#5 Design culture in an age of change

(00:01) Danny

Chris, we did it, we’re here. It’s so good to see you. It has been a long time, hasn’t it? I’m gonna get into that. But I wanna just, for people that don’t know you, I wrote a little thing. It feels like I need to do that because just so that people understand that when you’re talking, they understand from what experience you might be drawing on. So I wrote down here that you started out in design, you…

(00:23) Chris Compston

Thank

(00:28) Danny

moved from graphic to UX roles and into product design leadership. And then you’ve shifted from consulting, working on strategy and agile delivery for lots of big brands. And then over time, you start to specialize in product ops. And I’m really going to have to talk to you about what that means. Holding senior roles with places like Farfetch and Bumble, and then you sort of focusing on scaling big high performance teams. Is that?

(00:45) Chris Compston

Thank

(00:54) Danny

Is that the sort of a victory of your career so far?

(00:57) Chris Compston

Yeah,

I would say so. I was actually chatting on a podcast yesterday about this as well. I remember my first graphic design role and I always was more in

engaged with and I guess I got a thrill from the operational side of even that role rather than the work that I was doing is like how can we automate things? How can I enable other people to do even better work? So I remember, you know, it 20 years ago now that I started to do that kind of thing and I feel like I’m doing similar work now but just at a much higher level and a much broader scale.

(01:26) Danny

and

Why does that interest you? What is it that you just thought, like, I like that aspect of it? Because there’s so many sides to design. You could have been really into colors and fonts and logos, but you’ve drawn to that side of it. Why do you think that is?

(01:47) Chris Compston

Yeah, I mean, I used to be like that. That used to be my thing. I mean, I came out of university not really knowing what direction to go in and landed a graphic design job and really enjoyed the more visual aspect of graphic design.

(02:02) Danny

Yeah.

(02:02) Chris Compston

I wasn’t working at the hip new agency based Central London. I worked at a women’s fashion store that don’t think is around anymore. And I worked for a big paint company. I wasn’t doing the real high-end creative work. I tried to make it as creative as possible. I suppose I realized over time that I moved from graphic design into UX design because…

(02:21) Danny

Yeah.

(02:27) Chris Compston

I wasn’t able to push as many boundaries as I wanted to in graphic design and I was like, okay, so how might I design websites? That’s all I wanted to do. And I ended up doing UX design, which I didn’t know what it was at the time. I had no idea, it just landed a role. But even then, I really enjoyed the, how do we make things rather than the things that we were making and the things that we’re putting out into the world. know, of course I understood

(02:31) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(02:54) Chris Compston

We were trying to build things really well for customers that they enjoyed using that maybe they were paid to use. But it was on the internal side that I just enjoyed more. And I realized over time that particularly when I joined Sky and I was hiring designers, I realized that…

there was better designers out there than I was. And I started to lose that craft then. I stopped using the tools. I stopped caring too much about font choice and color theory. I just stopped being interested in it, I think.

(03:13) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s interesting. I can really resonate with that feeling of like, I’m good, but I’m not the best. There people that are better than me. yeah.

(03:33) Chris Compston

Yeah.

And enjoy it more than me, right? You can see

that they enjoy doing that. I was like, okay, you know, as long as you’re happy and you feel like you can grow your career in this direction, I’m happy to support that.

(03:47) Danny

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really, I think when anyone entering design, like, I think naturally, you know, people might start with with the graphics with the photo, you know, back in the day, Photoshop, you know, flash, whatever it was. And then and then I think especially in these times at the moment with, you know, there being so many different roles, you know, it used to just be that you were a designer or a web designer or something like that. And now there’s so many different things. I guess it must be happening for a lot of people where they come in from

(04:08) Chris Compston

Okay.

(04:16) Danny

graphic perspective but then soon start to sort of, okay, where in this landscape am I going to be for a bit? And then presumably that shifts as it did for you over time.

(04:24) Chris Compston

Yeah.

It

certainly did and I mean look we met I was thinking about the city the other day think it was 10 years ago in Edinburgh wasn’t it like

(04:34) Danny

Yeah, 10 years

ago, yeah.

(04:37) Chris Compston

conference

and my conference talk at the time was UX Design is Dead, which was of course very antagonizing and facetious to a design crowd. And if you remember, it was in that church in Edinburgh, I forget the name of it now, and I had to stand at the pulpit because my mic had blown and I had to stand almost preaching to a design crowd, looking down from the rafters that their profession was dying, which of course is a bit silly. It was evolving for sure.

(04:51) Danny

Day.

(05:07) Chris Compston

but I still stand by some of the things that I said back then. Yeah.

(05:10) Danny

We were so nervous. I can remember that because

that I think, I don’t know about you, but that was like the first big talk I’d done. Certainly to a crowd that big. But I’d just done little stuff to teams and things. And that was yeah, it was in a big church. I remember sitting next to you. And, you you went up quite early. I was at right at the bloody end, which is just horrible.

(05:20) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

(05:38) Danny

And I remember just like wringing my hands and just feeling so anxious and just sort of like going through all the points in my head and then saying to myself, don’t talk too fast, don’t talk too fast. I’m just interested in that emotional side of it. And I really want to get to the subject as well, but that emotional side, like, how did you, that’s a big talk. did some of that resonate for you, that kind of ride?

(05:40) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

in.

It certainly did. I’ve been speaking for about two years up until that point, I think. I think my biggest at the time was probably like a hundred people. So that’s almost like a large meetup or a medium sized meetup, suppose. So jumping up to like, what was that? Like five, six hundred people, seem to remember. It like a lot of people. because I was up relatively early, was…

(06:22) Danny

Yeah, yeah.

(06:29) Chris Compston

That was good for me. have a lot of energy in the morning, so I’m very pleased you booked this at nine o’clock. That’s great for me. So I had a lot of energy. I was raring to go. I’ve had enough coffee and no food, and I realized that’s how I now prepare for speaking events. And I walked up and they mic’d me all up. had the, what they call it, Brittany mic, don’t they, I think. And I walked up and I think the first few words I say, I said the mic popped because the previous speaker left theirs on.

