Designing Source by Webflow

0:00Janne Parri: Okay, Kyle. So, you have been working on the Source and I think that people have this feeling that it is especially for marketers. So, is that so? And would you like to correct that assumption in any way?

0:14Kyle Lambert: Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been working on Source you know since the beginning you know we started early spring on this you know sprint and this was like us reimagining what Webflow is today for the future and you know a big part of what Webflow is today is for builders and one of the things that's challenging is telling a story about Source and so we just came out of Webflow Conf and you have a marketing moment to tell the story about Source and one of the things we've been seeing in the industry is there's been this big shift towards building with AI and using you know back to the source or however you want to call it.

0:53Kyle Lambert: It's like people are getting comfortable with code again and that has worked really well for builders. What we've seen is there's a really large gap for marketing teams and so we've seen these you know teams build these stacks and actually boomerang and come back to Webflow after building with them. Not everybody, but there's a lot of teams struggling with, hey, this works great for engineers and developers and designers, but doesn't work great for handoff for those people taking a marketing site and optimizing it and iterating it from the day-to-day.

1:27Kyle Lambert: So when you think about like Webflow Conf what the story we were really trying to nail there was hey Source is a way to build agentically for marketing teams and you know really fill that pain point for marketers and show them the way of the future for them and you know the platform they're going to be buying. Now part of that is when you think about like marketing teams a huge part of the marketing team is the builder developer persona. They are building the product day-to-day. They are in and out of it.

1:59Kyle Lambert: And so when we think about Source, it's like absolutely for them. Like we can't build a platform that is just like for marketers. It's a platform that needs to be, you know, from starting from scratch. I can build a design system in this thing. I can enjoy working. I can build something very powerful. I can start building views that are perfect for my marketing team to use. And so you know when we think about you know marketing teams a lot of times like the backbone of that is those developers and designers building the initial site but when we look at the products today in the market they are typically you know Cursor, Claude Code they're serving that one persona they aren't serving the whole marketing stack.

2:42Kyle Lambert: And so when you think about it, one of the things that maybe didn't land is like yes, it is for designers and developers and builders, but when they're selling services and selling a platform, they also want to sell, you know, a great experience after they're done the initial build. And we really felt that, you know, that is where the gap is in the market right now. And so we really focused a lot of the actual narrative on Webflow Conf around that persona. We showed little glimpses of things for that persona, but the story was really resonating with that persona.

3:17Kyle Lambert: The story was really focused on that, but as we're building it, you know, we can't leave behind the developer persona or the developers and designers that we've built our product around. And so, you know, as we're developing Source, we're really taking those things into consideration. What does designing in the future look like? Does it look the same as Claude Code does today? Hey, does it look the same as Webflow? What's the mashup? And so, we're really taking, you know, a fine-tuned comb to that and asking ourselves, is this for the future?

3:50Kyle Lambert: Is this is this product we're building a product for now or is it a product for 2 years ago, 3 years ago? And that really changes how we design. And so I think you know how we build the product like I think some people may be like whoa that maybe isn't what exactly what I was asking for but we're trying to design for where the industry is moving not necessarily where we've been the last 10 years and so we're trying to take a lot of what we've learned over the last 10 years really make a great platform for builders for marketers and everyone to contribute and build for the web and so that's just been changing so much and so I think It's going to continue to evolve.

4:31Kyle Lambert: But that's a long way of saying it is absolutely not just for marketers. Like we have full individual teams of designers, engineers, and product managers just focusing on those like core principles, those core features, those core flows for people who are going to you know be building in this 40 hours a week.

4:53Janne Parri: That's beautiful. There was so much so much there. But just to kind of reflect on the Webflow Conf experience, I believe that everybody, every builder understands that marketing is an important thing and that is cool. There is obviously this shift with Webflow Conf keynote has been more and more about the marketers and this year the builder keynote was great and it was a new new thing but the community kind of has to like do the shift and maybe that shift is harder to make than it should be but I believe the Source if you guys can pull it off that's a great idea.

5:32Janne Parri: I'm not a marketer, but I can just imagine how messed up every like asset and marketing stack is right now with the all of the AIs and so on. So, I believe that will be a totally cool product once we get our hands on it.

5:48Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I mean it's all what people are building. It's just wild. It's so cool, you know, to be a technologist, to be a designer, developer in this era, you know, it can be extremely stressful. But what people are kind of putting together is amazing and seeing those outcomes is great. But there is like, you know, there is a sense of like I'm just trying to integrate all these like systems into one. And there's just like a lot, you know, it's funny is like a lot of what Webflow was serving initially with the build was just bringing all those pieces under one hood, you know, and you know, there's a lot of teams that are going outside of Webflow and kind of doing the same thing all over again.

6:28Kyle Lambert: And so it's like building really powerful tools, you know, with different stacks like headless CMSs and, you know, Astros, Next.js and all these marketing things that you still have to stitch them together. And there is a pain point to that. And there's like a big like procurement point when you're selling services like you know as a as a freelancer you know especially if you're trying to sell to bigger and bigger clients they might be like a little hesitant to like say like to achieve your goals you're going to have to buy these like five or six things on top of my services.

7:00Kyle Lambert: And so I think that's where like you know we're really trying to think of like how do we unlock that create a ton of flexibility for folks to use what they want to use. you know, with Source, we're building in a very modular way. So, it's like, okay, if you want to build with a Webflow CMS, you can. If you want to build with another one, that's okay, too. And so, I think, you know, the hypothesis is like there's not going to be a right one-size-fits-all for every team. And I think that's what we're what we're learning internally at Webflow is like how do we meet the customers and the designers and developers marketers where they are and where they're you know where they are in the process and what they need to achieve and can we can we deliver something to them that meets them and you know maybe they do start off you know when you look at these big sites it's like you know a large enterprise site could be hosted on WordPress could be you know have part of it like it's.com over here like a subsite o and like on another platform and so I think that's one of the things we've learned over the years is like how do we you know meet people where they are and I think Source is going to be a really good mechanism to start you know being valuable to people even if it's not they're not using it for 100% of you know their build.

8:20Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I'm right now tipping my toe into the static sites and Astro builds and the more I get into it, I kind of like miss all the things that Webflow takes care for me.

