Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance)

May 18, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Scott Belsky, chief strategy officer at Adobe and author of The Messy Middle, shares lessons from founding Behance (sold to Adobe), leading product teams, angel investing, and navigating AI. He emphasizes psychology-driven product decisions, enduring uncertainty, and adapting to constraints.

Cultivating Product Sense via Empathy and First Mile

Product sense starts with empathy over solution fixation: observe users shoulder-to-shoulder in their full context—amid meetings, family, or distractions—to grasp unmet needs and build intuition. Belsky stresses the "first mile" (onboarding, defaults, orientation), where users are lazy, vain, and selfish, seeking quick success without tours or friction. Most teams underinvest here, fixating on final-mile polish; optimizing it converts more users into lasting ones. This evolves as customer cohorts shift—early adopters forgive friction, later pragmatists do not—requiring redesigns, as seen in Photoshop's shift to low-cost access for novices.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:00:31) **Conviction test for enduring the messy middle***
2 *(00:05:49) **Scott's expanded role at Adobe: strategy, design, emerging products***
3 *(00:08:29) **Building product sense through empathy and psychology***
4 *(00:09:51) **Optimizing the first mile (onboarding/orientation/defaults)***
5 *(00:16:55) **What makes durable consumer products succeed***
6 *(00:21:12) **Do half: ruthless feature killing for focus***
7 *(00:26:33) **AI transforms products/work: from workflow to flow***

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, investor, and currently Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Design and Emerging Products. He founded Behance, an online platform for creative professionals to showcase and discover work, and served as CEO until its acquisition by Adobe. Scott is an early advisor and investor in several businesses at the intersection of technology and design, including Pinterest, Uber, Warby Parker, Airtable, and Flexport. He is also the author of two nationally bestselling books and founded 99U, a publication and conference focused on productivity in the creative world. In today’s episode, we discuss:

* How to strengthen your product sense

* Why you should only do half the things you want

* What it takes to build a successful consumer product

* Why you are probably underinvesting in onboarding

* The future of AI and how to prepare for it

* Advice for founders and PMs who are feeling stuck

* Why resourcefulness will take you further than resources

* Adobe’s current priorities and their exciting path ahead

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Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-on-building-product-sense

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Where to find Scott Belsky: