Koji Pereira
Living and Designing Outside the Comfort Zone
In this episode of Brave UX, Koji Pereira tells his inspiring story of becoming a senior design leader for some of the world’s hottest tech companies, against all the odds.
Highlights include:
- What’s enabled you to swim and not sink in tough situations?
- Why was Google’s Orkut social network sunset?
- How can we make our products work for people who have low literacy?
- What hard lessons did you learn leading a startup?
- How did your team discover the idea for Files by Google?
Who is Koji Pereira?
Koji is the host of the Cells & Pixels podcast and has recently joined Twitter, as a Senior Product Design Manager. There, he leads a talented team that is helping users to discover and find content, and other people that they care about on the social network.
Before Twitter, Koji was the Head of Design at Lyft Business. He also spent nearly a decade at Google, including roles as Head of Design for Google’s original social network (Orkut) and Head of Design for the Curator Team, which included the design, launch, and growth of “Files by Google” to over half-a-billion monthly active users.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Koji Pereira. Koji is the host of the live podcast Cells and Pixels and has recently joined Twitter as a senior product design manager. There he leads a talented team that is helping users to discover and find content and other people that they care about on the social network. Before Twitter, Koji was the head of design at Lyft Business where he and his team of six designers covered seven product areas.
- While at Lyft, Koji's team launched a brand new product called Lyft Pass, which enabled companies to create their own ride programs. Winding the clock back a little further, Koji spent nearly a decade at Google including roles as the head of design for Google's original social network or cut remember that and head of design for Google's curator team, which included the design, launch and growth of files by Google to over half a billion monthly active users. As a first generation Asian Latino immigrant with Amerindian heritage, Koji is particularly passionate about growing inclusive and diverse teams that have psychologically safe cultures. When he's not leading design teams, Koji can often be found volunteering his time for various well-known industry initiatives. He has been a design mentor for MIT's 100k entrepreneurship competition and also for YCombinator. He's also currently a judge of the tech innovation challenge with Koji having such an interesting origin story, which we'll get to soon, and a stellar career journey. I've been very much looking forward to today's conversation. Koji, welcome to the show
- Koji Pereira:
- Brendan. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great having you here. Koji and I, as I mentioned before we started recording, there are some really interesting parallels between both of our backgrounds. And while this isn't a story about my background, it is something that I wanted to get into about your background and explore some of those things. I understand that you grew up as one of five children in a poor neighborhood in the city of Bello Ante, which is about 250 miles north of Rio. For people wanting to place that geographically, paint that picture for us. What was the neighborhood? What did you see when you looked out of your bedroom window?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, Brendan, thanks for asking that. Yeah, I grew up in this neighborhood where basically my mom was a visionary there because she was like, Hey, I wanna make sure that you have enough things to do at home so you don't get to play that much outside because if I played outside, I will be probably involved with things that wouldn't give me a very good future. My friends from the street that I lived in, they all got into trouble. They all got into some sort of crime or drugs and things like that. So for me, using technology was a way to just find entertainment inside my house. And I used to play video games got my first computer very early. My first computer was a Apple two clone made in Brazil and I had some people over just to play games or show them some of my codes small programs that I coded that would do some sort of visual things on the screen. So it was very fun. And growing up in this environment for me was very interesting because I never expected to be very far from that reality. So for me, being able to support my family or to be where I am right now was something that I really didn't even dream before. It was never really capable of dreaming this high to be honest.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you mean we've got a whole bunch of questions about your career journey cuz it really, as I mentioned in your introduction has been quite stellar, but coming back to your neighborhood, I understand that for a long while there wasn't even paved streets.
- Koji Pereira:
- Oh yeah. The street was not paved at all. So a lot of, there are tons of streets and I used to study in a different neighborhood because my mom didn't want me to study in the neighborhood was. So the school district was a pretty violent and instead of that I would get into a school shuttle to another neighborhood and then study there. So for me, this was the best of my mom could do in terms of my education, in terms of my wellbeing cuz then she knew that I would be safe, I would be able to focus on study and I would definitely have a potential different future than my friends had in the same street.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I've heard you describe what school was like before your mom moved you to the other district and you said it wasn't uncommon for children to bring knives to school and for there to be fights almost every day. What was that like before you moved districts for you as such a young person growing up in what sounds like a very violent environment?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, I like to joke that I had many lives and my initial life was this one, living in this neighborhood, I remember to see many fights. I remember to sometimes have to run because somebody's into a fist fight with someone else or there was someone with a knife running around. And then when I got to this school in a different district, to me it was almost like, oh, I'm joining a new world. Everybody's different. I think on the other hand, I also noticed that they look at me in a different way too because my mom had a very old car, I didn't have money to buy all the fancy stuff. So as a teenager, being this different school district was also kind of put in a different bucket, if you can say that. And I saw myself differently too. And that kind of repeated in my life in different levels.
