DU029 – Designing the Stock Market – James Storer Freetrade Interview

Transcript

The Design Untangled Podcast
Episode: DU029 – Designing The Stock Market Host: Chris Mears and Carla Lindarte
Guest: James Storer, Head of Design, Freetrade

(00:17) Chris: Hello and welcome to Design Untangled. Me, Chris Mears and Carla Landarte, sat in the same room, which we know, is a very rare occasion. We are here with James Storer Head of Design at Freetrade. Is that the right title?

(00:31) James: Yeah, that is the one.

(00:32) Chris: Yeah, that is a good stuff. So maybe it would be good just as a start, if you could tell our listeners a bit about you and your backgrounds, where you have come from.

(00:41) James: Yeah. So I have I came from previously To Deliveroo and a few other companies. Yeah, I kind of was a bit more of a traditional multimedia backgrounds. I have been doing this about ten years, something like that, now, it has been awhile and it was more kind of like web design and then sort of move slowly into applications. And now it is kind of more just broad design I think is kind of more of a management and the head role is that you kind of doing everything right. So suddenly joining an early stage startup as well. It has paid. I have been making roller banners and socks as we were talking about.

(01:21) Chris: Yeah. Oh, you responsible for that?
(01:25) James: I am, I am. Just going to change my title to that. Just like Head of Socks.

(01:32) Chris: Yes, that is a good LinkedIn headline.

(01:32) James: I think so. Yeah. And it is been kind of a crazy journey. Lots of learnings in the year now, nearly, that I have been a free trade. That is that is pretty much it. Finish me in a nutshell, I think..

(01:48) Carla: So what is Freetrade? So I am not really into stocks and to be honest, I had not really looked into the product much. I am sorry. Chris is the one who is really obsessed with stocks, and money, and stuff. I just spend it. So yes, what is Freetrade?

(02:09) James: We were actually talking about this today. I think our tag at the minute is, ‘challenge your stock broker’. And then I said that somebody who was like, what, what does that even mean? Let me question that today. And it is more that where we are kind of like new age, so that is where the challenger thing is. So mobile only stockbroking application and we like to leave it more of like kind of a investment app rather than just pure stockbroking because I think that is a bit masculine. And as you mentioned earlier, Chris, a bit more old school. Yeah. So it is kind of an investment app that allows you to buy stocks and shares, and all the things, funds, ETFs, et cetera. We are on a mission, I suppose as many companies are, to democratize a little bit, to actually give access, and open up stockbroking broke to everybody, in anyone really. Making as easy as, buying a pizza. I do not know, that was kind of, when I joined, I was, we can make this kind of as easy as, using delivery for instance. I tried using a bunch of competitive apps and they are all pretty tough to be honest. I just ,like actually getting into the product then trying to figure out what you are doing, while you are in there. And everything has got like friction to it. And so we have really tried to pull out all of that, and then adding just the basics of user penalty rate. It is not, I do not think I have done anything particularly special. Just tried to address that, and make it as simple as possible really.

(03:42) Carla: That is hot.

(03:46) James: Well, that is fair. I mean I am humbled I guess. I guess it is like, I mean, it is just trying to do the core things, right, I guess. And there are some areas where, we have tried to turn it to be quite complex, and smooth, incredibly simple and we are probably going to have to iterate, and kind of actually test that a lot more to get it right. I do not think we have got 100% perfect, and let us say in that tool. But it is, I just think trying to do that very difficult thing and make it as simple as possible for somebody who is just like the core of what everybody should be trying to do, you know?

(04:25) Chris: So what do you think, what is the core information someone needs to make a decision about whether to buy a stock or not? Because obviously the traditional ones throw the kitchen sink at you, like eps and all this other stuff that is pretty baffling.

