Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:28)
So yeah, thanks for coming to the podcast. Welcome. As I mentioned before, we always start with a short intro of who you are, what you're working on, and so on. And then we can dive into the design, all the design questions we have for today.
Meylin (00:45)
Yeah. Hi. mean, thanks for having me. I'm Malen, ⁓ product designer at Cash App right now. My history is sort of, it's quite simple. I've worked at Wise before, which is another fintech. Cash App is a fintech company. Wise is a fintech company. I've worked there five years ⁓ when I was based in London, worked on a global scale. So it's an international product. So obviously we start markets from US to Europe to APAC and like
Australia, Asia, et cetera. ⁓ Before that, just sort of like dabbled in startups and agency world until I found my feet on hyperscale startups, which I sort of like fell in love with the dynamic of building product fast, trying to kind of disrupt, understand like how to best serve people and finance sort of is such a...
Jim Zarkadas (01:31)
Hmm.
Meylin (01:40)
good ethical company, tech company to work with because all we do is try to help people like manage their finances better. And yeah, that's like my short journey.
Jim Zarkadas (01:52)
Nice, nice. Thanks for explaining. Yeah, I'm a big fan of both. Like think it's not available in Europe, right? I'm a big fan because of the design. Like we're gonna dive into this now actually. Both companies are really good branding. For the product experience I'm using wise, I can also tell that the product experience has been great. But for CAS, I assume that it's gonna be great too, but I haven't used it yet. But yeah, both really, really cool companies. ⁓ On these actually, one of the first topics that I want to discuss is
The topic of taste and branding. I was looking into your story and what you're working on. You've been mentioning that you're into DJing outside of design and that sounds that really helps you and that you're seek kind of creativity and ⁓ you use like, how can I say it? Like stuff outside of design to develop your taste. So you don't just design more. You actually do other things related to arts, music and so on to develop your taste. So the first question for me is,
What is taste for you and how do you define it? Let's start from there.
Meylin (02:57)
⁓ I mean, that's a great question, especially hot topic right now with AI ⁓ coming in more and more. Taste is really, I would say, taste is based on your own experience. A lot of the times and I think for me, taste can be good and bad, but it shouldn't be average. That's what I strive for. Usually, I really try to be around people with
Jim Zarkadas (03:01)
Yeah, true.
Meylin (03:25)
even taste that I don't personally understand or taste that I don't like, but it's different to what is happening as the average. ⁓ So for that, I really respect when people are kind of like driving from their own history, from their own exposure to culture, to really try to do something that others might hate. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (03:50)
Hmm.
Meylin (03:52)
but really takes guts to go and like just say, hey, I like this and I don't care if you like it too. And I think it's hard to find, but the more and more we do it, I think the more we'll evolve into like a larger taste sample.
Jim Zarkadas (04:07)
Yeah.
I really love your explanation. like it's really what I hear from you is like, it really comes down to having a personality. It's like choose who you want to be and who you are actually in this case. kind of, yeah, with the taste, because what you said is that it can be either good or bad, but not in the middle. In the middle is where it's not nice actually.
Okay, that's very interesting. And what about DJing? What has been your experience of doing stuff outside of design? And what has been the impact?
Meylin (04:40)
I think this one is a funny one because I only started like two years ago and I think I have like where I started from was fatigue from looking at Figma and I was struggling to I was struggling to find like I remember asking one of my friends, how do you get inspiration because I cannot continue looking at apps to design an app that I feel like deserves to be outstanding and
Jim Zarkadas (04:51)
I feel you. ⁓
Meylin (05:09)
and really match the personality of the people we have. And they said to me, I don't even look at the screen for that. And that really struck me, that moment of how do we search for creativity and how do we feel inspired. And lately, learning a skill that is not looking at Figma has been quite critical for me. Of course, I love going to museums, et cetera, but that
that didn't quite cut the challenge I had to experience of creating something out of my comfort zone. And I'd say like that's probably been the largest arena of culture and taste development because music is so personal and everybody listens to music, right? How do you know how to move people like 220 people, 50 people, 200 people in a room in a way that matters to them emotionally?
