Incremental Changes to Help You Become Forever Employable

Jeff Gothelf at UXDX Europe. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpJntaHyMmQ

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and "future-screwed"

[00:00:00] Rory: Welcome, Jeff. Thank you for joining us today.

[00:00:02] Jeff: My pleasure. Very nice to see you. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:05] Rory: Great. I'll just give a very brief introduction for those who don't know Jeff. I guess to our UX audience he is very well-known as the author of the book Lean UX, which I think is pretty much a staple for anybody in UX these days, or definitely anyone getting into UX. And you're showing it off in the background as well. But what we're going to talk about today is your new book, Forever Employable, because, as Frank said, it is interesting times right now. Perfect on the brand name. It's interesting times because unfortunately what we're starting to see is the ramifications of the coronavirus rippling through, and job security isn't what it was a year or two ago. So it's quite fortuitous that you have this book and are willing to share your ideas with us. Welcome.

[00:01:01] Jeff: Thank you. Thanks very much. And for what it's worth, I didn't plan on the virus while launching the book. It wasn't me. That's all I'll say.

[00:01:10] Rory: That's good to know. Good to know. I'm going to start with what I think of as quite a controversial quote. In your book, you're describing your early career, and it sounds like everything's great. It sounds like you're in a very good place. And then you described yourself as saying your career wasn't future-proofed, it was future-screwed. Can you explain that and where that came from?

[00:01:36] Jeff: Yeah. Look, at least that was my perception, and it was really the motivating force for me to change what I was doing. I was 35 years old, and everything was good. I'd been working professionally for a decade at that point. I was the Director of User Experience at a high growth startup in New York City. Married, house, two kids, cars, the American dream, as they say. What I realized the day that I turned 35, and the genesis of that quote, is that the further up the corporate ladder I climbed, the fewer opportunities there were.

[00:02:25] This is particularly true in design and user experience. It's even more painful: that funnel gets super narrow as you go further up. My belief was that the likelihood of me continuing to win jobs that were slightly better, with more responsibility, slightly higher pay and more influence, was going to decrease significantly, exponentially. And finally, as I was hiring designers, I was seeing designers coming in who were better than me, faster than me, with new tools that I didn't know, and they were cheaper than me by a lot.

[00:03:11] I really didn't feel like I had future-proofed my career, despite having done a decade's worth of what everyone tells you is the right thing to do in your career. In fact, I'd done exactly what I was told to do, and I climbed to a point. You get to Director of UX. Where do you go from there? There aren't that many places to go in most organizations. You could be VP of Design, maybe, if you're lucky, a Chief Designer or Chief Experience Officer job, but those are super rare. I felt like I'd backed myself into a bit of a corner, and I needed to figure out what to do, because I had to provide for my family. I wasn't done working for another few decades.

[00:03:55] Rory: Great. So you have this epiphany, or a fear awakening. What happened?

From a push system to a pull system

[00:04:08] Jeff: Well, I realized that the dynamic that I'd been working in needed to change fundamentally. Back then, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't thinking about it from a systems thinking perspective. I've gotten into that more in the subsequent decade or so. But generally speaking, traditional career growth is a push process. You push yourself into the marketplace, you push yourself into opportunities. You choose these opportunities in the hopes that other people will then accept you for an interview, accept you for a position, agree to talk to you, that type of thing. So you're placing all of the responsibility, all of the dependence for the success of your career, on other people.

[00:05:02] For me, that was unacceptable. So I had to turn that 180 degrees and create a pull system. A pull system is where I am continuously attracting opportunities towards me with the activities that I'm doing. It puts me back in control of my career. By creating a content platform and sharing out what I know and what I do and what I've learned, I am creating these constant pulls on the tech ecosystem, and then opportunities are coming towards me. It fundamentally changes the dynamic 180 degrees, into one where I attract opportunities towards me, and it puts me in control, which is where I want it to be. I realized that if I was going to leave myself in the hands of others, that was going to be an increasingly losing game. That's what I thought, anyway.

