George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Today we talk about what's changed and what hasn't, with one of my very first managers. We looked at the dot-com era, the early days of web and user experience and how junior talent was viewed as magical rock stars back then. We also talk about what we've lost, mentorship, room for junior talent, real connections. We get into AI hype, women in tech, working in public institutions like libraries, and how to stay human in the middle of it all. I'm very excited to be joined by Jessica Want.

(00:27):

Jessica is a longtime product and UX leader. We worked together during the late '90s, early 2000s working on some of the very early versions of toysrus.com, travelandleisure.com, many more. It was an exciting time. Jessica's done it all, working at Barnes & Noble and Nook, Amazon Lab126, the New York Library, and she now leads enterprise data practices for the state of Maryland. She's also a brilliant writer and someone who has spent her career asking Who are we really designing for and who's being left out. You could check out her blog in the description. Please welcome, Jessica.

(01:03):

Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski.

(01:37):

Hey, Jess. Thanks so much for being here.

Jessica Want (01:40):

Thank you for having me on.

George Jagodzinski (01:41):

You and I, we started out our careers in the dot-com era, that late '90s, early 2000s. And now, we're old and grizzled, or at least I am. So I want to make sure we don't make this a get off my lawn kind of an episode, but I thought it would be fun since we both got our start there together and we've had long careers at this point, which is kind of crazy, is to talk about the trends as far as what's changed, what's not. A lot of things are the same just in different wrappers and different clothing now, and maybe we start with, what do you miss from that time?

Jessica Want (02:13):

I miss two things. One, I miss being young and being insulted and being a rock star because of my age and just because I knew about that newfangled internet and the World Wide Web, HTML whatever. I miss being able to actually make mistakes and be able to fix them pretty quickly. I think now, teens have grown so big and all of this technology is very convoluted and decentralized in a lot of ways that it's like even small mistakes look like big mistakes. I do miss just at that age being the person in the room who knew the most and being trusted by all the clients because of just how close we were to the work.

George Jagodzinski (02:59):

Yeah, we really were rock stars back then. I remember one time even the CEO gave us his office and they were bringing us in whatever lunches we wanted because they knew that we had this skill and the talent and the energy I guess at that point to solve some of the big problems that they had. Do we not see the younger generation like that now?

Jessica Want (03:21):

I think that especially now today, and I might have had a different opinion five years ago, but right now I think that it's a very scary time to be a young person in this industry. I think you're getting the constant message that you're replaceable, that we don't want entry level, that we don't want new people coming in, unless you can code, unless you can be whatever rock star means today, you're not worth the time and I think that, that's really dangerous.

(03:49):

I think first of all, AI is not the magic bullet that everybody says it is. I don't think I'm alone in that thought, but I also think that what we're doing is we're creating a generation of people whose ideas automatically are rejected. A generation of people who as obviously digital natives to the nth degree, but also just new minds and new ideas. We're kind of pushing them out and saying they don't matter. That there's some technology that can do better than them.

(04:17):

And I think it's really dangerous because I think we're just losing creativity and thought, and of course AI just builds upon itself and so it'll become an echo chamber after a while. And I regret not being able to lift up as many young people in that same way. Now, was it healthy for us to be that exalted and the cool kids in the room all the time? I don't think it was the best thing for our egos. Sort of being diminished and saying, "Okay, you're replaceable because we have technology." I think it also is really going to be a loss. We're going to have a generation of loss.

George Jagodzinski (04:51):

Yeah, there's probably a healthy balance in there somewhere, right? In that one thing I don't miss is working 100 hours a week and that was kind of a badge of honor back then, right?

Jessica Want (05:01):

Yes. I think that still happens though. If I can call it exploitation of sort of younger single people, I think it's still something, or maybe we're pushing it out to us older folks to a certain degree. I do miss being able to have a say over what we were building. I miss people pulling us into the room, coming into that CEO's room. I learned a lot. I also learned a lot about how to deal with things politically from the older people in the room.

(05:31):

So while we were the knowledge base of the technology and what could happen and maybe had great ideas about UX and pushing the envelope, I also think because we had, I'll call it a lot of power, there were also the folks in the room who'd been around for a while who were like, "Okay, this is how you actually communicate with people and this is how you present yourself."