Jim Zarkadas (05:41)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Meylin (06:07)
and like we've, we've been creating music for centuries now, so there's so much to work with. ⁓ and I feel like that really sort of, yeah, that really like helped me develop, ⁓ an unbiased opinion of like what people like beyond like just looking at a mobile phone to, ⁓ to like experience culture, you know.
Jim Zarkadas (06:31)
⁓ Yeah, it's very interesting. By the way, personal story as well, I've been as a kid, used to draw actually I would buy comic books and I would literally draw on a paper what I see on the comic book. I was never really good at kind of drawing something from kind of what I have in my
in my mind, like to visualize it. And recently I actually signed up for some painting lessons that I want to start next month as a way to kind of explore other areas of design. Like it's still like very visual because I want to double down on visual design in terms of my skill set, ⁓ the part that I want to grow. So yeah, it's very interesting to use art actually. And I even started just opening like...
⁓ websites with a history of art and just to consume like high quality visual content like paintings, understand how they use color, seek inspiration and so on because I have faced the same obstacles what you described like you just keep looking at other SAS products but it's just gonna be another SAS product if you don't look somewhere else you just kind of unconsciously kind of a copy what others do so on these
On the branding, I'm curious about your time in Wyse. ⁓ I was looking into your post and you've been the company since it was called TransferWyse. So you were part of the team when you did the whole ⁓ node migration, like that you switched to the new brand, Wyse with a new visual identity. And I'm curious to hear more about the journey there, like in anything that stood out for you.
could be like insights or learning throughout the process because I can assume that it's a very complex thing to do to actually see a new brand to so many people. I'm even curious, did you do any testing maybe or was it fully, we just trust our taste in the team. We don't care, we're just gonna do it, which is also a process that I personally believe in too. ⁓ So yeah, I'm curious about some behind the scenes from that kind of a big project.
Meylin (08:28)
Yeah, I mean, ⁓ it's a very happy project to talk about. there's ⁓ always like ⁓ rebranding of FinTech company ⁓ is not the easiest, mostly because of how the culture in FinTech is built, right? Like you have a lot of people in banking and regulation, a lot of developers behind the scenes building the platform and the rails who don't have exposure to design per se. And they think a lot in like
terms of like the product is working, it's functional. And what really stood out for me is I've been on that journey of building the world's most international account piece by piece. And as we were building this, I think we weren't realizing what we've built after like three years. We had this shyness almost, we were seeing our own flows and more and more talking with cross-functional partners, obviously that were the larger portion of the company.
⁓ we always had this like shyness about our product. couldn't like, we don't feel like screaming off the roofs, ⁓ about like what, what we've built. And, ⁓ a moment arrived where we've matured so much that our customers started telling us how much like they love us. And that blast sort of gave us a little bit more confidence to say, Hey, like we have an amazing functional product, but perhaps it doesn't.
culturally match the lifestyle which people want to live and they associate wise with. That was sort of like a breaking point in insights which we've heard over and over again where people felt proud to tell their friends to use wise, but they didn't feel proud to kind of like show it off, you know? And that is sort of like where we kind of scooped in and we sort of started developing ⁓ at first a few more visionary pieces of like
Jim Zarkadas (10:00)
you
Hmm.
Mmm.
Meylin (10:25)
what the brand could like look and sound as. Actually, interestingly, I always think like brand is more about tone of voice and the tone you're setting with your customers than the actual visuals, which sort of started inspiring people internally, started like giving like a lot of confidence to engineers and designers and product managers that like, wow, we actually have something great in our hands. And as we started that conversation,
Initially, we just pushed pixels, but it started turning into like a real deal. And that's where we felt like the power of now design is driving this conversation, right? Like we are the ones that need to take ownership and push this idea. ⁓ So we started like just going around with our own tastes, as you mentioned, of all the insights, customer insights we've consumed over the two, three years. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (11:05)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Meylin (11:22)
I personally think we sometimes take research a little bit too validative. If you look at the process of Apple, for example, they never build, I don't think they go and test something with customers too much. But they do consume insights, right? They talk to people, they understand what their needs are. And that process takes digestion and takes interpretation. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (11:35)
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Meylin (11:47)
from the people working on those things. And we did that. I wouldn't say we used our gut per se. I think we were quite methodical and we waited for the insights. We consumed them. We talked to our customers. We understood the culture around us. We understood the product that we built, the business metrics we were trying to hit and sort of started interpreting that more as a flow, which kind of led us to
Jim Zarkadas (12:10)
Hmm.
