Renato Valdés Olmos, VP of Product and Design at Pitch & former Head of Design at Grammarly, talks to Maze about building Pitch, designing for communication interfaces, and how to create successful teams and products.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
You can follow Renato on Twitter (@renn) or check out his website.
Resources mentioned:
Follow Maze on social media:
To get notified when new episodes come out, subscribe at maze.co/podcast. See you next time!
Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today I'm joined by Renato Valdés Olmos. Renato is the VP of Product & Design at Pitch, the collaborative presentation software for crafting beautiful presentations more effectively. Before joining Pitch he's held positions such as the Head of Design at Grammarly and the Director of Product Design at Lyft. As a former founder with a track record of successful exits, he's worked with Andreessen Horowitz to attract and prepare the next generation of tech talent and is an active investor in a number of seed-stage companies. Renato also has a master in Interaction Design from the Utrecht School of the Arts. Super stoked to have you here, Ren. Thanks for being on the show.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Super stoked to be here, Ash.
Ash Oliver:
Our topic today is focused around designing for communication interfaces, but I thought we could get started by taking a deeper look at your career. Your background is incredibly impressive working with pioneering tech companies, so could you walk us through your career so far and perhaps what's led you to join Pitch?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah, absolutely. Let's see. Before I joined Pitch, I had a function at Grammarly. I joined and adopted a handful of designers and quickly grew that into a really large design organization. I think there, our focus really was to move the Grammarly experience from a web extension, or Chrome extension specifically, to a fully OS integrated user experience, which was a really fantastic journey to be part of. I worked there and predominantly focused on building a very strong design leadership team. I was very happy where we ended up with Grammarly.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Prior to that, I was at Lyft indeed. I was responsible for essentially leading all of consumer design, which consisted of the rider experience, which is the Lyft app that everybody knows and loves. But there I was mostly working on taking the user experience from a service that takes you from point A to point B by car to a fully multimodal transportation service, including bikes and scooters, public transit, autonomous vehicles.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
And then prior to Lyft, I was at a company called called Honor. There I joined as the fifth exec and responsible to drive a design, a product, and brand. There over the course of four years, I built a fully centralized design organization, like a brand from scratch, and a set of services and products in one of the most complex and difficult industries that I've ever operated in. It's just a senior care industry, which is an extremely humbling part of my career. But then before that, yeah, I was a founder a handful of times. I've had moderate success there. I think the most well known thing that I've built is called Human, a very simple fitness tracking app that the team eventually sold to Mapbox.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
And then coming into Pitch, when me and my family decided to move back to Europe from the bay area, they were looking for somebody to initially take on and scale design, eventually, that became the entire product organization. So that's how I've come to join Pitch. I think the most important thing for me with anything that I take on is the mission behind it and the people that are building it. I think for Pitch, specifically, a tool that everybody perceives as slides for now, it's difficult space, crowded space. There's multiple incumbents in there with decades of development and knowledge ahead of us. It's not something that you just take on on a whim. And I think that is one of the things that I love about this team.
Ash Oliver:
I love that you mentioned the aspect around the mission. So I'm just wondering if you could touch on a little bit more of maybe that through line through your career, around being more of a mission led individual and how that's resonated for you when you've joined Pitch?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, delivering value or making sure that we solve a particular problem or scratch a particular itch has been really important to me. I think when I started out my career as a founder, it was more a direct result of the developments in technology, the opportunities, and talent that I had around me rather than something that was necessarily guided by the intention of solving a problem or changing the industry. The way Human came to be, for example, was just our ability to start tracking location and combine that with a geo sensor to get to motion, it was like motion detection, and building a cool interface on top of that was the magic ultimately. Building a product that would actually stick was a completely different learning curve for us.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
One of the things that I really learned was how important it is to have a mission that's bigger than the founders. I would say it's something that's truly changing a system, truly delivering an impact that is worth investing a lot of time. Because all of these tech companies invest a whole lot of our lives into this, it needs to be worth our while. For Honor with the mission of making sure that older adults could age more gracefully and that the families involved went through a less stressful time and making sure that the people actually taking care of the older adults, the caregivers, would get amazing products and the right compensation to boot. That is really how I learned how important it is to have a strong mission.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Grammarly really wants to improve communication and drive empathy through communication. And then with Pitch specifically, driving narratives and telling stories, which is something that humanity has done for ages. For me, throughout my career, I was delivering presentations and talking about work. And whether it's a portfolio presentation or trying to raise a series A, slide decks have always paid a huge role in that. And I think giving people the tools to deliver the best narrative live, or today is asynchronously, is a really amazing mission to be part of. It's essentially improving communication. And I think that that is an interesting topic from several angles. It is kind of connected to what I've done at Grammarly before—really focusing on communication at scale and how do we help teams communicate more efficiently. To me at the core, Pitch is also a communication tool. And that facet alone is so deep and so interesting.