[00:06:00] Rory: Great. It's an interesting mindset shift. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective.

Planting your flag

[00:06:09] Rory: Just touching on that: you said you started blogging and putting stuff out there, and you mention in the book that people should find their flag. What do you mean by a flag, and how do people find it?

[00:06:21] Jeff: The first step that I talk about in the book is planting your flag, and that flag is the foundation for your thought leadership, for your recognized expertise, for the reputation that you're trying to build. The question is, what do you want to be known for? It's a question that focuses on your experience, your expertise, your passions, and I would argue the current marketplace: the needs of the world, the needs of the marketplace or the industry. Really thinking through where you want to stake your claim.

[00:07:00] Jokingly, I was doing this earlier, but I planted my flag on Lean UX. I did that because it's the work that I was doing. It's a problem that I was solving that other people had. I had actual experience doing the work, so I could share what we were doing on a regular basis. And lots of people were asking for this kind of content, but nobody else was actually providing anything in the way of answers, at least back in 2008, 2009. So it's where you want to build that foundation on top of, and what you want to be known for.

[00:07:44] Rory: That's great, but it's a challenge for a lot of people. I look at you, for example, and you've got this wealth of knowledge in UX. But as one of our attendees, or a regular person, where do you find your flag? Where do you find what you want to be known for?

[00:08:06] Jeff: I didn't have that 20 years ago, and I had significantly less of it 10, 12 years ago. That knowledge and that experience, that expertise, comes with time, and it comes with doing the work and practicing the craft. If you're just starting out and you're looking to decide where to plant your flag, I think you need to look at your unique situation and decide what element of it you want to talk about. For example, you could talk about your first year as a UX designer. Just setting out, tell that story.

[00:08:42] A lot of people are having their first years as UX designers, and there are even more people in UX schools and bootcamps and programs that are going to be having their first year very soon. And you're going to tell that story in the midst of a pandemic as well, which is the world they're going to get into. So there's an opportunity there. You might want to say, "Look, I don't have a ton of experience, but I've spent the first three years [?] of my career in financial services, so I'm really going to focus on UX design for financial services mobile apps," for example, whatever it is.

[00:09:15] I thought about this the other day, which feels kind of ridiculous, but I'm sure you remember this. I think it was the first Rosenfeld Media book, 20 years ago, whatever it was: Luke Wroblewski's book on form design. He wrote a whole book just on designing forms. Granted, he's expanded his flag over the years since then, but he planted his flag on designing forms. That's what he was good at, what he knew, and what he had experience in. And the book was wildly successful too, because basically the internet's a bunch of forms, so that worked well.

[00:09:51] So really look at what you know right now, what experience you've had up until this point, or what experiences you're about to have that you can talk through. If you just came out of a UX program, for example, whether it was a degree program or an apprenticeship program or bootcamp or whatever it is, you can talk about that. My experience completing a 12-week UX bootcamp, my experience in the two-year career school, whatever it is. Talk about that experience and how you're applying it day to day now, in your first year and your extra time. I think there's a ton of opportunities. And what you'll find is, as you start to tell that story, you're going to see spikes in reaction to certain types of content, and those are hints about where to focus next, where to take that pivot next time.

Finding the time

[00:10:39] Rory: Great. Going down this path, let's say you've planted your flag. What recommendations do you have for people? I'm coming at it from a time perspective, and I'm going to look at my personal situation. I've got UXDX, and my daughter was born a few months ago. I don't have a hell of a lot of free time at the moment. So what are your recommendations? Because this sounds like it's your day job, but then also your night job.

[00:11:10] Jeff: Yeah. That's exactly what it is. I'm not going to sugarcoat it [?], Rory, not at all. That's what it is: it's a hustle, and it's time consuming. It is absolutely time consuming. When I started doing this, roughly 2008, my situation was not too dissimilar from yours. I had two daughters: one was five and the other was one. I was working full time in New York City, living in New Jersey, commuting 90 minutes each way every day, working 50, 60 hours a week, and then trying to maintain some kind of work-life coexistence at some point.