(06:34) Danny

Yeah.

(06:57) Chris Compston

and immediately it completely threw me off. The whole crowd had to watch while the mic was taken off and we had to discuss, do you want a handheld mic?

(07:01) Danny

I think I can remember that.

(07:07) Chris Compston

Or do want to stand at the pulpit and no one could find a handheld mic? was like, no, I’m stood at this pulpit. And I’m a very, I guess, energetic speaker. I want to move around. I want to try and engage with the crowd in some way. And all of a sudden I was giving like this presidential speech. that, I suppose my nerves came back quite a lot then because I wasn’t natural anymore. Couldn’t, you know, have a conversation with the crowd and get my points across as much as I wanted to.

(07:17) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, the lectern.

Yeah, yeah, I can really resonate with that. I feel like doing talks, I like to make it conversational, and I like to not have a script and to just know it enough that it feels like people are hearing me in a thought process rather than regurgitating something. Because I always kind of think, well, you could just watch a YouTube video then, you know, but there’s something I feel like it’s…

(07:42) Chris Compston

and

Yeah.

Yeah.

(08:01) Danny

more engaging when I hear somebody

sort of drumming up the words in real time. Like that feels more compelling to me and I can connect with some of that. And I feel like that’s, yeah, being kind of like locked into that lectern. And the talk itself, like, I think it’s worth saying, when you came up with that UX is dead, like that was a fairly new thing. Like it was going around a bit, but not a lot. now I think you said like, there’s a bit of discomfort about that now.

(08:06) Chris Compston

Mm.

I agree.

Mm.

(08:33) Danny

think

there’s a cliche to it, UX is dead and there’s these sort tropes that go around social media a lot and stuff but at the time like that was a fairly new thing I mean I was going up there saying hey isn’t UX great and then you were going UX is dead it was it was sort of a new emerging kind of conversation I thought at the time is UX dead now? Has it died?

(08:35) Chris Compston

Mm.

I love

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, right? It was intentionally antagonizing. wanted to, I suppose, poke a little bit at people that believed that UX was going to save the way that we built products. And look, I I think I was like four or five years into a UX career at that point. So I certainly didn’t know everything. But some of the points I was getting across there was…

In agile software development, we are collaborating very closely with a cross-functional mix and making decisions together. That’s like the ideal. And at the time, know, the Spotify model was all the rage where you had like US designers based on every embedded in every squad, you know, debunked quite quickly, but the model still exists today. And my point was there that the, there’s a collaboration around the decisions that we’re making on what to build.

you’ve also got, and that was really the beginning, the starting point of like design systems, component libraries that almost like a… ⁓

a front end or full stack developing team are building. And actually when I was working at Sky, which was ⁓ probably just before this talk, so I had a lot of experience there that built into that talk, there was a team that were building components that a designer in a cross-functional product development team could just bring in. And there was very little UI thought required because everything’s now becoming standardized and a lot quicker to load and that’s all fantastic.

(10:27) Danny

and

(10:33) Chris Compston

But the standardization of experience was also happening at that point. So you could just grab things very quickly. could just, you could, we were rapidly prototyping back then. We’re just dragging things in at very high fidelity UI, getting it from customers, deciding things and going. And I think my point there was that there’s starting to be, and that wasn’t a positive thing to me, by the way. I saw these things as positive, but the rolling up of all of that together wasn’t positive because there’s

(10:36) Danny

Hmm.

Mm.

Mm.

Really?

Mmm.

(11:03) Chris Compston

a degradation of experience thought and actually and I kind of wish I’d spoken about this at that conference I did an event a couple of like months before this where I was saying I wonder if product managers will evolve into like experience managers or maybe that’s what they should evolve into and you would have a much more design thought to product management which again I think is something that we are quite missing right now. Regards to whether UX is dead

(11:06) Danny

Hmm.

(11:33) Chris Compston

I think it’s evolved and I thought to be honest, that was my point at the conference. I see so little really great user experience design being done at organisations now that are building products. And I think it’s partly down to some of the things that I said and partly down to designers probably in like when, I don’t know, 2017, 18 picked up the term product design.

And that actually started off more as, ⁓ I suppose, product people thinking more about outcomes. And that was a really good starting point. And now we have ended up in this place where product designer is almost like… ⁓

(12:08) Danny

Mmm.

(12:16) Chris Compston

a full stack designer or something where they’re expected to do UI research, testing, user experience, they need to know how to use design systems, maybe a little bit of coding. And now obviously with ⁓ AI evolving incredibly rapidly, now we’re expected to know AI and data and this and that and know everything. So product designer is almost a catch-all term for just someone who can do all of those things. And that includes experience design. I think that’s where we’re seeing it disappearing.

(12:41) Danny

Yeah.

I’m so glad that we’re talking about this because it’s been bugging me. It’s really been bugging me. I feel like there’s a sort of Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein view in the recruiting market right now around we don’t like generalists. Generalists are bad. So if you’ve had a varied experience that might have been for 20 years or something like that and you’ve taken a number of roles, that’s sort of not really favored.

(12:49) Chris Compston

You

(13:14) Danny

What seems to be favored is they call it like product design and they’re saying they want all their skills, but the thing that they’ll totally lead in on is Figma and they’ll totally lead in on UI. They call it like taste. That seems to be the commodity that I’m seeing is kind of valued. It’s like we need someone that can do all the things that you just outlined. But if you go in there on an interview,

(13:27) Chris Compston

and

(13:42) Danny

and your CV and your portfolio isn’t going hard on like, you know, design systems and UI and it looks really polished, you’re immediately junked out. And it’s like, really what it looks like to me is that they’re looking for convergers and looking for people that can just deliver on a vision and can just knock out designs. so, like for me, that’s sort of a bit like a UI designer, really. Like I’m thinking about what about

(13:52) Chris Compston

Mm.

