John Maeda has been a professor at the MIT Media Lab, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, designer partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins and most recently served as the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that he made another big leap with his latest job, becoming chief experience officer at Publicis Sapient — the consulting arm of advertising giant Publicis Groupe.
At the time he took the job, Maeda said he’d become more interested in working with “end-ups,” his term for larger companies that “serve the lives of human beings, regular people, non-tech people.”
An admirable sentiment — but it’s easier to talk about large-scale digital transformation that it is make it a reality. So after Maeda had been on-the-job for a few weeks, we met up to discuss how things are going.
While Maeda didn’t talk about his work with specific clients, he only seemed more convinced than ever that he’d made the right decision, and that “grown-up companies have gotten a bad rap.”
At the same time, Maeda sees some key ways in which these companies need to change, like becoming “dataful” — i.e., “leveraging quantifiable data to iterate faster.”
He added, “The CEO needs to run at exponential speed, because they know that the water is already above their head.”
Maeda also discussed his upcoming book “How To Speak Machine,” how companies can collect user data without violating user privacy and why he built his own app during his first 25 days on the job. You can read a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, below.
TechCrunch: So you’re 25 days in. Before you started, you said you were excited to work with what you called end-ups — these larger companies that are the opposite of startups. How has your idea of what the job was going to be compared to those first 25 days?
John Maeda: It really fits what I thought it was going to be. The startup-endup terminology came from — I wrote something for Gigaom with my partner in crime back then (Becky Bermont, now at Ideo) about startups and end-ups.
I think the end-up company is like this Mother Earth or Father Earth that everyone needs to be healthy. Even the startups need it! They’re talking about disrupt, disrupt, disrupt, and you know, maybe a few are brand new ideas, but the rest of kind of like, “You know, I wouldn’t mind being acquired by [a larger company].”
TC: Right, their long-term plan is to be acquired by one of the companies that they’re disrupting.
JM: So I think the end-up — I’m wondering if we should call it a grown-up company. And I think grown-up companies have gotten a bad rap.
TC: There’s this this sense that a grown-up — or end-up or whatever terminology — isn’t tech-savvy. It’s the “before” state in the digital transformation, and it has this inertia and bureaucracy, that they’re stuck in the mud. And you came from the academic and design world and moved into startups, and now you’re working with big companies. It seems like you don’t feel those preconceptions are accurate?
JM: I personally realized that I’ve been multi-generationally inclined. Whenever a younger person is saying something, I say, “Everyone be quiet! Let’s listen to what they’re saying. Oh, my gosh, I didn’t see the world that way.” Versus, we’re in a world where the highest-paid person talks and everyone just sort of listens.
I’m working at a company whose job it is to enable the end-ups to move at exponential speed a.k.a., Silicon Valley speed. “Hey, everyone, this thing called Moore’s law is happening, has happened!” And what’s neat is that I’m picking up the baton pass of Nigel [Vaz] the [new] CEO.
I was stalking him and there was this video from 2016, where he was at a Publicis Groupe event, he’s in a big room of important people across Europe, and he shows a picture of some little drop of water. He says, “Okay, this drop of water is just a drop of water. Beautiful room we’re in right now. Now, what if I were to tell you that the water kept dripping? How long would it take for this beautiful room to fill? If it was linear time, it would be a few centuries. But if it’s exponential speed, Moore’s Law speed, halfway through my talk, you will all be drowning in the water.”
I love how the company’s been talking about exponential speed, trying to convince end-ups: “Hey, wake up.” And I’ve arrived in a moment where the “How to Speak Machine” book is about to come out to explain to everyone this computational thinking. As David Bowie said, “What is the internet? It’s an alien life form, and it’s invisible.” It’s here, right? And you’d better change your business. Stop looking at Google, Facebook, whatever. It’s happened.
TC: Before, it was this sense that this is where things are going eventually and that you’ve got to prepare yourself for the future. Now it’s this thing that has arrived.
JM: Glug glug glug, you know? And we know it’s so hard, because our bodies live in linear time, we age linearly, the speed of transportation is linear, etc. And let me put in here someone who looks like Elon Musk saying, “Tomorrow, it’s going to be rockets!” It’s because he knows the famous adage of: On the thirtieth day it’s full, so when is it half full? On the 29th day. He knows that in a year, it’s gonna get better.
Even for me, by joining such a large organization, I was wondering how do I disrupt communication in a way that I can move transformation faster. So I wrote an app in Flutter, which [allows you to build] iOS, Android native mobile apps. I tried Flutter last year, and it wasn’t very good. But I just had to wait one year and oh my God, Flutter is amazing.
TC: So you built an app in your first 25 days?
