Alex 🇺🇦

We updated our 4 company values this week to keep up with how the company has changed. Here's what I shared with the team internally. I hope it could be helpful for other companies.

When you hire product designers at least one full interview should be dedicated to assessing business instincts, because there are basically only 4 levels of designers that you'll encounter: Type 1: Can't design something reasonable on time. This is relatively rare at good companies since you can judge their output before hiring. Their value is -2x, as in they are so worthless from fighting and adding inconsistency that you need to hire 2 normal designers just to break even. Type 2: Designs well, refuses to understand the business, thinks it's beneath them. This is the default case, let's say their value is 1x. Type 3: Designs well, talks about how they care about the business, but is lying to some degree and doesn't actually understand or care about the business quite as much as they think (they often unconsciously think it's beneath them). These designers are ~1.5-2x. If you lay out the numbers or explain "yo we've really gotta do this so we can boost profitability" they'll go along with it, but they won't really feel it. Type 4: Designs well, understands and cares about the business. The type who show up and say "dude if we fix this workflow that the users hate we won't need half the support team and we can shift our post-sales operating model towards driving renewals." "I bet that if we changed this reporting system to provide alerts when there are anomalies, instead of forcing users to run a report, we'd save a few bucks on data processing costs and the sales team could tell a better AI story. Here's the prototype." These designers are literally 10-100x, and if they're fully unleashed they can change the trajectory of your business. The problem, btw, is that your average Type 2 designer hates Type 4 designers, because they think that they're sellouts for product management. So the key is to get ride of the Type 2 Designers or not hire them in the first place.

Another demo on text editing :) Adding voice for adjustments, followed by swiping to see variations

Introducing Lovable for more general tasks. Lovable has always been for building apps. Today it also becomes your data scientist, your business analyst, your deck builder, and your marketing assistant. This is a big step toward what Lovable is becoming: a general-purpose co-founder that can do anything. See examples below.