As product builders, what can we learn from a product that reached a state of near-perfection 20 years ago? In this talk we'll explore the evolution of the skateboard as a product, and how, despite many attempts at innovation, it's still just a plank of plywood, two trucks and four wheels. Nonetheless, both the skateboard and the sport it enables continue to thrive
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Build Turing Fest 2019
Skateboarding and Software: Putting Ideas Into Action
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Hello. How are you? Can you hear me okay? Great. Delighted to be here. My name is Eamon Leonard. I'm from Ireland. I've been building products, communities, and teams, companies for about twenty years. And in my formative years, I spent a lot of time skateboarding.
And, so it occurred to me that there's some lessons that might be transferable from the development of the skateboard to how we build products. And, I'm gonna explore that in this talk. And, hopefully, it's interesting. Hopefully, there's something that we can learn, in the process.
So this is me in nineteen ninety one. You can tell it's nineteen ninety one by the cool clothes and and the knee pads. I was fourteen years old. I built a ramp in my back garden, and the skateboard that I was skateboarding at the time was a third hand deck because everybody was poor back then.
First time I ever saw a skateboard was in back to the future. Any fans of back to the future here? I thought you're all nerds. Well, what's story, man? Right. So saw that, and I was like, well, that's that's amazing. What what's going on there?
And it would be a few more years before I'd see a skateboard in real life on the wild streets of Dublin. And the minute I saw it, I knew I had to have one, and so I saved up ten pounds and bought a third hand deck off a friend.
So one of the things that I think is is pretty special about skateboarding is that it's about the individual, but it requires kind of the participation of a group. Unlike say maybe team sports, you're not competing against other people as part of a team.
You're really only competing against yourself. And so it probably was my first path into kind of personal development without even realizing it. It's amazing how you can look back on these things in your childhood and just like come up with a narrative that makes sense that probably wasn't true.
So just for the guys in the booth that the the clocks aren't running here down on either side. Thanks. So before I get into kind of a breakdown of my analysis of skateboarding as possibly the perfect product, this is what a modern skateboard looks like.
Just a show of hands, anybody ever stood on a skateboard in the room? Holy what? Wow, that's way more. Anybody still skateboarding? Go. Yeah. Unfortunately for me, the mind is willing, the flesh is weak, my body no longer can keep up, but that doesn't mean I can't still have an interest in it.
So well, maybe I don't need to explain the parts of it because that was like ninety percent there, but I'll go through it quickly. This is a deck. It's made of Canadian maple plywood usually. It has some grip tape to keep you, from slipping off.
It's the nose, the truck, inner bearing, wheel, outer bearing, wheel nut to keep it all together, and the tail. Everybody up to speed? Great. So another basic. This is an ollie. Hands up who can ollie. Well, hang on a second. Those numbers don't don't add this.
Nearly everybody had stood on a skateboard, but only like four people can ollie? Okay. So, the ollie is the is the first trick. Once you can master standing on a skateboard without falling over, the ollie is basically the thing that you have to learn because everything else flows from it.
It's it's the basic unit of activity in skateboarding. And it's a fairly physical manoeuvre where you bend your knees, push back explosively on the back foot with a view of making the board pop off the ground, and you, a split second ahead of it doing so, also rise, in the air.
And somewhere along the way, you manage to, through amazing physics and friction that I don't really understand, Keep it all together at one smooth movement until you hopefully land it and everybody thinks they're cool. So that took me, I remember the first time I ever did an ollie, it was about this much off the ground and I lost my ****.
I couldn't believe it. It'd take me a year to master this. This is a seven twenty flip. Never did one of these in my life. This wasn't even invented when I was a kid. Anybody ever done a seven twenty flip? Didn't think so.
And it usually goes much faster. That's a little bit slowed down. The Ollie enables you to do a whole bunch of stuff. It's the starting point for this. That's really just a quick primer. Anybody recognise this? Really? Back to the Future. Somebody said Back to the Future. Yeah.
That's Michael J Fox's left foot there. And sure this is a movie that was made in nineteen eighty four, shown in eighty five, but fairly representative of the state of of what skateboards were in the fifties. Nobody really invented it. It was just a couple of kids messing around, had some roller skate wheels, hammered it to a a plank of wood.
