The Optimal Path

Starting and growing a design research practice with Gabriel Valdivia | Patreon

Episode Summary

Gabriel Valdivia, Principal Product Designer at Patreon, talks to Maze about starting and growing a research practice within design teams, learning through prototyping, and why product design is about exploration and cross-functional collaboration.

Episode Notes

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 connect with Gabriel on Twitter (@gabrielvaldivia) or check out his website.

Resources mentioned:

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To get notified when new episodes come out, subscribe at maze.co/podcast. See you next time!

Episode Transcription

Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, researchers, and product managers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.

Today, I'm joined by Gabriel Valdivia. Gabriel has been practicing design for more than 15 years both as a design leader within large organizations and a sole designer for startups. He's currently a product designer at Patreon where he is working to build the most exclusive membership platform for creators. In his spare time, he co-founded and runs Makeshift, a co-working studio and community center for product designers to collaborate and grow. Prior to that, he's managed the design and research team at CNN, spent time at Google building technology for communities at risk and worked for Meta and Automatic. Gabriel, I've been a follower of yours for years and a fan of your work in writing. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Gabriel Valdivia:
Thank you. I'm a fan of this podcast, so I'm honored to be invited.

Ash Oliver:
That's awesome. So our topic is starting and growing research practices within design teams. You've been part of a lot of zero to one product initiatives across startups and enterprise organizations, so I'm super excited to dive into this more. Maybe we can start with your current work at Patreon. Tell me a little bit about what the design and research practice looked like when you first joined.

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, so I joined Patreon almost two years ago and Patreon has been an interesting journey. We talk about zero to one projects, but Patreon has been almost like one to zero to one, where we've kind of unpacked who we were and are kind of reinventing the company and the product in real time. So when I joined there were three designers and we have been steadily growing the design team and today we're 15 product designers and the design org, which includes research and brand design, is 30 total. So over the last two years we've grown quite a bit and we've done a lot of soul searching to kind of figure out what kind of team we want to build and how do we want to work together as a team.

Ash Oliver:
And it's interesting that the brand team and the research team are part of the product organization. Was that a deliberate decision to bring those under the same umbrella or how did you arrive at that?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, so we're all part of an org that we called EPD, Engineering Product and Design. And part of this, I mentioned this one to zero to one, part of the one to zero was to take a step back as a company and figure out what was our differentiator or the part of the company that was going to make us successful. And the leadership team kind of arrived at the conclusion that the product is the way we will stand out. So combining engineering and design under that EPD umbrella is an effort to all of us kind of work towards making the best product that we can. And that means bringing in brand design in support of the product as well as research in support of the product. Other organizations have research as part of maybe the data science team or brand as part of the marketing team. And in an effort to kind of focus on what we think will stand out the company over the long run, we've focused on product being the focus for us.

Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I'd love that. I'm actually a user of Patreon, love the product, think that the user experience is really unrivaled. Can you talk to me a little bit about how brand and research and product design work together in the day to day initiatives? How does that collaboration unfold?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, so we're lucky in that a lot of us at the company are kind of creative or creators ourselves. Our CEO is a creator and a lot of people at Patreon have side hustles where they are creative and that develops us an intuition of what we should build for the company, but that intuition is limited. So we lean on the research team to augment that intuition with signals from our users, our creators on the platform. And we do that through a few different ways. We have what we call rolling research where every two weeks we bring in a group of creators and we put different ideas in front of them and get reactions from them. We also have a Discord channel where a few select creators are a part of that and we use that space to get in mind their feedback and ideas for where we should take the product.

And like I mentioned, our CEO's a creator himself and he hosts sessions with a few creators as well to get feedback. All that combined gives us a really clear understanding of what our users need and want and informs how we think about the roadmap of our products. And then the brand design is on the other side of that coin where once we do develop a plan of what we're going to do, we need to tell that story to our users. So we need to translate our OKRs and internal documents into something that people that are not in the technology space can understand. And we can convey not only what the product is today but what we hope it to be in the future. And that's where brand comes in. But all of it is rooted on feedback from creators and how we shape the product to evolve. And all of that is carried through research, product design and brand design.

Ash Oliver:
That's pretty remarkable. Research really seems like the bedrock as you're describing across the work that happens. And I can't help but think of the co-creation that might occur here, which makes sense for a creator business and platform that you would maybe co-create with your users. Did that already exist within the culture when you joined or is that part of scaling it back to zero and re-implementing some of these behaviors or mindset?

Gabriel Valdivia:
That's a great question. Shortly after I joined, we had our head of product join as well and his name is Julian Gutman and along with him came this idea of craft and making Patreon on a world class technology product. And part of that is bringing in people that have experience building technology products and adopting some of the practices that come with that. So I'm not sure if before that time we had this rigorous of a research practice, but as we started building the team and growing the team, we did so kind of leaning on what we know has worked in other companies and hoping that as we build this company from the ground up, we can avoid the pitfalls that other companies have fallen into and kind of develop the Patreon way of doing things. So my involvement in the company has really been at the beginning of that kind of transformation.

Ash Oliver:
I love that it's kind of embedded in the belief that it's part of the craft that research underpins the ability to be successful in the craft as creators, as makers, designers. As you said, it's been mostly formulated by past experiences of those part of the team. Did you come in with previous experiences from maybe past organization?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, absolutely. Before Patreon, I spent a few years at Facebook and most notably my last half there, I worked on, at that time, the very beginnings of what is now the Reality Labs team. So we were part of the first team that was trying to explore what virtual reality was and what Facebook's place in it was. This is back in 2016, 2015 and at that time, it was shortly after the acquisition for Oculus and there was a lot of energy and interest in that space, but we hadn't really explored that space before. So there was a lot of unknowns and there wasn't really an established way of doing things, especially when you contrast it to mobile design, now there's very established patterns for that. So what we did is we leaned really heavily on research and as we came up with different hypothesis of different interactions or different solutions to a particular problem, we got in the habit of bringing people in and put it in front of them.

And that's what the idea of rolling research came about. And in fact when I came to Patreon, I brought in one of the researchers that I worked at Facebook VR and we kind of adopted a similar working style at Patreon. But yeah, the idea was to get a recurring moments with users to kind of put in front of them these ideas that we were exploring and that was really particularly necessary in a space where there wasn't a lot of established patterns for what works and what doesn't work in the VR space.

I remember at the time, there was a few of us that were working in that space, maybe less than a handful of designers. I think that team now is hundreds if not thousands of people. But at the time there was only three or four of us and we were really excited about that space and we thought, "You know what we should do? We should build the human interface guidelines of VR because we're exploring the space and maybe we'll stumble into the pinch to zoom of VR and we'll be able to document it and tell people how to design for the space."

So we kind of made that an implicit goal and very quickly we found out, "Wait, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. We can't write the Bible of how to design for VR if we have no idea how to design for VR." So instead what we ended up doing is we built this VR resources site where we would literally just write a blog post every week or every other week saying, "We tried this thing and it worked, it didn't work, here's what we learned." And instead of writing the definitive kind of guidelines for how to design for VR, we were just kind of documenting our process in that space. And that, in a way, was valuable to people interested in that space because they could kind of learn through our trial and error. But I think that's indicative of the time in which we were where there were no established patterns and we needed to lean on our own experimentation and research to find the right path.

Ash Oliver:
That's super cool and it kind of draws a parallel for me because you've said that constantly exploring new solutions to a problem is the job of product design. I think when most people think about design, they think about the creation aspect, not the exploratory part. In emerging technologies, I think research is more understood as an important element within design. But when you get into established industries, for example contrasting VR to Patreon for example, where in Patreon you have a lot of creators, I think a lot of times in tech, organizations over index on their own internal knowledge, especially if they are type of their own users. So what do you think is different about Patreon? Why do you think it took hold as such a valuable and important part of the practice of Patreon?

Gabriel Valdivia:
In the case of VR, there was a lot of unknowns in terms of interaction design. How do you create UIs when there is no bounds to your display and the experiences all around you, that created a lot of open questions around how do you interact with this space. In the case of Patreon, there are also unknowns, but they're less in the interaction design space and they're more in the kind of experiential space, starting with monetization and how we're shifting from a model where content is free and it's flooded with content in the feed of infinite content that is algorithmically organized for you. We're shifting from that to you pay for content and you highly value this content and the creator has a direct connection with their fans in a way that they have it in any other platform before. So that is a vastly different understanding of how content works on the internet, how people access it, how creators distribute it, and the dynamics that that creates.

There's a lot of unknowns there that were left thinking is the feed model the right model, like a chronological feed where you have posts and comments and they suppose are ranked, is that the right model or is a different model, a better one? How do you create that space and how do you create an identity within that space? All those questions are less about how do you interact with this space and more about what is your experience of participating in that platform. So that's where research comes in where we kind of step into an unknown space and we come up with a hypothesis and we need to validate that hypothesis with real users. And the way we do that is through making. You are referring to the creative face of design. We try to move away from the hypothetical as much as possible and ground our explorations in real prototypes, in real tangible artifacts that people can use to understand how to interact with each other.

Ash Oliver:
Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, you've written a lot about prototyping and learning through prototyping. I'm curious, does the rolling research sessions breakdown what the environment looks like there?

Gabriel Valdivia:
So we try to present a few prototypes in that scenario. And I think the two components are important. There are one, speed and two, fidelity, and sometimes those are interconnected. The higher fidelity a prototype is, the slower it is to build. And we're in a really golden era right now where Figma has a lot of flexibility for prototyping and there are other more sophisticated tools like Origami or Framer that allow us to really simulate what it is like to interact with the product.

So we're able to leverage that and try to move really quickly and sometimes within the same day, within the same research session, we hear a particular piece of feedback and we can iterate on that prototype and the following session, a few minutes later, we'll have some of the learnings that we've gathered from that session. So I think we lean on the tools that we're comfortable with. Sometimes it's as rudimentary as a keynote or sometimes it's very sophisticated where we use a tool like Origami where you can access a lot of the native device functionality and simulate what it's like to interact in the space as if it was real. Prototyping is the vehicle by which we move people away from the imaginary space of, "what would you do if X?" and actually have them do a task and talk about that task during the research.

Ash Oliver:
That's awesome. It sounds like it's part of the ethos within Patreon to work hand in hand creators internally and creators externally to be able to really build the platform together. When you're in these rituals, like rolling research or even the CEO sessions or across the Discord channel that you've mentioned, is this something that the entire EPD team gets involved in? Tell me a little bit about where the swim lanes are or the collaboration exists between you and others.

Gabriel Valdivia:
So the rolling research, they're kind of a train that's always ongoing. So every two weeks we are definitely going to have creators available for us to put something in front of them. So then the different teams around the company look at this train and they decide, "Okay, I have something ready to show or I have some questions that I need to answer. When is the next session? Who signed up? Can we work with them to get a slot in there and present our work?" And usually when they do that, it's around that team's goals, right?

Let's say there's a team that's participating in the rolling research session that would generally be the designer who's creating the prototype, but also the product partners and the engineers are part of the observation sessions and we discuss the takeaways from the session together and I think that's when they're most effective, when the whole team can be exposed to how people react to a certain idea and we can kind of tease the insights together. Every team steps into this ongoing train and ideally it's a cross-functional investment where we're all interested in figuring out what the response to that idea is.

Ash Oliver:
In terms of the buy-in for this level of investment, cross functionally especially in this kind of cadence, was there any skepticism or obstacles that you had to overcome in order to embed this kind of as an ongoing practice among the team?

Gabriel Valdivia:
I think yes, but my approach to designing is very collaborative and I think it's rooted on this phase of teams that I tend to gravitate towards, which is when that's zero to one stage where there's very few people and there's not a really clear idea of what works. So as a designer there's always a lot of things to do, which I find to be really energizing. And the way that I approach that is I usually design something to 60 or 70% of an idea and then I put it in front of the team and the remaining 40 to 30% is co-design with engineers, with researchers, with PMs. There's a lot of open questions that I haven't thought about and partly because I don't have time to think about it because there's a lot more work to do. But another part of it is I really enjoy this process of presenting a half baked idea and then seeing how people react to that and saying, "I like this but what about this bit, what about that bit?"

And that all of a sudden becomes our idea. So it's not my design that we're testing, it is our design that we're testing because we're all contributing to it from the get go. And I think as a result everyone kind of tends to feel ownership over the things that we're testing and we all have different inputs into it. I may be the one that's pushing the pixels or connecting the noodles in Origami, but it might be an engineer's idea or it might be our researchers inside that is like, "Yeah we should do this instead." And I see my role as kind of a vehicle of the team's ideas and we can bring those ideas to research session to validate them or not.

So I think that process has welcomed people feeling invested in a sense of ownership over the ideas. So by the time we put it in front of a creator, everybody's kind of really excited to see if their brilliant idea is the one that's going to make it. And I find that process really fun because it's truly all of us coming together and usually what we end up testing is either a variation of what I initially thought of or something entirely different. So for me is really selfishly fun because it's very surprising that kind of keeps you on your toes.

