Milton Jackson
Why Crabs Can’t Climb Out of Buckets
In this episode of Brave UX, Milton Jackson graciously gives Brave UX’s first poetry reading, reflects on the critical importance of role models, and shares his aspirations for a more inclusive world.
Highlights include:
- Poetry reading: Love Lost in Likes
- What led you to a career in technology and design?
- Has the lack of black designers been painfully obvious to you?
- Where did your confidence to teach public speaking come from?
- Why isn’t the written word more central to the experiences we design?
Who is Milton Jackson?
Milton is the SVP of Experience Design for Wealth, Wellness, Rewards and Retirement at Bank of America, where he’s helping to redefine how the business serves its customers.
Before joining Bank of America, Milton was the AVP, Head of Digital Design and UX at The Hartford, a Fortune 500 insurance and investment company.
And, earlier in his career, Milton spent five and half years at ESPN, where he was responsible for leading the UI and UX for ESPN.com, ESPNFC.com and ESPNDeportes.
Alongside his busy corporate design career, since 2014 Milton has also been the Founder and CEO of PicSpotr, a proudly black-owned company and CRM that’s specifically designed to empower professional photographers to build their businesses.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, brave UXers. Just a quick apology from me to you and to Milton about today's episode. Unfortunately, my Head of Podcast Quality Control (me) didn't realize that my mic input was set incorrectly. As a result, on today's episode, the quality of my audio is not as rich as you've become accustomed to hearing. I promise you I wasn't recording from the bath. However, given that Milton is the focus of today and that his audio is clear, please stay with us and enjoy today's episode. Milton's stories and insights are well worth the listen.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to dearest product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the learnings, stories, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Milton Jackson. Milton is the SVP of Experience Design for Wealth, Wellness, Rewards, and Retirement at Bank of America, where he's helping to redefine how the business serves its customers. Before joining Bank of America, Milton was the AVP, Head of Digital Design and UX at The Hartford, a Fortune 500 insurance and investment company.
- And earlier in his career, Milton spent five and half years at ESPN, where he was responsible for leading the UI and UX for ESPN.com, ESPNFC.com, and ESPN Deportes. That certainly sounds like every sports loving designer's dream job alongside his busy corporate design career. Since 2014, Milton has also been the founder and CEO of PicSpotr, a proudly black-owned company and CRM that's specifically designed to empower professional photographers to build their businesses. An accomplished professional photographer, an active mentor on ADPList and a member of that InVision Design leadership forum, there will no doubt be plenty of ground for Milton and I to cover today. Milton, welcome to the show.
- Milton Jackson:
- Thank you for having me, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, it's definitely my pleasure. I've been looking forward to this for a couple of months now, I think since we set this in the calendar, and I really enjoyed getting into your world as I do with all my guests. But Milton, you've got some amazing stories to share with the community today, so I'm really pleased to have you on the show. One of the things that I wanted to start with was, I understand that you have a rather large extended family and that the importance of family is something that certainly comes through, at least from the outside looking in and how you put yourself out there into the world. I understand that your father played quite an important role in fostering this importance of family. How did he do that?
- Milton Jackson:
- My dad, and I apologize if I get emotional, my dad amazing, amazing man, very family oriented. He has a ton of siblings both on my grandmother's side and on my grandfather's side, and he had a knack for just bringing everybody together. We would do this cookout at my parents' house every single year called the Jackson Family cookout. It started off as just a way from my dad to get his sort of immediate family together and then to meet the next generation of the family. Then it was the next generation of that family. It was just getting everybody together, enjoying a bounce house music, food, and so his ability to just bring everybody into this same space, to be there to meet each other, to love on each other was really, really important. So with my family, we follow some of the same tools, tactics that my father did. We get everybody together at my house or my brother's house or my middle brother's house. We'll hang out at my mother's house and just get everybody in the same place at the same time, spend time together. I will say it is amazing for the creative juices. Whenever you're in a space of love. It sort of just opens up everything else and creates avenues for new ideas, for new friendships because it is, every time the family gets together, there's always one or two or three new people added to the family. So that's the lovely part.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And why was this so important for him? Why did he invest all this energy? Because it's a hard work, right? Bringing people together and coordinating. Yeah. Why was this so critical for him?
- Milton Jackson:
- Well, it's important when you have, and I'll use this word, but I really don't mean it to be a harsh sort of description, but when you have a fractured family, when you have parents who are no longer together and they have created individual lives, it's important for you to understand and know who is in your family because that love is irreplaceable. That love is irreplaceable. And so for him, he had siblings on both his mother's and his father's side, and then the other thing, and we're from Jamaica. And so this notion of family and community is really, really important to Jamaican people. And so at the heart of our culture is family. And so that, I think there's a multitude of reasons why it's important to my dad, but number one is just being at the heart. He was the heart of our family, and so he brought everybody into the same space the same time when he passed away, that created that. It created a little bit of a void. I knew that it was on me and my brothers to fill that void as much as we possibly can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How have you found filling that void given all of the things that you are up to in your life and just in general? The pressure and the amount of time that we all seem to invest in our careers where generations before us may not have had that same pressure or made those same choices?
