hello everyone how you doing yeah great um so when I first spoke to the organizers here about giving this talk um oh thank you for having me by the way and actually just before I start start thank you to the AV team who have been amazing so if you see any of them walking around say thank you to them um I said I would start with uh this image uh and I think it's a pretty decent analogy for the past few years for many people in the product space and um we started the fire uh we started a fire of change and ambiguity and it started a really really long time ago uh and with that in mind it's probably worth saying I don't know um really what I do anymore uh I began my career as a print designer with a love of sort of typography and a real interest in digital and around 2000 I began to experiment with putting things on discs and the internet and a couple of years later I became fascinated by accessibility uh on and off the web uh and that is where I kind of started my career in digital product design yes born a designer can you tell the job title thing is sort of less of an issue now my clients tend to buy strategy and vision rather than someone to play a very particular role but they still want to know where I've been and the part I've played along the way and almost every job that I've had over the past 20 something years had a sort of readily explainable title but over the last decade I'd say that those titles have really needed to be given a a really clear foundation with a detailed job description and a very very clear explanation of where that role sits and what reporting lines are now in most instances if you work for a company um probably someone in HR and your boss has read your job description um now not everyone gets to see your job description or your role or your responsibility and this I would say is an absolute Iceberg uh for most businesses only a a fraction of your role and your responsibilities is visible to the rest of the organization and your team so hands up everyone please yeah that everyone and you um and hands down wait if you have a job title that makes sense to others without a massive supporting document yeah hey some of you are cheating but um that's good to know so U and what about outside of your team of direct reports cuz that's the other thing it's like you may sit over here doing this stuff but then the rest of the the business that's the big question it's like oh okay now um I reckon that's less to do with you um more to do with kind of the status quo of how we label things and our culture around jobs not just in product but generally um and I'm going to assume there are no captains or inspiration officers or prophets or ninjas in the room good that's a relief because they mean nothing they mean nothing outside of that world that conversation uh they may have meant something to someone in a meeting in a moment in a singularity but they are sort of frivolous and Whimsical and they really don't help and they really don't help when things start to go wrong um and when things go wrong which they invariably do it's at that moment that job titles mean something because we look for accountability we look for someone to solve a problem and what's interesting I think is um that over the past 20 years there has been something of a real interest in product managers uh this is from Google from 2004 up to the present day I don't have a pointer but you see where the big dips and spikes are you can probably work out what that means uh and this isn't really because there are more PMS in the world than say ux UI designers or researchers um it's just a constant right I'd like to introduce this C uh this is uh esier um ostensibly responsible for for everything we take for granted in modern cooking and the way restaurants uh are staffed and operated and this is Alexis Sawyer there's another Frenchman and contrary to popular belief he actually had more of an influence on the way that kitchens operate and are staffed this is totally contentious but if you look at the dates he got there first so aside from designing and opening mobile soup kits during the Irish famine he invented portable fields stoves he invented uh the Brigade and smokeless kitchens uh if you've ever watched a TV show with Chef's In It Chef it's right here you can have right here Che chef chef thank you better sir NE yes sir is the FR still on yes sure you'll probably see that a lot and the thing with kitchens uh you see this all the way down from the executive chef and they're really really clear reporting lines super clear uh and this is fairly familiar to us it's just cookery um the exec Chef is basically your CPO I suppose and the difference is in a kitchen more often than not an executive chef will know how to make shoe Pastry as a product leader the equivalent is probably maybe not quite so true especially when you're looking at a bread that sits under product so data research you know some parts of engineering design customer experience experienced marketing coms that's a lot so you you don't need to know how to make the shoe pastry of marketing um essentially if you're in one of these product teams it's highly likely that the person you're reporting into maybe doesn't have a total handle on your role and there never lived your job doesn't have that lived experience they don't maybe understand how long something takes to do or how complex a task is or how difficult it is for you to balance you know your time against prioritization working in a kitchen for almost anyone who starts starts with the basics so pot washing or peeling potatoes or that kind of thing you start at the bottom and you work your way up and it's a broad set of skills and you work every station and what's interesting is over time how the Brigade system has actually evolved manipulated and the levels of severity or civility that um most successful and lorded kitchens in the world have so the specialisms are still there uh this is the Noma website best restaurant in the world a