And like most things back then, there was no internet by which these things could travel or memes or tropes could travel through community or a cohort of people. They basically went from playground to playground, neighborhood to neighborhood. So, in this talk, I'm gonna say a disclaimer first of all.
I can't cover everything of sixty years of an evolution of a product in a thirty minute talk, as much as I'd like to. I will probably leave stuff out. If if you feel I've left stuff out, that's fine. You can tweet at me.
For also for the purposes of this talk, I'm gonna focus on the modern street skateboard, which is the one that in the previous slides I've seen people do tricks. So I'm not talking about the longboard. I'm not talking about skateboards that are used primarily as a mode of travel.
This is a talk about skateboards where people have an interest in self harm by throwing themselves off buildings and very high ramps. So gonna be four four parts to this, and hopefully, I'll make it through in the twenty something minutes that's left. Gonna talk about the evolution.
Gonna talk about products that were, you know, good attempt but didn't really quite or innovations on skateboard didn't really quite kinda stick. Gonna kind of make some observations, ask some questions based on that. And, hopefully, there's some kind of learnings in there and parallels that we can take over into, into what we do in for our day jobs and then talk about skateboarding's legacy a little bit as well.
So this is I found this have no idea where this came from. It's like most of these photographs, very hard to to credit them because they're they're copied across the the Internet. But this is actually the highest quality image, so apology apologies that I could find on this.
But it does give a nice overview of how how skateboarding has evolved, and and that's that's what we're gonna talk about. So like I said, fifty is basically a plank of wood, roller skate wheels made by kids. Not much else to it. The fact it was roller skate wheels meant that they probably didn't go very fast.
The fact that it was just a plank of wood, meant that they probably didn't do much other than just go, trundle along. But it was a start, and, it was kinda to lay the foundation of what was to come. So by the time the nineteen sixties had come along, the deck had kind of changed shape to be a bit more standardized, maybe a little bit inspired by the shape of the surfboard, and became popular amongst people who wanted an activity when there was no surf.
The challenge however was that they were still based off of roller skate wheels, those wheels being made of steel or clay. They, were always going be a limiting factor because they were very poor when it came to creating friction with the ground, and therefore making the skateboards hard to do anything other than going in a straight line.
Same for the trucks. Again, trucks are kind of like the axles that hold the wheels to the board. They were more or less kind of, inspired by roller skate trucks and so not much innovation there. And the key thing here is that they were actually manufactured, so toy companies kind of saw that there was this emerging kind of craze as they would call back back then.
And, what you had was, an adoption of the kind of the the first kind of wave of kind of mass adoption of skateboarding. People, like, now had these, like, cool tools and would come up with, like, interesting ways of of doing stuff with them.
So, the tricks are very kind of gymnastic in nature. This is, Patty McGee. She is world world famous even today in the skateboarding community as being a pioneer, an early pioneer of the sport, as is evidenced by this life cover. Apparently, this is a trick that she made up on the spot for for the photographer.
Unfortunately, as you can see, the date on this is nineteen sixty five, and that would be the kind of the peak of the first skateboarding boom that year. So the the tricks were were mostly performed on on on flat ground. It was attempts to kind of institutionalize sort of the Skateboarding Association of America.
They ran national competitions, and so Paddy actually was the first women's national champion in the US. Again, manufacturer led design. And because the tech wasn't really developed, safety concerns started to emerge and that led to the bust by early nineteen ninety six. In fact, if you look at the cover of this magazine, you see the craze and menace of skateboards.
Like, I don't know. So R. I. P. So it would be another few years before, and these things kinda go in cyclical generations as this like skateboarding is characterized by this wave, cycle of boom and bust over over, you know, forty, fifty years.
So we're into the seventies now, and, straight away you can see it's a very different type of apparatus, to use a technical term. The deck has paint on it, so it's exciting for young people. It's more streamlined, probably because feedback has been gained from the types of tricks that people want to do and the equipment is put together in that manner.
The trucks have evolved a little bit. They're more flexible and more durable because now people understand the types of things, the demands that the equipment will be put through. And this is probably the biggest innovation in the history of skateboarding since it was first invented.