- Milton Jackson:
- It's fulfilling it. It's absolutely fulfilling. And I think there's two things that I would probably say, aside from one, it's fulfilling, but two, it's absolutely necessary because in order to inspire people within your family to reach to the heights of whatever greatness that they can achieve, they need to see it. And you have to be able to create the space where they could see that where they could see that love, see that success, demonstrate the love, demonstrate the bringing together of people so that they grow up knowing how important it is to stay connected with other people within the family. So my sons will never go a day without knowing what the love of family feels like. And that's really, really important to me. Whether it's my father's brothers or my brothers or my wife's brother and sister, I want my kids to know that at the heart of everything that we do is family. That's an example that I'd like to set.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'd say you're setting a pretty wonderful example. I was just thinking about our family, and my grandfather in particular was the heart of our family. And I think we had five, my grandmother and him had five children, so my five aunties and uncles and mm-hmm every Christmas and every celebration, every birthday. It was just such a special time. And when they passed, actually when they moved into the retirement village, where they went before they died, there was just such a void, is that word void. And our family, unfortunately, despite I had taken on a bit of that mantle of trying to bring people together for 60th birthdays and other things like that, we never really recovered. And it's such a, I suppose, a hole. It creates a big void, like you said. And yeah, it's a shame that we were never able to fill that. So yeah,
- Milton Jackson:
- No, you never do. Yeah, right. Never do. I'll tell you, every single year, my wife will tell you, every single year around my father's birthday, I almost go into a little bit of a cocoon. I have so many memories of my father. My father was the champion of the man that I would become. He and my mother really set the stage that allowed me to perform, allowed me to be who I am today. And so you never really recover. And I think I remember I had a mentor Lieutenant Derek McBride, who said to me after my father passed away, he said, Hey, get used to this. Get used to this feeling. It never goes away. You just have to learn, live with it. And the way you sort of get through the day is by remembering the positive moments, the moments that change your life of the person that you lost.
- And so I think about my father heavily on his birthday. I think about him on the day that he died. I think about him every July when we would be doing the Jackson Family cookout. We haven't done it a couple years because of Covid and all of that. But I think about him at Christmas. I think about him every time I turn on the University of Connecticut women's basketball game, cuz he was a huge fan. And I think about him all the time. And so I've gotten used to the memory of my dad and everyday thing. And that's the magic, right? Don't pretend to get used to the loss. Get used to the memory and the everyday
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Things. You mentioned Eastern Connecticut State University, which your dad was a fan of the basketball there. And you also mentioned how he has been quite a powerful role model. I'm using my own words here, but quite a powerful role model for you and set the standard to which you've aspired to and laid part of that foundation. I also understand that the university also was part of that foundation and played quite an important role. You studied arts, history and social sciences. And you have described this, and I'll paraphrase here, but it's a place that has a really special place in your heart and you've credited it with transforming you into the part, partly into the leader that you're today. Tell me about that transformation. Who was the Milton Jackson who started on day one at that uni, and who was he at the end when you'd finished and when you graduated? What was he like? How was he different?
- Milton Jackson:
- Oh man. I was a young, naive black kid who had no idea the world he was entering into. And I majored in history and there was a point where I studied studio art, but I didn't go to Eastern Connecticut for that. I went to Eastern Connecticut for radio and audio production. I grew up loving music. I was in the band. I played the trumpet for many years. I went to church, I sang in the choir. I had an affinity for mixing, blending. And to this day, I have turntables in my house and speakers. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I, Milton, I think
- Milton Jackson:
- I found a podcast
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Of yours.
- Milton Jackson:
- I [laugh]. Yes, you'll find the DJ Casanova Flight Time podcast on Apple. Love the name somewhere Casanova. Yeah, thank you. I was very much into music and still am. And so I went to college for radio and audio production. But when I said I was naive, I was naive, immature, and combined that with the perspective that I thought I knew it all. It was just not a recipe for success. And so I went in, I remember going to radio and audio production one, and I couldn't pass any of those classes. I would go in and be like, oh, why do I need to study this? I know all of it. And so that didn't really work out for me. I then went on to major in computer science. And again, there's a long story about how I got into computer science, but how
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did you get into
- Milton Jackson:
- Computer science? I give
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Us the short
- Milton Jackson:
- Version. So I had a mentor in high school, his name is Dr. Eddie Davis. And you'll see there's a trend in my story where mentorship has been the difference in my entire experience. So that's why I spent a lot of time mentoring on a d p list because a lot has been poured into me. And so I had a mentor in high school named Dr. Eddie Davis and Dr. Davis, whether he realized it or not, he was a man of routine. And one day he came over and asked me, Hey Mr. Jackson, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? And I was like, I don't know. I'm 16 years old. I mean, I'm trying to figure out if I have a girlfriend or not. And he was like, no, no. I need you to figure out what you're going to do with the rest of your life.
