Ask HN: How do I persuade my designer that a character is useful | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I persuade my designer that a character is useful

6 pointsinterdrift45 comments

Hi guys, we are a couple of friends building a product. I'm the so called 'leader', and I'm having the following problem -

I'm a huge fan of Github and Travis CI design. I just love the characters and the way they help the marketing of the product. I have a great idea of a character that fits the purpose of the product. The problem is that the designer doesn't like having a character in the logo as it is 'too childish' .Of course, I mentioned we can use it in email marketing etc.In my opinion having the character in the logo is crucial to the marketing. How do I persuade her that we must do this? What are the pros and cons to having a character? In short... can you compare the success of top products who feature a character in their logo and top products which do not. e.g which one maximizes the probability of a 'unicorn'.

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TL;DR: You don't have to convince the designer of anything---you can "disagree and commit" and spend time on other decisions. Maybe some help:

> Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

> Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

From Jeff Bezos' Annual Letter (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517...)

Thanks, your answer is great!

Ugh. Added to my list of 'manipulation tactics to be on the lookout for.'

I'd love to see the whole list, do you have it written down?

You won't get me to hand it over that easily XD

Seriously though, I think a lot of sales and leadership skills are unethical forms of manipulation. By this I mean covert or implicit triggers to change behavior. I'm fine with bargaining strategies, even aggressive ones - I don't enjoy bargaining but it's honestly self-interested conflict, if you see what I mean. Where it stops being ethical is in the deliberate use of ambiguity to create informational asymmetry.

In the example above, I'm very wary of propositions like 'we need to move on, will you take a gamble with me on this?' What exactly does the proposition of a gamble mean here? It has implications of win and loss, but the sense of urgency and the lack of clarity could mean that if the gamble is a win the proponent will take all the credit, whereas if it's a loss I'll be blamed for not having spotted the pitfalls.

Of course you can't infer too much from a single example out of context, but the idea of 'privatizing the gains and socializing the losses' is sadly widespread and I have encountered many decision-makers who seem to operate on such a principle.

Of course it's natural to want to take a decision and move on rather than get bogged down in many situations. When I'm in charge I like to do this by saying 'I want X, if it doesn't work I'll take responsibility and we'll do Y instead.' Obviously not a brilliant business strategy from many people's point of view :-)

It's not a manipulation, it's acknowledgement of the reality that one party has the power and the other doesn't. Why have a leader who cannot make decisions without taking a vote?

Then what is the point of asking for buy-in? As opposed to 'Interesting views everyone, thanks. I'm gonna go with option B.' Then there's no ambiguity about who took the decision.

I didn't remember it when I commented earlier, about 15 years ago I was in a job where boss walked in when I was with clients and asked me to proofread some ad copy. I did and made one minor correction (with a pen, I didn't talk about it). He called me into his office a few moments later and reamed me for 'undermining him in front of clients' because I had failed to understand that his intention was to show off rather than actually have me proofread the copy. He became so abusive (threatening violence and so on) that I quit on the spot.

tl;dr don't ask an open-ended question if what you actually want is validation of your decision.

I'm not really seeing a buy-in clause.

It's called 'disagree and commit', wherein you can disagree with the direction the leader has decided to go in, but still commit to following direction.

This is opposed to 'disagree and dig your heels in' which is the default expectation. Or 'disagree and implement poorly'.

Where Bezos asks 'will you take a gamble with me on this?' If you're not seeing it that's because it's already fallen below your language-processing radar and you're not actually evaluating the words coming out of his mouth, but rather the subtext you feel is being communicated. This isn't an accident.

Sometimes underlings see problems that leaders do not. Underlings were hired for a reason; you trust their judgement. If you find yourself disregarding their opinions on a regular basis then you may have a dysfunctional team (maybe your problem or theirs).

Here's a juicy real-world example. I used to work at a publicly traded Fortune 500 tech company. My boss' boss called us into a meeting to see a pitch deck he was planning to show to the executive team.

He'd done a survey that showed we should completely change the way we monitized our product. We would slash the price of our bread and butter product and charge more for add-ons. His survey showed that respondents really liked our add-on products, so it should be possible to make more money this way.