So it's like nineteen seventy two, so arguably about fifteen to twenty years after people started nailing skate wheels to plank of wood, somebody was like, well maybe we should change the wheels up. So they brought along somebody just had some uncle into making polyurethane for other stuff and he was like, oh I wonder if we made some wheels.
So this is like trial and error experiment which really goes, you know, is a core part of everything in skateboarding. I'll come back to that in a while. So the invention of polyurethane wheels meant that people could go faster because the and take riskier turns and innovate their tricks as a result because there was more friction created with the ground and they were less likely to slip and hurt themselves.
And then the second, this came hot on the heels, probably I think seventy four, precision engineered sealed ball bearings. Amazingly, up until this point ball bearings that actually are at the part of the wheel that go around the axle that make the wheel turn, they were exposed.
So dust and dirt and all sorts of crap would go in there and you would that would just slow down the board. And you can't really do much with a slow board. So somebody were like, well, maybe if we just covered up the bearings, things wouldn't, you know, last a bit longer.
So that's what they did. And those were the two primary innovations, along with of course the kicktail. The kicktail was added at the back of the board to allow skateboarders to be able to pivot and do faster turns that way. And arguably, modern skateboarding wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't for all these, but particularly the kicktail.
So this is a group of mostly young men. There's one woman there. Gender balance hasn't always been a great thing in the world of skateboarding, but it's getting better these days. These were a local group of kids. You may have seen a movie or documentary on these guys.
They were known as Z Boys. They lived in an area of California that was locally known as Dogtown, and they were sponsored by local skate shops. So they basically ran went around to competitions and they blew **** up because these were, young kids who were taking their surfing style to the skateboard now that the it had evolved to the point where it could support those types of those types of moves.
So the better wheels, bearings, kicktail means new moves. And tricks are widely seen as being explosive and bold in comparison to the more gymnastic style, acrobatic, slower, older style tricks that were on display at these competitions. So these guys developed a reputation for being kind of rebels, radicals, bad boys.
And they were really driven, like I said, their foundation in surfing, but arguably probably more of a driver was their disregard for for institutions. So they weren't fans of the competitions and they quickly broke away and decided to just be creative on their own steam and innovate in ways that nobody had ever done before.
Enter the backyard swimming pool. Now how do you get into people's backyard swimming pools? You wait for them to leave home, you jump over their fence, you drain their pool and you skate. That's what these kids did. Definitely breaking the law, but arguably, you know, what's that phrase, ask first beg or no, do beg for forgiveness later, what is it?
Somebody help me out here. Something like that. Yeah. Anyway. So the key thing with being creative in a new environment with the same tools they had on an older or a more kind of one dimensional environment was that, the innovation was physical within and of themselves.
It wasn't the skateboards doing the work. It was they themselves taking the risk, putting their bodies on the line, imagining, you know, lines in the geography that, previous generations of skateboarders would just never look at. And that's a theme that would continue to play out over subsequent generations.
So the seventies were really marked with a cultural shift from old to new. Skateboarders are now the innovators. They're the people who are informing the designers on the types of designs that they want. They're giving fast feedback on the decks that they're skateboarding on in the new environments that they're skating in and giving direct feedback to manufacturers and saying this isn't gonna work because of this or you need to improve that because of that.
Over time towards the end of the seventies, skateboarding became pretty visible in popular mainstream culture. This this is a spectacular clip. There's there's a scene that comes after this that I should have included, but I I I didn't I thought it'd be a distraction.
It's where Wonder Woman clotheslines two bad guys off the back of her skateboard. And so type but this type of kind of popular depiction of skateboarding in TV and media really led to this kind of resurgence around 'seventy two-'seventy eight and the development of skate parks across the United States.
And I'm talking mostly about the United States because that really is where a lot of the activity was happening. There was certainly stuff happening in Europe, but we didn't kind of have the the climate. We didn't have maybe the the risk taking outlook that certainly on the West Coast of the United States they would have had back then.
But because of the mass adoption, more accidents were happening, skate parks were being sued, and so this cycle started to come to an end again. There's no better way to kill off something that's cool and interesting than start to sue people. And, so RIP all over again.