- And he said, you have two weeks to do it. And two weeks to the dot, he comes around, comes back to me and says, all right, what is it? And I freaked out cuz I didn't have an answer done the way. But at the right, I hadn't done the work. So it just so happens I was on Black planet.com. I remember we had all these social sites back then. You had MySpace, you had mie, you had Black Planet. This is pre-Facebook days. I mean, I was on Black Planet. I literally turned around and looked at the screen and pointed to me and said, I wanna build these. I had no idea that that was not something that was really in the forefront of my mind. I just needed to give him an answer. She walked away and said, all right. Two weeks later, he comes back and he goes, come with me. And he walks. I was wearing, this is the Connecticut State Department of Education. I was doing a little internship. So he walks me down the department education building and walks me down to the IT office introduces me to this guy named Travis. I don't remember what Travis's last name is, but Travis is probably like six four. And at the time I'm maybe like five foot five, I'm still dealing
- Brendan Jarvis:
- With up at him,
- Milton Jackson:
- Right? And so Travis hands me, Macromedia, dream Weaver, Macromedia Fireworks, cork Express, and Adobe Photoshop. And he said, everything you need to be able to do web design and development, you're going to be able to use this software. Did
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It give you flash?
- Milton Jackson:
- He did gimme flash. However, I will fully admit, and this is the first time I'll admit it to the world, I never really figured out flash. I could do little animations here or there, but I never really figured the depth that creativity and the power of flash is just not something I ever really
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Comment. Some people who are listening to this probably won't even have heard of Flash.
- Milton Jackson:
- Very true. And so Dr. Davis said to me, if that's what you wanna do with the rest of your life, now you have everything. And I said, well, Dr. Davis, I don't have a computer. My computer at home can only run Microsoft Flight Simulator. I can't really do anything else. And Travis turns around and he handed me a laptop. And the thing was big, it was heavy, it was bulky, but I took it home. And I've been doing design ever since.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't think that we really, as in people that are born after, I don't know, the year 2000, truly understand the immense gift and power that having access to technology is for so many people. Imagine if you were never handed, that laptop could have changed the entire trajectory of your
- Milton Jackson:
- Life. Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. I always knew that I was going to college whether I wanted to or not. That's a different question. But I always knew I was going to college voluntarily or involuntary.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Who imposed this on you?
- Milton Jackson:
- Oh, I was
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Going to say my
- Milton Jackson:
- Father would not there. There is no, there's no way my father would've allowed me to not go to college. Was there
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A big tradition in the Jackson family going to college?
- Milton Jackson:
- No. No. My father had a seventh grade education. I have two older brothers. My middle brother, he resisted until my mother drove him to the registration office. And my oldest brother, he went to community college, but he had a knack and still has a knack for cars. I mean, he is a magician with cars to this day as an amazing mechanic. It wasn't so much that we needed to go to college as it was, we needed to be contributing members of society in a positive way. Cuz my father set that example. He was a custodian at no Webster school in Hartford, Connecticut dedicated to it. But it was more important for him to be dedicated to creating the learning environment than it was anything else. He wanted to make sure that every classroom was cleaned, every shelf was cleaned, every hallway was ready for the students to come. At the beginning of the year, the offices were clean for the administrators so that they could focus on teaching and administering and not focus on, well, what is going on in my office and why does it look this way? And why does it smell that way? He was very much focused on doing his part to create the best learning environment. So that's where it comes from, this push to be something better. And he always said that his sons were going to be better than he was, and we felt a need to fulfill that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't wanna overly generalize, but it is a dream of mine as a parent that my son, and if I have any other children, I'm blessed to have them, will surpass my own achievements. And I feel like yeah, too, you was gifted many things, many helping hands along the way. I'm a son of a solo mother. There are different tracks that my life could have gone down. And I was fortunate enough to have some people like your dad in my life that were able to set a good example. And I feel like compelled and I have felt compelled, and I continue to feel compelled to live up into that aspiration. I wanted to ask you about your public speaking, your communication skills. This is something that clearly evident on this podcast today. You're very lucid. You've got a great grasp of stories that you're telling. You're able to convey them in a meaningful way. Now, after you finished at Easton, you became an injunctive instructor and you taught the foundations of this, of this craft of talking to people.
- Milton Jackson:
- Correct? Yep.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Where did you, being so young at the time, I'm not sure exactly how old you are, but I'm picking 21, 22, 23, somewhere around that, right? [laugh]. So year and your twenties, your early twenties. Yeah. How did you get the confidence to teach this? Where did that come from?
- Milton Jackson:
- So I did a lot in high school. My sophomore or junior year, I don't remember exactly which one it was. I found that I had a knack for writing poetry. I wrote poetry in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. But I never knew that I was good at it. I just knew that I could write it. And there was a special education teacher, Mrs. Paris Silva, who one day heard me speak and she asked me, she was like, do you write poetry? I said, yes, I do, but nobody will ever hear it.
