Aurelius Podcast – Episode 61 highlights with Debbie Levitt:
- Differences and similarities between CX and UX
- How the UX industry has shifted and where it’s going
- Tips for opening conversations with cross functional teams about UX Research
- How to handle conversations where people mislabel terms in UX
- How does UX fit into the Agile process
In this episode we have Debbie Levitt. Debbie is the CXO at Delta CX, author of “Customers Know You Suck”, speaker and trainer in all things CX and UX.
Two critical factors often come up when talking about UX Research and Customer Experience work: speed and quality. Striking the right balance between delivering things on time, especially in an Agile environment and maintaining the quality our customers want and expect can be pretty challenging to get right. That’s exactly what we talked about with Debbie, who has a ton of experience helping companies and teams do just that.
We talked about the need to empower researchers in UX and CX in order to understand and address customer needs, while navigating fast-paced delivery.
To do this effectively communication is key, especially when trying to bridge the gaps between different roles within a team. We discussed some very practical tips you’ll take away to be able to improve the understanding and value of UX research from engineers, product managers and executives.
Links from this episode:
- Customercentricity.com
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbielevitt/
- https://www.patreon.com/cxcc
- Debbie’s Book – Customers Know You Suck
This podcast is brought to you by Aurelius, the powerful research and insights tool. Collect, analyze, search and share all your research in one place.
Episode Transcript
(this transcript was automatically created using our very own transcription feature in Aurelius and has been minimally edited, please excuse any typos or weirdness 😀 )
Zack
All right. I am here with Debbie Levitt.
How’s it going today? All right.
Debbie
How about you?
Zack
I’m doing pretty good.
Zack
I’m doing pretty good. I’m excited to chat with you. We’ve had several conversations in the past, but been following your stuff for a while. And as we sort of restarted the podcast and stuff like that, thought for sure to reach out to you would be a really fun conversation station to have on a podcast. And I know a lot of people would probably appreciate your perspective, especially on a lot of things that are kind of happening in the industry right now. But before we jump into that, I’d, like know, let everybody get a chance to know who Debbie is in case they don’t already follow you or know about your work. Can you give some background and context.
Zack
To kind of the work that you do?
Debbie
Yeah, sure. I’ve been a strategist for decades doing CX and UX work of various types, research, design, but lots of strategy. I have been doing speaking and training and writing also for decades, but mostly I am in the work. And so I can’t help but point out that among some of the talking heads people might have bumped into, I’m still in the work. I didn’t leave the work to become a well paid trainer. I’m a badly paid trainer. So my company is called Delta CX, and we are a full service CX and UX consultancy. We do projects and workshops and training and lots and lots of and we’d love to do more consulting and business design. So really helping people with how CX and UX fit into a company and agile and how to find product market fit on all of your products and services. So really, anything that’s kind of in that universe, people are welcome to contact me. Our new website, which is constantly a work in progress, is Customercentricity.com, because that’s the core of what we do.
Zack
Awesome.
Zack
Very perfect concise background, especially of what I know of you, because there’s actually a whole lot more you’re an author as well, a lot we could talk about with, you know, the one thing for anybody watching. So you didn’t see, but Debbie had a chance to just hold up her book, and we can definitely talk more about that too. But the one thing that you said in there, CX and UX, I actually hear a lot about that, and particularly when I read or hear things from you, I think it would be useful for people to kind of get a little bit of a take on what is the difference between CX and UX?
Debbie
Yeah, there are different definitions of CX, so it really depends on what people subscribe to. So over the decades, UX has changed what it meant. It used to mean the all encompassing experience that a user, end user, customer of a company could have with that company from start to finish. When we think about the whole customer journey map or the whole service design blueprint over time, people thought, oh UX, that’s just digital screens, they don’t have anything to do. If it’s not digital, UX isn’t working on it, someone else is. But then the term CX rose up and then those were somehow the people who were caring about the full customer journey. And so there’s just been this kind of strange shift over time in terms where UX accidentally started out meaning everything and ended up meaning just some digital stuff. And so I have always taken the approach that to me, CX and UX done well, can be the same thing. This can be great research, great design, it could be service design, it could be content strategy and other things. And that all of these play into every touch point that the customer has with our company or the potential customer or the end user. I also don’t want to die on the hill of who’s a customer and who’s a user because a lot of companies say the customer is the person who’s paying us and the end user is the schmo who’s on the other end of the keyboard or the phone. And I say, but when you do that, you usually optimize for the people with the open wallets and you totally poop on the end user. You don’t care about them at all. And so I’d like to get rid of some of those lines. And sure, we’ll still want to say who’s the end user and who’s a buyer persona or something else, but I think that when we start creating those lines, we stop caring or we care even less about the end user and their full experience because to me they’re a customer too. They’re part of your company’s ecosystem. So to me, everybody in your company’s ecosystem is a customer of some sort. And therefore I think customer experience is a better term, especially because right now it is more respected than UX. People keep redefining UX to mean less and less and less and less. I mean, when I go to Agile conferences, I have people from engineering and Agile telling me, UX, that’s not really a job or a role, that’s like a skill and anybody can do it. And I think there haven’t been enough leaders over the years who have fought that and just kind of nodded. And now there’s this perception that UX is one skill that’s easy for anyone to do. And so I’m happy with a change of terms towards one that is hopefully more respected and might get some more budget.
