Jane Portman
In this episode of Brave UX, Jane Portman shares the twists and turns of becoming a founder 🔀, how it has changed her view on design’s value ⚖️, and the role of writing in career success ✍️.
Highlights include:
- Why is it best not to know in advance how difficult something is?
- What made you realise that UX is not a big part of startup success?
- Why is a product’s marketing website more important than the product?
- Why do designers need to understand their contribution to revenue?
- Why is it important for designers to also be good writers?
Who is Jane Portman?
Jane is the co-founder of Userlist, an email marketing and in-app messaging platform that’s built with B2B SaaS in mind: enabling companies to onboard, engage, and nurture customers and leads 🌱.
Before Userlist, Jane was the founder of Tiny Reminder, a SaaS product that helps busy creatives and consultants to send automated notifications to their clients about the things they need from them 🔔.
She is also the founder and host of UI Breakfast, one of the world’s longest running and most successful design podcasts 🎙️. The show has been on-air since 2014 and boasts over 260 conversations with a wide-range of industry experts.
Given Jane’s talent and track record as a podcaster, it’s no surprise that she hosts another podcast. This one’s called “Better Done than Perfect” and it explores email automation, marketing, content and product strategy for founders and product people 🚀.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Jane Portman. Jane is the co-founder of Userlist, an email marketing and in-app messaging platform that's built with B2B SaaS in mind, enabling companies to onboard, engage and nurture customers and leads.
- Before Userlist, Jane was the founder of Tiny Reminder, a SaaS product that helps busy creatives and consultants to send automated notifications to their clients about the things that they need from them.
- Jane's also the founder of UI Breakfast, one of the world's longest running and most successful design podcasts. The show has now been on the air since 2014 and boasts over 260 conversations with a wide range of industry experts.
- Given Jane's talent and track record as a podcaster, it's no surprise that she hosts another podcast. This one's called Better Done Than Perfect and it explores email automation, marketing content and product strategy for founders and product people.
- A voracious content producer. Jane is also the author of several design books including Mastering App Presentation, which is a self-published guide for pitching design work, Fundamental UI Design, which was translated into a course in conjunction with InVision and The UI Audit, a hands-on guide to web app design.
- And now Jane's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Jane, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Jane Portman:
- Hi, Brendan. You have such a detailed inventory of the things that I made, even the not successful ones. It's almost on the verge of flattering and embarrassing. That's so nice of you. Thanks.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome Jane, and you made it very easy for me by painting such a clear picture through the things that you've produced on your blog, through your podcast and all the other things that I was able to look at before today. Now I sometimes start these podcasts on a curious note, so we'll just see how we go with this first question. And that is that I understand that Jane Portman isn't your real name, is it?
- Jane Portman:
- Whoa, that's a very spicy question. That's an interesting fact. In fact, if I had known that Jane Porter is Tarzan's girlfriend, I would have never picked that name, but I only learned that a few years afterwards. I come from a country in Eastern Europe that should not be named these days and back from the old days an exchange student, I just knew our names don't work. It just comes up as too big of a barrier between other people and ourselves in the conversations. So when I started out as a solo consultant in the international scene, I just had to pick a name. Jane is a short name that's very close to my original one and the last name I completely made up. I also had a pragmatic reason in mind because I was on maternity leave with my first baby. At that time I was a creative director at an agency and I did not want my director to figure out that I was doing something on the side while I was taking maternity leave in their company. So it's like two reasons why that happened.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you find it strange that I assume anyway, that people that know you, even people that don't really know you as in we've just met, call you a name that your mother didn't give you or that your mom and dad didn't give you?
- Jane Portman:
- It's completely part of my personality at this stage, so it's totally fine. There was a certain embarrassment when I had to sign bills or papers with my legal name and I had to give an explainer what that is. But with years that kind of faded out and these days I just stay that matter of fact. And it seems that the more confident you are, the less everybody cares. So.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, speaking of confidence, that's something that from the outside looking in, that's something that you really possess and I'm always curious as to how people have become confident, what are the things that have made them who they are today? And one of the things that I discovered when I was preparing for this conversation was a blog post on your website, which I think was from 2017, which is the year that you turned 30 and you wrote this reflective post where you outlined some of the bigger milestones in your life and the things that you felt had helped to shape who you were at that time. And I noticed in that post that you'd mentioned that you were raised by your mum on her own alongside your younger brother. And having spoken to you before the show, I understand that it was a loving but perhaps not quite a lavish upbringing. So when you think of your childhood growing up in Verage, the most powerful memory for you that comes to mind?