1980s. Does not just get you really excited. Yeah. So can you see the difference now? Haven't seen the three previous examples of the fifties, sixties, and seventies skateboard. Much wider concave design. So the the wideness gives stability, and and people, are moving again from this from the flatland tricks into the bowls, and then they're emulating bowls in parks.
So this is where the development of the half pipe comes in, is a ramp that of looks like a U shape. This is where and so into the eighties, vert skateboarding or, you know, half pipe skateboarding became a discipline in and of its own right, and so the broader board supports that.
The concave edition is where the board kind of dips in the middle and comes out a little bit at the edges. It just gives more control again for turning and for being able to to grab the board. Move to Canadian plywood, longer tail, graphics and artwork, tail guard, and, truck guards.
I'm gonna have to move fast here because I'm wasting time. So it just has all this extra ***** that didn't exist in the seventies and probably could just charge you more for it, I don't know. But this was style of skateboard I first encountered and I thought it was the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Just like in the seventies, there was like this ******** group of of skaters pushing the boundary the boundaries. There was in the eighties, the Bones Brigade that was formed by one of those guys in the seventies who now was too old to skate and he was just kinda like the elder statesman of of skateboarding.
Out of this, these people are all still famous today, of particular note, Rodney Mullen, Tony Hawk. You've probably heard of Tony Hawk. You may have heard of Rodney Mullen. Arguably, two biggest innovators, in the sport. And, their their presence is is clearly felt in in the two disciplines, Wirt, I spoke about, and freestyle.
Very different types, of, tricks, different types of equipment, different, skill sets required. So in the freestyle you got a narrow deck, symmetrical tail and nose. It's complicated, so there's a kind of a barrier to entry in that you need to, just be single-minded and focused and practice a lot to be anywhere good on it.
The Vert is a broad deck, shorter nose, bigger tail, again complicated. And also you need access to to a ramp like I don't even think Ireland has one of these ramps. I'm sure there was plenty around the UK. In fact, somebody told me that there was a our production guy over here told told us that last week there was some some half pipes downstairs in the town hall.
So but what happened was that, people kinda combined these two disciplines but in in a more accessible environment of of street skating. So they took, they took the skateboard to the world a new realm and came up with ridiculous tricks. Like, look at this yo here.
Like, I don't know what don't even know what this is called, but he's having a good time. So the tricks were inspired by freestyle, but kind of moved into a street environment. More accessible invert and less time investment in freestyle. So the nineteen eighties could really be characterized that skateboarders are now the creative force.
They're the ones in control in every way. They're inventing new tricks. They're designing equipment. They're starting skateboard companies and apparel, and they're they're contributing to and creating a subculture across music, entertainment, and art that eventually would take over or spread around the world and not be limited to the United States.
But inevitably, we have another bust, and so we're getting into the nineties. Now in the nineties, probably arguably the biggest development in the nineties was the development of the standard skateboard deck form that we know today. This photograph is from I think nineteen ninety two or something like that.
And the the disciplines of Vert and Freestyle were hardest hit, so they kind of fell away first because we're kind of think of it like it's a recession in in in skateboarding. Manufacturers close, but people are still able to skate in the in the streets.
The deck becomes standardised and there's just this explosion of new tricks because it's kind of underground now and all people have are each other. They have their skateboard, they have themselves, and they have the crew that they skate with. They just spend all day every day because they're kids and they have nothing else to do inventing new tricks and sharing that on an Internet that was just starting to come alive.
That photograph I put up there is twenty three years old because it just seems still so modern to me, but it's actually it's twenty three years old. This is what was happening in Ireland at the time. I won't dwell on this too much, but at the time in nineteen ninety five in Ireland there was probably one hundred people skateboarding.
And somehow they still managed to get coverage in a globally distributed magazine. Coming into the two thousands now, this is where skateboards are kind of standardised on shape and the technology, and the real pushes and the innovation was on what people do with them and what people do with their bodies and how they defy physics.
And so, it's a guy called Jamie Thomas, notable for doing big tricks. We can see that the skateboard skateboard's influence is still spreading across entertainment and and popular culture. And, yeah, the emphasis is on bigger and bolder moves. So this this is a seventeen foot drop that he did and people lost their **** when they saw that.
