Jeff Gothelf
Innovation, Executives and Humble Pie
In this episode of Brave UX, Jeff Gothelf shares his experiences travelling with the circus 🎪, why humility is essential for innovation 🪞, and the role design plays in breaking through local maximums 📈.
Highlights include:
- Why did you join the circus after graduating college?
- How do you help executives to embrace uncertainty?
- What is keyhole decision making and why is it a problem?
- What role should design play in breaking local maximums?
- Why do leaders need strong opinions that they’re willing to change?
Who is Jeff Gothelf?
Jeff is the Founder and Principal of of Gothelf.co, the company through which he provides independent coaching, training, and consulting that helps large organisations to create cultures of innovation, operate with agility and build better products 🚀.
He is the co-author of two influential books on modern product, 📘 “Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams”, and 📙 “Sense & Respond: How Successful Organisations Listen to Customers and Create New Products”.
And Jeff’s most recent book, published in 2020, 📗 “Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You”, gives people the tools to design and develop fulfilling careers that are a continuous source of opportunity.
Before becoming self-employed, Jeff was a principal UI designer at AOL, a user experience manager at Webtrends, an associate director of interaction design at Publicis Modem, and a director of user experience at The Ladders 🪜.
Jeff is a generous contributor to the field. Alongside his books, he’s spoken at many conferences of note, including Mind the Product, USI, and TedX, and he has appeared as a guest on over 100 podcasts 🎙️.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Jeff Gothelf. Jeff is the founder and principal of Gothelf.co, the company through which he provides independent coaching, training, and consulting that helps large organizations to create cultures of innovation, operate with agility and build better products.
- The co-author of two influential books on modern product, "Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams" and "Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Llisten to Customers and Create New Products". And Jeff's most recent book, published in 2020, "Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You", gives people the tools to design and develop fulfilling careers that are a continuous source of opportunity.
- Speaking of careers, Jeff started his career back in the late nineties working as a frontend designer and developer, although I have listened to him admit that the developer part may have been a bit of an overstatement.
- Since then, before becoming self-employed, Jeff has been a principal UI designer at AOL, a user experience manager at Webtrends, an associate director of interaction design at Publicis Modem, and a director of user experience at The Ladders.
- In 2012, along with Joshua Seiden, the co-author of Lean UX and Sense and Respond, Jeff founded Proof, a product innovation studio that was quickly acquired by Neo, a company owned by Eric Ries of the Lean Startup fame. A coincidence, I think not.
- If it wasn't obvious by now, Jeff is a generous contributor to the field. Alongside his books, he's spoken at many conferences of note, including Mind The Product, USI and TEDx. And given that he has also spoken on over 100 podcasts, I seriously considered letting him interview himself today, but that's not how we do things, is it? Jeff, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Brendan, that was an incredible introduction. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me too, Jeff. I have been looking forward to this for a while, and we are here now at the time has come, and I want to, speaking of time, rewind the clock a little bit just to begin our conversation, and that is back to 1995, which I believe is the year that you graduated university. You were 22 years old, and instead of knuckling down and getting a real job, an inverted commerce, you did something quite remarkable. And it's not mentioned on your LinkedIn profile or website as far as I could see. What is it that you did?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Yeah, I joined the circus. I literally ran away with the circus. Within two days of graduating, I packed up all my stuff, which when I was 22, the sum total of my stuff was a mattress. It was my motorcycle. I had a motorcycle. I was very happy with that. I missed that motorcycle and a Bob Marley poster. That was about it. But I did tag up my stuff and I joined a circus called the Clyde Beatie Cole Brothers Circus, which in 1995 was the largest three ring tented circus in the United States. So everybody in the United States knows Barnum and Bailey or Ringling Brothers. That's the big circus that come still to this day, comes all the big cities. Well, they didn't have a tent and they didn't have three rings, so three ring tented, that was us at least in 90, 95.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's the Clyde Beatie claim to fame, is it?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- It is, yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you mentioned running away. Were you running away from something or were you running towards something when you joined? Well, look,
- Jeff Gothelf:
- It was a job, right? That was an interesting thing is that I thought I was going to go into audio production. That's what I thought with my career was going to be. Even after having done, I did an internship in the summer of 94 in New York City at a recording studio where I really got a firsthand view of what it meant to do audio production, sort of the latter you have to ascend and how you ascend if you ascend, that type of thing, and how much money you might make. And despite that very, very real and shocking view into that world, I still hadn't given up on it by the time I graduated from school. And the circus provided me an opportunity to have a job as an audio engineer. I was the audio engineer and the lighting technician for the circus, and it was a paying gig, doing what I'd studied in school.