Zack
Interesting. So there are several things that you.
Zack
Just shared there that I want to touch on. The first thing is immediately when you started drawing the distinction that you did between CX and UX, I immediately thought of service design and you touched on that because it sounded just like service design to me. For sure. Maybe I’m showing a bit of my age, I’m probably older than you.
Debbie
Thanks a lot.
Zack
But whatever it is. So we’re showing our age, but just kind of like how we grew up in UX, right? Because it was the same thing for sure where to me, UX, the experience of it was everything. Most of the stuff we worked on were the touch points that happened to be digital screens. So I appreciate that you called that out. It was also really interesting to me.
Zack
To hear that you’re seeing CX get.
Zack
This higher level of respect and or potentially budget. So that was interesting that I want to dig into as well. But then the last point also very much surprised me where it sounds like you’re seeing a lot of folks that.
Zack
Are looking at UX as a skill.
Zack
Like I know JavaScript or I know Figma rather than an actual practice.
Debbie
Yeah, for sure. So to back up a little bit to your second point, I’m seeing a lot of the biggest consulting companies on the planet talking about CX and the importance of your customer experience, and that your customer experience is a lot more than your marketing department or your customer support reps dealing with trouble tickets and all. Those big companies are out there. And of course, they found a way to somehow monetize that and run a webinar and whatever. But they’re out there trying to inspire people to spin up customer experience teams and departments and bring in specialists and really fight for what the customer experience is. Because I think that we are really also seeing an increase, especially over time in companies that care less and less about their customers and users, even the paying ones. I think it’s pretty clear to us. We know as customers, we know that when we use these apps and systems or go to that hotel or whatever it is, it is so often absolutely crap. It’s just how bad is it going to be. And so I think that we see companies caring less and less about them. We see that jobs are easy to cut and budgets are easy to cut and companies seem to care less and less about users. They just think they’ll put something out fast, that’s good enough, it’ll make some money and someone will check off a box going, we did a thing and it was mostly on time. So I think that’s why these big consulting companies who are usually called in to fix companies problems and hemorrhages, are saying, get yourself a CX team and department. Get yourself experts who really know how to strategize and plan and prioritize everything that’s going to touch the customer, not just the reps they’re going to deal with when this sucks. Not just the marketing that might give people some awareness of a thing, but really the people who are creating the thing so that there’s something great to sell.
Zack
Yeah.
Zack
I think that there are some people who might hear the term customer experience, certainly outside of sort of our world, our industry, and they might think it’s exactly what you said, it’s the.
Zack
Person you call when you’re pissed off about something. Right?
Zack
And what we’re really talking about is it is the experience of interacting with this other entity, likely a company that you’re exchanging money for services or product.
Zack
Whatever the case may be, right?
Debbie
Yeah. And I’m hearing a lot of people who are getting CX titles in companies. They’ll tell me my job is customer journey mapping, and I’ll say, cool, where are you getting the information that goes into the customer journey map? Because I know the best place is observational research and the second best place will be interview research. And they’ll say, oh, I workshop it. We all get together and everyone puts in their best guesses. And I go, oh, holy poop on a stick. I say okay. And then what happens with your customer journey maps? And many of them tell me, nothing. I feel like I’m not really making change. And so the problem is that people have become excited about CX, especially from all the big consulting companies putting up microsites and webinars and social posts and talking about it. And they hire a couple of people, they tell them you’re going to run surveys or make customer journey maps. And they don’t really give them any real domain or authority or anything. They’re just this weird floating island of customer journey mapping. And many of them, not all are not even doing it well. They’re working from these guessed and assumed or very marketing driven customer journey maps. And then everybody’s surprised later that this didn’t really reflect the journey at all, or not much.
Zack
Yeah, just as we had the struggles very early on in UX that you’re.