Because nobody would ever think of doing that before. And that's really the point. Nobody would think of doing it. Anybody remember this? Right. Tony Hawk's skateboarding, PlayStation one, countless hours lost. And I actually I was still skateboarding this time. I was in my in my probably in my early twenties, and one skate park had opened up in Dublin finally by by people who were skaters and now they were adults and they could afford to make a business out of it.
And I remember seeing ten year olds skating at the time and they were doing stuff I wouldn't even attempt to do and they were telling me like, well I was able to do it on the Playstation, so I'd be like ****, woah, okay.
And then there's just this wave of bigger and bolder things like these, you remember these guys? They certainly did a lot to help mainstream the names, mainstream the idea that skateboarding is a crazy activity, and they probably push boundaries in their own right.
So I'm just gonna show you a series of this is called mega ramp. There's a bunch of mega ramps. This is the first one. It's a guy called Danny Way, doing some crazy thing, I don't know. Again, jumping out of helicopter. **** it, why not?
He's a millionaire. Like, you know, they're making money. He can he just he can afford to kinda come up with these things. But they're like, just make no mistake about it. Like, this is a dangerous trick. Right? So the twenty the two thousands were really characterised by forty years of refinement, have created this kind of core kind of, product and, and tool.
And so the innovation moved away from perfecting that anymore to the experience in general. Skateboarders now have access to affordable, highly refined product like no other generation before. They have access to an advanced interconnected ecosystem of manufacturers, designers, even like wider into wider kind of service providers like skate parks and whatnot.
And they have role models of people doing crazy ****. They're like, well, of course, why like, they can do it. Why don't I I try that. Right? So this is yeah. This is Great Wall of China. And it's mega ramp over the Great Wall of China.
Like, because **** it. Why not? Like, this is this is the type of of there's just something about innovation in in in in anything, in building a product or putting a team together or trying to solve a problem. The **** it, why not?
I think it's really special and I think the bigger companies get the harder it is for them to have those kind of moments. Because it's risky. Right? No real downturn. But this time, skateboarding has kind of just like had like mini little bumps along the road, but mostly is still in in a reasonably healthy shape.
So let's just go back to this and four minutes. Let's see how we do this. So quick timeline. So fifties, we got the the kid nail and roller skate wheels. Sixties, gymnastic style tricks. Seventies, we got the invention of urethane wheels and and precision engineered bearings and trucks.
We haven't really spoken much about trucks because could speak for an hour about how trucks are awesome, but I'm not gonna do that. This is the guy who invented the Ollie. His name isn't Ollie. Alan is his name. But anyway, like I said, probably was like who knows what skateboarders would probably just be rolling around from going from A to B if that hadn't been invented.
And really the next period of innovation is around refinement refinement of decks and tricks. And so I'm gonna whiz through this as fast as I can. So you'll see how the progression goes from very wide. Even the graphics, they're kind of like emblematic on this side, but then they start to get these two decks in eighty five there, these are freestyle decks.
And you can see how they're they're much skinnier and they're kind of more asymmetric between the nose and the tail. There's this weird experimentation with fishtails in eighty eight and eighty nine they were called. But here's where it gets really interesting. Nineteen ninety two, ninety four, ninety eight, two thousand, two thousand and nine, two thousand nineteen.
Like, it looks exactly the same. The graphics are different, made from the same wood, has the same shape, same same length more or less, give or take, depending on personal preference, and same width more or less, give or take, depending on personal preference.
So I just think that's that's interesting. So part two. I've got two minutes and forty seven seconds to get through. If if you if you're able to hang around for a few minutes, that would be really cool. So this is a real thing that somebody spent money making.
They have a website, you can hire this to come to your conference next year maybe Brian. What do think? So these are skateboards that didn't quite make it. Right? So and I'm not it's really important that I'm not giving these innovators a hard time.
It's just that I would kinda go like, why? But they clearly see something that that I don't see. This is called a Stair Rover. This had a Kickstarter campaign. Its only goal seems to be to enable you to go downstairs. That's that's it. That's it. Yeah.