- Jane Portman:
- It's really hard to pick just one. I was kind of a kid that was great at school but didn't have fancy clothes or anything else that can boost a child's confidence in life. And also as I learned these days now, having the ability to buy nice looking things and stuff. I do love it when things look good as a designer, as an aesthetic person. And throughout my childhood everything was a design embarrassment. So my whole life journey is from being not able to make everything look nice and perfective to getting there in terms of things looking nice basically. I think that's then it's important part of our life to be able to just surround ourselves with the things we like. And I'm not talking fancy brands, I'm just talking about building a nice life around yourself. There are many kids that are deprived of that. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand that your mother was particularly invested in the education of both you and your brother. And I wouldn't say force, that's probably not the right word, that's not conveying the intention that I'm trying to convey here, but really encouraged you to extend yourself past just the regular things that you were learning at school. Just what influence do you feel that her guidance in that direction has had on the opportunities that you've been able to create for yourself since you've been an adult?
- Jane Portman:
- We've always been on the extracurricular level of sciences and stuff. So she's a mathematician and a programming engineer by trade as a programming as it was in old years with punch cards, periphery, both the punch cards and stuff that kind of, but that still implies some in mathematic thinking. And we did follow her footsteps being programmers ourselves by going to university. So we were always solving interesting puzzles and it was always more interesting than a boring chore. And I have no idea how that came to be either through our natural curiosity and desire to learn or by some specific things that she did. However, that was an academically warm environment in our house. So we didn't do much in terms of sports, not much, but we definitely did lots of reading, lots of maths and that was math and physics, kind of gal a lot, but also thankful that she took me to English classes three times a week. There was a lot of time invested and I did pay off. So very grateful for
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Those English classes. Maybe this dovetails into something else that you mentioned when we first started speaking, which was the exchange program that took you to South Carolina in the United States. So reflecting on that time, cause I understand this is when you were around about 16 or 17. Yep. What do you remember as a young person from Eastern Europe arriving in the US as the most challenging cultural difference that you had to navigate?
- Jane Portman:
- It wasn't the cultural difference, but it was the language. I could write perfect academic English but perfect, but definitely nice. And I was really strong academically, but I could not make anything that people were saying with the southern accent and everything in mine. I arrived to school and my host mom, she had been hosting exchange students for ages before she had me, so her English was very well adjusted for international people. But at school, not too many people were that clearly talking. Basically somebody would ask me, what's your name? And in my home English, we were taught that it's supposed to sound like what is your name? Which is never effect in real life and other things like that. So I somehow struggled through the first four months and then by New Year approximately, I started making sense of what's happening around and also just the context of what's happening in high school, like holy cliques and tables and where everybody seats in the break. And I joined the clique of indie rock art folks who were sitting on the floor instead of sitting at the tables with other groups and it was fun. And we also had art classes there, which I think kind of gave birth to the designers as a profession because they did accept cgi. So I played with Photoshop a lot and that's after coming back became my sort of first si job and then a profession.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I understand that the first time you actually had a computer in the home was on this exchange year that you had and that sounds like it was quite a pivotal moment for you in terms of how you would eventually end up working in design and going on to do the things that you've done. Before we get into design, because I really do want to get into a few things around design, including the business of design and your journey as a founder. But before we dig into that, I learned that one of the side gigs you did when you were at university was as a live interpreter for business negotiations. And to me that sounded really fascinating and I was curious, was it really fascinating or was it just sort of humdrum boring? Did anything exciting happen while you were interpreting these conversations between people that can't actually directly understand each other
- Jane Portman:
- Among other side gigs? This was the least voluminous one, so I basically did one or two times and that's it. The way I went about it, I placed a Yellow Pages ad that I can be a tutor of English, which I did consistently and also an interpreter and somebody reached out and I actually got to translate a few days of that which was interpret, which was I imagine completely unprofessional, but also I did get the job done. It was a nice refreshing experience. My English skills and language skills were enough to interpret what's what's been going on, but it was a Spanish delegation and there was an interpreter on the other side and she was like, Jane, I can tell you're not a professional interpreter, you're just putting too much of yourself in this. When you interpret you should say they say that and so on. And I was just behaving as I'm the part of this group which I shouldn't be. Like I should be more neutral these days. If I were to interpret together, I would act more neutral.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Fascinating. It's really fascinating. So you were working at an agency, right? This is part of your story around about the time that you had your first child and you mentioned at that time you wanted to do something different and that's where the name Jane Portman came from. And also around this time, you've touched on this before and other things you've said that you were kind of a bit burned out or tired with the prospect of managing other people. So you founded UI Breakfast, which was your freelance consulting agency and you did that for a number of years and as I mentioned earlier on in your introduction, you also did a number of things during these years when you were a consulting designer, you published a number of books, you Koch, you created that course with Envision and you certainly put yourself out there with the UI Breakfast podcast, which has been phenomenally successful. It seems to me that you like to experiment with your career. How do you look at it? How do you look at your career? Do you feel like you're intentionally experimenting or is this just something that's just happened and it's just been good fortune the way things have unfolded?