Ash Oliver:
I love that. I mean, such a huge best practice in terms of collaboration and alignment, but even more so it sounds like kind of a keystone to shipping better products overall, working across startups and enterprise organizations and involving this level of collaboration across functional teams. Is there anything else that really stands out to you in terms of some of the best practices that you've honed over the years?

Gabriel Valdivia:
I think that for me that in my journey my career has been mostly about self-awareness and discovering really who I am and what motivates me and not just me but also the product, understanding the stage of a product. Sometimes I'm really excited about the idea and I share it and I'm really invested in that idea and I forget that it's 60% of the idea and I'm like, "No, no this is perfect, this is great." And then as people start poking at it feels like they're poking at me because I feel really attached to that idea and really finding yourself kind of separated from the work that you do and understanding that the process is there for a reason is a lesson that I learned every day. So it could be at the scale of one idea but also at the scale of a company or a person, we're all going through a journey and there's a process for getting from point A to point B.

Sometimes you have to trust the process and remove your ego or your attachment from that equation. That's kind of the layer of a product or an idea, the layer of a company that's more meta but also true in that the companies that have been a part of, because they're in this transitional stage, they're evolving and they end up becoming something that wasn't what I started. The less mature version of me gets attached to the initial version of that company and as it evolves I become really disheartened by what it turns into. It's taking several years to accept that companies evolved, companies are people and they're living organisms and the ideas and the values and principles of the company evolve along with the people as they come in and out. So kind of like stepping out in the observing that evolution has been also a really important lesson for me that every company will go through that and you need to develop the self-awareness to understand where you fit in that evolution. Sorry, I got a bit abstract but hopefully it's useful.

Ash Oliver:
No, it is. It applies the same principle working on something to that 60% threshold and operating in the mindset that the company is kind of always in that 60% as well. I want to come back to some of the research practice. Maybe this is a really tactical question but it made me think about the user's involvement. How did you get users involved and how do you have users at your disposal, especially for the rolling research sessions? Has that been a challenge to incorporate users or find users to talk to for those sessions?

Gabriel Valdivia:
I will start by saying I'm not a researcher so there are research skills that I don't have that more capable people are more sourcing people and keeping those relationships going. The thing that comes to mind as you were saying that is an experience I had when I was working at a startup. Again this zero one state, the startup's name was Automatic, this is almost 10 years ago now and at the time, we didn't have researchers, so even though I'm not a researcher, I kind of had to become a researcher. And the one thing that we did that I'm not sure if it's legal, but we did it anyway, we built this hardware device that connects to your car and gives you a bunch of data about how you drive. It was kind of like a Fitbit for your car at the time and the device connected to the OBD2 port of your car and it's like this tiny device.

It happened to be the same size of at the time the square credit card reader and we needed to design a packaging for the device, we were selling it. So I went to an Apple store and I bought a square credit card reader and I took the packaging and I unfolded it and literally traced it and I was like, "Okay, this is going to be the size of the package," and designed a cover and the package for it, printed it and then pasted it on the square package.

And I literally went back to the Apple store and placed it in the shelf and then I kind of sat on the corner waiting to see if anybody would pick it up and as people were walking by, as soon as somebody saw and picked it up, I would rush to them and be like, "Hey, why'd you pick it up? What stood out? How do you think about this?" I did that on the store until I got kicked out several hours later. But that ended up informing the design for the package that we shipped the product, it was very successful. And actually, a few weeks later our package was picked up by the Apple store so it was legitimately in an Apple shelf, which was a very vindicating moment. It was a kind of a guerrilla research where I'm not sure any company would recommend to do that, but at the time, we just had to do what we had to do. So that was one way in which I tried to recruit research participants.

Ash Oliver:
Dude, I love that story. Some research even in a guerrilla style is better than no research. Kind of bending the boundaries a bit in order to glean some of these insights helped you get the packaging to where it was in the end. And I love how maybe that's a driving force it seems in some of your design process.