8:34Kyle Lambert: Yeah. What are those what are those things? I'm like I'm very curious as someone building

8:39Janne Parri: Like everything like you mentioned there are like at least like five things that I have to like combine like obviously there's like hosting that probably covers CDN CMS do I even need a CMS and then I'll have to do some sort of form thingy in there. Every site basically has a form and so on and so forth. So there are so many like things that you are right now responsible with just the website not even talking about all the marketing tools and so on.

9:13Janne Parri: So there is a lot to stitch together and also one thing that I'm like especially curious about is obviously the visual editing for the static site. Let's not go there yet. Let's let's put that in the into the pocket because we are all already diving deep. We have to do little little intros before that. So you are now listening to Webflow and Friends podcast. My name is Janne Parri and my guest today is Kyle Lambert.

9:43Janne Parri: Kyle is a senior staff product designer at Webflow. He joined the Mothership in 2019. He has led the designs of things like Webflow's developer platform and the Webflow app launch. lately he's been working on the Source as mentioned and yes we're going to talk a lot about Source and what it brings but first I want to know a little bit more about the person designing it and let's start by getting everyone or at least me on the same page so what does a senior staff product designer actually do and how did you end up in that role

10:22Kyle Lambert: Yeah so I guess like now I'm a product designer you know by trade at Webflow and we have you know a number of product our product design team at Webflow is pretty big and so product designers I don't know if you're not familiar we're the ones kind of designing and building the product you're using behind the scenes so we're working like really closely with our product managers to you know define they're in charge of like what we build and prioritizing when we build it you know does this meet a customer need and does it meet like a business need and so we're collaborating really closely with them.

10:58Kyle Lambert: The same with engineering, you know, it's really interesting this world we're in right now where a lot of roles are collapsing quite a bit. And so there's like, you know, a fuzziness happening. And so as a product designer, I'm responsible for you building out coded prototypes and even like features and bug fixes in the product with AI. And I'm in FigJam like, you know, mapping out opportunities and diagrams for, you know, our product managers and tech leads and all of that.

11:29Kyle Lambert: And I'm also like talking to customers like a ton. And so really there's a lot of customer research and having your pulse on, you know, what the community thinks, what marketing teams are running into, what issues they're having. But yeah, I've been I've been in product design for a while now. I started my career as a web design, like as a branding designer. and I was like the new kid when the iPhone came out at a marketing agency and they were like, "Hey, you're the new kid. We can sell websites now. Go figure out how to do that." And so I built a lot of WordPress sites in my day and like essentially, you know, started my career as more of like a web designer, front-end developer kind of persona.

12:09Kyle Lambert: And then I realized I really enjoyed the product design side of things and building software. And so I started getting more and more, you know, rotations in that. And so that's when I started like pivoting towards that area. And, you know, I landed at Webflow 7 years ago as a senior designer. And, you know, now I'm a senior staff. And, you know, day-to-day I'm still designing. It's just the scope of work looks a little bit different for senior staff designer. So, I'm spending quite a bit more time. I'm popping around from different teams to teams designing like strategy and kind of maybe setting some boundaries and guardrails on what we're doing, but still designing a lot of features as well.

12:47Kyle Lambert: And so I think like as you as you level up in your career and you know get promotions or whatnot, typically if you're staying in the individual contributor route, it's just a lot more about scope of work that changes. And so still designing every day all day, but it's just what you're designing for and the scope of what you're designing for looks quite a bit different.

13:09Janne Parri: Interesting. Interesting. And obviously Source is one of kind of your projects. Is there something else, something interesting or if you if you cannot like name anything, you can just say that yeah, there are other things too, but is there something you could you could tell us like besides Source? Besides

13:28Kyle Lambert: Source, oh man, I think, you know, one of the things I write a lot, so I think I am I'm a dad, so I have like hobbies outside of work that I want to do, like, you know, skiing, biking, hanging out, and I also raise my kid. And so my like actual like side projects. I really love side projects that are more like I can do in a burst of time. I have like an hour or two and I want to produce something. And so, you know, a lot of my stuff is like I'm going to build like a little app here like really quick or I'm going to write an article.

14:01Kyle Lambert: And so, a lot of my like side hustle kind of things like are just like in short windows like what can I produce? How can I do it really quick and get an idea out there? And so, that's usually where it manifests. My recent thing that I like built that I love is I use Loom every day. Have you used Loom? you watch Loom all day and especially you work for a large organization and you're just watching a ton of Looms and so I built like just a Chrome extension to like long press on Loom to like fast forward like scrub like you know how YouTube has that like if you long press on YouTube video Yeah.

14:41Kyle Lambert: With 2x speed. So I built something like that for Loom so I could just watch videos really fast and scrub through the content I didn't care about and just get to the meat of things. So that's niche, but I use that every day and I love that. Oh

14:56Janne Parri: Yeah, totally. Totally. And it's kind of weird that it is not already there like in Loom,

15:02Kyle Lambert: That's like what's so cool about like this like this like AI era that we're in is you can just build it. I think that was my thing. I like had asked the Loom team and like we were one of the biggest customers on Loom, Webflow was for a long time and it was just like can you just build this? And there was always like silence. I'm sure like you all can relate to that being like web build this usually like

15:26Janne Parri: But there was huge but what was that at Webflow Conf there was that paper cut room with all the little fixes and new new stuff I didn't take part in it in a big way but I thought that's like a cool way for everybody back there in Boston and online so that was something

15:47Kyle Lambert: We I mean we published a blog post about what we launched from it and it was pretty significant and it was like you know one of the shifts we've seen internally which has been really cool in this AI era it's like typically when you're working on a really complex product like Webflow like it is it is very complex and building these features and things like take time and like you know for a long time it's just been handwritten code and so like you have an engineering team and you know product designer and PM like building out like a feature and there they you launch a feature and there's so much more you want to do with it but you sometimes you just got to move on to what's next and there's all these like little things that you want to improve along the way that sometimes just get cut.

16:35Kyle Lambert: What's been fun in this AI era is like now it's like as a designer I don't need to ask an engineer can you build this I just go and do it and so we have like you know systems in Webflow where it's like okay I can just like send a prompt to Slack to build a paper cut now or fix one of those paper cuts and so a lot of those like fixes that we got shipped and improvements like were coming from PMs were coming from designers were coming from engineers, but it's kind of like the whole team swarming on this thing now.