This is the motor the MotoBoard from nineteen seventy eight. Petrol powered two stroke engine. It's a lawnmower engine on the back of a skateboard from nineteen seventy eight. Six hundred and fifty big ones. Yeah. That didn't really go anywhere, but you can't say that that wasn't visionary because clearly with developments in technology and and battery technology, there is some market for the type of skateboards that get you from eight to b with very little effort other than pushing it.
You see it even has a little, what do you call it, control unit there to control the speed. But that didn't really take off. Anybody ever have one of these? One of these? Maybe the snakeboard. I think these ones were popular in these here parts.
Again these are all innovations on a vertical. They're trying to solve a singular problem that they perceive exists or is a limiting factor in the modern skateboard and so they try to innovate that way. Again none of these were major, you didn't see major traction, didn't create the kind of impact that the modern skateboard did, and there's loads of these.
I don't know what that one's about. This was my favourite, oh my god I remember seeing this when this came out. This was actually on had it on anybody from Ireland here? Four or five people, right? So there's a thing in Ireland, a phenomenon called the late late toy show.
Every Christmas, a talk show that's been running for forty or fifty years dedicates its time just to toys. And one Christmas in nineteen ninety eight or nineteen ninety nineteen eighty eight or eighty nine, this yoke was on it. Right? And they had kids skating around the studio and this, and my mind was blown thinking like this is amazing, this is cool.
But obviously with my adult perspective and by the time you look back, know what the ****? This is my favourite bit. Look at this. Check out this. Sorry for the poor quality. A board with wings? The first thing that comes to mind obviously is a gimmick.
But that's not the case and if you ask the guys who've been involved in this development and manufacture you'll find that they are taking it all very seriously. Any product developers in the house? Any product marketers? Any founders of start ups? Could you imagine putting that **** in your homepage?
And expecting people to buy it? Oh my god. Anyway, that didn't last of course. So I now have two red screens in front of me, we're officially up on time, so I'll do my best fly through the rest of this. Observations. What can we learn, and apply maybe to our own day to day?
And so some of these are kind of quite they're kind of rhetorical questions. I don't know if I have the answers to them. I'm also probably gonna unpick my own argument in this, so just bear with me on that. So is innovating on a use case worth it?
And, I actually tried one of these, and the use case for this particular board is to appeal to snowboarders in the summertime so they can go downhill and have that, experience of rocking back to forth and kind of a carving, presumably on a main road.
I don't know. Yeah, they're massive big things and I can't really speak to a success, but again, it's probably somebody trying to scratch their own itch, but like what if if you're just the only one that has that itch? And we I think we can we can we've maybe been through that process when it comes to putting our own products together or or or creating experiences for our users.
Being too early is still early. Right? So, like I said, these are the modern boost boosted? Boosted boards? Boost boards? They also have a line of scooters now as well because they've kinda taken the lessons from it. So, I mean, that's cool. So yeah, I mean you can be a visionary, but you're just born in the wrong generation.
Tough ****. Don't really know it, Don't know what to do with that. Global movements can be started with very little effort. Like, it takes zero effort to be that kid to hammer to tear apart your roller skates and hammer it to to a plank of wood and and give it a go.
But global movements often require kind of ******** group of radicals or innovators to push things forward. You can see this in source communities. It's really a great example of that. Where people are dissatisfied with the status quo and they're like ****, I'm just going to do my own thing over here.
And then other people like oh yeah, I'm into that and the next thing you know you've got a community of people building the type of future that you think should exist. I think you'd also say that's what start ups are about as well.
So this is this is Skye Brown. She's ten years old. She's a professional skateboarder. And, like, I couldn't I couldn't imagine being able to do that type of thing when I was even skateboarding on a regular basis as a fairly healthy young man.
So I think I think that the lesson here is that when the world is constrained by absolute, so like, you know, gravity, physics, the tools will only get you far and it's up to the individual to innovate and push themselves. I think that's been kind of a theme I've been working on through this now that I'm saying this stuff actually out loud and not just in my hotel room jamming slides together.
Another way of thinking about that, and so it's the same point but illustrated slightly different. This is Tony Hawk when he's thirteen. And this is a very distinctive part of, I don't know, LA or somewhere in California. And the trick he's doing here, he's he's actually if you can see just to his his rear, there's a kind of a lip that he's he's come flying off, and he's he's holding onto the side of the board.
