213: ‘The Rise of Tech-Driven Leadership in AEC’, with Jonathan Nelson, Nirva Fereshetian, Heath May, and Shane Burger

213: The Rise of Tech-Driven Leadership in AEC

Evan Troxel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TRXL Podcast. I'm Evan Troxel. In this episode, I am coming to you live from New York City, where I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at AECtech hosted by Core Studio at Thornton Thomasetti. Well, not this intro, I'm now back in Oregon at TRXL HQ, but the episode you're about to hear was recorded off the soundboard at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island just a few days ago.

The session was originally planned as a standard panel discussion with me as the moderator asking questions, but I wanted to do something different. So instead of talking at the audience I proposed we talk with them. So we flipped the script, turning it into a real conversation driven by the people in the room who will shape the next generation of design technology leadership in our industry.

The outcome was far better than anything we could have scripted. The audience showed up with really thoughtful questions about career paths. Culture, leadership structures and the real obstacles inside firms. And the panel responded with clarity, humility, and a [00:01:00] level of candor that made the entire hour feel electric.

It was a rare opportunity for emerging technologists and seasoned leaders to have a real exchange. Our panelists, Jonathan Nelson from Populous, Heath May from HKS, Nirva Fereshetian from CBT, and Shane Burger from SOM, each come from deep design technology backgrounds and now hold major leadership roles inside their firms.

Their stories highlight something I think is essential for our industry to understand. Design technology isn't a side path. It's becoming one of the most direct routes to broader firm leadership, and this is where I see TRXL adding more value. Moments like these shouldn't only exist inside one room for one audience on one day.

By capturing this panel and sharing it with you, we get to extend AEC tech's impact beyond the localized event, beyond New York, beyond the walls of the venue. This conversation becomes part of a larger ongoing dialogue happening across the industry and around the world. In this episode, we get [00:02:00] into the evolution of tech first leadership, the realities of navigating large organizations, the challenges of building strong talent pipelines, and what it really takes to advocate for, fund, and scale transformation inside AEC firms.

We also explore the tension between ambition and practice, how firms are redefining service delivery, deciding when to build versus buy technology, and wrestling with a cultural inertia that so often stalls meaningful change. A key takeaway from this conversation for me was the growing opportunity for design technologists to step into major leadership roles.

And by capturing events like AECtech and bringing them to the global TRXL audience, we're widening that opportunity even further. The more we share these conversations, the more accessible these pathways become. There's even more in the show notes, so be sure to check that out.

I've included links to previous episodes with Core Studio leaders and with the members of the panel that have been on the show before so that you can get even more from them. Supporting members of TRXL+ will get all of that right in your [00:03:00] podcast app. And if you're a free member, just following along, you can find those over on the website, which is trxl.co.

As always, sharing this episode, commenting on my LinkedIn post or joining the conversation on YouTube helps the show grow and helps elevate these important discussions. I came out of this panel energized about the next generation of leaders having access to people in this industry who are so willing to share their experiences.

So without further ado, here is the leadership panel discussion live from Core Studio's 2025 AECtech event in New York City.

Jeroen Janssen: So for this session, um, we'll kick it off with a panel of our distinguished guests here. Um, I'll let them actually introduce them themselves, but um, they're gonna be moderated by Evan Troxel gonna come up and start the show.

Evan Troxel: All right. while we're getting situated, I just, first of all, amazing event thank you to David Mans.

Where's David? He is [00:04:00] outside organizer in chief. Thanks Alex and Rob, and thank you, the audience, uh, you brought it today. Amazing questions. And, uh, my goal with this is to give it to you. What I hope you see up here. Is a potential path, which now I think we're getting a glimpse of what we're gonna see a lot more of.

This is to me kind of connecting the dots between design, technology, and leadership. At a firm, at the highest levels. I was in school, this was not a thing. All right? we were taught three things. You can be a designer, you can be a project manager, or you can be a technician.

And we really focused on design. How many people had that experience? and then like 1% actually got to be designers, And so what we're seeing now is that there are many paths and. Specifically with this group of people here, we actually get to see where some of these paths can lead.

And so I'm hoping you, you see that. So I'm gonna seed that thought with you now I want you to ask questions so that you get the most outta this [00:05:00] opportunity to speak to these people. If you like what you hear, the kind of conversation that we're having today, this kind of conversation I have all the time on my podcast.

My name's Evan Troxel. I host a podcast called the TRXL Podcast. And so I hope you would tune into that because you can hear the kinds of, the couple people here have been on the podcast several times already and also, many people in the audience.

And so I hope that you'll tune in for that kind of thing. Like I said, this isn't gonna be a, a discussion just on the stage. It's really a discussion for you to have, and I, and I hope you'll have questions for these people. So I'm gonna ask each one to introduce themselves, and after the introductions, I'll kick it off with a question. I'm gonna have each one go through it, and, but then I want people to be ready to ask some questions. All right. So Jonathan.

Jonathan Nelson: I'm Jonathan Nelson. I'm the Global Head of Digital at POPULOUS.

Nirva Fereshetian: I'm Nirva Fereshetian. I'm the Chief Information Officer at CBT Architects, uh, Boston-based, design firm

Heath May: Heath May. I am the CEO elect at HKS [00:06:00] based in Los Angeles.

Shane Burger: Shane Burger. I'm the Chief Design Technology Officer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Evan Troxel: Thank you. All right, what I would like you all to answer and, my goal is for you to, you know, a couple of bullet points, but, if you can kind of talk through a couple of pivotal moments you have experienced throughout your career from where you started to where you are now, but you think that people could relate to.

