FFS Jonathan Waddingham
I was recently asked by the lovely team at Futureheads to share my career story on their blog. As they were calling it Futureheads Five Stories, or FFS for short, I couldn’t possibly say no.
Here’s the original post:
We love exploring what makes digital minds tick. So we launched FFS, or Futureheads Five Stories, where we speak to people who have interesting stories to tell.
And we couldn’t resist the acronym.
This week, we sat down with Jonathan Waddingham.
What’s the story of your career so far?
My career effectively started in 2005 when a year after graduating I joined a small, little-known startup called JustGiving. I was supposed to be a temp, but I was accidentally offered a permanent role. And here I am, still there, twelve years later… I really made them pay for that mistake ; )
When I joined, I doubled our helpdesk team (of one) and learnt the ropes on the front line — speaking to real customers on the phone and by email. This was an enormously important lesson in learning empathy for customers and their problems and needs. From there, I moved to marketing, where I used to write and send email newsletters to our charity partners, launched a market-facing charity blog, and even dabbled in PR (not very successfully).
It was the advent of social media in the late 2000s where I really started to step up and learn to be more strategic and analytical. At that time, very few businesses were making successful use of Facebook but I worked out that each Facebook share on JustGiving was worth £5 in donations on average. That was a milestone moment as it paved the way for me to do lots of talks at conferences around our social media stats (25 events in 2010 alone!) and also started my move into the product team.
Going from B2B marketing to B2C product management was a big leap, but I was fortunate to work alongside some great product people and very smart developers who helped the transition. Initially working on the fundraising page product which everyone knows JustGiving for, the first feature I shipped was adding a Facebook like button. And yes, there used to be a time when adding social sharing buttons was innovative and new. Incidentally, we had to roll the feature back within a couple of hours due to negative user feedback, so it was an early lesson in both being mindful of all the types of users we had, and their level of technical understanding.
I then worked on lots more Facebook integrations like canvas applications and Timeline before starting a ‘Labs’ role in 2012, looking at building innovative new products to diversify our product portfolio. The first of these ideas started with a grant from NESTA’s innovation in giving fund, as we built a crowdfunding site in twelve weeks, with our first BETA tester raising money after just seven weeks. From this idea, we launched a sub-brand called YIMBY to test the product worked, and it has eventually become JustGiving Crowdfunding. This has undoubtedly been the highlight of my career so far, and I’ve spent the last five years growing the product from an idea to one that has raised over £100m for a huge range of amazing causes. As well as the product, the evolution of our strategy has been great over that time, and we’ve learnt so much about what it takes to grow a consumer product, act lean and agile, and actually test and learn.
What advice would you give to yourself when you were just starting out?
Don’t worry so much about planning too far ahead. I remember in my JustGiving interview when I asked “what could I be doing in five years” the answer was “what do you want to be doing in five years?” It was a good point — I didn’t really have a clear idea, and I could never have imagined what I ended up doing. I’d never heard of product management until a good few years into my time at JustGiving, and certainly never had any ambition to be one.
As long as you’re enjoying what you do and you’re learning, new opportunities will come along — just make sure you grab them when they come up and make the most of them.
What do you love most about what you do?
One of the best things is working with talented people who have skills I don’t have. I was always fascinated by sitting behind developers’ desks and seeing them write this weird language called “code” and somehow this code turning into the website. It seemed like magic. I get the same feeling when I draw an awful sketch of something on a whiteboard and a designer looks at it and comes back with something beautiful. Equally when an analyst uses a shortcut in Excel to do something in seconds that would take me ages. I really enjoy seeing people excel (pun intended) at their craft and getting to learn from them. I was no expert in any particular area, but I’ve picked up a lot of skills from all the experts I’ve worked with.
Ultimately, though, it’s the output of our work that is the most rewarding aspect of working at JustGiving. Every single day, millions are donated on the site to cure diseases, help prevent homelessness, or fight for injustices. And it’s all enabled by the products we build. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but it’s actually very profound and meaningful.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career?
Empathise. With all your stakeholders, be it customers, colleagues, or even board members. You’ll always get feedback on your plans, and people will always have an opinion on whether your idea is good or not, but learn to see things from their perspective and not take it personally. When I was a young PM I would get frustrated if people challenged my roadmaps, but I learned that was because I wasn’t listening to them enough, or at all. And if they did have criticism, it was of the plans, and not me. Now I try as much as possible to put myself in the shoes of my stakeholders and see where they are coming from, what’s important to them, and how I can help.
What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge in our industry over the next five years?
If I were to take my earlier advice to my earlier self, I might say it’s too far ahead to know. But in the consumer internet space, I’d say the big challenges are the ever-increasing power of Facebook and Google. If you want to grow a consumer business, you’re to some extent beholden to these two behemoths. As we’ve seen with Facebook’s recent newsfeed change, one algorithm change can have a massive impact on your ability to talk to *your own customers* on their platform.
Within the digital industry, I think finding enough people with the right skills is going to be a big challenge. As pretty much every business has some sort of digital footprint, and so many more are digital first, finding the people with the right experience and digital know-how, particularly at senior leadership levels, will be increasingly hard. Still, that’s good news for excellent digital recruitment agencies…
A little bit about Jonathan
I’m a senior product manager at JustGiving, working on our crowdfunding product and our iOS and Android apps. I’m passionate about using technology for good, enjoy presenting much more than any normal person would, and occasionally share vaguely interesting things on my blog.
