Mark Swaine: From UX Foundations to Venture Leadership - Insights on Innovation

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Matt

My name's Matt and I will be talking with Mark Swaine about his career journey from UX to product management, the challenges startups face and the impact of AI on product development. Hey Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here especially so early in the morning. Like for me, like in your case, 8am middle of the night for me, for me 9am still fine.

Mark Swaine

Yeah, yeah, thank you Matt. It's nice to be here and early morning for me in Dublin, Ireland, 8am I'm usually, I'm usually an early starter so 8am is good to have a good shot.

Matt

So let's start with the first question to you know, get, get to get to the flow. When we recently met in Dublin, I noticed that you have like pretty extensive experience with ux. So I think you are the, you even have the domain ux guy.com and like they're talking about it that it's not related so much like to your current role that you have. But I believe that this experience, experience shaped you and help you with the more of a business approach to the current role that you are having. Like could you tell me because you are more like closer to the business umbrella, like how this UX experience helped you and shaped you here.

Mark Swaine

Yeah, sure. So I mean there's quite a big story around all of that. But to try and keep it short, I, I acquired uxguy.com way back. It must have been 2012, 13 maybe time and I had a website up for a long time and people kind of really got to know me. I was actually abroad at that point. I was in Toronto, New York, working across the US extensively as well and I was working on a lot of UX projects back then, enterprise projects mainly. I was brought in as the UX lead but you know, those roles and those projects and those startup projects that I worked across as well as a lot of banking projects were all kind of working as a UX lead on product.

You know it was very early days. I mean UX was around and you know, user research and usability testing course has been around for years. I was probably one of the only people practicing it way back as 2008 on projects with companies who were creating basic wireframes just to kind of represent something to talk about about the project. So early days of it mainly SaaS, 2013, 14 time and really it helped me shape up my exposure to so many different types of products, startups, medtech, fintech and so many different business models that just the lens around UX that I had been doing for years just naturally morphed into product management and it was kind of just they go hand in hand. Obviously they're heavily interlinked and you'll even find, you know, the role of a product manager is heavily scattered across many companies in different roles and very immature also in a lot of companies where some PMs are doing the UX as well or guiding the UX. So, you know, it's a massive mixed bag still out there. But it really helped me up to that point where I kind of morphed into a product role.

I was acting as a product lead role as well with a lot of startups. So yeah, it all just morphed over time into product and now today I'm a head of product.

Matt

Yeah, speaking of being your head of product, you work at the Elkstone, which is really interesting company, investing in the Irish ecosystem, I would say in the Irish tech scene. And yeah, maybe you could talk about the responsibilities in your current role.

Mark Swaine

Sure, yeah. So my current role I'm working with probably the top VC company in Ireland, Venture team. In Ireland, we're a wealth management company on a venture team and real estate, believe it or not, the real estate arm of the business is incredible in terms of the projects and the funds they're building and they're executing across the island of Ireland. So I'm mainly focused on the wealth team and the venture team. My role as head of product is introducing new tech into old workflows. So we're cleaning up data, we are creating a new client experience, rebuilding CRM from the ground up, bringing the company on the journey with me, all stakeholders, which is one of the key parts of any role. Well, to me it's the most fundamental role and activity of either of either a UX lead or a product lead is soft skills and communication and honing your ability to bring multiple key stakeholders on a very long deep journey while spending a lot of budget to get the job done and convincing them of it.

That is a single art skill of its own, which I've been honing for years and how I work with people. So yeah, so the current role is rebuilding the infrastructure in the org, introducing and building a new SaaS investing platform as a service for clients. And also I support the venture team. I do a lot of heavy due diligence on new startup intake, new decks. I sit with a lot of startups, I go deep under tech, their stock go to market, product segment, pipeline approach and you know, right through to conversations around how open aisles probably kill some of their startup within 18 months and how they're going to mitigate all of the pain that's coming. So I end up in a lot of heavy conversations with startups that way, but always coming at it with a product and ux lens which VCs don't have.

