Welcome, tell us a bit about yourself
Hello! I’m George. I live by the sea in Margate with my wife Jen and spaniel Mungo.
I’ve been doing product and product strategy work for 7 years now - most recently at Kin + Carta and TAB. Before that, I was a brand consultant coming up with names, brand concepts and growth strategies for clients. My first job was doing music and game design for Activision on DJ Hero. So Jazzy Jeff and Daft Punk were colleagues of mine once. Sort of.
What are you looking forward to about being part of the Loomery team?
Firstly - an amazing team. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Brett and Tim a lot before, and I’m really excited to join them in building a modern product organisation. The Loomery team and maker network bring energy, smart ideas and craft skills by the bucket-load. It’s been great to meet them and start collaborating from the get-go.
Secondly, it’s an incredible time to be in the world of digital product - especially as the mobile, cloud and data layers of the stack mature, and new weird stuff like AR, blockchain and ML starts to appear on top. Clients are increasingly keen to invest in exploring that, but are also re-assessing how their org should work in light of the sustainability imperative, and other big shifts in wider society.
So - I’m joining a great, growing team, and there’s lots of amazing work and learning for us to do yet 🚀
How have you found your first few weeks?
Lots of quick fire mental stimulation!
I’ve dived straight into a proposal for UK GOV, and a working session with some of our clients in the education sector. I’ve also been exploring how we might create a business model innovation framework and accompanying workshop + experimentation sprint too.
It’s also been great to hop straight into the camaraderie + lulz of the Loomsters. We had a team trip go-karting and the new office in Shoreditch is a great blank canvas for us to muck around in.
Have you been learning anything cool outside of your discipline?
I try to keep my information diet as omnivorous as possible, so lots. Maybe too much?! Here’s three:
I’m doing a lot of delving into the worlds of remote/hybrid work at the moment, what it might mean for our economy and society… and how it might interplay with things like sustainability, urbanism and wealth inequality. I’d really recommend Dror Poleg’s writing if that sounds like your bag.
I’ve started to do a bit of tinkering around the fringes of Agent-Based-Modelling lately - these are ways to model and simulate complex systems (e.g. how information or ideas move around society, or customers move around a store… or how starlings flock together).
I’ve joined a DAO - called Invisible College - which is trying to decentralise learning about the crypto space. It’s a great way to get the latest on what’s happening ‘over there’ in that strange subculture, and it’s also a front-row seat on being within a DAO itself, which feels like an idea and technology challenge that could go a long way over the coming decades.
I’m on Twitter if you want to chat about these sorts of things and whatever else pops up in the pre-frontal cortex.
What’s your favourite tool or app most people haven’t heard of?
I’m pretty mainstream with productivity/work stuff, so I think probably Ableton?
It’s the music production software I still use to straighten out music for when I’m DJing at weddings. It’s incredibly powerful, but actually relatively straightforward to use. My favourite features are time stretching (basically mapping the audio to a grid, and then making sure it stays in time) and pitch shifting (moving the audio up and down semitones so you can match up the keys of two records)
Probably already sounds a bit much if you don’t do any music production - but it’s fun, honest.
What’s the first website you built yourself?
I got into the online bootleg/mash-up music scene when I was 15, under the moniker ‘Poj Masta’ - which is what I still use on a lot of my online accounts (embarrassing?! Nah).
That was a great delve into the world of DIY - obviously music, but also creating make-shift websites, hosting mp3s (somewhat extra-legally), making album covers etc.
In a foreshadowing of getting into lots of mobile work over the last decade, I actually made my (very simple) website work for WAP Internet which feels like the stone age now, and also did some downloadable ringtone versions of the glitchy music I was making.
Recommend one podcast or book
Just one?! Tough.
Like many people over the past few months, I’ve gotten into the Huberman Lab podcast. Alex Huberman does an incredible job of methodically explaining the mechanisms of various zeitgeisty parts of personal physical and mental health. I’d start with the Dopamine episode to see if this is your sort of thing.
Loomery is a faster path to product progress. We deliver trusted teams, when you need them. Our community of expert makers, remote teaming approach and flexible partnership model mean we can demonstrate progress on your priorities next week, not next year.
