How to Make Magic

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For my first project leading the product studio and consulting practice at Every, I designed and built the website for Sparkle, our AI-powered file organizer. I built a V1 that explained what Sparkle was and how it worked: It organizes all of the files in your Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders—both existing and new ones—into a personalized system. The site looked clean and told the story well with words and images, but it wasn’t that unique compared to any other tech product.

When I shared it with the team, I got some great feedback. But on a call with Every CEO Dan Shipper to discuss the next version, he shared something with me that forced me to rethink the design from the top to the bottom: “Make it magical.”

Making something “magical” is different from making it “thoughtful” or “high quality.” Thoughtfulness and quality are the results of a process—magic is…magic. It’s the result of something that you evoke from deep within yourself—something that can be felt and therefore pursued, but can’t be defined or reduced to rules.

At Clyde, the insurance tech company I started and ran for seven years before joining Every, I pushed the team hard to execute, whether it be competing against our better-funded competitor or strategically growing our product offerings to gain market share. But in this moment, on this call with Dan, I realized that I had never made magic. Nor did I push my team to do so. I wanted high-quality results, fast, and my expectation is that great people can do this. And they did! We launched thousands of brands, many of which were major household names, and built a robust tool that changed the embedded insurance market in the U.S. Our product worked extremely well and our execution was strong, but it didn’t feel magical. I learned something important that day: Sometimes great execution isn’t good enough.