Meet The Find Others Team; Anthony Faconti
To kick off the New Year, we would like to introduce you to the team at Find Others. Starting with Anthony Faconti, Find Others’ Product Director.
Describe your role, where you fit within the team, and what your responsibilities are?
My role is primarily to oversee the shaping of the product. I’m in charge of how the system functions and how we present it to our users.
My responsibilities range from gathering knowledge and requirements, conducting research, planning and strategy, to design and testing.
My job is to sit between the stakeholders and the product delivery team and to keep information flowing between them.
What was your experience before coming to Find Others?
I’ve been super lucky in my career to work with some of the most talented people there are. I’ve worked for all kinds of businesses from micros up to blue chips. I’ve worked for some fantastic leaders and been fortunate enough to be able to work for myself a few times through various ventures.
Being a designer is a mixed bag too. Over my twenty years as a professional, I’ve also worked in many different design-led roles, working in graphic design, animation, print, service design, and digital product design. I’ve worked in teams with designers, and more often than not, I’ve been the sole designer in the company.
My standout experience has to be when I first met the team I’m working with today in our previous venture Una Tickets. The journey we went on together from; designing a disruptive system, getting funding and launching a marketing campaign to being acquired by Sky UK pre-launch, really solidified it to me as a high functioning and enduring team. That’s a big part of the reason I’m so happy to be working at Find Others.
What does a day at Find Others look like for you? How do you expect this to change over the next year?
My days are incredibly varied right now and as anyone who’s worked in a small startup will know you wear a lot of different hats for a while until you begin to grow and can hire dedicated staff for all the various roles.
A day for me could be designing at my desk, or it could be running group discovery sessions, meeting with research sources, producing promotional or social content, creating presentations or networking.
Over the next year, I can see it probably not changing a great deal and most likely growing somewhat as we go from pre-launch into our first release candidate.
How do you like working with the Find Others team?
Frankly, the calibre of the people I’m working with is so high that I genuinely feel I would struggle to work elsewhere. There are no challenges or blockers this team cannot overcome while displaying immense professionalism and passion. I could not be prouder to work with these people and cannot wait to see how this team grows.
What are your thoughts on the idea of Find Others, and how do you see it impacting the market? What are your hopes for this business, and what would you like to see it do in the future?
Find Others is one of those ideas that when you hear it, you immediately want to start asking questions. The intrigue it creates, and the instant interest in how it could work, tells me that we’re on to something big. The potential to provide real change and bring about a shift in the balance of power is so exciting to me. I genuinely believe that Find Others will have a significant impact and unite people in a way they didn’t realise was possible before, allowing them to stand together and be stronger than they are alone.
In the future, I can only see us pushing the Find Others platform internationally and also taking on the more severe injustices the world faces today.
What personally motivates you?
Problems. I am fundamentally a problem solver. It is in my nature that when confronted with a problem, I am immediately planning and pitching solutions. However, these days I’m learning to pick my battles as the more severe or significant the problem, the more I’m likely to invest myself in it completely, so I’m learning to be more selective and only focus on what truly matters to me.
What behaviour or personality trait do you attribute your success to, and why?
For better or worse, I am a highly empathetic person. Empathy is a word that gets very overused, and I don’t think that people understand how overwhelming it can be. When I am confronted with the emotions of others, it is a consuming feeling where I am forced to share their experience and emotions. It has taken me most of my life to understand this, and I’m just starting to learn how it hugely informs my work. My ability to put myself in someone else’s situation and experience something as they would, I believe, puts me at a significant advantage in my profession. It’s not without its challenges and pitfalls, but it’s my job to keep on learning and developing my skills so that I can continue to harness my empathy and apply it to helping people.
Who inspires you?
For want of not being incredibly cheesy, I am going to say my wife inspires me most. She is the most just and selfless person I’ve ever known. She teaches me infinite patience and to always look for the reasons things are the way they are, a skill a lot of people could do with developing more. She guides and supports me every single day to go out into the world and to do the most good I’m able to do with the tools that I have; the tools that she has given me.
If you could learn one new skill in 2020, what would that be?
My goal for this year is to start putting my thoughts into the public domain and see what comes back. I’m going to focus more on writing and speaking both on my own and with some of the incredibly talented people I know.
If you could only have three apps on your smartphone, which would you pick?
Instagram — Because I’m a hugely visual person (look into hyperphantasia) I prefer to consume information in graphic forms. I know there’s a lot of controversy around people selling ‘fake lifestyles’ on Insta but you don’t have to be a sophisticated user to understand how to easily avoid that nonsense and enjoy the masses of great content.
YouTube — I’m not a fan of television, more and more I find myself put off by the divisive nature of tv programming and advertising. YouTube allows me to schedule programming, and I get to decide what content I am exposed too. I get to balance my information from sources I trust, and I get to spend my time learning or growing instead of watching misleading material or being taught to be fearful.
Timehop — I have an appalling memory. I also take a lot of photographs as it helps me capture moments and feelings and fix them in my mind (again, I am a very visual person). Timehop bridges the ever-growing gap for me whereby I can not only recall things that I’ve experienced, but I get to see the context of when it occurred. It also really helps me see patterns in my life where I see repetition or similarity. It’s a seriously helpful tool for me.
I wanted to include Spotify in the list, but frankly, my relationship with music is so strong that I’d listen to it anyway I could with or without Spotify (but I do love it).
What’s the best advice you were ever given, and who was it from?
I know I’ve already mentioned my wife once but out of all the reading I’ve ever done and all the people who have guided me throughout my life she has given me the most useful piece of advice I’ve ever had.
“People are more than one thing” — Hannah Faconti
Despite my overly judgemental sense of humour, this has helped me learn to accept people who I’ve never been able to relate to or really understand. It helps me see through people’s words or actions and recognise them as a complex set of thoughts and feelings that make up a fragile human being.
We are all more than one thing.
