Happy Paths

Koyfin with Rob Koyfman

October 4th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  28 mins 14 secs

Koyfin's rise to the top: Building a product for a broad target market is hard - even harder if your competitors are entrenched corporations.

Jam with Dani Grant

August 9th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  40 mins 4 secs

code, commandbar, dani grant, developer, engineering, jam, qa, saas

It's bug squashing time. Jam and the future of bug reporting.

Circa with Matt Galligan

July 26th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  26 mins 58 secs

atomic units, circa, journalism, matt galligan, mobile, news

It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off.

When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobile apps gained a new way of sending information directly to users.

One of the categories where push notifications are most used and overused is news —every day, all the time. Suddenly, you can get breaking news updates pushed straight to your phone every hour of the day.

For this episode, James talked with Matt Galligan. Matt was the Co-founder and CEO of Circa, which was the first mainstream news app to approach news delivery in a fundamentally mobile-first way. They talked about what being mobile-first means, some of their highest-leveraged design decisions within Circa, how it was received among mainstream media, as well as its legacy in online journalism.

Trello with Justin Gallagher

July 19th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  26 mins 17 secs

justin gallagher, productivity, project management, trello

Project management is one of the largest categories in all of software. From side hustles to huge multinational corporations, teams of all sizes use project management tools to plan and execute their work. And the number of tools in the market for project management is as diverse as the people that use them: Jira, Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, and many others. Each brings its own unique spin on how to break down work and track progress.

But one tool, perhaps more than any other, has influenced how other project management tools work. And that's Trello.

For this episode, James talked to Justin Gallagher, who worked on Trello for more than ten years, starting with its founding as a hackathon project and running through its meteoric growth and eventual acquisition by Atlassian. They talk about Trello's origin story, the opinionated way Trello encouraged people to break down their work, and the product's impact on future generations of project management tools.

Snap AR with Stephanie Engle

July 12th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  26 mins 3 secs

ar, augmented reality, snap, snapchat, stephanie engle

Augmented reality combines computer-generated virtual elements with the real world. Unlike virtual reality, AR enhances a person's perception of the real world instead of replacing it entirely. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, recognized the potential of AR early on.

In 2015, they released Lenses, which have been one of the most popular features of the product ever since. In their S-1 document from 2017, they described themselves as a camera company, not a social company or a software company. And their continued investment in AR experiences makes Snapchat probably the most used AR-centric product ever.

Today, James chats with Stephanie Engle, a Product Design Lead at Snap who focuses on many of their AR products, including Shopping Lenses, which shipped at the end of 2022.

Skin Tones in Product Imagery with Diógenes Brito

July 5th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  23 mins 33 secs

diógenes brito, emoji, product images, product marketing, skin tones, slack

Every software company needs to announce new features…and some of us pay more attention to these announcements than others. Sometimes, a feature announcement catches our attention, and it's often because of a well-designed graphic.

Diógenes Brito has first-hand knowledge about this as the Head of Product and Design at Air. He's well-known for his work as a product designer at Slack, where he added a brown skin tone to one of the company's biggest product feature rollouts at the time.

In this episode, James interviews Dió about how these rollouts can have subtle, sometimes unintended implications beyond just the specific feature and product they showcase and unpacks how it's influenced product marketing since.

Twitter Spaces with Maya Gold Patterson

June 28th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  27 mins 47 secs

audio, maya gold patterson, social audio, spaces, twitter, twitter spaces

Twitter wasn't the first company to get traction with a social audio product, but it quickly became a leader in the space, in no small part thanks to the work of Maya Gold Patterson, who was the Lead Product Designer for Twitter Spaces through its launch and early growth.

In this episode, James talks with Maya about her experience helping build Twitter Spaces, how to learn from competitors' launches, how companies with large reach can still ship experiments thoughtfully, and how specific design decisions the Twitter Spaces team made took advantage of the Twitter platform to grow beyond other social audio apps.

The Hashtag with Chris Messina

June 21st, 2023  |  Season 1  |  24 mins 33 secs

chris messina, hashtag, twitter

What do TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have in common? It's the hashtag: invented by a man of the internet, Chris Messina. Throughout his career, Chris has worked on movements online and offline that have helped define social media and social technology broadly. If you've used Firefox, attended a BarCamp event, or even checked in at a co-working space, then you're more than familiar with Chris' widespread impact.

James sat down with Chris to learn more about the hashtag and to see how a simple feature proposed via a tweet evolved social media basically everywhere on the internet.

Superhuman with Gaurav Vohra

June 14th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  27 mins 33 secs

command palette, email, gaurav vohra, productivity software, superhuman, superhuman command

Email has been around for decades, and many people now spend hours reading, writing, and replying to emails every day. Since being founded in 2014, Superhuman has become the most revered email client in existence for people who write a lot of email. There are so many useful chapters from the Superhuman story.

James sat down with Gaurav Vohra, who has led product and growth as part of Superhuman's founding team, to chat about these war stories.

Creating Gmail with Paul Buchheit

June 7th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  23 mins 23 secs

100ms rule, email, gmail, google, paul buchheit

Gmail is one of the most used pieces of software ever, with 1.8 billion users today. In many ways, Gmail defined modern email, transitioning us from the "You've Got Mail" era into the present. Pretty much everyone has used Gmail or another email client that's been inspired by Gmail.

James talks with Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, to learn more about how what he built came to be the juggernaut of the email world.

Introducing Happy Paths

May 19th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 min 14 secs

commandbar, happy paths, internet history, product development, software development

Happy Paths, a series from CommandBar, explores the human process behind some of the most well-known software of the internet era.