(04:42) James: I say we would probably lower on the information side right now, but I mean that is because the core proposition was, trying to get the low fee products out there. But yeah, I agree. There are kind of certain things that you want to know, to be able to make a decision. We are kind of showing basics of the information, so current price, historical price in data with the graph, that you can kind of move the timeline. And then just some kind of recent pricing data. So the things that we are kind of looking to push out and give more information on, probably like new dividend yield and it is market cap. Let me say, the basics information. But when you look at basic information in any other app, I honestly could not tell you how you can even see it, there is so much noise. So at the moment, it is fair to say that, maybe the research is perhaps to have done elsewhere and then the trade place with Freetrade, but we want to obviously bring all of that within the platform.

(05:40) Chris: So I guess like some of that we are vaguely familiar with stocks, so we know even what dividend yield is. Carla, do you know what a dividend yield is? That is kind of something I wanted to touch on. So you might see that as something that is core for someone to say, buy or not buy. What kind of approach, you got to educating people maybe that aren’t familiar with that?

(06:02) James: Yeah. And that is massively what I want to do with the app. Is actually make it more educational, make it easy for people to kind of go in the app. So we were talking about kind of curated content, at the minute and how we can bring that into the app. We have got an amazing content writer who fills our blog posts up, and there is some really good stuff in there. Just basics with things like what is an exchange traded fund and really positive thing for you to invest in because it is, generally, going to have a really good, nice long uptick. So it is quite safe. And then it is trying to bring that, how do we surface that into the app to make it simple? So these are challenges that we have got to face. I think, as I was saying previously, I think we have done kind of the basics pretty well in terms of getting the MVP out there, but it is now how do we make it a bit more fit for mass market. That is the challenge that we are kind of trying to do.

(06:58) Carla: So how do you work, in terms of design and research and how do you make sure that you include the right users in what you are doing?

(07:08) James: We are pretty lucky that we are quite an active community actually. I could not tell you how many users. I think we were up nearly 2,000 users, in the community and so we have been talking to them a lot, obviously. And what I did, in terms of research, I have done a couple times, where we reach out to them, try and get a reasonable segment across, and actually bring them in, do face to face interviews. We have also sent out some kind of, you know the Maze? I started using it a little while back. It is pretty good. So they basically set up missions on there, and kind of direct, and indirect success routes. And then you get a bit more of kind of a mass information back, than you would perhaps from maybe, four or five face to face interviews. We have been doing that. The thing that we need to do more of, I think is, more of the people that probably never invested before because we do have that in the community. I am not saying we do not, but I think there is definitely a skew to people who are a little bit more savvy and have perhaps use other investment apps, or doing crowd funding, obviously a lot of other users the media come from that crowd funding.

(08:14) Carla: Yes. That is kind of intentional, right? Because, if you were developing an NVP, it should be that you were prioritizing for this type of user?

(08:22) James: No, not necessarily. But yeah, I think we are more likely to get those people because they are ear to the ground. They realize that, that is coming and it is kind of a bit more, they would want a low fee product, [inaudible 00:08:35] What we want is to provide it for everybody. So there is kind of, we do not necessarily think about hardcore traders or anything like that when we are designing for features and things. We were trying to think how accessible can we make this? How easy to use can we make this?

(08:51) Chris: And then could you maybe, so obviously you are sort of early stage startup, could you maybe give us a bit of an insight as to how that is a bit different, to maybe a sort of later stage stuff like delivery for example, in some of the yeah, maybe the challenges you have had scaling up?