- It paid more money than I'd ever made before in my life, and it paid in cash. So every Sunday I'd had a stack of twenties on my pillow and I had to go run to the bank and get a money order and mail it to my parents so they could deposit it in my bank account for me. So I wasn't running away from anything. I'd graduated and I just didn't have any plans. And this opportunity came up during literally the last week of school exam week, final exams, and couldn't say no, really. I mean, I even called my parents, that was the, I called my parents and I said, Hey, listen, I know you guys know I don't have any plans for after graduation. I just got this opportunity to join the circus and go on the road sort of indefinitely. And my parents said, go for it. I was like, really? I said, yeah, go for it. All right, I'm going to go for it. Were you
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Surprised by that? Did that reaction from your parents surprise you?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Shocked. I mean, look, my mother is that mother who's like, you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer. Those are your choices when you grow up. And then I was like, I'm going to join the circus. It's just go for it. I was like, all right. If you cool with it, I'm cool with it too. And I did it. And look, I don't regret doing it. I did it for six months. It was memorable to say the least. I don't recommend it to anybody else, but I don't regret it the least. I learned a ton. I met a ton of interesting people, saw a world that very few people get to see. It's a culture that very few people get access to. And I feel lucky that I have that opportunity, even though I'll admit that for a lot of the time, I was unhappy for those six months.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What was it that made you unhappy?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Well, I mean, I wasn't enjoying myself. I left school. My girlfriend was like, ah, this, you're joining the circus. This is probably the end of things for us. And my girlfriend breaks up with me. I joined the circus. Really, it's a weird place. It's hard initially to make friends. No one goes by their real name. At least no one went by their real name. Everybody had a nickname. And the way that you earned your nickname was by whatever was the most ridiculous mistake you made in the first week of being there. And so for example, I lived with a guy named H, which is another word for vomit, and his name was hurl because when he showed up his first week, he had food poisoning. And so forever moving forward, he was known as hurl. There was another guy I lived with, he was a trumpet player. His name was Toro, and they called him Toro because he snored like a bull. So are you going to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell us what your name was? Yeah, I was going to say
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Figured that was coming, right? Mine was C, like the Battlestar Galactic robots, like the classics Cs from the eighties. And because in my first week I was the audio technician and the audio system for the circus was grossly inadequate for the size of the tent. It was a big tent. The tent helped 4,000 people. But the PA system, the audio system was grossly inadequate. And so here I am sort of first week on the job trying to balance the sound in a tent filled with 4,000 people on a PA that isn't going to cover it in mid-Atlantic America summer. So it's 150% humidity. It's, it's a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, so like 35 C, whatever it is. And so every time the ringmaster had a wireless mic, every single time he stepped in front of the speakers and they were hung up on the tent somewhere on top. Every time he got in front of them, I would get this feedback that sounded like that sideline was like wall, wall, wall, wall sound. And then instantly they were like, oh, thes C's here, and that's it. That was my nickname.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was thinking about how keen your parents were to support you in this endeavor, and I wondered whether or not your mum might've had some sort of premonition that you'd only last six months and that's why she was comfortable with this
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Experience. Yeah, I can't see this as a forever gig either. But I mean, look, the interesting thing is, I mean, six out of nine months, the circus season is nine months. I did six months. They travel with the warm weather, so they're always based out of Florida. All circuses are based out of Florida, in case in the US in case you're wondering. And then they kind of start in February, and then they work their way up north, up the east coast as the warm weather gets there. You hit Maine in about August or so, and then you start to come back down as the weather starts to get cold. So you're just kind of staying with the warm weather basically. And I did six months of the nine month season.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Your mum might've hoped that after that you would've gone to med school or law school. But I understand that you actually ended up becoming a touring musician, playing the piano for a number of bands. And I just,
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Yeah, so yeah, couldn't get off the road quite, but at least this was in my opinion, for a better, cause I, I've been a musician my whole life. My dad plays piano, I played piano and was bands in high school and then bands at university. And as I was leaving to join the circus, a couple of the guys who were still in school, a couple of us had graduated and it was a question of are we going to keep doing this and tried for real? Are we going to graduate, go our separate ways? And we had to wait for these other guys to graduate. So I said, look, I've got this opportunity. I'm going to join the circus. And so I did it for six months and I, in Virginia, I went to school in Virginia, which is right in the middle of the east coast.
- And then I went up to Maine and we came back down six months later. And as we were passing through Virginia, I called up the guys and I said, look, I'm coming back through Virginia. Am I getting off the circus or am I going to Florida? And then, no, we're all going our separate ways. And the response was, get off, get off, and let's do this. And so I did, and we did. And for the next four years or so, we tried with this band and we tried with the second band to be successful touring musicians who played original music. We toured up and down the east coast of the United States holding down whatever jobs we could to pay the bills. And to this day, those guys are my best friends. I talk still, we have a chat group, we talk every day. And it's pretty amazing to have that shared experience. We had the time of our lives, even though we were broke and sometimes played, not sometimes often played to empty rooms. It was amazing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I want to quote you about this time you've said, when I got tired of being broke because trying to be a rockstar, trust me, does not pay the bills. The internet happened. Before we get to the internet though, I was curious about the moment if there was one where you realized that you were tired of being gro broke and you'd had enough, was there a particular low point?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- It wasn't a low point. It actually was a high point. I met my wife and I wanted to take her out. We wanted my dinners, I wanted to do stuff with her, and she had a real job. And I didn't felt, did
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You tell her the truth?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Yeah, I mean she knew. I think the first thing I said to her was I, Jeff and I was in the circus. No, she knew. She knew everything. And in fact, I met her right after her performance. So there was no reason to hide it, but certainly there was no hiding it. So it was just a matter, I've been doing it, it was 1999 at this point. I'd been doing this for seven years, roughly, maybe a little bit longer. And we really, we gave it a really good run with two bands on the road out every week, at least four nights a week, sometimes out for a couple weeks at a time, really recording CDs because that's what you did back then. There was no YouTube. There was no Spotify. And we really gave it a real shot. It is what I felt like. And the interesting thing about a situation like that, it's just a startup in money.
- It is, and it is a startup in many ways. You've got this crazy idea, you think it's going to change the world and everybody should love it, and you pour everything you have into it. And then it's kind of like you reach a point where you really have to ask yourself, is it worth keeping to keep going? Is it worth it to keep going? And there's this voice in your head that says, one more night, one more week, one more month. Who knows? Who'll be in the audience tomorrow night maybe. Right? Next week's gig is where we'll be discovered, right, maybe. Right. And it's really like then, and at some point, well, you don't have to, but for me, that was the breaking point. At seven years in, I'd met, my wife wasn't making any money. I was 26, almost, no, 25, 25, 26. So it was time to get slightly more serious.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And how did the internet happen for you around that time? Was this something that you were enamored by alongside being a musician, or was this a hard break and all of a sudden you found yourself staring into the future and not knowing quite what to do?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Computers were always in my life in the sense that my parents worked in computers when that actually meant something in the seventies and the eighties. It's weird to hear that now, but it's what they did. They worked in computers as systems analyst and business analysts. And I had computers growing up. I had a Commodore 64, I had a Commodore 1 28, and it was like the one 20. It was a real upgrade, 128 kilobytes. That was a real upgrade. And so one of the things that I started doing as the band stuff was winding down for me was I taught myself html. It's late nineties, got a book, learned HTML in 21 days, something like that. Got a book, started teaching myself html, started building websites for our band and then for other bands. And then as the band was winding down for me, this.com thing happened.