- Jane Portman:
- It's definitely a lot of experimentation and just planned well inured business experiments. So always I think it's called the Barbell Strategy, one of my favorite books, an antifragile book by Naim, so he calls it the Barbell Strategy. You can't advance in life without taking significant risks, but your basis should be always covered so you protect your, you always have that plan B or your core way of making money while you can experiment with other things. And that's what I've been doing in different ways. So on one side, basically when I was that little girl in the middle of nowhere on the maternity leave completely no friends, no idea how to make money online, but I did have good English and I did have great design shops by then, so I was sure about that. I was specializing in mobile design back then was the big thing.
- So I thought I can figure it out. I did a bit of Googling, came across Upwork esk back then, so I had my first few gigs at $16 per hour back there. I actually have a letter to my employee back then saying not employee, like client saying, oh, I'm very sorry, I have to raise my rates from $16 to $25 an hour because that's how much I'm worth. I'm very sorry if that's too much and things like that. So I went through a range of clients raising my rates. I hid the ceiling somewhere about $50 per hour was just a bit too much. I was also doing a lot of freeing about marketing and consulting and a life-changing piece by Patrick Mackenzie about how I turn from a hundred dollars an hour developer to $5,000 a week consultant. Basically you're doing the same things but calling yourself a different name and making it about business, not about your skills.
- From then on, I said no more gigs from Upwork. I'm going to write a book, call myself a consultant, hike my rakes and just go from there. And a bit of hustling. I did write that first book, which didn't go anywhere, made no money but was a foundation for building my email list and stuff and just took it from there through series of experiments, more books, more collaborations. Yeah, sure. Luck did strike a few times for example, that collaboration with Envision was definitely a great find for me back then because they gave me a number of emails. That was the first few thousand in my email list, not the first few, but a big part of my email list was through that collaboration. I also stumbled across a few awesome clients who amplified what I was doing. Also was lucky enough to ride the wave of productized consulting with my gig so that it became known not only for the design itself but for the fact that it was in the format of productized consulting. So it was featured in a couple well amplified blog posts about productized consulting and then actually the fourth book that you didn't mention was about productized consulting between all the four books. I think that one still holds business value and it's still,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's the one I missed
- Jane Portman:
- Cause it was written the last, it was I think maybe 2017 that was done. You are a productized consulting guide, so there were many good events that were stroke of luck, but that would never be possible if the foundation for that were not done with hard labor.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about something that has to do with hard labor and that is the role of UI Breakfast, the podcast. Where did that come from?
- Jane Portman:
- You're saying it was wildly successful, it wasn't wildly successful for the first five years for sure. It's been now out for nine years, so the first few were just completely erratic schedule. I started it with the intention of getting more comfortable in front of the mic. The was the only purpose and I just experimented with this, had fun, had the very, very cheap editing service for the audio and just observed and I made it a more regular publishing schedule for another few years. Things started ramping up and it took seven years to get to the first million of total downloads. Then another year and a half to get to 2 million total downloads and we're like approaching three or maybe have already crossed 3 million at this moment. It is just incredible how this builds up over time. Somewhere in the middle of the journey, maybe five years and before years then I started accepting sponsorships, which was a nice cash addition to the whole thing and then in another year or two I delegated production to a dedicated person, which that person has changed over years these days it's Chris, our team members at Useless, but the being able to put it on as a background process done by somebody else so that I can show up, do the recording, upload my scribble notes, and then everything else is handled that makes it possible to run two shows and have a full-time founder job at this particular moment.
- As a busy founder, every now and then every few months I kind of audit what's on my plate and we're like, oh, podcasting, shall we take a break or shall we not? But it's always learning and making friends and it's schedule learning for me so I don't listen to other podcasts these days. I don't have time and I prefer audiobooks, but one or two times a week I sit down with a very interesting person and get to pick their brain and serendipitously there is always a timely insight for my own business situation, like a nugget of something I can apply and it's definitely fun and it's definitely useful to listeners so we always choose to keep this flywheel going on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is really great that you've outlined that. That was actually something I was going to ask you about because I've heard you talk about this before about the role of UI Breakfast and how it has related to the success of Userlist and it's not quite what people might think and so I'll quote you now, you've said I have an audience of my own until you're talking about UI Breakfast here related to design and I'm sure there are plenty of founders in that audience and I've learned that personal audiences don't translate into SaaS sales period. So what you were saying there about the applicability of some of the insights from the conversations that you have with people once or twice a week having direct impact in your business, that sounds to me at least as to the reason to why you keep producing this podcast on a weekly basis because it's clearly it's not an effort that doesn't happen without a lot of effort.