(09:10) James: Absolutely. So I think with delivery I saw kind of the same growth really, is not quite what I am doing right now. They grew very quickly into a big company. So the startup side of it was quite a small portion. I mean, I think they still kind of think of themselves as that, and that is in culture, as much as anything I think. But challenges wise, I think when you were kind of say like 30 different designers versus one or two, it is kind of communication is king, there really, you have got to have, and whether you like it or not, process does come in at those stages. And every kind of hike of people, I think they always say, for every sort of four or five designers you add, you’ll have four, five x the problems. And it is. So I think, not that I have zero process here in the back, but you kind of sign off is a much smaller, fewer people and you kind of working really closely with those people so you can move pretty quick, which is good. I try to set up some things early, like lessons I have learned, like I would say three years ago, like UI kits and design systems wasn’t really thing anyone was thinking about. And now it is hot topic. So it is something that obviously coming off the back of delivery where we were creating one. Coming here, it is not like a come straight in and go, we use design system for the one designer, but it does help to create kind of a loose kit that you can move quickly and consistently with. And then that way when you do add additional designers, you do not kind of lose that pace and it is a lower overhead. So I think that is kind of helped a lot actually.

(10:51) Carla: So you kind of start creating the process as you grow?

(10:51) James: Yeah, I think that is it. You have got to kind of try and identify in advance. It is never going to happen all the time, but you try and identify them in advance. And it does help that I have kind of seen that before. So you can spot some of the signs that you are looking for.

(11:04) Carla: Yes, experience.

(11:04) James: But yeah, and I think we are pretty good actually at adapting. And we took a kind of old world stuff you would like, this is the complete opposite of what we are and we are a product company and we do adapt very quickly. If we spot something’s not working quite right, we will change it. And that is been quite good so far. We were trying to do sprints awhile back. But, when you are wrangling towards an MVP, it just does not make that much sense. I do not think. You do not need that kind of cadence of delivery. You just need to deliver. So we kind of, we switched to a more can run style, which is obviously a little bit older in its sense anyway, but it was more just like we were just driving through this stuff we had to do and hitting milestones internally. That meant we could then test things quicker. So they actually work quite well.

(11:54) Chris: Cool. And we were chatting a, bit before we started recording about kind of hiring staff and stuff like that and you mentioned about junior designers, in particular, and what that title means or connotates at least?

(12:06) James: Yeah. So we have actually had some kind of our first, I am going to say like entry-level designer, who joined last week. And yeah, one of the things I was really keen not to do was to have this kind of like junior attack. It is each to their own really, but I have kind of we, we did the same thing at Deliveroo. We dropped that junior tag and I think that it just benefits everyone. It benefits the actual individual. It benefits the company. I think just because that person is just starting out in their career. Does not mean that they do not have really good ideas and I just think it feels like a barrier when you are sitting in a meeting maybe with a junior designer in the room and they do not want to speak up because they do not think what they have got to say is valuable. And you have maybe more senior people, that do not want to listen to them, because it is a little less junior. Whereas if nobody, if there is not that kind of feeling, I think that everybody just benefits a little bit from that, because so far that we have seen really big impact. I think they do feel they can speak up a little bit more as well.

(13:05) Carla: That is so true. Especially in agencies that is really strong and you have the junior designers and they come to the room and they are not allowed to say much. It is more about the creative directors actually talking. So this is interesting. How that works, and I guess it is easier when you have a smaller team.

(13:22) James: Exactly. And you know, as you scale, I think of it more of they have kind of set in leveling and getting that right early, rather than thinking about the talking so much. So that is, that is something that I am trying to invest in a little bit now, but it is time consuming.

(13:37) Carla: That applies as well to UI and UX design. Because, have you see the division between the two, if you see any?

13:46) Jamea: Yes, I am pretty firm on the product design tag. I know that is a, [inaudible 13:52] It is because I have seen it done both ways. I have seen pure UX and pure UI and I personally think there is quite a lot lost in translation between the two. The handoff between those, it is vast, and it can be very vast, whereas you have the same person responsible for that. That is I think just works so much better.

Equally, when I think of product design, I think of people that, they take more of an end to end approach and it is like the research is up to them to decide what research is required for that piece, what fidelity level is required for that piece. It does not have to be starting with a sketch and you go into a y and then you move to a much more fidelity wires.

(14:30) Carla: Yeah, yeah, you kind of think, what for?