JM: It’s a welcome app for me. It’s native, multi-platform and I’m now reaching out to people to see, “How are you doing?” I want to talk about like, what’s next, what is their purpose. This is not an app just for me to make and have fun. This is a product that I can enable to increase the speed of transformation.
The framework I pushed out there is: Experiences have to be light. Because if you’re cloud-first, it’s all about the speed.
And then ethical: You have to make experiences that are grounded in ethics, not just how you talk about them, but how they are. The biggest issue for tech today, they have to be accessible, not just accessible-accessible, but actually easy for everyone to use. Think of the Macintosh in 1984 — the computer for the rest of us, right?
And then being dataful — I want to popularize the word dataful. Because it seems like, “Oh, that’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” It’s actually dataful.
TC: So what is dataful?
JM: It’s like being Amazon. It’s leveraging quantifiable data to iterate faster.
TC: When we think of things that are not ethical about digital products right now, a big part of that is the data collection. So how do you see that intersecting with your idea of dataful?
JM: Well, that is a design problem. There are different kinds of people out there, specifically in the UX space, that are trying to educate the community, the experience makers, that there are all kinds of patterns for data sharing. There’s a site it’s called Privacy Patterns with like, 80 different variations, and we know the GDPR one — that we hate. But there’s all kinds of methods to say, “How much am I disclosing right now? How do I opt in?”
TC: So these aren’t necessarily legal frameworks.
JM: They’re more like interaction paradigms. They’re more like: Be more obvious.
Without this, I think we’re used to default GDPR, and we hate that. But there’s some elegant patterns for data sharing that I didn’t know about until I began editing the Design in Tech Report.
And so, number one, being able to use those kinds of patterns. Number two is for everyone to ask questions around business information: Are we at least doing the effort of reducing bias in information, whether it’s specifically socioeconomi bias, and number two, are we doing the least amount of work, are we at least considering anonymization, knowing that AI/ML can do cross referencing etc.? But if we don’t consciously do that work, it’s never going to happen.
The reason why datafulness cannot go away is because computation. It used to be too expensive to spy on you — spy on you, or know about you. If I’m knowing about you then I’m serving you better.
And I give that old example of the three cups of tea. It’s an old fable.
There’s a super important lord, he’s in feudal Japan, and he’s come back from hunting. And then he wants some tea. This person gives them tea, and it’s a big cup of tea, but it’s not hot. So he drinks it down, and then he has a second cup of tea, it’s slightly smaller, and it’s a little bit warmer and then drinks that one down. The third cup of tea is a really beautiful tea cup but it’s super hot tea. So by that time he is ready to enjoy the tea cup, and enjoy the temperature.
That was predicated on this person knowing that he’d come from hunting and hadn’t had anything to drink for a long time. And that’s the expression of incredible experience. Right? If he just shows up and the other guy says, “I’m going to give him the best-looking tea cup with the super hottest tea,” it would have burned. He probably would have died, too.
TC: So it’s thinking about the whole context and the full experience.
JM: What you’re trying to do, if you’re trying to [deliver a great experience] and you’re working data-less, you have to use the Force. And the Force is a concept that is from a sci-fi movie. [laughs] Datafulness is about a beautiful use of data and an appropriate use of data, is about starting from an ethical frame of mind.
TC: The other thing you’ve been talking about is this sort of generational thing. And you’re maybe pushing back against the idea that older people just don’t know about this stuff, but it was funny when you were talking about it, because I’ve been in these meetings where it’s someone who’s not a millennial, or Gen Z, fetishizing them and talking about: This is what we need to reach young people.
But then all the younger people in the meeting are the ones who were frantcally taking notes from this older person about what their generation wants.
JM: Oh I love that picture. It’s like a New Yorker cartoon.
TC: So how much have you seen that? How much are you trying to get companies to rethink their communication and hierarchy?
JM: So, first of all, I love that. I can imagine the older sage, [they’re] describing everything that they know about Gen Z and millennials, and the millennial is just writing it down. That’s a terrible image and wonderful.
You know, people ask me why I’m such a believer in younger people. It’s because I was at MIT for so long, and so I admired [the students], and I was learning from them. When I left that world, I [found] it odd that everyone doesn’t work that way, that everyone doesn’t listen to them first before believing that they’re right.
TC: Even in the university context, not everyone works that way.
JM: I think I was an anomaly in general. Part the fact of, why do I listen to them so much is a nice thing about being, not a genetic but a sociological accident. I came from a tofu store in Chinatown, I go back to Chinatown, Seattle, I see kids running around — I should still be that kid. I don’t know how I got to leave that.
And because of the uncertainty, I just know that whatever someone says to me, I don’t know if I can believe it 100%. Because they were just as smart, the people I knew then as a child, and the people I work with now.