- Once I joined Google for instance, that was the only company in my city that didn't have someone looking in your shoulders to make sure that you are working well or that you're not taking breaks too long to not work or anything like that. So a lot of micromanagement from that era. And then likewise, when I moved to us, I was pretty much the only person I knew on the design field from Latin America. Then moving on to leadership, I'm still, today I know maybe two or three other designers who are in the design leadership here that comes from Brazil or Latin America. So there is not many of us representing Latin America here. So to me it's almost like every time I have this pivot or this moment in my life, I'm kind of stepping in a different world. And sometimes either I am the only person that is stepping in that world or there is few people that I can identify.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what is it about you, Koji, that has enabled you to swim rather than sink in those situations?
- Koji Pereira:
- It's a good question. I think I was always motivated to do 10 times better because I knew that for me to just to do the minimum, I would have to do 10 times better than a regular person who had access to things. Because let's say if I do my work in the same level as someone who have already that position or that prestige or that status of being the person who is supposed to be there, I wouldn't be noticed. So I have to do 10 times better to someone come to me and say, oh wow, Koji is really shining here. He needs to be promoted or he needs to come to our company. And I just did that tirelessly across the years for that reason because I felt like I needed to do, but also because I wanted to support my family and I want them to have the opportunities that I didn't have or many other people in the family didn't have.
- I was the first one to go to university in my family to have a college degree. And for me that really changed how I perceived the world. That also opened up a lot of opportunities for me. I know there's this big discussion today, the designers need a degree or not, but for me was not much about the design degree was more about having access to this new world that I mentioned before. Just being able to connect with people who have different opportunities than you have so that those people actually enable you to see other landscapes that you didn't see before. So for me, being able to go to college was this big experience of stepping again in a different type of landscape. And I supported another member of my family to do the same. I also get a degree so right now there is three people in my family who are able to get a degree, which really I think changed for them too in a very positive way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Mm-hmm a hundred percent. In listening to you tell this story Koji, it's clear that you're an incredibly resilient person and I think if you want to look for amazing examples of resilience and also unconditional love, you often have to look no further than solo mothers. I understand your mom raised you on her own and she's being quite a inspiration in your life and she's always fought your corner. What lengths and why did she go to the lengths that she did to provide you with the opportunities that she has?
- Koji Pereira:
- So yeah, it's interesting. I feel like women who have kids and are solo, they are the proof that the impossible can be possible. Having a kid by yourself, just going through that pain and that huge emotional hit that has on you, plus working at the same time, supporting your kid, giving your kids the access to education and shelter and food, this is almost impossible in my head. I can't even imagine me doing that at all. And to me, looking at my mom doing that, he's raising me and another siblings by herself was a big inspiration and I definitely feel like I'm not even close to what she could do by herself. She actually, she built a house by herself actually doing all the construction work with her own hands. She did the project herself, she did the architectural project, the engineering project by herself without any support of course, everything very informal and not very necessarily academically correct, but she was able to do it by herself, which is very impressive.
- And to me, I think it was not only the biggest proof of love, but the biggest teaching to me over life. This is what I should try to do because I definitely don't feel I can do that level of work, but this is how amazing humans can be and especially women in this case. And I definitely feel still very inspired by her. And there is so many women that are raising their kids by their themselves and I just wanna say, you're amazing [laugh], definitely very impressive and I wish that the world will be different and that wo woman have the support of their partners. But of course this is a reality that I still see happening many, many families. So I think the flip side is that it just shows how strong woman can be and in case of my mom it's is very impressive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that's actually one of the parallels that we share is that solo mother and just the extreme resilience, love and strength that women our mothers have had and just how deeply appreciative it seems like both of us are for the opportunities that they've given us. And it also sounds like you've really taken that on board and paid that forward and to other members of your family to help, I suppose elevate their opportunities in life to another level. And it all started with the hard work of your mum. We also share something else in common, and that is the absence of a father, as you could probably imagine from what we were just talking about. I understand that your mother has a merit Indian heritage and your father was Japanese but you only met him later in life for the first time in 2015. I understand that was when you could afford to actually book a flight over to Japan to see him. What was going through your mind when you were sitting on that plane on the way to Japan?
- Koji Pereira:
- Wow, thanks for the question, Brenda. You did your homework on research. Awesome. Yeah, I would love to hear your story by the way, in my case, I grew up without the presence of a father, which of course when you're a kid it's confusing, you know, have shame you, you're not necessarily the most proud of it. You feel like you know, don't worth of love and that type of thing. But growing up to me was like, it's clear that my mom did a great job growing up even more. It was like, I'm actually grateful that I have only my mom [laugh], because I seen some fathers who are not great fathers at all. So maybe I'm lucky that I didn't have my father presence. So I started to get used to the fact that not all families are equal and that's okay. And when I was about to meet him, first of all the goal was only to check the box.
- Yes, this person has my blood and I just wanna know him in person, say hi and have a conversation, but not necessarily open up the past and inquisitively ask about things that are longer gone. So I met him and I was in an Airbnb, he got in the apartment and he just sat and we start to talk and have I think he also didn't have the intent of trying to rebuild the story or talk about the past. So instead we just started to talk about Tokyo and Japan and what are the things that he's up to, what his family is doing, how's his family's doing? And we took a walk together in Tokyo and he showed me a couple of places. So I really look at this experience as if he was just a nice person that I met and I was just to get know more about him, but not necessarily someone that I needed to mandatorily have a relationship with because that's kind of ho. And I didn't want to do that either. And it was very good and very nice for me to check the box and know that I met him and we had a conversation and were able to get along without necessarily keep rebutting the past or reconstructing the stories that happened years and years ago.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like you haven't maintained a relationship with him.