(14:30) James: Yeah, exactly. I think you can be a lot more lenient. You can actually move a lot quicker by having that all under the one kind of role. I certainly do not always start in that way. There is some very quick things that you can move straight into. We had a kickoff meeting the other day and I actually was like, this is pretty much served as a wire frame. And that is exactly the kind of thing we are trying to do because it enables you to move quicker. And like we talked about, the size of the company helps with that, because you can talk to the right people very quickly.

(15:02) Carla: Again, going back to small teams, better.

(15:06) Chris: Nitpick road, [inaudible 15:06].

(15:08) James: But on the sort of the research side of that as well, I do see a lot of value in research and whilst I really like product design to do research, I think I would to bring in a user research because it is, its own discipline and I think there is a lot of value of having that knowledge on the team.

(15:29) Carla: The more you get designers to participate in that research, is much better.

(15:34) James: I go and see the research and like [inaudible 15:35] somebody that will facilitate, how would the discussion guys actually run the sessions. But I want the product designers to be a part of that. And it is like, you know, I have been in situations before where you kind of say you have a weekly research session and it is okay, hand in your thing that you want to be tested, and then that is that. You hear back analysis in a week or two. That is so detached.

(15:59) Carla: I know, and it also as a designer, you have created all these design hypothesis is that you should be able to test with a researcher supporting, it is not the researcher coming up and saying, this is why I decided to do

[inaudible 16:12].

(16:12) James: Exactly that.
(16:13) Chris: And I think that best research is helping put into the design as well.

So it flows back that way as well.

(16:19) James: We are quite fortunate the minute, because obviously I said we do not have that dedicated resource right now, but we do have a community manager and customer ops, and they are such an amazing tether to our customers right now, that they are almost kind of subsidizing that for me a little bit at the minute. And I have been having like a weekly meeting with them now, and it is actually like, it is proven to sort of bear fruit already because you kind of hearing people’s direct pain points very quickly. And whilst we have got lots to do, and lots to build, we are kind of, we are trying to address those as quickly as possible. We even added like a kind of surprise and delight OKR so that we could try and at least force that so that you can make sure you are shipped in some of these things every month. So we just like working pretty well actually right now. I think we had the objective was for something like two or four and we should play eight last month. So it is great.

(17:10) Chris: Put lighting all over the place.

(17:11) James: I hope so.

(17:14) Carla: That’s cool. So why do you think traditionally these investment apps and websites did not really think about user experience and design?

(17:28) James: The short answer or the long answer? I think that they have invested a little bit in it now, but just money probably. I would not want to speculate too much, but I think that the way I look at it at least is they have a product. They do not think in a way that product companies, they think in a way that financial companies do. They have a thing that does the thing they wanted to do. They are making an incredible net worth, why change it? And it takes, and the banking industry is seeing the same thing, right? It takes a challenger to come in and say, well, just challenge everything essentially, like and challenge people’s expectations of that. So I think Monzo did very well, obviously in the banking scene. I hope that we are going to have the same impacts in the kind of stockbroking scene, in investment scene, because there are other kind of more portly companies like the Robo advisors that have kind of come before, it was not making it, etc. [inaudible 18:26] But obviously there is nobody that is come out and doing and going to pure stock management and your own kind of your personal portfolio. So it is a, I think we have got the kind of real opportunity here to chuck it up a little bit. And hopefully like, even if it is, I mean, obviously I want Freetrade to be a massive success, but even if forces them to just be a little bit more mindful about what they are doing, because they just do not care. It is just the bottom line.

(18:53) Chris: So we heard from Sandra at Monzo that one of the challenges that you have got as a kind of challenger bank is getting people just trust them enough to actually put money with them. So I am guessing that is maybe one of your challenges as well?