Zack
Just doing design without having research to inform the decisions you make in design. You need the research to inform the decisions you make in a strategy and execution of an overall customer experience. So this segues very nicely into a lot of people listening to this are UX researchers, right?
Zack
You and I included.
Debbie
And so then everybody.
Zack
I think that there’s a lot of discussion, questions, consternation, hand wringing about where UX research fits.
Zack
In in this world, right?
Zack
And maybe let’s use this lens of CX kind of becoming maybe a more respected practice. Where does UX research fit in to any of this now and potentially in the future?
Debbie
Yeah, I mean, if you go by my Customers Know You Suck book, the answer is everywhere. Basically, the book is about becoming more customer centric. And I’m quite clear that the path to that is good research, good recent qualitative evidence, data and knowledge replacing guesses, assumptions and opinions. And so to me, research fits in everywhere. Everywhere that we are working from guesses and assumptions and let’s workshop it. And we don’t really understand people, but let’s guess at their problems. And guess at a solution, which I call a guessing lasagna. These are all the places where research can show up and with small or large studies, be able to replace these risky and wasteful guesses and assumptions with the evidence that we need. Scrum says be evidence based. Lots of people say be data driven, but yet we just run a survey because we think that’s fast and cheap. The survey is usually written badly, the numbers are manipulated, and we end up magically proving that we should build the thing we wanted to build anyway. Amazing. Wow. How does it happen? And so to me, the room for research is everywhere. And companies believe in research. They do surveys, they do focus groups. We pull data from customer support. We’ve got data analytics. We’ve got voice of the customer. We do have research. We are just going for the fast and cheap research. So our companies do believe in research. They just thought it had to be fast and cheap. They’re afraid of research that isn’t as fast or isn’t as cheap. But the problem is the fast and cheap stuff rarely tells us why, and sometimes it sends us down the wrong roads. So what I’ve been trying to push is, look, instead of I used to fight people and say don’t run a survey, they’re garbage. Now I say to people, look, if you really want to run a survey, go ahead. And when we see the results, I’m going to ask you why. I’m going to ask you why x percent of people answered this or Why? And when we realize we don’t know, then we’re going to spin up the qualitative research to answer that. So I hate NPS. But go ahead. Run, NPS. And then I’m going to ask you why. And when we don’t know why we have that score or why our score is changing, I’m going to say let’s spin up the qualitative version and find out why. And so I think that these are the conversations that we can have more of. I think that many of us who saw our jobs and world changing either froze and did nothing and let it turn to crap all around us and said, sure, design thinking, whatever. And some of us ended up in anger where we said, UI isn’t UX and how dare you say this word and don’t call me a product designer and research is this, not this. And we got very caught up in these definitions. And I say to people, you know what, let’s not die on that hill anymore. If someone wants to say UI UX to me, I’m just going to keep going because at least they’re talking to me. And I’m just going to use that opportunity to open up a warm, gentle conversation to fill in their missing information, rather than starting with UI is not UX, or you don’t understand my job, or something like that, which I know some people aren’t saying they’re thinking. But we as researchers, know when you think something, even if you don’t say it, you’re wearing it, and a perceptive person will get that. So these are some of the shifts that we need to make, because I think too many of us had these very strong reactions that made people not even want to talk to us. And in many cases, our researcher sorry, we are researchers. Our managers just became doormats and said, design thinking. Sure, bring it in. Everybody’s a researcher. Sure, let’s give it a try. Democratize. Everyone can do research, even if they suck at it. Yeah, let’s sure.
Zack
What?
Debbie
That’s got to be better than nothing, right? And I’m looking for everybody to.
Zack
I.
Debbie
Don’T know, get more mobilized, push back against this, but with intelligent conversations. I didn’t see it, but I heard that two people debated each other about Democratization at some conference I did not go to. And I heard that the antidemocratization person basically opened up, and I heard this. I didn’t see it, so this might be not true, but opened up with, like, Democratization is a dumpster fire. And my thought is that’s not a good debate tactic. That’s not a good debate tactic. And if that’s the way we’re opening up conversations with our cross functional team, with leadership from other domains, no wonder they don’t want to talk to us.
Zack
Yeah.
Zack
That would be like having a debate with a child, basically. Right. And there’s not going to be any productive debate or conversation about that. It’s just I don’t like blue or I don’t like broccoli.
