Transcript — S2E1 — Sent to Canada with a Suitcase Full of Money

Rhyd: In today’s episode, I’m talking to Phil Parker. He’s the head of Deliver for Equal Experts and he’s based near London. Phil, thanks for coming on the show today.

Phil: No worries Rhyd. Good to you.

Rhyd: Good to see you, mate. What are you rethinking about at the moment?

Phil: Rethinking. So I’m generally a very curious person. I think like curiosity is kind of one my personal values. I know when I was a kid, my parents tell me that whenever a trades person came around to the house, I used just stand there and ask why a hundred times. You know, it used to drive them mad, but it’s something that I kind of really encourage in my own children. I’m pretty sure that the inner workings of my brain is still the same, it’s just why constantly. It’s almost the opposite to the Homer Simpson kind of meme. It’s pretty useful in my job. I think what I’ve always done is problem solving. So asking why is really useful in that but it’s also a bit of a curse. I get so frustrated when things don’t work when it’s like - not just websites or apps - but you know, systems, services, coffee shops, lunch places are hell. Interacting with the NHS—I appreciate what the medical professionals do—but the systems that they have to work with are so frustrating and so many of these things could be solved if people are allowed to apply a little bit of curiosity to solve the problems, you know, unfettered by politics and personal bias. So I guess I’m rethinking everything all the time. But if I pick something that’s quite topical to 2023 and I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions and things like that, but I have been thinking a lot in 2023 about health and habits specifically. This all stemmed from two things happening on the 1st of January. The first was that our girls were creating bullet journals. Dunno if you’ve seen this. It’s like a TikTok trend of creating like colourful visual trackers of your life. You know, like tick boxes and things like that. The second thing that happened was I made the grave mistake of weighing myself. So these two things combined means that the rest of the month and hopefully the rest of the year and beyond, I have a red, amber, green tracker on my fridge. The way it works, I’ve got like a number of targets each day. The same target every day, but target for food and alcohol and exercise and sleep and stuff. And if I hit the target it’s green, if I missed the target one day, it’s amber. That’s fine. If I missed the same target for subsequent day, it’s red.

Rhyd: What happens when it goes red?

Phil: Well, nothing really happens except there’s a bit of red on the fridge, right, you know. But I managed January with only two reds. But I think this is the thing, it’s not like a binary yes or no, like tracker, you know, you’ve either achieved it or you haven’t. It’s about returning to good. So even if I get, like in the middle of the year, if I have two weeks where it’s just red, it’s still there. And hopefully I can, you know, return to it. I think the fact that my kids look at it and ask about it as well is a little bit of extra motivation. They’re like the ultimate accountability partners. So, I spent quite a lot of time I guess rethinking what it means to have habits that improve your health.

Rhyd: I love it. Is that something you invented or something you find out about online?

Phil: Yeah I kind of tweaked this a bit in the early part of the month. I think it’s not patented. Obviously, being a software developer, I went through that stage of thinking this is a brilliant idea. I need a website and app. And then I remembered every other idea that I’ve had, which I thought would do the same.

Rhyd: So you working at Equal Experts, they’re a global network of technology enthusiasts and they help companies innovate. I know them well. But what I’m interested in is there a common myth really about innovation and building software products that listeners might not realize.

Phil: Yeah I have a mixed relationship with the term innovation actually. I’ve talked about that and I’ve rethought that a lot recently in conversations with colleagues as well. And I think a lot of people think about innovation, about kind of, you know, unbridled creativity, research and development, really pushing the envelope. And I don’t think that’s what we are really talking about when we’re talking about innovation. I think we’re talking about the ability for businesses to respond to change.

