for prototyping. You don't think of prototyping as a separate activity. You're actually thinking the product should support a prototype. 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 and it's going to become, you know, with a little more massaging, become our production page. So, you actually get this economy. You know, then you can also take the product and fork it and get, you know, and just do some, you know, some usability studies, what we call Lean Back Scrum Team, and then take it right back into Agile.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

So, how different is that from the concepts of, like, MVP, the Minimum Viable Product?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Is it the same?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

It supports it. It supports it because what you can do if you've got a real rapid prototyping stack is you can create an MVP. Now, you can create, you know, there's a larger process of, you know, going out to customers doing visits or doing studies or surveys or whatever else. that may include just paper prototyping. Or using, you know, something like a tool like a prototype on paper, which you take pictures of your sketches, stitch them together, and you've got to work on a prototype. Or, you know, maybe it's like an action, which is a prototyping tool. There's a lot of tools you can use. But what I've been talking about the last two days is really more what happens when you get that closer to the Agile. You actually want to, you want to somehow marry designing the Agile process, which has been a long-time question. The way we've solved that is by having what we call a Lean UX Scrum Team that runs just a little bit ahead of the Agile Scrum Team. But some of the same team members flip between the two teams. And the Lean UX Scrum Team is focused on pushing out prototypes and showing it to customers. That's their sprint releases.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Whereas the Agile is doing a little bit of code that can be applied.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Okay. So that's interesting. So you have these two teams running in parallel or near parallel.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

A little bit off from each other. And using two slightly different methodologies for delivery.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

What was the reason that none of us using the Scrum methodology and other ones using the Agile?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Well, they both use sort of a Scrum methodology. You know, the Lean UX doesn't look so Agile. You know, Agile Scrum has a lot of, they like to come serve on the machine.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right. It's true. The process. The stand-ups. The weekly iterations.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Right. Right. So there's still the concept of stand-ups, you know, in the Lean Scrum Team. 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 a prototype form, and then getting a usability testing so you can 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 fairly, you know, rough state. You know, it's got the happy pass and stuff. And you've got some of the application built too so that you can take and harden it. And what we like to do is flip engineers between the Lean and the Agile so they're always like more of a customer setup. So there's much more of a customer setting.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. That's very interesting because it makes me think of like the spike into production. Kind of a concept. You just build something that's just good enough.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Just clean it up and put it into the production code base.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. So I think of this. I heard somebody, you know, on the design side use the same. You know, engineering say CI/CD, you know, continuous integration, continuous deployment. But you can think of continuous innovation, continuous design, you know.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So the design is always a problem.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Looking back at some of the big companies and trying to bring in these Agile work, working with more Agile methodology in these larger companies might be a little bit more, let's say, traditional?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

A little, maybe a little bit stuck in a rut as it happens in larger organizations.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

So, has that been something that's been openly embraced from the bottom up? Or has it been pushed down?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

It's been bottom up and top down.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And outside in, I would say, too. You know, if you're actually, if you look at change models, generally the best change models are top down, you know, bottom up and new DNA from the outside coming in. Because you do need DNA in an organization. Because big organizations that have gotten static, what's happened is, you know, they don't even know why they do stupid stuff.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

They just do stupid stuff. They just do it. And there's actually smart people in there. Smart people like stupid.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Because this is the way organizations work like that. And then you have some bad DNA. And you have some antibodies that are in the organization that resist change. And so, you have to flush the system out. You have to like, you know, get rid of some of those antibodies.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Change some of those antibodies into actually being something positive to get change going. So, yeah, it's, you know, I mean, PayPal, Franklin, coming in 2011 from Netflix, I knew what it was like. I've done a lot of the investigation. It was, it was screwed up. It was screwed up from technology, from process, and design. Everything was, I don't think there was a single, you know, organization, I'm thinking from a customer-centric perspective, that was really operating right. And sometimes, you know, because they had to at some point right the ship and really turn the dial towards risk. You know, be risk averse, make sure payments went through. And in that whole pendulum swing, you lose the experience. You lose the fact that you're freezing accounts and putting the accounts on hold that are very good people that are going to charity you and whatever else. And all those stories get out there.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And over time, it creates this very angry. Because what you do with people's money personally affects them.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And they don't forget it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. And you're right. I hadn't even thought about that before this interview. But about the, there's the constant story on Reddit about the, my, this charity or my Kickstarter got frozen. I don't know why.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yep. And what we do is what, David does this, I do this, a bunch of us do this. We're watching Reddit. We're watching Hackney News. We're watching Twitter. As soon as you see something like that, we go fix the problem. But then what we do is we look under the cover saying, okay, what's the policy change in this thing? Sometimes these things are overnight. You know, for example, I had, I forget who it was exactly, but I had, you know, one of the conference organizers, you know, all of a sudden you got this account's frozen line. And we went to work on it and, you know, it was obvious that, look, this is a common occurrence. You can't just say if somebody's all of a sudden money starts coming in really, really fast, that that's a bad thing, you know, because there are certain scenarios where that works. So the risk team has to develop different models.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