- And she said, come to my class after school. And I didn't have time. I worked two jobs in high school. I remember I was telling a story about a couple years ago. It was like, I don't know what it's like to work one single job since I was 14 years old. I've always had a minimum of two jobs. And so I didn't have time so I didn't go. And she sought, looked up my schedule and sought me out and said, you need to come to my classroom after school. And so I did maybe the third attempt, and she had a poetry slam team that was practicing in her special education room after
- Brendan Jarvis:
- School. She had handpicked, she found people like you and she
- Milton Jackson:
- Found students who are great writers and brought 'em together. And I remember my first poetry slam was in a Barnes and Noble, and it was a bunch of Hartford area high school students performing in this poetry slam. And I remember I won that poetry slam, the first one I participated in. So can
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just ask you about that, because you sort of conveyed that your poetry wasn't something that you were wanting to share before she approached you and brought you together with that other group of students. How did it feel, if you can cast your mind back to that moment, how did it feel being recognized as the winner of that poetry slam being so public and out there and putting your emotions into words and then expressing them to other people?
- Milton Jackson:
- I was scared of what it meant to be very honest with you. I remember high school is not an easy place. And so I grew up being bullied. And so I was scared of then walking into the school the next day and being tagged the poetry nerd or all. So I was scared about that. But I remember Mrs. Paris Silver saying to me, speaking is one of the bravest things you'll ever have to do. It's just a matter of whether or not you have a desire to do it. The most powerful instrument that the human collective has is our voice, because regardless of ability, our ability to communicate is destination destiny altering. And so she kept empowering me to keep going, to keep speaking, to keep talking. What it requires though, is a command of language, not necessarily words, but the ability to articulate your thoughts regardless of how complex or how simple in a way for people to understand it.
- And that's how I ended up into teaching. Because when I got to college, you asked me before we got on about Kendall, when I got into college, I had the opportunity to do some things with Kendall. And this, we were talking about Kendall, one of my best friends. I had the opportunity to do some things with Kendall to get on the road to perform at colleges and universities and in slams and venues and private clubs. And I think by the time we went from my junior year of college, and I did two senior years to when I actually graduated, I think Kendall and I had done maybe 60 or 70 performances at that point. And so by the time I got in front of those students to teach public speaking, I'd probably done 150 live poetry performances and probably 40 to 50 keynotes at that point.
- And so there, there's no nerves to teach. But where I got nervous was teaching the foundations. I'm a natural speaker and I learned a lot from Mrs. Paris Silva, but I didn't know the academics. I didn't understand zone of interaction. I didn't understand persua persuasive speaking. I didn't understand the fundamentals of speaking. And so I had to learn that to teach it. And in learning it, I actually learned to alter the way that I spoke, which ultimately the teaching public speaking. And that course was for what's called the summer transition at Eastern Program. It was in this program that allowed students who had non-traditional admissions processes to be admitted to the university. And so you're talking about a lot of people of color who maybe had low S a T scores or underperformed in high school. And so this is an opportunity for me to recognize and teach a lot of the kids that I grew up with, a lot of the kids who I felt connected with me personally. And so I was very passionate about teaching in the program.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perhaps there should be a question that doesn't or shouldn't in the future need an answer, but why was it so important to you to help those students to find their voice?
- Milton Jackson:
- The answer to this is a hard one because we talk, I studied history and social sciences, and the context of that is heavily focused on the black community. And there are structures and institutions that have kept the black community. I don't know if you've ever heard the term crabs in a bucket, right? No. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But I see where you're going.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yeah. You have communities of people where metaphorically speaking or crabs in a bucket, and you have people who are climbing, trying to climb out of that bucket to attain success. But the problem is the nature of crabs themselves is plastic elements. Buckets are not things that they can climb out of on their own. So this notion of people pulling them shelves up from their bootstraps and climbing their way out of poverty is just not a realistic one. With me studying what I studied and understanding the structures that were in place, that kept people of color. And so you think about the history, right? We're talking about post-slavery into reconstruction. Reconstruction into separate but equal separate but equal into the civil rights movement. Civil rights movement into the drug afflicted, afflicted, eighties drug afflicted eighties into the gang warfare of the nineties. So you're talking about 120 years of systems being established to keep communities of color where they were, which is uneducated lack of access to finance, lack of access to housing.
- And so I felt like I needed to do whatever I could do. I needed to do my very small part in trying to turn the tide, I wanna say the three or four years that I taught that course, I taught somewhere about 80 students, some of which I still keep in contact with, and I'm extremely impressed with where they are right now. And I don't attribute it attribute any of that to me, I attribute it all of that to their share will and desire to be successful. And most of those kids are first generation something. They had no demonstration of what success looked like before they got to Eastern. And I think some number of 98% of those students end up graduating.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned how the expectation of that analogy of the crabs in the bucket and this idealism that exists out there, this belief that pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you know, just have to go for it, is willfully ignorant of the structures in this case, correct. The bucket that aren't really designed to enable that to happen for everybody. It's very easy for people to point the finger at say people like yourself. You know, obviously had a wonderful family environment with your father being a tremendous role model, and no doubt your mother as well, which is a wonderful thing. But what I suppose you're acknowledging here is that not everybody had that day in, day out. Not everyone was that fortunate. And the role that you were playing in your own small way was to provide some of that role model, that aspirational achievement that you had and the role that you were playing as that instructor.