Matt

And then I'm always interested in a working culture, especially in tech, like how it is Ireland compared to, I don't know, uk, us. I had a lot of conversation with some leaders from. From the us, from Israel, from Germany. Like all of those countries are different some kind of way how they approach building the technology, how they approach building a product and like for you as an insider and somebody who was working abroad, like do you see like some major differences here?

Mark Swaine

Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not too sure what it's like in some other countries. I do know the US well but. And the UK maybe, but startup culture here I think. Well, there's a lot of activity in Ireland and it's really positive. There's lot like I'm receiving decks weekly from people reviewing decks, new ideation. The culture is really good that way.

We need more support from the government which is lacking due to probably a lot of lack of understanding their side of the prominence and importance and the waves of tech that are going to come and hit us. Because Ireland will fall behind. I think we're trailing a little behind at this stage across Europe from latest stats I've been looking at. But we do need to up our game with deeper, bigger supports in Ireland for sure. I think culturally there's really good activity Ireland in small place, everyone knows each other, right? So all startups know the typical startup leaders and board directors in the country and who's doing what and so you can't get away from that. I probably am fairly well known at this stage through not trying anyway my side but it just naturally ekes out because we're small cohorts and groups and people want to talk to you.

So I'm meeting new people all the time, looking at new product all the time. There's new stuff coming through regularly. It's really positive, it's really vibrant, it's really good, but it's not good enough. We need to be doing way more, we need to be going way faster to catch up with what's going on across Europe and the US.

Matt

Regarding your career. So you started on the UX side, you are focusing on a product but I would say you are involved a lot in the investment side and probably you have seen and evaluate a Lot of startups. So yeah, I'm just wondering from your perspective, like what common mistakes do you have? Do you see like within those startups when they are applying for, for money? Like, you know.

Mark Swaine

Yeah, yeah, there's so many there. It's a really good question. Cause it can spread to every angle at the startup. So I've been working with B2B SaaS startups since about, I've been mentoring them since about 2016 and I've been building B2B SaaS since about 2012, 13 and from the very early days when SaaS was really kicking off. And it's funny, at this stage, after 10 years or more, I could write a small playbook on this, which I've been threatening to do and release it because I think it would be hugely valuable. I've done a couple of masterclasses on this to some large cohorts in Ireland around these mistakes of pitfalls that they face in their buildings spend. So key things off the bat are inefficiency in their build, in their tech stack and their build.

The normal story, which literally plays out verbatim, is that the startups kick in, they build some version of their core differentiation point in the software. The feature, the core feature key workflows. It's built pretty shitty. That's okay, it's an MVP. It's supposed to be maybe they, after 18 months or 12 to 18 months, they have maybe five, seven key enterprise clients or they have a few of them onboarded into the software. But what happens normally at that point is they realize with the feedback they're getting is that their software is built pretty bad, shabby clients are expecting much more faster, their UX is incredibly weak. And what I've noticed all the time, which kind of kept a lot of my career going in my early days in SaaS, was that they kind of, they have a tools down moment where they have to go and redesign most of the workflows.

And that's where UX lead consultant, product person comes in because they don't have the budget or UX lead or a lead or a head of product or anything at that point. But so I spent a lot of my career redesigning SaaS platforms to what customers actually want. That's one pitfall that almost every startup I meet fall into. It means they could be building so much more efficiently from the start and avoiding all the spend later, but they're not educated enough to spot that. So that is number one. Number two would be customer design programs, meaning when they're kicking off with the features or workflows for their proposition that they are partnering with at least two or three key customer types. They've identified who they have convinced or incentivized in some way to come on the journey with them for the year or 18 months to build the first version of the software and get it out.

And if you're not partnering with key customers and allowing the customers to come in and build the software with you, you know, you're. You're fucked early basically. And an awful lot of startups don't do that. They do it at the end. They. Some startups I meet have not even done any usability testing with their key customers, which is incredible. They have to be told to do it or they have to be put.

Even at this stage, you know, 24 usability testing, you know, was a norm back in 2014 or 16. You still have startups today who are just plowing ahead. They're doing very little customer research, not building a customer design program and they're pushing the product through in old fashioned ways, which is incredible still today for me to see.