- Koji Pereira:
- We still have some chats on WeChat that that's what he used in Japan, but it's very superficial in a weird way, is like, Hey, how are you doing in Japan in us? But there's no real strong connection as I have with my mom for sure. Brendan, how how's your story? I just like to hear at least the basic notes about it, if you don't mind.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, sure. So similar as in growing up for the most part into an adult before I actually ran into somebody who ended up, actually took someone out on a date and she ended up being best friends with my half sisters, one of my half sisters that I had never met. And we just pieced it together. So I mean it's a relatively small country. There's only 5 million people here so there's a bit of a joke that you know better be careful cuz you might be related to somebody. So you ask a few questions and where we put it together and it just unfolded after, I think emotionally, I had reached a point where you had realized that my mom had done a fantastic job of raising me and enabling me to have the opportunities that I had and I really put it behind me. I made my peace with the anger that I felt growing up without a father.
- And it was really only about a month after that I met Charlotte, who was the person I mentioned, who I took out on the date. And after that it was a cascade of events that eventually led to me sitting down opposite my dad, not too dissimilar to you at a restaurant up here in Auckland in New Zealand. And I didn't have any expectations of him and I like hug, I wanted to check that box, I think in many ways to close the circle just to be able to look your maker in the eye. And so I did that and he was what I, I said I didn't have any expectations and I think that was probably a good way to go into it. But on the other hand, I feel like he was what I expected, I didn't expect anything would come from that. And it was pretty clear to me from that meeting that he didn't really have any intention of developing a relationship and neither did I want that from him. So we see each other, I mean he's talked to your dad on WeChat, we see each other at family events. But with my half sisters, one of the great things that came from that from me is actually meeting my half sisters and now I have nieces and nephews and I have a great relationship with these wonderful women. So there was a silver lining there, but it's definitely a really formative experience. I think I was 25 at the time and I'm 30, 37, 37, 36, 36 now. So yeah, that's my story.
- Koji Pereira:
- Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh well good. Yeah, really was keen to explore that with you. I'm also keen to ask you about that you know are from mixed heritage and while you don't necessarily have a deep connection with your father there, what about your connection if any, with the country of Japan? The culture of Japan?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, it's interesting. You may have heard that Brazil is very mixed. My grandfather was black, my mom came from a indigenous family a tribe called Khali in Brazil. That tribe was completely destroyed. There's no history, no, there's not much things saved from heritage on that tribe, which is very sad. I still wanna do some travel there just to meet the less people who remain in that tribe. But anyways, it's part of the history. And my father's side, of course I went to Japan for the first time in 2015 and I met him, but my mom was always very appreciative of the Japanese culture. So we used to have Japanese food during the weekends. I used to a lot of the Japanese culture when I was a kid, especially I did karate, all those things. And my personality somehow was a mix of Japanese and Brazilian, even though I didn't have any contact with Japanese culture besides my mom and made me few friends. So I grew up with some sort of Japanese culture in Brazil without any Japanese people around me, which is interesting to think about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's great to hear that your mom made an effort to connect you with that part of who you are when you were growing up. Let's fast forward a few years. I understand that what you studied at university for your first degree was fine arts. And then after that you went on to work for a startup, which you eventually became the c e o for. And then that startup was hired by Dentsu. You then went on and did a master's of interaction design and applied for a role at Google. So I've just, I've fast forwarded quite a bit there, but before you got to Google, you said, before we get to Google, you said that you learn many hard lessons in that first role, that journey to becoming that c e o of that startup. What were they?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, that's a good story. I mentioned I was always this mix of very into technology person, but I also had this very strong side of arts drawing and projecting stuff. And then when I start to study to go to university, cuz in Brazil we had a test back then to get to uni Public University. By the way, this university that I studied was one of the best universities in Brazil. Very hard to get into, not very well known outside Brazil. But for me it was a big deal. And when I decided to apply, I told my mom, Hey, I'm applying for fine arts. And she was like, [laugh], what fine arts? And I said, yes mom. I'm like, this is what I like. And then the next day she was like, it's fine, you should do what you like and you should do what you believe on. I'm pretty sure if you follow that dream, you're going to find something that's going to be great for you. And that's stick in my hand and was like, okay, this is a big responsibility. That's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Also great parenting. That's brilliant parenting right
- Koji Pereira:
- There. It's brilliant. And she didn't learn from anyone, she didn't have any formal education, she didn't really have any supportive family behind her. She was just coming out of nothing saying that to the kid, the first one, going to university. So she is really brilliant. And then I was like, okay, I'll do it. And I did fine arts, but I was already working as a graphic designer in parallel and being a graphic designer, my first job was in a print studio and in that print studio, my work was really mechanical. It was just building logos for his model businesses. In every hour or so, I didn't have any time to do any more elaborate type of design work. So my dream was to join an agency, but then the internet became a thing. And again, I was one the first person from my friends to have internet connection. That internet connection. Before that I had, oh
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You would've been popular.
