Solving Problems as a Designer

Michael McWatters started out wanting to be an architect and got disabused of that quickly. Industrial design, then graphic design, then fine art, then an MFA, then a job at a bank where they offered to put him through an MBA — which is what finally made him ask what he was actually doing. The answer was that he wanted to make things people used. Agency and interactive consulting work followed, then a move to New York and a stretch on the brand strategy side, then burnout in 2009 as his boys were born, one with health and developmental issues he still navigates. He led a UX and HCI practice at a tech consultancy, spent seven and a half years as director of experience design at TED on a small scrappy nonprofit team, and has been at HBO Max for the last six as VP of product design. He used to describe himself as a generalist and now thinks that's wrong: what's actually moved him forward is going deep, repeatedly, on whatever caught his curiosity — motion design, HCI, accessibility.

He's not a bleeding-edge adopter and says so. He waits to see what sticks. The web stuck, mobile stuck, NFTs he doubted. AI he was unsure about until he started playing with the tools himself, learned where they fell down and where they didn't, and got interested in the potential — plus the realization that people with a few moral bright lines about design ought to be in that room helping shape it. With his team he moved gingerly rather than mandating anything: build a little excitement through real projects, find the designers who are genuinely into it, let momentum accumulate. He splits AI into product, meaning what customers touch, and productivity, meaning third-party tools plus a few they build themselves, and both are pointed at the same goal — keeping designers strategic and at the center of the work instead of adjacent to it. His view is that a designer who isn't at least aware of the tools is exposed, so the effort is as much protection as motivation. On burnout, which he sees in his team and feels himself, his answer is the problem at hand. He quotes Lou Danziger: design is intelligence made visible. He's never wanted requirements handed to him to execute against; he wants to drive them and do the first-principles work on why. The designers that resonates with stay motivated longer, because they're no longer on a treadmill of making things to a deadline.

On competing for attention, he's clear that no streamer is going to win a war against TikTok or YouTube, and he isn't trying to. With a library spanning HBO, TCM, DC, and Studio Ghibli, the question he keeps asking is what mindset someone is in when they want to sit down with something like The Pitt or an A24 film, and how to get them there with the least friction possible. Opening the app with no idea what to watch is the hardest position a user can be in — TikTok has no friction at all, and YouTube learns you fast enough to hand you low-risk fifteen-minute content immediately. So his attention goes to what happens before the app opens, so people arrive already primed. He thinks the streaming industry is still running a paradigm inherited from '90s video stores, shelves and rails and titles, which serves browsing well and intentional viewing badly. His own evidence that the appetite for deeper engagement survives: he stopped reading books for years, bought a Kindle Paperwhite, put a device curfew on himself, and six months later is reading every night.

His advice for breaking in comes with the acknowledgment that it has always been hard, largely because design has never built an apprenticeship culture — by the time anyone is hiring, they're desperate, and they need someone who knows Figma and can start immediately. So build one or two personal projects compelling enough that you can tell a real story about them, and skip the speculative redesigns; everyone has redesigned Spotify. He's hired people off thin portfolios on exactly that basis. He's wary of the templatized bootcamp portfolio, not as gatekeeping but because after two hundred of them the thinking underneath becomes impossible to distinguish. And he thinks the purpose of a portfolio gets misread: it isn't there to tell the whole story, it's there to provoke a conversation and get you in the room. He notes that if an app takes twenty minutes to understand, he's failed as a designer — and applies the same standard to the portfolios he reviews.