- And the amazing thing in 1999 in the US at least, if you could spell H T M L, you could get a job. I could do more than spell it. I could write it, I could, and I could do a little bit of graphic design. And so it was an easy transition because the jobs were easy to get. The money was really good. And by comparison to what I was making before, it was really good. And so it was kind of a no. And then I'd met my wife, and so it was time to think about the next step, the next chapter in my life.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about someone else who from the outside looking in appears to have been quite an important person in your life, and that's your co-author and also I believe you've done Business together, and that's Joshua Sien written two books together. You've founded an agency, you've established a publishing business business as well, and he seems to be someone that you keep collaborating with. How did you meet Josh and how did all of this collaboration come to be?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- That's a great question. I'm glad you asked that. Josh and I have been colleagues, business partners and friends now 15 years, I believe it's been 15 years. In fact, I just got off a call with Josh right before this recording. We teach together regularly every week and super, super grateful for the relationships, the various types of relationships that we have. I met Josh, like I said, in the late two thousands. He was heading up a design team in New York City. I was heading up a design team in New York City, and we kept ending up on stages together or in meetups together. And I keep looking at my left and my right and there and there was this guy, he was always there. I'd go to these meetups and there was this guy and he was always there. And so we started chatting. Turns out that he was facing very similar challenges to what I was facing at the time, which was building a design team in a software development environment that was increasingly turning to agile as the way of working.
- And in the late two thousands, there were very few ideas about how to do this. There were some, and we began to bond over that challenge. Turns out there were other folks in the city and in beyond New York City obviously that we're having the same kinds of challenges. And we started to build these communities around that. And what's been amazing is that out of that sort of shared need ultimately came the collaboration on the book Lean UX. I did actually start that book without Josh, but I couldn't have finished it without him. And I was really grateful for that. And over the years, like you said, we've written two books together. We're writing a third one together this year, which is exciting. We have launched businesses together and we work together on a regular basis. And I've found, look, it's kind of a very comfortable situation, I think for both of us now because both of us know how each other works, how each other thinks, and there's a real trust and calmness when we work together.
- And the nice thing about it is that we have complimentary personalities. And so Josh is very deliberate. He likes to think things through. He likes to do his research, he likes to make sure that all the T's are crossed and the i's are dotted. And it's like, let's make everything, let's before we jump into this, is everything good? And I'm a bit more of, Hey, let's jump out of the airplane and we'll figure it out on the way down type of thing. We'll land, don't worry about it, we'll figure it out. And the nice thing about it is that it's complimentary because I speed him up and he slows me down. And with that and the level of trust and transparency that we have, we're able to avoid a lot of the challenge that I think a lot of other partnerships have because there's a level of honesty that we've nurtured in the various relationships that we've had.
- And look, we hang out, we're friends, our wives know each other, our kids know each other, that type of thing. But there's a level of transparency that when something happens and one of us feels like a situation isn't right, or hey, I don't really feel comfortable with the way this went down, I'll give you an example for that. For example, we have a lot of shared ip, Josh and I, we've created a lot of content together and most of the time we deliver it together. And so when that happens, there's no question about how we divide any revenue or anything like that, but occasionally he'll deliver something on his own. I'll deliver something on my own. It's almost impossible to separate the IP and say, this is mine and that's yours. And so there've been situations in the past where maybe I did something and collected a paycheck for it, and he was like, Hey, look, that content was ours.
- For him to be able to bring that up and for me to be comfortably and for me to say, you're absolutely right, I totally forgot about that. And then to make it whole, make it right, and then we deal with that kind of stuff. And again, I hate to even bring that up in the sense that that's such a trivial part of the collaboration and the friendship, but I don't think we'd have it, the collaboration and the friendship without that level of transparency and honesty and the ability to just bring up any topic and say, this is working for me, this isn't working for me, that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Type of thing. Well, you've answered what was going to be my next question, which was what has made this a successful, sustainable, creative collaboration? And I think what you've talked about there is super key and important for people to hear, and that is when money comes into the picture, it runs the risk of changing what otherwise would've been a productive and good relationship between people and that level of transparency and honesty, and it sounds even there, a little bit of humility sounds like it's served you particularly well. I mean you see this when bands make it big and then all of a sudden the knives come out and things can fall apart. So it's a really key point you've made there. I want to talk about humility, and that is cause there's a section on your LinkedIn profile, which I believe is about section and it starts with the following words. And I'll quote you here. You've said, I believe that humility and learning are in short supply. So what is it that you've experienced that's led you to believe that
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Working in the corporate world? I mean really, I'm joking, but I'm not right? I'm joking, I'm crying. Look, we have here, here's the challenge. The challenge is this. We have a hundred years of management canon, just books and articles and case studies all based primarily in manufacturing of some sort or production of some sort or another that essentially has taught people over the last a hundred years, more or less, that leadership tells the staff what to do. Leadership has all the answers, leadership has all the creativity, all the innovation. They just dictate to the staff and their job is to execute the visionary ideas that are spawned by the leaders. And we've trained so many managers this way, we incentivize and reward executives this way. And the reality is that particularly with knowledge work that simply isn't true. It doesn't hold anymore, but because this is how leaders have been trained and because this is how job descriptions are written and incentives are determined, there is very little incentive to learn and there's very little incentive to be humble.
- In fact, I think there's so little incentive that people have actually lost the real meaning of humility. I think a lot of folks see it as abdication of vision or abdication of leadership. If I'm humble, then I'm not a lead. I'm not a big confident leader, that type of thing. But the reality is that humility is the simple definition for it. In my opinion. Humility is the ability to change course in the face of evidence. That's it. The ability and the willingness to change course in the face of evidence. And that isn't short supply. Because again, I think that many, many leaders and managers believe that they have a strong opinion about something and that the evidence that they're presented with contradicts their opinion. If they cave on their opinion, they believe it will make them look weak or it's not. Their job is to tell people what to do.
- And despite the evidence to the contrary, they will stick with their idea because well, they can't be wrong. I actually have a really great anecdote for this that my daughter told me. So my daughter was just on a school trip recently, in fact, a week ago. And it was a small group of kids who went on the school trip and there was one chaperone, there was the teacher and one parent chaperone, and they were having breakfast, and this was a trip to the Middle East. So I live in Spain, and this was a trip to the Middle East, so it was a kind of school exchange performance thing. The chaperone who went is a former business executive and a very confident and smart individual, and he had pulled some food off the buffet for breakfast and he was eating it. He was enjoying it. And somebody asked him what it was and he said, oh, it's Shunka.
