Black Stories/30: Jarman Hauser

Jarman Hauser:
I found my skill set. I was fumbling around trying a bunch of different things and not all of them worked, but I had the freedom to experiment. You don’t always get that in any job that you’re in. You got to deliver results wherever you work.

Justin James Lopez:
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Amazon’s Black Stories, where we highlight the stories of Black designers, researchers, and creative minds from all around the world. I’m your host, Justin James Lopez, and today I’m joined by Jarman Hauser as we talk about how he uses his creative core to amplify both his personal and professional life. Let’s hear his story.

Well Jarman, thanks for joining me on this episode. I’m really excited to dive into your story, but before we do that, I wanted to give you the opportunity to just introduce yourself to the audience here.

Jarman Hauser:
Thanks for having me too. I’m Jarman Hauser. Born and raised local, Seattleite. I grew up here, got into art early, but changed my career and went into tech. So at Amazon, I lead one of our transformation business programs. I’ve been in business development for the past seven or eight years, and I’ve tried to find ways to still exercise that creative muscle independent of whatever role that I have.

Justin James Lopez:
I think that that’s probably the best way to describe yourself from my knowledge, and we’ll dive deeper into it. But I say that because how we actually came in contact was, painting the picture for the listeners here, I’m walking into the office space here in Seattle. I turn the corner as soon as I walk in and I see these big posters of your artwork and a little bit about your story and being an artist and the exhibitions that you have and the work that you’re doing just in this general community. So naturally I’m like, “Who is this person and why have I never heard of them?” So I reached out and thanks for responding and agreeing to be on the show, but I reached out naturally and then I learned a bit more about your story in exactly what you just described, being this really creative, this artist that decides, “Well, you know what? I want to shift and I want to move into this.” I want to dive a little bit into that decision though. You said you started in this creative space.

What was it originally that made you feel like this was a safe space for you when it comes to being creative, being an artist? What was that that drew you into that space to begin with?

Jarman Hauser:
I mean, it’s a great question. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this since we first spoke, but I started as a musician. I come from a very big family. My mom had eight kids. I’m right smack dab in the middle, and so really daycare provided services was through church. So we went to church a lot, and I just gravitated towards the musical instruments and I started playing the organ. I started at about 14, and for me as a middle kid, big family, my brothers all into sports, basketball, football, baseball, music and art or being creative was really where I found my voice. So I continue to just gravitate there because I didn’t know at the time, but if I had issues in my life, I didn’t know how to sort out, I worked them out learning chord progressions on the keyboard or on the organ, and that gave me a chance to really focus critically on something, but also process these other things that are going on in my life at the same time.

But I always also drew letters and I was a kid writing on the walls, and I got in trouble quite a bit for doing that. And so instead of writing permanent markers on the wall, I started doing it in notepads, and the kids in school, they would pay me a few quarters, $0.50 or $1 to write their name in graffiti letters. And I didn’t think of it as trying to make money. I actually liked writing letters and somebody giving me a different name, just more unique letters. To me, that was the most interesting part. Not to mention a few dollars in your pocket in middle school is not bad. So I really started there.

Justin James Lopez:
And at what point did you decide not to pursue that as a profession, any of these parts? Because it sounds like you really dove into the artistry and the creativity in different avenues, whether that was music or the drawing and all of that.

Jarman Hauser:
Honestly, my life really took a turn high school. I had a kid, became a single parent, and Jarman Jr. he became a different motivating factor or a forcing function for me now to think critically of I need to have a sustainable life where I can provide not only for myself, but for a kid. And as a 19-year-old then going to college with a newborn baby, I really started to think practically what degree option could I fulfill and what kind of jobs are ready and available for me at the end of that? And I was going to just try to build my life as somebody who didn’t have a father growing up, I want to make sure to provide that for my kid.

