This interview comes from a conversation with Lindsey Jayne, CPO of the Financial Times Group.
Prior to joining the FT Lindsey Jayne was a product leader in Fintech, at Monzo, where she led all of product during their scale up from 1 million to 3 million users and at Yoco, an African payments company. She has also held leadership roles at Farfetch and the Government Digital Service, where she was an early member of the team building GOV.UK.
Lindsey is an adviser to founders and VCs and coaches product leaders through the company she co-founded, Product Leadership Coaching.
Lindsey talks to us about
- Her experience working in fast growing organisations and how that shaped her thinking
- Strategy as a practical, simple action plan to yield results in the Richard Rumelt mode
- Structuring hypotheses and delivering testable, iterable results
- Thinking commercially and balancing risk
- Structuring organisations and setting the right KPIs
- Her personal mantras
Introduction to Lindsey
Lindsey, would you like to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about who you are?
I’m Lindsey Jayne and I’m the Chief Product Officer at the Financial Times, which has more products than you think – itās not just a pink newspaper! I do that four days a week.
Then on the fifth day of the week, I have a business doing coaching, consultancy and advisory for small scale ups and startups. This speaks to my background in scale ups, creating and finding sustainable growth.
I mostly coach early-stage companies on their strategies or at moments of change, where itās imperative they get traction.
Lindsey Jayne
What particularly drew you to the FT? Why did you want to work for them?
I find the challenges faced in media both important and interesting. Disinformation and misinformation are on the rise, so trusted news is more important. Yet, willingness to pay for news is generally not high. The engagement of younger generations with news is very different to older generations. So you have a host of systemic challenges.
The FT has been around for 135 years – the way it stays around for another century is to evolve. I found it fascinating to be part of the journey of figuring out how we evolve to keep our position as a trusted and relevant institution.
The FT built a very sustainable business based on subscriptions early on, so not just on advertising, giving us a strong foundation from which to start. Growth beyond the core audience and core product means diversification – meeting different needs for our audience, or reaching new audiences.
I was drawn in by the combination of that opportunity and the people. It’s got a good culture of mission-driven folks and it’s one of the most diverse and inclusive product and tech teams I’ve ever worked in.
What are the other products that the FT has?
Alongside the well-known regular FT, we have the FT Edit, which is a delightful, curated set of eight articles a day, as well as a host of newsletters.
For business users, we’ve been building some great tailored tools, to help people get more value out of the FT and to do their jobs better.
That might be about being able to get insights out of the content quickly, such as ask.ft.com, a generative AI service currently in beta, which generates answers to users questions using FT only content. So, you could ask it āwhat are the emerging global trends for interest rates?ā and it will scan our articles to find answers, summarise the information, and link out to all the sources.
We look at where the FT brand has resonance and has space to play. So we do things like train people on how to become board directors, or deliver other kinds of professional development. We have an events business that runs events all over the world for individuals and for businesses.
We have a portfolio of specialist titles like The Investors Chronicle, which has been around for longer than the FT. We start new titles too. We run a lean product process where we’ll spin up an idea, such as one we did recently called Sustainable Views, which is all about environmental and social governance. They start off very simple as a newsletter and then graduate to become a full publication if we see traction.
We actually build a bunch of our own tools. As an example, we created a content management system called Spark, which had an NPS of something like 90. Weāre also experimenting with what we can do with generative AI to help journalists find signal in the noise: give them superpowers to go out there and find and tell the stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told.
Pivotal moments in Lindseyās career
Going back to your journey towards the FT, what would you say were the pivotal moments in your career? Where were the inflection points and how did you wind up where you are now?
When I was at school, you didn’t know you wanted to be a product manager when you grew up, because the job didnāt exist. My path has probably been very, very different to most peopleās.
First pivotal moment
My first pivotal moment would be discovering product and learning that really successful products start from really understanding the user. As someone who started work in the frontlines of the service industries, this really validated my experience that empathy with users made for better business.
I used to be cabin crew for Virgin Atlantic and was part of one of the early service design experiments with I think the Royal College of Arts. They mapped the entire travel journey end to end, the travellersā highs and lows.