- Milton Jackson:
- I think the difference between me and a lot of folks that I grew up with, both my mother and father were home. My mother was a certified nurse's aide for wanna say 18 or 20 years, and then she went back to school and got her L P N probably in her late forties, early fifties. So that's a lic licensed practical nurse. My dad kept the same job and he made time to do two things. He made time to invest in the things that we as his kids were passionate about. So we were heavily into music all and my two brothers, we were all, we're all DJs, we all played music and vinyl too. We're not the CD stuff that came later, but vinyl. So we have collections and collections and collections of vinyl because my father, it would invest in us. And I think the second part was when he wasn't investing, he was making time.
- And so when I did band and all of that stuff, it'd be like a 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning where he could be relaxing. He could just be hanging out watching tv. He got in the car and he would drive me to the Hartford Conservatory so I could play in the band. So I think that was the difference between me is that, but I not only had my father and my mother, I had role models and mentors in elementary school. I had Doug McCury, I had middle school, I had Dr. Charles Gross in high school. I had Dr. Eddie Davis in college, I had Dr. Stacy Close and Walter Diaz and Lieutenant McBride and Dr. David G. Carter. I've always had my parents. And then I had people who poured water into my bucket. And that's how I was able to crawl out because the more people poured in my bucket, the more I got up. And so I think that that's one of the things that is really, really important to me is you have to consistently just pour into people's buckets because you never know what they'd be able to achieve. I'm quite sure my father would've never said, you are going to be a senior vice president at a Fortune 50 company and one of the biggest banks in the world, I'm quite
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sure, tremendously proud.
- Milton Jackson:
- I appreciate that, but I'm quite sure he never imagined it. But the more people,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is why this is important, right? This is why it's so crucial to do, as you say, to pour water into people's buckets.
- Milton Jackson:
- And that's why it's, it's become a personal mission of mine.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about another bucket. Let's talk about the bucket of design and corporate America. I came across, I gave a talk at Design at scale this year, and I touched on the last a I design census that I could find, which I think was back in 2018. So pre pandemic. And it found that only 3% of designers who responded in America were black. Now, considering that black people represent about 12 and a half percent, depending on how you cut it in terms of the US census, the most recent census, which I think was 2020 this highlights a massive level of underrepresentation in the field. So when you've looked around your design orgs, your own experience coming up in the field over the years, has that underrepresentation been painfully obvious to you?
- Milton Jackson:
- Oh, yes. Yes. I will say I did not think about it. Regardless of all my studies around race and all of that, I did not think about it until after I left espn. And a part of the reason for that, I like espn, the culture there is, it's a very inclusive culture. And so it's not to say the representation was high, it's just that being there, you felt like you can be your authentic self, so you don't think about it as much. But in other roles, I would look, sit in a room and I would look around and realize that I was always one of the only or the only. And so I've had a lot of thought about this. When I get into the role or the position where I can make changes and increase representation, I've always thought this is something that I have purposely have to do because there's no lack of talent.
- The problem is not that there is a lack of black designers out there that can be hired. The problem is that those black designers are not in the networks of the people who are hiring those black designers. And so it, it's important for people to expand and go wider in their searches. Don't limit yourself to just say like, well, I, I've got this person who is one connection away from me that comes highly qualified. The magic of design is when you have representation in the room, you saw for scenarios. And when I say represent, I'm not just talking about racial representation, I'm talking about all sorts of diversity of age, sexual orientation, race, ability, the way you seniority, right? Seniority, your upbringing. And so I've always found that the magic of design, the best solutions come out when you can bang away at a problem from 30 different perspectives to come up with a magical solution. And I, I'll tell you a little story about Pig Spotter. Yeah. And we were going to talk about that at some point.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We will. And let's do it now. Yeah.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yeah. [laugh], when I started PicSpotr, I remember I was still at e s, ESPN at the time, and I started picking up a camera for the first time. Thank you to Sean Hintz, if he ever listens to this. I went out and I was doing a second shooting with Tony Spinelli, who was is just a fantastic photographer. And Tony kind of showed me the ropes and helped me understand not just shooting, but the business side. And so when I decided to create PicSpotr, I went to a room and I just started designing. And I brought on a couple guys, Chris Turner and Kyle Hamilton. We just, we'll just keep going. So we just built it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How'd that pan out?
