RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – What’s Your Why by Jaimee Newberry

My Experience at Zappos

From 2009 to 2011 I worked at Zappos.com. And 2009 to 2010, the first part of the engagement of that two year engagement I was focused. I was a product manager for the website. My mission was to give the website an overhaul, a visual re-skin, look and feel.

Immediately upon completing that, June of 2010, the mobile apps were my babies. The very first mobile apps for Zappos were my babies.

It came to me right after the iPad had come out. In June of 2010 I was approached with this project and we had decided that the iPad was the way to go, we didn’t have a mobile app at all in the space. Nothing: no iPhone or anything.

We decided to lead with iPad, and I consider this project a success because we went from never having touched an iPad to having an app in the app store when we submitted it, Apple called us to say, “Wow, good job.”

Then we repeated that process with iPhone in eight weeks. Again, we got a call from Apple. That was really cool. When I analyzed what happened there, why did that go right, what I was able to chalk it up to is I’d had that year with Zappos of working on the website where I really understood what Zappos was about.

I understood their core values, and I understood their business goals with absolute clarity so that when I got this project, I knew exactly what to do with that information to have this team make some awesome stuff.

Analyzing core values versus business goals, this is where I went a little wobbly on my own list of what’s important.

I quote this all the time if you’ve ever seen one of my product engagement talks. Aarron Walter wrote this book called, “Designing for Emotion.” He says, “Finding out who your customers are is only half the question. You also have to understand who you are.”

I used to always internalize that way beyond the product realm. Zappos is a company that I feel like really gets this; they know who they are as a company. I’m kind of tapping into this, and analyzing okay, what went right? Core values: they know who they are.

Let’s look at this. Let’s look at their core values in 2009 when I was there.

Zappos.com Core Values

This is what they were and these were established far before I got there in 2009. I went back, when I was writing this talk a couple months ago, I went back to see what their core values were now. That’s them now, they haven’t changed, not one word.

The core values remained the same, static.

Their business goals in 2009 looked more like this, doesn’t matter if you can read it or not, that’s not the important part. The important part is that the goals were defined by a really clear timeline, 2009 to 2013.

Zappos.com 2009 Business Goals

And they’re really specific sort of dynamic things, like a dollar amount, a vertical, really defined brackets of information that can change over time. They’re expected to change over time. But core values are static, foundational.

What I Realized From Looking at Zappos

That was really, really important for me to analyze and go, “Okay, now I was treating my core values as something a little more dynamic, a little more goal based. That was wrong, that was not the right way to approach it.”

Goals are important, but they’re not foundational.

Looking again at the core values of Zappos, when I analyze this stuff these are the core values that we used when we made those apps as design principles. Every decision, every feature, every function, every animation transition, even the raining cats, I can cross reference this list and say, “Yes, it supports one of these things. Everything we did aligned with these core values.”

When I flip that to the me side of things, I aim those questions at me, and all my life struggles and the things I was trying to work through.

When I did that and I looked at my list in the context of core values up against Zappos core values, I realized I was in pretty good shape, but I did have one more goal: write more.

It’s something that I could have defined a little bit better with what does “more” mean, I could establish that. Really, this goal supports doing things I love. It supports contributing something positive to the world because that’s the angle I take on what I write. And it supports the idea “if it seems scary go for it” because putting things out publicly is terrifying for me.

This is a goal, and that was one thing that I needed to edit on my list. That was a more dynamic thing, that was a thing that can change with time and as I grow.

My core values needed to stay the same. And again, every action supports what’s important. In my case this was my life, and all of the choices that I was making as I worked through burnout, needed to align with my values there.

And then there’s the financial piece, and you know, for other people maybe the financial piece is a core value. To me the financial piece actually supports being the best mom I can be so I can provide for my children and give them necessities and luxuries. To me the financial piece, it can change what defines it, just like my writing goal. It can change, but it supports the core values, it isn’t a core value for me.

If you’re force fitting stuff into that list it might be a sign that you’re doing it wrong. Basically though that comes down to your why.

What Do You Need to Take Positive Action?

Here’s my perspective on stuff like burnout. When you’re feeling off, when you’re feeling like the course isn’t aligned. It applies to products, and it applies to you on a day to day basis, your mental and physical health.

You lose track of where you are when clarity of vision is lost, when your core values are misaligned. When we fall off of those things, we lose the understanding behind the why.

The phone call that I talked about, the phone call that changed my life, it started this big wheel in motion for me. I don’t know that without that phone call I would have figured out that I had the tools already inside of me from my Marry Poppins bag of fifteen years of design experience. Every one of you has experience on making the products that you make. You have a bag of tools within you to design things, to develop things, to make things.

When you have clarity of vision about what you’re doing, you’re able to do a better job. When you don’t have clarity of vision you get frustrated, you don’t understand why you’re being asked to do something that doesn’t seem to make sense because you don’t have the big picture, the why behind it.