So Jonathan, why don't you kick us off

Jonathan Nelson: I guess I, I have a pretty non-traditional background, right? I did go to architecture school, but I've spent very little of my time working for architects. I've been in software development, property development, applied r and d manufacturing, those kinds of things.

so getting all of those kinds of different experiences and seeing those different lenses has been very pivotal for me. as far as the, the leadership thing goes, at my previous position, I immediately left from being an on the tools person to being a leader person. And that was a, [00:07:00] a really, transformative moment to have, to learn a completely new skill, and a different way of talking to people and using different language.

and yeah, learning to be a good leader and also managing up and managing down is, is something that's really changed everything for me.

Nirva Fereshetian: I also have an architecture degree. but at the end of that, last year, I was very interested in technology. New things were happening, and, I wanted to do a master's degree and had very few universities that had computational programs at the time. So, um, very few people were really doing the integration of, architecture and, computation.

So I willingly went to a, a master's degree at UCLA for combining both and the first experience was really, an internship at SOM in LA that kind of defined All of my career. So the company was doing things that no one else, unlike now, it was not democratized.

They had really very expensive, Sun [00:08:00] Workstations. They were developing, a, software program internally with IBM. So things that were, are happening now and it's very commonplace. but then when I. Finished everything and got out. I thought, well, everybody was like that, but it was shocking that no one was like that.

and it was kind of a challenge to, get integrated in a firm and I was, I guess, lucky enough that a firm was looking for some, technologist Now that, that. Being part of that, integrating into a technology career in a creative firm is one part of the, equation. But I think it's only in the last decade or so, that has been recognized as either a C-level job or really being part of the business, not really.

Oh, let those people figure out the technology. Is it broken? They can fix it. So I think the remarkable advances now and the career opportunities, are really being part of the business, having a voice, and [00:09:00] integrating with the decision making process. I, I feel that. being knowledgeable in technology is part of the equation, but in order to be developing into, a career of, combining those is really about the business and things that I never learned neither in architecture school, nor in, in even the master's degree that I pursued for technology.

So the opportunities are real and. As you could see today from all of the. different sessions, the different titles that people have, the different departments, these are just explosions in the last couple of years, so I encourage everyone to think out of the box. In some instances, I think many people have made up their titles.

They were never existed before, right? And in many companies. They mean different things. It's very much related to the context of what kind of company you are and what are you doing, but it's extremely encouraging to a new generation [00:10:00] that, there's a million different ways of developing your career and you are in charge of it.

So go for it.

Heath May: pivotal moments. Well, 13 years ago, um, I found myself working at a large architecture firm, something I never thought I would do when I was in grad school. I think I wrote a manifesto about why that would never happen.

But I learned that you could get away with a lot in a large organization before someone knew what you were doing. And that became kind of an interesting place for me to be. So at the time. Started to notice that there were some people with some latent skill sets with computational design, parametric design, you know, this idea of connecting performance to, to driving geometries.

But, uh, wasn't really sure what to do with that. But I found myself in New York, uh, where I kind of, uh, begged our CEO at the time to spend a couple thousand dollars and send me up here to this innovation conference. And I came back with this idea to create a studio where we could, uh, explore some of the new workflows and methodologies.

Um, and to my surprise and chagrin, [00:11:00] um, our CEO said yes and, uh, said, you know, go ahead, do it. You, you can take someone and, you know, start to try it out. But, uh, come back next week with the business plan. This was before chat GPT. So for me it was like, okay, Google what is a business plan? Right? And, uh, tried to get that.

Off the, uh, you know, kind of off the dime and start to do something with it. But, um, that became, uh, a studio called LINE, Laboratory for Intensive Exploration. Um, and we took that and we took that opportunity to really investigate the project as the lab, you know, what could we do with each new potential client user opportunity to really drive methodologies and process forward.

and we really started To critique, and investigate different softwares, create our own where ones didn't exist. And, um, from there, you know, began to slowly start to find opportunities. One project at a time,

Shane Burger: I guess key moments for me, a few that come to mind in particular, before gonna architecture school, I was much more interested in being a [00:12:00] musician.

And I think what I really enjoyed about that was the kind of creative interaction with other musicians and what it meant to kind of improvise, but also have like a fundamental framework underneath chord structures, melodies, those types of things. And it was a collaborative affair.

That was the thing that I really enjoyed about it. And then I went to architecture school where creativity was a solo thing. Um, very much on your own in that sort of case. So that was always a little bit of a frustration for me. It took me years to really come back to that. But I also say I, I started first playing around with, tools like, alias on sun workstations, those sort of things back at university at that time, mostly run by the automotive program at the school. I was learning those kinds of tools. And then a few years later I was at, uh, Grimshaw Architects and saw a presentation by Robert Ish, and he presented on the Waterloo International Terminal by Grimshaw as a computational model and an early version of generative components.

This is about 2004. Immediately I was excited. Went to a conference, learned how to use the tool, and started meeting an amazing group of [00:13:00] people, quite a few who are in the room right now. Uh, that for me was the real starting point and developed an amazing community. And it, what it did for me though, as a designer and as a thinker, is it changed my approach.

It changed how I thought about the design process, how I thought about geometry, how I thought about integrating. Analysis, fabrication materials, how I thought about how I could build in my methods of collaboration with other people into that exact same kind of system. Number of years later, went to Woods Bagot, where I then scaled that up in a larger way, across a broader.