- Shakka is a Middle Eastern dish with eggs in tomato sauce sometimes She's delicious, right? It's fantastic. We eat it here in my house all the time, and therefore my daughter knows what shukah is. And this guy was eating rice with some vegetables in it. He's like, I'm eating. And my daughter was like, that's not Shukah. My daughter's 16. That's not. He goes, yes it is. I pulled it off the buffet and the sign says Shukah. And she said, no, it isn't. We eat it at our house regularly. And also here's a picture of it on the internet, eggs and tomato sauce and that type of thing. And he refused to budge. He was like, no, I am eating right. All right. And look, this is not to criticize the guy to illustrate my point. I like the guy and I was grateful that he was there with our kids and he was communicating regularly about what was happening. But that said, this illustrates my point. People who see themselves in leadership positions, they will make a statement. And if they c get evidence, even incontrovertible evidence from people with better experience from the market, from the internet, from whatever that says that they're wrong, they will not admit that they're wrong. That humility isn't there because that humili, if they admit they were wrong, they look weak, they're not supposed to be wrong, and it's threatening to their position of authority. They see that I think as well.
- And sadly, that is common, very, very common, particularly across large organizations. I mean, I don't think it's uncommon in smaller organizations, but certainly in the enterprise, it's how you get ahead. You kind of make these bold proclamations and then you drive the team to execute on those proclamations regardless of the data that comes from,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You gave a talk at mine, the product in 2019 called Lean, agile and Design Thinking. And what you're talking about here with your daughter's field trip to the Middle East, it reminds me of something that you said in that talk, which is regarding roadmaps. You said, we want for those fact-based decisions ultimately to overrule the hierarchy. This is where the conversation on humility comes in. I have a strong opinion about this, but if the evidence disagrees with my opinion, it should overrule it. So people seem to have quite a flexible relationship with facts like this gentleman who was eating shukah or not at the time. And status seems to play a role in how, like you were saying, where they are in the organization, the inability to admit mistakes because of status seems to play an outsized role in whether or not people can do that. So is it possible in a modern corporate product-based organization or just any organization that has to make stuff, is it really possible to establish a meritocracy of ideas?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Is it possible? I'd like to believe that it is. I tell a lot of people, have you seen it that it is, I've seen pockets of it in the enterprise. So can I say that this 80,000 person company is an example of it? No, but I've met teams inside 80,000 person companies who have exhibited those ideas and those ideals. The reality is that it comes down to leadership and it comes down to leadership modeling the behavior they want to see in their teams. I'll tell you another story. Few years ago, Josh and I in fact did some executive coaching at a big bank in the United States, six months of it in fact, and it was with the leadership team of the bank. And our charter was to teach these folks how to manage an agile organizations when it comes to banking. There's probably 200 years worth of experience between the leadership team about how to do it.
- They knew way more than us about banking, but they were now running not just a bank, they were running a software company that was in the financial services business and that it happened to be an agile software company. And so we essentially were there to teach them agile, and we spent six months with them on a weekly basis, essentially helping them collaborate more, articulate their assumptions, learn, iterate, inspect and adapt, ship sense and respond, think, make, check, field measure, learn, all of those things, getting them into this a bit more humble process of instead of just saying, this is where we're going, you have an idea. I'll give you an example, another example from this. They were planning on reorganizing their physical office space across the United States. A lot of people are going to be affected by that. They were going to grow some locations and they were going to shut down some locations and offer people the options to transfer if they wanted to.
- Then it wasn't layoffs, but it was, Hey, we're going to grow this area, but shut down this area. And they were just going to make a decision just flat out and it was going to affect tens of thousands, not 10, maybe thousands of people's lives and livelihood. And they were making assumptions. Well, 10% will resign and 50% we'll take the relocation package. And I was like, how do you guys know this? Go find out before you ruin 7,000 people's lives, go find to 70 of them, go talk to seven of them. And so we did this and we forced them because they were paying us a lot of money and spending time with us to go and do this. And they adjusted their plans based on that. And the biggest thing, one of the most impactful things that happened, I came out of that engagement was the c e o after one of our coaching sessions, had a meeting with all of his direct reports.
- So all the EVPs and SVPs is like 150 people. And he gets up in front of these folks and after being with us for about three or four months and it's just coming out of a meeting with us, and he said three words to them, he said, agile is hard. And man, my phone blew up. I was getting text messages and emails from our con, cause we'd been working with some of the teams as well, and they're like, oh my God, he gets it. What did you guys do? How did you make him see the light? How did he even understand? People were losing their mind and all he had to do was admit that the thing that he told them to do a year earlier, go be agile, whatever do agile is difficult. It's not as easy as he made it sound like. He didn't even admit a mistake. He didn't admit that he was wrong. He just added something that he had learned recently, which he didn't know a year earlier when he had just told the organization to go do this. And it was massively successful. And so the pockets of, you called it the meritocracy of ideas exist where leaders model the behavior that they want to see in their staff.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It really does all come back to those senior leaders. That executive, you said something back at U S I in 2014, so I'm going back, are wee wild now that I felt,
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Do you remember better than I do at this point?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I've had the good fortune of being able to recently watch that talk. So amazing that that's an advantage to me, I suppose. But let's see where this goes. Back in 2014 at USA you said you have to design this culture of innovation and this culture of innovation is a culture of experimentation. It's a culture that encourages learning. And so fast forward five years, and you're on the stage at mine, the product in 2019, and you said no one wants to buy experiments, people want to buy products, systems, solutions to things. So in this context, when you are talking to senior executives about developing a culture of innovation and this potential tension there between it needing to be about experimentation, but experimentation not really being a thing that people want to buy or believe in, is there a tension here? Is this a development of your thinking? Is there some nuance that I'm missing in the way in which you can communicate this to senior leaders so that they get that agile as hard, but they're still willing to press ahead and to figure it out?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- So something significant happened between 2014 and 2019. Is that in 2015? I'm wrong about the dates actually here. So in 2014, we were still running our agency. And what was interesting about that is when we launched that agency, it was a product studio that was meant to work in with lean, agile and design thinking ways. So not just build me a thing, it's more like we'll do the whole build, measure, learn, think, make, check type of thing. And we learned very, very quickly that people don't want to buy experiments. They don't want to buy the check portion of it and they really want to buy the think part either they just wanted the make part. If you think about make check or build measure, learn, it's really just the build part is what most people wanted. And when you're like, no, buy this experiment, and they're like, I don't want an experiment, I need an app.
