Utku Can

I thought it might be fun to share some of the story of how Monogram came to be. Here is the first paper prototype of Monogram @tomtaylor and I made. At the time, Monogram would be called Origami or Mosaic, and we went with Mosaic. (We were never sure on the name, and about a couple of months to launch, we changed it to Monogram.) The original idea was to let you create something that was...

Thanks for submitting @robjama. 👋🏼Hey! I'm Utku and I worked as the product lead on Monogram. A team of five of us made Monogram here in London, UK. If you have any questions, post away and I'll answer them here. Thanks!

Hey! Congratulations on the release; it sounds like a great idea. In the meantime, @flaneur, could you share some tidbits around the algorithmic design? Obviously secret sauce™ is secret but some insight into what data points you are pulling from, and what makes a song more likely to appear on a playlist would be really interesting. Do you pay attention to recency of release or taste...

Very cool idea. I imagine you discussed the mental barrier of email access to use the service many times. Have you considered letting people forward Uber/Lyft receipts to a unique email address you provide as an alternative?

Thanks @wanghq. I think it was Victor Hugo who said you can't fight an idea whose time has come. Perhaps this is one such idea. I think your collection is really interesting, mainly because the language is very much around hackers, startups and building things. In terms of where Stacks differs, I would like us to build a product that's more accessible to a wider audience. Our approach is to...

And I think that takes us through to the current iteration! Stacks is only a few weeks old, so I'd love to hear what you think and to get your feedback. If you're curious about how we made Stacks, here's a stack on Stacks! https://www.stackshq.com/@utku/stacks-on-stacks-how-we-made-stacks-f0quhyzm

With that change in tack, I wanted to look at the stack builder again. In this iteration, you can see the inline builder coming together: http://cl.ly/aLKa This is also the point tags switch from being on tools to being on Stacks. This made so much sense, and got rid of the repetitiveness of having to tag everything 'design' in a stack to do with design. We also built in an auto suggest for...

This is a very early wire of a homepage idea, where the focus was on selling Stacks on how individuals we would have on rotation get stuff done: http://cl.ly/aKTy This wasn't really clicking for us, and actually brought on the shift in thinking that made Stacks into what it is today: A complete stack — not the individual tools in it — is our point of focus.

You can see how the Stack formation was coming together in this third iteration. http://cl.ly/aKXS This is when I got into the idea of representing the tools you have stacked via a block of colour grid we generate. In the current version of Stacks, this a narrow bar to the left of the stack, but here, you can see me trying out a grid, and even a circular version!

This was followed by a second iteration. Here's another peek: http://cl.ly/aKVb http://cl.ly/aLb2 This cut feels like the first time it clicked, and the idea for the stack you build crystallised. This is also when we introduced tags, but you'll notice they are on the tools; and not on the Stacks. More on this in a bit.

I thought it might be interesting to show the first ever cut of Stacks. Here are the first three screens that I put together: http://cl.ly/aKgb The original idea was that everyone would have a single stack, and we'd ask everyone at least three default questions, such as who do you bank with, or which airline you travel with the most. We quickly realised however, that (i) it felt too restrictive...

Hello! Tom and I were the product leads on Stacks. It's the first product from Offset, the digital studio at MOO. Here's a short blog post: https://medium.com/offset-hq/introducing-stacks-a2d7fc7bbbd9 Making Stacks is invite only at the moment. Want to try it out? Request one on the site, and ping me! I'll send one your way. Happy to answer any questions too.