Scott Belsky
Founder and CEO of Behance (acquired by Adobe in 2012), where he subsequently became Chief Product Officer and EVP of Design and Emerging Products before becoming Chief Strategy Officer. Author of Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle (2018). Angel investor in Pinterest, Uber, Airtable, Flexport, Warby Parker, and many others.
Belsky’s product thinking is shaped by two decades of building creative tools — from Behance’s portfolio platform to Photoshop’s mass-market subscription expansion — and by the observation that companies consistently fail in the long, unglamorous stretch between start and success.
Key positions
- In the first thirty seconds of a product, every user is lazy, vain, and selfish. Design for that.
- Most teams under-invest in the first mile of the user experience while over-investing in features that the first-mile user will never reach.
- Do half the features you plan. Killing existing features concentrates usage on the core action; addition is usually worse than subtraction.
- The conviction test: knowing everything you know now, do you have more or less conviction in the solution? More → you are in the messy middle, keep going. Less → the signal is real.
- AI will generate the average, the expected, the optimised. Humans will shift to the non-scalable edge — craft, presence, experience — where AI cannot follow.