- Like you said right now to my comments in 2014, to build a culture of learning is a culture of experimentation. It's creating the systems, the tools, the support, the psychological safety and the rewards and incentive systems that encourage people to go and find out if they are working on something that will actually deliver value to the end user. And so it's not so much the two concepts are compatible in that we want to build these types of cultures, but if we try to sell them as, Hey, you're buying a bunch of experiments, that sales pitch doesn't work. The sales pitch that works is learning is not like everybody wants to learn, but more importantly is the reduction of waste and a faster focus on a thing that will actually achieve the results that we're looking for in the market. And so it's just a different positioning of the same idea, right?
- Because we tried I to go out there and sell experiments and we failed a lot, but when we went out there and we said, look, I know you told us you've got this a hundred thousand dollars budget to build the thing, we're going to take 10% of it and we're going to figure out exactly how to do it so that we take the 90 grand that we have left and use it to the best possible outcome. And generally speaking, not a hundred percent of the time, but generally speaking, that sales pitch works more than do you want to buy an experiment? And so that's the challenge here. But look, speaking at, forget about it from a consulting perspective or a services company, speaking about it from kind of an enterprise culture, it's really difficult. It's really difficult because the incentive structures aren't there, the success, the performance management criteria. So hey, I'm a product manager, I'd like to be a senior product manager. What am I rewarded for? Am I rewarded for learning and evidence-based decision making, or am I rewarded for shipping on time and on budget? And the answer to that 999 times out of a thousand,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about budgets. You mentioned there in your consulting capacity, this hypothetical of a hundred thousand dollars to build a thing using $10,000 to figure out what it is that you should be building, but the bounds of the money that's available to do make the thing have already been predetermined. And this is one of the frustrations that many people find inside corporates as the budgeting process. And about this, you've previously said, and this is from your I talk in 2014, you said large corporations lockdown next year's budget today, they assume they know exactly what's going to happen in the future. So budgets, as we all know, they're a form of control. They're a way of limiting the downside risk of an activity, of maintaining a margin in a business that is cost plus focused. So they're necessary for many, many corporations. But if we take what you've said is true and agree that the future is largely unknowable, which is something that I believe, and I dunno, I think we've had enough evidence to suggest that that's the case.
- Silicon Valley Bank, for example, just collapsed a couple of days ago and it seems that nobody could have seen that coming. Maybe it'll turn out different in the wash, but these things, these blacks won events, these things happen. How, why do we continue to dance this way with budgets and this enamored belief we have in innovation or that executives say that they have an innovation? Why do we continue to put the way in which the budgets are set and the incentives that you've touched on there in terms of how people are encouraged to work, why do we continue to operate in environments where those things seem to be at odds with the promised land that we say that we're all about getting to?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I think there's a couple of reasons at least, and I know there's probably way more than this, but I mean, look, one is this is the way we've always done things. And again, I think this is based out of manufacturing. So when you're manufacturing, you buy a certain amount of raw material, you have a clear sense of how much product that raw material is going to produce. You have a sense of cost for the production of the product using that raw material, and you know what you're going to sell it for. So you have a sense of your pro profit margin. And most importantly, and with physical products for the most part, for the most part, you have a pretty clear sense of what people will do with those products as well. And so predicting budgets and profit margins and sales based on past behaviors makes sense, or at least made sense. The challenges is that we've translated that exact same way of working into software based businesses. And I'll tell you a secret, every business is a software business these days. Anything of scale at least, or anything that seeks to scale is a software business. And so we're trying to translate that same level of predictability to software development essentially, and it's impossible to do it. Now, the alternative is also impossible. The alternative is the truth, let's be honest. I'm put right, and the alternative is,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Here we go.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Right? Well, the truth is what are you going to make for next year? In other words, what are you going to build? Not how much money are you going to make, right? What are you going to build next year? I don't know.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you've talked about this, right? You've talked about Kent Beck, who was one of the signatories on the agile man manifesto, and you've quoted him before, and what he said was product roadmaps should be a list of questions, not a list of features. So what is it about that you agree with? Why should they be a list of questions?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Well, but because I think, look, again, predicting a set of features is assuming that the thing that you're making will still be relevant and do what you expect it to do in a particular way by the time that you launch it. And this is particularly, so all those things I listed are risks, their assumptions. Now, this is particularly risky in the enterprise because enterprise aren't particularly, enterprises aren't particularly agile or quick at doing anything. And so by the time you actually ship something nine months from now, the risks that I just listed out are exponentially higher because a lot has happened in the world in those last nine months, particularly today. And so instead of saying we're going to build X, we can ask the question, how might we best solve problem Y, right? How might we do this more efficiently? How might we deliver value in a different channel?
- How might we adjust our pricing strategy to fit kind of new realities? You think of Adobe going to subscription model, right? They did. I mean, they went to the cloud and then they went to subscription. So hey, how might we deliver through a different channel? How might we change our pricing model and our pricing strategies? They didn't necessarily innovate with the products per se. I mean, Photoshop is still Photoshop, it does what it does, but now it's delivered via cloud and it's subscription model and that type of thing. Those are the types of questions. Instead of saying, make it cloud, put it in the cloud and charge 12 bucks a month for it. I know it's not 12 bucks a month, but whatever. And just there's just an immense amount of risk in those, but the alternative is untenable for the traditional organization. So you know, can say, look, you guys are building the, you're the mobile app team for the bank.
- Okay, terrific. What are you folks going to work on next year? I don't know. What's the corporate strategy for next year? Oh, we're still figuring that out. Okay, well, once you tell us what the corporate strategy is, we'll give you a sense of how we believe the mobile app can support that corporate strategy. And we're going to give you those beliefs in terms of objectives and key results rather than a set of features, changes in behavior that we think that we believe will help support the corporate strategy. And then we're going to discover the best way to do that. And we're going to, and look, and if you're comfortable with that, with giving us, let's use just a round number, like a million dollars. If you're uncomfortable with giving us a million dollars for the next year to do that, then give us a quarter of that and let's get back together in a quarter and we'll tell you what we've shipped and what we've learned and how we're progressing towards those key results.