- Koji Pereira:
- I was popular. People used to go to my home just access NASA or n b websites. And for me, I was into that before because I had a bbs, which it's a ING board system for those who are not as old as me it's basically internet for ms dos, right? The text only connection. And then instead of connecting with everyone in the world, you just connect to a server and via dial up connection and then you can exchange files and that type of thing. So I was already on into that. And when the internet became a thing in 1997, I had a band and I started to do albums and posters for other bands too. And then I started to do websites and I was doing websites for maybe a year and a half or so. And then this company at that time, we didn't call startup, but it was a mix of a startup and an agency because they had clients but they also had three products.
- And the CEO at that time, he interviewed me and he asked, Hey, do you know how to use fireworks? And I said, yes. Do you know how to use Weaver? I said yes, but I never really used any of those tools because they were so expensive. And I learned in a week, I learned in a week, and I work in that company for a couple of years until a day that the CEO said like, Hey, I'm leaving, I'm joining a telecom company. I have this amount of clients, I have four olds desktop computers, I have two or three products that we had on there. And he said, I can't just pay you and you leave or you can just stick here and it's all yours. I just transferred the company to your name. And I said, yes. Wow, what a moment. Yeah, I'm still his friend.
- I was 21 years old, I have no idea what it was to be entrepreneur at that time. And I said yes, it was a big mistake in some ways because I had to survive with $10 per month in some months. But I also was a big introduction to product design in a time that nobody really talked about product design. So one project that we had was a very primitive version of Uber Eats. So imagine again, desktop internet. In two thousands, people would take two minutes to turn on a computer, two minutes to connect to the internet, another two minutes to open a website. So we had a server connected to a fax Simi, people would open this website, order a pizza, then we would have a software that would send a fax to the pizza place, deliver the pizza and get the money in cash.
- So we didn't have any billing transactions. Our business model was ads. So people could say, Hey, I wanna be highlighted on your homepage and then here's like a hundred bucks. So that was our product called TuDu at that time. And I had a lot of fun to be honest. So I didn't care that much about the money that I was not get getting paid. But at some point the company started to get bigger, especially on another product, SMS newsfeeds. So we actually built SMS for a bunch of telecom companies, so you probably remember that. But once you buy a new phone at that time, you would get sign up for, I don't know, horoscope or World News. And that was a platform that we build in Brazil for plus for the companies in Brazil. And there was just another second company that had that in our city. So a bigger company acquired us, which later was acquired by Densu. And at that point it was like, okay, now I'm done here. And that's when I decided to leave and join Google.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So when you did join Google, I think initially you came on as a UX designer on the Orca social network and that project was eventually sunset in favor of Google Plus. What was it about Orca that wasn't quite firing for Google? Why did it get sunset?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, I know this is a question that looks a bit obvious for people who even use OrCAD at least once because if you open OrCAD, let's say OrCAD was online today, you would have tons of people, millions of communities ads and it was a fully functional product and quite successful. It was the biggest social network in Brazil, the biggest social network in India, which you think about now India is such a huge market. The problem was at that time Google had this mentality of if I build a product it needs to work for everyone in the world and if it's not working only for a certain demography, I will shut it out. So that's pretty much what happened with Google Reader, which was a product that just very tech savvy people would use.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm still sad about that. Yeah, I'm still sad. It's gone.
- Koji Pereira:
- Was killed by the same VP by the way, who I worked with
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Who is that person? Find
- Koji Pereira:
- Him Vic Gundotra. So Vic was our VP for Google plus I'm pretty sure he won't listen to this so it doesn't matter anyways. But he knows this too. He was the person in charge at that time and he said to us like, Hey, this doesn't make sense for us because it's so expensive to keep this product running and it's just successful in Brazil and India. We wanna build something called G plus will be for everyone. And the fact is we learned later that it didn't end up as a success that they wish it was. So we actually sunseted Orca and we lost millions of users because nobody wanted to migrate to g plus.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like the strategy at Google did change because near your end of your time at Google, I think the last three years or so, you became the head of design for the curator team, which was heavily involved in Google's next billion users initiative, which did center around those emerging economies of India and Brazil and possibly some more. And the idea there, I think you were leading a team of nine UXs across multiple continents was to develop a set of inclusive products for those markets. And that involved a lot of discovery. Before we get to discovery, just for the people that are listening that aren't familiar with Google's next billion user initiative, what is that?
- Koji Pereira:
- Right. So that was very interesting because after G plus I did work in a several other tentatives of social networks that didn't work very well, but I learned a couple of things on lean startup type of playbook and building something from scratch, zero to one, so on and so forth that a lot of discovery And someone from this team, next billion re users reach out to me and he said to me, Hey, we actually wanna do the same thing that you tried before, the same playbook, but we wanna build products for emerging markets. And that's what next billion users means. They wanna build products for the next people who are not online yet. So there is the statistics saying that more than a billion of people will still become aligned in the next few years. Of course things just change very quickly in the past five years.