Company, about a thousand person company. And at the same time, I started running the smart geometry conferences for about eight or nine years. Where again, it was about building out that community and connecting people in collaborative creativity. so those end up being a number of, kind of key moments for me is this kind of balance back and forth between individual and collaborative creativity and the ability to kind of embed that thinking process and structure into the tools that you use as an extension of your thinking [00:14:00] process.

Evan Troxel: Amazing. Uh, one thing I wanna go back to Jonathan, because you, you spoke the least, Jonathan. I didn't know we had a time limit. you actually mentioned a thing that has come up in many conversations, which is like that shift from being a do.

To being a leader and that kind of soft skill, like a whole new skill set. And so I, I promised I would give this to you guys, but I wanted to bring this up just to kind of set the stage for if you are looking to work your way in a firm to this kind of position, that's a very real thing. And, and that's what actually I think makes a difference between success.

And unsuccess in, in that kind of a role. because if you, if you're so stuck on continuing to drive the car, the, the tools, the technologies, that's all you can do. You have to, if you're gonna be in that leadership role, take on the leadership burden. this isn't something I think many people even look forward to doing.

if I were to ask these [00:15:00] people, if, if leadership is easy. I guarantee you the answer is no. And so, learning those skills, Jonathan, just any, anything, just to expand on that point for you and how your mindset or your behaviors, or however you wanna frame it has, completely shifted. And then I want people to start raising their hands for questions so that the, the mics can get passed out.

Jonathan Nelson: there's a, a, a framework called Maker and Manager, right? And the, the base postulate of it is that makers. Uh, which are people on the tools spend their time in two hour chunks. And this is Paul Graham, isn't it? The I, I think so, yeah. And because you need time to get into the zone and you need time to, to work through problems and, and be, have a lot of interrupted time.

But a manager has to live their life in 15 minute chunks. So you really don't get the time to always consider and make, you know, great decisions all the time. and life moves a lot faster. And when you're also, a maker, again, because it's a, it's a solo thing, it's a lot [00:16:00] more difficult to expand and move outward inside of a business, right?

But a manager's job is really to, to manage outward as well, And there's lots of ways you can learn to be a leader. There's courses in, you know, CL two and those kinds of things are great, but becoming an effective leader is really just about reps, right? And, and learning how to change your life.

So for me, that happened, in my previous company, Lendlease, I spent some time and came up with a big theory of how something should work and we should build something. And this was a, a three person digital organization at the time inside of a 14,000 person company. And apparently, luckily it, it impressed some people.

And the next thing I knew, I was giving this same presentation 60 times throughout the, the business to IP people, to lawyers, to development managers, to chief digital officers, CEO, all of. Those. So you learn really quickly how to adapt to different stakeholder needs, right? Because it's, my job is, is mostly communication, [00:17:00] right?

And change management with people. I'm not on the tools. I trust my team to be able to build those things, but I have to effectively make sure that the, the board, which is a bunch of architects and, and finance people, right. Understand the nuances and details and, and the importance of what's happening here.

So yeah, it's, it's a complete 180. Mm-hmm.

Evan Troxel: Any takers on questions? Let's get the, the mics going out.

Audience: I am wondering if you could address, if you ask any you person here, how many softwares they use or their preferred set of software. You could have like people who have 17 things installed and use it for different projects here and there. what is the, a good balance or how does it even work in your firms about, top down, Hey, this is the kind of software we want to use, versus grassroots, Hey, someone discovered this free trial and now we're all gonna start using it a little bit more.

Heath May: Yeah, I can jump in. And, uh, Natasha, our chief technology Officer is back here so you can correct me, as needed. Natasha. Um, it's a balance of both. There, maybe a reconciliation of both [00:18:00] because there's never really any balance. Um, but I think right now, you know. And then I had the, uh, the privilege of hearing all of the panels before this, and things are changing really fast, right?

The pace of change is increasing, and the proliferation of different softwares that are available that are just kinda screaming come kick the tires are out there. Um, so I'll share, you know, just a, a quick anecdotes. Uh, we just, we, we do like small kind of incubation tests. Throughout the organization, and we did this key to the future, competition where little teams of two, uh, where they found a problem and kind of naturally found a technological solution to that, that included sometimes using AI or not.

But where I'm sitting right now, in order to be agile enough to grapple with what we don't know is coming at us from the future, you know, we can, we can think, we see it, we can't see around the corner. So to have that agility, we really need to have a lot of little bets that we're making so that we can hit on one.

And so this grassroots movement, you know, to really [00:19:00] begin to test to understand is absolutely fundamental to that. Now, where that top down comes is that will get us nowhere if we don't communicate what we found. And we have to take that and be responsible enough to say, here's where I'm finding some value.

Maybe here's where I'm not. Uh, because we don't wanna have the redundancy of, you know, 1800 people in our case, testing the same workflows or the same software without communicating to each other. So, you know, this idea of leadership, you know, it's not a, it's not a rank and it's not a title, but it's a posture.

Uh, and distributing those decisions as far away from the top, so to speak as we can is really where we're coming from.

Nirva Fereshetian: I think, Everyone knows that it's overwhelming amount of things are, um, landing in everyone's toolbox. But I think the fundamental decision, there's always a top down in the bottom, bottom up.

But, um, people are testing things whether we want officially to have them test or not, and that's a reality. But the more important part is in [00:20:00] decision making for a tool, is what type of workflow that tool is in. So. If it's. On a one-to-one workflow, then it's very easy to do the bottom up and have, uh, for example, image generation, idea generation, those type of tools can come and go.