Matt

And you mentioned you are giving a lot of talks and I recall when we last met in Dublin you are mentioning that are preparing yourself for a talk for the designers at LinkedIn and it was se especially crafted around the AI topic and I'm just wondering like maybe some key points out of it if you could mention like how. What have you about.

Mark Swaine

Yeah, that was an interesting talk. You know when I do these keynotes and talks and I've just done another one recently for a HR SaaS software event as well where I got up to chat about AI as well. Yeah, the LinkedIn one was really good. There was great engagement, really big crowd, a lot of engagement from product people and founders. My spiel for that talk and what I delivered and what I'm trying to communicate to a lot of cohorts out there is that building software today is not very hard. It's really fast from a product design and UX lens. A lot of our workflows are going to go away faster than we understand or think and I hope they do and I hope that AI comes in and kills most of figma and most of the pain that designers go through while laboring behind completely useless work in figma because they spend so much of their time repeating same screens, same features, same workflows, same navigation patterns in the product, whatever it might be that have already been done to death a million times over by Every single other B2B SaaS platform.

Over there, there's nothing left to design, right? In some ways you could look at it that way. This is my opinion on it, by the way, so. And there's not a hole left to design. Everything's done paradigm wise. So just show the developers what you want and build it fast. Stop thinking about it, Stop laboring over pixel perfection.

There's design systems off the shelf that will build this immediately, in days for you. Just get rid of the figma flow as much as you possibly can. Stop laboring in figma over all these screens and workflows and repeating mobile versions and all this kind of crazy crap. We're doing days and weeks of work go. It is completely unnecessary. And I genuinely hope that with tooling stacks that are going to evolve like Galileo and others out there that are on the rise, that they are going to quash and knock off figma and really allow AI from a prompt perspective to really pull together key workflows in seconds to hand over in some level of quality code dev ready wise to hand over to implement. We don't need to think about a lot of this.

Much more the parts that are going to come to the top over that work for designers to get better at is prompt articulation, of course, and strategy. Getting deeper into UX strategy in terms of how the screens or flows should work end to end, pre to post journeys and how we upsell, scale and monetize off those. That's where deeper, more important work should be. Time should be placed, not on laboring over buttons, cards, navigation, rails and all that sort of crap.

Matt

It reminds me like 2015 when I was starting my company, Brain Hub and like we are, we are doing a lot of software and I was surprised like how many times you could start over like on each project and develop like the sign up and login form and like remember your password. It's like, come on. It's like, yeah, like scratch. It doesn't make sense. It's a waste of time. Money, right?

Mark Swaine

Yeah, yeah, it's a waste of time. It's days of a designer's work that is completely unnecessary, that is done to death everywhere. We all know the flow, the format. Why are you designing this? Yeah, so, so I'm. And that might sound quite negative towards the product designer's role as an example, but I'm. It's not at all trying to be negative at all.

It's trying to, you know, shift that role eventually in the next three to five years to being much more strategic and much, much more being a director, directing the work with the developer prompting and getting much deeper into strategy, which is far more interesting than pushing pixels around the screen.

Matt

Speaking of the product itself, I think really important part of building the product is the good roadmap, good prioritization, especially for the startup, because you have so many things to do, like on your backlog, and it's really hard to manage it. And I'm wondering in your case, how do you approach it? Do you have like your own, you know, approach here or the lessons learned that you could share?

Mark Swaine

Yeah. So road mapping is like, I've been through it many times in terms of roadmap management and backlog management, around prioritized workload and features and use cases, et cetera. Building a roadmap and backlog is absolutely critical for any team. If I meet startups, one of the first thing I ask the founders for CTO for is their roadmap. I want to look at the roadmap, I want to look at what they're planning to achieve quarterly, where their time and spend on salaries are going per feature, per workload, what level of effort they're kind of putting towards particular feature development or workflow development. That's critical. And so one of the things in there with the roadmap as well is being very honest and clear about the actual effort required because it wanes up and down constantly as you learn, as you go.