- Milton Jackson:
- [laugh]. Five years of Pain. My friend [laugh], five years of pain. It was Field of Dreams. You built it and nobody came. And the minute we started collecting input from a diverse set of customers, by that time I had just started my master's degree program at University of Maryland. I reached out to over a hundred photographers, black, white Latinx, Asian, male, female, young, old, and just continued to build the product. And the more I got perspective, the more they came. And by no stretch of the imagination is Pi Spotter wildly successful. That was never the intention. The goal of Pi Spotter was to do something for a community of passionate artists. So as much as people would be like, oh, you have millions of you that, that's never the goal. I love the community. After George Floyd, we had a little bit of a reckoning for a very long time. The business strategy was heavily, well, don't let everybody know that we're black. And then post George Floyd, we were like, the black community could really use the love. The black photography community could really use the love. And so we came out and very boldly said, we are a black owned business. It didn't mean that we were being exclusive, it just meant that we were focusing on who we were at the core. And that's worked out for us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wanna go on to that bold and seemingly brave decision, but I want to go into what you said about that in the space before you made that decision. So prior to George Floyd, it sounded like you were hiding.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yeah. Why? There's no other way to describe it. The world of business is probably one of the most segregated. And the structures you hear, we talk about structures a lot. If you looked at the amount of companies that applied for federal grants and contracts and look at them and say, how many of these are awarded to businesses that are owned by people of color, that number would be significantly low. You see, there's a lot of data out there that points to the fact that when companies are publicly open about who they are, what they bring their makeup, what their ownership structure looks like, when those companies are owned by predominantly black and brown founders, they tend not to be as wildly successful because the systems in place and the perspectives in place really resist that sort of success. And there was a point in my life where I very much wanted hypergrowth for Pi spotter. I wanted it to be the Google of photography that was misguided. I bought into the IPOs and the crunch stories and all that. I bought into that. So much so that it was worth not putting my face on the website as its founder
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Of your own company,
- Milton Jackson:
- My own company. And then I brought on Keith Clater and TriNet, Atwater, Chanel, Walsh Henderson. And they were so passionate about the community and so passionate about the work. And I remember that discussion that we had. It was about 30 seconds long. We really need to do better at supporting our own. And it was thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up. And we've been proud to be black owned ever since there's Ma. And to go back to what we were talking about in terms of diversity, there's so much magic in understanding and watching the community that is so diverse, this pig spotter community that is so diverse, grow their businesses on our platform. So much magic in that. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Cause you'd see the data, right? Yeah. You'll see the billings. Yep.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yeah. But the greatest part of it is the relationships that go back to, we talked about this at the beginning, is the relationships that we've built just within the community itself. And being black owned allowed us to bring our whole selves to what we were building. And so I'm proud of what we've built. I'm proud of the fact that we were able to declare who we were. It has made us better. It has made us more authentic. The platform is not, it's not a million dollar idea, probably never will be, but it's good enough for a tranche of photographers to really grow their business and be successful. And one of the things that Keith and I always talked about, a TV commercial that we wanted to do for Pi Spotter, which was you've got a photographer who's just shooting a wedding and then he puts his camera down, puts it in his bag, he hops in his car, drives home, he picks up his kids and his wife or his partner, and you just go to a baseball game.
- And the idea is he or she can just spend time with the family, whereas in the background, pi spotter's working for them. One of the reasons why the baseball game analogy comes to mind is because it's one of the only places in America where you actually can actually sit and look around and see people that look like you, that don't look like that are in relationships that are yours and are not like yours. It is truly they say baseball is America's pastime. I don't really enjoy it myself personally, but I'll go and I'll enjoy it. I have a good time when I go, but I will not watch it on tv. That's a whole different conversation. But it's a very diverse set of people, different countries, different personalities, different races, different relationship types, truly the diverse audience and the diverse world that we really aspire to.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And sports has that ability to bring people together around a common cause that I think about my own experiences watching the All Blacks play, for example, here in Auckland, when I go and see them play rugby it's very much the same sort of feeling that you get. I do want to come back to design in corporate America, though we've talked about the story of pick spotter and of not hiding anymore about the black ownership nature of the company and serving that community specifically and being proud to do so. Yet if we look at the gap between 3% of designers in America as being people who are black, and then 12 and a half percent of people in America who are black at the general population, there's a big, big gap there. So I suppose what I'm curious about is when you zoom out and you look at this situation and you think, I've been the only person in the room or one of a few, and the corporates that I've worked in, and we talked about this notion of the bucket and the structures that are in place. Yet if you sat down with any design leader and you had a one-on-one conversation with them about this, I don't think you find anyone that would suggest that the status quo is acceptable. So what is it that needs to shift if we get it? Yeah, you just look at the numbers
- If we get it.
- Milton Jackson:
- I've thought about this so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. What is it in the way?
- Milton Jackson:
- It's funny. The design world is one of the most inclusive industries in the world. We take your awkward, we take your ultra creatives, we take your extroverted narcissists and your introverted sweet souls. The problem is not that the problem is not staying in design. The problem is getting into design. It is not approachable. It is not affordable, it is not accessible. America's an interesting place because the microcosms of segregation still exist. So you'll hear terms, communities of color. Well, those communities of color aren't exposed to design in the same way that other communities are exposed to design. There's not a lot of kids, at least when I was growing up, let me speak specifically for me. There's not a lot of kids that I knew when I was growing up who said, oh, when I get to college, I'm going to go to art school, or I'm going to study user experience or visual communication or because we didn't know about those things.