Ash Oliver:
I mean, that's a perfect segue because presentations have previously been this semi-formal act and conjures this picture of a person standing in front of a crowd at a podium. And I think even thinking back, I started Apple just a couple of years after the release of the iWork Suite and that included Keynote. And now, Keynote is not just the name of the software, but you really think of Keynote as delivering a keynote presentation. And I used to train individuals on that software, and now there's many more solutions to creating these slide presentations. What I'm wondering is how does this formal picture of that kind of presentation almost like a TED Talk reside in the mind or shape the way that the team approaches the design of the product at Pitch?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah. Great question. And I think lovely segue, indeed. I think first and foremost, Pitch, as much as it is this generation's answer to this particular problem, building on the backs of giants is definitely something that I've done throughout my work and have to acknowledge credit and give credit where credit is due. I think for Keynote in particular, when we talk about software that delivers a cultural impact, which to me is the biggest pointer around whether you've succeeded with your tool, with your program, with your app. Do you truly deliver cultural impact, whether it's across a generation, across a population? This is truly how I measure success for a company or for a business.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Keynote is already in the name there, but the way that Apple in particular has defined the quality bar for good looking presentations is definitely something that I think has been a big inspiration to the Pitch team. That's definitely how we've looked at presentation creation at Pitch. Our creation experience is top of the line. And I would say it's on par with what you can achieve with a Keynote presentation. I think that, indeed, where it differs from a cultural impact perspective is that Keynote, even though it is still a great tool, it delivers mostly on a single player experience. And it's particularly good at that. But I think that current generation of folks is looking for more than just a creation experience.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
When I look at how we have started using Pitch, for example, and one of the features that we have been working on that I'm extremely excited about, recordings, which is a super simple and easy way to add live video recording bubbles to any slide that you are working on. This feature is so interesting to me because we really move Pitch from a presentation tool to becoming an unmissable, asynchronous communication tool for teams. And when we talk about how companies deliver a cultural impact, I think about the presentation and delivering a certain narrative and about how valuable that is to companies and teams specifically. When I look at the people that surround me on a day to day basis, for example, product managers, designers, engineers, people in marketing, people in operations, people in sales, the single most defining factor for success or the single most important trait that all of these people share within these growing organizations is communication. That is the single thing that all of them have to do effectively in order to get ahead.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Across the board, communication is one of the most important skills to have. And that, I think, is the gap that Pitch now, with recordings especially, fills. When I look at all of the companies that I've worked at, for example, in terms of how companies communicated, there was always some form of text based communication. Whether it was email, HipChat back in the day, Slack specifically, presentations have been a core part of every organization that I've been part of. Every important decision has been made with a slide deck preceding it. And I think how those tools fit into, especially, the world of today. We're just coming out of two years of terrible pandemic where we've completely had to relearn how to do everything. I think the tools that we're using for presentations have not necessarily focused on making sure that teams stay in sync while it's such a crucial communication tool. And I think that with recordings in particular, we're creating this amazing slide platform that addresses this generation professional needs. And that's the cultural impact that we're after.
