Justin Rosenstein: A Needed Shift in Industry Values

Yeah. So the question is, isn't technology making us less mindful in a bunch of ways? I think that is definitely true. It is definitely the double edged sword of like wandering around with a phone that I have access to all this information, but it's so tempting to me that I keep accessing it. I think there's a number of solutions to this problem. One is I really think we just have to. I think that the common success metric that companies use in order to determine whether they're doing the right thing is something like page views or something like minutes spent on the site. And I think they do that not out of malice particularly, but because it's just the easiest thing to measure. It seems like, well, surely that is our success metric. And yet I would be much happier to have a product that people were spending five minutes on per day instead of 20 minutes on per day. If those five minutes were making them happier. In fact, that would be much, much better because it means they can get back to their lives. In an ideal world, people would spend zero minutes on asana. It would feel more like just as there's telepathy between my hands in a way that feels effortless and that's what allows me to do complex things or play a guitar. It'd be great if it were effortless for us to coordinate our collective action among the different nodes that are different people. So we don't use that kind of time on site as a success metric. Moving to a world where you instead think about the impact and as a product designer, think, what am I actually trying to accomplish in the world? Not just how much are people engaging with this product right now is something that I think is a mental shift in values that is desperately needed in our industry. And part of why I'm now going around and preaching this.