Uh, and yet they're very much personality and intent related. But when you're gonna implement downstream tools that affect an entire project team or entire ecosystem, you gotta have some top down. Um, so no, no one is able to replace Revit yet until that comes. That is a major top down situation, but other workflows are very conducive to either way, approach, and most importantly the bottom up because all the time a tool sells itself.

I don't, I always tell The founders we're working with. If we are forcing it on people, it's not working. people tell each other that it [00:21:00] works and it, it becomes like a wildfire. and those generally are either one-to-one workflows or workflows that affect small number of knowledge workers.

The decision making top down is very important when it affects interoperability between different projects, training between different projects. It can't be that everybody uses whatever tool they want. Each project can't have different types of files, but it can on a design, you know, image generation end for example.

Shane Burger: Three terms that come to mind for me at this one. First one is composability. This is probably something we've heard from a few others, is that the ability for any of your design and engineering teams to compose the collection of tools necessary to get the job done, it needs to be there. They need to be able to assemble what they need because different types of projects require different types of engagements, different client conversations, different things you need to be able.

Present them the whole journey of exploring. You need a certain level of composability to connect up to the tools that you need. [00:22:00] So then on one side of that, you have the second term, which is democratization. You wanna be able to have those systems available to as many people as possible to use the way that they need to, and for them to be able to bring up new tools to try new things and test new things.

But then the third term is governance. From a data perspective in an organization, we have to think about the intellectual property of our projects, the intellectual property and copyright of our clients, and we need to be able to understand that these composable systems have to interact with each other all the time.

So we need to be able to know how this data connects on a very regular basis, especially if you wanna take advantage of some of the agent based approaches that needs to be able to connect into the various kind of data repositories. It's a complicated mix and a complicated stew of things that you have to think about.

But I think to kind of echo a little bit what Heath was saying here is that you have to, in a way, give a direction. You have to be able to communicate to people, this is what's working. This is what aligns with the values of our company and where we are going and the journey we're going on. [00:23:00] And you know, empower them to find the solutions.

I think we can. In leadership positions, we can set those directions and put out those big questions, those asks of the company. But there's no way that us or even our technology teams have enough bandwidth to evaluate everything that's out there. But I think to engage the group and empower them to be part of that conversation, but also make sure that they're not just doing checklists of features, but they think more fundamentally about how does this change how I think and how do I do my work?

So it's that kind of combination of. Composability in the center with both democratization and governance, kind of pushing and pulling in equal amounts.

Audience: I think following on from that question, so when you're in a leadership position and you set a direction, you know, that then trickles down into the people that execute on it. My question is ultimately like how do you as, as a leader, evaluate whether it's working?

Like what are your frameworks for being like, yes, this, this is working well, or this is not working well. Um, [00:24:00] and maybe as an example, like having been. On design technology teams or with people who are, you know, if you make an architect, if you could, if they can produce a rendering in half the time, they're not gonna go home earlier, they're just gonna make twice as many renderings.

Uh, so it doesn't necessarily show up in the, like, you know, financials. I would, I would imagine maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But I guess that's, that's kinda the question, like for, I guess. Given that you're all, you know, at the top of very large organizations, what's your framework for evaluating whether your strategy's working or not?

Shane Burger: I'll just kind of briefly note, I usually try to evaluate things both on the data and the narrative. So from a data perspective, I do want to know, are they completing two or three times or five times as many renderings? Also, it is good to know are people spending fewer hours? So does it save people time?

So there's both. If there's a terms would be basically either a cashable or non-cash value versions of these things that you wanna be able to track. And it is something that was very much on my mind. A lot of the presentations before, I didn't get a [00:25:00] chance to ask people, how many of you are actually tracking the use of every single tool and the different kinds of ROIs that are associated with it?

'cause some of it is, is an increase in efficiency and some of this is an increase in value. The value is a harder one to. To figure out. Maybe you only realize that over a year or two by increase in clients or quality, whatever, but there is a data portion of it. I think any of you who are building tools, please build in some method to track the use of those tools because people in positions like mine are gonna be asking you for that information.

So just plan it in advance. But the other side is the narrative. What are the experiences people have? Do they enjoy it? Do they ask to use it? Are they excited when they get a chance to use it? If you can make a tangible impact on the experience of your staff sitting at the desk, that's the best thing in the world.

You know, there's one way to basically say your company's going to, save your clients money, and therefore that's a value. Another would be to say you increase the profitability of the shareholders in your company. That's another part of value. Another would be to say you're increasing the quality of life for the [00:26:00] staff that you have in your, studio.

That, for me, is the number one most important thing because those other two things fall in line after that. So I think, uh. Constantly speaking with and working with staff and understanding what the quality of their experiences are, and then mixing those two, some sort of understanding of data and some of the narratives.

And also just to point out, leadership in the company tend to, you know, I don't know if it's a left brain, right brain type of thing, but tend to make decisions based on one or both of those sort of scenarios. And if you have answers for both, that's, that's the best way to see it through.

Evan Troxel: I'll just real quick add in that this is something that Shane and I spoke specifically about the last time we had a podcast conversation, so you can hear even more about that because I think that job satisfaction part it not is like that.

I'm glad you said that. That goes first and the other things fall in the line after that. Uh,

Nirva Fereshetian: I mean all those data in the metrics, metrics that you. Are able to collect are very important, but employee experience and client experience overrides that even if the data [00:27:00] shows something different.

Have you ever heard that they went to a meeting and showed something to the client and they loved it? Guess what? We're using that tool.

