Episode 14: InVision CEO Clark Valberg on Distributed Design

Howdy, howdy, and welcome to The Distributed Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Mullenweg. My guest this week is Clark Valberg, the founder and CEO of InVision, a company that makes collaborative design platform is very popular with distributed teams. It does ideation, design, prototyping, sharing, and it all lives in the cloud. No more emailing files back and forth. It's pretty slick. Clark founded the company 7 years ago in Brooklyn, and now they have over 5 million users in places like Airbnb, Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, and my company, Automattic. Like Automattic, InVision is fully distributed., and is similar to us in size. So I'm interested to hear from Clark about his experience leading and growing a distributed workforce. Alrighty, let's get started. Welcome, Clark.

Hey, great to be here.

So y'all are one of the other big fully distributed companies. So tell me a little bit first about what Envision does for, you know, people in a cave who might not know yet. And tell me a little bit about the scale of what y'all are doing and the—

That was my opening line to you, by the way. Oh, y'all are one of the other largest remote companies. This is a constant debate, by the way, internally, which one is bigger. Okay, so Clark is the CEO and founder of a company called InVision. InVision is a design collaboration platform. Most of the products— I hope most of the products that you use every day, if they're well designed, if you love them, if you feel excited about, you know, how they work and how they fit into your life, it's because the design of the product is good. And so that's where InVision comes in. We're the place where those products are designed, tested, where the stakeholders that make that product great are engaged. We're both the design tool and the place.

And so if you were to describe what it's like to use an Envision product, like let's say I'm a designer, I'm collaborating with another designer, like what would we do?

If you are a digital product designer, you have need a place to design, right? You need the place to actually create the screens that make your product beautiful. That's Envision.

So before I would do this in Photoshop on my computer, now it's happening like a web app?

Photoshop or, you know, a cave wall depending on how old school you are. But yeah, so you would've done that there and now, you know, you do that in Envision and then InVision is also the place where that design comes to life in a collaborative sense. It's the place where you put your design so that others can look at it, engage in it, with it, give you feedback on it. The question you're asking is fundamental to this transition of design altogether, which I can talk about for a long time, but design is no longer a, uh, a job to be done. It's now an organizational discipline in a world where the screen has become the most important place, or one of the most important places in the world.

When and how did design become important to you?

I ran an agency and kind of dealt with, I think, uh, what was the general operating dynamic of agencies at that time and probably still today in many respects. You have a client, they have an idea of what they want, they have some business problem they're trying to solve, and you're trying to put together some kind of a requirements document, some kind of a, a contract that hopes to look into the future and imagine everything they'll ever need to accomplish whatever business goal they're trying to accomplish and, and define that today. Or at least in the next few hours until we can get this thing signed and, and move forward. So this idea of upfront definition kind of bothered me. That was like a deep intellectual itch.

Mm-hmm.

Right? How can I, instead of creating a contract that separates me from the client and hopefully mitigates the legal risk, right? Of like giving them exactly what I told them to, that I would give them and you were charging by the hour. Like how could I align my values and go on this journey with them together side by side? Right? How could I act as their guide? Toward the business reality that we would ultimately end up discovering together.

Yeah.

Anytime there's a client, there's that dynamic of, you know, you want in your head, it's impossible for me to get that outta your head and get it into my head. And by the way, even if I could, hopefully if we do something right, that will change over time. Right. The, the more, uh, articulate that vision of the future becomes.

How did this agency look like? Were your clients, were you meeting them in person? Were your colleagues in person?

Both. It was my first kind of, uh, dip of toes into the world of being able to work with people seamlessly online. And so A lot of the fundamental little inventions, collaborative inventions that we have here at Envision, 900 people totally remote, came from that world of just trying to make clients happy at a much smaller scale, sometimes remote.

How big did the agency get before you switched to doing the product work as your primary thing?