New models, yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Just think about it. You got 120 million customers. You know, it's not like somebody sitting in and going, I'm going to freeze this account. It's just computer algorithms.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right. That's right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So what happens you have, if you're, you know, the call center support team is not enabled to fix those problems, then you double whammy it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So it's just stuck in the mind. So David did things like, you know, the team actually that does the call center support, some of them, they actually enable them with what they call tokens, almost like goodwill tokens.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Or basically if they can take one of those tokens and fix any problem and can't get fired, can't get in trouble. If they make a mistake, you learn from mistakes. So you have a certain amount of these tokens you can kind of utilize to get on.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

That's interesting. It's like, you're going to enable, we're going to trust you.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Just do what you got to do.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. But we're going to have a safeguard.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. And there's a little bit of spending there you have to do with it.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. You know, so you have to make a decision. You know, you think about it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. You know. So those kind of things have changed. And we actually, you know, I don't know the exact number, but it's a pretty high number each month. Less account reasons. Less account goals. Funny story. I'll give you a funny story. So, early this year, there's a story came on Hacker News about this kid who created a JavaScript library, an animation library. And he was a junior in college, I actually, in Northern Kentucky University. And PayPal had locked his account because he made a tremendous, I mean, I found a tremendous amount of money in a very short period of time. And he got on Hacker News and said, I think he said something like, you know, I made about $200,000. And PayPal's locked my account.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

So we saw it. We went to work, unlocked his account, and we hired him.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Oh, really?

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

He came in and did amazing stuff for us, one of the best interns I've ever had.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And he's coming back. We made him my offer. He's coming back next year and joining us. Had a blast. We were about to do so much articles about that. And I really loved doing that because, you know, PayPal has been, I gave a talk in Ireland last week at Node Congress. And one of the guys was writing up stories about it. He said, he called my talk mesmerizing. Because, he said, all of us in the crowd had written PayPal off as being in the dark ages.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And it was so refreshing because, you know, we're leading the charge on Node. We're one of the companies that's actually, we're about to open source a bunch of Node frameworks. But, you know, we brought a bunch of people from the outside, from other companies. We also had some great people inside that were already there. And we changed. I kind of like that story. That's a funny story for me is, you know, how do I get engineering and design work together? How do I get 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. So we got that. Who are you 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, and the what down right, of course, you got to pay decent. Maybe good location helps. But those are all, you know, they're not the main thing. Right? People make all kinds of sacrifices to get the how, who, and what.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Well, I mean, it sounds like one of the things when you hear about a story like the young man who made $200,000 off his library is he's got some decent seed money that he could spend on the next thing.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

But convincing him that you obviously had to bring something other than just pure money to him. And say, you're going to have this environment where you're going to be, have some latitude and some freedom to do something interesting.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Well, you know, fortunately, at the same time, I've hired a friend of mine who 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 to help build the initial cloud and even in the early days of Mac OS. So the guy's a well-traveled.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

He's a wonderful guy. So we were able to bring Emmanuel, the intern, in and worked directly with Rod. So he got to work with one of the best clients around.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And that's something that isn't just money. That's more of that money.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right, right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And then, of course, Jeff Harrell on my team is just really brilliant. And another guy, Eric, that I brought from Netflix and a few other folks have been from Netflix. They're 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?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

This intern is, at the end of the day, he's passionate about creating the best experience possible. But he would sit there and go, you know, when I do this, because he was building an HTML5 equivalent or a native app. And nailing it, infinite scrolling and doing all the crazy complicated stuff.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And he's going like, look, when I move this, you know, and I can see it because I'm a pixel maniac too.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Right.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

But some of the people on the team couldn't see it. Every once in a while, it jigs by one pixel. That just drove him nuts.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

He was going to get that right. And I love that attention to detail. 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 HTML5 experience versus the native. He said, well, how so? And I'd show him, you know. I'd say, notice how, you know, the ease out of the very last, you know, it slows down. And so within about an hour, he came back and checked this out. He had nailed it.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

And he loved that, you know, being challenged like that. So.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. And knowing that he's working with people he can respect.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

I mean, it's not about that you don't respect who you're working with, but somebody who's --

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

You want to be challenged, right?

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Who's going to push you and be like somebody who's been there.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Well, thank you very much for having this time. I really enjoyed it. It's great to meet you.

Guest Guest ▶ Speaking

Likewise. Thank you.

Mike Hall Interviewer, UGtastic ▶ Speaking

Thank you.

Mike Hall

Guest

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