Whatever it is that produced that, because the client liked it so. even though you can show the data behind it, it might not be as influential in the decision making.

employee experience is also the same way. So if they are happier to use it. Like I mentioned before, it's like they tell the next team, the team over, they show we don't even have to announce it, that we have the tool. You keep getting this request of, I want a license too. She has it, I want it, he has it, I want it.

So I think those are other types of metrics that sometimes override the numbers, which are the logical things.

Heath May: I like the focus on people first. Right. Um, and someone was talking about it earlier, maybe Pablo, on the idea that, you know, where do you see ai, for instance, you know, as one tool making a difference, and how do [00:28:00] you evaluate what value that's bringing?

And is it, uh, is it allowing us to be more creative or what is the ultimate goal here? And, you know, if, if you have a purpose, what I've found is. Asking the right questions. And so, you know, adoption is something that you really wanna look at. But you know, if, if it's really about design, you know, it's asking what's the big idea here and what are you trying to do and how did you accomplish this?

And if the technology is part of that answer, that's telling me something. Uh, but if I ask, how much time did you save? Um, or how much fee did you collect, that also sends a message. Um, and as a leader, we, we have to be very careful about the questions that we ask.

Jonathan Nelson: So, when we're looking at internal, uh, initiatives, we actually have a framework that we use to make sure that we get this right.

A a lot of firms don't track in a lot of detail how people are performing on certain things, right? So if you're in an ERP and you're marking down your time sheet, it doesn't get very granular most of the time because it would take you, you know, three weeks just to fill out that. So a lot of times we don't actually even have a [00:29:00] baseline to measure improvement off of.

Right. So that's where the employee satisfaction comes in or, um, the, the people asking for adoption and things like that. FOMO is very powerful in our company, right? So we make sure to disseminate what people are doing with tools and technologies, and then more people come and come and ask for that. But when we're doing internal initiatives, I have my teams make basically a two slide business case, right?

And we measure it on, on five specific things, and that's time and money. It's, Brand perception with our clients. It's, legal and risk, that can be reduction of that. it's employee satisfaction. And the last one was, competitive advantage. And you just have to address those things and what you think it is.

So it doesn't have to always be numbers, right? It can be qualitative as well as quantitative.

Evan Troxel: Do they present that information to you or do they, do those slides have to speak for themselves?

Jonathan Nelson: They do present it to me.

Um, but it's like a quick 15 or 20 minute thing. and that gets a little bit relaxed depending on how much [00:30:00] time or money they're asking for to do something, right? So we, we have a very specific portfolio that we work on, and it's, it is roughly 60% of our effort is fundamental to the business. 30% is innovation.

And then about 10% is experimentation. So I do allow them time to do moonshot type stuff or let's, you know, let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks, kind of things. And that helps me manage my employee's time, the money that, that I have to ask for and also make sure that we're integrating with the business.

Heath May: Can I ask, ask a quick follow up so that, uh, that ratio, have you dialed that up and down, or have you found a sweet spot with that?

Jonathan Nelson: It's, it's pretty loose. Um, so when, when I first came into POPULOUS, I don't have a predecessor. They just decided that they were behind in digital and technology and they wanted someone to lead it, uh, instead of a, a board of people that didn't really understand the technology all that well.

So, I actually hired business analysts to go around, um, different parts of the business and analyze pain points. That they had and try to figure out what the explicit [00:31:00] needs of people are and the latent needs as well. And then some of the business opportunities. And that set my initial roadmap and the, the 60, 30 10 is a pretty recognized framework, but I, I just do it loosely because I don't want people to be stuck.

Making PowerPoint slides for me all day. Right. That's, that's not any fun. I do PowerPoint all day. so it's, it's mostly about just getting it iterated quickly, but then when we're asking for half a million dollars to implement, you know, a new global system that is a formal business case that is, you know, 40 pages, that's distilled down into two or three for the board, but they can read the rest of it.

So it just depends on, on the effort and time required.

Audience: I'm very curious to know what was your last hire, in terms of role, obviously, and if it's the one before the last, um, it's also fine. But I would like to know, why did you hire them and what was the impact that you were, uh, expecting for. In your organizations?

Shane Burger: so the most recent hire from me was actually a junior [00:32:00] computational designer who joined in our, one of our West coast offices.

A recent graduate from school, had interned with us for many months, uh, had been just building really interesting little projects and helping out with things, and was really excited to come join us. The thing that really caught me about them. When we had the conversation about whether they were going to join was just the enthusiasm to explore and try things and this desire to go steps beyond what we were asking as well, the, the kind of hunger to do something interesting.

This was a point of where they were also showing me some of the work they did in school, which was super impressive. And then. we wanted to bring them in, uh, for a growth opportunity to try to make an impact and have some excitement with the work they would do. Learn from people who had been in our company for 10 to 20 years and really kind of bring some new energy and vitality into the work.

And it has absolutely paid off. They're not in this room, so I'm not saying this to get them, you know, build up their ego or anything. Uh, but it was, it was an an [00:33:00] amazing sort of moment because even in the last few weeks they've been sending me screenshots of stuff that they've been working on and. We have been asking to develop these set of tools through kind of some rhino plugins and rhino environments.

And they, we had originally thought we were gonna get this far and this person's already presenting ideas that were gonna be six to 12 months down the road and already accelerating and thinking, you know, forward thinking in that sort of workflow. I saw just somebody who was excited and interested and really wanted to think through the work, and I wanted to give them an opportunity to grow.