(19:07) James: Yeah, I mean, so we are not seeing that just yet. We are still early days and I think everybody that is kind of signed up, [inaudible 19:14], like I say, they have come through crowd funding, through community. So we do have quite a lot of trust there. I think what you are kind of referring to is going to be as we grow, how do we kind of like reach that mass, more mass market, and made sure that the trust is there. Yeah, it is a challenge alright. But we have a fantastic kind of growth team and I think they are very good at presenting our narrative and our company values, and we are always very transparent with what we do. Obviously we, we look at Monzo for that a lot and we love the fact that, there is that level of transparency.

(19:47) James: And I think we have tried to do the same thing. We are kind of as you would never have seen any of the stock brokering app, We are showing our development process and what we are building. Does that inspire trust? I hope so, and I guess we will see as we grow, but I think we have a slight benefit that we, we do have a bit more of a revenue driving business. So I think we perhaps do not need to grow as quickly, on a user base level. But as we do grow, we obviously want to do that. So it is a really important thing to try and make sure that people do have enough trust to put their money into us.

(20:24) Chris: So the other thing I wanted to talk about as well, I have worked on government projects and stuff like that, where you had to kind of slot in with these existing kind of legacy backend systems to make stuff work. And then that is had kind of impacts on what you can do with the design, stuff like that. I am guessing there is some pretty old tech in the stock market world that that is kind of running the show. What challenges have you found with either integrating it with that or do you kind of build in your own stuff to make it work?

(20:56) James: Yeah. Both of those things. So we have had similar issues. It is we have kind of got a platform that we have built and obviously the client app that we have also built. And then there are obviously, third party, the things that you have to. Unfortunately when it comes to financial partners, there really is, it is like you pick the kind of best of the back bench really is that sort of thing. And even data feeds and things like that is like, it is not always the best, but yeah, we have made it work the best we can. And I think like longer term would we want to try and control more of that. Sure. But right now we have a part of the works, which is great. And I think we are kind of focusing on delivering features over trying to replace anything like that. So, but yeah, it is been interesting. That as much as I can say.

(21:52) Carla: Oh, sorry. I was going to tell us a bit of I do not know if it is controversial question, but you mentioned at the beginning that this stock market has been being really masculine. You use the word masculine. Have you identified that in your user base right now? Is it still very masculine and how do you actually balance that out within fair trade to make sure you have that gender balance?

(22:18) James: Yes, that is a really good question. So yeah, it certainly is still skewed that way at an even if you just take like the community. I would love to be able to tell you the split, but it is male dominated. But we do have quite a few female members on there now, and we do try and work on that, makes sure it feels quite open. I mean, Alex is our community manager and he monitors that. We tried to implement more guidelines to be a bit more open and welcoming of any female investor.

(22:49) Carla: Do you have females in your team?

(22:50) James: We do. Yeah, we have, I think we have. So we have three and we have got two more joining. Yeah. And I know, in our kind of, we are very conscious of it from everything, like contents a big one, because we want to have a nice tone of voice and it would be gender neutral and we have been using a few pieces of software. Well I think it is Tech Text, I think is one, that we have been using. There is a few things that you kind of like run copy through on the internet and kind of give you a bit of a sense of what the tone is. So we have done that. Obviously the, when we were doing the rebranding project, we were kind of very conscious of it and I think, we have gone pink, it is a little bit more feminine and yeah. And I think as we kind of grow the brand out a little bit as well. Like there was a lot of stuff that we did as part of that branding project that we have not really pushed out yet because we are still not doing advertising and things like that yet. So yeah, I think it is definitely something that we think about, which I think is a positive thing anyway.

(23:53) Chris: Obviously you are kind of focusing on your kind of community, users I guess, or that group of people primarily at the moment who may be at least slightly interested in investing. Have you identified through research or anything else? Like what are the main barriers that actually stop people kind of thinking about their future and maybe you are 20 years old or something and probably what you are going to be doing when you are 60 is not necessarily in your mind at that point.

