Episode 106: Spotlighting UX Strategy with Jared Spool
Melissa Perri welcomes Jared Spool to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Jared and Melissa talk about how user experience as a discipline has grown over the years, the challenges that come with it, and how to improve UX for both product leaders and customers.
Jared is the co-founder, co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE, where he and his team “uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services.” Throughout his career, Jared has worked in the White House and has been instrumental in establishing digital organizations and shaping the future of UX. His extensive experience and expertise in the field have earned him a reputation as a thought leader in the UX community.
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Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Jared explore:
Jared talks about how he got started in his UX career.
The biggest issue product management currently faces with user experience, according to Jared, is that user experience is both seen and treated as a service. This kind of approach to user experience work does not produce good quality products or results. Product management and leadership has to make sure the products aren't only being built right, but that they're being built for the right purpose and solution.
The core basis of UX strategy is utilizing all the skills, resources, knowledge and experience available to help an organization achieve its goals. "[Strategy] involves having ways to measure, so it has some metrics capability. It involves understanding how to make sure we're solving the right problems, so it gets involved in the roadmap. You need to have a vision of where you're trying to get to. That vision has to be compelling so that everybody gets excited about that vision," Jared emphasizes.
What differentiates a product strategy from a UX strategy is product strategy is about the progression of the product and UX strategy is about the progression of the user experience.
Product leaders need to understand the importance of having a UX department in their company. UX brings long-term value to companies. Melissa talks about the most successful product organizations having their management teams partner with UX. Understanding your customer user experience will do wonders for improving the quality of your product output.
Jared explains that his school for UX designers teaches all the relevant UX concepts, as well as how to work with product managers and organizations.
Smaller teams allow for UX designers to be able to share their thoughts more openly and freely, and brainstorm more. The product leader must create an environment that allows designers to brainstorm solutions to challenges without feeling like they are walking on eggshells.
Melissa and Jared talk about the challenges that come with company mergers that do not take into account user experience. Companies spend millions of dollars on mergers but have no idea how the product will look at the end of that merger or what the user experience will be.
The more you can improve your user's experience, the more valuable they will see you and the more they will want to do business with you.
Resources
Jared Spool | LinkedIn
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello and welcome to the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we have a great episode for you all about UX strategy, and I'm joined here by Jared Spool. Welcome, Jared.
Jared:
Oh my God, it's Melissa Perri. I can't believe I'm in the same room with Melissa Perri. Hey, Marge. I'm in the same room with Melissa Perri, <laugh>. I act, there's actually no one here named Marge.
Melissa:
<laugh>. I was gonna say, Who's Marge?
Jared:
I dunno. <laugh>.
Melissa:
I was like, where's Dana? <laugh>?
Jared::
Dana's in the other room. She's nice. So she's talking to the, you know, the bi, the big important people.
Melissa:
Yes. Doing all the important White House things. And we'll have her on the podcast eventually too.
Jared:
Isn't Yeah, I heard, I heard. It's, it's working its way through comm's approval.
Melissa:
Yep. <laugh>. And you would know that too. So you, you've had a very illustrious UX career. You've been doing this for a very long time. Um, you've worked in the White House doing digital, you know, making a digital organization, starting that stuff, getting involved in ux. Right. Um, what kind of, what led you to get into ux? How'd you get started?
Jared:
<laugh>? It was an accident. Um, I, I was a software engineer. I, I built software and I, my, the systems I ended up building were, um, uh, the first word processors and email clients and voicemail. I was, I worked on one of the first voicemail systems and, and, and these, these really sort of things that, that we all just take for granted today. But, but, you know, I focused on designing more efficient word wrap algorithms. And, uh, we were building things that, uh, were unusual at the time, which was software for people who were not computer engineers right up until the, the personal computer industry, which I, you know, I worked on the very first personal computers. The, the, up until that was a thing. Only computer engineers used computers. And, um, we took training and, and there were massive manuals. I mean, one of the systems that I worked on, um, uh, uh, you would, when you would get a new computer, you would get two large pallets, you know, like the pallets they have of toilet paper at Costco and forklift pallets.
One of them would have your computer on it, and the other would have your manuals. And the manuals were so expensive that people would lock them in a closet or chain them to a desk so that they wouldn't walk away, because replacing the manuals were very expensive. And it was the only way you could use the system was, was to use the manual. So, um, uh, so here we were building things that were going to go on everybody's desk, and no one was going to use a manual, and no one knew how to build something that didn't have a manual or didn't have weeks of training. The first word processors, if you wanted to learn how to use them, you had to go to Lowell, Massachusetts, which is not a place anybody goes to unless they're forced. And, uh, uh, go to the towers of the Wang Corporation.