And I think that was it. It wasn't a matter of like finding, I had a. A, a square peg and I had to fit somebody who fit that particular role. It was like, I'm gonna bring some energy and excitement into the group and somebody who really wants to learn.

Jonathan Nelson: Uh, my last hire was a data analyst. I spend a lot of time trying to bring non-traditional skills into an architecture business. Um, and part of that was because we have a lot of data and we have, you know, most of the businesses made. Of architects [00:34:00] and they consume everything in a very visual way, right?

So they don't consume information in a tabular way like an accountant would or something like that. So we have to find an effective way of taking a lot of tabular data and turning it into something that's useful and engaging for our designers, but it's also for our clients. So as, as you know, we do mostly sports and entertainment work, um, and a lot of our clients are extremely sophisticated in this area.

So if you. Most of you have probably read the book or seen the movie Moneyball. so these organizations are spending tens of million dollars a year on data analytics. So we also wanted to reflect that. We have similar sophistication to that. Uh, just to add to that, um, my next three hires will be a machine learning engineer and two full stack developers, and they'll concentrate fully on ai.

Heath May: the last one that I was. Really involved in was a Chief Data and digital officer. And, uh, the way that we are building the team here, we have a Chief technology officer, chief information Officer, and then [00:35:00] there's been, you know, lots of talk today and even earlier on the conver conversation around governance and data.

And to be able to longitudinally connect data that spans from the practice of what we do to the business and operations of what we do. that's the platform that we're looking at. So in order to really be able to get value from the, the data analysts, um, that we have on staff, um, having someone that can really start to look very broadly longitudinally across the firm, uh, with that perspective, to work directly with the chief technology officer and the CIO, uh, was a gap that I saw.

And, uh, we're trying this out with, uh, with that as a technology leadership team.

Nirva Fereshetian: we last hire is a computational designer that was an intern for two summers, but not just for, developing scripts or computational, setups, but mostly two. Uh, we have, uh, workflow use cases, to improve that we've determined that are inefficient.

[00:36:00] and We work very closely with a lot of startups, that, have the overall objective that fit in improving some of those workflows or solving some of those problems. So he is actually working to develop, Workflows that are going to be used for, uh, because so far everyone, you know, one example is designing in Rhino, and then, throwing those files to the Revit people and.

Uh, pretty inefficient way. And then those people throw those files to the CA people from a very inefficient way and no one knows how. So we have three, four use cases that we have developed. so internally he's sourcing people asking, you know. Why do you do it this way? How is it that way? And then we have couple of, external partners, uh, startups that, we seem to think that they're fit solving at least part of that problem.

so that's, essentially the role.

Shane Burger: Mind if I just ask [00:37:00] a quick question. I'm curious from the audience here, how many of you are actually either hiring people in data analysts or senior data engineering type of positions, or yourselves might be going that direction from a career perspective?

Alright, a hand, a handful of those. we're going down this journey ourselves and I feel like all of the major practices are investing a lot more in this sort of data engineering, data analyst positions. I guess a question for you, Jonathan, on this. So the data analysts that you're hiring, and maybe this is the same for, for any of you, are you focusing on people that are domain specific, understanding architecture, engineering, construction, or more general skills based, or a mix between?

Jonathan Nelson: Uh, none of our data analysts have any AEC experience at all. Um, it doesn't matter to me.

They come from banks and stuff like that. We hire, uh, usually junior ones with two to three years experience. Um, then we can, we have the expertise. We can show that to them, right? They have the data expertise that we need.

Evan Troxel: Shane, you should start a podcast. Good question. I don't, I don't have time for that. [00:38:00] Sorry. I wish I, I will leave it to the experts.

Audience: I had a question on, because you, you are all leaders in technology. Uh, do you guys think about a succession plan for yourself?

Or like, how does the younger crowd come up? And, what's your thoughts and what are the factors you consider in those, uh, succession plans?

Shane Burger: I, I'm not gonna be cheeky and say like, an AI agent is gonna take over my job because that, that, I just don't think that would work. I honestly, I think it's, uh, synthesizing ideas and communications is probably the biggest thing that comes to play for me, is your ability to communicate out a vision or a set of strategy to people and to bring them together.

'cause, uh. Our organizations are large enough. You've got differing opinions, you've got a whole collection of people that have great ideas, but they may differ from each other. You've gotta collect everybody together under one sort of idea. So the ability to, communicate that sort of vision, synthesize those ideas and speak it back to the company is probably the biggest part of it.

so that's probably one of the biggest qualities I'd be looking for is the ability to synthesize [00:39:00] lots of different ideas, communicate and work with, large diverse stakeholders.

Heath May: I think in general, we should always be thinking about succession, right? It's not, uh, it's not like a point in time that we start to think about that, but it's an everyday thing, right? and I, I appreciate that. Thinking about the equality, is it a skill set or is it an attribute, you know, that we're looking at and what are we trying to accomplish with this?

And I think communication is absolutely fundamental to this. Uh, but I also think it's a, you know, it's a moment that we can think about that there's an inspiration. Right. And you know, I, I think back to, you know, many years of attending these, like, you know, today there were, there's so many talks. Today that we're inspirational and, and it should always be that way.

We have to have that curiosity that continues to happen regardless of where we are in our career or what we think that we might have, uh, accomplished at one level, taking on another. Um, but, you know, someone, Rob over here sitting, he was doing what I was doing only like 10 years ahead of me at every step through my journey.