- Jane Portman:
- Yes, having a personal audience and having a business audience and it doesn't work from one another. It's like you do parlay. I think the word is parlay, right from sort of segue from being influential in one place towards building something successful because you're capable of that. I think that's the most important influence of it, but in the way of translating leads from one place to another, at least in the business we are in the B2B hardcore emo automation business, it does not translate like that. And more importantly, just generally making sales in Userlist is a hard process because it's a very long-term game, it's a very long sales cycle. There is only once in five years or so, once every three, five years, the business changes their email platform and that's when we need to be on top of their mind. We can't just call email people and say, oh, just come switch your email platforms, come to us. And they're like, sure you but well not another few years that we are planning to implement that. By the way that we only learned a few years in, we somehow were more delusional when we started, which I'm great grateful with did because if we did know about the hardships of selling email software and how competitive the space is and how many hardships there are, we would never have started and now we have. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but it's also a wonderful thing not to have before. Yes, as in foresight because otherwise we probably wouldn't do many of the things that we do do
- Jane Portman:
- Between Userlist and consulting. There was another first product that you mentioned. So proudly tiny Reminder tool which only existed for a year was a great learning experience. I sold it for a small amount of money to a fellow founder that took it as a satellite to their business. That's when I learned a lot of things that selling software is hard, that you need to be solving a very burning business problem and being close to the money versus being a vitamin, which is not necessarily always true, but that's what I learned back then and that your personal audience does not guarantee you sales, this is this completely different story and a book, an info product is an impulse buy. You can sell that with your eyes closed, people will buy it because they like the only thing they have to do is to make the payment and put it in their bookshelf, maybe read in a good way, but you're not really tied any further with software. You really have to be bringing value continuously and that is a much, much tighter match in terms of value and the audience and the pain and everything. It's just such a different story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned that you learned with Tiny Reminder that you needed to be much closer to the money, I think the words you used and not be a vitamin. So for people like myself who aren't really that familiar with the underlying meaning there, what do you mean is the thing, why do you not want to be a vitamin type product
- Jane Portman:
- These days? I'm kind of back to thinking that vitamin products also have their place in the universe. For example, a fellow product turnkey, their founder is one of our angel investors. They target the same exact audience of SaaS businesses at a similar scale, but they have much easier time making their sale because they don't have to replace an existing important piece of infrastructure, an existing piece of infrastructure, but they can be just added onto the existing system for preventing churn. And even though the installation does take effort and time, it's still easier to add something versus replacing the core piece and we represent the core piece. The beauty of that is of course that once we are in this kind of resistance is in our side and we have much higher retention and things like that. So that's a positive note, but if the friction of getting started and replacing something important is a different story, but overall there are tools that are kind of nice productivity, nice to have things, and there are tools that are payment providers, payment processors, some hardcore business stuff that is your vertical line of important tools that your business runs on.
- We want it to be that kind of tool, not an add-on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you describe how you never had any doubts that Userlist was a product that people needed yet the slow slowness of the growth in terms of monthly recurring revenue, which is essentially the adoption of the product by the marketplace surprised you and that at times it's felt like, and I'll quote you now like a marketing drudge, so there's obviously challenges in all businesses and clearly you've touched on there perhaps more significant challenges in a product-based business than there is in a consulting based business or in a info business. How have you grown within yourself as a professional as a result of sticking with Userlist and riding these highs and these lows?
- Jane Portman:
- Yeah, so I think you've read the update from like 17 2017, 18 were really the dark years because what I described just now of adoption friction and everything that was obviously still valid then we just didn't know that very specifically yet that multiplied by the fact that we were a very young startup with no credibility and people do not want to have young startups. It's their core infrastructure in the business and that multiplied the fact that the product itself was in fact very young and featured deficient in some spots it was very decent, but there were some things missing that are sort of the normal for email service providers and it's a very feature rich business. So it took us a few years to catch up. Right now I think we're done catching up most cents and that's really very nice to know because we can sell this more confidently that but multiplied by the fact that oh, we have more credibility now.
- So that curve is happening smoother and throughout the last couple years we've gotten much better at email automation itself. So the last two years all we've I've been doing is talking about email marketing strategy and how the actual implementation mechanics work because there is a very big gap in the market. Marketers even email marketers, they know what they want to say in the emails, they know how to write the emails, but the campaign mechanics, how to orchestrate that, how to link that to behavior data and how to set things up so that they trigger the right time. There is basically a few people in the world who are good at that and these are specifically email automation consultants and a typical marketer at a SaaS company who's our ideal client. It's not an email automation consultant, they're just a marketing person, they're great at marketing, they are not great at email automation.
- So we have to bridge that somehow. So right now really three viable options for them are to hire that automation consultant or to get our own done for use services which we added this year or to just work very, very close with us using all the planning materials and everything we've got so that it's a successful implementation. It's not a thing you can wing. So just putting that in the brain of our audience and just working from that standpoint. It's something that we have learned and that we have, we're still in the journey of making the best of what we know there. And that's on the product knowledge, audience knowledge side. And one more thing that I've really grown in the direction of is content marketing. We started working on SEO two years ago, covered the foundational piece with the help of the consultant and then we've slowly drifted from just having content for SEO toward and that ranking towards having really awesome content for seo.