Debbie
You’re poopy. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Yeah. I mean, to me, again, if we are researchers and these people are evidently researchers in this debate, if we’re researchers and when someone says, I really think we should Democratize UX or research or design, whatever it is, I say, okay, I usually don’t agree with that, but tell me more. What if the conversation starts there instead of, Are you effing kidding me? BOP boop? I say, that’s usually not what I advise companies. But tell me more about why you believe that’s the right way to go. And usually that’s a warm enough environment for someone to open up to me and say, well, we don’t have enough researchers and someone’s got to do it. And then I can say, well, what happens when we don’t have enough product managers? Who does the product management work? We usually get the budget and hire one. Right? What happens when we don’t have enough developers? We don’t give it to marketing. Right. We open that up and we hire a specialist. Is there a reason why we shouldn’t hire more research specialists? And then usually it’s, well, research is easy. Anybody can talk to customers. So you see that we can have this conversation with people, and we can little by little, chip away at their arguments. But again, I come from a family of new York lawyers. So I’m comfortable having that type of debate and using that type of technique. I once had a product director at a company say to me, and I want all my product managers to do research. And of course, I pulled up my usual research thing and I said, okay, so typically research starts with planning. Then we’re going to recruit to make sure we’re speaking to a representative sampling of the right population. Then we’re going to run sessions where moderation skills are really important. Then we’ve got analysis and synthesis, which can take days or weeks, depending upon what you’ve collected. Then we need to create actionable suggestions and report on that and create the right diagrams and artifacts. Do you plan for your product managers to learn all of that? And he looked at me and he’s like, I thought it was just picking a few people and talking to them. And I said, Maybe that’s market research, maybe not, but it’s definitely not what we do. And then he was like, oh yeah, they don’t have time for all that, and they’re probably not good at it. And I was like, Cool, let’s dive in deeper. To me, that’s my style and my technique. My style and technique is, especially if I’m in a difficult conversation with someone, how quickly can I get them in a logical corner where it’s hard to disagree with me?
Zack
Yeah, well, the one thing I think.
Zack
Is really useful for folks to hear, regardless of your position or.
Zack
Your approach.
Zack
To having these conversations, is don’t die on a hill that isn’t worth dying on. I share a personal story. Back when I was working at a consultancy, we had a very large client. It was easily the biggest, UX research project the company had ever had. And I was assigned to it, and I was only there like, a handful of weeks, so there’s a lot of pressure on me. We go downtown into this person’s office. This is the new CTO, so there’s a lot of pressure on this person too, because they just got hired to basically help turn their flagship product around, which they also hired us. So there’s just a lot of expectations on this. Normally that early in the project, you don’t get called downtown into the CTO’s office to have a conversation. And so we’re a little nervous about this. And this guy starts getting into it. He goes, look, the whole plan looks fine, but I don’t see anywhere I’m.
Zack
Getting my templates now.
Zack
We didn’t make mention of any templates in the proposal or scope of work.
Zack
We just didn’t do it.
Zack
And me and the other designer I.
Zack
Was working with on this just were.
Zack
Kind of sitting here listening, trying to figure out what was going on. To make a long story short, he was talking about, when do I get to see the prototype that comes out of and when am I going to.
Zack
Get that he wanted from a technology perspective.
Zack
He wanted to know, when am I going to get that page layouts that.
Debbie
He can turn into templates in his CMS exactly right.
Zack
So that he can give developers and sort of replicate these pages.
Zack
Right.
Debbie
I’ve done that project.
Zack
Totally.
Zack
But did I spend that time in his office trying to convince him that, no, you’re actually talking about a prototype? No, I said you know what? This is when you get your templates. I didn’t decide absolutely something else, because just like you said, he’s talking to me. He could be yelling at me. And he was definitely nervous because he thought we weren’t going to be delivering what he needed most out of the project.
Zack
And the reality was, we did.
Zack
And so, you know what we did? We changed its templates in the scope of work and the project plan and everything we did moving forward with them, and it all went off without a hitch.
Zack
And there’s no reason to fight people.
Zack
About definition or language or anything like that. I don’t see people doing that with cross functional teams from marketing or engineering or product management.
Debbie
Yeah, absolutely. When people say to me, that’s not really a mock up, it’s a this, and then I go poop on a stick again. What’s the problem if someone says wireframe or prototype or mockup or screen or template or design? Let’s just roll with it. Unless they use a word that is really way out, then let’s just roll with it. I had someone ask me the other day, hey, can you tell me more? And this was someone from Data and analytics, and that person said, can you tell me more about UI UX research? And I said, I would love to tell you about, um, so here’s what UI is. Here’s what UX is. I know you often hear them put together, but we’re not necessarily researching the UI in this case. We’re going to be researching experiences and tasks and perspectives. And it’s really more behavioral. It’s really not so much about the appearance or the branding, and I know a lot of people think of that as the UI, so this is really more in that Cxux bucket where we care about behaviors and tasks. And he was like, oh, this is great. I never really thought of it that way. And it was a beautiful conversation, and it didn’t start with, Are you effing kidding me? UIUX?
