Can treating a business like a product revolutionise your approach to management and strategy? Join us as we sit down with Jonty Sharples, an experienced product and strategy consultant, who discusses product management and business design evolution. Listen to his reflections on career disruption and the significant impact of current economic trends, including job losses in the tech industry and the potential game-changing influence of AI.
Featured Links: Follow Jonty on LinkedIn and X | Design Leaders Community | 'Six things we learned at the Pendomonium + #mtpcon roadshow London 2024' feature by Louron Pratt
Episode transcript
Randy Silver: 0:00
Hey everyone, randy here with another chat that Lily and I had at Mind the Product and Pendo's Roadshow in London. Today we're talking with product and strategy consultant Jonty Sharples. I'm gonna be honest, we taped this one at the end of a long day and it gets a bit philosophical. Thanks to Jonty for being up for it. You know how Douglas Adams described Marvin the Paranoid Android as having a brain the size of a planet. It felt like we were challenging Jonty with a brain the size of the planet, just throwing questions at him that made him pause and then laugh and then go really deep into why the product job can be so challenging and what we can do to be better at it. So let's get philosophical now.
Lily Smith : 0:44
So let's get philosophical now. The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:56
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice.
Lily Smith : 1:09
Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities. Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind the Product supports over 200 product type meetups from New York to Barcelona.
Randy Silver: 1:20
There's probably one near you. Jonti, thank you so much for joining us live and in person from London. How are you doing?
Jonty Sharples: 1:31
I am very good. It's been a super day. Thank you for having me.
Randy Silver: 1:34
Fantastic. So people here on stage well, they saw you on stage and they got a proper introduction, so can you give us a little bit of an intro? What is it that you actually do? Sorry, that's a lead-in question. There's a reason for that, and how did you get into this world of product-related stuff?
Jonty Sharples: 1:54
Well, I've been doing this kind of thing adjacent for lots and lots of years, more recently last couple of years, working a lot more with companies on a sort of business design level, I suppose. So going into organizations and talking to them about vision and objectives and team structure and treating themselves a bit more like products rather than businesses, and then using the various sort of tools and processes that we are familiar with in product design to help them succeed.
Randy Silver: 2:26
And how did you get into this world in the first place?
Jonty Sharples: 2:29
This one, or like how did I begin? What's your origin story? My own, All right, okay. So I started out as a print designer in the late 90s and then started playing around with the internet like building things for the internet, putting things on CD-ROMs. Remember that.
Jonty Sharples: 2:47
And, yeah, it just kind of went from there, I think early 2000s started getting into accessibility in quite a big way, realized that most of what we were producing as designers for the internet was just for designers and it wasn't. Do you know what I mean? Sorry, I lived through that era, yeah, and so I think that was a real turning point and started to think about like how people sort of digest content and how people want to look at things, and that sort of was a sort of formative moment for me. And then I went and did all sorts of stuff. So I worked in all sorts of different sectors, building all sorts of different things and then slowly but surely getting into building teams.
Randy Silver: 3:30
So we're of a certain vintage, as evidenced by the CD-ROMs and the designing for designers thing. The world is changing. The way we work is changing. Product managers are always complaining about the world. Well, a lot of people are going through a recession for the first time and see the curve does not always go up and to the right, but we've been here before, we've seen this. Well, we've seen this a couple of times anyway. What's going on? How is the way we work changing and where are we going with this?
Jonty Sharples: 4:05
Yeah, I think it's a lot more fluid, which is good and bad. I think where we in inverted commas came from, there was a lot more structure. You were a certain thing and you kind of stayed that thing because those were the roles that were higher. Now it's well, you do this and you do this and you do this and you work with these kinds of people. And we've broken out of silos in quite a big way over the years and we were so used to working in silos.
Jonty Sharples: 4:34
You know, we did a thing, handed it to someone else, they did the thing, handed it somewhere else, and so there is this sort of level of positivity to change, but it's also impacted by the fact that people don't really like change.
Jonty Sharples: 4:48
As a generations of neophiles, we like new stuff but actually we're not that receptive to it when someone puts it in front of you. So I think that the challenge these days is very much people have set out and created a career for themselves and they have a sort of loose career path and they believe that these are the things they should do in order to accomplish their role and to go on a certain journey, and that has been disrupted and that's difficult for people to get their heads around. The thing that is really tricky is that we haven't necessarily disrupted it. I mean, in my talk I was sort of alluding to the fact that the original disruptors in the sort of mid-2000s are now running the planet and they are looking at the things that are going to disrupt them. And it's not startups really Well, it kind of is, but it's AI. What's the thing that's going to sit on top of them and sort of potentially put them out of business?