- And if you like what you hear, you can give us another quarter. And if you don't like what you hear, you can tell us to go do something else. But these are conversations that just don't happen in the enterprise because of that lack of that need for certainty and predictability. It's like a security blanket, but the reality is it's a lie, nearly impossible. I don't like to speak in absolutes, but I think it's nearly impossible to predict today what you're going to start working on in nine months. I just think that at the end of the fourth quarter from now, I think it's nearly impossible to accurately predict what you're going to be working on. But we do it anyway because that's what we're asked to do, and it's wrong. That's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What we are paid to do, right? Yeah. We're not paid to, we're not for the most part, we're not paid to ask questions. We are paid because someone believes that we have an answer to something
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Or if they have an answer for us that they just need us to execute.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've talked about silos in the past and enterprise as being another obstacle for cultures of innovation to develop these large tens of thousands of people working in these organizations, the way in which they organize seems to trend towards the establishment of silos in order to have any form of structure that enables people to work together. Yet those silos that develop, come with their own subcultures, come with their own barriers to enabling collaboration and communication and therefore innovation. You've suggested that when people are operating in heavily siloed environments, that they make decisions in what you've called a keyhole decision making way. What is Keyhole decision making and why is it detrimental to a culture of innovation?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Yeah, so I mean, keyhole decision making. I mean, imagine you're peeking through a keyhole, which is super rare these days. I actually have a lock in my apartment that has a keyhole you can peer through, but when's the last time you could actually peek, peek through a keyhole? If you think about it, unless you got one of those big, which I have one of those big almost skeleton keys. And so it's when you're peeking through a keyhole, and so you only see that part of it, you only see, and you can't see anything around the keyhole. So you're just making a decision based on the thing that you can see. And generally the thing that you can see is the thing that you do. I do code, I do design, I do requirements, I do testing, I do marketing, whatever it is. And so you don't get the big picture, and it's not just the big picture of the other disciplines.
- So there is that, right? Hey, what's engineering doing? What's product doing? What's design doing? But it's also like, Hey, what's that team over there doing? What's that team over there? What's that business unit over there doing? And it's this lack of shared understanding that leads to great inefficiencies, it leads to duplicated effort, it leads to a lot of waste in the process, and it can easily be like, this is an easily fixable solution, which is simply so you sort of broaden the space that I have visibility into. But to do that, we have to break down some of those silos. I have to be able to talk to engineers. I have to be able to talk to my designers. We're going to bring marketing in for a few weeks for some conversations it requires, and for some reason there, there, and look, maybe it's territorialism, maybe it's a fear of exposing that, hey, we're also unsure about what we're doing here.
- Who knows? I think in some situations, particularly with designers, by the way, I think there's a fear of obsolescence. If I bring others into the design process, the thing that I have the title for, then what's my value, I think across the board is, I'm not saying this from a, is a design from a designer point of view, a product manager point of view, I think across the board has hesitation to open up the silos for a variety of different concerns. And that's causing a lot of this inefficiency and waste. And all we have to do is expand each individual's view into what's happening and the work becomes exponentially better. The efficiency increases, the collaboration increases the conversations, increase the decision making speeds up. All of these things get better if we open up this world, but everyone's afraid to do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It seems to me that executives might not be immune to keyhole decision making. So as I was listening to you there, I was thinking back to an earlier part of our conversation about the consulting work that you and Josh did for that big bank, and that statement that the CEO made of wow, agile is really hard. That somehow through widening the perspective with that ceo, with that executive, you were able to help them to see, you know, talked about in the past, in one of your talks, Tom Peter's framing of management by walking around this, getting on the floor, actually getting up and down and walking around and talking to people about what's going on, how much of the success that you feel that you had in that engagement was a result of helping to get the executive out of this keyhole view of what the problems were in the organization and how things needed to be changed in order to be more successful.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I'd say 80 to 90% of it. I think there was some value in sort of very, very basic agile structures like standups, conbon, board, breaking down work into small chunks, that type of thing. But I mean, I'd say 80 to 90% of it was getting these folks literally downstairs because
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We assume just because they're on the top of the organization that somehow they can see all, there's some sort of sark's eye on the top of the tower and they can just look and do everything. But that's not the case.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I mean, look, to an extent, one of, I get this question all the time because I always feels like I'm advocating for the disempowerment of managers and leaders. So let me be clear, I believe that one of the responsibilities of leadership is to see the forest for the trees. Okay? A hundred percent. But if you're the CEO of a 50,000 person company, you're going to see kind of the canopy of the forest. We're going to take this metaphor, some stupid extreme, but you're, you're even going to see anything below the canopy of the forest. And if you're going to start to just randomly make decisions that in this, the example that I gave you that affect the lives of the livelihood and the lives of thousands of people and their children and their families, et cetera, you should descend below the canopy. And I think that doing that, look it, it teaches them humility.
- Let's take it back to what we were talking about before, because I have a strong opinion and based on my experience and my expertise, we should shut down Office X and build up office. Okay, why don't you go talk to the people in Office X, just talk to 10 of them and say, look, hey, we're considering restructuring the office and we have the option for you to relocate to Office Y and see what happens. And they did that, and all of a sudden they came back and said, you know what? We shouldn't shut down Office X, at least, at least not all the way, because the attrition levels are going to be way too high, cause not enough people want to move to office Y or whatever. It's right. And so the humility comes back in and look to some extent, not a lot because still the CEOs still in the room and there is that sort of, he is the eye of soran looking at them. But to some extent, at least within the safety and the confines of the executive boardroom, once they came back from these exercises, they were able to say, well, here's some data that we collected. And instead of just saying, and we were wrong, which never, no one ever said, they sort of waited for folks to sort of make the realization on their own. But it was massively impactful, I think, just to get them down literally from the top floor to talk to people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it fair to say that there's an assumption that many of us operate on, which is just because I'm asking a question means that I'm seating my power over the decision and that if we could realize that asking questions is actually making our decisions more insightful and more powerful and doesn't detract from our ability in those positions of status to make those decisions, that we would be making a better experience for our employees and that we would be able to more easily create these cultures of innovation that you speak of.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Look, it's incredibly powerful. I think people fear it. Executives, they fear this approach because it feels disempowering. But what it actually does, in my opinion, is that it gains the respect of the people who work for you. And again, I want to say it again because in the event that leaders are listening is, oh, we have aspiring leaders who listen to this, right? This is not to say that you should not put forward strong opinions based on your experience and based on expertise. This is why you're in a leadership position. We want to hear those. But in the face of contradictory evidence, you should be able to comfortably say, you know what? I know I said we were going down this particular path. It seems like we should actually take a right turn here and here's what we're going to do about it. Here's what it's going to cost us. Here's why we're doing it, and here's what we believe the new path to be based on this data.