(14:11) Danny

facilitating workshops, what about dealing with difficult stakeholders? What about resolving conflicts? What about ⁓ sense making really complex systems and data? I can’t understand how someone can accrue all of that and be really good in Figma and deep in Figma and be really good in the tech, you know, side of it as well. Do those people exist?

(14:37) Chris Compston

Well, I mean, I don’t think they do. I think the part of the problem that you’re identifying there is that organizations can now take their time to find someone that they deem 100 % perfect in every single aspect.

(14:56) Danny

Because there’s so

many people on the market right now. Yeah.

(14:58) Chris Compston

to so many people in the market. Yeah, so

if it’s a fintech looking for a designer, they’re less interested in how you can explore and understand customer problems if your background is say in warehouse management systems or in retail or other B2C products. Because they can just wait for the 50 to 150, 250 fintech designers that have been there and done it that can prove.

that when they join they can just stop. And I think this is another big issue because I’m seeing less onboarding, less support and training for people when they do join, because they’re 100 % perfect. And they’ve got a six week period of, if you can’t get on board and understand what you’re doing here, then there’s going to be questions asked.

(15:34) Danny

Yeah.

So it’s hyper relevance over breadth of experience. And yeah, I totally resonate with that. I think it kind of creates this risk of like a homogenous, I’ve been calling it on LinkedIn a little bit, like a homogenous design team, you know, where it’s just composed of people that have all had very similar experiences and you haven’t got anyone, you know, who’s had more breadth and who may not have the exact same experience in the last three roles.

(15:43) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Hmm.

(16:09) Danny

they’ve had a very experienced means they can bring, you know, I I feel like that’s where you’re going to get innovation, because you’re going to have different experiences and different minds contributing to something. Whereas if you just get a load of people that have all worked in the same companies and done the same things, we we just kind of it’s like a race to to Yeah, homogeny.

(16:12) Chris Compston

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

but I mean, what you’ve just described there is something that’s very, very easy to manage. Like if I’m thinking about an organization, and maybe in this organization we’ve started to reduce the number of design leaders in there anyway, because that’s happening too, you hire in 20, 30 designers that are all basically the same mold, and we can just move them around whenever we need to move them around.

(16:54) Danny

I

see. I see.

(16:55) Chris Compston

That’s

very easy to manage. Now, I remember having this conversation at Farfetch when I worked quite closely with the design director there and

we were trying to identify the different capabilities each of our designers had. So they can be more fungible, meaning we can move them around depending on the need. So if we’ve got like a principal UX designer who’s really great at that, there’s an area of that business of that product that we’re building that’s probably going to need more experience design at a given time than other areas. And if we are able to move that person around,

(17:15) Danny

Yeah.

(17:31) Chris Compston

We know that we’re going to be able to innovate and create great products. the experience design can take some time. It’s not a thing that you can just quickly ⁓ mock something up and say, hey, let’s build this. It does take time to understand the problems and design the experience and experiment, see what works. So we only needed a couple of those people at Farfetch to kind of move around.

a larger part of the design group was probably product design that can kind of do a bit of everything. And I actually think when you’re less experienced and you’re learning your different capabilities and tools, having a bit of everything is great. So you want a big chunk of your team to be like that and then have a few specialisms to move around. The moving around, depending on the need of the organization and the product at the time, does require effort. You have to have design managers in that are looking

(18:00) Danny

Yeah.

(18:24) Chris Compston

broadly across the organization and able to, and have a good enough relationship with the other functional leaders to say, actually, we think we need to like shift a little bit. We’re to take out a couple of ⁓ product designers. We’re going to give you like a lead, you know, principal UX designer to come and work on that thing. So it does take a lot more, I guess, overheads to kind of manage that as a system rather than just saying, we’ve got 20 designers, they’re all the same. We’ll only move them around if you, if you really

(18:51) Danny

you

(18:54) Chris Compston

need it or if there’s some relationship issue or if someone’s on parental leave or annual leave then we’ll move things around. This is lot easier.

(19:02) Danny

Yeah,

that’s interesting. I remember when I did some management of, I would say medium sized team at John Lewis. When I did the hiring, I was working with another UX manager and we would always be thinking about like, oh, we’ve got so and so and they’re really good at that. So we need someone who is good at this. And that was our thinking was like, so that we would have someone that could roughly fit into different types of project. That was like a real…

And there were some people in the team that had like UI backgrounds and dev backgrounds and that was great because it just meant that you know we could really put someone in there into a project that would sort of suit their skills you know like that was definitely our thinking. I’m wondering like I mean I mentioned earlier about this Convergency thing like do you think this whole like push for product designers and this like UI focus and stuff is actually really about the

the death of divergency. And that’s part in part because of AI, the cost of getting it wrong, it isn’t as high because you can just build things much quicker. And there’s a sort of a contraction on costs and budget and all this kind of thing. And it’s like, we don’t want to spend ages researching, which is partly why you see a lot of user researchers out of work at the moment. And it’s like, let’s just let’s just like build the thing and see what happens later. You know, it’s the break, move fast and break things. Do you think?

There’s less appetite for discovery and research at the moment. And that’s maybe why product designers is seen as a primary focus for the market.

(20:41) Chris Compston

Yeah, maybe. I look, I’m speaking here with quite a subjective viewpoint anyway, right? And broadly, you know, it would be unfair for me to say the market’s shifting in a certain way, that’s for sure. But some of the things I’ve been speaking about recently is with the advent of AI and look, the reality is honestly that when I speak to people about AI and they tell me what they’re doing with it, they’re doing very, very basic things.

(21:10) Danny

Yeah, like the Butler service, it’s just helping them, like a junior, go and analyse this bunch of notes for me and stuff like that.