So I could have a question and, uh, he would kind of, you know, grin and nod and say, yeah, here's how [00:40:00] we, here's how we went through that. But. Finding somebody that inspires you, that's done something that's created, something that took a risk, right? You know, there's an element of risk. I think that that hasn't really been brought explicit to all of this.

those are the things that makes me think, yeah, I wanna do that. Think about hearing John Cerone talk about Barclays many years ago and what they were doing with, you know, should the panels, you know, they're going to make the structure sag. Do we design to where it was or to where it's gonna be? And you know, you think like, that's what I wanna do.

I wanna be making those decisions, you know, that have huge impact. Take a risk, find somebody that can inspire you to do that.

Nirva Fereshetian: also, I, I think the field has been evolving. You know, it's not a one-to-one replacement anymore. whoever was in my role before, um, and me we're not doing the same thing.

And, and as you could see, the proliferation of the. Managing technology in large firms have become from one CIO or CTO to like a data officer and a innovation officer [00:41:00] and an AI officer. And so I think it, it's no longer, uh, who can replace who. as our nature of the businesses change and the way we do things change.

It's uh, it's a very different structure.

Audience: Hey, I have a question about your personal kind of leadership, uh, strategies actually, uh, about your measures and philosophies in this like weekly changing technology landscape, right? None of us can open up Slack or teams anymore without having three LinkedIn articles inside of our inbox, right? With people that are really excited that might be tangential to technology or not in technology at all.

And I, I think I'm interested in hearing how you decide what gets incubated internally for r and d, what you choose as an early adoption and what you might wait for to cook a little bit.

Jonathan Nelson: so we also have another loose framework that we use, which is called Make Buy Partner. Right? So we evaluate the pain points or the ideas, and then we say, is [00:42:00] there something on the market that's currently there? Uh, is it something that is suitable to our needs? Right? And, and then it's subject to review by legal and IT, and all of that stuff.

Um, and then there's some things that. We feel that our partners should be working on, right. And that, and that's software companies or, or cloud provider companies or something like that. So, I mean, there, there's things inside Revit that we don't think we should be developing. We think Autodesk should be developing.

So we just make clear and then we communicate that to them that, that this is a need for us. then there's things that may be very sensitive or have, significant competitive advantage to it. And then those are things that we tend to build internally. but most of our ideas actually come from within projects or within innovation that's already in the company.

So we have tons of innovation happening all the time. A a lot of what we do is to try to capture that and say, can we scale that up and make it for everybody? Or is there a better workflow to do that? And so we've built a dozen tools just based on. Little POCs that other people have made for one [00:43:00] project and they turn out that it's useful for almost every project that we do.

Nirva Fereshetian: I think it's very important for the technologist pr inside the firm to not. Make it look like all the decisions are made by technologists and, I always keep saying that during sessions or presentations make it look like it's their idea. because it has to be working in their realm.

And no matter what the technologist thinks, and no matter what a wow idea it is, if it's not functioning within that realm, then it's not, it's worthless. So, um, I feel that, integrating everyone, and I think that's where everything is headed, is. More of a distributed technology function, and then the technologies themselves are just giving directions.

As you could see, Turner showed that 15,000 people are building agents on their own. and so I, I think. The self-sufficiency and the new, [00:44:00] um, tools that are on deck for people to use and create things is going to be defining a very different role, that we play. And I think it's a positive one because the business needs to make the decisions, not necessarily just, uh, all of our frameworks or all of our explanations.

Shane Burger: I, two things that come from mind for me. If people are sending me, you know, slack messages with LinkedIn files or videos and hey, have you seen this piece of tech? They're excited. Right. Like respect that, that's good. That's, that's like what we should be trying to bring out in the people in there. The worst thing you want to be doing is be like, yeah, that one's no good.

You should actually look at this. Or just ignore them and not know, right? They're excited. That's the kind of person you wanna work with. Now, maybe the specific one that they chose is not the direction we want to go. Meet them there on that, like ask them about it. What is it about this that you liked?

Let's have a conversation, right? You should ideally have enough people on your team who can work and communicate that way where you can, [00:45:00] you know, receive those sort of conversations. That to your point, Nirva, it's like, it shouldn't feel like it's coming from me. It should feel like it's coming from the collective of the community that comes up with we're there guiding it particular directions, but you wanna harness that excitement.

The other thing that comes to mind for me is when I look at software companies. particular tools or whatever that come up. The tools that I get most interested in are the ones that have a clear roadmap, that seem to align with the kinds of things that we would like to do. It's not just the specific features.

Yes, that'll give you short term decisions and help you out, but we're trying to steer thousand person plus organizations. We're not buying licenses to use for a few weeks, that then get leapfrog by some other tool that came out that did the same thing that they then texted you about a week later. Right?

We're trying to make larger decisions for this, so I wanna look for companies that I like the direction they're going. Ideally they're not gonna get bought out by Autodesk or somebody else, but you know, the companies that are, that are doing something that have [00:46:00] some. Resiliency to it. Some ideas that the idea behind it is interesting and fascinating and aligns with the types of things that we might want to do.

So that, that's often where I'm getting into. Just what shows up on the webpage is one thing. I want to feel, what's underneath it, what's the subtext? What's the, what are the founders doing of that company? Like that's the stuff that gets me excited.

Nirva Fereshetian: I, I think we talked about, uh, communication and just as much as it's important communication to the board or other decision makers, I feel that the communication with people like that and how you explain and how you, uh, get feedback and, uh, explain why that is not something we want, maybe not use or why we should try is far more important than the leadership explanation because those people are your allies, you know?