17:09Kyle Lambert: It's really enabled us to move quickly and we've seen just a ton in those little paper cuts. They're often sometimes they're much bigger. Like I had one the other day. I was like, I want to do this and I realized, oh, this is actually like this is a big challenge. This isn't going to be like a small little fix that I can do in a do in a day. But yeah, it's really it's really enabled like a whole new kind of workflow for us and it's been fun just shipping things out. I think I have like a fun little new feature that I've been wanting in Webflow for years and I just built it last week.

17:41Kyle Lambert: So it should be coming out soon but I'll be excited about that one. I won't tell you what it is audience

17:47Janne Parri: Just teasing. Yeah. Yeah. We'll we'll have to just wait. But kind of relating that I the audience obviously wants to know that feature but they want to hear about Source. But before that I kind of want to hear your take on this designing for developers like I would imagine a sense you are doing like this developer platform that must be a challenging in itself. So how do you do it? You mentioned that you talk a lot with clients but is there is there some sort of magic that you have realized when you have been designing for developers?

18:27Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I think just saturating yourself with the content that is around the industry and smart people is like what you have to do. It's and I would say the same thing probably for any product but I think for Webflow you know one of the things I've done you know for a long time is just like build Webflow sites you know I'll build them myself I'm a product designer but I still build like silly internal websites and to kind of come up against like the boundaries of what you're running up against.

18:58Kyle Lambert: You know for the developer platform it's a little different. It's like I'm technical by nature, but I've had to become like really technical. Yeah. And using like, you know, over the last, you know, years, it's like launching the app, you know, Webflow apps and things like that. It's like, okay, well, I've had to like learn how to build, you know, code like not just like front-end apps, but like full on like, okay, like get used to like CLI and working in the terminal and using all these other like tools that like hadn't been using like really in my day-to-day at Webflow. And so, I think like really just trying to get in the mindset of a developer is one of the big things.

19:39Kyle Lambert: And really, as a designer, you're constantly like asking yourself, how can this how can this be better? How can how can I improve this? How can I simplify this? How can I make shorten up the time that it's going to take from you to get to point A to point B and make it more enjoyable along the way? And I think to do that with whatever tool you're working on, you just really have to immerse yourself in the problems and the context of that tool. And sometimes it can be like a little bit out of your comfort zone. And it definitely was like developer platform like you know I was getting more out of my comfort zone before AI because I was working on developer platform before like you know ChatGPT and all those things and so doing that it's like you're just on calls with developers and reading developer documentation and trying to understand like okay what do you really care about?

20:29Kyle Lambert: But I think that's the you know where you just need to be is just like saturate yourself in the product and care deeply and not just I think we you know we talk about using our own product. It's a term I hate dogfooding. I've heard some other good ones. It's like drinking your own champagne is the one I more prefer. But yeah, it's really hard to build a really good product if you don't care about that product and you don't use it and you can't put yourself either as a customer number one like I'm not the end customer.

21:04Kyle Lambert: Like I can empathize and I can, you know, know what it's like to build, you know, in Webflow, but I'm like I have to like really put on my like research hat when it comes to like, hey, I'm like someone building for a client and handing this site over to a client. what do they care about? What do they need? That's a much harder thing to reproduce in like using software. And so that's when like you really have to get into like listening to your customers who you trust, doing a lot of research and leaning on them to help you guide you in your decision-making. Oh

21:37Janne Parri: Yeah, totally. It's one thing to empathize and think what would a hairdresser think about that compared to backend developer or something like that. there's a high chance that you have no idea what they are like doing and so on. But I'm curious like is that a kind of like musth have if someone wants to work as a designer in a tech company or a development platform like Webflow. What do you think?

22:05Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I mean one of the traits in designers as a whole, I think especially product designer is there's a level of empathy required to be good at your job and it's like especially if you aren't that like person doing it. If you take any other software, you know, I designed in the past for like chat software, not AI chat, but like sales customer support like software. And it was like one of the things like we had to do is everybody in the company at that time, you know, it was a little chat tool, little widget that sits on your site.

22:41Kyle Lambert: Every single person at our company had to work a customer support rotation once a month. And so you're answering chats like you're using the product. And so I think whatever it is, you have to develop some kind of sense of empathy to deliver something of value. It's really hard not like to build great products when you don't care about the people you're building for and like care about the problems that they care about and that are running into you. And I think we've noticed this at Webflow is like our team is just stacked with people who really care about who they're designing for and who they're building for.

23:19Kyle Lambert: And it's like I think we've noticed that as like the more care that goes into it, the better outcomes we see from like an experience perspective, a business perspective. It's just like we're building a better product. And so I think that's like that's like a big piece of it is empathy is like such a core skill to work on and you can get at that through a number of ways. But I think it's also like you need to realize where empathy starts and ends because I can empathize all day with someone's experience, but I can never put myself 100% in their shoes.

23:51Kyle Lambert: And so I need to realize like have some kind of humbleness to be like I'm not I may not be completely right about this and I need to get the answers to that are missing from like my knowledge gap or where I can put myself in to it's like yeah I'm sure about like these one things but like where do I really really need to lean on customers and I think it's like you need to lean on customers 100% of the time you know with outcomes but there's a lot like little decisions you can make, you know, as a designer day in and day out where you're just like, I don't need to ask someone like if this is good or not.

24:28Kyle Lambert: Like, oh, there's like form errors. Like, yeah, this needs to be clear like when something errors like, yeah. So,

24:34Janne Parri: And nowadays there's this like shortcut. You can just ask AI like, hey, hey, AI, what if you were this kind of person, what would you think? And it feels like you get the answers, but I have a sense that one should not totally trust that. That's that might be a starting point, but it isn't the same thing as asking from actual clients, actual human beings doing doing the thing.

24:58Kyle Lambert: Yeah. I mean, you can do this like I think it's like interesting like AI is really good at like taking transcripts and putting outcomes. It's like reading artifacts. One thing that it's not good at is just like understanding emotion and nuance. like hearing like really like you know you think about like psychology and like on these customers calls and anytime you do research it's like there are things people say with their words but it's like if you hear the tone of their voice you know their facial expressions how they're acting there's a lot that is being said without just words and so I think that's like one of the things as you know designers engineers product managers anybody building for anyone you know even yeah designers building for marketing teams and pitching their ideas you like have to like pick up on like what people are, you know, putting out.