I couldn't make that up, that, that's the actual name. And, um, uh, uh, and up on the, the, the 14th floor of the Wang Corporation was a training facility. And you would, you would spend a week learning how to use your word processor. And in the first week, they taught you how to load a file, save a file, um, uh, print a aile and change the ribbon on the printer. And that was, that was week one. Week two was the advanced course where you got to learn italics and bold, italics was hard because you had to actually change the daisy wheel on the printer, uh, to, to get it to do italics. It needed to get a different font. You had to change the wheel on the printer to print a different font. So, and, and italics were considered a separate font. And so, uh, so we were trying to figure out, well, how do we, how do we get it so that you don't have to take two weeks of doing this? And so we figured out the first UIs and the first UX stuff, and, and I got involved in doing the world's first usability testing on software and, uh, things that we all take for granted today. We were doing for the very first time back in, you know, 19 79, 19 80, when I was working on this stuff. And, and I, I just, I just found UX to be really interesting. And so I just kept doing more of it. A whole industry grew up around me.
Melissa:
It's so interesting. And I feel like when, when we think about, you know, how our practices and software have changed, how we do product management, how we do ux, how all of these things have emerged over time. If you look back on it, even, you know, 10 years ago, usability testing, like people didn't do it. <laugh>, right? Right. It's, and
Jared:
Well, surprisingly enough, a whole bunch of people still don't do it, but
Melissa:
People still don't do it. Right. But I'm curious, over time, as you've seen all these things maturing and UX growing up as a discipline as well, uh, what do you think are the biggest issues that we currently face, uh, with user experience?
Jared:
Well, I think the biggest issues is that user experience is, is, is seen as a service and it's treated like a service. It's treated like dry cleaning, right? You know, you, you, you realize you're going to the wedding. You realize that you, your suit's been sitting in the closet that you never did take care of that stain. So what do you do? You drive your, your, your, your, your suit over to a dry cleaner, and you drop it off and they tell you, okay, it'll be ready in three days. And you come back and you pick it up and hopefully the stain is gone. And hopefully they did a good job. And you never ask the question, what do they do? And you never really think about what they do. It's just what they do. And it comes in this pretty nice package, and it, and it, you know, it's all crisp and clean and, and wonderful and, and, but it's all a mystery, right?
We don't actually think about it. And, uh, and you don't think about the dry cleaner at any other time, except when you are realize you need to wear your thing to the place. And so the, um, uh, the dry cleaning is, is just this, this thing we treat as a service. And I think UX has evolved into this thing. We treat as a service, right? We need wire frames, we need figma files. Let's make sure the developers keep coding. We, we, you know, uh, uh, can we run some usability tests to make sure that this thing is gonna ship well? And we're not gonna be surprised when it comes out, right? And, and, and you don't think about what they do. I don't really wanna know what they do. I I, I just wanna drop the stuff off and have it cleaned and pick it up.
And, uh, and, and this is the least interesting way to use user experience work. It is, um, uh, and it's, and it's not, um, it doesn't produce good quality products. It doesn't produce good quality, uh, results. You know, chances are that wasn't the right suit to wear to the wedding. But the dry cleaner won't tell you that, cuz you didn't ask the dry cleaner. The dry cleaner doesn't have the resources to tell you that they, they just clean the suits. They, they, they take the suits, they clean them no matter how, how mismatched they are to the purpose that the suit is going to be used for. And, um, so, uh, uh, you know, if you really want someone to make you the star of the event, the dry cleaner is not the person who's gonna do it, but someone out there is the right person to do it. And, and this is where sort of strategic UX comes in, is that, is that we're, we're, we want to think in terms of are we, you know, not just making sure the product is built right, but is it the right solution for the problem? And in fact, are we even solving the right problem? And that's, that's the work that, that most interests me right now. And, and that's, that's where, um, I think we have huge opportunities.
Melissa:
So when you think about, um, a UX strategy, what are the core pieces you need to put together and what types of questions does it answer?
Jared:
Um, so there, there's, there's a bunch of things that, um, uh, need to happen, right? There's, there's, uh, uh, you know, all a strategy is, whether it's a UX strategy or a product strategy, or a sales strategy or a marketing strategy, is it is a high level plan to accomplish a goal. You know, the folks over in sales, they're trying to accomplish the organization's goals by selling stuff. They, they use all of the skills, knowledge, experience techniques, uh, people, resources that they have to help the organization achieve its goals by generating revenue through sales. Um, but they might have multiple strategies at any given time, right? They may be trying to roll out a new line of products that they wanna sell to their existing customer base, or maybe they're trying to reach new customers that they've never sold to before. Or maybe we're moving into the Latin America market.
And that's gonna require a completely different strategy than what we used in North America, because they're fundamentally different places. And we're established in North America, and we're not established in Latin America. And so there's, there's, um, that's the, the high level plan is, you know, what are we doing? And then we translate that into the tactics of what happens on the ground. How does a salesperson get a lead? How do they process that lead? How do they connect with them? How do they move a proposal further? All of those types of things. So when we talk about a UX strategy, what we're talking about is how do we use all the knowledge, experience, resources, capabilities, techniques, skills, people, of everything we know about UX to help the organization achieve its goals, which basically translates into how do we build the best products and services that are gonna help the organization do the things the organization is there to do.
