Maryam Cristillo - Love

Maryam Cristillo - Love

Maryam Cristillo grew up between cultures and continents, studied anthropology and art in the same breath, and has spent her career building creative teams at places like Victoria’s Secret, Naadam, and now Lindt, where she gets to do creative work on chocolate, which she will tell you is exactly as good as it sounds. She also runs a seventeen acre homestead in Maine with her husband, a hundred chickens, and two kids who roam the property wearing bells so she can hear where they’ve got to. There is a lot of love in how she talks about all of it. This conversation moves through some unexpected and tender places. We talk about a stutter she overcame with the help of a stranger her father introduced her to, about her mother scrubbing restaurant toilets to give her children a different life, and about a poster covered in ampersands that has quietly shaped how Maryam thinks about ambition ever since. We talk about leading creative teams with real care, about learning the difference between empathy that helps and empathy that overwhelms, and about why investing in yourself sometimes means stepping outside the four walls of wherever you happen to work. Underneath all of it is the same through line: people, properly seen and properly cared for, are the whole point. If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes. Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com [http://www.growwithadamjennings.com] and book a call. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Want to support Awaiting Approval? Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show. And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp [https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe [https://growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Tamora Petitt - Clarity

Tamora Petitt has spent 25 years helping people find their way through complex experiences, from redesigning one of the internet’s most visited health tools to building UX teams from scratch, teaching over 200 career changers the craft, and quietly applying design thinking to everything around her, not just the screen in front of her. She started out as a dancer. That turns out to explain a lot. What comes through most in this conversation is how much clarity Tamora has about what the work is actually for. We talk about why the people commissioning the work need to be in the room long before the final presentation, about the difference between asking for approval and asking for alignment, and about what happens when you start treating the relationships around your work with the same care you bring to your users. There is also a redesigned symptom checker that is still live today, a six-year-old vocabulary change that reframes every stakeholder meeting it touches, and a lesson learned on the floor of a Target store that has never left her. If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes. Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com [http://www.growwithadamjennings.com] and book a call. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Want to support Awaiting Approval? Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show. And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp [https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe [https://growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Charles Cadbury - Conviction

Charles Cadbury has spent 25 years building things at the edge of what’s possible. He created one of the first voice-enabled hotel concierge systems, invented voice-activated audio advertising, won the global Alexa Cup, and has spent the last decade quietly convinced that the way we talk to technology is about to change everything. He also watches the sunset every Thursday, without fail, with someone worth talking to. That alone tells you so much about him. This is a conversation about conviction, the kind that keeps you building in a direction long before the world catches up. We talk about what it actually takes to bet a business on a technology that isn’t ready yet, about the difference between brands that will own the voice era and those that will be left scrambling, and about why the most important thing you can do, in work and in life, is stay genuinely curious about the person in front of you. Charles has a way of making the future feel less frightening and more like something worth leaning into. Don’t be scared, he says near the end. Be excited. If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes. Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com [http://www.growwithadamjennings.com] and book a call. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Want to support Awaiting Approval? Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show. And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp [https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe [https://growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Odeya Noble-Bougay - Continuity

Odeya Noble-Bougay returns. If you heard her in Season 2, you already know why. If you didn’t, go back and find it, then come here. Odeya thinks in ranges rather than binaries, leads with a generosity that feels entirely natural rather than performed, and has a way of reframing a question that makes you wonder why you were asking it the other way round in the first place. She was the obvious choice to bridge Season 2 into Season 3. Continuity, in every sense. This conversation picks up where the last one left off, which is to say it goes somewhere new entirely. We talk about kindness as an act of noticing, about what it means to hold space for the people around you without losing the thread of what you’re trying to build. We talk about why things are never as clean as the framework suggests, and why that is not a failure of process but simply the nature of real work. And we talk about the moment a CEO said something to Odeya so simple it has stayed with her ever since. If there is doubt, there is no doubt. If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes. Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com [http://www.growwithadamjennings.com] and book a call. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Want to support the Awaiting Approval? Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show. And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp [https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe [https://growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Nacho Zuccarino - Vulnerability

Nacho Zuccarino - Vulnerability Nacho Zuccarino has lived several careers in one lifetime. He started out teaching metaphysics in Buenos Aires, moved into advertising, spent a decade in Silicon Valley working at orgs like Google and Netflix, helped launch Starlink with SpaceX, and has spent the last two years building at the intersection of creativity and AI. He is restless, warm, and deeply, disarmingly honest. And he will tell you, without hesitation, that he is still a broken kid. This conversation goes to places neither of us expected. We talk about what it means to drag yourself into rooms full of people who know things you don't, and why that discomfort is the fastest way to learn anything. We talk about therapy, about fathers and mothers, about the generation of men who were taught to take the hits and say nothing. We talk about what happens to your identity when the two things you built it around, being a parent and being a professional, are suddenly out of reach at the same time. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Nacho says something that has stayed with me: becoming an adult is mostly killing your creativity. That is what this conversation is really about. If you’re feeling stuck, or just want to think out loud about where you’re headed, you don’t have to figure it out on your own. I offer free 15-minute conversations for anyone who wants to talk through what’s in front of them. Whether that leads to working together or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve got someone in your corner, even for 15 minutes. Head to http://www.growwithadamjennings.com [http://www.growwithadamjennings.com] and book a call. I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Want to support the Awaiting Approval? Remember to rate this episode, and subscribe to the show. And you can get your hands on amazing Awaiting Approval caps, mugs and more, here: https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp [https://adam-jennings-shop.fourthwall.com/en-gbp] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe [https://growwithadamjennings.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]