25:49Kyle Lambert: It's like, okay, like I'm in a customer conversation and trying to pitch like, hey, I want to build you a website, like what is resonating with them and like, you know, understanding that in a moment or reflecting on it. It's like, hey, like we had this conversation. I noticed like you're getting like a little uneasy about this one thing. Can I follow up with that? It's like I don't know that AI is there. And so there's quite a bit of like human interaction that we just like can't rely on AI to solve for us.

26:17Janne Parri: Totally. Totally. Okay, let's get back to the Source. I'll empathize with you since I'm about to dig every ounce of information out of you.

26:26Kyle Lambert: I love it.

26:28Janne Parri: So yeah, there's this big thing called malleable software and you kind of touched that at the beginning like how do we have a software that fits every user and maybe looks looks a bit different for every user. How on earth do you design something like that?

26:47Kyle Lambert: It's a much different design problem. And yeah, essentially what you're doing is you're setting up systems. And so we are designing like this harness for how our views will be created. And so it's like when we're building Source, it's like there's going to be first party views, right, that are just like static deterministic. This is what this looks like. You can think about like your CMS might be one of that. Like okay, I open the CMS and Source and it looks like this. But also, when I prompt something and say, "Hey, I want to update a CMS item for this one page, and you know, maybe I want to look at it." What we're thinking about is like, well, I shouldn't have to open up the CMS tab to do that.

27:28Kyle Lambert: I should have a view that populates with exactly what I'm asking for. And that view could be like, you know, maybe I have data for a bunch of events that I'm doing within a CMS and I want to prompt like, hey, I want to see a map for this. So I can click through the map of my events and like open and edit things directly from there. And then like it opens up like a CMS item. That's a way different thing than like just being like here's here's the CMS like structure like deterministic way of doing it.

28:01Kyle Lambert: And so when we think about it, it's like a lot more about, and this is where like a lot of product design is going, is like how do I set up the rules and systems for the output to do something in a non-deterministic way that's going to look right. And that's like a challenge. And you know, I think a lot of teams who are starting to do this are just figuring out as we're going. This is a very new way of working. The malleable software, I think that is where the world is going. And I think because it's just so powerful and it's really powerful for when I think about for the builders and you know developers designers who were talking about earlier in Source is like I don't know if Source is built for me.

28:44Kyle Lambert: It's like well this is an example of why it's for you because you know how to build systems. You know how to prompt very well. You know how to use these tools and you know how to like build things that your customers may want. So you could all of a sudden instead of relying on Webflow to like build the UI for you, you could say, "Hey, I want this kind of experience for my customer and then I can like save that view and share it with them." So they can have it in their Source, however they're work, like their Source app, and they can like click on it and just have a way of working that like, you know, maybe they could have done that the same thing, but like also it's just like reusable.

29:21Kyle Lambert: It's like, hey, this is a really cool app experience that I built for marketers to do this one niche task in this industry. And I think that's where it's like, you know, just becomes so powerful because like Webflow, we can build a lot of systems that are great, but you all are serving the customers. You're building things for those unique things that we will never we have to build for like, you know, the platform for people to use. And so, we can't get down to like niche systems very well. But all that to say is how we are designing that is through like harnesses.

29:54Kyle Lambert: We have like rules that we're building, rule sets, recipes for like how these, you know, different areas could get built. And then evals, you know, we're essentially building a lot of evals, like systems of saying, hey, does this look good? Does this meet this standard? And if it doesn't, like then we can iterate on it. And that's been like a big shift in, you know, how designers are working, a big shift in like skills. you're learning as like a product designer. You're starting to focus yes on visual design and core experiences, but you're also kind of starting to focus on like things that are going to like set up systems to succeed, not just like the end the end experience.

30:34Kyle Lambert: Because when you're working with like non-deterministic malleable software, you're just like, I don't have complete control of what it's going to do, but I do have control of like the principles and like maybe some guard rails in place to get to something special.

30:50Janne Parri: Yeah, this is kind of drifting away from Source, but I've seen like people building like design systems that are made for the LLMs to read. So do you think that the design roles go even further and further to that direction that we do not design certain let's say views we just design certain like rule sets and I then build the thing that we will show to the client or the user.

31:20Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I think it's like an interesting point. I have a hypothesis, but I don't know that it is. I think like luckily it's flexible with however we're moving is LLMs are like just becoming more and more powerful. And you think about like designing in the old world and still the new world is like component-driven design is huge. And so I'm designing a component because I want it to be reusable and I want people to just input and I want it to be on brand. But what I think about is like with LLMs, it's like is you know the design is the design harness in the future strong enough to design without components and just create an output that is fast and works and I think like this still to be determined.

32:04Kyle Lambert: I think I could see a world where like component driven design isn't as much like 5 years down the road. Maybe it is like, you know, token driven and it's like we have these really strong design harnesses and rule sets and so I think there's like there's going to be work for designers regardless. I think it's like how you work and how you kind of get to that shape and outcome is going to change. And we're already seeing this in the industry and it's like we've we've seen this the last two years. It's like people even within Webflow it's like we're seeing like our people using our MCP to design and build websites is like skyrocketing and that's like how they're working and so I think it that's going to continue to evolve that's going to continue to shift but as a designer I think it's like you're working towards outcomes and experience outcomes like and like holding maybe loosely in this new era to like how that gets accomplished.

32:59Kyle Lambert: I don't know like I'm curious your take like what do you see where do you see that world going?

33:05Janne Parri: I have sometimes tried to tried to do some sort of prediction but failed so miserably so I'm hesitant to like think anything like super concrete.

33:16Kyle Lambert: Yeah. And I mean I could say like you know the thing about like you know thinking about components I could be completely wrong and I'm happy to be like say like 3 years down the road like my hypothesis that like token driven design or whatever is like the way maybe that most teams are working. I'm I'll be happy to be wrong there and see but I think we're building Source in a way that you can do both and so I think that's what's like great is like having flexibility in that. I believe

33:44Janne Parri: Like certainly there will be people maybe especially designers who want to have the control and then there will be other people maybe marketers not dissing on marketers but who just want to proceed quickly do all sorts of experiments it's cool if everything is not precisely on brand and so on. So I don't know maybe it's not either or it's both and so on.