We ended up with the Upper Class experience for business passengers: you get in a car and are driven to the airport, get swept through security in a dedicated wing, and emerge straight into a lounge, skipping the airport stress entirely. Then onboard, you might choose to have your bed made straight away and be woken mid flight to eat and work, we can adapt the service to your needs. Those concepts of service design started to be interesting to me.
Then I went and got this job in the Cabinet Office, thinking that I wanted to help save the world and that working for the government was the way to do it.
But I was doing it on this laptop that took fifteen minutes to boot up, they were asking me to write speeches about things I didn’t know anything about, there was so much hierarchy and it just felt wrong. One day, someone walked past me carrying a MacBook and I was like, why do you have a functioning computer? So I followed them and I found the newly formed Government Digital Service and talked my way into the building and a job.
They were my intro to product. I just hit this thing that completely made sense to me. If you build a team with a diverse set of skills, someone with a technical point of view, someone with a data point of view, somebody who knows the context in which it has to operate, and you put all of these things together with a focus on user needs and a deep understanding of technology, then build it in an iterative way, you get results. The approach just resonated so much.
I think a huge strength in my career is having come up in this mental model of building products that was very user-centred, very clear and simple. Very transparent. If something sounded like jargon, or too complex, then it is. There was an ethos around getting to the crux of the issue and simplifying it. Seeing and being part of the change and the impact that type of thinking had was hugely inspiring.
Second pivotal moment
From GDS, I went to Farfetch. Operating in a global business going through growth and an IPO meant I learnt a lot. How do you hire the first user researcher in Shanghai if you don’t speak Mandarin, donāt have WeChat on your phone, canāt read the language? These were interesting problems to solve.
It was after this though, when I joined Monzo, that was the next most pivotal. VC-backed companies have definitely overused the rocketship of growth metaphor, but the sheer pace at which we were experimenting, and getting products out and learning was breathtaking. I think we released over fifty significant features in a year. There is no substitute for the knowledge and experience you get from building teams and putting products out into the world, and I feel like I got about seven years of experience for every one year I was at Monzo.
Product was much advantaged by the quality of the work done across the company, be it flexible technical architecture, unparalleled access to data or amazing customer support. There was remarkable dedication of the people in the teams to quality: the bar was really high, and thatās hugely motivating for me.
We were learning, we made mistakes, it wasn’t perfect by any means. Fast-growing cultures can be challenging sometimes. But, at the end of the day we shipped great stuff. Leading good people who want to do amazing work, and then you do ship that amazing work, is just the most rewarding thing.
Philosophy of product strategy
What’s your philosophy of strategy in the product context?
I think it’s one of those loaded words that gets used too much or gets bandied around everywhere in a not very helpful or meaningful manner.
The way I think about strategy is in a simple, practical and applied way. I love Richard Ruhmelt’s book Good Strategy Bad Strategy. He has this great example in it, which I’ll quote wrong but it goes something along the lines of āA small flotilla of ships needs to battle a larger one.ā
If the smaller flotilla just went at the larger, they would be completely obliterated. So āengage in battle with other side and winā is not a strategy.
But what if they decided to line up tightly behind each other and then try to break through the larger oneās lines. The first ship would get picked off and the second would get picked off, and the third one, but maybe the ships at the back would make it through.
Richard Rumelt calls that a strategy, because their way of approaching the situation was to set themselves up with what they had and the best way to succeed. For me, it’s exactly that. It’s what’s going on. What’s the diagnosis? What’s happening in the market? What are you good at? What spaces are there to play? What data do you have? What’s your unique value? Where might you add other value?
So starting with diagnosis and then outlining what you’re going to do. Where is it you want to go and what’s your plan to get there? What are you not going to do? I think that often gets left out of strategy and is one of the things that makes it ultimately difficult to execute.
I always think of strategy as something that’s got to be really practical, really tangible, short and sharp. Ideally you can stop somebody, you know, an engineer in their third week or a junior user researcher and say to them, What’s our strategy? And they can repeat it back to you. Then youāve done it well.