- And then these days we are writing pieces that are not even necessarily F SEO pieces but more for thought leadership. So we are publishing less, but this is really amazing stuff and our blog is something I'm very proud of that we've built over the years that was not in place in those dark times. So right now content marketing is our source of leads. Those days we didn't yet know that it would be, and you should know that SEO for email marketing automation is a very competitive space. Thankfully we have a privilege of nicheing down for SaaS. So basically adding anything and a label of SaaS in the end kind of helps with SEO because it's more narrow but it's still a drudge, not a drudge, but it's still a very slow painstaking journey. That would be the right word.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's touch on that because you've talked about the timing, the timing, the role of timing in people's decision making when it comes to switching infrastructure products of which Userlist is and that how initially that didn't align with how you thought things would play out, as in you felt that the market was going to respond more quickly and perhaps it has, but the things that you've been describing to me, there are a lot of long-term plays in terms of the podcasting, in terms of the blog content, in terms of just sticking with something through those dark times as you've called them. Now this is framed probably as quite a leading question, but please feel free to disagree with me. How important has just sticking with your guns been to sticking with this business? How important has that been to getting to the point where I believe that things are looking pretty good for you at the moment and the rest of the team?
- Jane Portman:
- It's foundationally important. Basically everything I do in business and in personal life these days is a long-term play. On one side, yes, it's hard to stick to something especially because it's ups and downs and they're downs and you're like, oh is it just not working? But you have to trust the process a little bit of figuring things out and such the business, the marketing, I dunno, my own personal fitness journey like weightlifting, weight loss, whatever, not all these things are just so gradual that you will never see the ROI in a week or two. You just cannot, but you will see their ROI within next month within few months or a few years. So that kind of shifts the focus from short-term decisions towards long-term decisions a lot and the whole startup game is about patients come on. It is just seriously just about sticking with it and you never know what's across the corner As one of the fellow founders, Sophia Quintero says, just stick to it because sure there will be some luck situations but again maybe in influencer will adopt your tool and suddenly something like will snap and you have an overnight success or something like that or maybe an industry trend comes along or a pandemic or what can happen and suddenly you will be writing a new wave that amplifies your M R R, but beneath that is a very slow and steady game of tedious month to month growth, which is hard work and things like that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Not so glamorous side of building a
- Jane Portman:
- No glamorous at all. No, the upside though is that when you are in the long-term business, there are no day-to-day things that you must do by midnight that will move the needle and that's great. You don't have the stress of those consulting deadlines. We've had broad the bit of those that stress with the done for you services like I mentioned because that basically puts us in consulting shoes a little bit. So that's added, but beyond that there is no consulting deadlines and you're just working towards those goals. Having a team and having a co-founder and processes does help a lot with being accountable and having that flywheel of processes instead of just having to come up with something every day. So that helps.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now you're obviously someone who's been a designer, a consulting designer, so you've got a very strong affinity for design and clearly through the podcasting that you are still doing, you're very much in that head space, but you've also developed other aspects of who you are, you know are now a founder and you're now involved in the broader scope of activities that are required to make a product business work, which is different to your consulting business. Now I've heard you talk about some realizations that you've come to as a result of that evolution. I dunno if it's an evolution, it's more of adding an and an ending to your professional toolkit and you've said, and I'll quote you now, the most important thing is understanding your place in the world as a UX designer. On one hand of course great UX is essential to software success. On the other hand, it's such a minuscule part of all the processes and limited resource game that's going on in the SaaS and software world in general. So that to me is quite a, sounds like quite a confronting realization. When did you first start to believe that and was that an easy thing to realize?
- Jane Portman:
- Well the fact that UX in general is a small part in terms of volume of work that is done on a startup that was a well-known fact had been for a while, but it wasn't until we had our own startup journey unraveling that we understood that design is a really, really not the crucial part of it. Even though I wouldn't say if we had poor design we wouldn't be aware we are today. So it's still mandatory to have a nice design like these days, especially for EMO platforms. Like you don't go anywhere with bad design. In my old days as a consultant and I quit, me and Benedict, we quit consulting in 2020. So the last three years we've been full full-time founders. My favorite clients were those who were able to achieve good business growth in spite of very bad design. So they had an audience, they had a working product and they only needed that improvement to make it even better. That's like the goldmine for consultant and having worked with a number of such products, it's really sobering even back then that you can see they're solving a pain big enough and doing it smart enough so that design is not a mandatory thing to be successful. Therefore
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a bit depressing from the perspective of a or could be a bit depressing from the perspective of a designer is it almost calls into question if the pain is big enough and it's been solved with bad design, then what is the role of good design?