- But still there's a lot of people to become aligned. And first these people are very different from us. They don't have the metaphors that I grew up with, desktops, icons and folders. They are not necessarily the people who have the same devices that I have. They don't have fast phones and phones with a lot of storage. They don't have iPhones mostly. And they also come from different cultures. They also are using this phones and devices in context that maybe I'm not used to it. For instance, the fact that in media in Brazil, the sun is always out and it's very hard to look at the brightness of a sheet phone in the outdoors. That's like a fact that nobody takes any account. The fact that most of the phones have screens cracked because people don't have money to replace those screens or not take account.
- So when he introduced the team, I was super excited because this is what I was doing when I was on orchid. But now Google was really building this intentionally and they wanted us to actually come join and build something from scratch. What I was not super happy about was the fact that the VP on that team, they already had some ideas on what to build and we tested so many of those ideas, a lot of them didn't work. But in the process of research we figured out all the problems and then some of these problems became what files end up being. And one of the biggest things that we learned in this research was that it's again very obvious if you live in Brazil or India, but one third of the population ran out of space and there are phones every day, meaning that there is nothing you can do in your phone because your phone is packed with memes or good more warning messages, then you basically, your phone becomes very slow.
- And we knew as a matter of fact that people didn't have the resources to buy new phone after that moment. So it's either we find something that will allow them to continue to use their phone in an optimal way or their phone will just get stuck and we build this very simple prototype that would pop in with a card saying, Hey, here's your good morning messages if you wanna delete them. And then if they said yes, they would go through a review screen where they could pick the specific files they wanna delete. And after that process they would save 30% of storage and then they could use again their phones normally as anyone would use. So this prototype was a success, tremendous success. After a week, 30% of people were coming back to it and using every day almost. So we have very good signs of like yes, this is the direction we wanted to continue.
- And with that clear signal, we started to build files which end up being licked in the first version. I was very used to licks at Google, Google is not very good at saving secrets, but usually the feedback from the media was always very negative. Hey Google is trying this new thing again, which doesn't make any sense. But this one was finally Google built this thing that is fixing the main Android issue, which is a storage. So again, we had research, we had data, we had media, we had everything aligned to a point where we felt very confident about it. And there's a big element of chance, there's a big element of having the right people in the right time, the right place. But I think one of the biggest source of the success of files to me was to being able to look outside the bubble. And the problem is not just in us, the problem is everywhere in the world and there's too many people looking at us already. How do you start to look outside?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanted to ask you about that because problems once they're solved are often self-evident, obvious people go, of course that's a great product idea. But just how obvious was that when you first started? How did you actually stumble across the problem?
- Koji Pereira:
- That's the element of chance. I would say with next billion users we had basically two arms. One arm was purely research with no necessarily any product goal was more like let's understand how people use technology in India. Let's understand how people are getting introduced to smartphones in Indonesia. Let's understand what the competitors are building to, I don't know, what are the things that things people are building in Brazil for Android phones let's say. And then we had another arm which was let's build new products, which was a team that I was on called co. So within this two teams we had a lot of cross pollination. And when we're doing research, a lot of times, let's say we're trying out this gaming platform idea, but we never ask questions like hey is we actually did have ask questions directly about the problem. Hey do you play games?
- Do you have a console that you play at home? Yes, we asked those type of questions too. But we also ask questions, what do you like to do in your daily life? What's the main products that you use? What's your biggest pain when it comes to your phone? And with all of those broad questions, we figure out many other problems that we didn't necessarily thought about it. I really like the idea that you fall in your love, not with the solution, you're falling in love with the problem. So we really spend a lot of time just understanding the problem and refining what type of problem we're trying to solve before we jump in and build that prototype that I mentioned.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You also said in something that I was listening to that Google, even with all of its resources couldn't fund you forever. And that was what made learning, learning quickly important. How did you know particularly with files, cuz that's what most of our conversation at the moment, centering on. How did you know that you were onto something? Was there some sort of magic moment where the team just went that's it? Or was there something different? Was it more gradual?
- Koji Pereira:
- He was more gradual. I think there was a lot of skepticism on if you have a fully staffed team who's super pumped about gaming platform, which was something we were building in the beginning, you're going to have some attrition. People will be there to be like, oh I'm going to work in this gaming platform for Google. And then in the middle of the process some engineers figure out, well we're actually not building that anymore. We are building a file manager. And some people are just like, no way, I'm not doing this, I'm leaving. So that happens and you have to convince people, you have to manage the tension and you have to keep the team lean, especially when you're in the discovery phases because if you just invest too much in the beginning, then you know have way more friction, you have way more attrition.
- The other thing that for me was very useful was to make sure that when we have the right problem and then once we start to work towards the solution, I try to work with my team to make sure that the solutions we were building was also based on the profile of the users we're talking to. So for instance, one example that I like to discuss is the fact that the file managers for Android at that point, they're mostly folder based navigation, your Windows or your Mac macros. When you go to your file exporter, you have this multiple tree level folders and you start to get in and multiple levels and sometimes you lose your files, you don't remember where they are. Sometimes you create categories that doesn't make sense. So I had a big conversation with my age team because I was like I don't wanna rebuild that experience for phones.