If the organization is there to sell products and services, then how do we make sure we're selling the best products and services If the organization is to deliver a service that is, you know, say fundamentally a human service, like, you know, uh, uh, a nationwide network of plumbers. How do we use the technology and the UX work to, to make it easy to schedule a plumber, make it easy to know when the plumber's showing up, make it easy for the plumber to collect your payment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we're always thinking in terms of, of what is the experience that we're delivering and how do we make that the leading market experience of all the things. And, you know, I worked in government, so how do we make government serve the people it's supposed to serve, um, in a way that's humane and, uh, has, you know, less burden, uh, uh, uh, as poss as least burden as possible on, on the people involved.
And so, you know, th this is, this is, these are the goals. So we, we create a UX outcome which basically says, look, if we do a really good job on this, how are we gonna improve people's lives? And then we work on what it takes to improve their life. And that's, that's really what a strategy is. And it involves having ways to measure. So it has some sort of metrics capability. It involves understanding how to make sure we're solving the right problems. So it gets involved in the roadmap. It needs to understand, uh, you need to have a vision to where you're trying to get to, uh, uh, that vision has to be compelling so that everybody gets excited about that vision. Uh, it needs to, uh, make sure you're building the right team. Uh, it needs to make sure that, that that team has leadership skills in it, because you're gonna have to lead people through this process, cuz it doesn't happen naturally. Um, and, uh, uh, you know, you're gonna have to hire the right people. You're gonna have to train everybody on the right things. So the strategy is multifaceted and it's all about how do we do all the things to make this happen? Just like, you know, what are all the things we have to do to roll out a new product line? Or what are all the things we have to do to, to, to sell in Latin America?
Melissa:
How do you think a UX strategy and a product strategy are different? Or are they same thing, or are they combined in some way?
Jared:
I, I think that, that, well, first let's to do that, we have to sort of talk about how is UX and product different? And I think, I think the, the, the daylight between product and UX is getting smaller all the time. That if you have a Venn diagram of all the things that product people do and all the things that UX people do, there's more and more overlap every day. Uh, particularly UX leaders and product leaders mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, I, I think in the detailed tactical work, there's nice distinctions, but, but I think it's really, you know, it, there are sort of, there are, there are, this is a little deviation from what you asked, but there are, um, in my mind there are two types of teams. So if we're, if we're gonna get into sports ball here, you, you can, you can sort of have like a baseball team or you can have a basketball team, right?
A baseball team. There are positions on the field and, and the third baseman has a job, and the pitcher has a job, and the catcher has a job, and the right fielder has a job, and they all have very different jobs, and they all pretty much stay in their lane and they do their thing. I mean, occasionally there are plays that involve the pitcher getting outta the way and the third baseman coming over to the mound. And the first base, you know, there are things you do, but the third baseman's always a third baseman. But, but it, but from what I understand about basketball, and I can tell you that I don't really understand basketball that much. Uh, um, the, uh, uh, there are positions, but the, the, the roles of those positions sort of dissipate the minute the ball's in play, because it's really about who has the ball, who needs to get the ball, where's the ball need to go next?
How do you keep it from the people you need to keep it from, how do you get it to the place it's supposed to go? And everybody's sort of versed. And it's more of how do we dynamically change on the court than it is how do we play through the, the position football, which is a whole different game. American football is, you know, you, you've got all these different chessboard pieces moving at the same time with all these different people. It's a management problem, right? And so the, um, so there's this sort of spectrum from well-defined roles to, uh, overlapping set of skills that we just negotiate in real time. Who's gonna do what, depending on what the situation is. And I think product is more like basketball than like baseball or football And so to talk about, well, what is a UX strategy versus a, a product strategy?
It really depends where you're drawing that line. And one way you could say it is what are all the skills, talents, resources that product, the product team is gonna bring to help the organization achieve its goals versus what are all the things that the UX team is gonna bring to help the organization achieve its goals? And some organizations, they're gonna overlap a lot. One big difference I see is that product strategy often thinks in terms of, of what is the evolution of the product over time. So we're gonna release something now in the next few weeks or months, what's that gonna be? And then how does the thing we do afterwards make it better? How does the thing we do after that make it better and for whom? And so it's really about thinking about that progression of the product, whereas UX strategy is more about the experience. So it's, so if we're releasing all these products, how does the experience of the user get better? And there are ways to ship a product that makes the experience worse, and how do we make sure that we don't make the experience worse?
Melissa:
I like that explanation. And I agree. I, I feel like I get a lot of questions from people who are, you know, UX people being like, products encroaching on my space or product people being like, UX is encroaching on my space and I keep yelling at people just to work together, because at the end of the day, it's, you know, you should just be partners on it and, and it should be skills based, like you said, like, how do we just make up a whole of the things that we need to accomplish?