Product strategy must consider commercial and technological realities
Knowing what is technically possible
The interesting thing about product, I forget who said it, but somebody said that the role of a product manager is to know what is just now technically possible. And that feels especially true at the moment, as we see big leaps and limitations in what is technically possible, enabled by generative artificial intelligence.
If you’re a marketing director, you might not have up to the minute knowledge of what we can now do with machine learning to help target customer messages. You might not know that we can take our existing tech that creates subscriptions and within 5 minutes, create the ability to gift subscriptions.
When one area sets a strategy and then hands it over to somebody else to figure out the implementation, weāre missing the opportunity to bring different expertise to bear through partnership or true collaboration. The bit where folks can share what is possible that you maybe didn’t know was possible. Or what may be harder than it appears at face value. Conversely, if we build a tool for marketers without really understanding their workflow, itās going to be a pain for them to use. The more it’s a collaboration, a partnership, the better results we get. And to do that, product people need to stay up to speed on what is technically possible.
Example of a detailed strategy process
Can you share a concrete example of a strategy youāve created?
During the pandemic, I ended up working with a South African Fintech called Yoco. They were a well-known and well-loved card machine provider for entrepreneurs in South Africa. They had really ambitious growth plans, to move up the value chain and expand the services they offered, to expand internationally and to expand which customers they served to include more of the informal market. It’s quite hard to change on that many fronts at once.
The team hadn’t really worked with product that much before either. They wanted to have more products and be more product-centred, but people didn’t know what that meant in practice.
Collaborating on strategy
You can’t create a strategy in isolation. It starts with getting people in a room and understanding how far away they are from the direction that you want to take them.
There’s a really fun exercise where you give everybody an imaginary $100 and say, These are the different things I’ve heard we want to invest in next year. You’ve all got $100, where are you going to place them? Some smart workshopping in a group setting that helps people focus on the issue rather than their opinions can be really, really useful.
So for Yoco, we narrowed in on four product areas that were at very different stages of fidelity, that we wanted to make progress on. For each, we laid out the opportunity, where we wanted to be, what our strengths were, what we needed to succeed, and how weād measure that success. We listed examples of things we would do, and would not do.
That didnāt happen all in one room on one day, but we used the input, expertise and challenge of the whole leadership team.
Allocating resources to bets
When you have multiple bets, I like to break things down and as a rough heuristic say: 60% of our energy is going to go into our core business and this is our strap line for what we’re going to do there. And these are 3 or 4 results that we’re going to set up teams around. 30% of our energy is going to go into breaking into new markets. This is the way that we’re going to approach it. This is how we know we’re starting to see results and this is when we’ll check in. This idea is now a research project only, but at least you know it’s being covered, it’s being held.
Check out Joe Tinston, CPO of Bloom & Wild discussing using the McKinsey Horizons model
So we articulated how much of our energy we are putting into them, what we thought the opportunity was based on qual and quant research, and when weād see results. We then created the org structure around that, allocating work to teams configured to those four areas and the goals within them.
Translating concept into vision
Whilst we had the people who got this in the leadership team, but it just wasnāt resonating through the company, people kind of got it, but it wasnāt fully resonating. So it was time for hearts and minds. The love language of this organisation was video. We had an astonishing brand team who would come on to our town hall every month and show this incredible new campaign that had pumping music and incredible stories. The adverts would make people cry. It was when people got excited and how they got excited.
What I did was tell the story of where we wanted the product to be in three or four years by filming a video that showed our customers using our products in the future, that showed how the vision might become reality in 20 seconds with that same high energy, high production value.
It’s a hell of an investment to make, and that production bill probably did not land well, but it really brought the concept alive to the whole company. And it really shifted the level of ambition in our product teams.
Build trust by shipping
One of the challenges always is getting everybody aligned behind the strategy, and then getting them to commit to it for long enough to deliver results.
There are a few things you’re just going to need to deliver on, no matter what. Find the non-negotiable things that you need to deliver on that will build your credibility, particularly if you’re new somewhere. And then do them. I think itās also the role of a leader sometimes, to have those difficult conversations with investors, with the board, with whoever, about what is realistic.
