Jeff Lash

Excellent.

Well, Jeff, we just talked about this a little bit in the pre-show, but let's revisit it for the audience here.

You've just had such an interesting path going from UX all the way back in 2002, usability specialist, really rare title to research and product management, leadership, advising across industries.

Just can you, would you mind walking us in the audience through like really what shaped the way you think about customers, product management, and even decision-making in today's fast-paced world?

Yeah, I think maybe I was always naturally going to end up in product management, but I, like many people, did not take a straight path to it.

So I always grew up around technology.

My dad had always lots of technology computers at home.

If you can see the background on video, I got a whole bunch of old tech.

So I grew up with technology, but I was never really a programmer.

I just liked it.

I went to school and studied marketing in my undergrad, and this was right around the time that the Web was taking off.

And I was kind of anxious to start applying some of those ideas to dot com and Web stuff and not necessarily the quote unquote old school stuff that we were learning a lot of at school.

This was back in the day, as I like to say, when knowing HTML was a very valuable skill to have, when the same person would set up the Apache server, design the graphics, write the copy, and maintain the webmaster of the site.

A webmaster, that's it.

A webmaster, yeah.

And so I did that for a number of years, you know, or I did that originally, you know, both on the side and kind of for a year or two, let's say.

And I very quickly realized, oh, this is going to get very fragmented.

You know, there's specialization that's going to come out of this.

I was not a great programmer, though.

I figured out how to write, you know, CGI, Ben and PHP and all that stuff.