Awkward Silences

This week, we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re talking to the CTO of User Interviews, Bob Saris, and a bunch of random strangers about one of the biggest questions out there—is it ok to recline your seat on an airplane? We got our whole team involved to do some on-the-street research. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2w3iUfU 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to pro UX designer and researcher Nicola Rushton. She's worked with teams large and small to facilitate fantastic research. She walked us through how she does it and how to think of researchers as facilitators of learning. Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2VRwqSk 

This week on Awkward Silences, we talked to Kate Towsey, a ResearchOps thought leader and advisor and founder of the Cha Cha Club—a members' club for ResearchOps professionals. Previously Research Operations Manager at Atlassian, you may know her as the person who started the ResearchOps Slack community in March of 2018.

In the past year, the ResearchOps community has grown and Kate has left her consulting career to join Atlassian. Erin and JH talked to Kate about how she's started a ResearchOps practice and what she's excited to see as ResearchOps grows. 

65% of homeowners have experienced anxiety related to their home. Adam Sigel wants to figure out how to get that number down. As the VP of Product at Hometap, a home equity startup, he talks to homeowners about their hopes and fears about their homes. We talked to Adam about his experience interviewing users and how he's become a more empathetic researcher.

Highlights

• [2:21] Adam talks about his research at Hometap
• [4:32] Resist the urge to pitch
• [9:15] Let discovery conversations be open ended
• [12:39] The difficulties of pattern recognition in complicated discovery interviews
• [17:40] Can someone productize dads?

About our Guest

Adam Sigel is VP of Product at Hometap. He once shared an elevator with Michael Keaton.

Talking to customers is pretty powerful stuff. This week Erin & JH talked to Katelyn Bourgoin, 3x startup founder and growth geek, about how qualitative research can become your marketing team's competitive advantage. Learn more about the episode here https://bit.ly/2IHsbSu 

Highlights

• [3:30] Go into qualitative research with a goal of learning
• [7:18] Stop running away from the angry bear
• [13:41] Doing a switch interview to learn about the buyer's journey
• [16:46] How to do churn interviews
• [20:03] Creating better marketing personas based on qualitative research
• [23:54] Don't do selfish marketing
• [27:57] Create a culture of consistent research

About our Guest

Katelyn Bourgoin is a growth strategist, marketer, and 4x founder. 

She's founded 4 startups and has learned a lot about growing your business through customer feedback. Her specialty is helping growth-hungry teams figure out what triggers customers to buy so they can market smarter. Katelyn has been called an "influential entrepreneur" by Forbes and named as one of the "top 20 wonder women of SaaS marketing and growth."

This week on the podcast, Erin and JH talk to Shipra Kayan. After 10 years of working in UX design and research at Upwork, she's launched her own consultancy. On the pod, she talked about getting your research started on the right foot, no matter what kind of research you're doing or how big your team is.

Highlights

• [5:47] How do you decide between what to do long-term and short-term?
• [7:49] Do research your team is ready to listen to
• [17:16] Always plan on learning from your research
• [20:05] Democratize your research planning process
• [24:21] Always document your research
• [27:48] There’s a lot of value in actually getting people together in a meeting 

About our guest

Shipra Kayan worked on UX design and research at Upwork for over 10 years. She is now an Evangelist at Miro and runs her own consultancy, helping teams create amazing research-driven UX.

John Cutler is a man of many talents. He’s a product development champion, team whisperer, and now, podcast guest on Awkward Silences! Erin and JH talked to John about just-in-time research, promoting healthy team practices, and integrating research faster.

Highlights

• [3:22] Start together, work together, finish together
• [7:50] Consistently integrate your ideas
• [9:02] Continuous design, rather than design then build
• [10:16] Create a backlog of learning goals
• [11:30] Integrate research faster
• [17:32] Finding a working balance for you and your team
• [18:10] The dangers of defensive dogma
• [35:02] Critiquing your research process

In this special edition episode, we're talking about what we think about the podcast so far and where we hope to go. We want your feedback to help us decide what to do next! Let us know what you think here: https://bit.ly/2uoijV9 

Erin and JH talk to Sonya Badigian. As a researcher at a fully-remote company, Sonya is a big fan of remote research. She walks us through how remote research can be affordable, flexible, and fun. 

About Our Guest

Sonya Badigian is Staff UX Researcher at Procore Technologies (previously UX and Content Specialist at Marketade). She has Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon. After graduating and taking a remote research job, she was surprised to learn how powerful remote research can be.

Pluralsight is built on continuous discovery and continuous delivery, which means they are constantly building and shipping code, while constantly digging in to how customers feel about their product. We talked to James Aylward about the framework that keeps his team moving while creating products that are all about the customer.

Episode Highlights

[1:45] James talks about how Pluralsight thinks about continuously delivering and discovering

[4:10] Culture and values at Pluralsight

[5:57] The directed discovery process

[13:05] Who you should have on your team to bring the most value to your products

[17:15] How a culture of learning promotes research

[19:10] Different teams will work together in different ways

About our Guest

James Aylward is GM and Chief Product Officer at PerkSpot (at the time of our interview, James was SVP and Head of Data Product at Pluralsight). He’s passionate about identifying customer needs and rapidly designing and developing products that offer solutions. He has 10 years of experience managing products and nearly 20 years of experience in the field.