(24:19) James: Yeah, that is really fair, the short answer I think is no. But the kind of the longer answer is that is we obviously think about it and demographic is definitely something that we are trying to build out a little bit more because as I kind of said earlier, we sort of know who is using it right now. But we do need to build out and maybe that is through personas, or any other method. And I think that we sort of say that we are looking at like more millennial investors and, and because they are the people that are going to benefit the most from investing in the stock market now, because they will see that sort of compound interest and the fruits from that in, you know, ten, twenty years. And so yeah, it is a tricky one, but the fact that we have an accessible app I think actually gives us that benefit, because even if they were not thinking about it, sorry, even if they were thinking about it, the choice is out there right now.

(25:14) James: Just like they are not what people are used to in terms of using a consumer facing app. Like you look at any of your sort of big consumer apps. I have sort of an AirBnB delivery train line. Even at the minute they are doing a really great job. Those kind of products are just so simple. And so the switch from that to try and open up x stockbroking app is massive. It is huge. And even me, I consider myself reasonably tech savvy. I would hope so anyway. Yeah, it is a real barrier. So I think that alone is a good thing. But then, yeah, we do obviously need to know how to talk to those people in how we want to get them on the platform. That is definitely as we grow, that is going to be the challenge. It can be less and less about the experience in the app, but you have got to still drive people to the actual platform itself. So yeah, that does become a bigger part of it then.

(26:10) Chris: Cool. And what you have got to see kind of on boarded, a couple of fuses now we are more than a couple now. Just out of interest, what is the most popular kind of stocks that are being traded at the moment? This does not constitute financial advice. Just saying.

(26:33) James: I was just about to say that is a risk. That is an interesting one. I think some of our ETFs have been pretty popular. We have started a stock game in the office actually, just like picking out something and see how it does over the month. But there has been some really random ones in there, like Wetherspoons came up the other day. The rationale was, it is getting like late and cold. People want to a cheap pint, I was like, all right, okay. Yeah, sure.

(26:55) Chris: The Brexit play I suppose.

(26:56) James: But so yeah, I think we see a surge every time we add new stocks. You do see a bit of surge in those ones. We added, Aston Martin the other day and it was just through the roof. But as I mentioned earlier about like ETFs, they are kind of more of a collective of stock. So like the Footsie 100 for instance, is obviously all the a hundred biggest companies in the UK. So we have quite a reasonable range actually for the VTS. We added like 16 more, I think two weeks ago. So they are the ones that seem to be particularly in the most and then you get kind of a more scatter gun approach, to everything else.

(27:31) Chris: Yeah. It is interesting you get that spike. Do you think that is because it is one that people have been waiting for you to add or do you think it is because it is just there, so they check it out?

(27:41) James: A little of both. We actually, so we have been kind of polling the community. We have got a form that people can kind of fill in if there is anything that they are really desperate for us to add, because yeah. We are trying to continually grow the universe. I guess that is the sort of second side of it I guess, is the university right now is limited, and it is limited to the U.K. stock market too. So I think when something new does come on people are like, ooh exciting, because there is a new stock to buy. But I mean we are going to be, by the end of the year, adding 200 U.S. stocks on there as well. So we kind of really start Christmas list today. And that is one of the things that is going to happen. So that is really exciting.

(28:23) Carla: So what is the feature that you are more proud of?

(28:26) James: That I am most proud of? That is an interesting one. I actually would say, I mean I would not call it a feature search by as the experience was. The onboarding itself is actually, we took like what was something like 15 steps and tried to condense it. And I think it is five steps, and I tried to keep it as well, within that, I really liked to have kind of like focused form. So it is like you are not only focusing on one or two things on the page to try and do that with such a bulk of information. It was, it was tricky, but yeah, I was actually really pleased with how we did it. Even in user research, when I am kind of talking to people while they are trying it onboard, I think they were doing it in like 90 seconds or less. It is pretty quick. I am not, not to say that everything needs to be fast, but I think, as long as we are making sure it is secure and we are getting everything we need to be able to onboard, users just want it to be quick.