[00:11:55] The work that I was doing to plant my flag and start to really build this content platform was done in the cracks. If I'm standing on a train platform waiting for the train to come and I have 10 minutes, I could fire off a couple of tweets or write down some ideas. Then 45 minutes on the train every day, headphones on, laptop open, as many words as I could get done between my train station and Hoboken, where I had to stop. And on the way home. Sometimes getting up early on the weekends before everybody wakes up.

[00:12:37] Infants are not bad. If you're stuck walking around with the infant in the middle of the night and they fall asleep on you, and you don't want to put them down because you're going to wake them up, sit on the couch so you can get a laptop on while they're sleeping on your shoulder. But the point is that you've got to find the time and the motivation to do this. And this is why I think it's interesting. Sometimes I read the stuff in reviews [?], and a lot of folks say, "This is really good stuff, but I feel like this is common sense." And it is. The difference, though, is that many people lack the motivation to implement common sense.

[00:13:13] So this is a competitive advantage for you, if you have that motivation. Yeah, it's going to be tough, and it's going to be tiring. But the goal is that eventually the mix of time is lucrative, and you're generating enough income or opportunities or whatever it is from building the platform that you can dedicate more time away from other employment to it. But it's a balance, and it's a hustle for sure.

Imposter syndrome and getting better with practice

[00:13:48] Rory: Okay, great. Good tip on holding the baby and trying to write with one hand. Going back to the writing, one thing that I've suffered from in the past, and I know a lot of other people do too, is imposter syndrome: it's not perfect, I need to do more research, I can't publish it just yet. Do you ever suffer from that, or do you ever look back on some of your previous writing and wonder what you were thinking?

[00:14:20] Jeff: Yeah. I suffer from it about once an hour, so it's fascinating. We launched about three, four months ago now, on June 16th, and I remember the morning of the launch, I was terrified. I'd been working on it for a couple of years. Everything was edited and re-edited and confirmed and designed, ready to go, quality tested and checked. And I was terrified that no one was going to read this, or they were going to hate it. And it happens again and again and again.

[00:15:07] Here's the thing: I don't know how you get over that. I think you just keep publishing, just keep writing. You get better, because the more that you do it, the better you get at it: the better you get at storytelling, the better you get at conveying your ideas, the better you get at connecting with an audience. If you maintain some kind of pace or cadence over months or years, you will absolutely notice an improvement, and you will absolutely notice an increase in the quality of the connections and conversations that happen.

[00:15:36] I'll tell you a story about when Lean UX's first edition was written. The final manuscript was turned in in December of 2012. It was published in March of '13, and in 2016 we were given the opportunity to write the second edition. To do that, we had to go back and read the first edition. It had been a while. I'm not going to lie to you: I went back to read the first edition after not having read it for a while, and I was mortified. Mortified. Really just embarrassing. I can't believe I published this thing.

[00:16:23] Rory: I think it holds up pretty well. I think you're being harsh.

[00:16:26] Jeff: But from my perspective, my writing had become so much better between 2012 and 2016 that I was like, "Oh my God, let's fix this." And to finish out the story, Josh and I just signed on with O'Reilly to write the third edition of Lean UX. In the last couple of months, we've had to do it again. We had to go back and read the second edition and figure it out. And I'll tell you, I didn't want to puke this time around. There were certainly things to update and improve to make the third edition valuable, but the writing was significantly better than what I was expecting based on my first experience. That happens all the time, and the only thing you do is practice and get better. That's it.

Everyone can teach

[00:17:13] Rory: Great. In addition to writing, you advocate teaching and getting out there. I guess writing in a way is teaching. But is everybody a teacher? Is this a viable path for everybody, and can everybody become a teacher? What are your thoughts on that?