Zack
Yeah.
Zack
As is my job as the host of this is I try to distill what our guests say, and I just basically turn it around in a different language that through my own head filter sort of thing. For me, what I heard you just say is you met them at their level of understanding, and they then became more receptive to hearing what your opinions and your education on the topic was. Had you started by saying, like, well, first of all, pal never say UIUX.
Debbie
Rule one.
Zack
Yeah.
Zack
You don’t create a teaching or informative moment by starting in a combative stance. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, professional or personal. Right. You don’t do that. So this person hadn’t heard of that before.
Debbie
One build rapport. How often do we talk about that in research where we talk about building rapport and then we forget to do that with our own teammates and coworkers? And I was so grateful mr. Data and analytics was asking me more about the type of research I was going to do on this high profile, very important project that I’m now on that I was like, I would love to answer that question. I am so grateful you asked.
Zack
Yeah, totally.
Zack
I think it’s a very important point. Again, anybody listening? Doesn’t matter if you’re new to this game or if you’ve been in it for a long, long time. Maybe it acts as a reminder is use these things as an opportunity to have a conversation.
Zack
This person signaled an intent, right.
Zack
That data analytics person signaled an intent and a curiosity about that work. Why they did is irrelevant because they see some value in at least learning more about it.
Zack
Right.
Zack
And this is exactly the point is if you want to call it UIUX, of course it’s not accurate. We know it’s not accurate, but that isn’t the salient point to this. Right. What is, is to say, yeah, I’ll tell you exactly how I do UI. And A, you want an awesome design that’s easy to use, I can definitely do that. The way I can do that is I have to go and learn what people’s expectations, pain points, behavior are in.
Zack
Order to make those decisions. Oh, I didn’t know you did that.
Debbie
Cool.
Zack
Well, no problem.
Zack
I can tell you about it because guess what? Yeah, right.
Zack
As the person speaking, I’m the person that does that work well, so I can tell you exactly how that happens. Oh, we weren’t expecting to be able to do that. Not a problem. That happens a lot. Let’s talk about how we mitigate those challenges. But if you rather start from a place of going like, well, you got it all wrong, you throw your hands up and you say, they don’t get it. They don’t value it. That’s not true. Number one, I’ve always said this for a very long time. Engineers do not expect anybody else in.
Zack
The organization to know how to code. We should not expect other people to.
Zack
Know how to do UX or research.
Zack
It’s not their job. It’s our job.
Zack
So don’t expect them to value your.
Zack
Craft the way you do, or else.
Zack
They’D be in the field. Help them understand how what you do is valuable to them, because it is. And when they’re asking you these questions, it’s because they think that that might be valuable, but they’re basically asking you to convince them. And if you start by saying, well, you called it the wrong thing. You’ve gone ice cold immediately.
Debbie
And I also sometimes see in articles that I don’t fully agree with where they will say, don’t use lingo. And I go, well, you know what? Every domain has lingo. And it doesn’t make sense for us to act as if we have no terms. What are we going to do? Like just reduce everything to the simplest nouns we can think of? We have terms, we say personas. So I make sure that as I’m speaking to someone who seems interested or is listening, I can also say and we do this this for this reason, and we call it generative research because it generates information about our target audiences, mostly behavioral and task based. We call this evaluative research because it evaluates I want them to understand the lingo. I don’t think we have a mountain of lingo, but we definitely have some terms that while they are normal English words, they may not be terms people are familiar with. So I just try to find really good ways to define them. And if they forget later what’s generative and what’s evaluative, that’s fine. Sometimes people say to me, are you going to QA test this prototype? And I go, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We call it usability testing or evaluative testing. And yes, I’ll be doing that in September. So to me, sometimes people say yes, and there are definitely times I say no to people, but I think when people are trying to communicate with you, even if they get these terms wrong, roll with it. And then you can always tell them what your term is.
Zack
Yeah, and to add to that, I would say in your example, I think it’s actually a really good one because you were saying unless it’s a term that could be misconstrued or like QA testing is real as well as usability testing. So use that as a moment to say, yes, we’re going to do that. But what I do in that is.
Zack
X, Y, and Z. I’ve heard of.