Our team worked on add-on products, so that was nice to hear. His survey validated our opinion that we were doing good work and the company should pay more attention to us. However something in the back of my brain said that his survey didn't add up. I asked him some questions about his methodology and discovered a big problem.

He only contacted people who had made money by using our add-on products. Roughly half of users didn't earn a penny, and he was ignoring those people in his survey. That would have dramatically lowered the satisfaction numbers in his survey.

I brought it up and he got very angry. He insisted that he'd conducted the survey correctly, and he didn't consider non-money-makers to be real customers. Several engineers chimed in and said I was right; he'd biased his sample and this survey wasn't accurate. He got even angrier and so we dropped it.

He brought it to the executives and they loved it. They completely changed the monitization system for the whole company. Within a year revenue had collapsed. It was so bad than many investors accused management of actively trying to hurt revenue. At least 5 class action lawsuits were launched over our rapidly declining stock price. Most of the executives were forced out by the board, and the company was acquired for a fraction of its former value.

I had a chance to stop all of this during that meeting, and I didn't. I let my boss' boss intimidate me into dropping it, and I can't help but feel like I'm partially to blame for everything that happened after.

He was a smart person, and generally someone I enjoyed being around. The problem is that he didn't have a science background and didn't understand how to create a controlled study. He also didn't understand the concept of statistical significance. Some of the engineering team did understand these things, but he dismissed our feedback. The result was a disaster.

I think the blind copy/pasting of "disagree and commit" into every decision-related thread we're probably going to endure for some time will be annoying, and I don't think it is appropriate in this case, but I don't necessarily think it is a manipulation tactic in and of itself.

There are lots of times where intelligent, informed, well-meaning people cannot come to an agreement on something important, and at some point, someone has to make a decision and everyone else should get on board with making it successful (this is hard - I've been in situations where a decision was made I didn't disagree with and it is against human nature to work hard on something you don't agree with - but the alternative is worse).

There is a lot of subtlety in making that approach successful, though, which probably will get lost on a lot of people. If this is always unidirectional (from the manager) or is wielded too bluntly, then yes, it is manipulative and is really worse than just flatly saying "I'm the boss, do what I say". You'll note that even Bezos himself is on the other end of "disagree and commit", though.

I don't even know how to approach this question.

There are grammatical typos. The poster appears to have little professional experience in an area they're attempting to get reinforcing opinions for their stance from HN for, and the entire question seems both shallow, stupid and ridiculous.

Someone with apparently no experience in branding or marketing wants to override their experienced colleague and thinks it's going to mean the difference between a 'unicorn' and a... moderately successful company?

You are currently not adding any value to my question and I did not force you to answer.

There was actually significant value there, but I fear you're going to do what the other poster suggested, flex your position of power and drop the "disagree/commit" line on one of your friends to get your way.

You came here looking for validation, but what you really need to do is focus on the things that actually matter and trust your team to make the best decisions they can. At the very least you might still have friends a few months from now.

We are taking decisions as a team and I don't see how friendship matters while you design something.

Single biggest problem in the startup world is the "founder's vision". You either do or do not need a designer. If you know better, don't hire a designer. If you don't know better, hire a designer.

Now, since you _already have a designer_... How about let them do their job and if there is poor response or if the employee is twiddling their thumbs at some point you can ask them to make the version you want.

I have long since lost track of the number of times a small startup, which finally got some funding, hired experienced senior employees at the request of their investors and proceeded to ignore everything those new employees recommended. This applies to everything from design to devops to running the reception desk.

Clearly, the probability of a unicorn is maximized by putting a unicorn in the logo. Boom. Unicorn. Probability 1.

Nailed it.

I don't know that any hard data exists on this because, frankly, it seems kind of silly. Plenty of companies have been incredibly successful without any sort of character as part of their branding (Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple - to name just a few) and there are plenty of "characters" in the graveyards of internet startups. Sure, some successful ones may stand out to you, but is it because the characters sold the product, or is it because the product itself was so good that you got a lot of exposure to the characters?

It doesn't seem like design/marketing is your area of expertise, yet you are trying to push someone who is more experienced in that area to follow your vision, which you don't really have any good validation for (hence the reason you are asking here) - that doesn't seem like very good leadership to me.