34:11Kyle Lambert: Yeah, cuz I mean it's really important to think about those distinctions too cuz it's like you have two different roles, right? You have a designer who's designing things and like doing things for like the main.com and you have like a marketer who's like I have an ad that in you know Google that I want someone to click on land on this one page that is built for them. Like it's like but they're building like tons of those for like unique pages for ads. like there's no way a designer is going to be able to like go and like you know design all those pages by hand at the scale of like personalization.

34:44Kyle Lambert: And so it's like do you give people like you know more flexibility you know this is like the new campaigns product we're building at Webflow like people like marketing teams have been asking like those enterprise teams are like we need to work faster and we want something that is on brand but it also doesn't need to be perfect like this needs to sell something and like hit moment and so there's a couple different outcomes you're designing for there but yeah but it's different you know maybe a feature page which is like way more high traffic than this one page that gets like 10 views in its whole lifetime.

35:21Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. And Google already like optimizes the ad. They can could do all sorts of assets and combinations. What if in the future you give editing rights for Google to edit your landing page or something like that? So, it would have the whole funnel. I don't know. Yeah, we're staring way off from Source, but maybe it's good. We're getting into the like marketer or advertiser mindset. Yeah. But there was something about those views. I believe you mentioned first party views.

35:53Janne Parri: Yeah. Can you can you give us a little list? What could those be? Will there be like the visual builder I mentioned at the start that I want to see and so on?

36:04Kyle Lambert: Yeah. One of the things we're thinking about like core capabilities is just like okay, there's going to be like a browser that would be a first party. you need to be able to preview your site with that. There's like, you know, we still want to have like the navigator like to be able to see the structure under your under it, you know, a way to navigate pages, a style panel of sorts. You know, there'll be like we're working on like a components view. so you can design and build your components and have like a safe space for that.

36:35Kyle Lambert: You know, there's stuff we'll add on over time too. It was just like analytics, some of those campaign views, there'll be a CMS view, a data view. Yeah. So, there'll be a lot of like firstparty views. I will say like the hypothesis that we have is there's going to be a mix of how you do those things and like utilize them. And so, I think like when we're thinking about Source, we're trying to think of something that's agentic first. And so, like leveraging AI to really do a lot of the heavy lifting. And when we think about like view creation or like that designer visual builder view, I don't know about you, but like I have found like in prototyping like having AI go and do its thing that I can work so much faster than like visually building something myself.

37:20Kyle Lambert: And so I think one of the things is like we're really thinking about how to leverage that. And so it's like where is AI really good at and where is where is AI much faster than humans and where is human intervention needed? And so when they think about like you know a design experience is like hey the AI AI using AI I can get to like build out like a landing page really quick especially if maybe I have like some Figma markup or I understand like what I'm trying to do but that like refinement is like really frustrating in AI tools now right it's just like prompting like fix this border radius do this those are the things that are really annoying and so when we're thinking about like the experience for Source that design in a building experience like how we're kind of using it internally and thinking about it is like okay AI for the first 80%.

38:11Kyle Lambert: And then you know those tools, those visual tools for like the last 20% of refinement, like how do we how do we find and blend that? But that's kind of like how we're thinking about like that builder persona is like, okay, we really want you to leverage AI because we think you're going to be much faster at building your system. And so I think we're kind of taking that approach. And you know, I think a lot of it is like we're going to learn a lot in this process. I think that's the thing about Source that it's like okay we have this we're sprinting towards this research preview this GA this whatever but when we launch it Source is not going to stay the same like we're going to learn stuff just like we did with Webflow you know we're going to learn a lot of things along the way we're going to make a lot of wrong calls we're going to make a lot of great calls and we're going to see how customers are using this and we're going to adjust accordingly but I think when we think about Source it's not going to be something that we just launch and just it just remains static.

39:08Kyle Lambert: We'll probably you're going to see like a ton of continuous development on it just like you've seen from Webflow over the last you know 10 years.

39:17Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There was so much there. So there are a few like concrete things that I want to just ask. Firstly, like the first 80% that you mentioned like the build phase like the Webflow Conf the keynote and the demo kind of skipped that understandably that's a tiny amount of time. So how do you how are you right now like thinking of that? I would imagine there's a way to start a fresh project. Do you force the client to some sort of workflow maybe from a design or nothing at all or how does that part of the process or the build part work?

39:57Kyle Lambert: Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, we heard about this a ton at Webflow Conf cuz it's like we showed this like narrative and it's like green field. It's like, hey, import your website and it just kind of works. But a lot of times that's not how you're working, right? You're starting from scratch. And so yeah, we're really we're really starting to think through that and we have been thinking through that and so we're building in you know ways to bring in how do you build a brand system you know sometimes you can do that in AI a lot of you know designers are building in Figma and bringing things over in AI and we're not seeing that workflow go away and so it's like okay how do we bring in you know Figma into Webflow as a design system and so starting from scratch is a big thing that we need to solve for cuz we can't just expect people to just get off the ground running and have a finished site ready to go.

40:52Kyle Lambert: And so that's like a big part of the process we're designing for right now. Another piece of that, you know, we heard at Webflow Conf is like what happens to my current site? Nothing is going to happen to your current site. Your current Webflow site is going to stay a Webflow site. Now, if you do want to bring that Webflow site over to Source and turn it into a Source site and say, hey, I want to use the Source as a platform and I want to, you know, bring this into an Astro project instead of having it as Webflow and I want to use the Source CMS, like we are building a mechanism to import that in a very easy way.

41:29Kyle Lambert: And so we're working with that on the team. And so that's going to be something that we build along with Source so people can continue to use Webflow because there's a lot of teams who don't want this. Like there's a lot of teams who are getting value out of Webflow the way it is and they love it and we're still going to continue investing in Webflow, you know, the product Webflow, but we also are going to invest in this and so yeah.