To tell leadership that we want to use that. So I feel like our success has been that we have explained to them that this might or might not be the right choice. And then [00:47:00] once it's something we wanna push, they are our advocates to make that decision happen. Once they show in their projects that it's working, then I don't have to convince someone, uh, in the finance department that we are gonna pay for it.

So there's just no option, but pay for it.

Shane Burger: I have to say, like I have a certain amount of empathy for the experience as well. I was that person 15, 20 years ago. The IT team hated me, right? Like they, now I kind of par, I co-run it. So that's a little bit ironic in my brain, but it's like, yeah, having some empathy for their experiences and what they wanna do also.

Sometimes they're bringing it up because they've got to solve a problem on their project. It's right in front of them. They see an answer. And they want to get it done, why are you telling them no? Right? Like sometimes you gotta be careful 'cause that tool might train on the IP of the company. And then we've just released confidential material like that.

That is a line to not cross, but have some empathy for the experiences. 'cause I think a lot of you in the audience have been in that exact scenario.

Nirva Fereshetian: Yeah. I mean, how many times [00:48:00] people said critical thinking, we appreciate critical thinking, we appreciate curiosity. That's a display of that. And that's a way to encourage people.

Evan Troxel: I think we have time for one or two more questions.

Audience: strategies do you do your organizations use to retain computational designers, machine learning developers, data analysts, developers in general.

Developers in general. Uh, when competing against big tech companies that may offer bigger salaries. Um, better resources. What are you talking about? What makes a mistake?

Jonathan Nelson: So this is actually an interesting conversation. Um, and it's something that I do try to talk to the board a lot about, right?

So I mean, when you think about just having a design firm, it's very easy for the very senior executives to think of everybody in terms of architects, and they benchmark people in terms of architects. And I do make that case to them quite often. I said. We're not gonna lose our computational designers to a, a competitor, right?

We're gonna lose 'em to a tech firm. It's just that simple. [00:49:00] And here's the reasons why. Our digital twin people aren't gonna be gone to, you know, a, a rendering house. They're gonna go to a VFX agency or something like that. so we're still in the process of figuring that out. I like to think that we make the quality of employee experience, good enough that it makes it a little bit harder to leave.

and we let them work on things that they're very passionate about, which also makes it a little bit harder to leave. and it, it goes up into the company culture as well, right? So if you feel you're respected as an employee and the company culture is good, it's also again. Much, much harder to leave.

But as far as very specific pinpointed strategies, it's hard to have one for me. but I have had to a few times go directly to the CEO and ask people, get out of cycle raises and things like that, because they do from time to time get lured away.

Shane Burger: I will just say there's at least one person in this room right now who left my team for a major tech company.

So this is, uh, this is an act. There he is. He's right there in the corner. Alright. So I wasn't gonna call you out, but you can do it. Um, it, it's really hard. It is really [00:50:00] hard. I mean, there's a few things you can do and I was unsuccessful with some of these things, but, first of all, pay everybody a reasonable salary.

That's like a clear thing to do. Alright. also just give them enough support and opportunity. They shouldn't just be the lone computational designer within the company. Give them a community of people to work with. Give them a career path. What do they do next? Are they going to go the direction of, building software tools all the time?

Then give them that opportunity. Uh, do they want to be, become a designer? Who just has computational skills as part of their toolkit, help them go that direction. Do they want to go leadership directions? Help them go that direction. So have paths for them to go to. Also do everything you can to keep them creatively and intellectually stimulated in learning.

Right. Don't just make them do the same damn grasshopper definition on the same kinds of projects all the time. Give them things that keep them excited and interesting to, to learn, connect them in with communities like this, support them attending conferences like this. There's a whole host of things that I think we could possibly do.

In [00:51:00] the end, you still will not always be successful. Like that's gonna be the case. But I think giving them learning opportunities and career paths are to, and a community are probably three very large things that you could do to help them. I'm the kind of person that I get excited about the buildings that our company does, right.

I feel vicariously like I benefit from that experience of seeing the work that our designers and engineers actually produce, and that's the product of the work. And sometimes you'll find computational designers that feel that same sort of thing and others will want to build software and others will want to go into consulting and do other things.

And so we're not gonna fix it for everybody, but I think there are. Absolutely key things that you could do. And I also say this again from an empathy perspective as somebody who left a major design firm because they were not supporting my career path, and it led to the path that I'm on right now. So I had this exact same experience myself.

Heath May: That's what we try to do also, Shane, you know, think about, uh, we wanna improve people's lives through design. And that's the key piece. And, and it's my job to [00:52:00] help everyone in the organization understand how their role, when they come into the office every day contributes to improving someone's life through design.

Um, and that can be different from, you know, doing this somewhere else, being a technologist somewhere else, writing software somewhere else. It's the design aspect and to feel some pride of authorship in that. And I think the other reality is that, uh, we are reevaluating compensation models. Uh, also role progressions, uh, with the understanding that as you start to think about behavioral human scientists, anthropologists, data scientists, machine learning experts, all of these things that are maybe tangential to what we do, but also becoming, uh, critical to where we're going, um, there will be a different compensation structure.

And, you know, with the theme of this panel, I think if you're considering that, you know, weigh that in. You have skills, you have capabilities that, uh, someone else doesn't. Um, and I think that deserves a conversation around compensation because of the value that you can bring. And I think that's just a reality that we start to have to grapple with.

Evan Troxel: Amazing. That's all the time we have for questions. I hope you [00:53:00] got what you wanted out of this. That was the goal. And so thank you to the four panelists for speaking so candidly,

and once again, thank you to you all for coming and showing up and bringing it today. It's been a wonderful conversation. Thanks.