staggering five times over it has a very similar structure to ones that we're familiar with certainly these days so these are the people that work in the service kitchen roles have been merged skill sets adapted a five person kitchen is not going to have the same depth or breadth of knowledge or uh output as let's say you know the RIT which has you know 150 people working in it but that doesn't mean that they can't producing exemplary food and as with our own industry sadly this absolutely doesn't mean the kinds of people in charge are necessarily the sorts of people you want to be working for until recently um I don't know whether anyone has seen Juro Dreams of Sushi right you should watch it it's brilliant it's about sushi restaurant in a Tokyo under underground station that used to have three Michelin stars it started by four the dad is in his '90s the son is now in his 60s and they are a remarkable team and they serve very very specific types of food to a very very specific audience so outside of sort of ideation and during service or delivery we were used to the equivalent of the Brigade system uh we build our bit and we hand it over the fence to someone else I'm going to jump back in time a little bit to give you some context and I'm aware of the time so I'll be economical is with the detail let's imagine the whol scale digital product and design as we sort of understand it kicked off in the mid 80s proper um this I couldn't find a picture of uh Virginia howlet so this is some of her art um she's a print designer by trade and she sent Bill Gates an email in 1987 or something like that saying we need to put design more front and center we're going to be doing complex interface stuff let's do that anyway they built the user interface architecture group at Microsoft and she and her small team were responsible for the look and feel of Windows 3 the look of look and feel of Windows 95 vidana love it or hate it um and that was a huge step forward for our industry um as an aside if you've not read Douglas Copeland's microsofts I cannot recommend it enough it's set in the era of kind of crunch and ship and the emergence of the internet and as per this dream within a few years loads of Windows machines were landing on desktops uh Microsoft and Carter was launched design was in front of you design was in our homes uh Apple went toe-to-toe with hu Packard um and apple and Microsoft yeah three of them owning gooey elements and the fold was a thing which is a concept so retrograde we had to derive it from newsprint now with all this information and data that we were starting to put in front of people uh it needed to be designed content needed to be designed and it needed designers it got more and more complicated there was more and more of it it was on the internet it was on screens um and we had kind of managed up until that point with engineers and people doing bits of design so in the earlier days we had this strong set of disciplines making things go engineers and designers limited by the capacity of Technology something we are also starting to see change again and again and again then we need front end developers because we have a front end that's being designed and we need ux practitioners and IAS it's all slowly coming to the mainstream as we have to handle more and more data and the data is valuable because it puts eyes in front of screen we needed people who could organize so here come the Librarians um I've met so many people in the early days of IIA who have been working for places like Yellow Pages so anyone who could organize and understood data and how to categorize it you know ontological taxal choreography they need it it's no coincidence that in 1998 uh Lou rosenfeld's seminal work information architecture for the worldwide web was published the average internet speed was about 56 kilobits a second and getting faster now we at the time were very used to waiting for things to load uh it was part and parcel of consuming the internet but our appetite for faster more immediate more searchable was being wetted by lower latency and we've been teased by this sort of interesting glamorous future you know 1995 Sandra Buck is ordering pizza off the internet oh my god um and with a handful of years you could get pretty much anything you wanted via the Internet in North America if you live near a city um yeah I think within 10 years so 2005 and so who was making this stuff go what tools and processes were we using in this new internet age um pretty much every approach I would say and process was born out of manufacturing like we were just taking this stuff and supplanting it and tweaking it a little bit we were still operating a waterfall process is anyone still operating a waterfall process you let's get a drink um and at this sort of primitive level it worked okay you know lean crept into the business Consciousness in the mid90s with the sort of lean production system um and all processes around this time I suppose had some to a greater or lesser extent sort of iterative uh Improvement element to it the challenge was that around here putting stuff on the internet became easier uh and when things become easier for the masses we lean into disposable what a good friend of mine calls digital litter um and the amount of content on the internet ballooned again and uh anyone if they wanted to could just build something and you know we'd lowered the barrier to content creators and it's a journey we had been on ever since um is anyone familiar with slop oh good so slop is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence generated material up on the web for anyone to view slop is cluttering the internet slop is cluttering your searches um and it's it means we have to sift through more stuff to get to the stuff we want and it's not going to stop until we stop it so who is going to join all these disparate disciplines together that's what happens when we change slides um and make sure the wheels don't fall off well it's PMS yay um and I