41:54Janne Parri: Okay, let me get this right. like the so-called Webflow classic will be there obviously

42:00Kyle Lambert: Webflow not Webflow classic Webflow just still it's still getting love it's not going away

42:06Janne Parri: I have I have heard a few few folks call it Webflow classic so that might be might be a thing that community just starts to

42:15Kyle Lambert: They might start that we are still going to invest in it and you know

42:20Janne Parri: Yeah okay that's there are the Webflow sites and if you want to import your Webflow site Does that mean that it will be imported or migrated to something else like Astro or Next.js or is there something in the middle there?

42:38Kyle Lambert: What we're building now is a way to get it into those platforms. And so we're still developing it. It's in active development right now, but we do need a way I'm and with Source, it's like really important for us for people to move to Source if they want to. And so yeah, it would essentially, you know, move your Webflow site to another, you know, just a codebase that's not proprietary to Webflow, which is like the whole like, you know, thesis on Source anyway. It's like getting, you know, giving people access to the whole codebase rather than like an abstraction of that code, which is Webflow right now.

43:16Kyle Lambert: And so yeah, the mechanism is something we really want to invest in and make it easy to move your Source project or Webflow project to Source Source codebase.

43:27Janne Parri: Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I'm just waiting when I get to like play with it. The open nature makes it so that it's hard hard for me to like imagine what are all the like use cases and things I could do. Obviously there will be good examples when people get their hands on it but yeah another concrete thing was those components. Of course there will be like a view for the components and editing building those but what about like different framework?

44:02Janne Parri: I believe different frameworks use components in a different way. So would the would the like UI be kind of the same maybe a bit different for different frameworks and how do you handle that?

44:15Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I mean this is one of the this is one of the things the team's working on right now is how to resolve that and so there could be nuances to how it shows up in different frameworks. But you're exactly right like Astro handles their components completely different from Next.js and so how we how we facilitate that there's probably going to be like a unique flavor we're trying to build like a system that can work for everything but I think it's like goes back to that like even internally like some of the stuff that we're building needs to be malleable enough for the underlying codebase and so we're thinking about like building like malleable systems it's like we need structure in place and there's some things that probably aren't going to necessarily really change like you know think about like the Source is like IA like how you navigate Source how you kind of set things up that probably will be run by Webflow we will kind of own that piece but like how little things manifest in the app and those views are a good example of it's like if I have like my style panel view you could write an extension and say hey Webflow like I actually don't like Source's style panel.

45:31Kyle Lambert: I want to write one on my own and overwrite that and just use my own style panel instead of the one that populates in Source's browser. And so those systems need to be malleable enough for customers to do what they want with them, but also malleable enough to work with different frameworks. Yeah. Cuz they're they're going to manifest in different ways. That's why we're starting out, you know, working next.js Astro starting out small. and then like expanding things out as we as we go.

46:04Janne Parri: Yeah, I'm getting even more and more excited. I have to ask the tough question. I'm not expecting a detailed answer, but can you say anything about the pricing or the timeline of sorts?

46:18Kyle Lambert: Yeah, I'm going to disappoint you, Janne. I'm not involved in any of the pricing conversations and this is like an ongoing conversation with the team. pricing and packaging is like it's just a complicated and big thing and there's just a lot of people talking about it and so it's like you know product leads and business folks and you know pricing strategists and so I don't have anything clear to communicate about pricing and packaging and so sorry to disappoint there it's like a non-answer but I personally don't know yet and so I think you know as we get closer I don't know what our strategy will be in communicating that out.

46:59Kyle Lambert: But it is an ongoing conversation internally right now to figure out that as far as like timeline goes, it's like we have a picture in our head, but I will say our team is just like sprinting. We are we are working as fast as like AI possible. I won't say humanly possible because AI is much faster than humans. We are we are working so fast on trying to deliver research previews. So we're in the research preview stage right now.

47:31Kyle Lambert: So we're starting to like get more and more functionality built out over time. And as that functionality gets built out, then we are going to bring in more customers into that research preview. And the reason it is really a research preview right now is just there's just like a lot of functionality that isn't there that isn't like stitched together yet. And so we're not quite ready to bring in like a whole bunch of folks to give feedback yet just because like we need those feedback cycles to be really tight as we're building this out.

48:02Kyle Lambert: And so it's like the more the more people you bring in to research it can honestly like sometimes slow things down a bit. And so it's like we're trying to we have like you know really tight-knit group of partners that are supporting us right now. We have a bunch of folks internally. Timothy Ricks just joined Webflow. Timothy has just been giving us great ideas and feedback. So, we have like a really tight feedback cycle right now and we'll continue to, you know, bring it to a broader audience as we get there and reach beta as soon as possible.

48:33Kyle Lambert: So, I don't I don't have anything on timelines cuz I don't want to commit to anything because things could change. We could find out something that could maybe speed things up or slow things down. But like this is this is like very high priority for the Webflow team right now. And so we have like all hands on deck like sprinting to build this thing out. Yeah. And so it's starting to come together though. I will say that it's exciting.

48:58Janne Parri: Yeah. Totally. Totally. And what would you say if there was this unnamed freelancer from Finland who signed up for the research preview? When might he or she get get the chance to play around with Source? Oh

49:15Kyle Lambert: Man. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not I'm not I'm not in charge of I'm not in charge of expanding out that research preview pool. Hopefully soonish. you know, the I would say like the research preview will be out before GA obviously and we'll start building bringing in more and more people for feedback. But yeah, we have we have some like scheduled like milestones for these previews to get to a much better state. But yeah, I don't I don't have any concrete examples on timelines just yet.

49:50Kyle Lambert: I want I want this out sooner than you do. I think our team I think I will say that as far as our community goes like our you know EPD engineering product and design team more than just that team our solutions engineering team like we want to get this out as soon as possible like we just trying to like sprint towards towards that and so I will say that is like no one is hungrier to get this out than than we are.

50:19Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. But I have to ask and I have to try try.

50:25Kyle Lambert: I'm sorry. I wish I could give you know the golden ticket right now.

50:30Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything anything else about Source that people are like asking or wondering?

50:36Kyle Lambert: One of the things we heard about Source is like will it work with Webflow CMS and we are we're building the CMS in a completely new way and so we are building like a headless CMS at Webflow and so with that you know we're really re-imagining the CMS completely for this agentic world and so with that we're going to provide a much more customizable CMS and so we're building it away so it's not as constrained.