(05:55):

I was a bit more forceful than I've learned over the years I should be. My ideas are always right, of course, and I know that. But we had the opportunity to make those mistakes to be pulled in and reined in and mentored. I also think there was something very scary about it too, which was the guy we worked for sold his old business based on the stuff that we knew and based on what we could do.

(06:22):

And so the level of responsibility, at some point, I remember it hitting me. At some point, I got to see how much the contracts were and we were doing estimates and things like that, and I was like, "Oh, we should definitely get this right." Because he's kind of making promises and bank on us. I do think it was also a very risky time because the dot-com boom was there. It was a thing that was happening. We were somewhat shielded from it. I was lucky. I kind of found my little niches. It just wasn't something that impacted me beyond watching the news and seeing it impact other people.

George Jagodzinski (07:01):

Well, it's interesting as today people are looking at the AI bubble. I feel like there's a very similar fear that's happening right now. I feel like something that helped you and me at that point is it was such a focus on user experience and it was really close to the actual users. And so you're building something that matters to a human versus something that's just fluff. And I'm curious how you've seen that evolve, that focus on user experience.

(07:26):

I don't know. From my perspective, I remember we just have to justify user experience, like, "Oh, we'll save time on training and we'll save the number of clicks." We'd have to count the number of clicks that you'd save. And now, I feel like it's just a given that user experience should be a focus and it should be good. Yet at the same time, I feel like so many people are so disconnected from the users and the front end workers that there's worse user experience now for some reason. I'm curious how you've seen that progress.

Jessica Want (07:54):

So for a while, my direct experience with it coming into the forefront was when I was working at Barnes & Noble, I started there as an IA and then I became a product manager. They could quantify what a good user experience was, so they had a cost per call for their customer support. And when we built better interfaces, the cost per call would both go down and the calls would go down.

(08:19):

And so there was this kind of very obvious metric that helped us prove that it was really important, and that was both the website as well as the devices and whatnot. What I've always found tricky is when people lean on frameworks like agile became popular around that same time, didn't actually take into account user experience. It's really only for engineering, and then some user experience frameworks and methodologies are backed into agile. And so there was this real challenge that happened. When you had this framework of we want to be dynamic and we want to fix problems and we want to be able to go to market faster, and all of this where user experience became a cost.

(09:04):

I think you have other frameworks like design thinking that stress empathy and stress like who the user is and really solving problems where you get more into being helpful and opening up these interfaces to be used by many, many people and showing the advantages of being accepted by a larger user base. But I think that there's always a tension there, and I think that tension really became very, very explicit when more companies try to just use the agile framework in its purest form because there is no room for UX there. There really isn't.

(09:37):

You can get your business requirements and you can do all of the ceremonies you want to do, but you had this group of people who'd be raising their hands and saying, "But what about, but what about?" And so I think that there's a tension that was established where UX was pushed to the background because it just seemed like cost and too slow.

George Jagodzinski (09:54):

Interesting. Yeah. With that push with agile, your measurement of success is how many points are you completing, how much stuff are you getting done. Whereas your Barnes & Noble example is great. It's very much your measurement of success is how are you improving the operator's lives, the human at the center of it, and I feel like that's happening a lot with AI right now. And this happens with all technology is you get confused by things and distracted from what are the things that are actually measuring success. I don't know, have you found any secrets in there and how to actually narrow in on that?

Jessica Want (10:30):

Well, I think AI is. There's so many billions of dollars going into it that success just becomes use at all. Obviously, your big main companies that are investing so much in it. That the bubble there is the juice worth the squeeze. I don't know. The challenge is that everybody has this faith that AI is going to get better the more that it's used. We know that there's a number of challenges. We know that AI is built on a corpus that is already skewed in one direction. Mostly, it does not take into consideration global user bases. We know that it is accommodating in a lot of ways. It aims to please.

(11:11):

I always worry when there's that much force being put behind something. And when I see these companies forcing their engineers to use AI, don't get me wrong, I find AI to be very, very helpful. I think you have to be skilled to use it. I think that you already have to be an expert in the thing that you're using AI for, whether that's coding. Right now, I write policy and so I will use AI to look up statutes and to verify and to make sure my citations are correct, but I'm already an expert in it. I can tell if it's gone down the wrong rabbit hole for the wrong citation or it's looking at one domain versus another domain.