[00:17:32] Jeff: The saying is something like, if you want to get good at something, then you should teach it. I think that every time you share your expertise, you're teaching. That may not be your explicit job title. It may not be the name of the activity that you take part in. But if you're coaching someone at work, if you're just looking over someone's shoulder and offering some advice, if you're writing something for the corporate blog or for your own blog, if you're putting together a video for a conference, if you're a guest on a podcast or you host your own podcast, any one of those activities is a teaching activity.

[00:18:20] Can everybody do it? Yeah, anybody can do it. Will everybody do it? No, not everybody will do it. But it is a fantastic way to exercise the ideas from where you planted your flag, and to really get a sense of how to convey something meaningfully to an audience. Teaching it is a great way to do it. Again, a blog post is teaching. And then you get a sense of how people are reacting to it. What questions are they asking? Are they reacting to it? I've written things that I thought were pretty good and got zero reaction. So the question is, is the idea bad, or did I just not teach it correctly? Was there a better angle on this?

[00:19:03] It's about recognizing which aspects of the content resonate best, and then adjusting your teaching tactics to highlight those bits that people actually care about. For example, I teach a lot of Lean UX courses. In fact, I just finished up an online course last night. One of the main reasons people come to the class is to talk about how to do dual track in Agile, how to do discovery and delivery together. I know that's a big part of that conversation because over the years, every time I talk about that, the traffic spikes, the comments spike, the inbound communications spike.

[00:19:46] So for me, it's valuable to have those conversations, and I focus a lot of my teaching, a lot of the different conversations that I'm having, on that. And I think you could do that too for your practice, for whatever stories you're telling: look for those signals, and then amplify your activities around those signals. What the best channel or medium is for that, I don't know. That's a test-and-learn, sense-and-respond type of activity. But I do believe that everybody can do this. Again, I don't think everybody will.

Give it all away

[00:20:18] Rory: And that leaves opportunities for those who do. That touches on one of the last big points in your book. You've planted your flag, you've become an expert in it, you're writing, and then you say, give it all away. If you give it all away, you're not getting anything back. What do you mean by that, and why do you advocate giving it all away?

[00:20:45] Jeff: You are getting a ton back. It's just that it's not an immediate exchange. It's not a commercial exchange right away where you're saying, "I will give you expertise and you will give me money." That's great; that's consulting or full-time work, and that's fine. But what I mean when I say give it all away is to generously share your expertise with the industry, with the domain, with your discipline, and with the audience that you're trying to build. That immediately makes you valuable to that community and immediately associates you with that context. When people need to think about something related to that content, they find you. When they need to hire somebody to help them with that at work, they find you.

[00:21:34] Giving away your articles, your blog posts, your podcasts creates that content marketing engine, and that drives inbound leads to you. That's exactly why you give this all away, because eventually you might want to sell the content. It's tough to do that initially if you don't have an audience. By giving it all away, you're building an audience. You're building a network; you're building a reputation. And then on top of that, you can start to sell products or services. That might be your freelance time or your consulting or coaching services. It might be a book. It might be speaking engagements. It might be other kinds of coaching and training.

[00:22:19] It might be the actual content itself. At some point you might say, "Look, okay, I've been giving away my content for four or five years. From this point forward, there's going to be a paywall for it." That's okay. But initially, to build that audience, the network and the reputation, giving it all away is the key. That's how people get to know you. That's how you build your audience.

Treat your audience like customers

[00:22:39] Rory: Do you have any tips? Because there's often a bit of a fear as well, when people start writing, that you're screaming into the void. You're putting all this effort in, all this time and research, you're writing and you're preparing podcasts, et cetera, and you're just getting nothing, and nobody's picking it up. Aside from the creation, how do you manage the marketing and try to build that audience?

[00:23:07] Jeff: This is where being UX people is an advantage that many people don't have, because we know how to do customer discovery. We know that launching a successful product or service or piece of content means an audience. So we're going to design that piece of content with an audience in mind. We're going to do research with that audience. We're going to have a target reader persona. For every one of my books there's been a target reader persona, and we have gone out and met those folks and talked to them in advance of writing anything.