Meylin (12:14)
a few decision points. think it's worth mentioning that we work with an agency, Ragadich, which was external to wise. Absolutely. Yeah, you should talk to Max. He's pretty inspirational. ⁓ I think having like their external point of view gave us gave us as an in house team, ⁓ more confidence to kind of push that narrative that we believed in.
Jim Zarkadas (12:20)
They're also great, by the way. I want to get them on the podcast too.
Yeah.
Mmm.
Meylin (12:43)
because it was like a party that didn't have particular, you know, investment in like beyond the brief. ⁓ And we built up a really great relationship with them. So like that sort of, that allowed us to have a sounding board as an in-house team of like, are we moving in the right direction? Are we not? And also like us as an in-house team, like being able to kind of develop that business point of view of like what we were trying to achieve as a company.
And that's where we landed. think it was like, just like as you're mixing a DJ set, you have songs from different people and you just choose in what sequence to play them out. And then you create like a night to remember rather than like a single track that like stands out.
Jim Zarkadas (13:20)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Okay. Love, love the story. And I really like how you said it is that we didn't do A-B test because it's also, it's a brand that you cannot A-B test everything. I feel like it's a cheap excuse. say, yeah, we're just going to A-B test. Like outsourcing the problem to some kind of a tool. I really like how you described that you were methodical. So it's not that suddenly you're like, you know what? I have great taste. I just trust myself. I'm going to do whatever I want with the brand. There's actually a lot of
like what you said, a very methodical kind of a process to follow where you hear, listen to people, pay attention to the insights and keep iterating, similar to how we build the product, ⁓ build products as well. ⁓ Okay, that's a really interesting story. And... ⁓
One quick comment from me as a customer of Wise, like I remember Wise from the early days with the blue identity that was called Transfer Wise. It was always for me. So I can share a bit of like my story with Wise since you started, ⁓ why you did the rebrand because it really, I can really relate to the problems that you mentioned. For me, was just an, how do you call it? Like currency exchange kind of a platform. It was never really like a bank for my, even for my business. And
There is one thing where like the product has evolved and suddenly something new. It's an entirely bank that you can use for your business or personally. And also it's not for like corporate use or something. It's actually for daily lifestyle stuff. And that's why I find the new brand brilliant. The colors are amazing.
the new primary color of the green one. Photography is really cool. I've started the loaderwise.design to kind of understand all the principles there. Typography is one of my favorite parts, like the new custom fonts you made. And everything just creates a way more creative vibe that you can see somebody using this on a daily, on a day-to-day life. But it's also why I'm so in love with the wise is because it's also very serious and elegant and sophisticated to trust it for my business.
which is the other thing, because there is a lot of emotion involved when you decide which bank you're going to use either personally or as a business. And I've seen, I've done the research with all of them, Revolut.
like local ones, Monzo, like all the popular ones and Weiss was the one that kind of clicked for me the most. I can, yeah, I can totally understand what you mentioned in the beginning that from a cultural point of view, what you had was not really matching kind of the audience. So you had to rebrand. That was the main problem to solve. Cool.
Really, really nice. And Cas also from what I've seen, you also have the cool thing with both companies is that you have very unique visual assets. In the case of Wyse, you have the tapestries. I was like, what did they use? How did they do this? Like I cannot understand. And I was looking into the Wyse.design and so like some more details. I didn't even know about the visual pattern. And I found it brilliant because it's so unique. Like you can look into 10 different fintechs. Wyse has a very authentic, unique style. And that's why I
I'm so excited about the brand and Kaz on the other hand, it's like a liquid 3D kind of style. I'm not sure how even to describe it, but it's also a very strong visual identity of that. yeah, feel like both companies are doing really well on this part. It's a very interesting topic with the brand because you can do a branding project, but it can also look like another SaaS company, let's say, or another FinTech company. So how do you make it unique? It's also a big, big challenge.