- Jane Portman:
- It's still super important because it well makes the life of the user pleasant one and it communicates quality because poor design communicates poor quality assure they're making it work without good design, which means if they multiply it by good quality perception and pleasant user experience, they could achieve even better results there. So it's just a great validation for their own business that design is not a prerequisite and honestly the first years of any startup is cutting corners whenever you can so that you can get it up and running an actual business problem. And for those businesses design just they just easily cut corners there and it was fine. So also there are so many design resources these days, libraries of components, whatever not there is amazing tailwind success for example, and anything that you can get things up and running in a pretty way without even having a talk with a designer or maybe having a, I think the best way is to have a conversation with your design friend, have a lo nice logo design just to make sure you're not committing a crime there and then going with some libraries and that can easily take you as a founder through the first few years until you have time and resources to invest into design work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you are thinking of your use of the word design there, are you including UX research within that or are you speaking specifically to the more visual aspects of a products design?
- Jane Portman:
- Also, UX research can take different shapes as you well know. So specifically testing different UI components, that's a very high fidelity advanced game that only funded startups or startups with a lot of resources can afford to do. But customer conversations are also a form of UX research, so that kind of thing you cannot skip on and those startups who have poor design, which the product looks horrible still doesn't mean that it works horrible. Maybe they have nailed a couple functions to work really well that actually solve the problem. UX is kind of dime a dozen on one side, yes, great UX is higher to nail on the other side. Everybody who has good eyesight for quality products, who has good experience as a user can come up with successful patterns that satisfy their business need. So it's not like it's rocket science. So that combined with good customer customer conversations, jobs to be done stuff, customer development, that can lead to good results and every founder can do that so they can replace their lack of professional UX jobs with just good investment into customer conversations. It's a bit of a convoluted answer, but yeah, that kind kind of product work is definitely happening in startups even with no money.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a really curious answer and why I say curious is I'm just wondering about the framing of the answer for my own purposes and for the people listening it's because it sounds like you are saying that there's not a huge role for designers and at least not initially when money is tight. And I was wondering if the same thinking applies to how you see design in later stage companies or perhaps enterprise businesses. I'm not sure what your exposure has been with those businesses, but does the same framing apply outside of the world of early stage bootstrapped SaaS?
- Jane Portman:
- I don't think it directly correlates with the stage of growth even though it's, it's resourceful. I don't specifically say there is no place for design because it does depend on the founder so much. There can be founder of a two day startup who is saying like, oh, we're not launching without good design. This is a must have and they're right, it's definitely a great success factor. Or they're like, oh, we're not investing in design until we are five years in and they're also right because there is more important stuff to do. And same for advanced startups, not startups, even mature products and enterprise. I'm not big into enterprise game, but also there are enterprise products that are nice looking and there're enterprise products that are completely unusable. All of them are making money and it depends on the product leader or whether the leadership team is thinking about design much or whether it's not of course a certain point.
- Every business is kind of forced to think about design because they're hopefully evaluating their business and looking for areas to improve, but that's when they will stumble across very poor product design. But unless it's causing specific support issues, the bar of quality differs dramatically from business to business and these days web design is great to get, so you will be seeing plenty of pretty product websites and thinking, oh it's pretty from the outside, must have a great product inside with the same kind of design edge. But no, it's very common to see something not very pleasant inside. Even if the marketing website is looking pretty, and I don't want to call names, but even the big, big incumbents in the space, if you open up their ui, you'll be unpleasantly surprised by how unintuitive it is and they're at the Salesforce level of being huge.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you talk about that before and I'll quote you again. You've said for a software product, a well-designed marketing website is 1000 times more important than what's inside the product and it's pretty sad cause the product itself matters, so that is sad. I agree and you've just touched on all the reasons
- Jane Portman:
- I want to add a couple cents from my very, very historic work. Yeah, sure. In the old days we were developing software products, we called them digital encyclopedias or digital info products on CDs back when then what a thing, that was a thing. I spent a few years of my life designing CD covers because they would put the most best designer on the cover because it matters the most. Basically that square piece of paper, I dunno like five inches by five inches, it's more important than anything that goes inside because the buyer buys the city, they only can see the front and the back and that's all unfortunately that's the same, sure with software can get demos and stuff, but it's still the CD cover that matters.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's almost a bit of an indictment on modern business practice because it's, what it's bringing up for me is it's almost like that whole lipstick on a pig saying that we are dressing up our software through our marketing websites when we know that what the user will experience once the buyer, if we're talking about B2B here, has purchased it, is going to be disappointing in comparison to what we conveyed when we were marketing that solution. Our product to them,
- Jane Portman:
- The users are not dumb, we should not underestimate them. They will tell a good product from a bad product, but if the marketing website is bad, they will not even have a chance of checking out your product and seeing whether it's good or not. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's why you say it's a thousand times more important.