If something is unfamiliar or controversial, I think you also have to invest in a PR strategy for it. You can’t say We’re doing it our way, this way it’s fine, just trust us. You have to create excitement, you have to show the workings, The first step is going be talking to these 50 user types we’ve never spoken to before, Weāre figuring out what the regulation says that we can do with pricing, or Weāre looking at three different business models and seeing what our tech can do. Once we’ve got the answer to that, our next step will beā¦
Breaking things down into small steps
I’m a huge advocate for breaking things down into small steps and getting them done. We’ve created a product life cycle very specific actually to the FT. The first thing you do is that you have an idea. It’s got to have an elevator pitch, but it’s also got to have a clear hypothesis that you can prove or disprove. If we don’t prove that hypothesis, then we need to have a conversation about whether we’re carrying on or not.
Itās about bringing people on the journey, starting small and having proof points along the way. People will often be happy to sign up for 1 more month and see what happens rather than signing up for the next year.
By breaking things into small steps you get feedback points that help you go, Okay, what are we doing? Have we derisked this? Are we feeling confident enough to invest further? Yes, we are, let’s carry on.
Having a hypothesis approach also helps with setting expectations at the beginning that not everything will win and that some things will be turned off.
Structuring hypotheses and calling out risk
How do you prove or disprove those idea hypotheses?
I mean, that’s an absolute art and a science, right?
I’m fascinated by Gen AI and have been following like a total nerd. I’ve got right down into academic papers. There’s a lot of hype and everybody’s just whacking Gen AI on things and shipping it and getting a bit overexcited.
We have a Gen AI product that we’re putting out there and we were in a product review yesterday. We were talking about the hypothesis. We think that this particular group of users will find this valuable, and we think the reason that it will be valuable is this. We know that will be true if we see this sort of behaviour.
That’s how we structure our hypotheses: itās that We think [for this audience], this thing will have [this effect] and we will know it’s true when we see [this thing].
Check out the Booking.com experimentation and hypothesis approach
When you’re early in your journey and you don’t know your users well, sometimes just the act of writing things down in that format helps you build up the knowledge to write better hypotheses in the future. It’s a really useful way to make sure that there is a logical flow between the effect you’re trying to create and the results that you think you will see, and it holds you to account.
The other thing we always do is call out what the specific risks are. What are the biggest unknowns that we need to be clear about for this hypothesis to be able to stand up at scale? If we built this product all the way out and is it commercially viable? Is it technically possible? I’ve done a lot of work in regulated business, Is it legal? Will people find it valuable?
Thatās built off Marty Caganās framework of four risks. I always end up slightly adapting it slightly to work for the context Iām in.
The Four Big Risks – Marty Cagan
Itās all about setting out an opinionated stance on what you think will happen, being very sure you have a causal relationship that links back to your hypothesis and then designing something that tests it effectively. Then being very honest about the results, the signal and what you’ve learned from them.
Spend time with real customers
When you’re managing your teams how do you imbue that focus on customer discovery and customer understanding? What do you advise them to do?
Get in front of customers. There is nothing more humbling than having finished something which you think will work for a customer and then watching them miss it, or use it in a totally different way. This has happened to me plenty of times in my career.
Make interacting with customers a whole team sport
One striking example came from a usability session.
GOV.UK was built during one administration and a new government was coming. Policy pages from the old government had to be preserved for record, but we needed to clearly signal to users that these were from a previous administration.
So we’re like, oh god, this is important. People need to know what the latest policy is.
So we built this blue banner. It was a chunky blue banner right at the top in our primary colour that basically said, THIS POLICY IS OLD. And in a user research session the woman there reads the screen, does the whole thing and the researcher says, So when do you think this policy is from and how would you know it’s up to date? And so she says she thinks the policy is up to date.
She hasnāt registered the banner in any form. The researcher says to her: How would you expect to be notified if it was old? And the woman goes, I’d imagine a big coloured banner at the top of the page. You’re just like, oh, wow, wow. We havenāt done our job well enough here yet, even when the solution seemed obvious. This is something the whole team needs to experience, not just a researcher.