(21:11) Chris Compston

They’re not like in…

Yeah, and

honestly, I think that the majority of people are kind of using generative AI in that way, right? Like, can you help me shape my ideas around something? And that’s great. There’s obviously a lot of…

(21:27) Danny

Yeah.

(21:30) Chris Compston

prototyping, someone showed me yesterday a tool they’d built for measuring a product manager’s capability scoring. Something that’s been around for a while, but they spun it up in two days because they used Lovable and they just created a prototype. And it looked great, that was fantastic. The question I still come back to is, is AI going to make us more efficient and effective? And if yes, then go ahead and use it. I think on the diversion point, ⁓

I’m seeing that like a lot of product managers, similar to the way that we described just before how product design or product designers have to end up doing quite a lot of things. I’m now seeing that shifted slightly onto product managers and now they have to do a really wide variety of things that maybe they didn’t do in the past. And there was, ⁓ there was quite a, LinkedIn conversation going, let’s, let’s just call it that, where I believe someone in a Google team, so not

representative of the whole organization but soon an A-Google team was saying they’re now using vibe coding as a replacement for writing PRDs, so product requirement documents.

(22:40) Danny

Yeah.

(22:44) Chris Compston

I was like, okay, well that’s interesting because to me, the act of writing was a collaborative effort. The act of writing was not for documentation. It was to help shape our understanding of what it is we should be building and why we should be doing it. And what they’re saying is that they’re not going to do that anymore. They’re just going to build a prototype.

(23:01) Danny

skipping that.

(23:03) Chris Compston

showcase it to the engineers, they’ll probably have a few questions about how things work, and they’ll go ahead and build it and get things live. So that lead time from idea to launch of a thing is really, really getting a lot shorter. And we probably all know the stories of, I think it was at booking.com, we like ship, I don’t know, like 100 experiments a day per team, something like that. And they’re all small tweaks. Now we’re probably gonna be able to ship experiments in a couple of days that are actually full features.

(23:15) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(23:32) Chris Compston

And yeah, they might not work perfectly. As long as it’s a learning experience, that’s fantastic. But there’s still a learning experience in that writing. I know we’re kind going off the topic of divergence here, but more on to how AI is going to speed things up. And it might be a bit like the conference talk I gave in 2016 when actually we’re going to see things evolving quite quickly because of essentially automation.

we could just ask it to create things for us. I wonder if, don’t know what the future looks like on this. It’ll either end up being that we end up with, again, like hyper specialisms where…

(23:59) Danny

you

(24:12) Chris Compston

only designers that have a very specific type of skill set or experience of getting hired. But we also have, when you look at the mix of functions we have in a product organization, we’re going to have very specific roles for very specific things. And I think that does a bit of a disservice to individuals, generally generalists.

And again, going to your point about innovation, if we end up having like 10 to 15 very specific role types, we have a UX researcher doing long-term research, we have a UX researcher doing medium-term research, we have a usability researcher, only doing usability testing all the time, you’re going to lose that breadth of capability that I think builds a better group of people, better group of teams that can innovate more quickly. So don’t know if divergence is going to be something that happens.

(25:01) Danny

and

(25:05) Chris Compston

see it in other roles and particularly in product operations I’m wondering if there’s a divergence happening there as well but that might just be based on like experience level. As you grow you’re going to get more capabilities are you going to specialize or are going to keep broad?

(25:21) Danny

There’s something that’s happening at the same time as what you’re describing, because I think you’re describing, you know, very, you’re connecting like how the market is shifting and how roles are changing and all that kind of thing. The thing that I’m just aware of, you you’re talking about AI and you mentioned there that, you know, they used to work with, you know, content designer or something to, and now they don’t need to. And it’s like, there are people in this.

(25:49) Chris Compston

Mm-hmm.

(25:49) Danny

You

know, like we’re talking of roles and we’re talking about, you know, different processes, but these are all people in here. And these are people who may have like been working in their career, you know, for a long time, they might have, you know, a mortgage, they might have kids, they might have a certain setup in their life. And suddenly, their role is obsolete, you know, or is suddenly getting like shifted and

And we’re in this age of, I mean, think, you said you start with that UX is dead. mean, what that is really saying is like we are entering a phase of uncertainty and mass change where we don’t really know where we’re going. something that I’m feeling a lot myself and something that I think is evident in the comment, I wanna get to the comment that you put on LinkedIn recently. There’s a sort of like, I feel like…

And maybe I’m like, you know, a bit altruistic here, but there’s like a lack of care happening, you know, for humans and people. And maybe it’s like, yeah, we’re all in this like capitalist, you know, machine, and it’s not about people. It’s just about churning out outcomes and outputs, you know, unless you’re like in tech for good or something. It’s all about that. And I feel like the commercial side hasn’t really impacted me a lot in terms of how I’m treated.

(26:56) Chris Compston

Yeah.

(27:14) Danny

as a person in the market. But now I feel like it is. It’s looking at me as a commodity and saying, you’re of less value because, know, you’re like, AI can do 20 % of what you can do today. And I kind of feel like there’s, yeah, there’s something uncomfortable about that for me, of how we’re being like, brushed aside a little bit as in this sweeping change that’s happening. that resonate for you?

(27:14) Chris Compston

Yeah.

(27:43) Danny

Am I just going off the wall?

(27:43) Chris Compston

It does, but

it’s not surprising to me. think a lot of, I mean, you’ve hit the nail on the head by saying that we live in a capitalist culture that does not value us, it values the financial output that we can drive.

(27:48) Danny

Yeah.

(28:00) Chris Compston

That’s the be all and end all. Yeah. And look, that’s not a great place to be. It’s the world that we live in, unfortunately. I think a lot of organizations that have tried to showcase, you know, we have really strong values and principles and we care about people has really just been on the face of it. And it’s the people in the organization that are saying those things, but they also work in that capitalist machine, right? So you can say like, these are the values and principles that we have and we believe them.

(28:01) Danny

That’s the bottom line. Yeah.

