Chris Messina
Developer Experience Lead at @Uber. Inventor of the hashtag
Discussion
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
I lead Developer Experience at Uber, and I'm always looking out for emerging technology and product trends. I'm super excited about conversational software and the ever-increasingly thin line that separates human experience from real life technology extensions. I've worked at startups and big companies, and helped to bring a number of communities into existence in the last 10 years. Let's talk about what's going to happen next!
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Ankit Shah
@iamankitshah · Artist | Fashion Photographer | Doer
Did you know that #hashtags would get so popular when you first used it?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@iamankitshah OMG, no. I mean, we didn't even know if Twitter would become popular, let alone survive the fail whale! And considering how Biz and other leadership at Twitter poo-pooed the idea, I half thought that they'd be proven correct, and hashtags would be too nerdy to catch on. Fortunately I kept pushing the idea, and organically, over years, they caught on!
Motiv
@motiv · Motiv
@chrismessina @iamankitshah Nice. Can you even imagine a world WITHOUT hashtags now?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@motiv @iamankitshah #nope.
Sar Haribhakti
@sarthakgh · Learning
I have already told you how I like your ability to connect the dots. You have a deep understanding of both macro and micro level stuff when it comes to products. What does your learning process look like? My q is purposely open ended.
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@sarthakgh awh, thanks! I appreciate your attentiveness!
Y'know, I just love to observe products and people and trends and think about things from a macro perspective. I've always been an abstract thinker in that way — so much so that in high school I often got in trouble for it! My guidance counselor actually had to work intensively with me to get me to be "more concrete", and focus on things around me, instead of long term concerns. So, I guess I've always had a preference for understanding the world, and relating what's happening at the micro level to broader shifts happening at more systemic levels.
My process is organic, intuitive and opportunistic, which can be frustrating to accommodate for people who are more data- or process-driven. I tend to think in network effects and watch for biomimetic clues that might suggest why something is happening the way it is. For example, if you think about the interwoven root structure of trees in forest, they "collaborate" to protect themselves rather than compete in a survival-of-the-fittest model. We can learn a lot from nature and how resilient it is when we design systems for humans — and so I'm always looking at the negative space to try to understand things from oblique or unexpected angles.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Yo, Chris! You've spoken and written a lot about conversational commerce (love your #ConvComm collection). Bots and audio-based interfaces introduce new challenges and opportunities for product designers. It's still very nascent and it appears that people are still figuring out how to design experiences for these platforms.
What are the best examples of conversational commerce done right?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@rrhoover there's conversational commerce as a new product category, then there's those that extend existing service offerings, and still others that are using conversational contexts to build brands and extend narratives. In the last two categories, I love the work that Pullstring is doing — and in particular I really like the Call of Duty and Persona Synthetics Messenger bots because they're doing something native to the mediums and using character development and rich narrative authoring to do something useful and innovative.
Esther Crawford
@esthercrawford · CEO, Olabot
After the election of Trump it's even clearer that average workers are being left behind thanks to advances in technology. It's no secret at Uber is testing driverless cars. But in a world where there aren't any more drivers there will be tens of millions more people without jobs (delivery / taxi / Uber drivers and even truckers).
Companies like Uber and Google win big in this new world of automation (along with their shareholders) but if workers are displaced and left to feel hopeless -- then liberal values could be the real loser... because history teaches us that when people feel left out and disenfranchised they get angry and support tyranny.
I'm curious what you think the role of the tech industry is in leading conversations about the future of work and economic reform?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@esthercrawford great question. I think about this often and worry about it. I don't think that there will be easy answers, and instead will require leadership to help people adapt to the new reality that technology and automation will bring, and that the economic shifts that will occur because manual or repetitive labor will be taken over by machines will require us to think differently about the kind of useful work and activities that people will be able to pursue. I don't believe that there's anything "special" about the jobs that people have had in the industrial revolution; what's more important is that people engage in the power process, which, like in any game, allows people to opportunity to be challenged, to try, to learn, to adapt, to change, and then grow. If we orient society around pursuits structured around those kinds of personal growth and transformations, and we figure out how to value and reward them, then I think education and culture and art will become primary activities that we celebrate and engage in as robots and automation take over more and more rote work.