- We knew about business degrees and business programs, MBAs, which felt unattainable. And so if we spend more time empowering and exposing people in communities of color to design, you will increase the representation in design. But the second part of that is you have to make it affordable. I mean, there's a local university in Connecticut, two of them actually with two of the most amazing design programs in the Northeast. It's also two of the universities with the highest tuitions in the Northeast. If you went to a high school in the middle of the inner city, regardless of how artistic you possibly could have been, could you afford to go to any of those two universities? It's very likely not. But before that, you need to know that those programs exist in those universities and a lot of these kids don't. Right? So it's almost on us, not just me. And when I say us, I don't mean people of color. It's almost on us as people in the design community to do what I did in that poetry slam, step out on faith a little bit, enter these communities and walk into these rooms and allow these kids to understand that there is a path to success in this space. And you gotta chart a path so that they understand how to get
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There. I'm really glad you brought up poetry again, cause I want to come back to poetry. I think you might know why
- Milton Jackson:
- [laugh].
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay, so you mentioned Kendall XM A. Yeah. And you, Kendall, you put together a book poems called Defying Gravity. I was chosen, but you've also recently written your own book of poems as an independent poet called Not Good Enough to Give Her. And it's about love as far as I can tell. Yeah. The theme of the collection is about love. I believe you've chosen a poem to read us today.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Take it away.
- Milton Jackson:
- All right. Held safely in her bosom. I decided to write these stances, caressing her face, painting perfection on canvas, lost in her multiple choices. I decided to search for answers to the simple questions of our lives. Why do you love me? Within me there is a need, better yet, an intention to define as a constant search for love. And though I love you, I like you a hundred times greater. As long as I like you, you'll continue to melt in my mouth like a lifesaver. You are my lifesaver, the center of my being. Like meridians and equators. I pretend love has eluded me simply because when love is lost, just likes to search for her. And I like to search for her. This woman breathes life into my equation. She creates permeating sensations from each brain cortex. I like her so much. I'd scale the walls of her mental fortress just to witness the wonders of her thoughts.
- And when she is distraught, I am inclined to write words. And stanza is not to provide answers, but just to give her a moment. So why do I like you? Because your voice squeaks when you're happy, your smile gives life to the world around you. Your skin is soft, is velvet, and your style is misjudged by swag because you realize the world is not molded by what we've had or what we have. You are truth, and I'd like that you made me want to sing songs about liking you, but no song is as great as actually liking loving you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow, that was amazing. I found myself smiling throughout so many wonderful plays on words scaling her mental fortress.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wow. Milton, what was it that compelled you or why did you feel moved to choose that out of all of the poems you could have chosen?
- Milton Jackson:
- This July is a special month for my family. My wife and I, we were married on the 3rd of July. That poem is very much about my wife and the relationship that we've grown and the life that we've built. We always talk about our love, and I try to do the things that she likes because it is the little things, the little parts that create this loving relationship. And so she does the same. We love each other deeply, but it's the things that we like going out to dinner. We like vacations, we like spending time together, even if it's just helping in the kitchen or she's helping in the kitchen, or she's cleaning up the yard or whatever the things that we create, the bond that we have. And so I wrote that poem at a time where her and I, we were together and learning about each other and growing our relationship. And it's the realization that you really, really deeply love someone, but you love them because of the thousand and one things that they do that you really, really like. And so that's where the impetus of the poem comes
- Brendan Jarvis:
- From, those thousand little life sort of banal moments that you can find joy. And if you're doing it with someone that you love, even cleaning the house.
- Milton Jackson:
- Yep. Yep.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Milton, you've spoken about recently the importance of writing and words and the experiences as designers that we create. You've even gone so far as to say, and I'll quote you now, if you strip away everything we design, the only things left are the words. Let them drive the experience you want to create. Why have words which are so central to human experience, not just designed experiences that we do for a career? Why have they been, for the most part on the periphery of what we do as designers? Why haven't they been more in the center?
- Milton Jackson:
- Cause it tend not to be the most sexy thing on the screen, right? Design is a beautiful thing. When an artist paints something on canvas, how often is it that what they're painting are words? It's not very off. Often if you look at a Picasso, the only words that tends to be on the Picasso is the signature that he put at the bottom. So human beings are fascinated by colors and the ability to combine and create artistry. And that's where the, that's beautiful. But at our core, we are communicators, creating customer experiences and digital experiences and user experiences is very difficult to create both a successful and accessible experience without words. If we look at what we're creating as designers and you take away the blue buttons and the green buttons, you take away the headers and the navigation and the videos and the overlays and all that. What you have left is what a screen reader does, which is essentially read a narrative. If you can create an experience successfully by simply creating a verbal narrative, when you add on the Picasso, you have a beautiful experience in that. If you look at all of the major product, successful product designs of the last 15 to 20 years, they have all been a combination of words and beautiful design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was speaking with Daniel Rosenberg on the show a few weeks ago, might actually be a couple of months ago now. And if, for those of you that dunno, Daniel, you should definitely check out that episode. Daniel's held several executive design leadership positions at some of the world's then largest and most influential tech companies. But he's also still a practicing UX in the sense that he's very big on what he calls semantic interaction design, which is paying very close attention to the words that you include in the system and reducing those down to the most dense layer that you can get to so that people have to do less thinking about what things do and where they take them. And it's completely devoid of anything else that you would think about when you think of design and interaction design. There's nothing to do about how it looks.