Ash Oliver:
I love that. It's very clear how Pitch is really addressing, as you mentioned, this generation's need. And just thinking about communication and language in general, how much may be missed if these kinds of aspects aren't woven into a presentation. Totally different modality when you start to include things that go beyond just text and interpretation through text. I'm wondering about the behaviors and mannerisms of tool adoption that might inform the design process at Pitch. Can you speak a little bit about what you're experiencing within your team and how this is informing how you're bringing this new collaborative experience and an async experience through the presentation space?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the way we build product is really a well balanced combination between bringing in the right insights at the right time, whether that's user research, whether that's qualitative studies, whether it's analytics, more quant data, whether it's customer support, frequency of tickets, all of that needs to be combined with a strong sense of product, a strong sense of quality, a strong gut feeling. I think the combination of all of those factors allows us to prioritize things in the right way, and the culmination of those things leads to features like recordings, for example. I think the fact that we're a tech company that is forced at the same time to dog food our own product to the maximum extent definitely helps us to make bolder choices, to test things out early and often.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Now, to me, testing things internally is completely different from testing things externally, so there needs to be like a good balance between the both. But with being a company that is heavily reliant on slide decks to use to communicate things or to make decisions specifically, and where a large part of the knowledge base as well exists within our own product from onboarding decks to strategy, to just status updates, everything essentially lives in Pitch, we have a great way to test things. For the recordings feature in particular, I was so impressed with the recordings feature and decided to make one of the key meetings, which can be considered as the all hands for product engineering and design leadership across the company, which is the meeting where we report on progress, we decided to take our own product and turn that session from being a synchronous Zoom session to completely asynchronous, which has been an amazing change.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
We've been able to reduce the overall lifetime from a two hour session to something that we can do under an hour. And it all proceeds just like a well curated, well designed deck where through the inclusion of these recordings the presentation can be consumed at any time that you want. And I think that is truly a game changer for us. And the simplicity in the interaction, the ease of adding a recording to each slide, it really opens up the possibility for doing so many things more efficient at scale.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Having an asynchronous deck that people can consume at their own time is definitely useful. Let's say you're an entrepreneur, you're raising your series A, and with Pitch and recordings right now you can deliver an asynchronous presentation, are not dependent on an investor's time, and use the time that you actually get within an investor to focus on questions and diving deeper on the deck, because you've already been able to deliver that pitch asynchronously. And I think for us to find out whether we can truly change companies for the better, we need to make these bold choices and try things out for ourself. And I was like, it's great when things pan out.
Ash Oliver:
I love how you've kind of led that transformation internally, really changed the impact of the delivery, that experience of consuming the content. Just thinking about, as I've mentioned, being able to change from what was reading and trying to interpret the messaging through a deck, versus hearing the voice of the narrator, that delivery experience of the presentation is totally different. And I love how that's morphed internally before it's extended externally. Definitely a great example of drinking your own champagne. My question is a curiosity question. You're dog fooding Pitch across all of these different kind of modalities within the team—are there any unusual ways in which you've incorporated Pitch that maybe one wouldn't outside of Pitch consider using Pitch?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a really good question. I've used with my teams Miro before. A lot of use cases that Miro covers from a brainstorm perspective, we've done through Pitch. So slide decks that have like a workshop set up, through our life collaboration feature, for example, through cursors. There's a lot of interactivity that you can have around a presentation. And those are some of the more surprising things that I hadn't anticipated as I came in.
Ash Oliver:
One of the things I remember being really shocked by at a previous startup was the product team, design team most specifically, would use Keynote as their way of prototyping. And I'm just thinking about, as you're describing these different ways of being able to collaborate and also communicate through a slide format, how that might be able to be used for prototyping to be able to discuss what you're describing in the design and how you can actually prototype through through slides. Nothing I had ever seen before, but just shows how you can break the boundaries of what would be traditionally regarded as a presentation. Quite interesting.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah. No, no. And I'm happy to provide a comment there as well. I do have an opinion on prototyping within presentation software specifically. I just like general design teams using a combination of the prototyping tools there are available. I think because Pitch supports interactive components, it's very easy to integrate that into how we eventually communicate things and get things approved. I do think that with Keynote, at least for me, the reason that you can prototype so great in Keynote is I think more of a side effect than something that was absolutely intentional. It would be awesome if we could prototype in Pitch, but I'm also not super worried if we can't.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, totally. That leads me, though, to thinking about some of the micro interactions and especially considering your master's degree in interaction design, there are these subtle or small moments in which the user interacts with Pitch. Can you talk about some of the intentional UX decisions that you and your team have gone through in terms of how the brand is connected to the interaction design through Pitch? Because in my mind you can very clearly see the connection between the maybe visual identity and then what you experience in the actual product, but I'm intrigued by your background in interaction design. So I wonder if there are very deliberate decisions that have been made across your team in that regard?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