didn't really encounter a product manager until the mid naughties I met uh Bas and producers uh and project managers and program managers um you know in the same way back in the olden days if you wanted something built you had a product sponsor and an IT team um some of them were really nice and some of them didn't want to build anything um and the discipline like those around it developed as we realize we should be designing for customers and this kind of thing happens this kind of thing happens when you leave designers alone with their thoughts and a budget um I love this and I kind of use it in almost every talk I give because it makes me happy um this is the hot Bur uh you can't see how much water's in it uh it burns you it doesn't pour properly um there are about 350 second hand and is this what happens when we Silo disciplines is this what happens when a discipline goes unchecked this is what happens without collaboration um even Alberta leie said our most beautiful Fiasco the kettle was very much criticized but it was never a stupid object we just went too far oh uh and this is where a company like allessie after founding in the 1920s um they pioneered something that we're all too familiar with has anyone got like sort of Joseph Joseph stuff in their house sort of like designed designed it would be described as an amphibious product you can have it in your kitchen you can have it in bedroom uh you can kind of have it anywhere in your house and it's a it becomes a sort of talking point it's essentially a product that can exist in more than one environment uh and so you know lesie who was founded in the 1920s primarily doing table wear and stuff like that they were able to identify audiences through customer Trends and thinking more broadly about how they were manufacturing so what's wrong with silos well they exist on their own they have a rigid form factor they can't be expanded or merged uh the content stays within it and they stop us seeing the bigger picture and actually what tends to happen is the people that are in charge of them tend to be viewed often and accused of being kind of Gatekeepers and silos create really interesting monocultures and I say interesting I mean really boring that's an interesting picture but monoc conscious are not interesting the general consensus was that um silos weren't that great and having been part of many and spent many years trying to dismantle them um it was kind of good to bring them down but also there were risks involved so we have uh Silo Blended teams which are good for Focus making people work together towards a shared goal less good for disciplin supporting one another we've got siloed disciplines which is great for familiarity and I don't mean families because that's dangerous and support and it's less good for interaction across departments and skills uh is it falling yet yeah um and this is actually this is what happens when you dismantle a silo and you don't think about it uh and then you have Silo work stre which are great for Focus um might be less good for sort of holistic shared learning now by the mid naughties the world was being disrupted again and those doing the disruption with these small Nimble highly collaborative teams low overheads a really good handle on the market that absolutely terrified the incumbents startups were bootstrapping with whoever and whatever they could primary focus being get a product out the door uh before someone else did and the process didn't really matter so long as you shipped and optimized and you were able to show traction once the dusted started to settle about 2015 this is Tom Goodwin and this has been recycled by so many people and so many people claim to have said it but he said it um Uber the world's largest taxi company owns no vehicles Facebook creates no content Alibaba no inventory Airbnb no real estate no hotels something interesting has happened no one at IHG could have foreseen that they'd be fighting for the same customers as Airbnb within a matter of years Airbnb had a few million in Revenue in 2010 2011 IHG had about 1.5 billion you don't sit up and take notice until a company grows 500% in 12 months and these companies were the interface owners the interface layer is where all the profit sits so U products in the startup space just keep evolving and iterating and finding these layers and that was sort of very much what Web 2.0 was about every time it felt safe in a sector someone else came along looking to R sort of reimagine a little bit more of it or put a wrapper over the top now um those large corporates that were on the Innovation Trail hired really really hard they built teams at PACE uh was anyone trying to hire product people or designers in about 2011 in London no one there must have been some someone hiring a designer or product team okay well um it was really difficult cuz everyone was a barle um and and that's what happened the financial services sector freaked out and hired everyone at risk of disruption was a phrase that was lobbed about quite a lot uh I had a deck uh that I used to show clients with think like an entrepreneur so we were taking the smartest people in those businesses putting them somewhere with other smart people and trying to work out how they could not be disrupted sometimes by building their own startup within the business um The Challenge I suppose for lots of these companies is that thank you um they have massive Legacy systems you know ever worked in financial services ever worked in Insurance ever worked in transport you might want to be able to do x y and Zed but there is a server somewhere that no one will unplug and no one knows what's on it um there is a very well-known bank that has a I would want to say an office but a considerable amount of space with with Legacy servers in it and I'm not joking they cannot turn them off uh they have their own generators and they don't even have people that know what's on them anymore so anyway from these little tiny handfuls of operations