Janna Bastow: evaluation

Transcript context

…Coming back to the now, next, later approach, you're often doing something really hard at companies, which is changing their way of working and changing their product culture. And I'm curious what you've learned about what it takes to change product development culture and product culture and the way of working at larger companies. Larger companies are tough. They're tougher. I think of culture as calcification. So calcification being the limestone that is built up as watered run over and that sort of thing. And in order to fix it, you can kind of chip it off over time. You can't just fix it all in one go. And so in order to fix it, you've got to chip away at it. You've got to find a small pocket somewhere. You've got to make use of the tools that you've got. So sometimes it might be finding a small subset of the company and saying, 'Hey, here's the startup lab within the business. Let's let them run off and go do something." Because changing the mindset of the whole company is just too difficult. It's set in stone, and it's stuck where it is and can't change them all at once. But we can change this one little space right here, because we've got a shit hot leader who knows what they're doing and we can take this pocket of people and go do something here. And then they're going to teach the rest of the company. They're going to teach this section and then this section and then this section. You don't have to go and change the whole company all at once, but it does take buy-in from above. And sometimes that can be really difficult to take, because the incentives from above are often misaligned with the incentives that it takes to get a company moving this direction. Ultimately, a lot of these larger companies, they're incentivized to keep the company as stable as possible, to keep the company just growing quarter on quarter. Which is great for the stock market, they love that stability, they love that quarter on quarter growth. But if the company is actually under threat from startups, if you're a big bank, you're in health tech, something like that, you almost certainly have startups nipping at your heels. And the reality is that you probably have enough cash to make it for the next 20 years or so, but over time it's going to get bitten away at. And you've got smaller startups who are going to take the juicier, more interesting parts of your business and leave you with the tougher parts of your business. Take HSBC versus all the companies who are coming out with got a Starling account here and I've got a mortgage with somebody else and you've got your savings account somewhere else. You've got all these smaller startups nipping at their heels. These companies are going to nip away at these larger businesses and if these larger companies don't actually do something with it, they're actually going to end up losing this ability to innovate themselves. And so these companies are essentially stuck in this pattern where they want to continue growing and yet they're not going to, they're going to end up not being willing to take the dip to move upwards. What's the biggest company that you've implemented this new way of building? And is that how you approached it, you found a team within the larger company to roll out this new-…

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