Jared:
Yeah. Somebody the other day was like, how, how do I stop the product person from drawing designs and and, and handing them over? And I'm like, why do you wanna stop that? Encourage it. Yeah. You know, teach 'em how to do it well, yeah. Because if you can get them to, to draw designs, then, then you don't have to do all of them. Well, how do I make sure they're all good? Like, well teach them to do them well.
Melissa:
And this is also a gap I've seen with a lot of people in companies with transformations, right? Like, I got my start being a hybrid product manager, UX designer. There was no product that I did without the UX part, and I didn't even know there were two different disciplines until my boss came in and was like, Hey, by the way, we hired a UX designer so you don't have to do that anymore. And I was like, what? I thought this was my job. <laugh> <laugh>. I was like, but I've been doing that piece, but I didn't do it well, and I learned a lot from this person who came in, which was good. Um, and I loved it and I, I liked that it made me a better product manager. But I see, um, I, I tell a lot of product managers, like, you really need to deeply understand ux If UX is like your bread and butter of what makes your product valuable.
Like sure, you could have a crazy like backend database system where people don't actually interact with any interfaces and it's an AI or something like that. And maybe UX isn't as invaluable there if you don't have any interactions with, um, humans using it. But if you are in a B2B product or a, um, B2C product, like you need to really understand ux. And many times that's the part that's critically missing. I've done a lot of due diligence on products and it's almost always comes down to their UX just being trash <laugh>. And it's because they have a lot of really good business people in there playing the product roles, but they don't bring the UX pieces to it and they don't, they see it as an afterthought, like you said, like a service instead of
Jared:
Yeah. Critical
Melissa:
Dry cleaning. The way they win,
Jared:
It's the dry cleaning. It's like, oh, what? Let's get the UX people in here to make it pretty, you know? Yeah. I'm gonna go live with my parents for two days and let them make it pretty and then I'll come back Yeah. And move the furniture back to where it was supposed to be.
Melissa:
Exactly. And they, they don't see it in there. So when I, when I interview people, senior leaders, especially when we're talking about this UX strategy part, um, a lot of times I'm looking for them to at least acknowledge it, talk about it, like make sure that's incorporated into the product strategies that they're looking at. And I think that's so important. But I like how you distinguish them too, where, you know, in product strategy, a lot of times we have those ev evolution of the products coming out. Like, how do we, we do this feature set, then we build this feature set and this is how it unlocks monetization as we go, or something like that. Um, but the most successful teams I've seen partner with UX and product at the leadership levels or higher up in the organization, they do have that director of UX or the VP of UX considering the whole end state experience of how do we bring this all together and how do we make it really valuable for the user? Whereas the VP of product or the director of product, they're like, breaking down, how do we actually make this actionable over time? But I've seen the UX people be more of the longer term strategic thinkers about how do we bring that value in there, which is great.
Jared:
I think it has to do with who has the skills, right? I see it happening on both sides of the fence. And it, and it really, I mean, in a lot of organizations that I've worked with, product has evolved as basically being, um, well in some ways Chinese soup. Um, uh, someone once explained to me, and I'm probably gonna get this horrifically wrong, but, but I'll try to get it right, but someone once explained to me that, that, um, uh, in a lot of Chinese Asian culture, the soup in a meal is served last. And the theory is it's there to fill in all the gaps and, uh, you know, you've got gaps in, in all the other foods. So you, you use the soup to fill it all in, which makes perfect sense to me at some level. And I have often seen product management use that way.
We hire a product manager because we have this team and they have some overlapping skills, but they have a lot of skills that don't overlap. And when they don't overlap, there are gaps. And those gaps need to be done by somebody. There's someone who needs to do them. And so we bring a product manager in and we ask the product manager to do that. And what happens is, is you go from one organization to another and the product managers don't do the same thing because there are different gaps in different places. In fact, you go from one team in an organization to another team, and the product managers don't do the same thing. And this, I have noticed, creates somewhat of an identity crisis amongst product managers. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because they're like, no, no, tell me, tell me what my job is.
And I'm like, I don't know. It's whatever the team is not doing, right? You're, you're the one, someone has to fill in those gaps because you can't just let them go. So if, if the team is not good with talking to customers, we're gonna let the product manager talk to the customers. If the team is not good at talking to the executives, we'll let the product manager talk to the executives. If the team is not good at figuring out what the schedule will be, we'll let the product manager figure out what the schedule will be. But, you know, it's just, that's, that's what they do. So, because every product manager is different, it's hard to talk about product management in terms of a concrete set of responsibilities or skills or, or, you know, you own this or that, you know, it's, it's on the basketball court, who owns the ball? Well, it depends who has the ball at the moment, <laugh>, and they're gonna pass it and they no longer have ownership of it, but they are responsible just like everybody else for making sure it gets to where it's going to go. And that's the, the, um, uh, the, the, the way I, I see this.