Meylin (16:52)
Yeah, I mean, on that, on that topic, I can actually give you like, to tie in the conversation with taste and, the tapestries, which is quite interesting. I can give you the origin story. Basically, ⁓ obviously like we've, we've been like, ⁓ dealing with cash for centuries, right? Like we've developed this beautiful bank notes. Each country had.
Like before the Euro, for example, each country had its own identity embedded into like cash. Even in the UK right now, like you have the Queen or the King's face ⁓ in different countries, like you have like statues and symbols that represented their culture. And we, ⁓ when we were talking about what like wise is as international money, we wanted to preserve that culture that people would associate with the currency they are dealing with.
And similarly, we started exploring how like these banknotes beautifully designed suddenly turned into just 3D flags on most financial apps, right? And we've lost like centuries of like identity ⁓ over the years through this like translation of like cash to like digital cash. And we wanted to preserve that and that's how we kind of came up with like the tapestries and
Jim Zarkadas (17:58)
Wow, okay.
Meylin (18:13)
Actually, one of the main questions we asked our customers is what are some unique places they visited around the world that they really feel attached to. And a lot of people like said different things like one of our customers had climbed Everest and another one had gone to Cappadocia, which was the beautiful like balloons. And someone else has been like, I don't know, Patagonia.
Jim Zarkadas (18:34)
in Turkey, yeah.
Meylin (18:40)
And we kind of like took shots of like those places and kind of created those new cultural tapestries, which we called like ⁓ as an identity to our own customers.
Jim Zarkadas (18:53)
Yeah, it's really cool. And also for like the international aspect of the brand to communicate as well. Yeah, that's really cool. And I never really realized what you said. It's like going from the physical money to the digital. There is so much culture and art that has been lost through this transition. Like I just realized now that you said it. So yeah, I'm going to do some research after like on the the back notes and everything. It's very, very interesting. And it's also very interesting on the branding side, like how
starting the history of the industry you're into. For example, we're one of the teams that we're working with is called Zenmade. It's a scheduling software for cleaning businesses. We've been working on a rebrand for the company because we want to improve the product branding and realize the brand foundation is not solid. So we need to work on that first. And we'll be looking into the history of cleaning services and also ads like in the old times in the US where we had like this retro funky kind of a style with playful typography. So you can find a lot of inspiration just by looking back.
⁓ into the past and try to find even ads or whatever that could be actually. It's a very interesting process like branding. I'm a product designer is my main thing but I'm a big brand enthusiast. I cannot do it myself. I have the people doing the team but I'm a big, big believer of branding honestly. ⁓ Beautiful. So...
Now I was thinking as the next topic to discuss a bit about the product design. And one of the topics we discussed on the podcast is how to combine growth and delight. Like that's many times a debate in product teams, like designers wanting to add more delight and details, and then PMs wanting to focus more on growth and metrics. my personal quick take on this, like in the past, I used to see that it's a...
If you have a PM that cares about design, they're going to prioritize the delight, but I realized that it's not about the person, it's about the process, that you have to find a process where you can do both without having these two projects to compete in a way. And we found a process to do it for the teams we're working with, but I'm really curious about your personal experience on this topic and if there is anything.
kind of any process that you saved ⁓ along the way where you can actually feel you can work on both and you don't have to pick a side, let's say.
Meylin (21:12)
Yeah, I mean, I think like maybe as a step back from growth and delight as everyone in the company wants to do good job, right? Like this is like the baseline that I usually start with. and where sort of like the crunch comes is the time we have to do good stuff, right? ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (21:37)
Exactly.
Meylin (21:39)
I think that's probably like the tension point rather than one, like function cross-functional partners, not wanting to prioritize the other cross-functional partners perspective. so like the way we usually approach it is very simple. ⁓ we, we don't share designs we are not proud of to start with. So let's say that we get a brief, ⁓ that we want to increase our metric. Like that's usually like.