51:07Kyle Lambert: So if you look at our CMS today, like every item requires a slug field like CMS. And so that's a very opinionated way of doing it in a no code way. But when we think about like headless CMSs, they require a lot more flexibility. And so the underpinnings of it is going to be a lot more flexible like a headless CMS you see in other products like Sanity or something where you can really configure the schema to whatever you want and then you can set up you know custom blocks for that schema and like have schema shapes that are injected and so there's going to be a lot more power with our CMS.

51:44Kyle Lambert: So it's not just a Webflow CMS ported over to Source. It is a completely new foundation for building. And so there's going to be like a lot of flexibility there. And one of the cool things about that is like we're going to provide a whole bunch of flexibility with that. But because it's built into Source, we can do a lot more things with it, you know, and tie it in and integrate it directly with like how you publish your site, which are is really tricky with other tools and working with headless tools. And so that's one advantage we're going to have there.

52:16Kyle Lambert: But that's a big one that we are hearing from customers is like are you just like porting the CMS over and it's like we're rearchitecting the CMS to be a lot more powerful and headless.

52:27Janne Parri: That's totally cool. Do you do you try to push it out with Source on the same same pace?

52:34Kyle Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. That's like one of the things we want we want to launch at the same time as the CMS with Source because you think about today one of the things that one of the things that might shift is like Source you could build things you can build it however you want right you can build like a static site if you want and just have your routes porting over you know just have it on Astro or Next.js and you can build it without a CMS but there are real reasons why you would want to back everything with a CMS And with the way we're building the CMS is you could have the CMS backing every page of your Webflow or of your Source site.

53:14Kyle Lambert: And so that means every page you build in Source could be backed by a CMS page collection. And so what that unlocks is it gives you a way to build schemas in a way that you know you open up your page settings in Webflow today and see all the settings. That's just like a schema of like, hey, I want my title to be this. I want the route or slug to be this. This is what I want my meta, you know, SEO descriptions, my AEO, like. And so you could have repeatable systems like that.

53:45Kyle Lambert: But that also allows you to build localization in a way that's way easier to manage and translate and, you know, have multil- language support. And so building with a CMS, you know, maybe not every site needs it, smaller sites, but for larger sites and enterprise sites, you're really going to want to like do CMS first, like building foundationally CMS and then, you know, have your front end, you know, the CMS backing all your data for every page and structure and then your front end is like, you know, all the all the code and, you know, rendering that'll be output there.

54:23Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. I believe there was a little bit about that in one of those Webflow Conf keynotes or demos and that is kind of a new concept for everyone coming straight out of Webflow like when we hear CMS it's just those collection pages and collection lists but now we're like editing stuff on every site. So could you like go go through that again? What can we like expect does it help to also edit those things if we give marketer some user rights is it easier for them to edit if it's on the CMS and the alternative would be that it just statically in the code right

55:07Kyle Lambert: Yeah and so you know I think one of there's a lot of power that comes with that what you see today is like you have your Webflow like one-off pages and then you see collection pages which are always templates in the CMS we're building. It's like you could still have that world where it's like I'm building like a collection page and I could build a template page for it that every time I publish a new blog post or this kind of category page it publishes out. You could also set it up where you know one of the things we see today is like I want different versions of this.

55:39Kyle Lambert: So I want a blog but I want a blog that is rendered this way. And so like within your CMS you could like you know decide like where you want that actually published to like what template you want that published to because of the flexibility it enables. It's there's not this like Webflow restriction. The restriction is like how you build it. And so when you think about building like everything underpinning the CMS, you could build it in a way where it's like I have a CMS, all the content on the page is mapped to a CMS item or and so within that item, you could have like a block that is like maybe like a hero block and it's like everything that is mapped from my hero component is mapped to a CMS block.

56:22Kyle Lambert: So that way like marketers could go in there and or anybody you could just like type in deterministically and say I want this to change and then just publish the backing data of the CMS. So it's like an instant publish whereas like you know if you do it statically you know with a site today like a you know Astro or a Next.js site you could build a interface that like works and you know creates a visual way to edit that you could edit it that but you also with that edit if it's not backed by the CMS you're having to deploy a code change.

57:00Kyle Lambert: And so, you know, when you're deploying a code change, you're probably deploying your whole site. So, that publish time takes quite a bit longer than, you know, a CMS item like data publish. And because it's like built in a headless way, it's like, okay, if I have, you know, my content and I just make an edit and I publish it, then it's your content is just live. So, but that's one of the one of the powerful things with like you know how we're how we're thinking about Source too is like when you look at these like headless approaches there is a challenge of deploying content and code changes at the same time and that is a pain point we see we've heard from customers using other stacks and headless CMSs and that's one of the things like we want to make really simple in Source is like I can make code and content changes at the same time I have an umbrella to ship those in one unified publish just like you experience today in Webflow.

57:53Kyle Lambert: That's going to be important for us to maintain because it's important for you know that's one problem we can solve is like how like going back to like what you said you cared about Webflow earlier was like oh man I care about all these things and there's some things about Webflow that they just make it easy. I think that's what we really want to bring to Source is like okay there are some orchestration of things that we really want to make powerful and that's where you know Source is going to be a really powerful orchestration layer for a lot of these things that yes you could build by hand and you could cobble all these tools together and you can absolutely absolutely build like really amazing things but that orchestration of how those things get shipped is still very choppy and still tricky to navigate and so I think I think we meet the meet the need there.

58:44Janne Parri: Yeah, there is quite quite many challenges that can be solved but still on the CMS side and specifically the new CMS will that be kind of like a standalone product if someone doesn't use Source can they still buy it use it?

59:01Kyle Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. the new CMS or the CMS we're like rebuilding is going to be composable and so you could buy it in the future and not use it in Source. You just have it as its own version, you know, living outside of Source as a product. You could use it in Source. So, it's going to be really modular. And so, that's really how we're kind of thinking about products that are, you know, we're going to be serving with Source. You know, AEO is another great example.

