Scott Belsky on the First Mile, Doing Half, and the Messy Middle
Scott Belsky (CPO/EVP at Adobe, founder of Behance, author of The Messy Middle) and Lenny Rachitsky on the product design instincts he has refined over two decades — why the first thirty seconds of a new product experience are the hardest to get right, why you should only build half the features you plan to, and what it takes to survive the long slog between start and finish.
Key ideas
- The First Mile. ‘In the first 30 seconds of using a new product, you are lazy, vain, and selfish.’ New users want immediate gratification (lazy), want to look good (vain), and care only about their own needs (selfish). Most teams spend the final mile of their time building the product while only the last moment considering the first mile of the customer’s experience. Designing explicitly for the lazy-vain-selfish user is the unlock.
- Do Half. Only build half the features you plan. At Behance, killing features — the Tip Exchange, Groups, custom colour controls — consistently drove more use of the core action (publishing projects) than adding features. The insight: if you make the whole product about one thing, everyone does that one thing at 10x the velocity. ‘Try to kill things and everything you think you need to do, you probably only need to do half of it.’
- Optimise for the problems you want to have. Kill the brick walls (catastrophic failure modes); tolerate the things you want to have (scale problems, growth problems). Distinction between features that unblock and features that complicate.
- The conviction test. When a founder is wondering whether to continue: ask how much conviction they have in the solution now, given everything they have learned. More conviction → they are in the messy middle, keep going. Less conviction → the signal is real, the original thesis may be wrong.
- AI and the experience economy. AI generates the centre — the average, the expected, the optimised. This will liberate humans to focus on the non-scalable edge, the craft, the things that move the needle for experience. Belsky is long the experience economy as AI handles production.