Jim Zarkadas (21:48)
Hmm
Meylin (22:08)
either increase a metric or either like reduce churn or whatever like the business metric we are after. Once we get that brief, I don't think I'm ever going to a position to put myself as a designer to present something that I wouldn't be proud to ship. Even if it's like, no wonky designs, no half-baked experiments. And one of the things we say very often is pixels are cheap to push, right? Like code is expensive.
Jim Zarkadas (22:27)
Hmm.
Meylin (22:37)
Pixels are cheap, we can push pixels all day, very fast, within a day. And really it's just about accelerating that speed of delivery. And again, back to conviction, if as designers we know something is not up to our standard, why do we even show it in the first place? Why do we even go and present that idea? ⁓ I think everybody appreciates showing a fully-fledged idea first and finished, and especially with
Prototyping and AI now, this can happen even 10x faster. So we just need to be ahead of the curve really on that one. And once we kind of present the idea, more often than not, I have seen us find ways. It might not be exactly like per the timeline I imagine as a designer, but we've definitely found ways to kind of like really push the quality to the level of interaction detail that I wanted us to go into, et cetera, et cetera. ⁓
So like my advice is like push the pixels you believe should be live in product, go with that proposal. Don't try to kind of like downgrade the proposal just because that was the brief. Go a step further and I think more often than not you'll find people interesting to actually pursue that full scope rather than half scope.
Jim Zarkadas (23:53)
you
Yeah, I really agree on what you said in the beginning, especially, like the time is the core variable that creates all the tension and so on. And I'm curious to go a level deeper and ask you, how does the design process look like in terms of like, let's say, I'm not sure if you work with weekly sprints or bi-weekly or no sprints at all. how does the design process look like right now for you, for example?
Meylin (24:26)
I mean, it's fair to say like it has changed quite a bit in the last four years, for example, like, we moved to much flatter structure. have a lot of like vertical, vertical, alignment in terms of like IC skills. And we have very little management ahead of us, ⁓ above us actually, like, which is helping, right? Like, so the process would be very, very simple. It will be based on a.
project, we call it a project, something we want to impact, something we want to deliver to our customers, like let's say new car designs, something else, like new onboarding flow. ⁓ And then we'll give ourselves a deadline of when do we want to ship this with? ⁓ And then we try to figure out what's realistic within that deadline. We try to avoid working in too much like water-foley process, mostly because
Jim Zarkadas (25:15)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Meylin (25:22)
it doesn't induce creativity as much and it kind of like creates a, it doesn't leave space for human error, which I kind of personally find really interesting because in all that interaction of like negotiation of like showing designs, discussing timelines, understanding engineering constraint, a lot of great ideas and innovative ideas happen. So we try not to kind of like follow too much like by sprintly. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (25:24)
Hmm.
Hmm
Meylin (25:51)
like schedules, we try to kind of say what we want to impact and then what is our proposal and how can we kind of deliver this.
Jim Zarkadas (26:00)
Got it. So you pretty much come up with projects, you define a deadline and then you make sure that this deadline is problematic and it's not like too ambitious or something like that. I see. see. Yeah, it makes, makes sense. And like with the sprains, also like I've worked in different formats and
Nowadays, like we have the weekly sprint more kind of to keep a rhythm on the reviews and everything, but a project could last, let's say for five, six sprints or something. I don't really like calling it a sprint because sprint means you have kind of a two bus in a way. It's more like cyclists, weekly cyclists. Let's call it this way. But yeah, I fully hear you on the creativity part.
⁓ On the design process, I'm curious also about user research. So before we start recording the podcast episode, I mentioned about why I started really love the microsurveys that I've seen in the product. ⁓ I think it doesn't show up after every transaction that I do, every money transfer, but I'll see it a few times throughout the month. So I'm curious about your experience on that topic because it's a very broad topic and every company approached in a different way. So when it comes to...
let's say, including users into your design process. That could be literally that you include them by talking to them or invite them into design call or that you do a survey or you have like systems in place where you automatically collect feedback, let's say, every month. So what are your kind of a top favorite, let's say, ⁓ methods and practices that you've seen that work really well in terms of the insights that they generate to help you on the design?