Biggest, I think, got to 25, I think, tops. So it was a small agency. The word boutique sounds much better than small, doesn't it?

There's probably a lot of people part of or running agencies listening to this. That dream of switching to be a product company. What advice do you have for them? Like, what made it work for you? Because there's so many examples of that not working.

I'll tell you, I, I did not have a vision of becoming a product company. It happened as an extension to the reason why we started this agency in the first place. So the agency was founded on, hey, instead of ending up in these, you know, weird litigious semi-adversarial relationships with clients, like, what if we could figure out a different operating model, a different communication model? So we started by building prototypes., and we would write those prototypes in code. We would show them to clients early. We'd be able to have a diverse conversation across the organization instead of just dealing with like one project manager. We'd be able to kind of embrace all the different business leaders that represented the parts of the business that we were trying to serve with the software. We'd have holistic, multidimensional, diverse conversations. That was the whole idea. Mm-hmm. Like, I wanna be an agency that loves its clients. I wanna be on the same side of the table. These were all the different keywords that we, the key phrases that we used, uh, to make ourselves sound different and differentiate. But it, you know, I think it sprung from a place of what we saw wrong with the industry. And then that tool called a prototype just evolved over time. And at some point someone, not me, said, hey, what if we just took designs out of Photoshop and connected them together and turned them into a little simulation that was almost as high fidelity as the coded prototypes you were building? It would be almost good enough and probably could, you know, we'll just run it as an experiment, but it'll take, you know, an eighth of the time to build and maybe we can use that as a communication device.

Who was the first client you tried that on?

So it was a company in upstate New York. So this is one of our few fully, fully remote engagements. Like we went to see them maybe once a quarter, but you know, other than that, everything was happening online. I'll reserve the name, but you know, a large education product company. They created educational products that they sold into school districts.

Hmm.

And we were building essentially a totally custom ERP solution for them. Every part of their entire business modeled into a piece of software. Every, every experience that exists between two people in that entire company was modeled into a screen someplace.

Wow.

So very sophisticated piece of software. And it, it would've been an absolute nightmare had we not employed this process, I think, because there were just too many stakeholders with too great a diversity of perspective on what needed to be built. And it just had to be a conversation that happened over time. This was a, let's try this new thing. What do we call this new thing? I think literally the, the time that we've been on this call so far was the time it took us to come up with a name and vision. Mm-hmm. I think it was like the second, second idea. We're like, oh, we'll just change it later. That's fine., and we had absolutely no interest, almost an explicit disinterest in having anyone outside of the company know what this thing was.

Hmm.

This was just for internal use only. Somebody even said, hey, what if we wrote a blog post about this? What if we— once it worked, once we saw that, you know, it totally changed the game for us, and it really did in very profound ways. This is like a whole new movement for agencies. This would be a cool thing to talk about. I said, absolutely not. This is our differentiator. This is our competitive advantage. In this agency, you know, maybe let's just keep this under hat. Luckily, someone— it's good to have a lot of people who disagree with you all the time around you. Otherwise, you end up being a victim of your own vision.

But so at this time, it sounds like you had kind of an office and colleagues in that office. At what point did you switch to being fully remote and using these tools to enable that?

Even the agency was hybrid. And if— in New York City, my entire kind of movement into a fully remote world Again, never had a vision for it. Didn't think this was the future. I'm still not sure if it's the future for everyone. Okay. This is like a matter of significant debate and worthy of debate. It was a necessity thing. So the agency was a hybrid, but like, let's call it a reluctant hybrid. Like, hey, we can't find enough people in New York, so we'll hire people who aren't here and we'll just kind of deal with the, you know, overhead and kind of managing that overhead, collaborative overhead as a, you know, cost of doing business. When we transitioned into Envision, So yada, yada, yada. I'm sorry, yada, yada, yada through the birth of an entire company. But, uh, you know, this product is cool. What if other people liked it? Let's put it in front of the world and see if, you know, if they bite. They did. We raised some capital and then we had to transition out of the agency and into the product company. I sold the agency to a, you know, basically a hostile takeover. Sold it to my wife for a dollar. Literally. It's a whole big story where the company Envision kind of sort of launched its like for-pay model on my wedding day. So here we are with, you know, like $1.1 million and, you know, an office that was my co-founder and I sitting back to back in a tiny Regus space in Midtown Manhattan. I think it was like the year that Google opened up the Google Megaplex. I don't know if it has an official name, but the building in Chelsea.