Rhyd: Right

Phil: To continue to be successful in the long term. And this is why I think we debate the word innovation a lot. Cause I think some people maybe think of it as frivolous or aspirational when actually it’s, to me, it’s table stakes for survival, right. You know, to be able to be in a situation where you’ve got a product portfolio that can survive for the long term to allow the business. If not thrive, at least survive. So, a truly high performing technology product organization is able to, I guess, identify shifting needs in the market. You know, recognize when product market fit is failing or fading, able to identify and validate where products may be able to deliver value. It’s able to quickly test possible solution, you know, maybe in days or weeks. And it’s able to effectively run those products, not projects, products, but for many years, right? It’s able to know when to decommission them and how to do that in a way that doesn’t leave either technology overheads or doesn’t leave users stranded or doesn’t leave product teams with nothing to do. And I think the extraordinary thing in really high performing teams, which we rarely see is they’re able to do that on a foundation, which is constantly shifting, right? You know, the lifetime of most products and certainly of portfolios, is much longer than the average tenure of a developer in the team, probably longer than the tenure of any of the technologies that they’re using. Certainly longer than the technology of the company investors, owners, or leaders who—quite frankly—have little understandings, of how any of that above stuff works, you know? And it’s hugely difficult to achieve that ability to respond to change. And the thing I always talk about is that what it really it’s boring.

Rhyd: Right

Phil: The big picture is hugely exciting. I use the metaphor, the like marginal gains in cycling. You know, this vision of having, you know, being on top of the podium and everything is amazing and it’s exciting and it’s fantastic, but the way they do it is by being relentlessly professional and removing half a teaspoon of oats from their weighed out breakfast, right? And lots of what we do in teams is boring and disciplined and it’s not the fancy stuff that gets all of the plaudits but, when you put it all together, it achieves amazing things. And we constantly see, you know, companies and, you know, our teams. We have a small victories channel on Slack, which you’ll be aware of and you see, and it amazes me, you know, we multiple times a day, you just get these constant stories of success and almost always they are that we’ve done this with a product for the users or this business metric, or this has been saved, or this has been achieved, you know, it’s not we’ve managed to use you know, wiggle, wiggle framework 2.0. You know, it’s genuinely people making changes to businesses. And so to me that’s what innovation is. The myth about innovation is that it’s sparkly and fancy unicorns and glitter when it’s hard work, professionalism and expertise applied for the long term.

Rhyd: I like that definition. That’s a great definition because I’ve seen sort of companies in the past where they’ve got a Head of Innovation or a Director of Innovation. And I’ve always struggled to understand how that person or that group is able to affect change across the rest of the organization. It feels like they come up with ideas, but then they hand it over to someone else and then they’re gonna get lost. It doesn’t seem to work, right?

Phil: Absolutely. I’ve seen exactly the same failure many times and I think we often talk about the fact that we’ll prove something and then industrialize it, but we take the opposite approach: you industrialize it first, right? Not necessarily you don’t invest loads industrialize it, but you have something that you know you can run in production and then you add business capability to it. It’s the concept of the steel thread or tracer bullet or the walking skeleton. There’s lots of different terms for it, but it’s building an organization that is able to ship things that are industrialized immediately without a massive upfront investment. Yeah, I agree. Isolated innovation. I think it’s okay to create, I think you can create short term task forces, you know, to try and push the boundaries in a particular area which would maybe be hard to do within existing organization structures, but I agree. I think innovation labs, R&D departments rarely end up delivering business value.

Rhyd: Yeah. I really like the idea that you have to remove half a teaspoon of votes to get the kind of consistent. Gains over time. I’m gonna think about how I might apply that at work as well, cause that’s quite a nice thought.

Phil: You can quite unkindly push the metaphor even further, people in the organization, you know, people in the industry may be operating at a certain level who haven’t necessarily done it before and they, they talk about. How we’re gonna climb the podium. You know, that’s what the communications are on. It’s almost cargo cult thinking. Well, if, you know we don’t have to climb the podium, then that’s the problem. But it’s not that’s the result. Not the thing that causes the success.