became these are little cute Brands suddenly took over the world these are some of the biggest companies on the planet and they they yeah they basically run the world and we didn't see that coming um and what we tend to do is we look at these Brands and for some of us we have this sort of um weird memory of them being cute and Innovative but as with all these things as organizations grow they get to a certain size and then they need to inspect how they operate and how efficiently they operate you know they have shareholders there's a board if something can be operated or automated uh then do that if people can work faster or smarter or more iteratively if it's possible to reduce headcount and attempt to deliver the same level of quality then it shall be done um one of the nice things about working right up to the line is that um I get to include things like this so um this is the customer experience index rankings released by Forester on Monday um so 2021 was pretty good and it's gone downhill ever since so is this to do with reduction in headcount is this to do with merging of teams is this to do with the removal of certain specialist skills I don't know it's it's a possibility but if you track it back to 2017 and you you think about the level of investment and Innovation within companies whenever an industry evolves there is always a contraction and naturally workforces will always push back this is absolutely not a new thing it has been going on for centuries and centuries after the second world war we saw automated processes take a major major role in driving levels of manufacturing across the world in order to rebuild economies um individuals up until that point who'd had highly skilled jobs were moving more into kind of machine operator roles I suppose um and that was creating sometimes quite monotonous work there this really interesting study or a series of studies some of the first studies that were done into the mental health of workers that happened in the 1950s and and onwards where there were teams of people working at machines and there's this great line which I haven't included um where people were doing 10 12 hours of work and coming away and saying Their Eyes Were buzzing they'd never had that before because they'd always been doing sort of manual interesting work might be repetitive but not at this level at the end of World War II 40% of the US Workforce was employed in factories in 2024 7.9% of the US Workforce is in Tech related roles that is a it's not a disparity it's just an interesting juer position so when we talk about the tech industry uh being upended we're talking about different scales and different types of numbers you know over the last sort of 30 years or so um globalization in Tech has happened and it's happened in other Industries too so this is not new what we're experiencing today is not new and I'm going to keep saying it and if anyone sees me later I'll probably keep saying it then but every time there's an evolution we have adapted new roles and skills are found and learned um sure some of you remember when this happened um actually Airbnb when they did their kind of product management shift it actually happened a few years ago it didn't happen last year but some reason it was mentioned last year and toys were thrown out of prams and all that that kind of stuff um but it was highly divisive but if you dig into it and you look at what Airbnb were doing and looking at this sort of Apple version of product marketing approach they've done rather well with customer experience like these are two of some of the most successful brands in the world when it comes to customer experience delivering products that people want like using and will come back to we don't all need to be taking kind of drastic steps like this uh similarly something like Spotify and squads which I always find fascinating because they didn't invent squads squads was just a as named a solution to a particularly specific set of problems that Spotify were facing and we love branding and Squad sounds kind of cool not like the other stuff that we've been talking about and it was co-opted by thousands of companies some from very positive reasons bringing teams together allowing them to collaborate more effectively and some not so much um I have had dealings with certain companies that have just taken that model and supplanted it and it has against everyone's wishes failed dramatically now these adaptations and changes are being made by some of the biggest companies in the world huge businesses and these wants the upors are now looking at their lunch and wondering who's coming for that there is real concern and it may not be like a a sort of direct Challenger it's more than likely going to be something like policy or legislation is anyone familiar with Pace layering um if you're not take a picture of it put it in your next deck everyone will think you're really smart um this is by a guy called Stuart brand um and I love it because if you let's just take any kind of organ let's take okay get your photo and then I'll I'll stand in front of it and point at it so imagine Commerce up here um o a hole down the back of the stage right so Uber is kind of over here when Uber first came in they're moving really really fast moved into cities did the thing whatever they wanted but governance was all the way back here and so government and local authorities and uh taxi groups were all saying well hang you can't do that but we were saying well we can you just don't have the the regulation in place for us kind of not to be able to do that and you can play with this is just ultimately fascinating stick things on it that you like and work out where it sits in relation to basically fashion no one understands fashion that's why it's at the top it moves so fast young people get it old people are just permanently baffled so with that in mind are these the kinds of companies we need to be mimicking when the first of the most recent round of layoffs started