- And as long as you can, as you can have those conversations, I think it goes a long way. I used to work at a high growth startup in New York City many years ago, and there for a while before it got unwieldy, we got up to about 400 people and it was starting to get a bit unwieldy. But for a long time, I'd say for the first couple of years that I was there, we had a daily all hands, I mean, sorry, a weekly all hands, every Monday morning, 15 minute, all companies stand up and from nine o'clock to nine 15, and it basically encompassed a couple of like, Hey, here's birthday type of thing. Here's a cool thing that we shipped, or a little demo or something. And then most importantly was the numbers. We go over the numbers every Monday morning so everybody understood the health of the business so that when every decision was made, somebody could point back and say, we're making this decision because you saw that our retention rate was down over the last couple of months, and so we're trying to drive retention back up.
- And that was massively powerful and that was transparency in that organization. And it allowed the c e o and the founder of that company to stand up in front of everybody and say, look, we've been trying this for a month, and as you've seen over the last month, every Monday morning, the retention numbers are not turning around. So we're going to pay them. We're going to do something else. And I think that there's, in many ways that was brilliant on his part because he created the environment where he was safe to be wrong. That transparency that preceded his course corrections allowed him to comfortably stand up and say, as you've seen week over week over week, the thing that we've been working on isn't working, and so we're going to try something else. And I think that that's super powerful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's tapping into this notion of experimentation. So in the trenches level, every week you are reviewing what your experiments were. You are reflecting through the numbers on whether or not they were successful, but then at a certain point, leadership's looking at it and saying, we are not able to move this to the degree in which we need to for the overall health of the business. So they have to make a bolder bet or a more significant change that maybe falls outside that scope of experimentation that was going on. Now I want to come back to something that you said, and again, this is going back to 2014 ati, and I recognize that your thinking is probably or may have evolved since then. So feel free to jump in and clarify what that is, if that's changed. You said Amazon pushes live code to real people every 11.6 seconds.
- What that allows them to do is have an ongoing conversation with their millions of users, this sensing layer to get a sense of is this the right thing to do? The cost of being wrong here is tiny. If you get this wrong, you can roll it back. So I understand that I understand this notion of experimenting and production, particularly when you've got the scale that Amazon has. But I know that it's also relevant for organizations that are smaller as well. Now I recently reread Eric Hall's just enough research, and in that book she references something that Andrew Chen had applied to product, which is this concept from calculus of the local maximum, which basically suggests that while these sorts of experimentations in production will help to optimize the existing system, there's a cap on just how much optimization you can squeeze out of the system as it stands because of the constraints that in thinking and application that exist around that system. So what role should design, if any, play in breaking through established local maxims?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I think it is a really great question. I think there needs to be a recognition, and I think generally speaking, with the prevalence of data science these days, I think we can pretty quickly recognize that we're hitting the local maxima with particular work. I think design as user advocates, the folks who hopefully understand the customer the best, who understand the challenges and the workflow, who understand what people are trying to do, whether they're currently getting stuck, can provide plausible hypotheses about where to jump to next. So the local Maxima says that you kind of, squ is not a word, but I like it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Everything. We'll go with that
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Out of this part of the customer journey. And so the design can say, well, we can jump over here, here or here because those are three pain points that we still haven't really addressed, as opposed to just randomly sort of hopping to the next thing or the thing after that. And so I think that that is a tremendous value that designers can bring is a deep understanding of the customer and the customer journey and where there might be opportunities for improvement. So if we've completely hitting the local maxima on the ad to cart page, but then maybe we've got opportunities in the checkout process or on the search results page or whatever it is we know. And so design can really bring those opportunities to light I think quickly and say, great, let's move over here. Next, within the context of a hopefully well understood product strategy, not sort of randomly, oh, we should fix X, right? No, we should fix X because now that we've maximized Y X is the next logical place to go to drive the product strategy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to ask you about that framing because this is a constant, I'm sure you've heard of this as well in your conversations with designers in the field of design is this frustration of our rationale occasionally or maybe more than occasionally falling on deaf ears. So what you've said there about connecting the recommendation or the suggestion to the product strategy is that framing that enables people that are outside of design to sit up and pay attention to what it is that we are recommending that they do.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I've been on a rant for the last couple of years. In fact, my TEDx talk was about this as well about storytelling. Mostly that conversation has been pointed at product managers, but it should not exclude designers. Look, product managers are not the CEO of the product. Product manager generally don't lead with authority. Generally they lead with influence. Designers are the same. Generally speaking, designers don't lead with authority. They're not the CEOs of anything and they're going to lead with influence. The most effective way to influence in a large organization in my opinion, is to tell compelling stories. What's a compelling story? It's a detailed description of your idea that connects data points. It connects facts that make your story plausible or your hypothesis plausible. We believe that we should improve the checkout process because we're seeing customers, the data says that we're seeing people add to cart and we're seeing a high abandonment rate.
- And because the product strategy this year is to drive an increase in average order value, we're not necessarily trying to acquire new customers. We got to get the current customers that we have through the funnel more successfully. And so we've gotten the first part of that funnel, now we're going to focus on the next part of that funnel. And what you're doing there is you're piecing together a compelling story that's informed with data. It's specific, right? It's specific with numbers and it comes across as objectively as possible. The last thing, particularly in this particular, the product managers need to do this, need to do this, but it's particularly good for designers to do this as well because there's still somehow in 2023, this perception or misperception that designers just kind of paint put, add the paint on. At the end you're like, oh, you like red better than blue, that's why you chose red.