Gabriel Valdivia:
Maybe the core of that thinking is that more information is better than less information. And if you subscribe to the idea that design is never finished, you want to continue pushing something forward, this whole idea of feedback is a gift. Before design, I played music for a long time and my favorite part of that was the idea of coming up with a song and then playing that song in front of an audience and seeing how it affected them and feeding off of their energy that way. That interaction between creating something and putting it in front of someone else. The closest we get to that and design is through research and through thinking of an idea and taking it up to the point where someone who doesn't give a fuck about your idea is exposed to it and you can either convince them that it's a good idea or they can dismiss it as a bad idea. And that to me, that dance is really fun.

Ash Oliver:
I love that. What do you think when you're thinking back to those days especially, what did you say though, the sole designer at the time and no researcher?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yep.

Ash Oliver:
How did you build that mindset into the company as the team grew? Were there things that you did to try to socialize that mindset or instill that across the team? What did that feel like?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, companies are really just communities of people or kind of living organisms so they evolve as they grow. So there's no codified way of doing things. A small startup is just like, "We're trying to get this thing done, let's get to our common destination." And as the company grows, you start developing ways of doing things and things you should do and shouldn't do. And that's where if you have an idea for something that doesn't fit within the things that you should do, then you need to ask for permission or you need to convince someone to do it. I've found that the most important part of being part of an organization is to be really aligned on what the end destination is, what is our goal. In the case of Patreon is we want to fund the creative class, we want to get creators paid and we're all really aligned on that.

Depending on which organization you're a part of, there's a different goal in mind. So I think if we agree on that, I tend to ask for forgiveness and not permission and try new things and kind of lean on my initiative to explore a different approach to arriving at that shared goal that we have as an organization. I think that's rewarded in a stage of a company that is earlier on, but I tend to thrive in situations where that initiative is welcomed and that to me is what makes working as a part of the organization really fun that you're presented with a problem and you're encouraged to try creative solutions towards that problem.

Ash Oliver:
I love that we share this in common why I've spent the majority of my career in startups because I also thrive in that. I find that from seed to sea is kind of my sweet spot.

Gabriel Valdivia:
That's a good catchphrase.

Ash Oliver:
I'm curious about where you draw some of your inspiration when designing products. You talked a little bit about previous experience in music and some of this in terms of zero to one. Is there anything else that really informs the inspiration or the reference behind the design work that you do?

Gabriel Valdivia:
That's such a good question. I've thought about this a lot and I don't really have designers that I look up to and it makes me question, am I a real designer? Am I bought into this industry if I don't have people that I can point to that are like ... they're doing the things the way I wish I was doing them. But I tend to consume a lot of comedy, a lot of film, music. And what I admire most in those industries is some sort of understanding or point of view of what the world is and what humanity is and then contrasting that with what they think it should be and then creating some sort of artifact or experience that bridges that gap for people and makes people kind of think about that middle ground. I think that happens a lot in standup comedy where you enter this dark room with no windows and what happens in that room kind of stays in that room. Lately you can't even bring your phone there and there's, there's a lot of exploration of ideas that happens there.

It becomes a space where you're constantly in the border of what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And I think as a result you could walk away with a better understanding of the world and your relationship to that world. And I think extrapolating that to technology, I'm a fan of products that are really opinionated and can expose you to that opinion so you can decide for yourself if that's something you want to do or not. I think the best example of that today that I can think of is The Browser Company who is making this tool as a browser and they have an opinion of what a browser should be, which is different than what other browsers are.

And I see that as very similar to what good comedians do, what good directors do, what good musicians do. And it's taking this group of people and coming up with a shared point of view of what interacting with technology could be and putting that in front of others. That's one of the reasons why I was drawn to VR at the beginning because there was all this potential of what it could become. That potential was really exciting for me because you could really kind of play in that space between we do things a certain way today, but we could do them a different way and that's really inspiring, for me anyway.

Ash Oliver:
It's poetic and beautiful and I love it and it's clear to me where that would find a home at Patreon. My last question for you is how has your design process changed or is different from when you first started?

Gabriel Valdivia:
I think most people go through this journey where they start as a single player game and as a multiplayer game, if you're a starting designer, you worry a lot about what you can do and your own skills. And as I've grown older and done this for longer, I think more about what we can do as a team and how we can complement each other as a team. When I was starting out, I was looking at Dribble and there was a way of doing the certain design and the challenge was like, "How can I bend Photoshop at the time to execute this design? Technically, how can I do that? What are the menus that I should go into?"

