Jeff Lash

I didn't.

taken some art classes in college, but I was definitely not a graphic designer by any means.

But somehow kind of stumbled upon this whole idea of usability and user experience and information architecture.

And it just kind of clicked with me.

For whatever reason, it resonated in this idea of, yes, we should be making websites and products that

you know, are easy to use and meet the needs of users.

Seems like that makes sense, but I was also experiencing so many products and websites that were not doing that.

So I kind of refocused in that direction and did that for about maybe four or five, six years.

And as I was doing that, I really liked it.

There was a great opportunity to, you know, make products better, make digital products and technology better.

But I also realized I was hitting a point where I remember at one point saying to my boss, if I learn to run a usability test 10% better, how does that help the business versus if I can make the product 10% better, that's going to have a much bigger impact.

And so there was an opportunity for me to move into product management at the company I was in.

At the time, that was a pretty rare thing.

So this was early-ish in the 2000s.

And product management was still not really well understood.

More broadly, user experience was not really well understood.

And my company, no one had ever moved into a product role from UX.

And more broadly, that wasn't a common path.

Now it's very common.

But back then that was, you know, I wouldn't say unheard of, but it was fairly uncommon.