Ep. 207 - Jeff Gothelf, Author of Forever Employable, Sense & Respond, and Lean UX on business lessons for professional development

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. With us live today, we are doing our IO live series with Jeff Gothelf. He is the coauthor of a number of different books: Sense & Respond, Lean UX. He wrote the book Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams. And today we have him on the show to talk about his latest new book coming out called Forever Employable. Jeff, welcome to the show. 

Jeff Gothelf: Hey Brian. Good to see you again. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back on. I think you've been on the show three times in various forms across the platform [various forms - laughing]. That's probably three or four years ago when you were launching Sense & Respond. You and Josh came on the show to talk about that. More recently back in Episode 156, we talked a little bit about building a culture of innovation and learning, and now the world has changed, and you've written another book Forever Employable. You're known as the Lean UX Agile guy. Why did you decide to write a book about career development?

Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. It's super interesting. And everything you're saying, everything you're bringing up is exactly sort of the thought process and concern that I've gone through over the last couple of years. I've considered this project and whether or not it was something I was going to invest in and put out there. But the reality is that as different as it may seem, by comparison to Lean UX, Sense & Respond, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking. When you read it, what you'll see is that the subject matter is different. Subject matter is you, your career, your professional development, your growth and your safety net. But a lot of the thinking is very, very similar and should be very familiar. If you're familiar with Lean UX, Sense & Response, Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking. 

And the reason why this project even kicked off in the first place is tongue in cheek to some extent, but not really, was a response to things that I was sensing from the marketplace. For years now, for the last two, three, four years, I've been getting inbound requests on a semi-regular basis to talk about how I built my career and how I built this platform and how I started writing books and giving talks and teaching workshops and that type of thing. People really want to know this kind of stuff. How do you actually make it happen?

So I added an item in my backlog that said, you know, write something about this, tell this story, that type of thing. And I just maybe do a Medium piece about it or blog posts or whatever. I've been thinking about doing it, but then never kind of kicked off anything about it? Because again, it really felt outside of everything else that I was doing. And then, about eight months ago or so I had to give a talk for a private community of product leaders primarily. And the talk they wanted me to give was the author's journey. That was what they called it. Again, another request, right? Another inbound piece of feedback from the market that says there's a desire to hear the story.

And so, I wrote a 45-minute talk that told me the story. At which point I was like I have a story arc. Now I've got a slide deck, right? This is basically a table of contents for a book. After a conversation, and just a delay, so I dragged my feet a little bit. But after conversation with some folks finally kind of got the kick in the butt to make it happen. So really it was a lot of sensing and responding and eventually just not being able to ignore the inbound evidence.

Brian Ardinger: The timing is impeccable in a lot of different ways. Last couple of months, we've been thrown into a pandemic and a lot of people are questioning this whole idea of disruption and it's a little bit more real to folks. And so, I think a lot of people are at that point where they're starting to reevaluate, Hey, what am I doing? And the world of work is changing. I'm changing from a timing perspective. You couldn't be better time to tell people about some of these tricks and tips and ways to go about that. 

Let's talk about the changing world of work. You talk about how you have to create yourself as an invincible career and this ability to the forever employable. I talk a lot about this idea of having a portfolio career. It used to be you could be a product developer for your entire life, and that was what you did, but now people have different slash jobs. I'm a podcast or I'm a newsletter writer. I'm a director of innovation at a big corporation and whatever it is, it's never one thing. So, let's talk about the world of work. How are you seeing it? Are you seeing this pivot to this career that's never one career? 

Jeff Gothelf: There's a tremendous amount of volatility and unpredictability in your career. My best friend, his father worked at DuPont Chemicals for 40 years. Can you imagine? No. Right, right, right. Like the concept is so not reality anymore. And I do a lot of work in financial services and banks and that type of thing. And I meet folks who've been at the bank for 20 years, 25 years. Even those numbers to me are unheard of. Right. I think the kind of volatility that we're seeing today, hopefully not to the extent of the pandemic. But nevertheless, it's going to become commonplace, right. This idea of evolving markets, market shifts, competitive shifts, economic shifts, geopolitical shifts. The organization that you work for, it may not be as stable as you think, or as you'd like.

And frankly, the loyalty that you might expect from that organization is probably not as stable as you'd like. I mean, right now, good people are getting laid off right now because the pandemic is challenging. These organizations to stay in business, in a way that they've never been challenged before. And so good people are losing their jobs. People who didn't do anything wrong. Who did a great job? Who are not the bottom 10% like the Jack Welch, you know, let's take this as an opportunity to cull the herd. These were good people. 

Look, I know this. I spent the first decade of my career following in that standard career path. So, applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs, getting my resume in shape. And then doing it again and then doing it again for a slightly better title, a slight bit more money, like just kind of playing that game. And every time there was a layoff, every time there was a seismic event in the market, I would start to panic, and I would see the panic in my colleagues as well. Like, Oh, I got to get my resume in shape. I start applying for jobs. Oh my God. My portfolio is out of date, all this kind of stuff.  And that is a crappy way to live. And I don't believe that you have to live that way. I believe ...