happening in 2022 it came from these businesses didn't come from small organizations who kind of got their oh mad swear they act together um small organizations didn't fire the starting gun big big corporates you know we look at again look at airbm B and Spotify and aren't they cute and don't they provide nice Services they're no different to like a massive Mega Corp you don't go into a massive Mega Corp and go oh you're running your teams really interestingly we should we should copy that but we we look at these Brands and we think well immense success incredible Maus hockey sticks you know but there's a huge amount of window dressing now we all know sadly that AI is coming for our jobs I was going to speak after the AI panel so kind of laying it down now um this will be the next inflection point uh how we approach this and how we deal with this is absolutely going to be down to us people in this room leaders in this room need to be aware of change encourage those with less experience to question it and ultimately adapt to it 10 to 15 years ago we were all about disruption we love disruption we wanted it more and more of it 10 to 15 years later we are the ones that are being disrupted we didn't necessarily see it coming and there is a definite level of irony here as a generation of sort of neophiles we put ourselves in this position our constant drive to push the boundaries of what we have at our disposal is well documented the thing to remember is that in a sort of broad historical context this isn't a scary proposition this has happened before you know we're doing what we told ourselves we should always do which is iterate tweak realign and adapt so cast your mind back through history this is not new so what have we been good at I thought I'd talk a little bit about that rather than like the end of civilization as we know it what I'm seeing more and more of um and hearing more of is about the effort that people in leadership positions are putting into getting their teams so yes we've taken this discipline and it now sits under you and the best leaders are understanding that discipline they are spending time not just within with the leaders of that discipline but the people that are kind of at the calace um and and those teams are thriving uh a lot of this starts with the hiring process working to staff teams for tomorrow uh there is a lot of shortsightedness uh I talk a lot about this I've written a lot about this hiring for today versus what do I need in 12 months time or how can I invest in these types of people uh some of the best hires I've ever made have been like uh maybe tool naive but very very smart hire someone who is tool naive in 3 months they'll be doing that bit of their job fine but you're hiring their brain you're hiring their creative thinking uh and that is a that is a thing I think that's been that's been trending and every single time I've seen a business begin to list or there's been sort of disparity or upset within teams it is because there is team and skill IM balance as someone that's run product teams with you know my designer hat on hiring more senior designers than senior product people that is a challenge people who've got more experience will go you know what I don't know whether I really want to be led by this kind of individual who has less experience than me who doesn't let me have a voice uh communication amongst peers uh and admissions of fallibility there are more and more communities uh sprouting up I think since since forever actually maybe maybe yeah early 2020s there were loads of design and product communities lots of drinking now it's a bit more sensible uh and and people are being very honest and open with their communication they're sharing where their roles are not working they're sharing where they're having troubles with their teams and I think this this sort of collective problem solving and openness will only benefit us um moving forward teams themselves independently forging relationships so we can apply a structure to an organization but the thing I would encourage everyone to do is encourage your teams to work outside of that sounds kind of counterintuitive and maybe a little bit chaotic but I really want my B2B team talking to my b2c team uh I want my back office talking to my front office because if they're not then we're missing opportunities so what is next uh it is often hard to remember that where we are now is just an extrapolation of our Collective past where product exist today is a result of an amazing Fusion of skills and ideas from our own and other Industries and what we do next is really what counts making sure the people that we work with are clear on their roles their objectives and ideally have a career path uh in front of them and that will be crucial to success if you want to retain people for more than a year and a half show them that they have a future in your organization we do have a tricky job of bringing disperate disciplines together uh balancing business and customer objectives pandering to individuals and disciplines absolutely does not work and it's not sustainable it's a bit like getting up in the morning and doing emails before creative thinking it's actually super straightforward and it feels like it's rewarding but it isn't um you can't be a counselor to a team of 50 people and you can't be seen to be that person it's nice though it might be um The crucial bit is to do this detective work you know we put aside our biases really think about the people we're hiring really think about the skills that we're growing within our organizations and thinking about the future the '90s internet Revolution promised so much much and in many ways it it delivered and overd delivered but in this sort of weird uh technological porridge pot sort of way it's not stopping and we don't quite know how to stop it so our Collective job and it is within our Gras is to redress the balance for the people building the future and also those experiencing it thank you [Applause]