- People don't have this metaphor of organizing things in a tree folder structure and this is just a mess. It's not even a good solution in terms of design cuz it's too much confusion, too much control and it depends too much in the user memory. So I came back to the D N H team and I said like, hey let's try this tab and category based navigation where if you tap on images, we show on your images. If you tap on documents, we show all your documents and if you wanna see all you just stay on that first screen. But if you wanna see from WhatsApp, from Twitter or from email, you start to swipe. So using a lot of the natural gestures that people are used to do in phones and in the beginning they're like, no way we can't break fire structure on a phone because that's how files are physically attached to a device or a storage in the phone. And I said yes and no because this is just an abstraction and we can just create another abstraction on top of that. But it was hard and we did a lot of research again to just show that hey, this is working better, let's try this. And I think my fallback trying to look at both points of view was to add an advanced mode where people could still access all the folder structure if they wanted. But guess what? Most people didn't use it because it's so much easier to navigate towards your categories.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you actually put both of the modes into the product in order to assess quantitatively what would be more used.
- Koji Pereira:
- So we put that and the advanced mode is just something that some people still like it to use, especially the more tech savvy people. But again, if you think about the story I just told you on people who are having their first experience using a smartphone, it's way easier to take a picture or save a document, just go to files and tap on documents and your document will be, there will be the first in the list.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked about confidence and bringing a new product to market seems to me at least to be in part about building confidence, confidence that you've got the right problem, confidence that your solution is the right solution, confidence in the team in those things, but also confidence from senior leadership that when you are moving from prototype to product and about to launch something that it's actually worth the gamble worth the risk. What were you doing? What kind of conversations were you having when you were at that point, whether it was go or no-go with your VP or the other senior leaders that were involved in the decision to actually bring files to market?
- Koji Pereira:
- I was fortunate enough to be in a team where this was more a shared experience. I didn't have to do a lot of those things by myself. And we also, we are very open about the idea that we are research driven and we're U data driven and if we disagree that's fine, but we going to solve the disagreement by looking at data, by looking at user feedback. And because we have very good researchers and would say that Aisha, which was our researcher in India, she was super strong and she was one of the persons who would just come back and present this report saying hey this is what we are hearing from users, this is what they like, this is what the things that not working well. And that really made us confident, not just only the leadership but the whole team confident that either we are in the right path or yes we are in the right path, but there are some things we need to tackle.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanna come back to a scenario that I heard you describe about prototyping files earlier on. And I believe you're in a subway in Brazil and you were showing a participant in early prototype and that they were clicking on things really quickly. What was going on there for the participant?
- Koji Pereira:
- So once I was in Brazil and I had few people from with me from the product and H team and we're testing this prototype and we ask two people to just use it. And usually this type of research, we let the user just play a little bit and we observe them, we don't ask many questions or we don't give a specific task and we start to observe them and just ask them, what are you doing here? Why are you clicking there? And this is a very common type of research and they started to use our product in a way that they're just stepping on things very quickly. And I asked them, Hey, why you just tapp there? What happened? And he said like, oh I just tap on the right side. And I asked, what was the question there because it seems like you didn't read cuz it was too fast.
- And he said, oh let me take a look. And then he came back to the same screen and he looked at the screen and I asked him, what do you think does this telling you? And he said, I don't know. And I asked, what do you mean you don't know? Can you tell me can you read that to me? And he said, I can't read, I can't, like I'm illiterate. I never learned how to read. And to me that was such a eye-opening experience because there's so many people in the world that maybe are in the same situation. And for the first time as a designer I was having a contact with this person and then he starts to tell me, hey, I dunno how to read but I look at UI and I look for visual glues that will tell me this is positive, this is negative. If it's on the right and it's caller probably it's a positive action. If it's on the left, it's probably negative and I'll look for icons and sometimes I'll just communicate with my friends using voice on WhatsApp because that's the only way I can communicate. I can read I type. So to me that was a big eye-opening moment where I felt like definitely there's so many things that we still need to solve in the tech world that many people are not paying attention to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I mean this is huge. It's actually huge and it actually made me think a lot when I heard you tell that story just about how there are so many people around the world that are illiterate or struggle with literacy and it really is probably one of the biggest elephants in the room in terms of design challenges for technology, is how do we create a more inclusive set of products and tech experiences for these people. I was speaking with another guest a few months ago called Whitney Quisenberry and she runs the Center for Civic Design and the United States and as part of her role, she's trying to help more people participate in democracy by making democracy more accessible. And something that came up in that conversation was even in the United States, only 13% of the population has a high proficiency in English as in university level. We are talking now and both of us can read it with 43% of the US population basic or below basic proficiency. So I just wonder from your experience after that moment, how did that help shape how you approach the design of the product and the other products that you've worked on?
- Koji Pereira:
- I think there are two level to this conversation. One is the more broad and just broad and personal level of things. And then the more tactical level, I'll start with the tactical cuz it's easier. And the tactical level the things that we started to work on the UI was let's make sure we have visual elements in a combination with text. So when you have a button, there is a button that says cancel, but there's a next on the button. If the button is on the right, then it's a positive thing, it's always positive and there's like a check mark on it. And also small things that we work with the material design from Google, the design system from Google on making sure that buttons always have some sort of a visual affordance so they don't look like just plain links. So one of the things that we tested there was that befores were overlooking the buttons without outlines.