And so that immediate direction to me, it really pivoted my focus away from being creative and artistic. And I didn’t realize at the time how that was actually affecting my mental health and just affecting me emotionally or socially. And it took a long time for me to actually realize if I’m not creating or making music, there’s some type of imbalance in my life somewhere.

Justin James Lopez:
As you realized that, where were you in your life? You said it took some time for it to come back. So if you can recall, do you recall the moment where you had that epiphany of, “You know what, this is really missing and I need to bring it back”?

Jarman Hauser:
Yeah. I mean, these are tough conversations for me because being poor, broke, growing up in poverty, when I graduated, I moved back in with my mom and my brothers and just not being able to realize some of the dreams I have or accomplish some things, and then the amount of stress on me really led to really depressed states. And there was a piano one day. I’m just at a mall somewhere in California, I was visiting my sister and I didn’t even want to go in the music store. I don’t know why, but there was something that was just inside of me, repulsing me like a magnet like, “Don’t go in there. Don’t go in there.” And it was so much so that I was like, “Screw it. I’m just going to go in here and just start tapping on stuff.” And I don’t know how I got over that hump, but as soon as I started playing, I sat down and I was there for maybe an hour and a half. My family left. They didn’t know where I was. They were calling trying to get in touch with me. I zoned out.

And I realized, wow, I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t know why I needed that, but I just knew if I’m having some real issues, I feel like my chord structure’s now becoming dark in minor chords, but I’m actually getting some of these internal challenges or whatever’s going on in me outside in my overall life. I’m working it out on the keys. And there was that moment where I’m just listening like, “Why did I choose to play some of these chord progressions or find them?” And it was really my response to what was going on inside. And it didn’t really distill right there, but that was a signal, and I was a little young to really understand that signal and hone it. But that was pretty much the trigger where I was like, “I got to get a keyboard. I have to have something in my house where I could just make music when I’m really feeling like I want to.”

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah, no. One, I don’t know how old you were where you’re saying you were really-

Jarman Hauser:
24, 25.

Justin James Lopez:
... Because I’m thinking, man, there’s people probably twice that age that still haven’t figured that out. And it’s interesting to be in a space where you’re even receptive to that message in your life and being, I guess the description that I would use is being self-aware enough to say that there’s something wrong, and how do I deal with that. I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying. I grew up on the other side though. I grew up on the other side of the nation, but similar situation and we didn’t have any money. Every decision was thee decision. You almost have to be perfect because any decision is just the end, and it’s tough to really sit with yourself and be able to be honest with yourself around how you’re feeling.

It’s almost that embedded “boys don’t cry” mentality where you go, “I just got to keep moving.” But to be able to give yourself that gift of just being still for a second, long enough to be able to listen to what’s happening inside of you to then be able to express that outwardly, I think it’s really powerful. Like I mentioned, most men I’ll say, don’t ever have that moment where they can go, “You know what? This is something that I need and I need to shift.” When that happened for you, what happened next in your steps towards finding this balance that it sounds like you were missing at the time?

Jarman Hauser:
I mean it was a long slog, I’ll be honest. That was just one signal. I had a lot going on in my life. There was a lot of moving parts. I think that was just one of the early indicators that I knew that I was a musician. This is something that I find not only fun to do, but it’s regenerating. If I’m really, really stressed out or put a lot of energy into something, making music actually gives me energy. So there’s this regeneration process of that. And I think just from that point, I continued to make music, but I actually joined a band, and I had a lot of challenges with being the soloist or being in front of big crowds of people and the attentions on me. I had to get over that fear, but I knew the outcomes of me getting better at playing with some better musicians, me doing something I know I love that provides some intrinsic benefit or value for me. And so I just took the risk and I’ve always done that.

