Progression Podcast
31 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago -As tech teams we're great at designing and building products and experiences that people love. But one thing that we still can't do effectively is design our own careers.
With the help of regular contributors and special guests, we dig into why that is, tackling questions around managing vs making, missing manager tools, soft and hard skills and training, compensation and navigating a new job that's right for you.
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Episodes
#29 Jackie Bavaro (Asana, Google) on having impact as a Product Manager
January 25, 2023 11:59 - 45 minutes - 41.3 MBJackie Bavaro was most recently Head of Product Management for eight years at Asana, the well-loved work management software, where she joined pre-launch as the first PM. During her tenure, she grew the PM team to over twenty amazing people, helped Asana's go from $0 to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and launched Asana's associate product manager program. Jackie has since written two fantastic books on PM careers - 'Cracking the PM career' and 'Cracking the PM interview...
#28 Steve Bianchi (Beamery, Unilever) on the rise of the people-focused COO and a capability-based future
September 29, 2021 14:07 - 46 minutes - 43 MBThis week Jonny chats to Steve Bianchi, CHRO and COO of talent operating system Beamery. A real futurist and systems thinker, Steve gets into the future of the people team, why people leaders make good Chief Operating Officers and imagines a future where we’re hired not based on our university and CV but by our skills and ambition. Links: Steve on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenbianchi Beamery: https://beamery.com/ Jonny can be found at https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who el...
#27 Lucas Coelho (Roam Digital) on building an academy, leadership lessons and how to run a happy team
September 07, 2021 11:00 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBIn this episode Jonny chats to Lucas Coelho — VP of design at Roam Digital — about growing as a leader, his thoughts on how to build a bench of good junior folks, being honest and learning from failure and his experience building progression frameworks and using Progression. Lucas is a Progression customer, but we try and steer well clear of that until the very end. Lucas Links: https://lucascoelho.co/ https://twitter.com/coelholucas Lucas's talk at Figma Config: https://www.youtube.com/...
#26 Brian Lovin (Github, Spectrum, Design Details) on the rise of the senior IC
June 23, 2021 07:52 - 56 minutes - 51.6 MBIn this episode, Jonny chats with Brian about the rise of the very senior IC (Individual Contributor) - a subject close to our heart at Progression. We also go into the process of creating a startup and Brian's experience building and exiting Spectrum, his mixed feelings about how much we should be optimising for titles and putting yourself out there on the internet. Brian is a designer at Github, co-host of the very popular Design Details podcast and most recently published a collection of...
#25 Sarah Clatterbuck (Yahoo, LinkedIn, Google) on frameworks for startups vs large orgs and avoiding anti-patterns
June 04, 2021 14:30 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBIn this episode, Sarah Clatterbuck, Senior Director of Engineering at Google sits down with Neil to discuss a whole range of topics including: What is was like in the LinkedIn engineering team as they grew from 300 to 3000 How Sarah recommends startups and scale-ups think about rolling out progression frameworks for the first time How to think about and reduce unconscious bias and anti-patterns in frameworks Links: Sarah on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclatterbuck/ Sarah o...
#24: Jessie Hayes (Whereby, Box) on treating people like a product and keeping frameworks light
May 12, 2021 13:28 - 51 minutes - 47 MBThis episode, Jonny chats to Jessie Hayes, VP People and Talent at Whereby, the London video platform. As one of the first 'People people' on the pod, Jessie goes through her personal career journey to get to Whereby, through large companies (Goldman Sachs, Box) to small, then we dig into how to treat your people function like a product which your employees subscribe to (very novel and clever) and then get Jessie's thoughts on progression frameworks, where they've succeeded and failed and ...
#23: Gonçalo Silva (CTO, Doist) on building progression frameworks for a distributed team
March 25, 2021 19:27 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBWe're back after a bit of a break with a new series of Progression Pods - this time we're mixing up the presenter so watch out for some new voices from the team. In this episode, Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist (creators of Todoist and Twist) sits down with Neil to discuss the nine month process they went through to create a progression framework for their globally distributed team of 100 people. They discuss building the framework transparently, iteratively gathering and incorporating team m...