Melissa:
Yeah. And I find too that the catchall with product management is different from organization to organization. Cuz a lot of people do change it differently. I don't think every organization does product management well either. So they kind of, no, and I, I think that's what you're kind of getting at there too. Um, right. Cuz it's broken in many places and then you move from one team to an next or another organization. But you know
Jared:
What, so is UX and so is dev. Yeah. So, so, you know, they're all broken so often and I think the disservice we've done our industry is this idea that that that there's one formula for fixing all these
Melissa:
Things. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. And, and I think it, it's all about context too, and how do you wanna run your organization? Because I've seen great organizations, um, let's say have just the UX designers talking to the customers and user researchers who bring distilled great information back to the product managers. And that doesn't mean the product manager never talks to a customer, it's just that their primary responsibility lays more inside the organization and they're digesting that information to other people who are doing the interviews. Um, and then in other places, I see the, the product managers leading that because they don't have enough user researchers, right? It's a different scope, it's a different type of organization. Um, but it's so hard, I think, to do a catch all for all those different things. And usually what I advise is I just say, you need to treat yourself like partners.
Like your whole team needs to be a partnership and you need to have a discussion about who's gonna lead and who's not gonna lead these different activities based on who's good at it. And if you've got a designer that maybe didn't, you know, is new and didn't come from a traditional UX background, and maybe they skew a little more towards graphics, you've gotta take the lead when it comes to some of the user research stuff and help to introduce them to those concepts and get them into it. But if you've got a strong user researcher there, then you should lean on them and let them go out and do the user research and help guide what types of questions we wanna answer. But we get so picky over, you know, who does what. And I find that similarly with what we're talking about earlier too, like the UX strategy pieces and the product strategy, like who, who comes up with it? Does a, do the UX people come up with the whole vision of everything and mock it up or do the, the product people get into that? So I'm curious with like all these different delineations that we have across here, you, you started a school for UX designers. How are you teaching them with all these different cases out there? Uh, how to work with the product managers or how to work with the organizations? Like what's, what's your path for getting to this catchall piece?
Jared:
So, there's a bunch of different pieces. So,one is, is that I'm not a big fan of roles. I lean more in the, in the direction of, of skills and responsibilities, right? So there's a bunch of skills. There's user research skills, there's design skills, there's development skills, there's product management skills, right? All these skills are really valuable. And the reality is, is the more people who have these skills on the team, the more likely stuff gets done well because at some point someone's gonna be busy doing something over here, and you need someone over there to be able to handle the skills, right? You go into a, I've had the opportunity to go and observe, uh, uh, the operation of Michelin star kitchens and, you know, just sit in the corner and watch the kitchen work. And you go in and, and what you'll notice is that everybody's got a station and they're at their stations.
You've got, you've got a couple people work in the grill station, you've got someone doing some prep stuff, you've got, uh, a dessert person working on desserts. You've got a sous chef who might be also doing salads and soups. You've got, uh, uh, you've got an expediter sitting at the counter cleaning up the dishes and making sure the waiters get the orders and that everything's being fired at the right time and, and all this stuff, right? So you've got all these things happening and it looks like everybody has a job and they're focused on their job and they know their job really well because they're, they're working in a Michelin star kitchen and they're, and they're, they're doing all this stuff, right? You come back on another night, and the first thing that I noticed on the second night was that it wasn't all the same people and the people who were there the previous night are actually in different places.
They're now working different things. The person who was working the grill is now doing desserts. And the thing is, is that they're cross skilled. They have to be cross skilled, right? When the dessert guy has to go to a family funeral, you can't tell the customers, we don't have dessert tonight. Our dessert guy's at a funeral, you gotta have desserts. So, so, you know, everybody's gotta be able to make desserts and everybody has to make them as if the dessert guy who invented the dessert was the guy making them. And the, the, um, uh, and, and that's the, that's the thing, right? Is that, is that if everybody has the skills, then whoever's available can do a decent job. Now some people are gonna be better at it. So when they're available, we want to prefer them to do the thing. But if anyone can do a decent job and a decent job is a job that no one will notice that it wasn't as good as any other time we did it.
That's the goal to try to get to. Now, if you can get to that, right? So, you know, you asked me what do we teach at the school? So first we teach what the different skills are so that they can recognize them, so that they can figure out, well, what does a product manager do? Well, let me tell you what product manager skills are. And, uh, uh, so that, so that, you know that when you need someone who can do that thing, you turn to the product manager and not say the head of engineering to do that thing, right? So what are the product skills? What are the development skills? And then we teach the methodologies. We teach how agile works and we teach how safe works or doesn't work, I guess, or we teach how, uh, um, uh, all these things work. We teach how metrics work and measurement, we teach all these things so that, so that they recognize them.
And then the other thing that we do is we practice, they actually work on projects. They work on projects with product managers. They work on projects with product managers who, the first time they worked with a project manager, they, the product product manager did these things, but now they're working with a different product manager and they do different things and they just see that, you know, what you have to do? You have to figure out the situation when you're in it. You know, you're on the basketball court, people are moving around, you have to find the opening and pass the ball.