One of the people who worked there used to say user research is such sweet sorrow. But you can keep your learning cycles short.Do qualitative user research. Design short experiments that you get information from quickly.
That does mean that you’re straight into the harsh world of your stuff being in front of people and them voting with their feet, but you’ll have that moment of breakthrough where something will actually work. That is quite addictive.
The cycle of having an idea, testing it with a person, seeing what the person does, Gosh, humans are complicated, back to the drawing board, change it a bit, put it back out, is hugely rewarding. Itās probably the best way to get people to build successful products, and be convinced of the value of talking to a user before you’ve put loads of time and energy in and got a nasty surprise.
Lived experience is much better than me banging on at people asking what’s the user need?
Balancing customer and commercial outcomes
How do you balance customer focus and commercial outcomes?
Jobs where I’ve been most successful have been where thereās the balance of customer and commercial thinking in product. In the past in some companies, they may have said, oh, we donāt need to worry about the commercial aspects, thatās not our thing.
Having worked in Fintech the business model almost is the product. The pricing of a loan or an account almost determines who it’s for, and vice versa.
I see product as being successful when it’s as commercially minded as it is customer minded. Iām very much all in on customer centricity as a principle, but that’s not a principle that is versus commerciality or an abdication.
How do you build that understanding in your teams?
It depends on where they’re starting from. One of my mantras is start with the capability of the team you have and see where you can go. Find the people who know stuff and harness their expertise.
In the context of the FT, if we’re looking at going into a new market, it might just be including the market sizing and some data from our existing customers into the product framework when we’re assessing whether we want to go any further with this idea. Sometimes it might not be my team who are doing that work, but I need them exposed to it so they have the context and skills to consider it.
Itās also important to make sure that the goals that you set the team are not all speaking to user satisfaction or volume growth, but include value growth.
At the FT we have a Product Council, which is made up of our Board members who lead areas in which we have product and technology teams. We’ve just come out of a cycle of setting objectives and key results for everywhere product and technology is operating. We have revenue targets in that, because we expect our teams to be collaborating with and helping the teams who are setting prices or have sales targets.
Aside from having goals and making sure everybody understands them, we do things like getting our commercial teams to come us about trading conditions, and what matters in the numbers. Including those goals in the sub-team goals and making sure people understand it is always a good thing.
Structuring organisations
When you’re thinking about how to structure your org and set KPIs, what do you think is most important? Are there any sort of guardrails you always put in place or any tripwires you’re trying to avoid?
I always maintained that I could draw the org charts of half the companies whose products I interact with on a daily basis. Itās a version of Conway’s law, which is to say you end up shipping your org chart. Your customers can experience how the company is structured by the seams and points of friction in your interfaces.
Whenever I’m thinking about structuring the organisation, apart from thinking about skills, I always like to think about What does the organisation naturally optimise for? What’s going to happen if I completely take my hands off?
For instance here at the FT, people will very naturally stay in silos – media organisations have separation designed in so the journalism can be independent. So good cross-team collaboration on product work is something we believe in, and take deliberate steps to incentivise and encourage. I think about, OK, what is it I’m trying to get people to do? What is it that we need to do differently? This is our first time launching a new product in 50 years. How is that going to mean we need to operate differently?
I create org structures for the thing that we are trying to change and optimise for that, knowing that we can bank and rely on the behaviours that are ingrained. In big companies where three people are working on the same problem or need to coordinate to get something done, one of the principles I have is optimising to make sure that people have visibility on the work.
Another is making sure that as much as possible, a team has everything they need to solve the problem. At Monzo we put lawyers in the product teams because there were points at which we couldn’t create a product unless we had constant access to someone who understood regulatory and legal implications.
When I’m setting up an organisation, Iām always starting from: What are our goals? How much energy are we putting into it? Where are we placing our bets? How do we operate? And therefore, what might we need to change?
Setting the right KPIs
Next important thing is key performance indicators. I am really, really fussy about whether the thing that you’re measuring is going to tell you whether you’re getting the result that you’re looking for. I do a lot of leaning on and working with data colleagues to get there.