Meylin (27:32)
Yeah, Wise is notoriously customer centric. ⁓ Maybe first to mention that, I think if you ever interview at Wise, the first question would be probably how often do you talk to customers? Just to give you a little nugget of insight. think ⁓ whatever the goal has been of the project, that's how we've approached research. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (27:45)
that's cool. Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Meylin (27:59)
So for example,
we had a project where we had to redesign the home screen to match customers' expectation. For that, we couldn't do any survey because we didn't have any benchmark whatsoever of what currently, like we knew the current experience was not even up to standard. We had the conviction as a company, as a team, we didn't need to waste time and go and create a survey just to confirm what we already knew. Instead, what we did is like,
Jim Zarkadas (28:25)
Yeah.
Meylin (28:29)
spoke to customers hand to hand and sort of start debating what they were telling us they needed out of the product. the home screen was incredibly transactional, which was a reflection of the utility of the transport tool we had. But we have built a bank. And when you use a bank, you need different things like seeing your savings and seeing your ⁓ money and getting faster access to your car.
⁓ and sort of like that conversation really just helped us build conviction into what we already kind of believed had to happen rather than, ⁓ you know, give us any kind of like, ⁓ statistical benchmark that this is the right thing to do. ⁓ from there on, I think the way we approached it is we moved immediately to development and then to partial rollout. So no A-B testing. already knew we were doing the correct thing. All we had to do was.
Jim Zarkadas (29:21)
you
Meylin (29:26)
just not like not mess this up. And that's where like the partial rollout came into play where we would just go like 10%, 20, 30, 40 and observe metrics just to make sure that we are also not breaking any other experiences for potentially for customers that we couldn't like speak to.
⁓ and that was like a perfect example of like where research was really flexible working with us to understand how to match our need rather than just have research for research purposes. ⁓ I'm really grateful for that because it's speed us up. And then we've had other experiences where we've had mature product, like our transfer product is incredibly mature, right? We have so many customers use it daily and, ⁓
There we believe that we can optimize that flow to be more perfect and personalized to each customer. And that is where more statistical, survey significant research can come into play, where it can help us make the tweaks that we need to across the flow to make this experience even better. But we are likely not going to reinvent at least in the coming year.
I can't speak on behalf of WISE anymore, but I don't imagine that like transferring money fundamentally will change in the next one year. So all we need to do there is like optimize. I'd say like pick your project and then pick the research needs that you need in order to move you forward rather than just do it for the sake of process.
Jim Zarkadas (30:56)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly. Yeah, I fully, fully agree. Yeah, I fully agree. And let there is no one size fits all with research. Like research, what? Like it depends on the, what you say, like look at the project, what you need to learn and then figure out what's the best way to learn it. And also make sure you're trying to learn the things that actually matter. And you're not keeping yourself busy as well. Because research really has this, the moment you mentioned, like, I mean, not you, like from my personal experience, I don't want to generalize, but the moment
I'm going to mention, let's say research many times, especially in the past, it usually comes with a fear, but we're to slow down so much. We need to faster. So it's always interesting how you can make it efficient and also high value. I feel like it's really, if the ROI is going to be high over researching that topic, let's say for that project, then everybody's more willing to.
to actually go invest the time and the resources. So yeah, fully agree on what you said personally. ⁓ Let me see, I still have 10 more minutes and I'm thinking, yeah, I'm gonna ask two short, not short, like two questions and I think these are gonna be enough for the next 10 minutes. So the first one is, ⁓ where do you see design process heading to now with AEI? ⁓ What I'm asking is,
As a designer myself as well, I see a lot of hype on LinkedIn that I don't personally believe. see people over hyping every single thing that comes out and like, guys, come on, like this is way too much. And it's sometimes hard to separate what's like true versus what's not true, what can you believe versus what cannot. And with AI, I pursue their interesting developments, but...
I haven't seen anything groundbreaking in my process and sometimes I ask myself, am I doing something wrong or is this just a state of design at this point? So I'm really curious about your experience and on the current design process in general and how do you use AI and where do you see ⁓ design evolving into as well.