Melissa:
That's a really great way of looking at it. And I love your Michelin star analogy. I did a whole talk at UX London in like 2015 on what we could learn from Michelin star restaurants. They never published it, never videotaped it, and nobody's ever asked me to do it again. <laugh>. But I've always wanted to. It's my favorite talk I've ever given.
Jared:
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's fascinating to, to, to, to watch these places where people are working on really high. Now here's the thing, right there, there are very few teams that burn people out faster than the kitchen staff at a Michelin star restaurant.
Melissa:
Very true.
Jared:
<laugh>. Um, so, so I'm not sure it's always the thing to emulate. Yeah. But, but they've got a whole bunch of things, right? And one of the things is, is that they're, they're often surprisingly small teams for the volume of seatings that they do. And, uh, um, and the, the, um, the small teams just learn to work together incredibly effectively, uh, in really harsh conditions. I mean, you burn yourself every night. You're on your feet for 10, 12 hours, uh, uh, you get home, you're exhausted, and then you have to come back to work, you know, in six hours. It's, it's just grueling.
Melissa:
Yeah. And there's something to that, like just trusting your team to pick up certain things. Another thing that come, this made me think of it too, another thing I get a lot is I have to overexplain to my developers all the time what to do. I have to, they ask for like really fine tuned detail of what to build all these things. And I turn around and I ask the product managers or the ux designers, I say, well, are you allowing them to even brainstorm what the solution could be? Um, when I worked with developers on a team, sometimes the UX I built was not the best, and they would go, Hey, I put this into code and it kind of sucked. So I kind of, I wanted to change it to this and it worked. And you were like, cool, that's amazing. Instead of, you know, stepping on people's toes and being like, well, that's my job. You're not allowed to do that. Like, you're not allowed to design, as you were saying about the UX people before. Right? So I feel like the smaller teams too, like they have with the higher trust and with allowing people to flex different skills, you don't need to be like overly prescriptive about everything. You start to learn about different things. You start to work together, you start to be more collaborative about it. And it's not all about documentation and just passing it off.
Jared:
No, you're absolutely right. And, it's the case that we, one of the things that you, you know, you asked me what are the sort of big problems, challenges that we have? I think we completely over-index on design and under index on research. I think a lot of the work that the team does today is because we haven't done enough research and we're spending way too much time on researching, on building stuff be and guessing what we should be building instead of answering and, uh, researching and, and, and really understanding from knowing the users. It's, I, I've been spending a lot of time telling the teams that I'm working with, that it's their job to become the foremost expert on who their users are and what their users need. Right? I mean, everybody on the team should know better than anyone else in the world. You know, if you are a company that makes gene sequencing hardware for medical laboratories and scientific laboratories, you should know more about what the technicians and the scientists in those laboratories need from a gene sequencer than anyone on the planet. And if you are somehow not making the effort to do that, of course you're gonna build the wrong thing.
Melissa:
Yeah. There's also, I I, what you're saying really resonates me with me too, but also at the higher levels, and this is where I get into arguments, I wanna see what you're thinking about from a strategy perspective. But this is where I feel like a lot of leaders are falling short because they're not doing the research, they're not digging into the stuff they need to put together UX strategy or product strategy. Because a lot of people just pull out a thin air, what they want their objectives to be, write 'em down and be like, we're gonna, you know, the examples you were giving, uh, before were perfect examples. Like, we're gonna go upmarket, or we're gonna expand into these different problems that we wanna solve, or we're gonna go after these different personas. What research do you have to show that those problems that those people have are things that we can solve? Or how do we solve 'em? Or how do we put that together? Have you seen that a lot on the UX side when people are trying to build like longer strategies?
Jared:
Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that we work on when we're talking about UX strategy, when we focus on that with people, is how to get into those decisions. Let's take the ultimate non ux, UX problem. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, right? A merger. Two companies are going to merge. Now they've decided to merge. Someone has decided that they should merge because by there, there's a synergy. Because that's one of those $10 words that, that you use when you're doing mergers. There's a synergy between our products and their products, and we're gonna get their customers to buy our products and our customers to buy their products. And they're gonna, these products are gonna work together. They're gonna be, they're gonna be a, an Uber product that will, but not made by Uber, that, that, um, is going to, uh, change the world. And everybody's thinking about this. And no one on the diligence team has actually thought about, well, what will that, what will getting to that user experience actually be like, there are no product people on the diligence team exploring this merger.
There are no, there are only finance people on the diligence team, right? And, and there's no UX people on the diligence team. No one is asking the question, well, what is their platform built on? And how will we actually merge data? And how will we get these things to talk together? And what will the UI of this combined product that will be awesome actually be like, what will the experiences that customers will have, if customers use our product today and they're gonna use their product, how do we get the data to move between them? Right? No one is asking those questions or how long it's gonna take to do that integration. And then five years after the merger, people are like, yeah, we're just now getting the two, two different code bases to talk to each other. And it's like, why was this a surprise?
