What keeps you up at night?
Adam Polselli
Two things are coming to mind. One is, can Dropbox be successful at this? It’s going to be hard and there are some complex challenges. We feel very up to it, [however] I’ve been there for 3 and a half years. I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to this team and to this product, and I don’t want to fail. I think Dropbox is doing incredibly, but I have really high ambitions for what I want us to accomplish and it feels like we’re just barely getting there. I really want us to win in a way that would feel like we won to me.
What else [keeps me up at night]? Where are our next designers going to come from? Earlier [we were] talking about young designers—where they are going to school, what they’re learning, are they getting the tools they need to start and do great work on day one?—That isn’t often the case. So where’s the next generation of designers going to come from? Because it doesn’t seem like software is going anywhere, and we need more of us.
Those types of things [keep me up], wanting to be proud of what you built, and that you spent your days work for the last three and-a-half years—or if you count all of your product design career, now six and-a-half years, almost seven years—doing stuff that mattered. That keeps me up, in a way that drives me.
Adam Polselli is a Design Lead at Dropbox, based in San Francisco, CA.
This quote was taken from epidsode 120 of the Design Details podcast.