Q&A with Greg Jones: Building a culture of innovation to drive new growth
Greg Jones is Product Manager and Director of Global Business Development at Nvidia, a technology company with a strong focus on the design and manufacture of graphic processing units for gaming and professional applications. The company is also expanding into the field of artificial intelligence. Greg discusses how Nvidia’s culture fuels innovation and growth.
Tell us about your background and your current role at Nvidia
I have an MBA, an MSc in physics and a PhD in biomedical science, and prior to my role at Nvidia I worked for a large research group at the University of Utah for around 15 years. The research group was focused on graphics, simulation and visualisation, so moving to Nvidia five years ago was a natural progression.
At Nvidia, I’m one of the people responsible for product management, and I do a bit of business development on the side. I work on extended reality (XR); the way Nvidia looks at XR is ‘horizontal through a bunch of verticals’. The company has business units in professional digitalisation, which look at our graphics cards and industry verticals like architecture and engineering, manufacturing, medium entertainment and a variety of others. We look at XR as a function of those verticals – how can we help developers, partners, and our sales team add value to those verticals with XR?
How does Nvidia’s culture foster innovation?
“Employees are given the freedom to speak their minds. It means everyone’s opinion is trusted, so we can move quickly, and when the right idea or project comes up, we can attack it as quickly as possible.”
Constant innovation is a really important part of what we do at Nvidia. It starts with what internally we call ‘intellectual honesty’. This means closely looking at the products in the market, how they are being used, what the market is doing with them and so on, and then being brutally honest about where we measure up. This enables us to focus on the problems. It also enables us to take an idea that has come out of our research or engineering and see if it’s going to have a place in the market – or if it can change the market. All that starts with being able to have very honest discussions with colleagues about the technology, as well as the markets and how we approach them. Employees are given the freedom to speak their minds. It means everyone’s opinion is trusted, so we can move quickly, and when the right idea or project comes up, we can attack it as quickly as possible.
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How does Nvidia’s core value of ‘one team’ enable a company of its size to respond quickly to change?
“Nvidia is a flat organisation; there’s no real hierarchy, and teams form around projects. We do have specific job titles and are typically employed within a business unit, but I will work with all the different teams and I see myself as being part of those teams.”
Nvidia has grown quickly; it’s grown in impact, market position and revenue much faster than it’s grown people-wise. We employ around 26,000 people, which means we’re a pretty small company for the footprint we have. We use our people efficiently, and that efficiency comes from the one-team approach.
Our one-team philosophy stems from that previously mentioned intellectual honesty and the idea of the speed of light – how do we do better and faster all the time? Nvidia is a flat organisation; there’s no real hierarchy, and teams form around projects. We do have specific job titles and are typically employed within a business unit, but I will work with all the different teams – data centre, telecommunications, etc. – and I see myself as being part of those teams – hence the one-team approach. This approach means that if a project comes up, we can quickly align ourselves with that project, transform our role as we transform the project, and push it as fast as it can possibly go.
It works well, but it’s an unusual way of working and is very fluid. It can get a little chaotic at times, so there needs to be an extra level of communication – you learn to overcommunicate. I’ve worked at several corporations, and most projects have ownership, and the leader of that project will have a lot of control. In that case, you end up with a project that is well-led but may not have used as broad a set of tools as it could have to solve the problem.
Having experienced the working culture at Nvidia, I wouldn’t work anywhere else. I definitely plan to do my whole career here.
How does the culture at Nvidia foster diversity across the teams?
We’re in the tech field; there’s not as much representation as we would like in training or in high school or university, so diversity has to be actively built. Our CEO, Jensen [Huang], takes diversity extraordinarily seriously, and he’s constantly upping his game. It’s a hard sector to be absolutely diverse in, but both Jensen and our human resources department are committed to it. It’s great to be part of such a diverse company.
How does Nvidia encourage each individual employee to fulfil their potential?
When I do our yearly periodic reviews – or focals, as we call them – I’m less interested in the performance we’ve had over the year (if we’ve hired correctly, that takes care of itself) and more interested in where the employee is going and what they want to get done in the coming year. These are very intelligent, sharp individuals and, because of our one-team policy, they get to go where they need to within the company to do their life’s work. We also need to make sure our products are impactful and competitive – not just in the market but among the workforce – to compel the people working on them to want to fulfil their potential. No one at Nvidia has to work on a boring, going-nowhere product.
What are the three main skills/traits that Nvidia most values in its employees?
For me, there’s only one trait that’s important: curiosity. A driving curiosity for how something works, what it does, what it means and what impact it’s going to have. If those types of questions aren’t asked during the interview, then that person isn’t going to light up for me. Curious people tend to be very pleasant to work with because they’re inquisitive and want information from wherever they can get it. They also have a good skill set, as they will have been curious about other problems in the past and built tools to take care of those problems or answer those questions. So, once I’ve found a curious person – as long as they have the right technical skills and tools for the job – I’m set.
Who else would you recommend we speak to for more best practice in new product development?
Matt Coppinger, who works for VMWare, one of our partners in the UK. He did a great job of fostering his product – XR Hub – through the corporate structure to get a general availability launch.
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