I had a front-row seat at RIM for one of the great botched platform transitions in tech. The strategy was right. Almost everything else wasn't.
My first real, dedicated UI/UX job was at RIM, Research In Motion, BlackBerry, in Waterloo, in 2010. I was young, it was a big name, and I walked into what I slowly realized was one of the most instructive disasters I'd ever witness up close. Not a loud disaster. A quiet, polite, Canadian one, with very smart people in the room, which somehow made it worse.
Let me set the stage, because the strategy part is genuinely worth defending. RIM saw the iPhone coming for them. They knew BlackBerry's aging OS couldn't go where touch computing was going. So they went out and acquired QNX: a real-time operating system, microkernel architecture, the kind of bulletproof software that runs in cars and medical devices, to be the foundation of their next generation, starting with a tablet: the PlayBook.
I want to be clear: that was a smart move. Arguably a brilliant one. QNX was a serious piece of technology, and building the future on top of it instead of dragging the old BlackBerry OS into the touch era was exactly the right instinct. On paper, in 2010, you could squint and see a version of events where RIM pulls off the transition.
That's not what happened. What happened is a case study in how a company can get the strategy completely right and still lose: because strategy is maybe 20% of it, and execution and culture are the other 80%.
The execution problem was, fundamentally, time. It took too long. Everything took too long. The QNX integration dragged; the company ended up cutting thousands of staff before the new software was even ready. In a market moving as fast as touch computing was in 2010–2011, "too long" isn't a delay, it's a death sentence. Every month the PlayBook slipped, the iPad got further ahead and the window got narrower.
The culture problem was subtler and, to me, more interesting: because it's the part that's actually about design, and it's the part I think about most now as someone who cares about how design organizations work.
RIM understood, correctly, that they needed world-class consumer UX talent. BlackBerry had been built for enterprise, for IT departments and email and the physical keyboard, and the new world needed a different kind of design mind entirely. So they went and hired one: a genuine star, a design leader with a pedigree from one of the great UI shops of the era, the kind of hire that signals you're serious.
[DRAFT NOTE, VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: the leader I'm picturing is most likely Don Lindsay, who joined RIM as VP of User Experience around 2009–2010 and led the BB10 UI. I had remembered a Palm/webOS lineage, but the public record lists his background as Apple then Microsoft. Confirm the name AND the pedigree before naming anyone in print.]
And then. This is the detail that has stuck with me for fifteen years. That person never actually moved to Waterloo. They ran it from Silicon Valley.
Think about what that means. You have a company headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, with a deeply entrenched engineering-first, enterprise-first culture, and you are trying to fundamentally transform it into a consumer design culture. And the person you've hired to lead that transformation is doing it remotely, from two thousand miles away, in a different country, inside a different design ecosystem entirely. This was years before remote work was normal or well-tooled. You cannot transplant a culture you are not physically standing inside of. Design culture especially is contagious by proximity: it spreads through people looking over each other's shoulders, through hallway arguments, through being in the room. Running it long-distance was, I think, a quiet catastrophe, and I watched its effects ripple through the studio daily.
But the moment I'll never forget, the moment the whole thing crystallized, was small and almost comic.
I was in the design studio room. One of the designers had, on his own, just gone out and bought an iPad. The first one. The actual v1, the one that had just come out. He brought it in, set it on the desk, and we all gathered around and started using it.
And you could feel it happen in the room. You could watch, in real time, the people who were still drinking the Kool-Aid: still telling themselves the PlayBook was going to land, that the delays were fine, that the strategy would carry them: realize, holding this finished, shipping, genuinely beautiful object in their hands, that it was over. Not "we have a tough competitor" over. "We are bringing a thing that isn't done to a fight against a thing that is already in stores, and we are months and months away" over. The iPad wasn't a prototype. It wasn't a roadmap. It was real, it was for sale, and it was great. Our thing was still half-built and slipping.
It was both hilarious and genuinely sad. Sad because there were so many smart, committed people in that building who deserved a better outcome than the one the org's choices were marching them toward. Hilarious because there is something darkly funny about the exact instant a collective denial breaks, about watching a roomful of people quietly do the same math at the same moment, over a gadget someone bought at the mall.
The PlayBook shipped in April 2011, about a year after the iPad. You know how that went.
Here's what I took from it, and why I'd tell this story to a room of students. First: strategy is the easy 20%. Anyone can see that QNX was smart. Almost nobody executes the other 80%: the timing, the org design, the culture, the thousand unglamorous decisions about who sits where and who's in the room. Second: design culture is a physical, proximate, contagious thing, and you cannot lead a cultural transformation by remote control. Third, and most personal: this was the job that taught me UX isn't really about screens. It's about organizations. The screens are downstream of whether the company can actually function as a design culture. RIM couldn't, fast enough, and no amount of talent at the top fixed it from a distance.
I learned more about user experience from watching RIM get it wrong than I would have from almost any company getting it right.
[DRAFT NOTE: reconcile the iPad scene against your own timeline: the v1 iPad shipped April 2010; if your gig started ~July 2010 the device was already on sale, so this reads as your first hands-on, not pre-release. Keep your own UI work on the PlayBook out of NDA territory; this is your observed experience + public history.]