And the, the the, so there is no bigger UX decision then to merge with another company. It affects every user. I mean, just look at the recent decision of Adobe to spend, what, 20 billion on Figma when they had a competing product that they're now apparently shelving, right? So what is the experience of a Figma user who chose Figma because they didn't want to use Adobe, who now is being forced into the Adobe universe that they were trying to desperately run away from? What, and why were they trying to run away from that? And why isn't Adobe? You can't tell me that with 20 billion Adobe did not have the intelligence or smarts or resources to build something that actually was better than Figma. And so, so I mean, this just makes this deal makes no sense. And it was executed so quickly and nobody knows what the answer is. And, and, and this is the type of thing that happens all the time, and the customers just see the deal coming down the pike and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm getting out of the business. This is just gonna be the most, all the why is that the reaction? Well, it's because no one thought about how to tell the story of what a better experience will be when Figma and Adobe are run by the same people.
Melissa:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's spot on with that.
Jared:
We're gonna spend 20 billion and figure it out later. So that's like, yeah, I, I cannot get my head around this.
Melissa:
I have been part of so many mergers where we have to figure out which user experience do we go with, and sometimes both of them suck. So you have to, you have to fix them both. And then, you know, one, one company's built on a different code base than the other company, and their UX wouldn't plug into that ux and we'd have to re-platform everything. And it's, it's so cumbersome for all those things, but you're right. Like nobody usually comes in and starts to worry about that, right? Because we, we worry about financially engineering all these things instead of like, how do we actually solve these problems?
Jared:
<laugh>. Yeah. So here we go. So a company spends billions of dollars on a merger, most expensive thing the company will ever do, and they haven't thought it through. And so why not, right? So when we talk about UX strategy, my ultimate goal is to get UX people into the merger decisions.
Melissa:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I like that.
Jared:
To, to actually have UX and product people possibly even drive. I mean, why are they not driving it? Why is it not the case that user research, UX research has identified that there's a need of our customers to have this thing that it turns out there's a company out there that we've already researched the user experience of, and we think that they, that their experience dovetails nicely with ours because guess what? Customers are already using them together. We could, we could do that. We reached out to their teams, found out what they were built on, found out that, that we could get the code to talk to each other thinking we can do this under a year because we have a project plan. Now we should start talking about price and schedule and what this deal looks like.
Melissa:
Yep. For sure. And so one of the things too I'm thinking about in this, in this hierarchy that we're talking about, right? Like, we've got these financial models and these strategies of what we wanna do. We're just talking about upmarket or merge with Figma so we can get their people over here. We get all these business reasons, and usually it's only the business reasons leading this. And then we worry about the UX and product leader. Um, now we've got underneath it, how does the product or platform emerge? Then we've got a bunch of the tactics the teams are actually doing, the initiatives are going after. What is that UX strategy piece that goes across that top layer, right? Like, what's, what's that? What's that artifact or what's that thing that's missing there? That's kind of, I, I see so many gaps where people talk about, I want to go up market.
And the outcome is we build, you know, we, we make 20 million more a year from going up market or something, you know, $200 million more a year. Um, and then that means that if we wanna go upmarket, we have to do better security, and we need better reporting for the executives, blah, blah, blah, um, then the teams are like, okay, cool. I'm gonna do security, I'm gonna do this. But nobody's really talking about like, what's that product look like at the end of the day, right? What's that full experience? And that seems to be missing a lot. So
Jared:
What, well, it's, it, there's a simple way to reduce it, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So we have this idea of what we call a UX outcome. And the UX outcome is really an answer to a question. And the question is, if we do a good job on this thing, in this case, you know, if we do a good job on this merger or if we do a good job on going upmarket, how do we improve people's lives? Mm. Right? An outcome is different than an output. An output is something we deliver into the world. We're gonna, we're gonna deliver a product into Latin America, great. But the outcome is, if our product's available in Latin America, whose life gets improved and how, and you know, you wanna sort of move past, well, the shareholders get better value from our company, that's fine, that's great. Love it. But, but, but who else benefits from this?
Right? And, and, and so if we're doing that, what we wanna understand is, is what that improvement is, and to figure out what that improvement is, um, uh, we need to actually understand what the current experience is. Like what is it like in Latin America when people don't have AC access to our product, right? What is the issue there? What are they doing to, because chances are they're doing something, our product doesn't just, you know, appear and everybody's like, oh, okay, now I can do that. Right? It's like, you know, if, if there's a, um, a uh, uh, you know, if we're selling an accounting package, right? People are doing accounting without our package. So what does, what does our package do to improve people's lives in South America? That the other things that are out there are not doing, even if they're doing accounting on Abacus in, in their basement, right?
What, what is the advantage that we bring? And we have to understand that, and we have to understand it at a deep level. And we have to understand that maybe the way it happens in Latin America is not the same way it's gonna happen in North America. Cuz for instance, they don't speak English. So, uh, uh, uh, how are we going to handle the fact that in Latin America, they mostly speak Spanish, but they often speak a dialect of Spanish, and sometimes that changes, and in some cases they speak Portuguese, which isn't like Spanish at all. So now we have to deal with that idea and, and the, the, uh, and how does that ipl, how does that roll out through everything and what is that really gonna be? So everything sort of starts with that UX outcome. We're gonna improve people's lives this way.