Lily Smith : 5:51
You've covered a lot there isn't there there's a lot to unpack in everything that you've said, but I just want to touch on the, I guess, the sort of the human element of this. And you know, we are in a situation at the moment where we're seeing lots of people losing their jobs in tech companies, particularly in product people losing their jobs in tech companies, particularly in products, but across engineering, design, ux, testing, in very large organizations where people probably felt very safe. So how should we be feeling about all of these shifts in these very large organizations where we did think things were safe and in these roles where we thought, you know, the interest in tech and the growth in this area was such a safe bet?
Jonty Sharples: 6:34
I mean this is highly uninformed, but this is. But my feeling is, if you, we look at our parents generation and then their parents generation, job for life yeah, that was that was how that worked and then, over time, job for 10 years and then for us, I suppose, at the turn of the century, um, you know, five, six years, and that it's got shorter, shorter and shorter, and we as um I suppose employees and actually as employers have less control over that now. So what's the average tenure? 18 months, and actually, and actually, that I suppose in many ways correlates to innovation and evolution of technology. So, once again, we're back to this point of you don't really have that much control over it, unless you make yourself completely essential to operations and the success of an organization. Then, yeah, that's the cycle. We're just getting closer and closer, and the cycles are getting closer together, and I think we have a lot less control over our employment. I think that's probably what we're up to.
Randy Silver: 7:41
And we exist in a world of, in the product development world, where the mean time it takes to become useful in a company, when you've just joined, to get context, to understand what's going on before, to understand the customers, to understand the niche and then be able to make informed decisions. I mean it's a minimum of six months in lots of places, and then, if you're only around another year, are you giving value? Is the company getting value? Is this a sustainable model?
Jonty Sharples: 8:10
I think. No, I don't think it is. But I think we're learning. We, collectively, are learning what that kind of number is, what that sweet spot is, and it's not straightforward Because, to your point, you know, if you're joining like a massive SaaS organization, you're probably only going to be exposed to this much, this kind of slice of it. But what you really want is to be able to see all of it. And you do that.
Jonty Sharples: 8:39
I read a book years ago and it was like spend six months walking the floor. That's what you need to do. You need to meet everyone and hear all the stories, and I think that previous, previous job. I said well, what do you want me to do for the first month? It was like well, the first two weeks, you know, just get your feet under the desk. Ok, two weeks, that's fine, but it's not a huge amount of time and we are getting used to learning as we go and in much the same way. You know, we build and we iterate, so it's almost like we sort of need to dog food, the thing that we have been sort of shouting about for so long. We need to move fast, we need to move at this kind of pace, we need to use these kinds of people and these kind of techniques. And all of a sudden, chickens have come home to roost, a little bit Like live and die by the process, and suddenly you are part of the process.
Lily Smith : 9:31
I think it's a really good point that you made and it's interesting. Yeah, I do not me for those who are just listening.
Lily Smith : 9:40
Uh, randy just gave me a very shocked face. You know, having worked in lots of small startups early stage, like I've definitely feel like one of the skills that I've gained is starting in a business, because I've had to do it so many times. You know what can people in the current situation do if they find themselves potentially at risk or out of work, like how can they think differently about themselves and about their work in order to retain an element of excitement about the job? Because I think that's one of the things that I see, which is, you know, really difficult for people who have been hit with a redundancy Like it's so hard, I think, to stay positive and to stay excited.
Jonty Sharples: 10:29
Wow, that's a big one Full career advice. I think you make a really valid and interesting point. The challenge, I think, for lots of people is certainly if they're being made redundant in a sort of soft-ish way, as in thanks so much, here's three months. Have some gardening, leave that softer exit. You know, it's never nice, but that softer exit can sometimes lead to a level of complacency where it's like well, three months, I'm really sorry, but you don't have three months, like once that meeting is finished.
Jonty Sharples: 11:05
Then you reach out to your network, and I know everyone is doing it, but that's the thing. You reach out to your network and I know everyone is doing it, but that's the thing. You reach out to your network. The second thing I would say and definitely take this with a pinch of salt is find your specialism. I'm very fortunate in that I have like a couple of niches that are sort of growing areas of interest, and if you can find your niche and then go and find the people that are operating those businesses, that's also helpful.
Jonty Sharples: 11:37
And as someone who has had a career almost as a generalist, that was a very strange position to find myself in. It's like oh, I've got to commit to this, I've got to talk about this. This is is who I am, this is how I identify, and that is really tricky, especially if you have been doing this and this and this and working in all these different types of sectors, looking for work over the last two years and seeing the kinds of roles. It's fintech, they're still hiring AI, maybe a bit less on the sort of blockchain-y side of things, but those are the trifecta, I suppose, of where the work is. But equally, I would say to people maybe don't you know, sacrifice your principles, like, do stay true to yourself, because one of the most demoralizing things is joining an organization and going oh my god, why am I doing this? I don't actually enjoy my job anymore and, yeah, that's super tough, really tough.