In general I try to set just a few goals and make them really clear. There’s only 1 or 2 things you’re shifting at any one moment. There are maybe guardrails like, Go get me a million users, but they can’t all be worth 1 pound each. But I typically just tend to set a few things that really matter and then leave it to teams to set the ones underneath it, and do coaching and support to help make sure that they understand the key metrics.
For any product I’m always looking at, How many customer service queries are we getting, howās progression through the funnel from people being aware of it, using it, actively engaged to becoming advocates? Has it got the health metrics that it needs to around load time responsiveness, all of those sorts of things? What are we seeing across the different cohorts? That’s my go-to dashboard for a customer-facing product.
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Mantras
When you’re coaching your teams, are there mantras you end up repeating to them to keep them focused?
Absolutely. There’s a couple of things that are very Lindsey that I end up being known for wherever I go.
Digging deep
Getting to the bottom of a problem: Is that it though? Is that why? Making sure we’ve gotten to the bottom and we’re solving the problem, not solving the symptom. Ensuring we’ve got to the crux of the matter, we’ve really thought about it and our reasoning holds up to scrutiny.
Meet people where they are
The other one is to meet people where they’re at.
I think I’ve probably interviewed over a thousand product managers or product and design and research people as a penance for having worked in four astonishingly scaling businesses.
There’s an interesting trend of rage against the machine. Everyone’s like: Marty Cagan says we should be doing it this way and my stakeholder wants this. It’s almost āGrant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the differenceā. You have to be very open-eyed about What state is the tech in? What capabilities do you have in your team? What is untapped potential? How much trust does the company have in product? And start from there rather than being frustrated that all conditions aren’t perfect.
You could be yearning for the dream that you read about in the blogs of the companies everyone always cites. Or you could be more realistic and do something special with what you have.
Multi-disciplinary leadership
I tend to bring in coaching of teams by multidisciplinary groups of leaders.
What I often see is the product manager being told by their boss to do it this way, the tech lead will be told by their boss to do it this way, and then the team will come together and try to achieve that. But I find astonishing value when you put all the disciplines in a room together and they show the work, then you have some more senior people who’ve shipped that kind of work 30 times looking at it and asking them questions: Have you thought about this? Why are you doing that?
I like to do a fair amount of coaching in groups because that’s how we work and how we build.
Advice to others
You’re an advisor now. Are there common pieces of advice that you give out to companies?
Ensuring sustainable PMF
Success for me comes from being in love with the problem, not the idea. That all sounds very lovely in a textbook, but when you’ve just spent 10 years working without a real salary, trying to make this particular iteration of a thing, that can be hard to embody or practice.
Real rigour about building incremental confidence in something and being sure it’s sustainable is critical. We lived through a period of VC-funded growth, where everything was about top line growth for a really long time. Now we’re paying the piper on that, where we don’t have sustainable businesses. I’m always thinking about: How do we incrementally get confidence that this thing is viable and good? Are we really sure, as much as we can be, on all the dimensions we can be, because the ones we can’t that we’re sure?
Good working practices
The second one would be some of it is just setting up good working practices of having goals, of creating visibility and transparency of what’s going on so people in your team can build context and surprise you with things that you didn’t even know they were going to come up with.
Find good people and invest in them
The third one is your people. The reason I ended up coaching people from underrepresented backgrounds is I see so many cases of a founder giving up product or a company hiring their first product person and it being such a difficult role because they’re at the intersection of every discipline. If there’s any disagreement about the direction of travel or any blame thrown, that product leader will end up making it visible and having to work through it in order for the product to be successful.
I think that the scope of exactly how much a product person is holding and how much they have to navigate to be successful is astonishing. Having good people, investing in those people is your biggest lever for success. It would all be much easier if we just worked with computers, but we don’t. We work with humans and they can do magical things, but you need to look after them and that’s the really, really hard part. The product bit is easy.
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Who is Lindsey Jayne?
Lindsey Jayne is a chief product officer and advisor, currently working as CPO of the Financial Times. She has a proven track record of leadership in fast growing businesses, including Monzo and Farfetch in their early years. She believes in practical applications and rapid discovery to facilitate company ambitions. She also champions diversity in the companies and teams within which she works.