(11:51):

What people are seeing is urgency around it because of the dollars invested. Does it make life easier? Absolutely. Do I save myself hours of looking through executive orders and statutes when creating digital policy? For sure, it would take me a very, very long time to find the exact thing that I'm looking for, but it's just a tool.

(12:13):

I don't think it's a problem that you need to be an expert. I think the problem comes in when we stop making experts out of people, which is just to get back to the earlier point of not bringing up younger generations into this, we're going to lose that expertise. At some point, I hope we're going to retire. I mean, not being soon, but I want there to be younger generations who are experts who can use these tools mindfully.

George Jagodzinski (12:38):

You just reminded me that the year that we ruined Christmas with toysrus.com, when it hit the logistics and they took all the orders and they couldn't deliver them. But that phrase of making experts out of people, that is a worrying point right there, huh? We've run a remote company forever. I think it's over 20 years now at this point. We don't really have junior folks on our team. You and I, We were literally locked in rooms with people where we got so much mentorship. I wonder how we find that again for the younger generation.

Jessica Want (13:11):

You have to be really proactive about it. I think especially in remote culture, which by the way, I'm a big fan of remote culture. I am a mom these days. It gives me the flexibility to be able to do that, come back to work, whatever. But I think that as people managers, number one, I think it's important that you hire with that age diversity, all kinds of diversity, obviously, but I think it's important to hire younger people.

(13:36):

One thing that I say a lot is I benefited from somebody just walking past my desk and saying, "Oh, Jess, I'm on my way to such and such meeting. Just come in, don't say anything. Just sit and listen. I want you to understand, maybe take some notes, but I want you to see the dynamics in the room or I want you to understand how we're talking about this particular product or whatever it is, but don't say anything. You're just there to observe."

(14:01):

That serendipitous moment of passing by my desk or seeing each other in the hall on the way from here to there is the thing that we've lost and I benefited from hundreds of interactions like that. Or, "Oh, I'm just getting out of this meeting. Let me tell you about it." Because I'm just seeing you in the hallway and understanding it and then understanding it within the context of the larger organization and how that might play itself out in the work I'm doing or not even the work that I'm doing. We've lost all of that in this kind of culture.

(14:29):

So I think as people managers, as somebody, even if you're not a people manager, if you're somebody who's interested in bringing up that next generation, you have to reach out and you have to say just, "Oh, by the way, I had this conversation," and using all of your tools, but you're not going to be reminded of it. Because you're going to be heads down. In the next thing, you're trying to land the client, you're trying to seal, go through the last sprint, whatever it is, that moment, not a lot of people have an awareness of opening that door and it's not intentional. I don't think it's nefarious. It's just you're not there. You have to be very proactive to create those moments and remember these people.

George Jagodzinski (15:10):

Absolutely. And building on the concept of being in person and present and connected, you did a pretty strong stint in the library system. I mean, that's plugged into the community, right? What did you learn through that journey?

Jessica Want (15:25):

So much. I think before the library, I had made a commitment to myself that I wanted to work in the public sector or public adjacent sectors, libraries and nonprofit. I mean, it's a public sector, but I wanted to get closer to community and I wanted to solve real problems.

(15:43):

The library, especially near public library is a complex organism. It has a research side, it has a branch side where you do your summary reads or your story times and then it has scholars on the other side who are coming in. They could be journalists or they could be just the one of five people in their field coming in and using the resources, and figuring out when you're a community organization, how do you balance all that? How do you do story time for kids and also the number one cartographer in the entire world wants to use your resources? How do we do that? Being able to understand, especially from a user interface and not to play too much into any one group to make sure that everything's understandable and readable.

(16:25):

It was also really interesting, because as broad as that community is, the focal point was still New Yorkers to a large degree, and so how do you take into consideration that unique sector as well? Being able to have a reading happen offline in the subway while you're also trying to create a national product with different library systems. The standard of accessibility that the library needs when the user group is that broad is much, much higher than anywhere else that I've worked.

(16:58):

Even Amazon, that's supposedly for everybody, but the standard of accessibility when you're talking about kids, teenagers coming into the library versus home bound seniors who are trying to read some books, and then language, 10 languages that you have to be able to communicate to people in and so on and so forth. So the accessibility requirements at the library were a higher standard than I'd ever dealt with before, and I'm not even doing it justice right now, but we wanted to be hired in WCAG. It was far beyond a checkbox.