[00:23:45] Same kind of thing here. You should have a target persona for your audience, or a set of personas, and go research those folks. You know how to do this. Ask them: where do you consume this kind of information? Which format do you prefer? Why? When people used to commute, they'd say, "Oh, podcasts are my favorite, because I can just listen while I'm commuting." These days you might hear, "Look, you know what I can stand? Because I'm on Zoom calls all day, I can stand three-minute videos. So give me three-minute videos on YouTube, or give me 500 words on Medium, and I'll get it done." Do that customer discovery work, get a sense of what your target audience likes, what they consume, how they consume it, and then start testing with content in that format.

Making the leap to self-employment

[00:24:34] Rory: Great. We've gone through what you're advocating. When did you make the leap away from your day job and side hustle into this becoming your full-time career, and how do people know when to make that leap?

[00:24:48] Jeff: My story is interesting. I left my last full-time in-house job in January of 2012. I left to start an agency with Josh Seiden and Giff Constable, and the way that we were going to generate work for that agency was content marketing. So that ended up being the work that I was doing inside that agency. I was building off all the Lean UX stuff I had done already at that point. By 2010, Josh and I were already talking about Lean UX.

[00:25:31] What ended up happening was that the content marketing became a business unto itself inside the confines of this agency. Over the course of the four-year life cycle of the agency, not only was I generating leads for the business with my little content and education business, but I was actually generating revenue. So I had the comfort and the luxury of a paycheck from that business every two weeks while I was learning how to build it and, really, how to scale it. By 2012 I'd been doing it for a bunch of years, but now it was about how to scale it and build a real business around it.

[00:26:07] When that agency ended (it was sold in November of 2015), I was able to pick up my little business unit, take it out, and just change the logo on the outside, from Neo to check.help [?], and continue building it for me. At that point, I had had three solid years of proof that this was a viable business. I knew how to sell it. I knew how to deliver it and how much money it made. And I knew it was sustainable enough for me to become self-employed. Since then I've managed to maintain that. It's been five years now since that happened, plus the three years before, so it's been eight years of proving this out.

[00:26:52] Remember, that's me transitioning eventually towards self-employment. You don't have to transition towards self-employment. You might just want to create this kind of platform to ensure that you get the next full-time job very easily, that the next full-time job opportunity finds you. You can do that while maintaining your full-time employment, but continuing to do this kind of work that generates speaking opportunities and content opportunities. Eventually people say, "That guy Rory, I like what he's putting out there. Maybe we need him in our organization."

Q&A

[00:27:23] Rory: Thank you. I'm going to take a question that's coming from the audience. You talked about that content marketing engine. How has writing a book helped, the book format versus just online content?

[00:27:41] Jeff: Life-changing. That's been my experience. Lean UX was a success. If we start with Lean UX, which was my first book: absolutely life-changing, because Lean UX succeeded and became a global conversation. The book clearly continues to sell; we're writing a third edition. As a lead generation tool, I haven't had its equal in my career. All the books I've done help with that. It's amazing that to this day books still have that kind of impact and influence.

[00:28:24] There's a ton of books out there, and there are lots and lots of books being published every day. Simply writing the book is not enough. You've got to market the book; you've got to talk about it and let people know that it exists. You've got to keep reminding people that it's a thing. I say this as someone who runs a publishing house, Sense & Respond Press. Josh, (inaudible) and I have been running this for years now, and we've got about a dozen books published over the last two or three years. I can tell you that the authors that market their books sell books, and those books generate opportunities for them. The authors that do not market their books, generally speaking, do not sell books, and so the book doesn't work as well. You have to create it, and then you have to use it as a tool in your content marketing.

[00:29:13] Rory: Great. Sorry, I'm just looking at some of the questions coming in. I'm going to ask you about your personal experience, then. What has this enabled in your life, versus if you had continued down the track of the permanent employee? From your perspective, what has it enabled you to do?