That is awesome to hear. And I'm 100% sure that the team will love hearing that because their bar is so high. If there is anything that I hear them being critical about is the synchronization between brand and product and how we could continue to improve that. I think this is one of the most difficult things to do. I think, specifically from an organizational perspective, product design teams have, in tech at least, have traditionally resided within product or engineering organizations or tech orgs. Brand and marketing design teams generally is in marketing teams, even though from a functional perspective the brand design function has, especially in the past, I would say it's five to eight years, started moving towards product more and more. I think for Pitch in particular, starting out with a usually high bar for both product and brand is something that the founding team really understood.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Pitch is a company that has several designers as founders and with a founding team like that, you can assume that the company will be design led and will value those types of details. And I think that the way that we have organized things and will keep organizing things will allow that consistency and that integration of brand and product to even expand in the future.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
I think it is extremely important to bring brand into product. To me, specifically, I don't see them as separate things. Product is the brand, the brand is the product, specifically with products like Pitch, for example, but also like Grammarly. Grammarly was a tool that needed to be more in the background, but from a growth perspective the brand still needed to be recognizable. Those are very interesting dynamics that you need to take into account, and having a centralized design organization definitely helped building that bridge and taking into account the emotional components and the emotional communication facets that brand designers tend to specialize in.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
I think for Pitch, from a design perspective and from an interaction design perspective, it's a different type of tool. Whereas Grammarly is more part of a full day workflow and the intention to use Grammarly is often less active, like it's more of a passive thing that exists there when you need it, the choice to use Pitch is way more intentional, which has allowed us to be a bit more expressive in some parts of the product.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
In the end, what is important is the work that you make shine with it. And I think that both in brand and product at Pitch, we do a thing really well and that is simplifying things and creating really engaging and delightful user experiences. It's like tools that people love using for a longer period of time. And that is something that our largest competitors have a more difficult time catching up with. I think that current generation of workers really expects an interface that is fun and engaging to work with and not a drag. From that perspective, we have one of the best teams in the world working on this.
Ash Oliver:
Well, it's evident even just thinking about that fun, creative expression, maybe on the more visual identity side, it translates to what you feel empowered to do within the product. And even thinking about Pitch taking this one step further, when you see the loader loading in blue and yellow to signal about what's going on in Ukraine, that's not just the brand extension, but the brand value extension that comes into the product. Thinking about how you've led teams across such multidisciplinary extensions, as you've mentioned across brand and product, and really not siloing these teams, but really integrating them, are there experiences that you've come to regard as the ways in which you as a leader have brought these teams together? Is there anything fundamental that you can speak to across your time at Grammarly and Pitch so far that helps to solidify these teams more in an integrated sense and less of a dispersed relegated into their own corners?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Absolutely. I think for me, and this speaks more towards my leadership style in particular and executive teams that I like to join, it's important to create autonomous teams—teams that are the best at what they do, and that feel empowered to do that. They feel empowered to make decisions themselves. I see the role as leadership to edit that, to review that work, to provide feedback. But overall, the best thing that you can do for a fast growing company is to build autonomous teams that are almost really empowered to take action. That is what I tend to emphasize in terms of building teams.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
But what I've seen is the most determining factor of a successful team, that is definitely the diversity of folks that make up a team. And I'm talking all aspects, not just talking gender, age, race. From a functional perspective, knowing what engineering contributes, knowing what product contributes, knowing what design contributes, marketing, sales, operations, and having a deeper respect for each's experience, background, and what they contribute and knowing when they contribute as part of the product development process, I think that's definitely the determining factor for success.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
And it's a couple of things for me. It's a deep inclusion of user research early on and very strategic. I think to me, ideal organizations have product managers directly paired with strong user researchers. How design contributes is also not a monolith. I think lots of design organizations tend to classify in either just product design and brand and marketing design. In all honesty, for a strong product development process you need to be able to dismantle that monolith a little bit and know that there are strong interaction designers, strong visual designers, industrial designers, service designers, that all have their own specialty and contribute to different projects in different ways and understanding how to scale your team and when to move from more generalist focus to specialization.
Ash Oliver:
That's huge. I love your focus on the aspect of diversity and going way beyond just what would be traditionally considered diverse, but also just understanding the spectrum from generalist to specialist and when that paradigm might shift in scaling a company.