- So we made sure that all buttons will have out outlines, all buttons will have background. So that's more tactical and our design team worked on, on the more broad level perspective. To me I think it became very clear coming from market and working in several tentatives of social networks again then coming back to NBE users, that one you have to go deeper in humanity problems. You can't just look at the things that are not painful enough. Cuz there's so many projects here in US that are trying to give access to people who already have a lot of privileges and honestly it doesn't change that much because people have a lot of good access to things. If you look at people who are lacking privilege or they don't have access to things, then there's so many things you can improve. And yes, it is the right thing to do.
- It is a social good thing, but it's also could be a good business in the case of files, for instance, these people, some people will pay money for this, people will pay for a phone that is more accessible or for a device that can stay working for more than six months and they're just not having any scape hatch on their current experiences. So to me, I learned that building inclusive products are not just important, but it's good for business. And in a sense I also learned that the teams that I worked with this team was one of the most successful ones because we had diverse people too, and each of the people in the team, they had firsthand experiences in the past about an old phone or bad internet connection or growing up in a poor neighborhood like I did. So it's easier for you to understand how serious the pain is because it's not just about the problem being existent, it's also how big the pain is for the people who are going through these terrible user experiences in their lives.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You have that firsthand experience of it yourself. And I want to come to diversity and technology and more detail with you in a second, but before we do that, I'm interested in how did you know you were done with Google? It's such a big company and it seems like there are so many amazing products that you could work on. I know you'd been there for almost a decade before you left, but why not just move to another team?
- Koji Pereira:
- Good question. So I never, Brendan intentionally wanted to join a company for that long to start with. I never had a dream of like, oh yeah, I wanna join a corporation and be there forever. That would be almost the first that I wanted when I was finishing my degree. I really wanted to just experiment and find new ways to build things and blah blah blah. The reason why I joined Google was because Google was really at front of everything that I liked and everything that I appreciated in technology. And it was true, the time I spent there was amazing, but there's some facts. One, the company evolved and in some ways become became more like a big company, other big companies. I also evolved there, I changed over time and I noticed that there's many other companies that I could join, especially here in California that would still have that feeling of the Google of the year 2008, the time that I joined.
- And that's what I was looking for. I wanna work in very scrappy teams who can build things quickly and can be vulnerable. I'm like, yes, we missed that or we wanna get better on that. And Google just became very solid and hard to see that way. Not to say it's bad, I think it's great, but definitely didn't feel the right place for me at that point anymore. And when I joined Lyft, I learned a lot of things. The top thing that I was looking for when I left Google was a place where I could really take this idea of diversity and inclusivity and apply more broadly in the company. And when I joined Lyft, one of the first things that I did there was working with the diversity and inclusion team to think about, okay, how can we not only build a great product with a diverse team, but how can we actually be more intentional when we build any team in a company?
- It starts with hiring, starts with clear plan design pathways in our case. And one of the things that we are able to do together there was to think about, okay, for you to become a senior designer, here are the bullet points you have to do in your career plan. You have to be great on craft, you have to work well with your cross-functional partners. We're also be able to include things like you have to listen to people, you have to make sure that you give space for others to express their point of views. You have to include people who are not designers in your design process. And that to me was like, okay, now I can scale some of the things that I learned in that team to a broader group of people and broader group of teams. And for sure I could potentially do that at Google, but the fact that things are way more solid, there would be way higher effort and probably a longer term type of effort, which at Lyft I stayed there for two years and we're able to do some of these changes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I just wanna give people some of your personal context because you speak so eloquently about this, you know, are recognized in the industry is one of the leaders, particularly within the Latinx community for promoting diversity and inclusion and you're very, very active in this. But I just wanna bring people back to when you first moved to Mountain View in California in 2014 and you said, and I'm going to quote you now, I felt I wasn't the same person I was in Brazil even my personality felt different in a new language. I was also stepping back some levels in my mind I had 15 years of experience, but the US but in the US it was restarting from scratch. Yes. Why did it feel that way? What was it about that shift from Brazil to Mountain View that made you feel like that?
- Koji Pereira:
- I think there is multiple things. Number one to me is the language. English is my second language. English is not something that we learn in schools in Brazil in a very effective way. And even if you do free classes, I did outside school, they're not with native speakers and it's very hard to just get better on English communication. I see many Brazilian artists, like Anita for instance, a singer, she still struggles with English and she's a international artist. She's playing everywhere right now. And it's because in our formal education in Brazil you don't get to learn English that much. So to me, number one, and there is two elements of the language to me. One is being able to articulate things in a way that people can understand you. And then there is another level which is like you can articulate things in a way that you feel confident about it and you feel good about it, that's harder.
- And that's like a level where even today, maybe less, but I still don't think that in, I have the same level in Portuguese and English. So when I talk with other people, I see other Brazilians, I see that same struggle because sometimes they're like great designers, they can do a work that maybe some designers here can do, but they still struggle, struggle with the language. Then the second thing to me is just the fact that there is a lot of biases. There is a lot of, there's a lack of representation in Latinx community, in tech, Latinx community in Silicon Valley, if I'm not wrong in the numbers, but it's about 27% and there's like 3% in tech, in leadership there's even less than that. So I really didn't work with anybody on leadership and design. They're either Brazilians or Latinx. So that's very hard. And then people just don't get used to it.
