Georgios Athanassiadis

My name is Georgios Athanassiadis. I am Swedish with a very Greek name. My mother's Swedish but my father's Greek. I'm born and raised in Sweden. I live and work in Amsterdam in the Netherlands for a company called Your Majesty.

Your Majesty is a design agency, which means that we help other companies make really cool things, online or offline. So that includes websites, apps, marketing materials. It can be packaging for some kind of product, or it could be a film to explain how something works.

We're a team of designers and strategists and techies who help big companies look amazing and work better.

I do a lot of things but I think if I would sum it up, I think I help guide the team and make sure that we're working on the right things. Captain of the ship, I guess you could say.

I talk and agree with the client what it is that they want us to do. They often have an idea of what they want to do and I help them think through what's the best path of doing that.

You can almost see it like if you're designing a house, someone wants to renovate their house and they hire an architect to help them think about how the house should look like and work like. So I help the clients figure that out.

So maybe they want to sell a new pair of headphones that they want to design, then I help them think about how should we best talk about these headphones. What are the new features or the benefits? Why are these headphones better than some other headphones? And then how do we tell that in the best way and where do we tell that? So is that on social media or is that in the store or is that on a website?

One of the best things with my job is that no day will ever be the same, and that's actually what kept me in this industry for a very long time.

I tend to be most productive in the morning, so I start with doing things that I really need to get done. So if that's working on a new client, helping a new client figure out what they want and making a proposal for the project timeline, the budget and what we are going to do.I will work with our company's marketing team, so that could be writing an article or being active on LinkedIn or basically doing all these things so that other businesses find Your Majesty and know how we can help them.

Then after lunch I typically have my team meetings, so that could be status updates with project teams. So this morning I had a status meeting with Philips, the company that makes air fryers and shaving machines and those kind of things, with my team to review how it's going on that account.

So we're working on developing new marketing materials for them. So then I checked in with my project manager and my head of the design to see that theyhave everything they need from the client, if they need my support to communicate on the business level with the client. Basically I'm trying to help them get unstuck.

So I manage five people and they all manage other people. I am the kind of like general manager, so to speak, my direct reports are the technical director that handles all the technical people, I have the design director, which handles all our creatives and design, our strategy director who handles all our researchers, analysts, and strategists, and then our head of product management who handles all our project managers.

I follow a pretty simple format where I talk to them on a weekly basis about the three Ps. So the people, problems, and progress.

The people part is how are their people doing? Is everybody happy with their work and are they motivated at work? Do they get along with their colleagues?

Progress, which is how are your projects, or your things you're working on, progressing. So any updates since last time, have you had any problems?

And the last one is problems. Is there anything you're struggling with on a client base or on a process level or withone of your team mates?

I think I touched on it a little bit earlier but it's that no day is the same.

The beautiful thing with agency life or being in the design space is that we help other people do cool things. we are always reliant on having a client, it can also be scary because if there are no clients, we have no company. But the benefit of it is that we always get to work on new things.

So one day I worked with Philips and helped them figure out how to launch a new air fryer in the market. The next time, I work with Samsung, where we looked at how to educate consumers or educate people about smart home things.

We work right now also with a startup that does help people to feel healthier using supplements connected to their smart watch. And the next day we can help Netflix promote a new TV show.

So there's always these new things and new problems. I'm a very curious person and a problem solver. People come to me with fun problems and I help them solve that. And that's what I think makes the agency life so interesting. It's a very fun way to work that never gets boring.

As a leader you always get to deal with other people's problems.

I think that's the sad thing about the job, that people only talk to me when there's something wrong. When everything is going well and everybody's happy, I'm almost invisible.

But when people are not getting along or we are not breaking through with a client or a client is not satisfied with the work that we're doing, then they call on me.

So typically when I get an unexpected phone call or those kind of things, it's typically something that's gone off the rails. It's something that I've come to expect and this just comes with the job. The more you stay in an organisation and the higher up you move the ladder, the more problems tends to come your way.

I had no idea that I would end up in this field. When I was your age, I wanted to move to Japan and make video games. I dreamt to work for Nintendo. That's what I wanted to do when I was your age.

So I went to school to learn how to make video games and there was not that much to do in Sweden. We had one video game school and it was very hard to get in and I didn't have the grades to get in there. So I went to the next best thing, I thought, which was programming. There I discovered web programming, which is a lot more fun than traditional programming, because traditional programming you write like for hours and hours. And then you just see text and I wanted to see cool graphics of Super Mario doing cool things.

So I started exploring more in web development, which is a lot faster. So you write something and then you can see pictures and 3D and all these things, and that was like when I realised maybe I'm more of a visual person than I am a technical person.

So that's how I ended up in it. So I stumbled onto it and the leadership position in particular came a little bit later because I started as a developer and designer at an agency, but realised that there were a lot of people that were a lot better than me at both designing and in programming.

But I realised that what made me special was that I could understand their language. So I could understand what designers said, I could understand what developers said, and I could understand what business people said, and get them to get along.

I guess in a way I learned that I'm more of a translator and that's when I realized, oh, I found this role of being a manager of projects and clients and those kind of things. And I figured out that my strength lies in making teams and people and problems get along.

So I started a programming school in year 12. So we had a lot of programming courses, we had to learn Java and C and all these programming languages.

And then a lot of math, which I hate math. I was okay at it but I really didn't enjoy it.

And I did that for three years and then during the last year there we could do visual things. So I got to do 3D, which I discovered was quite interesting.

I took a break after school, traveled the world a little bit, and then when I got back from traveling, I applied for university at a media communications university in Stockholm.

So then I started looking around and found a partly private school that focuses on digital media and creative work.

So I applied there and got in. And there I met all these people that were super, super duper good at designing and coding and those kind of things.

I remember when I got my internship in New York City. And I was there and my first assignment, they just dumped this big project for Bloomberg, which is like the mayor of New York. I was like 25 fresh outta school and they was like, oh yeah, you're gonna do this website in 3D for the mayor of New York.

And I had no idea how to do it but then they were like, oh no, but we're gonna help you figure it out, I'm sure it's gonna just do your best. And me and my classmates who also had the internship there, I think we worked day and night for three weeks in a row. We even slept in the office to get that done because we wanted to prove ourselves.

And then the project, we launched it on time and it looked pretty cool. And then at the Friday meeting, later after we delivered that thing, the CEO of the company called me and my classmate up and said that we did an outstanding job and we are going to go really far in our careers.

That was really like the first time I got the validation that I was good at something. And that I will always remember.

Read more books. I'm not from a reading family but I've discovered it later in life. I realised that a lot of these things, especially when it comes to work, people have experienced before and has typically written a book about it. And now, today, it's so easy to read on your own terms, whether it's an audio book or a summary or whatever.

And that kind of leads to the next point, which is ask questions. You don't need to figure it out yourself because it's very likely that someone else already had this problem. So asking people for advice, find someone that is a little bit further than you in their career and ask them , Hey, I saw that you work in this. I'm struggling with that. Could you help me? Or do you have an ideas on this?

And people are typically quite helpful. I spent a lot of years at the beginning of my career trying to figure out everything myself because I wanted to learn it. And I think I would've been five, 10 years further now if I would have just asked for advice from someone that has done it before.