I see there’s an opportunity. I know directionally this is something that I want to do and probably will benefit me or need. I don’t have all the answers, but there’s something in me that’s compelling me to go forward there. And I responded to that. It was hard playing with bands. It’s hard getting to play with other musicians and creatives, but I started learning about creative process. I started learning how to make and produce music. And I think this is the thing that really changed my life because there’s many ways, so problem solving in general... Take any problem, there’s probably 5,000 approaches or more that you can take. So making music, it’s very subjective to the ear or the listener, what you’re interested in. And there’s genres, there’s tempos. For me, it was more along the lines of layering. I learned how to take and isolate different frequencies of sound, and then I layer and stack them on top of each other to make some new composition.

And then it really opened up my mind just to think about how music wave files are captured, how you can space those out in a three-dimensional type of space, I guess I would say. And for whatever reason, I just started to understand math a little bit easier or some of the more challenging aspects of physics, I guess, of how your brain processes sound. Those things started to click for me. And I think the reason why that was one of the most important things for me is because how I build things, how I dress, how everything I do is really layers. If I can isolate what is the base foundational thing I’m building here, how do I get this layer right, what are the additional components that can stack on top of this that look really well, whether it’s colors, shapes, programs, APIs, you name it. And I started to make those links and connections as I was making music.

Justin James Lopez:
And I guess you started to get into it right there, but when you describe it that way, which is really poetic by the way, but the way you describe it makes it really easy to draw these parallels in so many other spaces. So how have you taken some of those lessons and maybe the lessons you continue to learn through your creative process and your creative core and implemented them into other spaces to allow you to continue to be successful in your career?

Jarman Hauser:
I mean, that’s a great question. I think this aspect of my life leaning into being creative, I don’t know how to quantify specifically, but it has really changed my career at Amazon, as I’m thinking about building new businesses. And my job within business development is to take the signals we’re hearing from customers, particularly around a service or an area that we want to grow, and finding the solution that we would bring teams, people’s technologies, tools, partners as a go-to market strategy to go after this one new business or start to build something new.

And to me, I am like, this is like creating a band. It’s like creating a team. It’s finding the right drummer who, if that’s what we need, is a progression heavy solution. We find the drummers, we find the other band members, we find the auto engineers, we find the whole team. We stand that up and we bring that to this customer. And if we think about it in terms of skills in that way, or customer workloads or what they’re trying to solve, we’ve worked on these kinds of things with every customer you can think of. So there’s some expertise at Amazon somewhere, and if you can figure out how to tap in and assemble these teams together to come and solve a unique customer problem, it really does move the needle for big strategic or very difficult to move situations. And I work in migrations and modernizations, and those are very tricky things to do.

And so it does require really thinking outside the box and not just looking, “What are the mechanisms that I have? Let me apply this mechanism here.” Sometimes it’s building a new mechanism. And if you’re starting from scratch and if you’re not thinking expansively, then those mechanisms are going to have to be revisited or rebuilt. So just in general, taking a creative approach, taking a step back before we even look at the problem, are we addressing or are we defining the problem the right way? And that’s what I learned as making music and making art. And before we jump in and dive into some one-way door type of thing where we can’t easily walk back, we’ve done some type of prototyping in ways that writing code is very linearly structured sometimes, and there’s boundaries, but piece of paper and art and drawing, there’s no limit to the imagination for the kind of prototype you can build now artistically.

And I think marrying those two concepts, it’s just for me, it’s been incredible for having another toolkit to use in my tool belt.

Justin James Lopez:
This is an interesting line of thought. So how has that been received by say, your peers throughout your career? For me, I’m listening to it, but coming from a creative space, it makes sense to me for the way that you work through your problems, regardless of whether it’s a design problem or a business development problem. But how has that been received from people that maybe don’t have that same background as you? Have you noticed any of that?