59:32Kyle Lambert: It's like, okay, can you can you pay for Webflow AEO as its own thing if you want it or you don't have to have it and you could essentially in Source you could use AEO without actually even having a site in Source as well. That could be a standalone product that like, hey, your site is somewhere completely out in another location, but you can still use Webflow's like AEO product that we're building. And so I think that's where we're really trying to think about is like yes, we want teams to run their whole marketing stack on Webflow.

1:00:04Kyle Lambert: Absolutely. Like as much as we can provide them from a business perspective, from an experience perspective, we want it all under one hood. But the reality is in many cases, people are going to like maybe use us for a really big chunk of the work and they're doing things in other places or they're just starting off and saying, "Hey, like we want to give Webflow, we want to try this in Webflow and see how it is." and they can add services along the way and continue to build things out. And so I think that's comes back to the thesis of like we want to meet you where you're at and provide the best experience that we can provide for the problem that you're willing to like, you know, use us for at the moment.

1:00:45Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's a wise way to look at it. But I'm just wondering if you wanna have all the marketing tools. How do those like integrations work? Do you just like integrate with MCPs APIs? in the demo there were Google Analytics, I believe some newsletter tools and so on. So that must be a big thing.

1:01:08Kyle Lambert: Yeah, we're building Source as like an extensible first product. And what that means is like I think for us it's important to like how do our customers extend it and build malleable you know interfaces malleable malleable software like how do they leverage the malleability of the software we're building to build things that are great to share out for their clients and customers. But you could also build like an extension within Source too and say, "Hey, I want I want this extension to run across every site that I work on within Source." And so I want this to be a repeatable thing that I distribute out to my workspace.

1:01:49Kyle Lambert: In the same way, because we're building that foundationally, it's like, okay, we'll we'll be able to have like third parties kind of build the same way as they're building in for like the app marketplace today in Webflow, but they'll be building, you know, in a way that'll be work work for them. And so maybe they could do an MCP or like maybe they have like a visualization layer that they're they're handing over as part of their like extension. But the extension framework is you know it is thinking about there is like maybe visual layers to it but it is functionality at its core.

1:02:24Kyle Lambert: It's like what am I trying to unlock here for a customer? And so I think how we build that th that was like a big part of like how we're thinking about like the foundations of sources like this very extensible product you know because it needs to extend beyond you know the customer it needs to extend to our partner you know marketing SaaS products and you know like tying in Source but yeah just it's going to be flexible enough for anyone to manipulate something for their needs and So yeah, that's kind of it's built out from the ground up like extensible.

1:03:03Janne Parri: That is so exciting. Oh yeah. Yeah. I almost would like to ask you again when do I get to play with it, but

1:03:11Kyle Lambert: Get you on one of the early research previews. I mean that's why that's why I say like we are so excited about this thing internally. I think Jon Saxton I think built out a site for Source and like published it recently just like and his experience so far with like a really early research preview version of what he used and he's like this is what I did and yeah he was stoked we were excited but yeah we are we are running every every week is the rate of progress is kind of wild but we're getting there

1:03:46Janne Parri: Totally totally I believe This is a good good place to land the plane as we're excited. There is one weird little thing at the end. But before that, if people want to check you out, follow you, or maybe message you, where should they go?

1:04:04Kyle Lambert: Yeah, look at look for me. I'm at imkylelambert.com. imkylelambert on X or I'm on LinkedIn as well. Kyle Lambert. So that's me. The letter I, the letter M, then Kyle Lambert. That's where I try to try to make it easy for folks. But I'm active on those communities. Like if you want to talk about Webflow technology, I'm always I'm always willing to chat. You can tell I care a lot about this stuff. Nerd I nerd out about it. So yeah, let's let's connect.

1:04:34Janne Parri: Yeah. And I will obviously put the links in the description where they where they should be. Okay. Kyle before we started recording, you mentioned that you have seen some episodes in the past. So, I got to ask, do you have any idea what the last section is about?

1:04:53Kyle Lambert: No, I don't.

1:04:54Janne Parri: Beautiful. Beautiful. I almost prefer this way because then it's a surprise. So, good. Nothing to be scared of. This is just a funny little finish section at the end. And I again have to mention Nathan Huening who came up with a clever little name for the section and it is Finnish line because I will give you a line of Finnish a saying or some sort of metaphor or something like that. I will translate that to English and your job is to guess what it means. Gosh, is that clear?

1:05:33Kyle Lambert: Okay, we're going to do it. I don't know that I 100% tracking, but we'll learn along the way.

1:05:40Janne Parri: And don't feel bad if you don't get it. Like there has been just a few few people who have got it right because this might be super like weird or illogical or something like that. But I believe your saying is quite quite like maybe easy. I don't know. I'm biased because I know this. But it is simple. And the saying firstly in Finnish is tiukkapipoinen, and in English it means a person with a tight beanie like a hat made of wool that sort of beanie.

1:06:13Janne Parri: So what does it mean if I say that okay Nathan is someone with a tight beanie.

1:06:19Kyle Lambert: I feel like it's just one word or

1:06:22Janne Parri: You can explain however you want it.

1:06:24Kyle Lambert: I feel like that concept is like my head is so big and full of ideas that I make things so complex. So maybe overly complex.

1:06:34Janne Parri: That's a way of looking it. Yeah. Seems kind that is that is that is not right. But I like the way that you thought that the head is big instead of the beanie being too small. But yeah, I'll end your agony. The meaning is simply a person who is uptight. Oh yeah, like that. You could imagine how a beanie could like be tied around your head.

1:07:04Kyle Lambert: That was way off. You're so kind.

1:07:07Janne Parri: But yeah, this are sometimes super weird. This had some sort of logic behind it. But yeah, I like to see where how people people are like thinking thinking of this because some sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's just like totally weird. And this is also a little way to root our little country up north. So I obviously have to do that.

1:07:32Kyle Lambert: I love it. We have We have We call them the Finns at Webflow. We have like a cohort of Oh, yeah. Finnish.

1:07:39Janne Parri: I have heard the heard of something something like that. The

1:07:42Kyle Lambert: Finns. They're just like these OG engineers who are amazing. Yeah. Shout out.

1:07:47Janne Parri: Beautiful. Beautiful. Totally. Totally. Okay, Kyle, thanks so much for being on the guest. This was great. I got a lot of answers. And for the listeners and watchers, we'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:08:05Kyle Lambert: Thanks.