Yeah.

And we just found like every conversation we were having with any engineer, designer, anybody, everyone, they were also talking to Google. They were also talking to Yahoo and Facebook, anybody in a New York office with a more fashionable name, better ping pong tables to our no ping pong tables, was just destroying us for talent. And I found that we were spending all of our time wining and dining engineers we weren't hiring.

Wow.

And so we kind of got together after about, I guess, what, 3 weeks of slogging through this talent thicket and asked ourselves, an existential question. We did what, you know, we call pre-postmortem. Sure, you've heard this idea. Let's look into the future. Let's imagine that things don't work out. Let's guess based on what we know today, what are the likely sources of that failure? And the biggest one for me was not spending enough time on the things that really make a business successful, right? At the end of the day, product-market fit is where it's at. At this critical birthing stage, we have to get a group of people vehemently, maybe violently excited about this new product and talking about it to people. So it has to have independent lift, it has to have word of mouth, groundswell. And what will we probably be doing instead of focusing on the design of the product, the marketing of the product? We'll probably be trying to hire engineers and moving way too slow. And we just kind of opened up the envelope and Again, may not have been me. Somebody thought, what if we just hired the people that we had worked with as contractors in the agency? We had a pretty significant bench of folks that we pulled in who were full-time other places and just did little side jobs for us in exotic, far-flung destinations like Phoenix, Arizona, Houston, Texas, right? Just like, you know, places that were secondary, tertiary tech markets. Just folks that we just knew, knew from conferences, we knew because they were developers in the same language that we were developers in. We just hired them full-time. So we said, what if we just did this at scale? What if we somehow figured out how to make collaboration work where everyone was remote? And I had a piece of advice. I don't know if he even knows that he gave me this advice and how pivotal it was for me. You know, David Cancel from Drift? I called him up. He had just sold the company to HubSpot. I kind of ran the idea by like, hey, what do you think about this remote idea? What do you think about this talent hack? Instead of hiring people in New York, we hire them anywhere. We actually pay them above market. That was our thesis originally, to pay them above their local market, but, you know, arguably below the New York market. And there's a very, very widespread there. I mean, at least was then even more so than it is today. And then sell them on this lifestyle change, sell them on getting rid of their commute, sell them on work-life integration. This is the time where everybody talked about, you know, common theme was work-life separation. How do I turn off my phone? How do I turn off my email at a certain time of day? So, well, you know, the people that we work with, they were moonlighting for us while working full-time. They clearly have more passion, more interest in being involved in the work they do than 9 to 5. So maybe it's not about a certain time of the day where you just, you know, die from work. Maybe it's about having more control over when and how. Maybe there's a work-life integration idea that we can start selling people, right, that, that may actually be more meaningful than that separation. And he liked the idea, but he gave me a piece of very stern advice that, you know, we still follow today, which you're not following, by the way. I'm just going to throw this out there. It's don't go half in, half out on this. There has to be a sense that everyone has equal access to the executive team, to each other. In the way he put it, which I thought was like a beautiful way to kind of encapsulate it, there can't be a place where someone is not your office. Whether they work in marketing, it's the head of marketing. Everyone has to feel equal proximity.

And that avoids a classic problem, right? Why I actually don't like the term remote, that some people are more like second-class citizens.

And then 100% There's, you know, you're having a room and then there's that guy in the wall who's like, you know, trying to get a word in edgewise.