(29:25) Carla: That is good. So what tips? So if you have anything you can say, anything you can give people to, when they have a very complex flow like that or you know, an experience that is really broken, what types of, what things do you do to actually come up with something simpler?

(29:42) James: Yeah, no, that is interesting. So I think how I approached that at least was obviously we started with the big sort of twelve step, what it was. And it was, we are pretty lucky that we have got a compliance officer. And so I worked with him to kind of actually like boil down what did we actually legally required to be able to board them. So then you can kind of start at least picking things away a little bit. And and then, I worked with our content writers as well because I think some of the things that we requested was like declarations and stuff like that, but we can actually just pull them down into a case of if you proceed from the screen, you are kind of accepting that your moving on, like set intention conditions like that.

(30:27) James: And then, just using newer technologies in the case of doing postcode looker and yeah, it is kind of not necessarily rocket science. But it is, I think if you look at a more consumer approach rather than necessarily a more kind of traditional stockbroking approach. I have tried to choose my words carefully. Then yeah, it is because a lot of companies, all you got to remember that they are trying to collect information for marketing purposes, et cetera, whereas we are trying to build a community. So I think it gets a bit different.

(31:04) Carla: Is it lucky as well? Because when I worked for a bank for awhile and every time I tried to simplify a flow like that, there is a lot of pushback. So even though you can identify things that are not really necessary, because banks are banks, it is really hard to actually break that behavior. So you are very lucky that you can actually do that.

(31:24) James: I think because we are building from scratch as well, and because we all like, quite a lean team, you do not have those kinds of levels of pushback that you are talking about. I can literally walk over and talk to Adam, the CEO and we can have a quick conversation is a benefit and it does allow us to move quickly, which is good.

(31:43) Chris: And it is before we wrap up then, so is there anything you can share in terms of kind of what you are working on at the moment? What we can expect to see?

(31:50) James: Yeah. I can. It is really good time with that too. Today. Yesterday, I could not have told you anything. So the big the big one that everybody wants is an Icer account. So where going to ship, a kind of v1 of that which is that you can have an Icer or go to Freetrade general account. But obviously the benefits of having the Icer account, that is tax wrap. So it is definitely worthwhile get one. That is going to be by the end of the year. So hopefully as soon as possible. And then as I mentioned earlier, adding the U.S. securities. That is kind of another one that I am seeing a lot of people want and possibly people that are less bothered about the Icer account would still be really excited about those. So we were trying to make sure it both accounts got a good deal for this year.

(32:44) Chris: Do you want to fire off your favorite final question?

(32:46) Carla: I always ask the same question. Is there anything, like I always ask for a book, a blog or someone to follow, then you can recommend to designers these days.

(32:59) James: Oh, that is interesting. A book, a blog, or someone on follow.

(33:04) Carla: Could be ands as well. If you want to say more.

(33:09) James: Okay. So, so in terms of someone to follow, there is my former early designer, Deliveroo, Johnny Birch. He is actually doing some really great stuff around trying to break down progression barriers. I think it is such, such an impactful thing in the industry because it is something that is underserved. He has got his product progression pack. This is not an ad for him at all.

(33:37) Carla: We should interview him.

(33:37) James: You should. I just, think it is a very good thing that the industry needs. You were talking to us about the, the junior side of things earlier. This kind of addresses all of that, because it gives everyone a really clear view of where you are, and what you need to do to progress, and so many companies, because there is so many startups now as well as, they do not have time to do that. So he has got the benefit of having done that for thirty, forty people that Deliveroo. He is kind of taken that on and kicked off and, and made his own thing. I think he is actually doing a talk in a couple weeks. He is definitely someone worth following.

(34:18) Chris: Cool. Well I think that is it. So we go. So, thank you very much. (34:22) James: Thank you for having me.

Narrator: Search and subscribe to Design Untangled using your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. Follow us on the web at designuntangled.co.uk or on Twitter @designuntangled. Become a better designer with online mentoring at uxmentor.me.