And now I feel like most things are within reach, I can do most things that I can think about technically. The question is what should I think about what are the problems that we should solve? And that becomes a much more collaborative effort where I could do X and Y. That's not the issue, the question is should we do X or Y? And that's that's the conversation you have with PMs, engineers and executives and so on. And that's the actual design process, the discussion based on the design. Whereas at the beginning, I spent most of my time pushing pixels to make sure that it was a certain way and spend less time thinking about how do I influence people to go a certain way?

Ash Oliver:
I love that maturity curve from what's technically feasible to what is possible and then what's possible virtue of multiple people being involved instead of just one. That's a really great narrative arc to your careers.

Gabriel Valdivia:
I mean it's not linear. I've oscillated between the two. I worked as a designer for 10 years, then I started working in VR and I was like, "How the fuck do I do this?" I need to learn a lot of different tools. So I've oscillated between the two. But ultimately the question is like, should you build this? So how should you go from point A to point B? And that happens not in a design tool but in a room.

Ash Oliver:
And do you think that users being in that room is a critical component to that? Because it's making me think of this conversation in terms of building for your users versus building with your users.

Gabriel Valdivia:
Yeah, I mean it depends on what you're building. A lot of people subscribe to the mantra of solve your own problems or scratch your own itch, which it allows you to co-create with people like you or with yourself. But I think that whether you are the archetype of the person you're working towards or you're very different from them, the magic happens in that clash of an idea and people that are exposed to that idea. I think that, to me, is the exciting part of creativity. Some people subscribe to the idea that you can do art for art's sake and if you paint something and nobody sees it, it has value. I don't subscribe to that because that's like practice, but the real magic to me is when you put that in front of people and there's a reaction and there's some sort of conversation that happens from that. That to me is the exciting part. And design is similar. For whoever you're designing for, it's that moment of being exposed to it and clashing with it that is magical.

Ash Oliver:
Beautiful. I love it. It's an excellent part to end on before I get to these hat trick questions. My first question for you, Gabriel, is what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that you think few others do?

Gabriel Valdivia:
That's so hard. I mean, quit. I think that's the one thing I've done probably more than most other people. For me, it's helped me to be exposed to a lot of different environments, a lot of different problem spaces. There's maybe a trade off of how much depth you get into a particular area, but I see people that spend eight, 10, 15 years at the same company and I'm like, "How can you do that?" I understand the appeal of it and in some ways it's the responsible thing to do. But I like the model that film has where people get attached to a project for two or three years. They work in a movie for three years and once the movie's done, they get the fuck out and then they build a different movie after that. I wish we had something similar in the tech industry where yo ukind of work on a project for two or three years and then once that project's done, you go to the next one.

Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. I love it. My next question for you is what is the industry-related book that you've given or recommended the most?

Gabriel Valdivia:
Can I say two?

Ash Oliver:
Sure.

Gabriel Valdivia:
So the first one is called Team Human. It's by Douglas Rushkoff. And I'd read it right after I quit Google. And it talks about with the advents of AI and just technology in general, it talks about what makes us uniquely human and the fact that we are maybe a bit distracted and think of ourselves as a civilization that is ruled by productivity and efficiency. And those two things are things that AI will always do better than humans. So tries to find an alternative and what I took away from it is the contradictions that makes us human. The fact that we can both understand there is no God and there's a point in living, we can live with those two things as truths and still kind of push forward.

And then the second one is called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. This one kind of unpacks the myth of productivity in that you think that your value as a human is in making something. And she argues in that book that you have intrinsic value and that you can just sit still and understand, for example, the history of the ground in which you sit on and that has infinite depth and you can find a lot of insight in that and you don't need to create a building on top of that ground. And that's like so antithetical to how I live that I really appreciated that book.

Ash Oliver:
Wow. Timeless recommendations indeed for both of those. My last question for you is what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

Gabriel Valdivia:
I mean, I think I've been pretty pretentious, like the whole podcast, so let me just ground myself to say I love Marvel. I think it's pretty absurd and dumb, but I love it. I'll watch every single Marvel movie and show and it is very fulfilling to me.

Ash Oliver:
You've certainly not been pretentious, but I also love that you feel that you could be fully transparent in that. So that's amazing. Gabriel, this has been really a gift to connect with you. I really appreciate it. This has been super insightful, so thank you so much for being on.

Gabriel Valdivia:
Thank you so much for having me, man. This is such a blast.

Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a continuous product discovery platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources and companion links in the show notes. If you'd like to hear more, you can subscribe to the Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast and send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@maze.design. Thanks for listening, and until next time.