Yeah.

And I said, well, how far do we go with that? Can we have some kind of a New York office? He said, I would say not. And I think the next week, uh, my partner and I decided to disband the office, to shut down the office and to actually go home and work, even though we had been commuting into the city. I live in Brooklyn and he lived in Manhattan. So, you know, he was a few blocks away from the office. Even if we'd been commuting and spending time together in person, and, you know, you think, oh, the founding team, they have to get together and they have to collaborate, you know, move at warp speed and problem solving and collaboration. I said, you know, I think we should discipline ourselves to be able to make this remote thing work even between us. And if we can figure that out, then that'll scale to everyone else. Big decision. Bold. You know, I would say almost absurd, you know, decision in some, in some respects.

I would call it radical, actually. Yeah. Especially for the time, because what year was this?

8 years ago, 9 years ago now.

Yeah.

The only company that used— promoted itself as a remote or promoted the idea of being, of being remote or distributed was 37signals. And so they were original inspiration for this, or at least, you know, inspired us to believe it was possible.

Totally.

So we did it, said, hey, this is a design problem, essentially, like most things, the many things in life. Will Jaffe design the people, practices, and platforms of the business? We think about these 3 Ps all the time. To establish a healthy rhythm of connection. And by the way, Joel Spolsky— another— I'm just calling out all the inspirations for this because it definitely didn't come from me— wrote a book called Joel on Software, which I'm sure you've read. Everyone's read.

Classic. Highly recommended, actually.

He was a proponent of this, uh, idea of having an office with a door that closes. Now we think about it as deep work, right? This is a common theme that's used in tech today. And I had this kind thought. I'm still not sure if it's— how valid it is, but the, the percentage of intellectual focus, deep work that happens in your business is a significant driver or limiter of the success of that business to some degree. If you have a large group of people who are really talented and have a lot of time to focus on the work they do well, and there's an environment that brings them together when they need to be. But that ebb and flow of focus time, that intimate craft time, and that kinetic energy of collaboration, but not at the same time. There's a, a dual modality model that one can leverage to get the most out of— best out of both.

What percentage do you target for yourself there, and what percentage would you target for, like, an individual contributor at a division?

The more creative your work, probably the more focus you need to move through the work that you do. I think real creative work is done alone, right? You know when you need to collaborate. You know when you need that validation from a third party, or your rate of innovation starts to slow to a certain point where you need to start sparking and stoking those, those flames of creativity through communication with other people. You have to build a system that makes that reliably happen, at least at some point for each person in the team. So early days we had a standup, every team in the company in that time we had, you know, 3 teams and 15 people. Every team had a standup. That standup had a ritual, happened at the exact same time every single day. So 1 o'clock, whole company, 3 or 4 questions. I think it evolved from 3 to 4 questions for each person, round robin. Obviously that's much more difficult to pull off at 900, but you know, that is scaled in different ways. Let's make sure that everyone knows or is aware of the, the work that everyone else is doing. That, that's the fundamental kind of platform that creates that connection. And then people go off and they do their own work as individuals or as groups, right? And they reconvene regularly to check back in.

So if I were an ideal designer or developer at Envision in this model, would I be spending 80, 90% of my time more kind of in this deep work?

I would imagine probably 70.

70, right?

I think probably people in Envision would tell you that, you know, they get less than that because there are many meetings and at scale, obviously there's an overhead, connected tissue overhead to, you know, managing very large projects at scale that are cut across multiple departments and disciplines. Again, there's no perfect formula. It's just making sure that people can preserve that time or as much of that time as they can.

I have a selfish question, which is, as a CEO of a distributed company, What do you think your percentage of is that, of that work?

Mine is probably closer to 30%. Yeah. Because I'm not, I'm not a production person. I don't have a work product necessarily that I put into the world. I don't have a screen that needs to be designed to an excruciating, you know, level of detail and iterated on over time.