George Jagodzinski (17:30):

Yeah. Well beyond user experience and well beyond just putting the human first and foremost. It's all of the humans that you need to think about. Right?

Jessica Want (17:40):

Exactly. One of the interesting projects that we worked on to that end, there was this push to get stories, COVID stories from New Yorkers because New York was obviously very much impacted at the time, how to deal with that, how to deal with data that might creep into HIPAA areas because I'm talking about my own health or my family member's health.

(17:59):

And we had one project where we wanted people to use the website to record their stories. One thing that one of my product managers mentioned was actually the majority of people who were being impacted in that moment were elderly people who weren't going to go on a website and weren't going to press record, but they were going to call. They did feel more comfortable picking up a phone.

(18:19):

And so we basically worked our way out of a project. I mean, not purposefully. We did create a web interface, but we realized that the majority of the stories that we were trying to capture were probably best served from a call center. When you talk about centering the user, you don't always have the solution or you find out that the solution that you can provide might not be the best one, and so you have to go adjacent to you and say, "Maybe it's a call center, not a web interface, not an app, not whatever." It's honest, right? It's honest, and because you're working in the public sector, you're not working yourself out of a job, but you really are trying to center whoever that human is.

George Jagodzinski (18:56):

Yeah. I mean, you're saving yourself a lot of money and a lot of time doing that. I enjoy working myself out of a job and telling someone, "Hey, we could make a lot of money building this thing for you, but it's probably not the right thing for you to do right now." And it's a balance for sure.

(19:12):

One thing I was also thinking about the journey from beginning your career to where we are now is women in tech. And as a dad of a daughter, my optimistic hope is that it's a positive trend that's just always getting better. You and I talked about this that I always think about you because it was the very first time I experienced this moment where you were my manager, you were the senior, you were in charge, and when we would go to talk to people, they would just look at me and they wouldn't even really look at you, and it was really shocking to me, because I was young and I was new, and I'm curious how you've seen that evolve over the years. And where are we at now?

Jessica Want (19:52):

It's so interesting. So those moments for me, I felt like I was shouting. I felt like I had to jump up and down in those moments, and I was like, "He doesn't know the answer to this." In those early years in particular, those moments, it was a lot of hurt feelings. I actually felt less that. It's real. You're disregarded in that way and you're not ...

(20:13):

Even if you're the one whose voice is being used to answer a question, you're not even being looked at. It's hard to get settled with that, and I think that as a woman in tech, there's multiple ways you try and deal with it. For a while, I became very stern and very argumentative because it was a lot of ... There's a vulnerability in that moment where you had this junior person who has confidence. You were very confident at the time, and I think appropriately so who is the one being talked to. And so you're like, "Oh wait."

(20:44):

So it was really hard to process and to really understand was going on, and so I became more argumentative in that as my first reaction in that those first early moments. As I had gotten older, I think that there are just scrapes and bruises that are going to happen. I think it's a field that is still really hard for me to break through. I think even when we do, they're in mostly sort of softer roles. You have to learn how to navigate that.

(21:13):

At some point, I used that sort of somebody is not looking at me for the answer to my advantage because you and I worked well together. We were buddies. It was fine. And I've had relationships like that throughout my career, and so that person would see it. I went from wanting to fight it and jumping up and down to leaning ... I don't like the phrase leaning in, but to just understanding it and knowing that my one experience wasn't going to change anything. And so if I could create the relationships and the strength of relationships within the room, then I would have that person ask that person to point back at me. Or to just say the thing that needed to be said.

(21:50):

Then I started looking for older women in the room who'd been through this. I started looking for women technologists. I started to seek out mentorship and I started to seek out from other people. I get it. I'm going to have to prove myself every room that I step in. Even if I've been in the same room with the same dudes over and over again, I'm going to still have to prove myself even if I know the most. I have to not let that gap get to me. How do I do that?

(22:14):

And so in creating those other relationships, those mentorship relationships, it started to open up different doors where even when I started interviewing for companies to work for, I was sensing their kind of company culture about how they would speak to minorities in the room, to women in the room, to people.

