Today’s guest is Frances Karandy, a senior manager within the Customer Experience Group at Citrix. We discuss doing product-focused research in a company with a large number of products, what to look for when hiring researchers, and how to select projects that not only support the business but also help team members to develop.

Design goes hand in hand with research.. it’s about solving complex problems. How do we improve not just the UI or the screen, but also the product itself? – Frances Karandy

Show Links

* Frances Karandy

* Citrix

* Catherine Courage

* Stanford’s Design School

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Transcript

Steve Portigal: Thanks so much for being with us, Frances. I’m looking forward to speaking with you today.

Frances Karandy: Thank you, Steve.

Steve: Let’s just start at the high level. Maybe tell us about Citrix at a broad level, and what your role is, and what that involves.

Frances: Yeah, great. Citrix, if you don’t know the company, is an enterprise software company. We create virtualization, device management and collaboration software. What that actually means is that employees can be mobile and working from anywhere, on any device, securely.

We’re most known for GoToMeeting, you might have heard of that application, and for providing Windows applications at any endpoint. That could be a laptop, a thin client or even a Mac or iOS tablet.

I’m senior manager within the Customer Experience Group. I lead a team of user researchers who primarily support our application and Desktop Virtualization products.

Steve: Do you have counterparts that support other products?

Frances: Yes. I would say, in all, we have maybe two dozen or so user researchers and we’re supporting different business lines in different areas of the product. In addition to that, there’s also the Customer Insights Group that we work really closely with. There’s probably about another dozen or so, maybe a dozen and a half, on that team that we work closely with. Yes, we’re aligned to different product lines.

Steve: What’s the size of your team?

Frances: Four people. And then, myself would make a fifth.

Steve: Is there a specific type of customer for those product lines that you’re trying to learn about?

Frances: Yeah, actually, I would say not just our product line that we work on, but most of the enterprise product lines within the full Citrix suite. Really comes down to three segments that we’re often looking at or working with, within an organization. When we go in and we partner with a customer, pretty much it comes down to three types of users that we’re working with.

First one being the buyer. Who’s the buyer within the organization? Typically, that tends to be a C-level or IT executive. They would be the one signing the check for the technology solutions. There’s also the IT administrative team or staff. These are the folks that are responsible for setting up, deploying, rolling out, and maintaining the Citrix products within their organization.

Then, we also have what we call the end users. That would typically be the employees who are within the organization and acc...