#23: Gonçalo Silver (CTO, Doist) on building progression frameworks for a distributed team
March 25, 2021 19:27 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBWe're back after a bit of a break with a new series of Progression Pods - this time we're mixing up the presenter so watch out for some new voices from the team. In this episode, Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist (creators of Todoist and Twist) sits down with Neil to discuss the nine month process they went through to create a progression framework for their globally distributed team of 100 people. They discuss building the framework transparently, iteratively gathering and incorporating team m...
#22: Inside Progression Ep2 — Jonny and Neil catch-up
June 10, 2020 10:51 - 41 minutes - 38 MBIt's been a while since Jonny and Neil sat down to talk through Product progress, plans and strategy. This somewhat unplanned ramble-chat covers how we're thinking about high touch vs low touch go-to-market, COVID impact, honing the problem we're solving and for who. Of course, Neil also reviews a biscuit. We have no new guest interview episodes planned (it's been a busy few months) but if you like these team chats please let us know and we can do more of them! Anti-racism statement Duri...
Progression anti-racism statement
June 09, 2020 11:04 - 3 minutes - 3.13 MBA statement about our Anti-racism stance and plans for making Progression an anti-racist product and business. Read the full statement and more detail on our action items here: https://progressionapp.com/posts/anti-racism-statement/
#21 Cap Watkins (Primary, Buzzfeed) on helping new managers and the problem with taking other people's career ladders
March 11, 2020 16:01 - 46 minutes - 32 MBCap Watkins is CXO at Primary, where he's responsible for Design, Product, People and engineering (oh my!). In the recent past, he was a professional leadership coach and organizational consultant at Practical Works, helping senior contributors, first-time managers and managers-of-managers grow and evolve in their roles. Previously, he was VP of Design at BuzzFeed, where he managed Product Design. While at Buzzfeed Cap also created one of the most popular design frameworks on progression....
#20: Irene Au (Khosla Ventures, Google) on scaling design teams and practices, scaling yourself and finding your why
January 28, 2020 10:52 - 41 minutes - 28.6 MBAbout Irene Irene is a designer and veteran design leader, leading design and user experience at Google, Yahoo, Netscape, and Udacity. She was once even the most prolific hirer of UX talent in silicon valley. She now works as an operational partner at Khosla Ventures, working with fast growing portfolio companies on design and strategic problems at the highest level, as well as teaching yoga. Our conversation covered scaling design across some of the most well known and iconic companies ...
#19: Ryan Carson (CEO, Treehouse) on a winding journey to training 100,000 new software engineers
January 07, 2020 17:27 - 30 minutes - 21.3 MBAbout Ryan Ryan Carson has been a huge figure in tech and online learning for a long time now through his company Treehouse, but his journey to get there and onwards from this success story is a journey of learning about himself, what he loves and also his privilege. From Carsonified, his tech conference startup based in the UK through Treehouse to Project unlock the American dream (training 100,000 Americans from diverse backgrounds into software engineering apprenticeships), he talks thr...
#18 Anne-Laure Le Cunff on mindfulness, burnout, writing every day and building a business
December 18, 2019 14:38 - 40 minutes - 28.1 MBToday’s guest: Anne-Laure Le Cunff Anne-Laure is a prolific writer, thinker and learner. From a background in tech at companies like Google, she's spend the last year or so focused on entrepreneurial projects, culminating in her own Venture Studio Ness Labs, dedicated to products that help people be happier and healthier. She's hugely active in the online entrepreneurial community, championing learning and personal development with a broad set of 6000+ folks following along through her news...
#17 Kara DeFrias on changing careers, curing cancer and being a sponsor
December 06, 2019 14:03 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBI loved chatting to Kara back in August, excited to finally get this episode out to your ears! Kara started her career as an instructional designer, eventually working her way to leading user experience design through experience at (amongst others) top-flight companies in sport (the Super Bowl), Film (Oscars) and politics, both as senior advisor to 18F and as Biden's Director of UX during Obama's cancer moonshot. She was also one of the first Presidential Innovation Fellows. We talked abou...