(22:34):

I have a great boss right now, and I watched her just ninja her way through backlash in a meeting that was just ... I'm still learning. That was amazing. She didn't fight against it. She kind of just went with what the negative sort of response and just, "So tell me more. So tell me more. Okay, I understand what you're saying, I do see that." And she worked the other person into just becoming more open. They still disagree, but their openness to the conversation changed, and I think that was important. You have to look for the people you can learn from all the time, all the time. Hopefully you will accept defenses as you get older, but that was the hardest lesson. It wasn't the scrimmage and the bruises, it was how I was going to conduct myself in the face of that.

George Jagodzinski (23:20):

And it also sounds like you've self-selected out a lot of places, so you're gravitating towards places that have a better culture and an environment. And if anyone out there is running a company, then if you want great diverse talent, you're going to have to foster a culture, otherwise they're going to go elsewhere, right?

Jessica Want (23:37):

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And there's a community of people who want to do that for each other, and so you have the opportunity. Once you let one of us in, we bring talent with us as well, and so I think that's really useful.

George Jagodzinski (23:51):

Jess, we started out talking about things we missed from the early days of the dot-com and all that. And along the way, we talked about some of the worries for the younger generation and some ups and downs, so maybe we finish on some optimism. What are you most excited about or optimistic about right now?

Jessica Want (24:08):

I am optimistic that there is a space for women in technology, more minorities in technology. I think the idea of DEI and building for people who are actually using this, thinking about the elderly, thinking about how interfaces are really being consumed by people.

(24:27):

I'm interested in the fact that we're having more conversations about this, where we're talking about mental health and technology. We're really broadening the scope of the way we speak about these things, and I think we're really taking into consideration how people are using this stuff and just a wider range of people.

(24:45):

Even with backlash or no backlash, the more we talk about this stuff, I think it really, really helps more people come into this. More people use these products. More people really understand their own technology world and what it can and can't do, and I think that it's actually, we're in a really, really wonderful moment, even if there is some negativity there of people being able to take accountability for their own interaction. And I think the field is actually broadening in a lot of ways that we haven't seen the scope of work, is broadening the scope of the communities that we're trying to bring into technology is broadening and I'm actually really excited for that. Yeah.

George Jagodzinski (25:23):

Yeah, I am too. Our whole mantra is human first, and that applies to multiple areas. One is just the humans who are using the software. I think we can get distracted by the technology and the trends and the marketing buzzwords, but then it's also the humans building the software. Are we listening to those teams and helping them through? And then of course, there's just the broader human.

(25:47):

I think everyone got twisted around technology enough that everyone is getting untwisted from it I think. I think on a whole that there's more of like, "Hey, what are we actually doing here?" You're seeing more people say that, whereas before, I think you could see people just using buzzwords and lingo about technology all day long and forgetting what the heck that you're even doing here, right?

Jessica Want (26:11):

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think what I really appreciate about this AI moment is that we're going to keep having moments like this that make us question the ground we're standing on. And I think whatever the next ... I mean, it's going to be 5, 10 years away, whatever the next thing is, supercomputers or what have you. There will be something that makes you question so much of this, but it's all of us. Everybody is questioning it, and so the conversation's really broad and I think it's really useful.

George Jagodzinski (26:38):

Yeah, it's a catalyst to what's next, which is hopefully better. So just final question, I always like to end on this one, which is, throughout your career and personal life, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Jessica Want (26:49):

As you make your way up throughout your career, the next job you have isn't just more of the last job. So when you move from product manager to senior product manager, it's not just more. It is actually different, and you have to grow into that. When you move from senior product manager into director of product, it's an entirely different career. It's not just more and bigger. You have to take the time to understand who you are in those different roles and not assume it's just more, it is different. And what does different mean? It's such simple advice and it almost seems obvious when you say it, but really, really acknowledging that as you move through your career, it's a different job. The next one is a different job.

George Jagodzinski (27:34):

That's great advice. I've seen too many people go up in the same thing and then regret that decision because they've lost touch with all the things that you to love to do, right? So I think that's fantastic advice.

Jessica Want (27:44):

Exactly. Or try and stay the same, right? Try and keep their hands in the development of the product instead of the strategy of the product, because they need to come out of that former role a bit more.

George Jagodzinski (27:56):

Yeah. Well, Jess, this was fantastic. I really enjoyed catching up with you. I really appreciate you being there.

Jessica Want (28:01):

Yep. Nice to see you.

George Jagodzinski (28:05):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications.

(28:19):

If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com, or reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment is always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.