(28:30) Chris Compston

and we stand by them, which is 100 % true in every case that I’ve always found. If a company says these are our values, they tend to stick with them, at least the ones I’ve worked with, I have been very selective in the past about do values align with mine, and they generally do. But the people are creating those values internally inside that machine, and as soon as that machine changes, the people that create those values will also be gone.

(28:55) Danny

What are your values?

(28:57) Chris Compston

So I value really strong inclusive cultures. ⁓ I value building products in the right ways. as much as, I mean, it’s interesting, because I’m a, as an operational person, I want to go in and have operational challenges, but I want there to be a growth mindset and desire to build things in that right way so that there’s a continuous improvement mindset in there. care, inclusivity for me is like the…

the main cultural value that I think organizations need to have because being inclusive generally means you’re more diverse, generally means you’re more creative. And those are the things that I care about a lot. I actually have them on my website as well and I probably have too many of them.

(29:45) Danny

Do you do you

is that is that because you see it as a as a sort of effective principle that results in a good outcome or and or is there also a thread of it’s just the right thing to do? Because it’s it’s being it’s good to include people because and I and this is the deeply human podcast. So if I’m dragging it into that space, that’s intentional. And it’s just sort of like

(30:02) Chris Compston

Yeah, mean, for, yeah.

(30:15) Danny

Is there some space in this for sort of like, it’s not always about necessarily a business outcome. It may have a business outcome, but it’s just a good thing to do to include people. Is there a component in there for you?

(30:25) Chris Compston

⁓

I, yes, but I’d push it further than that. think, think as, as I say, the, viewpoint, which has been taken from someone else who used to work with Dr. J at ThoughtWorks inclusivity drives diversity, which drives creativity, which drives a better understanding of customers. mean, generally we’re building products for a pretty diverse set of people usually, unless you run a very specific, ⁓ like I have a one of

(30:29) Danny

Hmm.

(30:54) Chris Compston

Cochise is working at a Muslim dating app. Okay, so there is a specificity there to the type of customer, but even then there’s a huge amount of diversity in each of these groups, these religious groups as well, right? So yes, I think we’re gonna build more innovative products, which will drive more business impact, business outcomes. If we just go down the capitalist route, yes, we can make money about being inclusive. Okay, tick the box. I think on the other side, another kind ⁓

(31:03) Danny

Mm. Mm-hmm.

(31:24) Chris Compston

mantra that I hold from my time at ThoughtWorks is you should be able to bring your whole self to work without fear of reprisal and that’s the element of yes it’s a good thing to do.

What did they say? Like hell is paved with people’s good intentions. Yes, that’s a nice intention to have. I think we’re seeing maybe even more and so now that, you know, the geopolitical landscape is an absolute nightmare here in other countries as well. And I think we have to show a lot more care through action. I don’t think we can sit back and go, you know what, I have a value of being inclusive and isn’t that nice. I’m so happy. Because I think you end up in a position of

almost apathy where you see these things happening around you, you sit back and go, you know what, I’m not going to do too much about that. I care about it, but it’s out of my control. So I think building inclusive teams is one of those actions that you can really take.

(32:21) Danny

That word care stands out for me because I just want to, there’s a post that you shared that really drew my attention and I might just read a little bit of it. said, there’s a quiet unraveling happening in tech hiring. While many are focused on the headlines of mass layoffs, a tough economy and the rise of AI, what concerns me more is how these pressures are reshaping the hiring landscape.

(32:31) Chris Compston

Yeah.

(32:45) Danny

There’s a visible shift towards ⁓ valuing ultra narrow specialism and domain knowledge over broader, more adaptable experience. I agree with that. It’s as if depth now overshadows adaptability, even though the industry has always been defined by its need for people who can learn, pivot and connect dots.

(32:54) Chris Compston

Thank

(33:04) Danny

And I thought this was interesting. While candidates are being pressured to refine their CVs for every role to create bespoke cover letters, portfolios and narratives just to be noticed, I rarely see companies putting in the same effort to be compelling. And then you said something like, you know, ⁓ where is the evidence of care from companies? Where is the investment in inclusive hiring, meaningful culture or safe, supportive workplace? Where is it?

(33:29) Chris Compston

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, look,

I’ll touch on, you touched on the specialism point already, right? And I think that’s important, but there’s the next part of that, which is there is so much pressure on candidates and design candidates in particular to create ⁓ a world, a narrative that really very, very quickly explains who they are as a designer. And there was a post by

I didn’t know this person, ⁓ they’ve got a number of followers, I mean, in the tens of thousands. And a very long post saying they get so many applications for jobs that it’s hard to pick through them and to understand who each of these people are. And I totally get that. I’ve been there. It’s challenging when you have 50 CVs to look through. These people are getting five, six, 700 CVs because there’s so many people, right? And their advice was…

You have to hone your narrative for every single role you apply for. I know people that are applying for 20 roles a day.

(34:31) Danny

Yeah.

(34:34) Chris Compston

And those roles are really quite varied because as you just pointed out, they’re pretty desperate to a job. And they’re like, actually I could do that. So I’m going to apply for it. They don’t have the time, the brain, the brain space to create 20 CVs, cover letters, portfolios for those things. And this person went on to say, a good example of this was a designer that applied for a role and they were lesser experienced. only had three roles in the past and you could clearly

(34:40) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(35:04) Chris Compston

see that they cared mostly about accessibility. This was their narrative, this was their story. And I’m like, that’s really cool. I can tell you the most designers I’ve had have not had the ⁓ privilege, I suppose, of getting the types of roles where they can just do one thing. That’s really challenging. So even if this is a true story, I’m sure there’s elements of, yes, I want to showcase accessibility, but there was a bunch of other stuff I did and the CV has just been honed towards it. And I read all of this and I

(35:08) Danny

Yeah.