Zack
Testing, which is this. So just to make sure, which one are you referring to? Right? And they might say, oh, actually both.
Zack
And say, well, the good news is we’ll do both.
Zack
I do this one, somebody else will do the other one. And then again, they don’t have to appreciate the craft of usability testing. You want them to appreciate the value.
Zack
They get out of it. It’s very different things. Yeah.
Debbie
And I find that I’ve spent so many years writing and rewriting and some people have read my stuff and some haven’t, and that’s okay, but I’ve managed to boil a lot of stuff down, especially since I mostly do talks at Agile Lean and engineering conferences. And so I’ve had to come up with short and memorable and catchy things that help non UX people, mostly from the engineering side, understand what we do. So like I’ll say, usability testing. It’s the QA of UX. We’re checking if our designs and ideas really solve our original problem and really work for our users. It’s not too different from your QA. You’re checking that this is going to work for users because it’s good code and it doesn’t have bugs. So I try to find those parallels like, oh, hey, you’re doing this and we have something like that and it looks like this.
Zack
Yeah, love it.
Zack
Completely agree. You mentioned something there where you do a lot of talks at like lean and Agile conferences and stuff like that. And I know a lot of people get asked, well, how do you fit in UX research? In an agile process or a lean process? You have to have gotten asked that more times than you can count.
Debbie
Oh yeah, I’m usually brought in to talk about that, and sometimes even after my talk, someone will say, none of that was true. UX isn’t agile. And there are some people who have such a non agile definition of agile that unfortunately you might not be able to win them over. But I would say most of the people who have heard me speak at these events usually tell me, you’ve given me some things to think about. Like they’re not totally ready to redefine their world, but they couldn’t totally find fault in what I said. And so some of the key things that I remind them first of all, I usually pull up a slide on the Agile Manifesto principles and I say, principle one, our highest priority is customer satisfaction. Are we doing that at our company? Principle two, we welcome changing requirements even late in development. Are we happy to change something? Especially if you get feedback and you realize you’re going in the wrong direction? Are we willing to change our direction because we have feedback from customers that we’re not building the right thing for them? I’m not seeing that at most companies. Agile Manifesto principle number five, give motivated individuals the time and support they need and trust them to get their job done. Is that how you’re treating your UX counterparts? Is that how you as an engineer are being treated? And I try to start with things that in general, people feel like they agree on. We agree that Agile has these Manifesto principles that are mostly good and a little bit problematic. And we agree that Agile is about a repeated cadence. We agree that Agile is about good planning and getting things out to customers more quickly. Okay, great. Let me tell you, UX absolutely can fit into that. It’s just all about planning. If I need three weeks to research something and then I need two weeks or three weeks to design something, let’s call that three two week sprints. Some agilists will clutch their pearls and go, three two week sprints? Swim, baby Jesus, we can’t give you that time. You’re not agile. And I say, okay, but your team of ten people are getting six to eight weeks to do something. Why is this so strange that we want six weeks to do something and you’ve only let one of us do this or two of us do this? So I’ve been telling people, if you really want to be agile, it’s about time and it’s about headcount. My dream team is assigned to an Agile or project or product team. Three researchers at different levels, and two, what I call architects, that some people might call designers, possibly at the same level, possibly different. You now have five UX people assigned to one agile team. You are going to get stuff done so fast for those people and at a much higher level of quality, and you’re going to have them 100% allocated, which Agile loves. They don’t like when I’m on three projects, they like when I’m on one. And people go, oh, this isn’t Agile. You’re going to work for weeks before we are. And I go, yeah, and you’re going to code before QA tests it. It’s an assembly line. It just is. It can still be agile and just be an assembly line. Look, here’s your graphic about scrum. And the first thing on the graphic says product backlog. How do you think stuff got into the product backlog? Who put it there? What is it? It’s usually designs or at least descriptions of features. Let’s say a company has no UX people. It’s going to be a description of the feature coming from a business analyst or a product person. There’s something in the backlog that someone decided was what we’re building, whether that’s through a fantastic human centered design process or a business analyst going, here’s what we’re making, everybody just do it. So this all happened before you started coding and your underwear didn’t catch on fire, and the product manager made a roadmap and planned our quarter or sprint or release, and that happened ahead of time and your underwear didn’t catch on fire. It is okay for some things in Agile to be on tracks or asynchronous, but people have gotten so unfortunately over glued to the idea that Agile just means go as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, you’ll fix it later, you’ll iterate on it later. And we’ve totally lost sight of quality. And I think that is the core of why we have conflicts with people in Agile and engineering. They’re judged by velocity and time and speed, and we judge our work by the quality of our work and the quality of its outcomes. And there is a fundamental mismatch there because my work might not be the fastest it could be, but if you want my best work, I need time to do my best work. And some companies are just like, but I don’t need your best work. Just give me something in a day or two. And I say, then we have to document the risk of me guessing and making something crappy.