Meylin (33:06)
Yeah, that's a great question. actually I'm doing a talk on AI next week, how I use AI. So it's a perfect timing. I one of one of the biggest challenges right now is ⁓ how do we run away from bad taste. And for me, ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (33:13)
⁓ nice. Beautiful. ⁓
Meylin (33:27)
And this may not sound very like appropriate, ⁓ politically appropriate, perhaps, but LinkedIn is perhaps the worst place to get advice as a designer. ⁓ I keep seeing things that are just like mind bogging, to be honest. Like last week, for example, I saw someone posted that ⁓ if Google can sort of ship a product.
Jim Zarkadas (33:37)
True, ⁓
Meylin (33:54)
with half of the world missing because they just shipped the US map in 2005. You should go and ship whatever you have in your code base now. I think that was a terrible advice, especially as we try to look at how AI can accelerate us to move faster and better for our customers. Giving that advice sounded like out of context and out of touch, to say the very least.
Jim Zarkadas (34:17)
Hmm.
Meylin (34:23)
I think back to your original question. We are still developing, right? Like, ⁓ it's not like AI is done and it's finished. There is like a lot of interesting conversations right now that are having. don't know if you saw Brian Chesky just announced that he doesn't want Airbnb integrated into chat. GPT is like a UI front, which Expedia has done.
Jim Zarkadas (34:35)
Hmm.
Really? ⁓
I haven't seen that one. I'm gonna take, okay.
Meylin (34:50)
Yeah, I mean, it's it's within right, right? Like, Airbnb invested a lot in its own brand and its own voice. And currently, like what OpenAI is doing is trying to consume all these brands to give like convenience to customers. But I don't think OpenAI has done still the job to preserve the identity of those brands. It's almost like we are very early stage in this journey yet.
And I'm glad there's companies that stand up against it and demand more investment in developing that point of view more cohesively. So things are happening as we speak. I think every week there is something new that is happening and we are gonna take time to settle. But I am a firm believer that everyone will start building. We just need to kind of like figure out
Jim Zarkadas (35:22)
Mm-hmm.
Meylin (35:47)
how do we not build average products? And how do we kind of move towards something like really ⁓ special for customers and for myself as well. I mean, I use a lot of products and I'm always like sort of interested in things that stand out. To say the least, like at Cache at the moment, the way we've embraced AI is very...
Jim Zarkadas (35:51)
Yeah.
Meylin (36:16)
much with the experimental mindset. So the way we, we do things is like, we don't try to shove it into every project for whatever reason. We try to a find time to accelerate tasks that are quite boring for us. So for example, I'll give you an example. have like a quality tool that I just worked with some developers where you can report the bug from inside the product and
Jim Zarkadas (36:19)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Meylin (36:45)
That sorting mechanism was incredibly painful because it will go into our linear and JIRA boards and somebody had to manually like, ⁓ it's like this bug is this team, this bug is this team, let's like sort it out. ⁓ Instead, we sort of worked on a tool to help us distribute and prioritize those bugs based on the screenshot recognition and keyword recognition. And that sort of like speed up, I think like.
Jim Zarkadas (36:52)
Hmm.
I see.
Meylin (37:13)
like incredible amount of quality updates that we did just last week. That was quite impressive how AI actually helped us sort out a very operationally boring task for all of us into something that actually we can invest time in figuring out how to design the fix for that bug rather than figuring out who should be fixing this bug in the first place. That's a good example. I think we have other examples where
Jim Zarkadas (37:35)
Hmm.
Meylin (37:41)
we've actually used AI to accelerate momentum. back to the topic where we should just push pixels faster to kind of like propose a solution. We actually had like this project where we we needed a branding of this feature desperately, transparently, but we couldn't kind of get get the excitement behind it. Like, the company would understand our cross functional partners would understand but
We were empty handed almost because we were product designers and the best we could offer is some dot or some placeholder, which didn't quite excite people transparently. So what we did is we opened Runway, we gave it a few prompts of what we believe this thing should be. Probably, I would say now Hinsight, we described totally the wrong vibe we were going for, but what...