(35:34) Chris Compston

I’m coaching a couple of people, one of them being a designer and she was like, right, I need to do this, I need to think about this. And it got me thinking, was like, okay, and then will this actually make a huge difference? know, when you’re applying for these roles, they going to immediately, yours is going to stand up against everybody else’s? Everybody else, by the way, being other humans also desperate to find roles. And I think that’s a real sad state of affairs because I don’t see, on the flip side of this, do not see organisations

even when they do say they have strong values and inclusivity, diversity, you tell me now if you’ve ever been through an interview process, where they’ve asked you the question of how you would like to be interviewed to showcase your abilities and skills in the best light possible.

(36:22) Danny

That’s a great question.

(36:23) Chris Compston

And I go back to the design director at Farfetch because he told me something. was saying, anybody we interview should be perfect for this role because we’ve done our due diligence of checking everything before getting to interview stage. Interviews are very expensive for companies, right? You’re talking about four or five people taking a couple of hours out. That’s an expensive thing to do. So when you’re interviewing someone, they should already be successful, right? And now this interview is to really unearth how successful they can actually be here and whether it’s a good culture fit.

(36:38) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

(36:53) Chris Compston

I want to see organisations ⁓ changing the way that they, their hiring practices. So if you imagine you’re going for your say second round interview, you’ve been through the recruitment interview, everyone’s kind of happy. You’ve got an interview with a head of design, head of product and one other person, for example.

I want to see the recruiter, talent person coming to me and going, okay, we have a package of five different interview types. Which one do you think is best to showcase your abilities in the best light? Person A might go, do you know what? I want to spend two weeks on a task and I’d to present it to you.

(37:22) Danny

Yeah.

(37:32) Chris Compston

Next person might say, I actually love just getting into a conversation and spending an hour with you and I can talk to you about everything I’ve done. The next person might say whatever it is. So you’ve got these package, know, choose your own adventure of hiring practices. I also want people, I also want options where, if you think of the single parent,

(37:39) Danny

Yeah.

(37:55) Chris Compston

who’s trying to take their child to school in certain times and is also trying to juggle a job. Like, how are we going to support that person?

If you think of the person, and I’ve just said it before, right, like my energy is so high in the mornings, like my afternoons are almost useless to me. Like they’re so less value. I’m just not energized enough and I haven’t got the focus. So I should be able to say, know what, I only want a call between like eight in the morning and 12th. That’s where I’m going to showcase my best. For a single parent it might be, the only time I can do is two o’clock before the school run. That’s the time that I’m.

(38:31) Danny

and

(38:32) Chris Compston

And instead I don’t really see that. I see options at times, but I don’t see decisions from organisations to say, we’ve understood that everybody wanting to be hired for our roles and going through interviews are different. They have a diverse set of skills, so let’s give them options. They have a diverse background, so they can’t do an interview on these certain days.

(38:54) Danny

I’ve never both as a hiring manager and I’ve been hired lots of different times in different organizations, I’ve never had an exchange with the qualities that you’re talking about. Every hiring process that I’ve either done or have been a part of have always been almost like a mono culture approach, which is just

(39:10) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Yeah.

(39:22) Danny

know, it’s a one hour interview or, you know, one and a half and we do a task or what have you and

(39:27) Chris Compston

It’s designed

for the organisation, right? It’s designed for you as a hiring manager and you as a hiring company. It’s not designed for the candidate to showcase themselves in the best possible light.

(39:33) Danny

Mm.

That’s

a great way of putting it. So let me just play that back. So it’s you’re designing for the candidate, not for the organization, a process which helps bring out the best in them. That’s when we talk about inclusivity, like that’s a very good example of an inclusive hiring practices. that what you’re basically? Yeah.

(39:47) Chris Compston

Yep.

Yeah, look,

mean, and I’m, I guess fortunate in that I run my own consultancy now and I do proposals and that’s the way that I find clients and work with clients. I know even though I’ve held a number of, I believe really great positions and have grown my career up through the various levels, I am terrible at interviews. I’m really not great at them, particularly in a remote world. If I can meet someone in person, I’m pretty good.

(40:23) Danny

Can you tell me about a terrible interview that you’ve had?

(40:24) Chris Compston

Give it a go.

I had one relatively recently and the only reason I went for it was because it was parental leave cover and I was like, it’s a short stint. So that’s good for me as a business. And it was very, very specific to the type of work that I do now. So I went in there, honestly, full of confidence. I’ve done this position before multiple times and the questions were all competency based questions, right? Can you tell me about a time when XYZ? I’m terrible at them because I think

(40:50) Danny

Mm.

(40:57) Chris Compston

There’s a couple of reasons. One of them is I have had quite a varied career. So immediately I’m trying to think across 20 years of time and go, which of these things I’ve done aligns with the question you’re asking. I end up mashing them all together. So it ends up being incredibly theoretical and it sounds like it’s made up. It just never comes across as particularly authentic.

(41:15) Danny

Yeah. So in that

instance, you’re being evaluated about your ability to select the best story in a sort of three or four second pause that perfectly matches what they say. And when you think about design, do you ever need that skill?

(41:25) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the point, right? In any of the functions that we, in the ones I’m particularly hiring for, but any in product development, I’ve never been in an organization where someone comes up and goes, Chris, you’ve got 10 seconds to tell me what you think the answer to this is. Never. I’ve never experienced that. And again, going back to inclusive hiring practices, if they really want to stick with those questions, send it to me two days before.

(41:53) Danny

Yeah.

(42:02) Chris Compston

I will write down all my examples. I can even send them to you and then can discuss them. We can go through them in as much detail as you want to go through. Um, a bit like in a podcast, right? I’ve been on a podcast recently where they said we want a very clear example of where you think product ops showed value and impact. I was okay. I’ve got these five examples, sent them to them. They picked one and I said, okay, let’s talk about that. We spent an hour digging into it. That’s a way better approach for me personally. For other people, they like to think very much on the fly and they

(42:25) Danny

Yeah.