You are still building a product - is it worth expending this much time, energy, and conflict with your designer over something that most of us think is pretty trivial? Is your product in a good enough state that you have the luxury of fighting over something like this?

Twitter has the bird.

Isn't that more of a logo than a character? I'm not really sure where you draw the line, but it doesn't feel like the bird has been much more than a logo for Twitter.

At many points in its evolution, Twitter's logo was very cartoonish [1]. Third party companies often seized on this to make the bird even more of a character on their websites.

People would also often reference the bird, because of the connection that birds "tweet".

I can't say if they used the bird extensively in their documentation and backend tools, but that's where it's more likely to have been playfully included since their frontend was always pretty simple and to the point.

[1] https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/larger/pu...

Twitter's character is the Fail Whale.

How about you listen to the specialist you hired for this specific purpose?

You can have a character, just not as part of the logo

> In short... can you compare the success of top products who feature a character in their logo and top products which do not. e.g which one maximizes the probability of a 'unicorn'.

Why don't you do your own research to compare the success of products with and without a character in their logos.

You can't answer a question with a question. I'm interested in how people generally feel about it.

Well how are we supposed to assess this without knowing anything about your product or target demographic? Will it be used by quirky individual geeks, or are you aiming at market position in an established industry or...?

If you're offering funeral services, for example, even the world's cutest cartoon skeleton might not be an appropriate logo element. Your HN bia says 'builds software for chemical diagnosis' - sounds like your target demo is doctors and hospitals but I'm just guessing. I presume you wish to be different from other firms competing in the same market, but different isn't always better.

In short... can you compare the success of top products who feature a character in their logo and top products which do not. e.g which one maximizes the probability of a 'unicorn'.

I could...what are you offering in return? Right now it sounds like you want other people to do stuff for you for free so you can get what you want, which isn't a very compelling come-on. That might be why everyone is taking your designer's side instead of yours, hm?

Maybe 'unicorn' wasn't the correct word, how many of the products you absolutely love feature a character in their logo? Yes, it does depend on the context but you can consider the context to be as appropriate as octocat is to github.

I don't want to be rude to you but you're trying to get validation for your opinion from social media to win an argument, which is rather immature. This is disrespectful to your designer.

Not really, I want to understand how a lot of smart people feel about a conflicting topic. There's no right or wrong in the situation, there's optimal and suboptimal.

>There's no right or wrong in the situation, there's optimal and suboptimal.

>In my opinion having the character in the logo is crucial to the marketing. How do I persuade her that we must do this?

These statements seem to conflict with each other.

Not necessarily, I'm not saying her idea is wrong, I'm saying that mine is slightly better in this case.

But not, apparently, in any way that you are able to articulate. For example your designer feels the idea is childish, but if your agreed-upon strategy is to position your firm as the most friendly and accessible vendor for new buyers that might be OK. If you want to be the safe choice of professionals, then maybe not.

Taste is highly subjective, but your designer is a specialist in visual communication and literally sees the world in a different way from how you do.

Maybe you shouldn't persuade her but listen to the expert you hired?

IMO great products come with mutual agreement.

You're not a designer, so come off it.

If this is the sort of thing you're worrying about as a "leader," you're going to have a bad time.

Why?

To be honest, your post sets off a number of red flags: micromanaging, second-guessing employees in their area of expertise, and asking "how do I become a unicorn".

You should take this as a cautionary tale: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/2/10898762/uber-ceo-travis-ka...

> Kalanick is not a designer... Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding process to someone else. This was an unusual decision, on his part. When overhauling the identify of their company, most CEOs hire experts—branding agencies that specialize in translating corporate values into fonts and colors—or assign the task to an in-house design team. Not Kalanick. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalim Amin and a dozen-or-so other folks, hammering out ideas from a poorly ventilated space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. "I didn’t know any of this stuff," says Kalanick. "I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good."

Okay, that makes sense to me. Thanks

Ask your customers how they'd feel about a character in the logo, they're a better audience to poll.

And if you don't have customers to ask, then that should be your #1 priority instead of worrying about your logo. Github launched and worried about their octocat way, way later.

Great! Thank you!

How many of these companies were successful because of a character in their logo?

http://fortune.com/unicorns/

It doesn't matter. Don't you have better things to be doing?

Doing what I believe is the correct thing to be doing now.

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