Rhyd: Yeah, I think I was having a conversation quite recently where we were discussing what the end state for a customer might look like, and they were very heavily focused on making sure we included everything they might possibly need in the future. And I was trying to steer the conversation toward, no, what do you need now and let’s just focus on that and worry about everything else. Cause by the time you get to 3/4 weeks, 3/4 months, whatever, things will have changed. And like you said, the ability to be adaptive to the changes coming is more important than trying to plan ahead and think about all the possibilities that you might encounter.

Phil: Yeah, and I agree. I think there is… One of the things we often try and do, and you know, personally, systems thinking, like elevator thinking, think big, act small. Some of those things are, I think you need both. In fact, what’s the change formula or something talks about that. The change you need. You need a problem or a pain point. You need a vision. But for how it’s better. But you also need the next steps. I think that’s important. If you only do next steps, if you over YAGNI, you know you ain’t gonna need it, then there’s a real risk that you are only looking at your own feet and you don’t know where you’re going. So I’ve seen teams and organizations suffer from that as well. It’s having those two working in harmony, I think, which is what actually delivers, delivers success.

Rhyd: That’s a fair point. Point well made.

Rhyd: What event made you pause and rethink your approach to work and life. Phil, was there a singular event? I’m guessing there might not be based on what you just told me.

Phil: Yeah, I’m not, I think I’m not big on, on singularities, I guess. I don’t think tend to think of things particularly in my own life in terms of turning points. I think my brain works more in terms of—I guess a continuum—I dunno if there’s a less highfalutin word than that. It might be the wrong word, but I think everything happens could only happen because of everything that’s happened before. You know, the outcome and implications of every event is actually an aggregate of everything that’s happened before. So, I mean, one benefit of that is that I don’t tend to have regrets as in I recognize when I could have done things differently and I’ll try and learn from those things and not do the same again. But this, you know, when people say, what would you change in your life? I’d be like, I wouldn’t change anything. Cause I think you risk everything that you have today by changing something in the past. You know, if you get into all the nerdy time-travel paradox kind of things it’s like, well, you know, can you really change something and everything else just be the same. So, you know, I guess ultimately, you know, what do I rethink? I recognize that I’m very privileged, right? You know, I was born in the UK, I’m a man, you know, being heterosexual, cisgender, able bodied, broadly neurotypical you know, puts you in the top 0.1% of the species in terms of opportunities, right? And not having to swim against the flow on those things. So, You know, I think that’s something that you’ve got to recognize and appreciate. But on a personal level everyone’s life is personal, right? And you have lots of things. You know my father died when I was about 20, so I never, you know, I never feel like I knew him as an adult. And that’s something that kind of, you know, I, you can’t regret it. But I feel sad that I didn’t have a chance to have a grown up relationship with him. As well as a parent of a child. You know, about 12 years ago, we lost a baby which obviously is hugely significant. In the last five years I’ve been through a divorce, but I’m like in a new relationship with the blended family. And I think all of these things and many smaller things as well, like profoundly affect the way that you think, right? But I more than anything for me I think. Like, if I was gonna pick something, not an event, but something, then it would probably be my Mum. Because she has had multiple sclerosis 50 years. Right. So just in case anyone’s in doubt that’s before I was born. And before my older brother was born. So for the whole of our lives, you know, she had multiple sclerosis and I don’t really remember it affecting as much because she didn’t let it. So we used to go out hiking with a big group and she wouldn’t go on the hike and she’d drive and meet us afterwards and you know, there were things like that. But it essentially, we didn’t notice it cause she didn’t let it affects us. You know, she fought against it her whole life and she still does now, you know, even though she’s full-time in the electric wheelchair, she still fights against it. Which is amazing, right? And it’s sort of quite inspiring and especially considering the privilege that I have. It’s kind of, you know, quite thankful of that. But I think it does mean for me, I’d probably I think I value happiness like, you know, of myself. You know, of my loved ones, but ideally not at the cost of of others. Cause I dunno how people can necessarily enjoy if that’s the case. But I think because I am very, I guess, grateful and thankful for what I have that, you know, I kind of value that more than anything else. So I guess that’s that’s probably the pivotal, not rethinking or continuous rethinking I guess that I have in my life.