- It's everything to do about how it communicates through the written words that the system contains. So there is, you're saying there is something incredibly powerful and when you strip away everything else, like you said with your example, with the screen reader, all we're really left with is that narrative. How are you working to build a design practice at Bank of America to include, or perhaps this isn't something that you've yet done, but include more involvement from writing writers, people that have command of the word and are able to work with more visual designers or perhaps UX designers to bring those two worlds together.
- Milton Jackson:
- I think what's most important in my role is to ensure that we have the talent to deliver an experience that both folds in that narrative, but also illustrates that Picasso as a manager, and I've learned this in my previous role, this is my fourth foray into managing people. I've managed people now for roughly half of my career. And what I've come to realize is design and content are a ying in the gang. You can't have one without the other, and you only have half the puzzle if only one piece is represented. And so what I have to do as a leader is create an environment where people feel like they can lean into each other's expertise. And you actually do that by not focusing on design. You focus on the world around the people that work for you. You have conversations about climate change, about race and ethnicity, about social injustice, about pride, about, you know, have conversations about the things that affect the worlds around them. And you do that as a team. And by creating that environment, it isn't easy for the content writer to look at the design and say, ah, I don't know if that button label's right. It's easy for the designer to then, I don't know if that headline is right. So you create the environment that people want to be a part of, which also equals an environment where feedback is so appreciated that even the harshest of feedback feels like a knit in the conversation in the midst of all the conversations that we're having.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a lot of subtlety in what you're saying, and I'm about to bring a sledgehammer to this party. It sounds like what you are articulating is in a very beautiful way, is a very intentional and human approach to breaking down the othering and the silos that can emerge even within the discipline, even within a people that are working on the same team to how they're actually solving that communication problem or whatever it is that they're working on the product problem through the methods that they can bring
- Milton Jackson:
- To bear. Exactly. Absolutely right. The way you remove barriers to creativity is by removing the silos that we put ourselves into. When you create a oneness out of a group, what you ultimately do is you create a safe space. And safe spaces are magic for creativity. When you reduce the stress of the team, when you remove the roadblocks, all you get are the things that they innately to do, which is to create. And so if you are a manager and you're not focusing on people and the environment and the community around them, ultimately what you'll get is you'll get high attrition, right? You'll have people wanting to leave and walk out the door. And in this day and age, the way young people are forcing us to think about everything, the environments we work in, the people that we work with, the culture of the company, the things that the company contributes to the communities we engage in, all they are asking for at the end of the day is that we are both creating a micro and macro environment that they want to be a part of so that they can work. And so we've gotta do that. We've gotta create those environments. And once you create those environments, success will follow.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And just to tie back into what we were talking about earlier, just so that it's not too subtle for people that might be listening, part of that means that the Miltons of the future don't have to sit in a design org and be the only ones.
- Milton Jackson:
- Absolutely. Absolutely. I did. At the end, when I'm done and I retire, which I probably never will do, it is my singular hope that I will have made some subtle change in the industry. What does that mean? What does that look like? I'm not a hundred percent sure, and I'm hoping that it's not something that I purposefully have to define, but I get it. We work in the world, world of business where if it's not a kpi, it's not something that we're doing. But at the end of the day, the job of a design leader is two things. To deliver value for the company and to engage the team so that they could do their best work. Keep it that simple, that minimal for me, engaging the team so that they can do their best work also means growing the representation of the people on the team so that represent, that representation can deliver maximum value for the company.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, this has been a really great way for me to start my Monday. I know that you are finishing up your weekend there. You've really given me, and I'm sure you've given the people that are listening today, many positive and challenging things to think about and necessary things. Thank you for being so generous with your story, a very personal flavor to today's episode, which I greatly appreciate and I really value the experiences that you've shared as well.
- Milton Jackson:
- Thank you, Brendan. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. It was a real pleasure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're more than welcome. I really enjoyed my time today with you, Milton. If people wanna find out more about you and the wonderful work that you've been doing in the design community, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Milton Jackson:
- Just LinkedIn. My favorite social media platform.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I believe you might have a book on Amazon.
- Milton Jackson:
- I do. I do. There some Romantics listening. I do. I do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you wanna tell us about that?
- Milton Jackson:
- I do. Yeah. Not, not good enough to give her is on Amazon. If you search not good enough to give her, you'll find it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Milton. And to everyone else, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered in the show notes will be in the show, sorry, will be in the show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Milton on LinkedIn and also his wonderful book of poems, which I definitely recommend you pick up. If you enjoyed the show and you wanna hear more great conversations like this, don't forget to review the show comment on the episodes on YouTube, let us know what you're thinking about, what we're doing, and pass it along. There's someone else that you think would value from these conversations with world-class leaders in UX, design and product management at depth. Share it with them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for me under Brennan Jarvis. Or you can find a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. Or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.