#16 Dave Malouf on Design Ops and the power of speaking on stage
November 08, 2019 17:30 - 39 minutes - 54.2 MBDave Malouf is a veteran design leader, strategist, facilitator, researcher, and educator who has worked with some of the largest and fastest growing organizations globally. He's probably best known for his work around Design Ops, that slightly nebulous set of practices that help design organisations to scale. We get right into defining then pulling Design Ops apart, as well as touching on how speaking globally informs his practice and gives him energy. Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com...
#15: Inside Progression with Jonny and Neil – teamwork, a new feature and biscuit reviews
September 06, 2019 16:35 - 38 minutes - 52.7 MBHey friends! It's been a while... We're having a mini-break from regular episodes for the summer, but to celebrate Neil officially joining the team (about 4 months ago) as a cofounder, we decided to chat about working together and finding each other, our new feature 'check-ins' and our favourite office snack, the mighty Choco Leibniz. We'll be back with a new season, fantastic guests, a shiny new sponsor and more great interviews in a couple of weeks. Neil can be found at: neilcameron.me...
#14: Todd Zaki Warfel (Leadership coach, Design Career Index report) on frameworks and job satisfaction
July 09, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 106 MBTodd is a Design leader, leadership coach and lifelong learner. He recently released findings from a survey of over 800 design teams globally, with a focus on career growth and team health. We dive into his findings- getting through everything from hiring to attrition and the relative importance of different factors in someone's decision to leave. And the results are interesting: it turns out that 35% of people list lack of career growth as their reason for leaving a company, but under 4% o...
#13: Sana Rao (Twitter, Deliveroo) on life changes, sponsorship and scaling design teams through change
June 13, 2019 09:26 - 1 hour - 54.6 MBSana Rao was born in India, educated at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and spent 4 years at Twitter designing a bunch of the mobile experience we use today. She's now Interim Head of Experience at Deliveroo, working out how to support the designers, researchers and content writers on their journey with the company as it grows. Sana has taken huge risks, experienced twitter abuse, seen companies successfully improve diversity and has a fascinating story of her career to date. She's also ...
#12: Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path, Org Design for Design Orgs) on org design and ethics
May 28, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 51 MBIn this twelfth episode of the Progression Podcast I'm chatting to Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, long time speaker and blogger on design scaling and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs (2016). We get into the weeds on his back story, including learning how to write and speak confidently. We then got onto managing up, down and across, his book and the ethics of design (and a designers' role within it). Finally we got to some listener questions from various Slack channels th...
#11: Braden Kowitz (Google Ventures, Range) on co-creating the Design Sprint, becoming a founder and his design journey
May 07, 2019 09:20 - 38 minutes - 26.6 MBIn this episode I'm talking to Braden Kowitz, an SF based designer and founder. Braden's work has been hugely impactful on how we design today through his work on the Sprint book at Google Ventures. But his journey has also been an interesting one, leading from Google to working with startups to founding his own, Range. We talk about finding meaningful work, bucking the trend of an expected design career, the dangers of a rigid ladder in a small team and much more. Braden's Links Range: ...
#10: Jasmine Friedl (Intercom) on having a deliberate career and overcoming challenges
April 24, 2019 07:36 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBJasmine Friedl is now Director of Design at Intercom in San Francisco, but has had an interesting, varied career, learning her trade at Facebook before some time at Udacity amongst others. We talked about deliberately choosing a career that's right for you, learning from bad experiences, being lonely at the top, thoughtful leadership, privilege and much much more. Links from the episode Bad decisions and wrong turns: one girls guide to career success: https://medium.com/@jazzy33ca/bad-...
#9: Kevin Goldsmith on the Spotify model and rolling out progression at scale
April 02, 2019 12:25 - 1 hour - 92.8 MBBack in January I chatted to Kevin Goldsmith, a very experienced technical leader with background at companies including Microsoft, Adobe, Spotify and more. He was at Spotify when they evolved their org, witnessing and helping to shape the 'Spotify model' which has now found so much popularity in teams around the world. It's taken me ages to get this episode out, but it's a real corker for anyone thinking about scaling a team in tech. There's loads of lessons learned around parallel tracks,...