Rhyd: Well, thanks for sharing that. I mean, some very difficult moments, some very testing times. You know, I lost my dad when I was 18, so similar to age to you and you kind of do look back and think, well, look at all the after the time that has been, the opportunities were lost to, to learn more about your own family and more about, you know, your relative and then obviously you do think about the kind oh, what, you know, so many times I’ve asked myself the what if question. And the problem with that I find is that you kind of get, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t actually help you in anything. You know, sometimes it can, there’s a bit of melancholy and a bit of, you know, sadness that the can sometimes help. But in the end, I made decisions after that event that had I not made those decisions, my life would be totally different. So it’s almost impossible to go back and say, oh, I wish, obviously you don’t want it to have happened, but your life is what your life is now. And so you can’t change it. So you’ve gotta just look forward and move forward. Sounds like you’ve done exactly that.

Phil: Percent. Hundred percent. I agree.

Rhyd: You’ve been working in technology for over 20 years. How’d you get started, Phil?

Phil: I, there’s lots of different ways to answer this question, aren’t there? So, it wasn’t my intended career. I wanted to be a military pilot because I watched Top Gun too many times. I intended to be up until about A levels and A levels, so I was gonna do aeronautical engineering and then a-level physics didn’t agree with me or I didn’t agree with my A-level physics teacher, one of the two. I’ll let the listener decide which but so so aeronautical engineering came off the table. And I had done quite a lot of computing. So I’ve done, I teach at GCSE and computing at a level. Always enjoyed it, found it easy. I started. You know, I had ZX Spectrums and Amiga and things, and my dad wasn’t an IT professional but we had like a really early home kind of ring network thing, you know, so there was always that, there was always that interest, so it seemed an obvious thing to go. So I actually did a joint degree, half in computing and half in management. So at that point, which sort of set, set the tone. But so, so at that point I, I kind of assumed I would go into something. I intra I lived up north sort of, or at least in the Midlands. So certainly north of Watford gap for the whole of my, the whole of my youth went to university in Hull—one of the three great universities for any Blackadder fans—and I completely thought I would carry on living up there. Actually, I assumed I’d get a job in Leeds or Manchester or something maybe. And then I, after graduating, I randomly got like answered an advert where somebody was paying expenses to come down to London for an interview. I was like, you know, go and see the big smoke, may as well. Not thinking I would take a job. They offered me the job. And before I could say no, they said that you’d get a week in San Francisco as part of your onboarding. At which point I moved to London, and I’ve now been down South longer than I was over up North, which is weird. So that was my first job was working in a dot com consultancy during the latter half of the dot com boom. Which eventually came to an end with the dot com.

Rhyd: So dot com. Jesus. When was that? 99, 2000.

Phil: Yeah, so, so I graduated in 2000, I think. And I worked with them for a couple of years. So it was growing rapidly. It was fantastic. They’d got offices in New York and San Francisco grew hugely, lots of graduate intakes and everything. One of their big projects actually was Direct Line’s first online service. And you gotta think, I mean, this is a time when there wasn’t a lot. Online. Right. You know, you forget that there, there wasn’t a huge amount online. You didn’t do a lot of a lot of business online.

Rhyd: No, there was the Yahoo directory, there was Geocity sites that people built with under construction gifs everywhere.

Phil: Exactly. Yeah.

Rhyd: And Google wasn’t around till about 2000, 2003/4. Right? Or wasn’t publicly available to - obviously to the degree it is now so…

Phil: A direct line car insurance. Were doing their first website. And I’m not sure who was actually involved in this, but they decided cockney rhyming slang to call it jam jar.com. So there was a big thing called jamjar.com which was one of our big projects. And I do remember that, to get the domain, it was owned by somebody who was literally making jam in Canada and somebody basically got sent to Canada with a suitcase full of money to buy this domain, have it transferred over so that they could launch the first, I think the first, large online and a car insurance offering.