Jarman Hauser:
There’s friction. I think communication, it’s not that we’re using different language, but in some ways it feels like we are. And the different mental models that a lot of times the folks I’m working with are just highly technical, very specialized in one niche area. And so it’s difficult, I think, for some of the folks that I work with to zoom out and understand the bigger connection or the bigger picture of how all of these things fit together when they’re really just focused on this highly nuanced space. And so I do see a lot of friction with me having a different approach, trying to build analogous, “Here’s some scenarios that are similar and representative of what we’re talking about in an artistic space.” But it is heavy lifting because when I’m doing that, the references, the background, the stuff that people are researching is in another domain. And so trying to have some links or connections to help people quickly understand instead of reading this whole book or taking a course on creative thinking, “Here are some analogous pieces,” and building that bridge or connection of understanding in a team, it’s very difficult.

And I’ve found that honestly, because I’m artistic, I like to write code or build a quick little tool or app or something like that, I’m finding that I need to do that. It’s, build the prototype before the prototype to people to envision what I’m talking about. And I would say this has been the case for me ever since I’ve started working in tech, is I see this in my mind. I see the vision, I see the work that needs to be done. I see the people who should come into place that can fill the roles, but then articulating that vision and helping people see the bigger points or connections, I’m finding that as one of the most difficult things, especially working cross-domain, thinking cross Amazon, trying to solve problems that aren’t just a JavaScript, WebSphere application that you can write, whatever that is.

Justin James Lopez:
I mean, I think it’s true in general, anytime you introduce change. I think change is something that scares a lot of people. That’s why I wanted to ask that. I had that curiosity around it makes sense to me, but I wonder how that would be received by other people. I understand the decision that was made when you were younger, but as you continue to grow and continue to realize, almost fall back in love year over year, month over month, day over day, with that creative core and that creative piece that you get, and even looking at, from the sound of it, how this creative thinking and design thinking really embeds itself into all of the actual work that you do regardless of what space that’s in. Have you considered shifting back into that as a potential professional space?

Jarman Hauser:
Yeah, I have. It’s like a dream. If there was some role or something here at Amazon that fit that did these kinds of cross business building, cross discipline, assembling teams, going to solve the really difficult grand challenges that are out there with unique novel approaches, that would be great. And I look all the time. There’s certain pieces of this that I’m starting to refine as this could be a scalable business or could have some benefit for other Amazonians or my peers. I’ve started to at least capture the thoughts and I get to these places where I can’t see further than, there’s some block... Whenever I get that trigger or signal, that means I need to go out and get data and information, which usually means I need to go test some of these assumptions that I have and put them into practice. There’s no better way than the bias for action.

I learned this at Amazon. We don’t need to wait around for someone else to go do it. Let’s find the best next thing that we can do that’s going to capture the feedback that we need or whatever it is, and let’s start doing that and iterate and improve.

Justin James Lopez:
There’s a lot of Amazon buzzwords there. Yeah. No, I get you.

Jarman Hauser:
Because I’m writing a doc at the moment, sometimes.

Justin James Lopez:
It’s on top of mind. I find myself doing that as well when I’m in the middle of an important doc or whether it’s a year-end review, especially the year-end reviews where every part of my conversation, every part of my thinking is just embedded in it. And when I’m having a dinner with my girlfriend, I’m like, “What’s the working back plan for this?” This has been really enlightening, especially your background, your journey, how you intertwine these two worlds. And even the way you describe it.

On paper, they sound like very different worlds, but when I’m sitting here having the conversation with you, it feels like maybe I’m the problem for thinking that. And I’m wondering how much of the way that you look at your space, and I imagine this would’ve been true whether you were a software engineer, business development engineer or any path that you would’ve taken, I feel like this would’ve still been true for you. And my natural thought is how do we as a larger community start to incorporate these spaces into basically how we look at not just professional development, but personal development?

What are your thoughts on that?

Jarman Hauser:
I love what you’re saying because just personal development, both, and professional development, I kind of found my skillset. I was fumbling around trying a bunch of different things, and not all of them worked, but I had the freedom to experiment. You don’t always get that in any job that you’re in. You got to deliver results wherever you work. I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of benefit for me or de-risking situations where I’m like, “I’m not exactly sure what to do next.” And if I was to go put a lot of hours in to take a coding class to learn a new programming language to try to solve this problem the way that other people have, that might not even work out to be the right approach. And so I’m finding that I can actually skip some of those steps.