Ash Oliver:
I want to focus a little bit on the communication device and designing for communication interfaces. I'm thinking about the similarities between the constraints of perhaps the canvas in Grammarly, when you're writing something, whether it be an email, a document, versus something like a slide. These are all what I would consider a canvas. What do you think about when your teams are designing for the ability for the end user to design? Are there any kind of similarities that you've experienced across something like designing with natural language processing on one end to designing for the future of what presentations can look like?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
I think in terms of the similarities between the types of design for communication interfaces, all a successful application have some kind of chrome, some kind of skeleton that connects interactions and establishes a base of habits for users. And finding that out is one of the most important and difficult journeys for any team that starts building a product.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
I think some of that core work of defining what that chrome is, for Pitch, is taking decades of user interface paradigms and evolving them to match the needs of the current generation. That's a really important factor for Pitch. For Grammarly, it's definitely more of a zero to one to come up with that paradigm. There wasn't something before Grammarly necessarily, and so really it's building a communication assistant like that—anybody did it in that way.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
I think the commonalities that both of these tools have within communication is just the nature of content. For Grammarly, the flexibility of text—essentially is AI and ML software that generates specific suggestions– is a very ambiguous concept. It's not the easiest design process to take a highly technical solution and try to turn that into almost like user value that's an extremely simple interface. And I think the similarities between Pitch and Grammarly is that the content that you're dealing with certainly is so amorphous that getting somebody to a solid great looking presentation is generally a very difficult thing, unless you are educated in the art of aesthetics. Building an interface that allows somebody to easily create a well looking presentation is so dependent on so much flexible content. Those unknowns, that ambiguity, are definitely some of the similarities that I see between Grammarly and Pitch.
Ash Oliver:
Well, this has been great. I'm going to transition into our hat trick questions. This is just an opportunity for us to get to know every guest a little bit more personally. So the first one I have for you is, what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that you think very few other people do?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
That is a good question. I think I'm not really afraid to look like an ass or make an ass out of myself. I think one of the fondest things that I remember when we started Honor was that we were a founding team of all technologists, essentially. All from different companies, everybody had some success to their name, but none of us were from the home care industry specifically. And one of the conclusions I came to fairly quickly was, hey, this is a group of people with a significant amount of privilege. I don't think we're going to be making the best decisions. What about we actually go out and sign up to become volunteer caregivers and go work with older adults ourselves and go do that work in order to really learn and understand who we're building for? I think that, those types of things, learning directly, getting firsthand experience of things, just to me is always one of the best ways to build empathy.
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely could not agree more. Really poignant to think about the importance of designers building that empathy and directly having those experiences to draw from.
Ash Oliver:
Then my second question for you is, what is an industry related, and can be broadly industry related, book that you have given or recommended the most?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Yeah, I would say Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner's "Designing Design Orgs" is one of the most important books that you should read if you are a design leader, also if you are a product leader or engineering leader, to get good empathy and understanding of what a truly successful design organization looks like and what goes into it. I'm also a big fan of Elad Gil's "High Growth Handbook." When it comes to keeping your marbles together and making the right decisions in high growth environments is probably one of the best anecdotal references. And then last but not least, I would say "Managing Oneself" by Peter F. Drucker, which is a book that was recommended to me by my lovely partner. Every year I try to read that to reflect on how I am.
Ash Oliver:
I love the repeat books that cycle with us as we continue. The ones that are referred back to, and you can look in the margins, for example, of things that maybe resonated with you in the past. My last question for you is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Woo, let me see.
Ash Oliver:
I love how this question stumps everybody.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
My God, I really have to think about this. It's more of an interest than a habit. I've lived in the bay area for the past decade, and being from Amsterdam I've had a keen eye on the cannabis industry and how it's evolved in the United States, both on the consumer and particularly this medical front. My cousin in Chile has a very serious form of cerebral palsy that comes with difficult spasms. I have a very big interest in this particular intersection, medical marijuana and cerebral palsy, folks with spasms specifically. And as an investor, also looking for companies that are tackling this either from a medical or consumer perspective.
Ash Oliver:
That's interesting. We share that interest in common. Renato, thank you so much for sharing and for joining us today. I really appreciate all the wisdom and experiences you've shared with us today.
Renato Valdés Olmos:
Of course, Ash. This was a delight. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.