Randy Silver: 12:36
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Lily Smith : 12:42
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Randy Silver: 12:47
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Randy Silver: 13:25
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Lily Smith : 13:31
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Randy Silver: 13:43
Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast. From the other side, there are people who do enjoy their job, or enjoy the idea of what they think their job should be. Then they join a company, find out that's not what the company actually wanted and then find themselves laid off at a certain point In terms of branding yourself, in terms of the skills that you're going to need to survive.
Randy Silver: 14:11
We've gone through lots of different changes. There was an agile way of working. There was people then trying to embrace a Spotify model, trying to embrace an extreme programming model, and this model and that model Is there something that people should be optimizing for and saying, no, I can do a model, or is there something more general? That people should be preparing themselves for to be able to survive through these changes.
Jonty Sharples: 14:38
I think there is something to being a person that can bring people together around a problem. It's something I love doing, whether I'm full-time in a business or consulting in a business, bringing disciplines together and because you just get the best when people are collaborating. If you want a superpower, your superpower should be bringing the people into the room that maybe don't want to collaborate or have a hard time collaborating, because more often than not, they're the ones with the best ideas. So it's learning to work with people on lots of different levels, using lots of different tools, lots of different approaches. It sounds like a really kind of like soft skill kind of approach. It's not very process driven, but actually you can spot those people in a business because they get stuff done and they get the best out of people and they're the ones that kind of get retained.
Jonty Sharples: 15:28
I think that's probably the best advice I can give. It's not read these books, you books. Go and watch these TED talks. It's just be good at communicating. We touched on this a little bit earlier. That's the future. Be an amazing communicator with people in and outside of a business, because that's how you learn.
Randy Silver: 15:49
That's the kind of thing that AI is not going to replace. People are still going to need to be able to communicate with each other. Yeah, how do you get good at it? What are the types of things that are critical skills in this space?
Jonty Sharples: 16:02
Reading, read a lot, read other people's work. I think that's really important. So I talk a lot about sort of empathy and understanding other people's sort of day-to-day challenges. That's really important because there's no point in talking to, you know, a head of engineering if you don't understand what their pain points are. I think that's almost completely critical to anyone's job. Completely critical to anyone's job. Yeah, I would say that's probably the most important thing you can do is build out. You get to a certain point in your career where you kind of stop being a T-shape You're familiar with T-shapes, so empathy along the top, craft skill down the bottom and you become what's being classed as a broken comb. So got broad, weird empathy, lots of experience in lots of different sectors and then various different broken. Is it tines on a comb? I think it's teeth. Is it teeth?
Jonty Sharples: 17:02
yes, it's tines on a fork and teeth on a comb right so, yeah, just um, yeah, broken teeth, lots of broken teeth, um, but I think that is really, really you can't get that, you can't buy that. That's just experience and um, I love meeting people who and I love hiring people who maybe don't have the technological skill set or the tool skill set, but are really smart. You know, I've I've hired some incredible UX researchers in the past who have come from very strange backgrounds but are just whip smart and dogmatic and, yeah, just get amazing results. You can learn a tool in three months, guaranteed like you can go from meh to getting it if you're in the right environment, if you're working with the right people. But you, you cannot get life experience and you can't get a sort of creative mind and critical thinking, not in three months and what about the other sort of like big change that we've had recently in how we work?
Lily Smith : 18:06
you know, with covid, everyone went remote, and now people are doing either, you know, still doing remote, or a combination of that classic hybrid term, and some people. I read the other day about a company who said we've made everyone come into the office four days a week but we've gone to a four-day week, which I thought was great. Um, that's a new one that I've heard, though. So you know, how is that impacting how everyone is feeling about their work and and how companies and organizations are working?
Jonty Sharples: 18:39
I feel really sorry for people just starting out. I really do, because I had the best time going into offices when I was in my 20s because it was kind of fun, Like the work was hard but everyone, yeah, hung out a lot more. So the culture was it was quite a low-hanging fruit really. You know, because in London, in whatever year it was, All the years of the year, yeah, Everyone just drank Early days of the internet.
Jonty Sharples: 19:12
Yeah, Everyone just drank and that was, as I said, low-hanging fruit. From a cultural perspective, I think people are being more inventive with how to grow culture and bring people together in this age of remoteness. I worked for an amazing startup called Where's my Transport a few years ago. Hundreds of people distributed all over the world, multiple time zones, and there was a wonderful global culture of you know, people trying to achieve something meaningful. I think that is really helpful. You know you're not selling junk food to kids. Sorry for anyone doing that, but it's much easier to build a culture around purpose. So that is a real positive. You can be somewhere where there is purpose to your work.