I would say at this moment, I'm probably under 10%. So it's something I'm working on increasing because I feel like the time I'm able to invest in writing helps a lot. And the company is, of course, a product I think about a ton and need to spend, I think, more time than I currently am investing in how that product is designed, the product of Automattic itself.

Here's a little weird hack. I don't know if this makes any sense for, for folks. I like to sometimes just go to conferences, even though I'm 50% interested in the content, just because being at a conference blocks off your schedule. It puts you in a room with a lot of that kinetic energy of buzz of people who aren't distracting you because they don't have any interest in you. They're there for other things. They have no connection to you, but it's a room that's vibrant with, with the energy of people. And there's someone talking and there's time in between. And I find that just disconnecting and absorbing ideas on drip ambiently gives me a ton of headspace to have a divergent thinking time.

That's a cool hack. Now, we opened a lot of threads there. I'm going to loop back to some of them. One, if you were doing a pre-postmortem today for Envision, what would be on your list?

Oh, without a question, it's the cohesion of the company. I mean, it's a, it's a risk being a remote company. There are things that happen in a co-located environment. That's what we call the the world of onsite work, co-located, there are things that happen there between the seams that people don't even understand are happening. They don't consider it an explicit part of the work. Loose example, the water cooler. There's this, I'm bumping into people in the kitchen, in the hall, you know, there's this, you know, kind of ambient transfer of energy through, hey, you're working on this? Hey, what are you up to? We have to figure out how to allow that to happen. Deliberately. If what we're doing now is 80% as good as being in person in some ways, and let's— I think in some ways 130% better than being in person in other ways, how do we make sure that we take that 80 and get it to 100 so that we're not leaving a liability on the table?

I'm particularly curious about that water cooler. What did you figure out, and what has worked well so far?

What I've learned in these kind of settings is driving to solutions in real time. Again, going back to that ebb and flow of together time and alone time. It doesn't work, I think, in larger groups of people, right? You can seed things, you can create good traction around the idea, but I think a, a longer, more thoughtful, more deep work-enabled process of driving to a solution is important. Where we're beginning to think about this is making sure that the time that we have together as an executive team, even the online time, 2 hours every 2 weeks, we have something called the strategic alignment team meeting. So that group of people meets online, just putting more ceremony around that. So rather than get together and just have like a random group, you know, list of things that we want to get through, maybe doing a little bit more pre-work. So one idea that, that kind of surfaced was taking a facilitator that wasn't a part of the group. So let's say the head of Biz Ops or, or, you know, chief of staff, and making that person responsible for interviewing all the members of that team individually, one-on-one with a set of predefined prompts to pull out the value and get that value on the agenda ahead of time. Because if I pulled you into a meeting, Matt, you know, right after this call, I don't know if you have a meeting right after our little podcast here, but if you did, you probably would not be in a state to pull out the most important thing that's going on in the business or the biggest threat or the biggest opportunity, right? Or some weird HR thing or opportunity or great idea that you thought about 2 weeks ago. You wouldn't be in state to evoke that unless you're just a— you meditate a lot more than I do. I don't know. There has to be a mechanism, I think, for, for tilling that soil with those executives ahead of time, or with anybody, I think, in that case, ahead of time. So how do we create a list of questions? You know, for example, what's the biggest threat to the timelines that you're facing? What's the biggest HR people or resource or talent What's the issue that you're facing? I'm just making up examples of kinds of questions we would ask, right? What's the thing that you need the most from who on this team? I'm imagining a world where there are about like 5 or 6 questions that we ask each executive one-on-one before getting into that meeting, and that those questions ultimately end up tilling the soil and driving the agenda of the meeting.

So one thing that I've heard that's unique about Envision that I'd love to confirm is that y'all have everyone on an East Coast Office hours.

