Introducing...
Hi, I'm Jon. I was British Entrepreneur of the Year, a serial startup founder & formerly a senior creative strategist in Google's creative technology team.
I then went to night school to retrain as a data scientist MSc, because maths. Now I run a data unit at Google with a mission to automate creative behavioural research; training machines to find drama in data. My team's already developed YouTube's go-to internal platform for Creatives, alongside our project work, and that's just starters. Meanwhile, I separately direct the UX team for a fledgling private proptech startup.
If you see the value in approaching serious things playfully and playful things seriously, and want to meet a creative, technical & commercially trained leader then drop in 30 mins. Or come for lunch at Google. Or DM me on whatever the kids are using nowadays. Otherwise you can hear more about my team's work on this October 2020 podcast by the fabulous team at TheMeetingRoom:
VR, Zoom & Live Events
I recently had the pleasure to collaborate with the talented team at The Leadership Network; leading a small pilot group to develop & test their custom #vrmasterclass environment. Check out https://t.co/dycr9aSpdD to get a taste of the future of conferencing. pic.twitter.com/sfsmlgsdxq
— Jonathan Francis (@thanfrancis) November 1, 2020
Philosophy
Having worked alongside hundreds of major brands from across the world on tackling their biggest challenges, I believe that Step Zero just might be their unifying trait.
Picture the mountain of projects that every company says got off the ground... that their teams feel they got off the ground... but that, in reality, never made it out of a slide deck. This digital landfill is piled high with projects that fell at "Step Zero" - with no output to show from lifetimes of human input.
I drive my team to help clients both target & reach Step 1 - a Prototype. Something that you can touch. Share. Get excited about. Whether it's a Rush, a PoP, a Landbot, a toy model - whatever... just not a powerpoint. We don't need to exhaust ourselves with planning, project rollout, PR, scale, support, resource & comms. 100% of effort and focus is on getting to that prototype, and for one simple reason - prototypes can inspire people who weren't there at the start. Decks don't.
With a special emphasis on the journey from data to decisions, to achieve this I encourage my team to reinforce:
1) maintaining project momentum, 2) growing team confidence and 3) maintaining stakeholder alignment - three areas notorious for assassinating projects.
Awareness of Step Zero has been helping business leaders to get the things they need done, done - and fail fast when decisions need to change. All starting with one small step 🦶.
Ice breakers
I've represented the British Skydiving Team at 2 World Cups.
I played for the British Chess Team at 1 World Championship.
I speak French & Italian well enough to run a project.
German/Spanish well enough to run for a coffee.
And Python/R/SQL well enough to:
theory = ["learn", "to", "share", "about", "this", \
"new", "secret", "surrounding", "string", "theory"]
reality = [x[1] for x in enumerate(theory) if \
x[0]%2==0 and x[0]!=0]
print(' '.join(reality))