Rhyd: If you could send yourself a message back in time, 20 years, what would you say to your, to yourself?

Phil: I’d probably say that. Don’t worry, the millennium bug’s not that big a deal. I mean, I literally wrote exam answers on the Millennium bug for my degree. It was a big concern. I’m guessing a lot. I mean, that, that must be relatively in popular culture, but I guess for people that don’t know, there was concern that years that were stored in two digits that the year zero zero would appear as earlier than the year 99. And this was a massive concern that all sorts of systems would fail, error, miscalculate, et cetera. And it was big news. It was almost Brexit level news for the years before 2000. Right. And either because lots of work was magically done or because it was massively overstated or more likely a combination of the two?

Rhyd: I imagine, yes. I imagine either people could fix the problem in plenty of time, but they over egged how much worth there was or the number of systems that had that critical flaw were few and far between. But isn’t there one coming up in 2034 or something where some Unix time is gonna cause a similar problem?

Phil: Yeah, epoch time, I guess. The number of milliseconds since the 1st of January, 1970, I’m guessing, rolls over at number of digits.

Rhyd: So we’ve got 11 years to talk fretting about that. Okay. I’m gonna start panicking tomorrow.

Rhyd: Phil, what’s coming up next for you?

Phil: Thanks for me, I guess in, in work more of the same. Lots of interesting conversations with people who want to change the way they use technology to deliver products. I’m really lucky in my, I guess in my career, but in my role at the moment, I get to see so many organizations, you know, even with kind of modern careers of people changing jobs every couple of years. Most people with a 20 year career might have seen 10 different organizations, whereas I genuinely think I’ve seen interesting details of a hundred different organizations at least, which is a real privilege. But so I, I’m lucky that I get to see you so much. You know, you get to see the similarity of problems faced, but also meet so many people who, you know, genuinely really care about creating change, which, is nice to be able to do it. It’s quite an aspirational job to be able to do, to be able to book to people about how things can be better. And that means deliver more value, but also it normally means be better for the people who are involved in the system. I’m very, we’re talking this week actually on, you know, really human-centric processes for better software development. You know, TPS. Toyota Production System, I think, really was originally conceived as a human-centric process. When it got, when it sort of went to the US it really got very focused on wastes and things like that which was then mistaking as efficiency and productivity and quite badly abused. But I think, you know, I think you can improve the lives of people that work. You know, in, in these places as well as improving hopefully the life of users and stakeholders and others as well. So that’s work as normal, I guess, for Equal Experts. Equal Experts are going employee owned or employee trust ownership in 2025. Which even though that’s a couple of years away is obviously getting there rapidly. So I think that’s gonna make for a fascinating couple of years. So I’m very much looking forward to being part of that. In live, I guess it’s pretty, pretty simple based on what I’ve said. You know, as much happiness as possible with the ones that I love.

Rhyd: Phil, if anyone wants to get in touch with you, what’s the easiest way?

Phil: I think I’m relatively easy to find on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you search for Phil Parker Twitter, I’ll be the second result, right after the brass instrument specialist that used to be based on Hampstead Road, which is right around the corner of our office. So if I had a pound every time a colleague sent me a picture of that shop, I’d be rich. And I think I’d have at least £2 from you Rhyd.

Rhyd: Yes, I’ve done it. Yeah. Okay. I’ve done it at least twice. Sorry.

Phil: But yeah, Phil Parker, Twitter you should find me on LinkedIn. If you look at Phil Parker, Equal Experts and I, a big part of my role is just. Making our network better in the industry. So genuinely, if anybody’s interested in anything that we’ve talked about or anything that we not talked about, I’d love to have a conversation.

Rhyd: Brilliant. Thanks for your time today, Phil. That was Phil Parker, he’s the Head of Deliver at Equal Experts. Thanks mate.

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