[00:29:35] Jeff: I live in Barcelona, and I have the option to live here. I chose to live here; we as a family decided to make this move. Building this platform has enabled that, because I'm self-employed, and because of that platform, the opportunities that I get are global. So I didn't really need to be anywhere. I just needed to be somewhere near a decent airport, and have good internet. For me, that's the most important thing it buys me. It buys me freedom of choice, and it buys me time. And I think those are the most important things in life, frankly.

[00:30:17] It's hard being self-employed and mildly ambitious, as I am, because it's tough to draw a line about when to stop working and when you find that time. But you do have the option. For example, if after this I say, "Look, I'm done for the day, I just want to go to the park or get on my bike," or whatever it is, I can do that. The benefits of that are immeasurable. Or rather, it's measurable in quality of life, and that to me is worth everything. All the hustle, all the early mornings, all the late nights, all of it's worth it.

[00:30:58] Rory: Yeah. I'm very jealous when I see you posting your mountain biking pics in the hills of Barcelona. I'm just having a quick look at the questions. Is there anything else coming in from anybody? I don't think so at the moment. Are there any final tips that you would recommend to people, apart from going out and buying the book, Forever Employable, which you should do? Any tips for people now, given the times, when maybe there isn't as much job security as there used to be?

[00:31:35] Jeff: Look, the book is super tactical. There's a story; it's my story, and some other stories in there. But the book is super practical and super tactical. If there's any immediate bit of advice that I would give you, it's to figure out where to plant your flag, choose a topic, and just start writing, or start communicating in whatever way is most comfortable for you. You'll get better and you'll figure it out, and you'll feel awkward. There's the tyranny of the blank page. It's going to stare you in the face when you fire up that Google Doc or whatever it is, and you're going to think, "What am I going to write?" Just put something down, and you get something to react to, and start shipping stuff. Eventually you're throwing stuff against the wall; some of it's going to stick, and you're going to figure it out. So don't hesitate to do this. The sooner, the better, basically.

[00:32:30] Rory: Just on that metaphor of throwing stuff against the wall: should people really just start introspecting and saying, "Okay, well, as you were saying, I worked in finance, or I've had an experience in my first year," and just write about their personal experiences? Or should they start with doing some research first, simple things like keyword analysis, just to see what people are already searching for?

[00:32:58] Jeff: I think it's important to pay attention to the trends: the trends in your discipline, the trends in the market, the trends in the world. If you want to start writing about how to host a great live event at the moment, I would argue it's bad timing. You might argue that no one else is doing it, and so this is a great time to do it. But generally speaking, pay attention to where the discipline is headed. What are people worried about? What are the real problems we're facing? The reason Lean UX resonated so much is because everybody was struggling with UX and Agile, and they still are to this day, sadly. So what are people struggling with today? What are you hearing from your colleagues in the UX field? What's everybody saying? What are those trends? That's a great place to start, and a great place to begin talking from your experience.

[00:33:57] Rory: Great. We've just got time for one last question that's just come in. What forums do you think people should create content for? There's LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, podcasts. Where would you recommend starting?

[00:34:08] Jeff: LinkedIn and Medium. I think LinkedIn has been transformed, with Twitter being the burning garbage fire that it's been for so long now. It's a little sad. The community is still there, and you can still engage the community. But in between community engagements, it's, "Oh, the world is ending. Democracy is dying." All of that kind of stuff is in between there. LinkedIn at the moment is free of a lot of that. It's really focused on work stuff, professional stuff, and I've had a lot of luck there lately with building and engaging an audience. So I would definitely start there.

[00:34:49] And I like Medium for distribution. Remember, with Medium and LinkedIn, you're renting an audience. You don't own that audience; LinkedIn does. So it's a good place to start, and then eventually you start transitioning them over to your blog, or your content, or wherever you're hosting it. But that's me. I think podcasting requires a level of commitment and consistency that is tough to maintain. I haven't been able to pull it off consistently. That's what I'd say to that.

[00:35:18] Rory: Great. Well, thanks very much for your time, Jeff.