I’ve learned from a lot of the artists in the community that I’ve started to become part of of their process, and I started to incorporate some of those things in. And honestly, I don’t think there’s a one size fits all, but I’m starting to build my own methods for how I build programs or how I think about the connective tissue between things that actually drive results.

I would say if we’re smart, any company would invest more in creative. There’s a lot of generative AI buzz and I don’t think it’s going to take people’s jobs, but I think thinking more creatively of how to leverage and use these types of services or tools, whether it’s AI or whatever comes after that, that’s going to be more critical than just writing a cron job or a script that runs something that’s supposed to happen in a linear fashion.

Justin James Lopez:
Yeah. No, I think it is a direction that we’re headed in. Even when you think about that last concept, which is something I think a lot of people are afraid of, that concept of, “AI, it’s this new thing.” For one, it’s not new. It’s been around for almost 30, 40 years now. I think that it’s interesting, on the topic of this finding your creative core and implementing it into the work and just having it as a consistent part of your daily process, what I find is, what I think is most challenging about the concept of AI for people is really it challenges you to actually be creative. How do you the same inputs and come to new conclusions using imagination? And that’s something we haven’t really figured out yet.

And when you’re a child that was forced into a world that says you stop drawing the letters in your notebook and start picking up how to code and how to draft these very specific docs, you forget that part of yourself and you’re challenged to pick it back up after all these years the same way you were challenged to walk into that music store all those years ago. As we start to look at these new technologies that are coming out, a lot of the challenge is that. You’re being challenged to strip down all of the superficial parts of you that can be replicated in other people, in other systems, and really challenge to say, “Who is Jarman?” Who are you and what value do you bring? And that’s really comes from that creativity that you can bring to the problem space or the role or the company, which I think is really valuable.

Jarman Hauser:
I would agree. And I feel like I can show up to work differently, my whole self in a lot of ways. And that really wasn’t the case for most of my career. That’s a relatively new thing. And sometimes I think, man, I’m really grateful and glad that I’ve been able to get to this space, and maybe this is something that worked for me. I believe this will be very beneficial for other people, just to start to lean into creativity and find what individually makes you happy or what you’re interested in. And if you can tap into those things and build connections across what you’re working on or things you’re passionate about, you just show up differently.

Every job I’ve had, once I figure out what I need to do and what the overall vision or goal is for the company, that’s what I’m targeting. I’m going to knock out my job 100%, but I’m going to do all of the things above and beyond because if there’s a really tricky problem that some other team is supposed to solve, I love working on stuff like that. And that gives me an opportunity to go test some of these theories and ideas that I have.

Justin James Lopez:
I think how we show up in those spaces really says a lot about our character. And it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into what’s important to you and how to consistently challenge yourself to grow in all those spaces. But I just wanted to thank you for this time. And I’m sure that there’s tons more that the audience here can get to know you. How can people stay aware of some of the work that you’re doing maybe in the community when it comes to the arts and the creativity?

Jarman Hauser:
Instagram is usually where I post everything. I’m Luckyjjarms. It’s spelled “Lucky”, and then “Jarms” with a J. I just had a fashion show where I took all of the clothes, deconstructed things that were going to trash. Instead of throwing them away, my job was to skip the landfill. Let’s repurpose them into something. So you’ll see my focus is currently fashion and sustainability, but that’s seasonally going to change. It’s sunny. I’m painting outside next, so you’ll start to see really interesting things that I’m into, or activations that I’m building with visual design. But Instagram is the best place. And then LinkedIn, I like to post there as well.

Justin James Lopez:
For sure. Well, thanks again for joining us on this episode.

Jarman Hauser:
Awesome. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me.