(42:32) Chris Compston

got very specific examples to give, know, and that works for them. For me, it really doesn’t work.

(42:37) Danny

Yeah,

that’s I mean, I’m quite new to this podcast experience. And that’s what I’ve been learning is that I’ve had most people would prefer to kind of co create some themes to talk about. And I’ve actually just got someone I’m talking to later. And they’re like, No, I just want to do it on the cuff. That’s that, you know, I work better like that, you know, and it’s a really good thought because I think I’ve read a lot of things about people are struggling with the hiring process. It clearly seems broken, but I haven’t really heard any

(42:41) Chris Compston

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

(43:04) Danny

like practical examples of how it can be different. I really, yeah, that’s really helpful to hear that. I want to just, whilst we still are talking and I’m just keeping a little bit of eye on how much time we have left, but I was curious, like you’ve made a transition several times from sort of design to consultation to product ops. Well, firstly, can you explain product ops to someone that perhaps hasn’t got a clue what it is? I’m not saying that’s me, but it could be.

(43:33) Chris Compston

It

could be anybody, right? I was actually speaking to someone yesterday. was like, we have to stop saying that product ops is a new thing because it’s been around ⁓ around 2018 was when the concept first started to grow. So I mean, we’re like seven years into this now, right? But it’s still emerging, let’s say not new, but still emerging. So product operations is

(43:44) Danny

Yeah.

And

if I can ask you, can you give and this is one of those interview things, can you give me a response that I could pass on to my mum?

(44:03) Chris Compston

Let’s try, let’s try. For me, product operations is about increasing the quality of decision making in a product team, right? And that can be done in various ways. the, I suppose, slightly narrower boxed in approach of what most people see product operations is, is focused on internal data. So like how are teams operating?

(44:07) Danny

Take your time.

(44:32) Chris Compston

What is their strategic focus as a percentage across an organization? What is driving the most value outcomes, impacts, business value, sorry, business impact, customer outcomes, internal data? So how are teams actually operating? A lot of that comes down to lead time metrics, delivery metrics, all these types, how long are things in like QA and things like that. So really focusing on the teams.

The second part or the second pillar, and this is defined in a book called Product Operations by Melissa Perry and Denise Tillers.

The second pillar is the external data, so the customer data that’s coming back in. Are we hitting the right ⁓ value metrics, outcome metrics, impact metrics? And the third one is a focus on ⁓ processes and tools. So can we identify bottlenecks, challenges within our process? Now, there’s a difference here between product ops, which is a function, a team, a group of people, and product operations, all lowercase.

The latter is being done by every product company that’s already building things, that’s already happening. The second that someone says, think we should structure our product management onboarding like this, or I think we need to refine our PRD templates like this, or how do our designers and our product managers and engineers collaborate together? That’s all operational work. it can, the reason that ProductOps started to grow was essentially you want your product teams to be focused on

the watt.

Who are our customers? What do they value? What outcomes can we drive for them? And how do we link that to business impact? Are we making money? Are we reducing costs? Are we finding new customers? I want my teams to be focused on that. So all the operational side of things can be picked up by someone else in collaboration, in partnership. And it’s a scaling play, right? So any organization that’s around, I don’t know, eight, 900 people, either looking to get acquired, looking to IPO, just IPO’d, they want to scale rapidly. So they need repeatability of some of their core practices and processes.

(46:35) Danny

I think I could definitely explain the first part to my mum, ⁓ which was it helps them make better quality decisions. ⁓ I thought that’s something that I definitely want to take away with me because I thought something that I try and do as an individual, but I don’t have a methodology or a consultancy that explicitly says that that’s what I do. I feel like that’s certainly when you get senior and generalists, you know, in a a in a team that’s

(46:42) Chris Compston

Yes. ⁓

(47:04) Danny

kind of what we’re trying to do is to try and help that. I’m just curious, you know, that side where you’re now like, you know, you’re doing these podcasts and, you know, it seems like you’re building up your profile and your brand. Has there been a point when this started, you know, and going back to when we talking about that talk earlier where we were just like bricking it, like, did you ever have a feeling, because you come across as like very confident and clear and you’ve got like quite an articulation of what it is you’re saying and like,

I sort of think, oh, I can imagine you talking to senior people in an organization very aptly. But I’m just kind of curious, has it always been like this? Or was there a phase when you started saying, I’m a consultant, and moving out from just being an in-house designer where you kind of thought, am I going to get busted? Did you ever have that kind of sense? Or have you always been very like, no, I’m happy and confident in this space?

(47:54) Chris Compston

you

I think it’s Peaks and Troughs. ⁓ I know when I joined ThoughtWorks, the things that you’re describing were probably… ⁓

supercharged let’s say because you’re in position as a consultant where you have to be able to influence senior leadership and you’re in those positions to do that. I remember one of my first engagements, I was out in Dublin so I was flying to Dublin like every Monday back every Thursday evening so it was really quite intense as a project and I was super nervous going into that room, that office

(48:38) Danny

Bye!

(48:38) Chris Compston

for the first time because I was not because I wasn’t I knew my I suppose I knew my capabilities as ⁓

an emerging leader in that consultancy were strong. I don’t think my tech and design skills were particularly strong anymore, but I was going in I was like, what is a consultant? What do they expect of me? know, like, am I capable of being a consultant? Because that to me was a big word. It was a big term. And I always looked at this consultants as the, you know, the forerunners, the people that really know what they’re talking about. And I was questioning.

(48:57) Danny

it.

They’ve always got the answers.

(49:12) Chris Compston

Yeah, it’s almost like they have the answer. Now, obviously as a consultant and after a couple of years you realize you don’t actually need any answers. You just need to be able to, yeah, very good questions and enable other people. And actually I was very thankful because I did get into that mode very quickly on this first client. But one of the first things that happened was we were talking about a particular ⁓ new set of features, I think. And I think I said something like, and I come from a user experience and design background, and I said,

(49:18) Danny

Hey, just very good questions.