I do believe that you need a certain number of hours of overlap. So we have a kind of a loosely held standard set of operating hours. I think it's like 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. The recommendation I think that is fairly, um, closely held is there should be a, like a 3-hour overlap between most of the team. Because within those 3 hours, you can negotiate when your standup meeting is. If you're a team that works together, you can get to the company-wide meetings, generally speaking, unless, you know, Some people in Australia watch those the next day or a week later. I don't know what the time is in Australia right now, but you get the idea. Generally try to aim for 3 hours of overlap.

So does that mean you don't have as many people in kind of, uh, Asia-Pacific region?

I would say not, not by design. We probably lean out of hiring one-off individuals. We've done acquisitions, like say for example, in, in Australia, you know, and you know, we do have people in Asia-Pacific for sure, you know, but there's probably a light bias towards folks that fit into teams that have a schedule with more overlap.

The number I heard for y'all, and this is out of date, is around 20 or 25 countries that you're in?

It's gotta be. Yeah. I mean, 900 people. Yeah, probably for 25 countries, I'd imagine.

You know, at a very similar size, I think we're at 68 countries. I would say there's definitely a cost and a trade-off to having that kind of, no kind of like time zone overlap. Explicit part of the hiring. And it definitely means that there's certain teams that are more Asia-Pacific-centric because that overlap is important. And if you have a single team with people in kind of what I think of the three zones— North, South America, Europe, Africa, and then Asia-Pacific— there's no good time for any of them.

100%. I, you have to be getting something out of the remote thing. It's an interesting question. People ask about remote and they assume that I'm like a remote zealot. I'm not, I'm not someone who, you know, believes in remote as this, this is the future. And I, I'm just not religious about the topic at all, right? What we needed out of remote very early on is we needed as a talent hack. This is like a talent arbitrage. Hire the best people wherever they happen to be, figure everything out later, hire them quickly, get them in the ship as early as possible and start seeing results. How can I just hire the best people no matter where they are? If you are not hiring, if you don't find that your talent density is significantly greater than, uh, your contemporaries that are co-located in whatever city you happen to be in, then you're not leveraging that, uh, arbitrage the right way.

That's a really good way to put it. How long do you think that talent arbitrage exists? Right? Stripe famously now has remote as their new office engineering center. How long before Google, Facebook, et cetera, the same people you were competing with in New York, open into the distributed world?

That time is probably now. It just means you have to be more creative. Also, even if 10 of the biggest tech companies in the world were out hiring, the talent supply is big enough for us all.

You know, playing off on-site versus off-site, we've talked a lot about how you work in a distributed fashion. How and when do you bring people together?

So we have a company all-hands on-site, global all-hands called IRL, Envision In Real Life.

Ha, I like that.

This year was in Phoenix, Arizona. We took over an entire resort and that was just like an intense, amazing, high-energy experience that brought a lot into the work that we do, we have done since. And year before that, also really incredible in Los Angeles. I definitely like the format of the all of us together in one resort better than all of us split up between a few hotels. So all company, all hands IRL, and then we have miniature IRL. So product department has a product manager's IRL, which I think was like 2 weeks ago in New Jersey. And I think this week, if I'm not mistaken, is the all designers IRL in Chicago. They pick, they pick a city that just makes sense. And I think the CFT, customer-facing team, was in Denver a couple weeks ago. So departments have an IRL, whole company has an IRL, and then individual teams can, uh, tap into budget to get together in person.

So if I join Envision, how many weeks or days out of the year am I gonna be at these IRLs?

My guess is probably 3 throughout the week. We also encourage folks to go to the Envision events that we have, the customer-facing events. We, you know, design plus drinks, and we do panels. I mean, you know, not a week goes by that there isn't some sort of an Envision customer event happening in some, you know, bar someplace in the world.

That's really cool.

