Lisa Sy 🦋

product designer at coinbase
illustrator and artist based in southern california

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@j_smith Congrats Jeff!

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@jenny_wen @AnthropicAI Congrats Jenny! They're super lucky to have you

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@artswagonist this is incredible!

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

back to back on my timeline

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@kyliebytes Listening to "Kids" at @wesleyan_u 's 2009 orientation was a canon event.

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@kristinatastic LOL I'm the latter.

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@marcofyi Next iteration request:

Project--- → Project ————

(Dividers with titles)

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@alexbaldwin I was in Sedona 2 weeks ago and noticed this!

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@willw wow! is this your own tiling work? if so, this is super impressive - looks great.

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@zackrosebrugh Incredible! I really love seeing the textures and can feel the brush stroke

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@ericeriksson I'd like that Eric :)!

I'm focused on building little side apps to get into the flow of starting, building, and getting things out with React. Please send away!

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

sincerely not trolling, but has any product designer made the transition successfully to become a design engineer? would love to hear how that experience was.

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@ludwiczakpawel have you tried Origami?

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@michaelsayman it has a really neat puffy bag!

[Alex Baldwin @alexbaldwin]

Hey folks, it’s rare for me to post about work these days but for the first time in a few years we have an opening for a new client at the end of Q1.

My design partner, @justinrgraham, and I specialize in solving unique and high leverage design problems. Our studio is results focused and obsessive over quality. We strive to be the design partners we wish we had as founders.

Highlights from the past few years:

→ Redesigned user onboarding for Top 100 mobile app that directly attributed for adding $7M+ of ARR.
→ Managed design of content products (blog, edu, NUX) for Fortune 500 company that led to 40% improvement of new user acquisition.
→ Led design team of first generation hardware product featured at Apple retail stores.
→ Founded and developed the B2B product for a $10B+ consumer company.
→ Created a newsletter and educational product with 400K+ subscribers.
→ Responsible for the first revenue generating product at a Series-B stage start up.

Looking for similar results? Book a call here https://t.co/Ng5JFN2BSC

[Lisa Sy 🦋 @lisasy]

@marclou @levelsio Congrats on this!

Before 2021, did you already know how to code or did you also learn then?

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

Good worldly wisdom from Charlie Munger. I’ve generally never had problems finding (1) and have left companies because of (2) and (3).

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

Seeking product market fit isn’t a fine art; it’s wielding a blunt instrument to strike gold.

Part of my concern about some of the more academic takes on the practice of product management are that they almost make building great products feel like an inevitability. Smart people who do smart things the right way are told: if you do this, it will work.

And it’s not just frameworks or the academic side of the industry, it’s the startup lore and revisionist history that create this belief that you can pattern match how company A, B, or C did things you, too, could be as great as company A, B, or C.

But I’ve been a PM. And a founder. And a director. And at the C-level. Two decades of my career dedicated to trying to build great things—by myself or through a team.

And my gut (yes that second brain where all my startup trauma lives) continues to tell me:

Building something 0 > 1 is about 3 simple things, and those things only:

1. Finding the right problem
2. Solving it marginally well
3. Enough so you get paid

Early PMF feels so…stupid. It’s that: “wait—you’ll use this even though it barely works?” feeling. And it’s usually not about what or how exactly that thing works, but rather, #1 above: did you find the right problem?

(Note: I’m putting aside market opportunity, and identifying venture scalable problems, and all that jazz and focusing exclusively on building things people want, use, and pay for.)

And what I sometimes see is folks spend a lot of time on how they’ll solve the problem, to the detriment of being bold in the problem-to-be-solved side of things. I’ve been guilty of this: being so personally convinced a problem needs solving that I bang my builder head against the wrong thing, too long.

Now what’s interesting imo is that as soon as you strike down with that PMF pick and oil starts to flow (what metaphor should I use here?) then you very quickly have to scaffold structured PM mechanics on maximizing and expanding the opportunity. Though I might argue: vibes and hustle mode can and should last much longer than you think.

And the best of the best can do it all:
- brute force problem seeking
- hacky scrappy proto-building
- structured, analytical product scaling
- as ICs or as leaders of teams

But too many folks are trained exclusively on the 2nd half of that stack, and may not have the experience to grok the difference between a cleanly solvable optimization problem and a messy PMF issue. Not only do the frameworks fail here: they mask core problems by distracting with activity.

So my advice to both rising PMs and ambitious product leaders is this:

Go off and build something 0 > 1 until you remember how shockingly simple PMF feels.

Talk to users.
Test a landing page.
Ask for money.
Find the problem.

Your job may not give you this opportunity (building features is not going 0 > 1!)—so put down the non fiction books and go pick up some code.

Tune that second brain in your tummy—not on data analysis or sensible user stories or a spreadsheet of prioritized hypotheses—but on the direct hit of building something and vulnerably asking: will you buy this?

Remind yourself of how simple it can be.