And the outcome is, is in my mind, hey, you know, I, I've got a lens I look through, but the outcome in my mind is more important than the business outcome. That if we do the the UX outcome better, we will, the business will come, right? And the example I often use is retention, right? I got a subscription service. People are, are canceling their subscriptions. They're, they're, they're, they're not renewing. I want to increase retention. Well, there's all sorts of ways that I can increase retention and make the user experience worse, right? For instance, I can remove the cancel button and now you can't cancel, so you have to keep paying, right? It's been tried, it's a proven technique. We, we've seen it many times, I can make it. So they have to call a call center and listen to a sale, uh, a call center rep, pitch them other packages so that they don't quit for an hour until they finally say, no, I just really want to quit.
Please let me out of my contract. Right? I can do all sorts of things that make a worse experience and increase retention, but how do I make an experience that is a better experience than what they have today and increases retention. That's what we need to focus on. And chances are, if I do a really good job, I can make that happen, but I have to focus on the user's experience. And the real reason that people are quitting might be, you know, I watched all the shows on your little streaming video thing, I'm done. There's nothing new. So it's like, okay, I guess the way to get retention is to keep delivering new content. It seems like an amazing thing, but it's a much better solution than removing the cancel button.
Melissa:
Yeah. <laugh>, I've, I've seen that a lot, um, where people are like, oh, we'll just make it really hard for them to do that. I also hate when people remove the cancel a button, but it, it makes a lot of sense, right? Like, you take care of your customers, you give your customers what they want, they will keep coming back and they will. Exactly.
Jared:
I mean, it's sort of business 1 0 1, but we, we, we, we push that aside really quickly when we just focus on our business metrics. When we just focus on our objectives, we want to go upmarket. Okay? If we go upmarket really well, how do we actually improve someone's experience? What is missing in their life today? Because we haven't gone up market. How does our going up market really change their world? And the more we can improve their life, the more valuable they'll see us, the more they wanna do the what we wanna do. You look at the most successful businesses in the world, the Apples, the Disneys, the Netflixes, and what you see very quickly is that they got there by offering a better experience, right? What is the business difference between a Disney and a Six Flags theme park? It's the experience. What is the difference between an Apple computer and a Dell computer? It's the experience. What's the difference between an Apple phone and an Samsung phone? It's the experience, right? It's purely the experience. That's what does it. And, and people will pay way more money for a better experience. So why are we not learning everything is to learn about producing a better experience.
Melissa:
That's very wise words. Well, we are at the end of our time, but I think you've given a lot of people things to think about when creating a UX strategy. Any parting thoughts for our product managers and UX designers thinking out there about all this?
Jared:
Well, they should buy the build trap.
Melissa:
<laugh>, thank you for the plug
Jared:
<laugh>. What? There was another message I I didn't realize. <laugh>, um, <laugh> you, I I thought that's what you told me I was supposed to say
Melissa:
<laugh>. I was not planting these things.
Well, if you guys would like to learn more from Jared, uh, Jared runs a, a school that he's, uh, going to, oh, reopen, hopefully shortly called Center Center. And he's training the next UX generation out there, which is great. And I love the mission. I've, I've spoken at Center Center before, which is great. And you have UIE Can you tell us a little bit about, um, you know, where the Yeah,
What's on there?
Jared:
Yeah, so we, we, uh, if you go to UIE.com, UIE and Center Center are the same company. We just have two websites and we're still, you know, we have technical debt. The, the, uh, uh, but the, the thing is, is if you go to UIE.com, what you'll find is we are doing a lot of work in the area of u UX strategy. So if you wanna learn about, we have a free community called Leaders of Awesomeness, which you can join. Uh, it's got 43,000 UX leaders who knew that there were that many I didn't. Um, but they keep showing up. Uh, we have, uh, programs for leadership on building out their UX leader UX strategy so that they're thinking about the experiences they deliver at the executive level and, and working with UX leaders to do that. We have programs for folks who are, uh, still trying to get their organization to think about ux.
We, uh, we have a program called How to Win Stakeholders and Influence Decisions. That's all About, that's all for UX leaders to, to really drive the user experience to the next level. And, um, uh, those things, uh, uh, start every month there's a new cohort, so you can be part of that and you can find out all the information@uie.com. And, uh, yeah, and I'm on LinkedIn as, as Jared Spool and on Twitter for now as JMSpool. I'm, I still haven't gotten onto Mastedon. I'm still waiting for people on Mastedon to stop talking only about Mastedon, <laugh> and uh, um, cuz that seems to be what they talk about.
Melissa:
That's true. Well, thank you so much Jared, for being with us, and thank you all for listening to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Next week we'll be back with another Dear Melissa answering all of your questions. So go to dear melissa.com and let me know what you have questions about. We'll see you next time.