Zack
Yeah, this is really interesting because it sounds to me like you’re talking about the conflict between delivery, which is efficiency.
Zack
And quality, which takes more time.
Zack
It isn’t about how quickly it can happen or how on time it is necessarily. Not to say that those two things are diametrically opposed, but it does also remind me of the old saying, measure twice, cut once, where I think a lot of people were just interested in cutting, and if we screwed it up, well, then we’ll buff out the edges later. Or we’ll just cut again and again and again and again. Well, that takes time, and there’s waste, and there’s a lot of sort of long tail ramifications to that, which I think is what you’re alluding to specifically. And really, it sounds to me like your response to these folks is to say you can use UX research, UX CX. Process to define these sprints so that you’re cutting once so that they are.
Zack
As efficient as they can possibly be.
Debbie
And again, if you want it more efficient, you have to put more people on it. If you’re just going to put one third of Debbie because she’s spread across three projects, if you’re going to put one third of Debbie on a project, especially, that’s mission critical. And then I say, hey, I’m going to need forever to do this because I’m split across three projects, people yell at me, you’re not agile when they should be yelling. Where’s the budget to get Debbie on our project 100% and get her two assistance?
Zack
Yeah, I mean, the fact of the matter is, I think everybody gets this anxiety that I think everybody wants to do things faster, more effectively, at the.
Zack
Same level of quality, ideally with the.
Zack
Same amount of resources.
Debbie
I’ve got a graphic that I show for this, and I say, look, it’s a triangle that we have to balance. We have to balance the customers or users needs and the research we’ve done to understand those with how fast we want to be, but also with the idea of being lean, recognizing and cutting risk and waste. Because so many companies are just in cycles of fast guesses. And these fast guesses are usually cycles of mediocrity. And they go, well, we were fast. And I go, yeah, but which ones do your customers prefer? When’s the last time you got a one star app review because you didn’t release it fast enough? But you will get a one star app review because it was garbage or not what they needed or broken or difficult to use? Most of our customers don’t have a sense of how fast we are. These are internal things that we worry about. But our customers are like, oh, it’s out now, and it’s changed. It’s improved. Hey, this is what I need. It just works. This is great. But we don’t think about that. We idolize the companies that do it. People idolize Apple and a couple of other companies who really spend the extra time and money to try to get it right the first time. I mean, Apple doesn’t release something and know, we’re going to fix this later. It’s kind of an know, Apple always releases something and says, this is the second coming. This is all you need. We’ve read your minds, we’ve scanned your heart, and this is everything you could possibly need rolled up in a cotton ball that will dab you softly at night. And we go, but yet we love those experiences. And then when we get to our jobs, we go, yeah, rush out this low quality shit and pretend it’s good enough and pretend we’ll fix it later.
Zack
Yeah.
Zack
So this is a really interesting thing too, because we started talking about this earlier in the conversation where we were saying, don’t force people to care about your craft when it’s not the thing that’s important to them. Right? And we’re basically now saying that with customers is don’t force customers to care about speed when it’s not.
Zack
They care about the quality and the.
Zack
Expectations they had of what your product or service is going to do for them.
Debbie
Nobody, if I can jump in, I think that what someone on the business side listening to you say that would say is, well, I don’t care if customers are thinking about speed. I’m trying to beat my competitors. And I say, yeah, if you had really good generative research up front, you wouldn’t be beating your competitors by a millimeter. You wouldn’t be looking at what they’ve done and made it slightly better. You would have really understood their unmet needs and these opportunities that exist that nobody has touched. And when you release this, even if it takes you a little bit longer, you will be far ahead from your competitors. They will need to play catch up to you. And so usually people tell me, well, we have to be fast. We have to do this before the competitor or whatever. And I go, that’s a made up.
Zack
You know, one of the things that I’ve used in that argument is when people say, but we need to launch it faster or we need to do it like Amazon. I usually say, well, maybe not in the case of Amazon because it’s pretty clear that they do research, as does Apple, right. But I usually say, if you’re simply trying to copy a competitor that you think is doing it well, you’re banking on the fact that they know your customers better than you do. Can you guarantee that?
Zack
And that right there opens the door.
