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Steve Rogers - Director UX (User Experience) at Google

Global Perspectives Talks

Steve Rogers it the Director UX (User Experience) at Google, and also part of the Coventry University Alumni. His biggest piece of advice was that if you get the opportunity to be in the middle of a changing industry, take it! I believe this is exactly what the media industry is and is one of the reasons that I am excited to become a part of it.

 

Steve explained how he always wanted to be a leader, and this has led him to be in management since 1985. His past career has been wide ranging, from fashion design, to working with Braun as an industrial designer, and to Philips as a manager. From his experience he explained why we need to learn to pivot. Steve went from designer to manager, as he looked at his skills and passion and then was able to shape these into a career. He said that we can do exactly the same thing, as it is all about transferable skills within industries. Another of his jobs was being a Creative Director at the BBC, working for the relaunch of the BBC website, which was a success even under the extreme time constraints of only having 4 weeks to create it. This situation gained Steve a lot of respect, and he then used that respect to get the company to let him redesign more things, over longer time frames to a higher standard. After this he went to work at BT, writing a strategy for them to get rid of their links with Yahoo!.

One of the key things Steve spoke about was the power of a vision. This is a concept which puts the individual in the middle and works outwards from there. Firstly, start with a 6-12 months plan, which is where the vision path is created. Then move onto the 18-month plan, this is devoid of future, as it is close enough to know where society is going. At this point it is easier to identify which vision works best for the company and from that you can move onto working out a plan of how to get there. This process helps to prevent making the wrong choices.

He went onto explain how these visions work in relation to understanding business. For this he spoke of the 9 years that he has been working at Google. Steve was involved with Gmail, flight search, android watch, and working in emerging markets. Now, he is working on monetarising apps, as most new apps being developed are coming from developing and emerging markets.

 

The conclusions I have drawn from this talk include: data is important to get people to buy into any idea; to succeed you need to have a vision; change is inevitable so find out what drives you and go with it. It is important to earn respect and use it, as this is the only way you can make a change in a company. Lastly, to succeed in most industries you have to understand business. This was a really interesting talk and educated me about an industry I knew little about, I found Steve’s career changes inspiring and will definitely be taking on some of the advice he shared.

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