- People are not necessarily, they don't necessarily think that you are smart enough because of your accent. There is actually studies that tells that. So depending on the accent that you come from, people have different biases. There's also the fact that because when you come here, your resume is always Brazilian companies or universities that people never heard of it here that they might have biases to. So my wife and I, for instance, we made sure that we did classes here, we study at extension classes at M I T or Harvard, whatever, and uc, Berkeley, in order to just compliment a little bit of our background because at least like you go to LinkedIn and you see something familiar and it's not necessary something conscious that people do that because they're evil. It's just because we're not used to it. I know most of the Brazilians I know here, most of the Latinx people I know here in the US, they're working in restaurants, they're driving Uber or Lyft. So people just don't understand that when someone comes in design leadership or product leadership and have a background as the driver that that's okay.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you touched on how you and your wife had taken classes at M I T and Harvard and other places to, I suppose build a bridge between the world that you left in Brazil and the new world and the new culture that you want to become part of in America. And that's something that those types of behaviors, learning the language going to the institutions of the country are quite well reflected across the world with migrant communities or migrant people coming to that new culture. I understand as part of this, you also took accent reduction classes and this for me was fascinating. I'd never considered being a native English speaker although I do speak Kiwi English, which might be a bit hard from for some of our American friends to follow along that you would actually go to such lengths to fit in. And then I thought about a friend of mine, Robbie Allen, who's also been on the podcast and I'd heard him give a talk and he's a Kiwi European who speaks English natively and he'd gi given a talk, I think it was to mind the product or somewhere else like that where he was putting on an American accent.
- And that really, of course I know how Robbie sounds normally and that really stood out for me. And so my question is, how do you walk the line as someone coming from one culture into another, the United States, between fitting in and being who you are, how far do you go to meet the dominant culture where it is and how far should you expect the people within that culture to come to you?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, it's difficult and struggling, to be honest. Where you talking, I just remember that movie, sorry To Bother You, which there is a character who's black and he's selling stuff and he's just do this white American accent and people are just more prone to buy things from him. Whereas if he use his tone of voice normally, then people just not buy things. So it, it's similar if you think about it, the reason why we're doing this might not be okay. It's not okay for sure, but we're surviving. So you have to sometimes do things that you don't feel like it's ideal, but it's part of the journey. So to me, I took it in a way that to me it was not like I don't wanna lose my personality or my background, I just wanna make sure that I feel confident and I feel good when I speak. So people understand that when I'm confident until they can really understand what I'm speaking about. And the classes to me really helped in that sense because I learned how to communicate in a way that one, they would understand. And two, I would again feel confident, but it's troubling at the same time. Because if you think about it, it's like, okay, do I wanna sound like someone that I am not? It's confusing. It's definitely, definitely a little weird. If you think about it with time
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Koji, it's been seven years or there since you arrived in the us, what can people who are in a similar situation to what you are when you did arrive do to fast track their success in the us, particularly in tech, what's important for them to focus on and what have you learned through your own experience that isn't?
- Koji Pereira:
- Yeah, I don't know. It's hard because I feel time. There's nothing that really, really place time. There are things that you really need to have the time to sit down and just, people have different times. My feeling is that I try to be adaptable. I try to learn fast and be, keep in mind that people have their best intentions, but sometimes either they unconsciously do something that is not ideal or sometimes they just don't know how to act. So I try to keep myself always positive, always try to assume besting, intenses and just adapt fast. I don't think there is something that I would say to anyone to expedite that. I think it's just make sure that you always open-minded and make sure that yes, you acknowledge the other side, right? They also have to get better in this. People who are from the country, you are immigrating. They have to understand that the world now is global, but you can't change everyone's mind overnight. So it's easier to change yourself, but keep people aware of the things and the biases and keep that in check. So even once you maybe adapt better, you still kind of talk about that. And that's what I'm trying to do too. It's just like, okay, now that I have more space, here's how I feel. Because maybe in the past I didn't have a chance to talk about this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Such an important Mrs. Koji, thank you. What a great conversation we've had. It's certainly been a brave one. We've covered a lot of ground and I have no doubt that we've given our listeners today a lot to think about. I wanna say thank you for so generously sharing your stories, your the personal nature of those stories and your insights with me today.
- Koji Pereira:
- Thank you Brendan. I love the conversation. I really appreciate the time and everybody who are listening to us now. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. Koji, if people want to find out more about you, about sales and pixels and all the other great things that you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Koji Pereira:
- All right. So I would say you can look up for sell and pixels on whatever platform you listen to your podcast or you can go to cellsandpixels.com. I had many conversations there with people that I really admire, like John Meda and I actually started doing this weekly and it was really exhausting, but we was really fun. And now I'm doing once a month, so if you subscribe to the channel, you're going to see some updates every month. And also I would like to share my Twitter handle, which is @kojieumesmo, on Twitter. So if you wanna follow me, just talk or DM me, I'll be there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Koji, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here too. Everything we've covered, including where you can find Koji sell and pixels and all the great things Kojis been up to, will be mentioned in the show notes on YouTube. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find our link to my LinkedIn profile also in the show notes on YouTube, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.