Zack
To so many other opportunities to say, if you don’t, then guess what? We ought to do our own research. Also, if you don’t even know if they do research, they just might be making really good guesses. And maybe the person who’s making good guesses left for another job. Like, there’s so many other things. That’s why you just can’t sometimes these.
Debbie
Are experiments, and by the time you look at the competitor again, that’s had a remote kill switch hit or it got pulled out of the code, or we rolled back, and it’s amazing. I’ve been at companies that have done, like, quarterly competitive analyses to see what people are doing, and sometimes I go, hey, that thing we saw last quarter is gone. So I’m getting the feeling, while we thought it was interesting that didn’t work for that company, they’ve gone back to the drawing board, or they decided this didn’t work. And I’ve had lots of fights with people at some of the jobs that I’ve worked at long ago, enough that I’m comfortable naming names. I once had somebody, when I worked at Sony, I had somebody say, well, just copy Apple on this. And I said, let’s envision the TechCrunch or Verge headline Sony copies Apple out of ideas. Officially. I said, this is ridiculous. Do you think the media is not going to notice if we copy Apple on this? Do you think no one’s going to notice? And there were times at Macy’s where people would say, hey, just copy Ebay on this, or, Just copy Coles on this. And I would say, you do realize that we’re like Forbes 130 and we’re publicly traded, and journalists are constantly writing negative things about what a mess Macy’s is. You want to give them a reason.
Zack
Yeah, there’s a lot that goes into.
Zack
That, and I would actually like to even target that stream, because that’s useful for people to hear. But I realize we’re coming up towards the end of the time and as always, got to be responsible for you, because I could easily go for another hour on a few of sure. But one of the things that I like to do to close out each episode is I usually ask our guests if I got temporary amnesia, and somebody.
Zack
Came along and said, hey, Debbie, what was that podcast all about? How would you summarize it for folks?
Debbie
I would probably summarize it as a snaky path through researcher empowerment. That we really looked at a lot of different things that have been disempowering researchers, where we’ve disempowered ourselves, where we’ve picked the wrong battles, and some things that we can focus on to be more empowered and to try to represent ourselves better. Especially when we have coworkers who still don’t get what we do and think that UX is a single skill called UX, and anybody can do it, and we just have to remind them, anybody can do it, but most people don’t do it. Well, does this company want it done, or does this company want it done?
Zack
Well, love that, because that’s true of anything.
Zack
I love that. All right, before we jump off, I know people are probably going to wonder, hey, how can I find out more about your book or learn more about the work that you do, or maybe even ask you questions. How can folks get in touch with you? How do people find out about you? Learn more about what you do?
Zack
Yeah, sure.
Debbie
Thanks for asking and thanks so much for having me on our website, Work in Progress is Customercentricity.com. We also have a YouTube channel. We have a new one, it’s called Customer Experience, Customer Centricity, and we’re looking less at the craft of UX, which we really did on our Delta CX YouTube channel, and more at that full arc, the product strategy, the business strategy, all of the things that go into Customer Experience. So we’ve got a lot more varied stuff there. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I just usually don’t connect with a lot of people. If you want to connect, please send a message. Why? Otherwise, I usually don’t connect. Please don’t take it personally if I don’t connect. Let me see what else. We just started a patreon, which I think is going to be super fun. It starts at a dollar a month, so you can join it@patreon.com. Cxcc, which is for Customer Experience, Customer Centricity, and of course, for people who are book curious, customers Know You Suck is available in a zillion formats. You can go to Cxcc to Slash, Ckys, all lowercase, and you’ll find Amazon links for the paper version, the Kindle version, the Audible version, EPUB and PDF that I sell directly, signed copies that I sell directly. And now on the new YouTube channel, I’ve put up the full audiobook, completely free. So if you didn’t like Audible’s price for it, neither did I, and I had no control over it. So it’s now on our YouTube channel, completely free. If you can stand listening to me read this book for 16 and a half hours, please do.
Zack
That’s fantastic.
Zack
And the good news is, if you’re listening to this, you don’t have to remember all that stuff we’re going to.
Zack
Have in the blog post that accompanies.
Zack
The podcast where we host it. Of course, you can be listening to this elsewhere, but go ahead and head to our blog. We’ll have links to all that stuff where you can find Debbie and all of the goodies that were mentioned. So really appreciate you taking the time.
Zack
Love the chat and wishing you best of luck with everything else that you’re working on and the Work in Progress website. Debbie, thanks so much for coming on and chatting.
Debbie
Thank you, Zach. And thanks to everybody who’s listening. Hope to hear from you soon.
Zack
All right, everybody, we’ll see you next time.