Jonty Sharples: 20:01
But it is super hard, I think, for anyone sort of more mature and in their sort of second, third phase of work. We feel the benefits because we have, you know, usually home commitments. That's quite common and actually the thing that COVID did was make us realize that. Oh, actually I am quite good working at 10 o'clock at night when everyone's in bed, or I do quite like getting up early in the morning and having a solid amount of time, or do you know what? That two and a half hours that it would take me on a bad day to get into the office was just burnt time even if I had my laptop out. That all of these economies, I suppose, have had an impact on the way we work and the way we work with other people you've touched on a lot of the positives, but there are some negatives as well.
Lily Smith : 20:51
Oh yeah, for example, not having any commute time to switch gears from work mode to home mode, if you like. How do you see that affecting people and that changing the way that we work as well? You know, if we are then making time to work in the evening, like are we just all gonna end up burning ourselves out as well?
Jonty Sharples: 21:16
I think that it's not great, because lots of people are not very good at self-management when it it comes to that kind of thing. Okay, I don't need to get on a train at seven o'clock in the morning. I'm'm going to get up at half past seven, so that's gone. You made a kind of life choice to stay in bed until half past seven in the morning and I think a lot of people are suffering because they're not taking chunks out of their day. Businesses are getting better at. You must take an hour for lunch, but if you're looking at your day going well, you know, know these meetings need to happen and this work needs to get done, and actually I'd quite like to finish work at five.
Jonty Sharples: 22:01
The flexibility we've kind of granted ourselves, uh is very much double-edged sword, uh, and I think there needs to be more support for people who are, you know, basically working alone and that's really tough. So it goes back to my point about building a strong and supportive culture that people can identify with and can buy into, and whatever your personality type, there is something there to support you. I think it's really crucial now that businesses take well-being very, very seriously, because there's only so much kind of duty of care you can do when people aren't in an office. You can't see how people are behaving on a sort of fundamental level.
Randy Silver: 22:38
Jonty, we're getting to the end of this interview. This has been really fascinating. I was at an event the other week where someone was talking about they realized that they weren't getting the most out of their developers because they were not giving them the time they needed to do the work. So they decided their definition of a productive day for a developer had to be that included two two-hour periods that were uninterrupted, where they could just do their work and sit down and code or think or do whatever, and a minimum of an hour lunch break. And I thought that was great. But why just for developers? Why not say a minimum of a couple hours of thinking time for a product manager? Whatever time of design? You need things like that.
Randy Silver: 23:19
But what I did like about it is that they were very deliberate in their approach and they thought about it. And what you just talked about was being deliberate. If product people were anyone on a product team, we're often in middle management type positions and we think about it that way and we feel powerless. But we are leaders of other people. Regardless of how we feel about it, there are other people who are looking up to all of us. What's a practical thing that we can do to be more deliberate to create this culture. What's some piece of advice you'd give to people about that?
Jonty Sharples: 23:50
Find patterns of work that work. I've worked in places where meeting free Tuesday really sorry, no meetings. The world is falling apart. You don't sound sorry Really, but what divides teams or businesses is exceptional treatment. So you know, if I'm a UX practitioner or product designer or whatever and I see engineers getting oh so hang on a minute they get to have a really long lunch on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays and I can't speak to them for these reasons and that's holding my work up. That's not ideal. So, fundamentally, you need to find things that work for everyone. Not everyone's going to be happy, but we need to be able to sort of compartmentalize and support people in that way, you know, to find those work patterns that make sense. You know, do you need more than five hours in a day for meetings? Really? Probably not, Probably not.
Jonty Sharples: 24:55
I remember working in a sort of digital advertising company around 2012. And I was sat in a meeting with the CTO. We looked around the room. There's like 25 people in there, Right, how much is this costing? I think just get rid of the cost side of things, but how much brain space is this taking up? You know how many people are not going to be contributing and don't need to be in here. How many people would be much happier with asynchronous follow-up and? And those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking.
Lily Smith : 25:29
Showing up is important, but it's not essential as randy said, we've almost run out of time, but I have one more question for you okay what advice have you had in your product career which really shifted the way that you think in a really positive way?
Jonty Sharples: 25:45
shut up and listen best advice I've ever had did you notice that I didn't say anything? Just just listened um, yeah, all the gravitas are here. I think it's yeah. That as a as a piece of advice is just you know, if you join, you talk about. You know you've joined lots of companies, you've started lots of companies. It's the best thing just sit and listen to people. You gather so much insight just by almost being passive and letting information into the wash av thank you so much for joining us on the podcast it's been such a pleasure.
Lily Smith : 26:34
The product experience hosts are me lily sm host by night and chief product officer by day.
Randy Silver: 26:41
And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith : 26:50
Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver: 26:54
And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track.