- Jane Portman:
- Yes, that's like it's the top of your product funnel and you cannot go with that Being bad and marketing website is much easier to design and implement. By the way, we've talked great lot of great deal of time about design itself, but implementing a good ui, it's a lot of time and resources. Polishing good ui, even if you have your layouts in Figma, perfectly fine. Making that happen is a lot of engineering time polishing that is even more engineering time and that gap is also huge. And that's one thing that frustrated me a lot in my consulting days because I would deliver Figma files as a deliverable and then I had no control, only a fraction of my clients would go further into polishing stage with me, but there is so much to polish always, and it's going back and forth on very minor details saying like, oh, that should be three pixels more. It's a necessary stage if you want to look polished, but only a fraction of teams understand that. So design itself, it's not enough execution and polishing and maintaining and then much more is also important even on the visual level, even on the visual level, not speaking about UX
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Either and finding those partners in engineering, particularly in the front end of engineering who are just as invested in positioning the design by the pixel to convey the intent that was existing in that file is also those engineers, in my experience, they've been relatively rare. Definitely
- Jane Portman:
- I think there is great power in designers who can front and code. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time in my lifetime to learn that if I had another year in the site somehow I would love to be able to bring my ideas to life
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Myself. Well Jane, you're only about halfway through your career, so there's still time. Okay,
- Jane Portman:
- Definitely. So I'm a designer. I'm definitely a marketer these days. Maybe I will become an engineer when I'm 60 or so, but let's see, an interesting learning journey. Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, let's change things up a little and touch on when you became a solo consultant. So rewind in your mind there and also subsequently as a founder, which you currently are, you've had to navigate the realities of paying yourself your own paycheck through various things that you've done and about this you've said, and I'll quote you again, designers often think that if they have a nifty black and white page with some of their works that that's going to sell their services or that the UI is going to sell itself. No, you have to write about it as much as you have to design it. So what made you realize the importance of writing and how it would influence people's decision to work with you or to adopt your product?
- Jane Portman:
- Oh, there is a fun story how it all began when I just put up the first version of UI Breakfast website with the first consulting gigs on it. I showed it to my very loyal client for that. I met through Upwork and Ian Dooley from Australia, very grateful to him and he said, Jane, your copy is bad. I'm like, why? There are no grammar mistakes, it's probably fine. He's like, no, the copy is bad. Go to copy hackers.com and buy all Joanna weeps books and read them all. You're going to be much better off. That basically was an introduction to all the marketing slash copywriting that you can see on the marketing websites and sales pages everywhere. It's so essential. Copy hackers.com is a great resource. There is also a thousand other great resources on writing that teach you to tap into users pains and how to write and things like that.
- And it's all about writing. It's all about selling your services and then in the process of delivering your services, you again have to use language to describe your decisions and to sell those as you move into software and products. It's particularly crucial and the only way is to master that is to practice through writing articles, writing your own sales pages. Unfortunately images, sure they do sell themselves in a certain extent. If you want to be a pair of working hands that is bought, that is selling their time. When somebody browses your portfolio during your job application process, sure your good portfolio will be valuable, but if you want to go solo and go beyond the visual can, then you have to sell through sales pages and understand the business value of your work and sell it with words and copy absolutely trump's design on marketing websites. So the well designed marketing website is important, but if it has poor copy, it has nowhere to go. So a poorly designed site with good copy is much better than a well design website with placeholder stuff.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about something else that you've come to realize and that is if we zoom out from our day-to-day activities and we consider the broader picture of what it is that we are contributing our talents to, whether we are researchers or designers or product managers, you've said the foundational idea that people need to know about products is why do products actually exist? But it's definitely not baked into the design profession unfortunately. So why do the products we are working on exist and why is it important for us to know that?
- Jane Portman:
- It's kind of very, very old and vague thing. I said, I'm not sure what I, I had in mind when I was saying that, but products exist because they are solving a problem for the customers and the customers are willing to pay money for it repeatedly, and they also exist because the founders are able to draw people's eyeballs through marketing to that solution. I would add to that these days because that businesses do not exist without a marketing engine, but understanding that all definitely helps for the business context
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that business context. This is what many design leaders, particularly the ones that I've spoken to on the podcast here and I know the ones that are listening to will agree that understanding that business context is really important. In particular what you've touched on there in so far as how the business makes money, how does it actually pay us the salaries that we are being paid? And you've actually taken that a step further and you've previously said, learn how the business that you serve makes money and learn what part of that money belongs to your sphere of expertise. So what is it about understanding which part belongs to our sphere of expertise as designers that you feel is I important in the context of design and business? Oh,
- Jane Portman:
- I love it that you're bringing up those old quotes one by one. I don't, I'm not even sure if I'm thinking that way these days. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If you want to reframe, please go ahead. Well, it's
- Jane Portman:
- A great, but it's a great understanding how they make money. Yes, you can leverage that to anchor your design decisions. That would be a correct word these days. I think that design plays even smaller role and I don't think that any particular money goes into design at all. It's just the foundational layer of quality that belongs to a product and we are craftsmen that are responsible for that layer. It kind of spins out through throughout the business from the blog design to the marketing sales page designed to the product design. It's all foundational and it's necessary, makes for great experience, but it doesn't make money on its own unless it's married to a useful product, useful copy and marketing effort, marketing resources pumped into that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like what you're saying is that you don't see design as a strategic value driver or value creator.