(49:40) Chris Compston

What we need to do is just make the users do X.

And I was like, you know, I just, it’s something I said, and one of the ThoughtWorks consultants turned around in the group in front of the client team and leaders and went, that’s not a very ThoughtWorks thing to say, I don’t think. And I was like, wow, okay, damn. Um, I don’t care about that too much anymore, but I spoke to him afterwards about that and I was like, okay, so can we dig into that? It was like, ah, you know, someone just said that to me when I joined ThoughtWorks. So I thought, you know, it’d be worthwhile saying to you as well. And I was like, wow, okay.

(49:53) Danny

Yeah.

(50:14) Chris Compston

But in front of the client, that was actually the ethos of ThoughtWorks was incredible because we were structured such a strong unit as a consulting group that saying things like that in front of the client was 100 % normal. And to be honest, he was almost testing how quickly I would get on board with saying things that were very difficult to say in front of clients.

(50:15) Danny

in front of the client.

Mmm.

Did you feel like betrayed in that moment or like awkward or how did you feel?

(50:45) Chris Compston

I didn’t

feel betrayed. was very confused. I think it was mainly because I was going in there questioning if I was capable of being a consultant and there was someone immediately asking, you know, questions about that capability. It’s interesting because one of our main clients on that project, I was chatting to him like months later and he said he’s never come across a group of consultants that can debate. I think he used the word argue, but it’s really debating. Debate so strongly on a direction to go.

(50:54) Danny

Yeah. Yeah.

(51:15) Chris Compston

but still commit to One Direction anyway and then still go for the pub after and be best friends again. That was like eye-opening to him and that was the ethos of that consultancy. ⁓

(51:21) Danny

Yeah.

Isn’t isn’t doesn’t that happen

because of psychological safety? there there has been a degree that of an unsigned contract that you’ve all made that you could challenge each other. And you’re not challenging Chris as a person, you’re just challenging his ideas. But to create that safety, like do you were there things that either you saw Fortworks do or something that you’re mindful of in the the consultancy you do now that creates those safe environments?

(51:41) Chris Compston

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there’s multiple things. It does go back to inclusivity.

(52:00) Danny

Yeah.

(52:00) Chris Compston

everyone

knew and everyone had been hired with that type of value. And honestly, when I was hired, that value probably wasn’t as high up my agenda as it is certainly today. And I think ThoughtWorks taught me a lot about that. But that was a value that was hired for. So you knew that, again, you can bring your whole self to work without fear of reprisal. So you can say things quite openly. But we had the backing of leadership. And I just want to give you a quick example of what that honestly really looks like.

There has definitely been times where I’ve been in a room with a mixed group of ThoughtWorks consultants, client team and senior person in the room as well.

And I think we’ve all come across this and honestly we see it way more in remote world, remote meetings where a woman may be speaking and a man’s voice becomes the loudest in the room and becomes ⁓ the voice where everyone turns around and listens to. Now in most organizations what would happen is usually nothing, honestly nothing would happen. Or maybe if we’re lucky outside of that meeting someone might say to that leader, look, you know, I feel like your approach might not quite be

the best for the team because it is usually someone’s in a management position and usually a man. The ThoughtWorks approach to this is immediately someone in the room will say, sorry, hang on, wait a minute, I believe this person was speaking, let’s allow them to finish. Now, you can only do that if you know coming out of that room when that senior leader goes to your consulting director and says,

I’m not happy about the way I was spoken to in there and that consulting director says, okay, tell me about the story. They need to 100 % back that approach. And they did. We always had that air cover. We always knew if we took the consulting director into a room and said, this has happened.

(53:44) Danny

Yeah.

(53:51) Chris Compston

they would go and speak to that person immediately and say, look, this is not the way we do things here. And I think with that support of leadership, and that’s when an organization really believes in its values because they’re willing to lose a client. And they have those stories of ThoughtWorks slightly before my time where they lost clients, they pulled out of clients because the relationship wasn’t going to work because the cultures didn’t align.

(53:56) Danny

and

Hmm.

That’s such a really good story. I like that. It immediately makes me reflect and think, God, have I ever been that voice? I’m just like, God, it’s quite a humbling description.

(54:24) Chris Compston

Yeah, it’s very

hard to do, like it’s a very… and again because the unfortunately for both me and you the majority of the time people are doing this they look like us. It’s very hard to call out and say wait a minute that’s not right and again a lot of the time you’ll see if these stories come up it might be another woman or another unrepresented person in the room saying wait a minute don’t you think we should change and it’s not it’s on us to kind of do that the people that look like them.

(54:36) Danny

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know what, like, I feel this is an important conversation that people that look like you and me should be having publicly. you know, I feel like it’s a good reminder for me because I want to be on the right side of this debate, you know, and I don’t want to be making this a worse situation for anyone that I work with. And it’s something.

(55:03) Chris Compston

Yeah.

that’s the action

that I was talking about earlier, right? You can’t sit back and say, have this value and quietly talk to colleagues and friends about it. You have to make action. have to make things happen if things are going to progress in any direction.

(55:31) Danny

Amazing. Chris, I think that’s a really good point for us to leave on because I feel like that’s quite a sombre point, you know, and I just sort of feel like, yeah, I need to reflect on that myself. And, you know, thanks for bringing that point in. And the whole of your conversation has been really, really interesting to hear about, like, dig into inclusivity, particularly. I found that really helpful and hopefully other people will too. So.

Yeah, thank you, Chris. This has been great. And I hope, you it was nice to reunite with you briefly after 10 years. ⁓ And yeah, perhaps we’ll have another conversation another time.

(56:05) Chris Compston

Yeah.

No problem. yeah, thanks to all your listeners. Thanks for inviting me. Like I know we did this quite quickly, but I’ve really enjoyed it. So thank you.

(56:15) Danny

Awesome.

Thanks, Chris. Cool.