It's not that, you know, startups or even larger orgs are building roadmaps and they're set in stone. Roadmaps are supposed to change weekly, they're supposed to evolve, they're an ever evolving piece of workload that you adhere to. So that's completely acceptable and absolutely should be the case because you have new learnings weekly on the features you're building, bugs, issues, priorities, blockers that are going to stop or slow the roadmap or a particular feature that the team's developing. It's critical for the product leader on the team and whoever, the CTO or director of Dev management, whoever's involved in the startup or team are meeting at least once to twice a week on roadmap and are prioritizing or reprioritizing or documenting against core backlog items around what the issues are, what the blockers are, what they have to deprioritize because deeper investigation is needed around an API or whatever it might be, that is a constant workflow. And it's critical that all of the team are aligned and agree on that roadmap. And for VCs, we need to know that that's the case too, that the teams are heavily aligned on what's happening in the roadmap and that they're working on the right things throughout the right quarter to unlock growth, revenue, more pipeline and to onboard more customers to get money in the bank account. And I always have to have a view of that world immediately.

With any startup, if they can't speak to that and they're floundering over that kind of speak, then you know, they really have no roadmap or vision in their head as to what comes next. Lego brick wise, bit by bit to kind of get to where they're going.

Matt

I really like to speak about the controversial or contrarian decisions and I bet you have a lot of them in your backpack. Betty's on your track record, so I believe that you could share some stories. Like, you know, do you recall any like this controversial, contrary decision that you have made on the product side or the startup side because you advise the startups to. Like the Hansel from Ireland is one of them. Like maybe something like what was the impact of it?

Like how, how it went.

Mark Swaine

Yeah. Oh God.

I'll try and think. I can think of some examples where I've guided some startups in terms of rebuilding some of their core workflows and their software because the design system or framework they were building on was just completely. They could not maintain it and it was going to collapse on the floor, you know, a couple of years later. To scale the right way, they had to redesign and reintroduce a whole new design system. That has happened quite a few times where I've had to really educate both the CTO and the product lead and the UX lead. This ain't going to scale. To unlock the kind of workflows based on your vision, you need to rebuild and scale in the right way because you're creating huge pain and mess both in Figma and in your dev stack.

So that's always been a common contrarian pain point that they don't want to hear or they put off because they don't want to spend on it. So that's common. And look, I get that they don't want to because they're managing a very tight slim seed budget to place to unlock growth and revenue. And it's a really hard balancing act as to what foot to put in front of the other first and why in the right way. That's incredibly hard for any founder. Founders are under incredible stress that way in terms of making the right decisions. So, you know, hats off to them to be able to manage and run that.

But that would be a contrarian point. Always. Yeah, I've I've been through some experiences where I've ended up in long board sessions around some startups trying to repurpose their stack remodel the software from a large enterprise into one off implementation per customer to a slimmed down self serve version of the tool or the feature or the workflow to drive revenue growth. Founders don't want to hear it. They stick to their enterprise one off sales that are taking them 18 months and two years to land to get money in the bank account and they are burning true cash and killing the company. Though I've been lots of these awkward painful conversations to convince and educate and show founders why they need to go a different route to not let the company get swallowed or their teams get swallowed by enterprise implementations. The money, the contracts look shiny, it looks great.

But by by the time those client types actually hit the button to go ahead on the deal, it could take 18 months and they're waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Typical. It could be. It could be government based contracts or it could be large private contracts that can take a year to get signed off, which happens all the time. There's nothing strange about that. And in the meanwhile they are waiting for contracts to be signed for large sums of money to come in to keep the company running and things get really stressful fast. So I've been through a lot of awkward conversations like that trying to demonstrate the CTOs in two and a half months.

How can we slim down your stack to a slim version of the core workflow and offer it as a self served signup model to drive some revenue or growth. Go fish, go think about it, come back and let's talk to keep the company alive. Right? Those will be some examples that I'm in regularly. And also just the contrarian part just to with the amount of decks that come across my desk, obviously every single deck is has AI in the title, it's AI based in some way. And I it's not that I'm getting fed up or receiving AI text, but I am getting more hard on the speak and feedback I give back to the workflows or the quality or value of the workflows that they're proposing indoor proposition to build and the level of value or efficiencies it will actually create for their users or customers is usually much less than they're envisioning. And customers don't see the value the same way the founders do.

