What Pixar’s design process can teach software teams
Seeing behind the scenes of Pixar’s movie making magic at SXSW Interactive 2019 shined light on how creative teams can deliver exceptional and cohesive experiences at scale. Here are a few takeaways.
Exploration is vital
Pixar teams go through vast amounts of sketches and mood boards exploring the story narrative, style, and visual language for the film.
For software teams, there’s inspiration to be had for how many sketches should be explored early on. Often times there’s just one sketch of one idea. Better yet if there are three or four, but what happens when we create a culture that comes to expect 20 low-fidelity sketches and applauds even the most outlandish of explorations? At Pixar, this is the norm and for good reason: they’re avoiding the local maximum trap.
The local maximum is where you find yourself when you pick an idea to refine too soon, without doing enough exploration first. You get the design right, but it might not be the right design.
Critique is critical
At Pixar, they’re constantly sharing work in progress. While much of our culture and education system puts pressure on being right, at Pixar there’s a safe culture around exploring works of progress and finding ways to nurture the best of what’s working.
They recognize early on that “early on, all of our movies suck.” This creates a culture-wide understanding for the necessary role for critique for critique critique is an inherent part of the process, gives freedome Giving room for failure, and not trying to get things right on the first try, For a more in-depth review of their critique read this.
Their critique practice rests on some important principles:
- feedback should be constructive, never destructive or competitive
- they’re coming from other directors who can empathize with the process
- strive toward excellence and root out mediocrity
- don’t get defensive or take feedback personally
- comments are suggestions, not mandates
For software teams, this is a more challenging component of culture to improve, as it requires more behavior change across a larger group.
What this means for software teams
We’re already familiar with agile and devop methodologies that help teams deliver quality outcomes consistently, but there’s still room for improvement in the kind of culture we cultivate.
Encourage exploration
There’s an old saying that if you want to have a good idea, come up with a lot of ideas. Whether it’s perceived deadlines, minimal expectations, or lack of positive reinforcement, most cultures struggle to encourage the wild exploration that’s needed to surface truly innovative ideas.
We need managers to advocate for design teams to do broad explorations in how the frame the problem and ideate solutions to allow for the kind of new and creative work that teams at Pixar have been able to do for decades now.
Redefine critiques
How many critique sessions have you been to that try to see who can identify the biggest weaknesses or pitfalls in an idea? How many critiques are full of:
“yeah, but…” or “we don’t do things like that here” ?
Cultivating a critique session like Pixar’s likely requires forming new habits and dropping some old ones. It’s important for whoever’s leading the critique to state at the beginning what kind of interactions are appropriate (see list above).
In Summary
The creative collaborate process is relatively new for humanity. The term “brainstorm” wasn’t popularized until the 1950’s, and we’re still searching for how to do similar creative tasks at scale.
Pixar is an exemplar of successful creative collaboration and there are two foundations of success for them that most software teams should strive to emulate:
- Go big in exploring how we frame a problem and how many potential solutions we can come up with
- Evolve our culture of critique to be more constructive, less destructive.
These may seem like small asks, but changing expectations and habits is no easy task. Good luck!