- No, the data for years plus this usability study plus the research that I've done on the outside points, the fact if we were to change the presentation here, we could change the conversion rate. Oh, okay, let's now, so to me that's how you get this to happen, right? It's really difficult, I think, otherwise for folks in design and product management positions to convince people to do something. But if as a designer you're become aware that we're hitting the local maximum of something when you make your pitches for where else to go in the product, tell a good story around, it doesn't have to be lengthy just to be informed and specific and that becomes compelling.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are you familiar with Seth Godin?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- I am.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What you're saying there. I was just thinking, I wonder if this is why Seth Godin talks about the importance of considering what the person you're trying to communicate is going to tell their boss. And so when you're a product manager or a designer and you're not in a position of direct authority and it has to be through influence, actually thinking through that second bounce of the ball and thinking about what that stakeholder's going to tell their boss helps with the framing that you're talking about here in terms of using data and rationale to back up the story. But I also wanted to ask you about your thoughts on storytelling as far as the emotive aspect of that. Because in that example, you were very focused on the analytical aspects and quite rightly so. I mean, no one's going to invest a huge amount of money and time and effort into something if they can't see some line between dot a where we are now and dot B being a better future state financially or whatever metric it is that you are managing. What role do you feel that the feeling part of storytelling plays in actually exercising that influence in a way that is effective and memorable and helps you to make better progress and Greta innovation?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- Yeah, so I don't mean to be all cold and all numbers about it as well. We don't want to remove the humanity out of it completely, otherwise the algorithms win and we still need humans in the process. And so yeah, so look, building in real human stories into the storytelling humanizes the data. Again, a quick story, quick anecdote back to the job site. The high growth startup was a job board called The Ladders in New York City, and our job was to get high quality job postings and then get high quality applicants for it. There was a job board that at the time was for people who made a hundred thousand dollars or more a year. There was a clear sense that folks were posting pretty low quality short job descriptions that weren't generating, generating a lot of interest from job seekers. And they were complaining to us, Hey, your job seekers aren't good enough for us.
- And we were saying you're, you're writing crappy job descriptions. So one thing that we tried was we tried to put a minimum character requirement on the job descriptions. You got to put in at least x amount of words before we even post this thing. So think about it, tell a good story. And this worked for a lot of time, but there were some other folks who were using the site that we didn't know who were recruiting for a very specific type of role, very niche type of role, and they didn't need all those characters. They could put in just a couple of words and they could filter out anybody. And it was a very specific thing and there were significant amount of these folks on the site that we weren't necessarily aware of. And so what they would do is that it was a rich text editor on the site, and so they would put in their words and then they would put in white text in a white background to complete the character so that the submit button would light up.
- And there were more than, there was a few of these folks who did this. And so we caught them on tape a couple of times during user tests and that type of thing. And as part of the storytelling about how to improve the job posting the job description, posting workflow, not only did we share the data, but we shared videos of these folks as well. And this was not like, it wasn't a huge part of our population, our user population, but it was not an insignificant percentage. And so it made the presentation so much more powerful because we had a couple of 32nd video clips that showed these folks struggling with the form, and that allowed us to humanize the personas that we were putting forward for our proposed changes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a great example of joining those two things together and having myself also seen firsthand the impact that just a short clip of some user behavior can make to reinforce a point that you are making or that you've seen in the data as well. It's a really great way of getting people to buy in, I suppose, or to believe in what it is that you're there to tell them. Now, Jeff, I'm just mindful of time and it's time now for us to bring the show down to a close. And I'm going to ask you one final question. Now, you've seen inside many organizations and you've had many conversations with design and product leaders over particularly the last 15 years. And I know that you have a focus in your own personal practice of listening, learning, and improving. So I'm curious to know what stands out to you as the one thing, perhaps there's more than one thing that we either place too much emphasis on and importance on or that we forget is vitally important to our success
- Jeff Gothelf:
- As a whole organization
- Brendan Jarvis:
- As designers or product managers, within the broader organization.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- It's interesting. I think that there is, what I see consistently is, especially in the enterprise, is a culture of meetings. And it's this sense of I got to go from this meeting to this meeting, to this meeting to the next one. And what we're forgetting is to figure is to carve out time to do the actual work. And I think don't think people are necessarily forgetting that they're not doing it. I think they're forgetting to somehow, or their leaders are forgetting to help them, to protect them in some way, to carve out maker time, some consistent block of time that allows them to get the work done. It's interesting because I teach product management, we teach lean UX on a regular basis and we talk about doing discovery work. And the number one question discovery is, when am I going to have any time to do this, right?
- I'm in meeting after meeting, after meeting after meeting, and I already can't get the things that I already have to do. I can't get those done. You're asking me to do more in different kinds of work. And so I think what perhaps maybe we're not forgetting or we just don't put enough emphasis on is protecting our time during work hours to be clear, to do the work, to do the craft, and to get out of this meeting concert. I guarantee you probably don't need to be in all of those meetings. And so then how do we start to extract ourselves, not from all of them, but in a way that gives us back some time to do good work? I think that that is something that it's a plague really, and I'd love to see that improve.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's hope that plague ends soon. I can imagine that it would take one or two people to make a considered effort to make that happen. It would actually lead to a lot of other people breathing a sigh of relief that they've got some more time for maker time, as you've said. Yeah, that's a really key point, Jeff. This has been a really enjoyable and thoughtful conversation. Thank you for sharing your stories and insights with me today. And thank you for waking up. And I know we didn't quite get there, but for the people that are listening, go and check out Jeff's talk on being forever employable because when he was 35, he woke up in a cold sweat and decided it was time to change his career. And from that decision have come the books on lean UX, the books on Forever Employable and all the teaching that he's done since. So we r I really want to say thank you for deciding when you were 35 to commit to this career path that you've walked since.
- Jeff Gothelf:
- My pleasure. It's really been a blast and quite a ride and I'm lucky to have had the success that I've had and it's been a pleasure chatting with you today Brendan. So thanks so much for having me on the show.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome Jeff. And Jeff, if people want to catch up with you, want to follow what it is that you are putting out there, your contributions to the field or fields as it would be, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Jeff Gothelf:
- The easiest ways LinkedIn just connect with me there. I'm more than happy to. I'm on Twitter as well. I've been there for a long time. And then my website, JeffGothelf.com, those three things, easiest ways I'm I'm findable by design.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Jeff. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes where you can find Jeff and all the things that we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX research, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are very helpful. Subscribe so it turns up in your podcast feed every couple of weeks and tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis or on the show notes, you can find a link to my LinkedIn profile. Or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.