Number two, I think there has to be a combination of older thinking and newer thinking together. That’s why I will listen to the sages with a grain of salt. And I’ll listen to the new sages with a grain of salt and I’ll just keep experimenting. And I think that when I meet different people in these end-ups who are the innovation person, they all can do that work of being a bridge.
But to your point, they’re often a minority.
TC: So part their role and your role, in working at these end-ups, is encouraging the slightly older, more senior people to create structures for that kind of voice.
JM: Yes, to create structures and to invest in it. Knowing that it isn’t about helping the next generation. It’s about, if you accept the disruption premise, you’d prefer to be disrupting yourself than having someone else disrupt you.
TC: This is also happening as Nigel’s come on with this vision of the new Publicis Sapient.
JM: You know, I’m trying to set it in my mind … so that I can actually explain it to others, but it’s super simple.
Okay, ready? The old-world marketing funnel: I’m selling this watch. Anthony, you want this watch, but it’s way behind the glass, way over there in the back, you’re never going to see it. So I’ve got to make you aware of it here.
I’m going to show you a picture of a person walking through a beach, they’re wearing the watch. And then I’m going to get you to come closer to the finish line at the mall or wherever — this is before the internet. And I’m going from consideration to conversion. Then you’re going to go home, you’re going unwrap the watch, it’s in a box, it’s got a piece of paper that you’re going to throw away, and there’s a warranty card that you’re going to throw away, and then you’re set. You’re set for a couple years, maybe.
That was important in a world that made physical products that are all commodities. In that world, marketing is king or queen or whatever you want to call it, so you need advertising, marketing, extreme marketing, like a blimp flying all around, any stunt to get your attention to come down the funnel, come to this store.
And then in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, “Zero to One,” he writes — which I learned in venture capital and every company I’ve been involved with — number one, marketing is a waste of money. Marketing is a product of the bubble economy. The way you sell a product is to make a great product and have it sell itself. Viral growth. We’re gonna make an MVP, test it out, I’m going to instrument, push it out there, get data back, grow the snowball into a lint ball, until it’s a gigantic company.
But what happens is, take a look at Lyft now. It needs marketing, because it’s a commodity. So you switch from being product-centric to: “Let’s go hire a CMO. Whoa, hold on a second. We’re selling watches.”
But meanwhile, at some point, the marketers realize, you come down [the funnel], “How do I market something that’s a crummy product?” And the people in product, if you’re at Uber or whatever, and you’ve got a product group running, you want to take the marketing material to [convince users to stay] in Uber. So we’re going to pull some stuff from the marketing arm over here.
What we have is organizational nightmare. We have old, and we have new and emerging. What I love about what Nigel — and I’m not Nigel, I can’t speak for him, but my pure analysis is that Sapient began as IT backend. You know: It was hard for you to build a website, we know Apache.
And then at some point, I don’t have to do this anymore. I think the website is marketing content. I think the e-commerce is not that profitable, it’s kind of marketing. Marketing kind of took this thing over.
What Nigel’s done is, he’s totally Steve Jobs-ing it, He’s saying: “Focus. We’re going to do the part that involves IT transformation of the business at the CEO level, to be what the CEO needs to run at exponential speed, because they know that the water is already above their head, and they can only do it if they have power of exponential speed. The infrastructure has to have a dilithium crystal, and if you have a dilithium crystal, it’s going to change how fast you make products, how you report on them, how they work together, it will change marketing.”
What Nigel said, essentially, is: [IT transformation] is what we own. And we do a lot less of [marketing] over here, because we’re part of Publicis Groupe, which already does this thing, in spades.
TC: Part of you’re getting at is, there’s this division: Here’s the core tech stack, and here’s the marketing and advertising side. Your team and Nigel’s teams are going to be focused on the tech stack, but that’s going to bleed over. And you’re the person, in some ways, bridging it.
JM: It’s like a scrambled egg. The yolk is this, the white is this, they’re both great, you need both. I’m like: Separate the egg! Especially when it comes to experience — because experience traditionally, in the agency world, [is about] cool things. As for the product world, it’s about impactful things. So I’m trying to pull them apart.
TC: But not entirely.
JM: Exactly. Because who wants to eat an egg yoke? Some people eat egg whites, I know, but they want the whole egg.
TC: And your book “How to Speak Machine,” that predates your time at Publicis Sapient?
JM: The timing is so ridiculous. Because just as I was finishing my book, I was listening to Nigel, and thinking, “Holy crap, you’re telling companies how to do this. I have a book that says why you need to do it.”
Because he had that drip analogy in 2016. I’ve written an entire book that explains the drip.