And that was you know, it's a kind of an iconic photograph, and it was it was considered, wow. A thirteen year old is doing that. And so this is his son on the same pipe thirty four years later. And you can see like this this kid just came along and he's like, what if I was to go up on that pipe just completely outside the box thinking?
And and my my feeling is that if if it wasn't for the skateboard being the modern skateboard being largely perfected, the innovator, the skateboarder, wouldn't have the headspace to creatively think of a line like that and would probably just try to do the same thing that everybody else has done in that ditch.
Again, Tony Hawk features kind of widely here. This is actually him every time. He's some kind of magician. You know, I'm trying to illustrate a point that evolution thrives on fast feedback loops and that's what skateboarding is all about. Both as an individual skateboarder, your feedback loop is every time you try to do a trick and you modify slightly.
It's basically live iteration. You could call it like writing code a lot in a live production environment. That's kind of what it is like. And so that's one aspect of feedback loop in your personal development as a skateboarder, but then because the people who are really pushing the boundaries are designed they own these companies now, they're designing the skateboards.
They can take that feedback and very quickly work it in. I think that's really why the modern skateboard is mostly a perfected product. And I may be repeating myself here, but the product is only a tool and value is created when that balance is struck between a product being as good as it can be at the time and the impact it can have in the right hands.
So I'm not gonna labor that point too much. Nearly done. Got some questions. Oh, okay. Is an actual perfectionist just a failure to innovate? I don't know. Maybe this whole talk has been pointless. Right? But, you know, I think I think there's something in there for for for when you're developing your own your own products, your own experiences.
If you think it's it's good enough and your customers are telling you it's good enough, and is it really? And so I think maybe the question I'm asking is here, shouldn't you always be questioning your own assumptions on these things? If you do a search for skateboard reissue, every single skateboard company has reissued decks from the eighties.
There's this wave of nostalgia that has been, passing through, the current skateboard generation. And so I wonder, like, does nostalgia mean that, you know, demand for something new, but the the leadership isn't there to really push it forward? I don't know the answer to that.
And can the idea of something new and radical be so abstract or removed that we're closed minded to any attempt at innovation? Like, I just spent a few minutes just cutting through people's attempt at innovating on the skateboard and me wondering why the **** would you do that?
I clearly don't understand their particular use case. And so am I close minded, narrow minded, close off to the possibility that they may be onto something because of that? And do we do that in our day to day when it comes to building products and experiences?
Asking the real questions. Probably not. Okay. So very quickly, legacy. It's a project called Skateistan, this Aussie skateboarder. Yeah. Know. We're wrapping it up anyway. He he, wanted to bring skateboarding to, war torn parts of the world. So this is a cabal, and this is the type of impact that that he's been trying to give young people.
Building skate parks, bringing in decks, mentoring and tutoring, give them something to focus on that isn't like the decimation of their culture and their infrastructure around them and devastating loss of life on top of that. Pardon me? And girls can do it. And of course girls can do Right. Actually they a big focus on it.
It's like they strive for a fiftyfifty balance on it. So maybe I think that's where the legacy part fits in, is that that's where real innovation is, is that skateboarding as a movement to help people maybe not as privileged as those in the eighties with access to vert ramps, help those people live somewhat better lives if that's even possible.
Little footnote, I have one more slide and then we're done. Little footnote, skateboarding is now a recognized sport of the Olympics. So yay. And so this is my last slide and my closing, this is me from when I actually could still skateboard. Yeah, that's kind of like if I was to sum it all up, it's not really about the skateboard, it's what it allows you to do and I would say it's the same for products, for software, for tooling, for workflows.
What does it enable you to do? What does automation enable you to do? Whether it's abstraction or frameworks or however you build or test or distribute your products, what does it enable you to do? It's still just a tool. And arguably what does that product enable your customers to do as well?
So that's me. If you want to follow me on Twitter, Eamon Leonard. I have a this is my start up, if anybody wants to check that out. We're looking for trial customers. But thanks so much for listening and for going over a little bit.
I really appreciate it. Thanks.