If you’ve ever shopped online at Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Sephora, or Stitch Fix, you’ve got Julie Bornstein to thank for helping to make a lot of that possible. In fact, her resume makes you wonder if there’s any major e-commerce retailer she hasn’t changed for the better. So when she decided to take all her experience and build an AI-powered shopping app, we knew it meant big things for the future of online shopping.

After working with her and her team on the design of The Yes, we can confirm that this is definitely one you'll want to download ASAP. We got the chance to ask Julie about her vision, the things she’s learned the hard way, and why she hopes brick-and-mortar retailers never truly die.

On The Yes

Was The Yes a result of a lightbulb moment or was it an idea that evolved over time?

It was sort of a combination of both. I’ve been thinking about the idea ever since Amazon.com started selling books in 1996. To me, e-commerce was the perfect combination of my life-long love of shopping and obsession with efficiency.

In my experience working at Nordstom.com, Sephora, and Stitch Fix, I got a much clearer understanding of the challenges e-commerce faces: the overwhelm of choice, the one-size-fits-all nature, the inefficiencies of re-shooting every article of clothing, and the costs and limitations of owning inventory. Now that the tech is finally advanced enough to solve these problems, it felt like the right time to give it a shot!

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Why do you believe people are ready for a whole new way of shopping for retail?

For a lot of people, buying fashion online is really hard and overwhelming. We have the conversion rates to prove it. Also, media services like Spotify, Pandora, Apple News, and YouTube have trained us to understand the huge benefit of services that work smarter, ranking and editing content on our behalf. It's time to apply this to the shopping experience.‍

Why do you believe e-commerce has been so slow to change?‍

It’s a complex technical challenge. Established e-commerce players have huge tech infrastructures that have been built over the past twenty years, and they’re hard to establish, expensive to replace, and require a different level of expertise to manage. There are many interesting technologies emerging in the industry but most of them don’t have sustainable business models attached to them.
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What do you believe will be the hardest consumer behavior to shift? The easiest?

Trust will be the hardest. Our goal is for The Yes to become the “go-to” destination for all your fashion needs, which requires people to trust that we have the best selection, the best prices, and the best service. Trust takes time to build, but given our deep dedication to our customers and brands, I’m certain we can earn it. I also think the new paradigm of choosing “Yes” or “No” as a means of sharing preferences will be an addictive behavior, even though they’ve never done it for fashion before.‍

Can you talk about the strategies you practice that have allowed you to see and seize opportunities in the status quo rather than get stuck operating within it?‍

Two things I’ve always practiced: eat your own dog food and be solutions-oriented. My teams have always joked that I’m the best QA (quality assurance) person because I’m the one who uses our products and services the most. I’m always hunting for bugs and opportunities for improvement. I love thinking about how things can be done better.

On Leadership

Who inspires you the most? Why?

My mom, for teaching me that you can be deeply committed to your family and your career simultaneously. Meg Whitman and Sheryl Sandberg, for paving the way for women in business and tech. And Nancy Pelosi, for showing us all that you can still kick ass at 80 years old.

Not to leave out men, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, for true invention and innovation in our time, my husband, for proving that a man can be their wife's cheerleader while still having his own career and identity, and Colin Jost, for being so smart, handsome, and funny (and for nabbing Scarlett Johansson)!  I love stories about having it all—why not aspire to that?

What have you learned from failure? From success?

As cliche as it sounds, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Every failure I’ve had (and trust me, there have been many) helped me look at what I’d do differently next time. From success, I’ve learned to trust my instincts.‍

Whenever I’m afraid, I take that as a signal that I need to learn more in order to overcome the fear.

Can you talk about your relationships with fear and discomfort?‍

I’ve always faced my fears head on. But I wouldn’t have been able to start this business, convince investors to believe in me, or hire a killer team if I wasn’t certain I could do it, which is something that comes with experience. Whenever I’m afraid, I take that as a signal that I need to learn more in order to overcome the fear.

At this point in my career, I know what I’m doing and I’m qualified to build the best shopping experience, so that’s how I’m able to sell my ideas to others. The only exception to my fear rule is scary movies: I just don’t watch them.‍

Do you ever struggle with imposter syndrome?‍

Truthfully, not anymore. I guess that’s what you get for waiting until age 47 to start something! I’ve learned so much over the years and I’ve worked very hard to earn my stripes. As a result, I feel experienced and qualified, which gives me the confidence I need to push through the hard parts. That, and having great parents, of course :)‍

What stands out to you about your experience being a woman in leadership, particularly in a stereotypically feminine vertical, like retail, within a stereotypically masculine landscape, like Silicon Valley?‍

When I joined Nordstrom.com in 2000, I worked directly for Dan Nordstrom. I had such strong instincts about what we needed to build and what the consumer wanted, in large part because I was the target consumer. Dan saw that and believed in me. I’ve always felt like being a woman has been a huge advantage in building businesses for women.

Two things I’ve always practiced: eat your own dog food and be solutions-oriented.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve experienced and been witness to gender bias, too. I’ve never been one to keep my mouth shut in these moments, and I’ve always taken them as my cue that it’s time to move on to bigger and better things.

Most importantly, I had the privilege of having grown up with two sisters and always feeling like my opinion matters, so no man’s been able to convince me otherwise.

On Technology

You’re a big believer in marrying the physical and digital worlds. What analog tasks or activities do you hope never get “disrupted?”

My favorite sport is shopping, especially the physical kind. I truly hope stores never go away. It’s just that they don’t serve our every need in a way that online shopping can, so retail shopping is more a form of entertainment than a satisfying needs-based experience. I spent my childhood in the mall and I still love spending a few solid hours getting lost in great stores and boutiques.

I also really value the face-to-face time it affords you. Nothing like a “shelter-in-place” mandate to appreciate how virtual face-time could never replace physical togetherness.

For more about The Yes and the app we designed together, read the case study.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.