- Jane Portman:
- That's not necessarily so especially for example, Userlist, yet another email service provider. There is a thousand out there. The way we're successful is by focusing on a certain narrow audience, SaaS companies and designing the product in a way that makes a very complex job in automation seem feel easier in their day-to-day experience than really ease. So design is in fact our important differentiator, but we can't say that good design is our, that's why you should buy Userlist, but in fact it kind of is, but it's not going to sell Userlist on its own just by saying that we have good design. It's just something that has to be there. If we got it right, that's great, but it's not going to solve the problem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is creating an experience that taps into or a solution to a burning need or a problem in a business context that a company or in jobs language, a job performer for example, is that design or is that something else?
- Jane Portman:
- I think we should spend less time making labels for things and more time doing things and then you might not need the labels at all or the labels might emerge organically. I would say that why would we spend time defining the boundaries of design? Everything is designed product design in a very wide sense is meeting the needs of the audience, starting from understand, finding the audience, understanding the audience, designing the products for the audience, making it visually pleasing. It's all design, it's all important, but yeah, it's not as easy as it sounds because when you start implementing that you find that you only have that much time and that much money to make things happen. That's when the interesting things start. As a consumer, you might be looking at like, oh, Dropbox is a huge company, why don't they make this page prettier? How can it even happen in big companies? Well, no, Dropbox is also struggling with limited resources. Yes, they have a lot of resources, but it's never enough. I've interviewed many folks at very established companies and they're like, yes, we can never do what we want fast enough. It's never enough resources to make what we want happen.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, so what I'm hearing is you're talking about the emphasis should be on how do we create value and less about the label or the way that we identify, especially in the context of a SAS business that is not funded by a venture capital with heaps of cash to burn, for example.
- Jane Portman:
- It's kind of enjoyable to speculate, but what practical difference does it make? What will label design and what we make, don't label design. This stuff needs to happen for the product to exist. Wire frames, the visual design front end code, and then that and code. These are the jobs to be done for us as craftsmen and let's go make that happen.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Jane, you've certainly done a lot of interesting and challenging things in your career. You've been an agency creative director, a solo consultant, and you've been a two-time founder and also you're a podcast host of UI Breakfast and better done than Perfect. And all of this is in a career, as I mentioned earlier, that isn't even halfway through. So of all the things that you've done, what is the one that you are most proud of and why?
- Jane Portman:
- The one that you didn't mention is being a mom of three kids. I'm very proud of that because honestly, it's another part of me that we don't talk much about online, but it's a big part of my life. I guess what I'm most proud of is it's the journey itself. Being able to make progress over the years and being able to enjoy to do things that you enjoy primarily those for a living, working, being able to, I don't think that work-life balance really exists, but being able to manage all of that and staying sane and relatively happy, that's a great accomplishment in my books. I think through leveraging my career and then being able to buy parts of my time as a mom and as a business owner, because of course there is no way to run a business to podcast shows and have three kids and do it all yours.
- It's, it's just incredibly impossible. So I can buy parts of my time here and there, leverage our awesome team, leverage our another awesome team on the family side to make things happen. Yeah, it's a team effort. It takes a lot of village to raise kids and this way can hack the system, be happy female, and also be successful in business. I think it's a miracle, to be honest. I don't talk much about feminism and such. I do have opinions. I just don't want to, no one want to be known for that. I'd rather be known for general business things, but being able to balance it all out is pretty amazing. That's what I'm happy about.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's certainly an inspiring story, and this has been a really refreshing conversation about your story. Thank you. About the challenges faced along the way, both as a designer and also as a founder. So thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Jane Portman:
- Thank you, Brendan. It's been a pleasure to dive into those.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, it's been a pleasure for me as well. And Jane, if people want to connect with you or keep up to date with all the wonderful things that you are doing, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Jane Portman:
- My personal website is UIbreakfast.com. That's where the UI Breakfast podcast lives at. I'm also @UIbreakfast on Twitter and LinkedIn and UserList.com is where most of my work goes to these days. We have a spectacular blog with nice illustrations and great articles. Check them out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks, Jane. I'll make sure that I put a link to all of those things in the show notes and to everyone that's been tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. As I mentioned, everything will be in the show notes, including where you can find Jane, UI Breakfast and Userlist.
- If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave review on the podcast. Those are really helpful. Subscribe and also just share it with one other person who you feel would get value out of these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes. Lastly, you could visit our website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.