And so if you're going to execute in AI in some way in a SaaS tool of sorts. Whether it's automation or generative, there needs to be deep value or change in behavior of what they're building to demonstrate the value back to use the AI to the actual customer base they're going after. That's really hard. A lot of this stuff, unfortunately a lot of founders get mixed up as well between automation and generation. AI is not building a recommendation engine or slimming a workflow through automating some of it. That's not AI, that's just automation and slimming down using recommendation engine based logic or rules around particular workflows to speed up a workflow. That's not AI generative workflow.

Replacing a feature or workflow in a particular way is where the value is. It's where the system is doing the actual work for the user. That's AI. And unfortunately a lot of decks and founders and these startups are placing too much hope on automation when there's very little value in that.

Matt

Last year was really challenging for the tech. It was like a clear session and like this year it's really bumpy. I feel it's, it's getting better but it's still like so, so and I'm just wondering how do you, what is your view for like 2025? Do you see like end of a recession in tech like from like investor perspective? How do you feel about it?

Mark Swaine

Well in Ireland are like as an example, I think it's going to be a little tough. Pipeline has been generally okay from what I understand in Ireland at the moment in terms of new deals, new opportunities, new founders, new startups. It's relatively stable but I think we are in for a bit of a harsher ride over the coming few years. I'm not sure what effect Trump coming into power is going to have in terms of FDI investment and how that might impact Ireland and the ecosystem here. I have no view or opinion on that yet. I don't know enough but I know it may affect us somehow. I can see our national pre accelerator, which is called ndrc, which was a phenomenal accelerator for new startups coming in.

They had cohorts running every few quarters. They were, they were doing amazing pulling loads of startups through. The government has just pulled funding on that in Ireland, which has made national news here, which was a absolute shock to the whole tech ecosystem here. The fact that the government is so completely shortsighted about how important that accelerator was probably the most important in the country. It's Actually mind boggling how the government could even proceed to do that given the wave and speed that AI is coming at us from for new startups, just as one vertical I think over the next while as well, other conditions that affect founders is that we're saturated in a lot of verticals where product stars is everywhere, new AI product is coming in everywhere. We I'm already receiving decks that are solving the same solutions, coming up with the same solutions around generative AI and we're getting into a wild west of AI over the next few years and there's only going to be a slim number of those that are really going to fall out and be successful where there's true value for the customer on the other end. I think that's going to be much harder.

Like if I, if I look at AI agents and NLP and LLMs around building AI agent models, you know, there's new startups popping up everywhere, building, trying to clean up the wild west of AI agents that's only getting started. And I just saw the CEO of Stripe has just started his own new model around all this area as well. He's just left and started it and got lots of funding. So some of these areas are gonna hot up and get saturated really quick. And I think it's gonna be really hard for founders soon to really find the value in what they're developing in AI. And I foresee that I struggle with that still with the decks that come across and yeah, and one of the other pain points that I'm really foreseeing as well is that with the amount of new startups coming across with their AI solutions, I'm, I tend to a lot of the time put the AI solution aside and think about the customer who's going to buy that software, who's going to adopt and trust an AI generative workflow in their organization and about how far behind they are already adopting al software in their org and trusting an AI system or algorithm to some degree to produce and generate their work is going to be incredibly hard. I think for some more archaic organizations who are so far behind, even having their data clean to any point for use in a system like this.

So there's this whole, some companies will adopt quickly, but I do think there's a larger bracket that won't and there's going to be a lot of pain and adoption and trusting the system, getting ready for the system internally before they spend money on AI to even understand what they're spending on. And a lot of organizations like that are still, you know, years behind in their data to even be ready for AI. So there's a huge struggle coming that way, too.

Matt

Mark, great. Thank you for the, for the insights and a great talk today. I really appreciate it and wish you luck with the next investments.

Mark Swaine

Yeah, thank you very much, Matt. It was great to come on and chat and yeah, just want to thank you for your time. It was good fun to come on. And, you know, if you ever want to jump on again and go deep on another area, let me know.

Matt

Awesome.

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