And so we try to encourage folks to get together that way. Again, it's just personal, my personal principle behind this online versus— it's called cloud culture, that's what we call it— cloud culture versus the IRL stuff. When you're in real life, I prefer us not to be doing work. Interesting. I prefer us to be connecting as people. If you gave me a week with the team together in person, I would really like 80% of that to be stuff, things. It could be conversations that sound like work, but conversations that really bring us closer together as people. My mental model here is that we have little scale models of ourselves. We don't really— even if we're in person, we're not really relating to the person we're looking at. We're relating to our little mental model of that person that rests in our mind. Does that make sense?

Sure.

The more time we spend together, the more articulate, more detailed that mental model of you becomes. So when we're online, you get to a certain level of precision. You know, it takes a long time to get to know you as a person and get to know how you behave and act in different contexts, how to react, how you react to certain things as an individual or as groups. When we get together, the fidelity of that model increases exponentially. And we take that mental model into the online environment. That's the reason for the onsite in-person experiences.

I've heard, you know, you talk about the screen a lot, but I've also heard that at Envision, rumor, that you've banned slide decks.

It makes a great headline, doesn't it? It, it's, it's not exactly true. What I'll tell you is that We encourage visual collaborative communication in meetings more than prepared slides, only because that visual communication tends, number one, to be much more democratizable. You know, you can get more folks who are of a greater diversity of connection to the, to the problem space. Like, you know, if you, if you're gonna present something to a product team, I mean, that's, that's one kind of collaboration, but arguably a lot of those product conversations should reach far beyond the engineering product or designers who work on it. You'd like to be able to enge— engage business stakeholders, domain experts that exist within the business, or folks that are impacted by it. You'd like to have your head of finance on a product call and have them totally track and influence. So staying visual, like making sure that you just have a, a very strong bias to visual communication, visual storytelling, getting visually driven artifacts that are real to the customer, that real and true to the customer experience, I think are really important. You generate better conversations than you would with a deck. It happens to be that, you know, we're all kind of trained when we see a deck that, you know, it's like a movie, right? Now's our time to take out the popcorn, kick back, and let someone else do the talking. When you do like, let me say, a freehand sketch, we have a product called Freehand, which is basically a gigantic online whiteboard, right? Where you're actually showing screens of an experience and tying the conversation around pricing into the user experience that drives that conversation around pricing to the customer. Two things. Number one, you're being super customer-centric. You're orienting all of the people on the call around the frontline of that problem space. Pricing is not a number conversation. Pricing has financial impact. Pricing needs to be within financial guardrails, but ultimately pricing is not about a number. It's about a customer experience. All of the leverage you have around pricing, all of the acceptance from the market that is required to make that price the right price. I'm spinning off into a pricing conversation, right? But you'll understand how this is like a microcosm for all of these things. Totally comes down to somebody looking at a screen at some point and feeling good or bad about it. So if you can have that pricing conversation through a lens of design, and by the way, this is what Envision Principle #7 is meant to imply, being design-driven, like how do we get into the mind and heart of the customer and have the business conversation while we're having the customer conversation, design conversation, business strategy conversation, all in one. If you can do that, you can have a much greater diversity of people in the conversation. Your head of finance doesn't feel like they're in a product call. The product people don't feel like they're in a finance call. Everyone feels like they're in a creative problem-solving call.

I love it. Thanks again.

Pleasure.

That was Clark Valberg. You can find him on Twitter @ClarkValberg. That's Clark, C-L-A-R-K. A-R-K, then Valberg, V-A-L-B-E-R-G. We've got a special treat in store for the next episode. Back in September, Automattic held its annual Grand Meetup in Orlando. The Grand Meetup is a time for all Automatticians to get together in one place. We get to meet some of our colleagues face to face for the first time, hear some great talks from folks like Stephen Wolfram, who was a guest on this podcast a few weeks back, and of course hang out and have fun together too. We set up a recording booth at the meetup and talked to a bunch of folks from across the company to hear about their experiences with distributed work and the importance of in-person meetups for keeping people connected throughout the year. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.