Lucas Barboza
@lucasbarboza · Senior Developer at Sprinklr
Hi Chris, i have a lot of curiosite of methods, best practices and tools, you and your Team use to develop user interface and user experience. Can you explain a little about this subject?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@lucasbarboza if you're talking about Uber, a lot of folks use Sketch, Illustrator, Origami, and Principle. There's also a lot of qualitative user research that's done to inform the design process, which is often very iterative and involves paper prototypes, wireframes, plenty of white boarding sessions, and prototyping. We also run experiments in different cities to determine whether a product or feature will make sense before rolling out more broadly.
Farbod Saraf
@farbodsaraf · Co-founder Everboard.io
As a ConvComm evangelist, what are some bots that you're using on a daily basis?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@farbodsaraf it's important to distinguish between the messaging context as a new channel for delivering automated messages, versus a bot as an interactive digital agent, like Alexa or the Google Assistant.
As such, I actually now get a lot of my news via Messenger bots, like TechCrunch, The Verge, USA Today, HYPEBEAST, and CNN. But, I also love Purple, but it's not really a "bot" per se — it's a news service powered by humans but delivered through messaging channels.
I'm also interested in simple services delivered through the messaging channel, like icon8, but also think hybrid services like Operator and the forthcoming Crosby from Pana show a lot of potential.
Amrith Shanbhag
@ambonium · making ideas happen at feathrd
What does your average day look like?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@ambonium I usually get up around 7am (depending on whether it's a week with our two kids), do a short fitness routine, make breakfast (fried eggs in coconut oil, bacon, avocado, coffee), and then either head into work or take the kids to school. My days at Uber are spent working with the Platform team, liaising with other teams, working on social media, events, talks, posting to Product Hunt, Twitter, and staying up to date on news. My days usually end around 630-7pm. I'll admit that I wish I was a little more focused and disciplined during the day, but that's never been a strong suit for me.
Deepak Ravindran
@deepakravindran · CEO, Lookup.to
What will be the future of conversational commerce like? Will that be on voice instead of message?
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@deepakravindran I believe that hybrid solutions will be the most relevant. It's not about messaging versus voice versus touch — it's about designing services that are adaptable and meet people where they are, just like the people you interact with in your life: in person, over text, over email, over phone, over video, and so on. Our expectations are shifting so that we are starting to expect that brands have a presence in these channels — and that's what will bring about the "conversational commerce" future that I see.
Deepak Ravindran
@deepakravindran · CEO, Lookup.to
@chrismessina Agreed. But don't you think it's far more easier to just say than type? Especially with the new opportunities using Alexa and Google Home? What are the top things you think voice can disrupt better than texting?
Colin Devroe
@cdevroe · Co-founder, Plain
It seems like the smallest of ideas end up having the broadest impact, even if relatively unnoticed. You've either had the idea or helped the ideas get pushed forward notably coworking, microformats, hashtags, openid, convcomm (bots), etc. I don't have a hard Q in this, but more would like your perspective on how small ideas, when combined with other things or when allowed to grow, become large difference makers in our world.
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@cdevroe thanks Colin — I appreciate your question, especially since you've been around to witness so many of these initiatives take shape. Of course, you haven't listed the ones that haven't taken off, so it's worth reminding people that not everything me and many of my friends have worked on have caught on.
In the examples you listed, I think it comes down to constantly vacillating between being up close and in the weeds, and then stepping back to get a sense for directionally where people want things to go — i.e. where is the friction or the confusion, and how do you simplify an idea to its bare essence? How can you edit technical ideas down to their basest, most common and relatable form without losing the original integrity of the idea? It's an iterative and intuitive process and requires constant gut checking and socializing ideas to see what resonates and what confuses, and then dropping the latter and doubling-down on the former. It takes time, but I've found that that process has helped me hone my ideas over time.
I'd also add that investing in other people's success goes a long way to guilting people into helping you. Specifically, with BarCamp, I'd make localized BarCamp logos for people and "gift" them to people that asked me to organize an event for them. I'd send them the logo I made and say, "I won't organize it for you, that's up to you. But here's a logo for you — now go make me proud!" And then they would. That kind of affirmation and permissiveness seemed to really work to get people to take ownership and become contributors.
Colin Devroe
@cdevroe · Co-founder, Plain
@chrismessina "How can you edit technical ideas down to their basest, most common and relatable form" - I've considered this my job for my entire career.
Thanks so much for the response.