Jim Zarkadas (38:11)
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Meylin (38:36)
it got us to is Excite because it looked better. ⁓ It looked somewhat closer to what we wanted out of this. It spoke of a brief that would have been 10 pages on Word document, most likely into like one single image that when you look at it, you get it. ⁓ And we sort of like, actually, we got the brand team sort of a little bit annoyed with us that we did that, but they also like ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (38:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Meylin (39:05)
got to help us and actually were like, okay, we're actually gonna develop this with you, which is what we wanted out of this whole deal. Yup. So this worked wonders, honestly, like as a product designer, I wouldn't have even gotten as close as to what I wanted, but it provoked, it gave an idea, it gave the vibe, you could feel it, you could see it, it became slightly more real than my words or my team's words.
Jim Zarkadas (39:11)
It's like seeing is believing what it says, like, yeah.
Meylin (39:33)
⁓ And we actually got to an amazing like end state right now. And I don't think I would have been able to do that without AI.
Jim Zarkadas (39:43)
I it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't really have anything to add. Like I have a similar experience where we use mid-journey and now nano banana for photography. Where like for small teams where they don't have the budget for photo-suit and photo-suits, can really help to generate like high quality photos. But before that, it's actually exactly what you described. You can sell ideas because you can prototype them really fast and then people can get it. If you're not a designer, it's really hard to be able to see.
the thing you describe because we're trained to do that. Like we can describe something, but at the same time we can be able to, we're able to see this. How we can close the eyes and kind of visualize it. That's not something that a CEO could do, let's say, or a PM, because they're not designing every day. They have a different type of brain, let's say. So yeah, that's a very powerful use case as well. And all the efficiency part that you mentioned at the beginning of tedious tasks and so on.
⁓ The talk you mentioned, I'm curious so that I can also keep it in my radar. What is the talk you're gonna give in the next weeks?
Meylin (40:44)
It's an amazing conference. It's a FinTech conference happening in Vienna. It's the fourth edition, I believe now. I've spoken in the first edition and I was really impressed with how the organizers got ⁓ an amazing crowd going in together. It's called George UX ⁓ and it's mostly FinTech based. It's I think the largest bank in Austria, largest FinTech in Austria right now. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (41:03)
Okay.
or TX
That's really cool. Okay, yeah, I opened the website. I'm gonna take a look. Thanks for sharing. ⁓ I think we can wrap it up here. So actually I had another question I can ask very briefly because we can have the short answer. The last question I had in mind was actually, what is your favorite product at this moment? ⁓
Meylin (41:14)
So yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (41:35)
It can be a SAS product or something else, like ideally a SAS product, but doesn't have to be necessarily. ⁓ At this moment in why, that was the question. So I'm curious at least about the what, because we're running out of time. What comes to your mind?
Meylin (41:48)
Yeah, I think you should try Bump. ⁓ Bump is like this, I don't even know if it's Gen Z, maybe Gen Alpha app that is completely insane. And I think it's one of those apps that tries to do something different, completely different way. I downloaded it last week, but yeah, just get it and see ⁓ it for yourself. I'm not gonna spoil it too much.
Jim Zarkadas (42:05)
Okay.
Okay, is it bump wellness or how do you type it? It's B...
Meylin (42:18)
It's just
bump, so...
B-U-M-P basically.
Jim Zarkadas (42:26)
yeah map for friends
hang with friends in real life
Meylin (42:32)
Yeah, it's the concept of find me, find your friends on ⁓ Apple, but like expand it.
Jim Zarkadas (42:37)
Okay, so it's this one.
wow, like the visual, has like really strong visuals. Okay, I'm gonna take a look after the call. Love it. Thank you. Thanks for sharing.
Meylin (42:47)
Yeah,
I think it's one of those moments where someone said, I'm just going to do what I want ⁓ and sort of not care what the industry is doing. And I'm very happy that apps like that exist.
Jim Zarkadas (42:58)
Yes.
Yeah, and it really comes back to the initial thing that you said in the beginning of the episode, which is really about having either good or bad taste, but not in the mids. Like make sure you have like you have to say something like that you stand for something. I love it. Awesome. Thanks for joining me today. Yeah, super interesting, interesting discussion. And maybe we can have another one in the future and dive into all the product strategy stuff and so on. Or AI like that would be also really, really interesting topic where you seem to have a lot of
experience as well.