Dollars to Donuts

In this episode of Dollars to Donuts, I talk with Emily Sun, the head of Design and Research at Hipcamp. We discuss staying engaged in work, designers doing their own research, and research at a small, growing company.

There’s actually a big opportunity with smaller companies. At small startups, you are much closer to the people who are making the long term vision for what the company is going to be. Because we have access to that level of leadership, there is a lot that can be influenced through research. – Emily Sun

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my conversation with Tamara Hale, the Director of Product Experience – Research & Insights at Splunk. We talk about the long tail of impact, being an anthropologist of work, and having a creative practice.

The ‘doing the research’ bit is only about a quarter of your job. The rest of it is all the other stuff that goes around it. It’s about storytelling and influence and developing a vision and creating alignment around who the customers are and creating alignment on what actually are the business goals. It’s your stakeholder mapping. It’s your internal research. It’s your knowledge management. It’s improving how we work. All that stuff is part of research, and if you only think of your job as that quarter, you’re missing out on some of the most interesting and also trickiest parts of the job. – Tamara Hale

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In this latest episode of Dollars to Donuts, I talk with Vanessa Arango Garcia, Director UX Research & Research Operations at Delivery Hero. We discuss creating an engaged research community across a global organization, being accountable for impact, and how today’s challenges provide an opportunity for the research progression to grow.

We care a lot about our craft and we need to keep the quality up, but we also need to be pragmatic in how we are able to optimize that process of doing research to focus in the next stages. We dedicate too much in doing the research, delivering that report. And later, sometimes it’s very difficult to dedicate time to following up, connecting with the team, sitting together, ideating, thinking about the roadmap, because we don’t have time. We are jumping from research to research to research because every research takes time. – Vanessa Arango Garcia

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my conversation with Sarah Gregory, Director of User Research for Consumer at Coinbase. We talk about research comms, archiving user research, and doing research that no one is yet asking for.

Our email is designed for one very specific leadership stakeholder, and it is tailored to how that person likes to consume information. There’s a different stakeholder that hates email. That person, I use Slack. Another stakeholder tends to listen very well when they’re live in a regularly recurring monthly meeting. And so I make sure that research always has one or two slides in that meeting. You have to know exactly who you want to be listening, and you have to change your techniques depending on who that is. Which is really just understanding your user, right? – Sarah Gregory

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In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Jamika Burge, the head of research for Data and AI at Capital One. We talk about her journey through academia, discovering user research, and intersectionality.

Doing good – for me, as a researcher, and as someone who wants to do good in the world, it means understanding people’s needs in context and providing opportunities for them to succeed. That’s what that means for me. Success can mean different things to different people. I can guess what success means from a business perspective. I can even guess what success means from a researcher perspective, but ultimately it’s that end user who tells us whether or not we got it right. I want that person to feel as an end user, free to share with us when we got it wrong, but also when we got it right. – Jamika Burge

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features my interview with Akshay Verma, the head of User Research at Duolingo. We talk about being qualitative focused in an experimentation-driven organization, research team structures, team rituals, and sharing knowledge between researchers.

I don’t actually want to bemoan or belabor this concept of a room that we’re invited to or not. At Duolingo, I feel it pretty acutely just because we do have a lot of rituals and traditions at Duolingo around how product gets built. And it’s great. It works. It works really well. But, you know, I could spend a lot of time and energy going crazy, being like, “How do I get invited to these rooms?” and then get upset when it doesn’t happen? I actually don’t. I try my best, but I think our energy is probably spent elsewhere.” – Akshay Verma

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In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I speak with Daniel Escher, Director of UX and Research at Remitly. We talk about more ways for researchers to add value, business questions over research questions, and the things that researchers worry about.

Where I think collective identity can be limiting is when someone thinks of themselves as a researcher and says, “Therefore, that means this is my small box of things that I do and ways that I contribute.” And what I always want to do is push that box to be bigger, right? I’m not at all saying that the box doesn’t exist in any way. But we as researchers can drive far more decision-making, far more strategy, far more hypotheses than I think we realize. I think that we tend to want to hand off work to other people when actually what I encourage my team to do is figure out where are the places where actually a handoff doesn’t make sense, but a handshake makes sense. There’s some contact there. Or where does hand-holding make sense, where there’s really extended involvement? – Daniel Escher

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features part 2 of my two-part conversation with Reggie Murphy of Zendesk. We talk about psychological safety at work, Reggie’s career journey, and online career resources for UX researchers.

That helps the team be better researchers when they feel like they have a space where, man, I don’t have to be perfect every time. I’m going to definitely strive really hard to do great work and try to be successful. But I have a leader who’s going to have my back if something goes wrong. It works. I want every people leader who’s listening to this to understand that. That you’re not going to get it right every time. But if you set the environment and the intention of being a leader who understands that people will make mistakes, but it’s not that you made the mistake. It’s, okay, how do you learn from it and not do it again? And how that we can set up parameters within the team to address that particular mistake if it was something like a research protocol or something. – Reggie Murphy

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This episode of Dollars to Donuts features part 1 of my two-part conversation with Reggie Murphy of Zendesk. We talk about aligning the work of the research team with stakeholder OKRs and empowering non-researchers to do user research.

The researcher would go into these meetings and say we’re going to do a “I Wish I Knew” exercise, where we start thinking about what we’re building for our customers, what are the questions outstanding that we still don’t have an answer to. We’d go through that exercise, and then we’d prioritize that list. I can’t tell you how valuable those exercises were and how our stakeholders looked at us and said, “Wow, I did not know that research could add this kind of value to our conversation,” because it really helped them see. You know, that question that we’ve been battling around in these meetings isn’t really the one that’s most important. It’s this one. And to see it all together was a revelation for some of our stakeholders. I can’t tell you how important that was. – Reggie Murphy

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In this episode of Dollars to Donuts I catch up with Leanne Waldal, five years after she first appeared on the podcast. She’s now a Principal in User Experience at ADP.

A couple of years ago, I realized I know things. We all know things, but sometimes we go through life thinking there’s always something more for us to know, or we don’t know as much as others. A couple of years ago I was like, oh, I know some stuff. I could share it. If I think of myself at 23, 24 years old, I had people who were my age now who were telling me things that I listened to and got advice from. I’m that person now. I can be the person who like gives people advice or says, I don’t actually know everything, but here’s some things I learned over the years that might help you. It makes me feel good to do that. It boosts my confidence. It helps me feel like I can actually do something that’s not just my craft or not just my job for a paycheck or not just this, but I actually have something to offer. And that’s a great feeling. – Leanne Waldal

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