#8: Mills (ustwo) on having to change to stay the same
February 26, 2019 12:09 - 55 minutes - 76.7 MBMills is kind of a legend of the London product and agency scene and co-founder and cultural hub of ustwo, the company behind (amongst others) the multi-award-winning game Monument Valley. Ustwo are now huge, with offices in several countries around the world and hundreds of employees, but 15 years ago Mills and Sinx, (the other one in us'two') didn't know what the hell they were doing. Mills is now on his own journey of self discovery. We talk about what it means to have a good career, t...
#7: Designing your design career, with Jonny and Austin
January 29, 2019 11:35 - 38 minutes - 53.2 MBFirst podcast of the year! Took long enough... Jonny and Austin chat about their upcoming workshop – a collaboration with General Assembly – for designers of all stripes to introspect about their design careers and set better goals. Our first workshop is on the 14th of February, in London. Only 25 tickets total, grab yours (or gift to someone in your team) sharpish. jams.progressionapp.com ------ Us: Jonny: twitter.com/jonnyburch Austin: twitter.com/austinkeeble
#6: Jason Mesut on Online Mistakes and Designer Shapes
December 05, 2018 22:06 - 44 minutes - 61.2 MBThis week I'm on the pod with Jason Mesut, designer and mapper of design skills. We get into both his work over the last decade in mapping the shapes of designer across multiple companies, balancing family and being a designer, and being vulnerable online (and making mistakes in public). As we know each other a bit, we glossed over some of the details of what we were talking about, so there's a list of useful links below to help you out. The original design shapes article from a couple of y...
#5: Lauren Currie and Bud Caddell on making work fair
November 14, 2018 10:02 - 53 minutes - 73.8 MBThis week I chatted to Lauren Currie OBE, a service designer, blogger, passionate advocate of social issues, and managing director of NOBL here in the UK, as well as Bud Caddell, the founder of the California based organisational design consultancy. We tackle a couple of meaty topics around diversity - how can we as an industry better empathise with and improve diversity in the workplace? Plus we get to hear about the inner machinations of NOBL and the other projects that Lauren is working o...
#4: Jonny and Austin chitchat
October 15, 2018 12:24 - 43 minutes - 59.4 MBAlongside talking to leaders in design and careers, I'll be spending some episodes coming back to fine people like Austin Keeble to talk through ongoing progress of our projects and challenges that we see in the broader design industry with regards to skills and personal growth. This episode we talk about the Progression Pack pilot, the importance of using data to power team growth, and the need for a more structured hiring process for diversity and the good of teams. Also, the audio is gra...
#3: Jen Dary on Becoming a Manager and Taking a Break
October 10, 2018 09:59 - 39 minutes - 54 MBThis episode, I'm chatting to Jen Dary, a leadership coach, workshop organiser, writer and card-maker from California. Jen runs Plucky, a company focused on helping companies and their people create happier workplaces. We like that! We talk about the strange need for managers and leaders to spend time creating physical things, the challenges of moving into management and how much it can help to chat things over with someone who can't fire you. Jen is wicked fun, and a great guest. I hope yo...
#2: Andy Budd on Ownership and UX titles
October 01, 2018 08:41 - 1 hour - 86.2 MBI take this episode to chat to Andy Budd, founder of design agency Clearleft, outspoken social media presence and organiser of several design conferences here in the UK. We talk about issues with designer titles, building an ownership mindset for your own career, agencies vs in-house, and bringing a new generation of designers into more senior design positions. Got thoughts or feedback? Hit me up on twitter @jonnyburch or join the community at progressionpack.com/chat Handy links: - Andy ...
Episode 1: Minimum Viable Podcast
September 04, 2018 11:40 - 54 minutes - 74.6 MBIn the first ever episode, I'm joined by fantastic designer and design educator Austin Keeble, for discussion on design progression, levelling and expectations at work. Among other things I ask Austin for feedback on the work in progress intro to my upcoming course, and he gets into the weeds on the state of design short courses and bootcamps. I'm looking for cracking guests and great topics to cover in future episodes. If you have an idea for either, or just some feedback about this episod...