PRODUCT BREAKFAST CLUB PODCAST #3: USER RESEARCH & THE DESIGN SPRINT - Aj&Smart

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello and welcome to the product records club podcast by AGM smart where each episode will be near a fresh and insightful chat between designer and co-founder of AG and smart join us and Courtney and check nap the New York Times bestselling author of design process blueprint remember to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts if you're watching on YouTube don't forget to hit the subscribe button Jake has said it to the John gets a little electric shock each time you do if you're enjoying the podcast please take a moment to like share or comment we love hearing your feedback [Music] all right so welcome to episode three of the product breakfast podcast no wait it's actually the product Breakfast Club podcast it's in we got it that name is gonna totally stick it's gonna stately and welcome to episode three of the product breakthrough of Bochy on is can you put the name of this show in the comment we're here and we're still in San Francisco we're still here at Jake's house he hasn't let us out and yes get pretty creepy it's except to go and fetch him croissants fetch is the operative word you're welcome so for anyone who hasn't heard this podcast before you're lucky yeah you're are very lucky this podcast is you know what I'm gonna say that all in the pre-recorded intro that I'm gonna make so let's just do a quick introduction round starting with Michael L Michael here from a James mod product designer and man who brings good stuff out I'm Jade nap I am a writer and designer what book did you write this book hot spring it is about the design sprint I need to have a book so I can kind of hold that up maybe I wrote so my name is Jonathan Kourtney also co-founder of AJ and smart with Michael and I wrote the 4-hour workweek Wow under the pseudo name of Timothy Ferriss so yeah I'm Tim Ferriss actually you thought you would be a lot more muscular and jacked but that stuff works yeah he's not the other supplements are really doing a good job so I know that we're kind of crowded around the screen here if you're watching this on YouTube but yeah this was the best we could do and it's raitis it's physically uncomfortable it's my close to each other yes weird because we're ramblas so yeah I couldn't be sure that this one is gonna be a short definitely I could also see the me the timer in the background here a very nice white timer which is kind of cool and we're going to be using that to make sure that this episode doesn't go too long we're going to try to have a like that may be the cadence of a couple of my episodes in a couple of short episodes but let's see how that prototypes it's all prototypes I don't know we don't know what you like we know if you like the longest or the short ones okay so this one's gonna be a very specific one focused just on one single topic and it came about I guess over the last I mean this thing's you release the book but also over the last year or so and especially over the last few weeks on Twitter there's been a bit of a flaring up of controversy relating to the design sprint process and how that deals with user research oh yeah and a lot of very well-known and famous designers very accomplished designers are not happy with how this print treats user research or how fast the design sprint is and it that it's sort of it seems to be coming across that the design sprint is almost like a little bit insulting to the classic design processes yeah yeah so maybe let's just open the open the floor on that topic and yeah what do you think about that yeah well you know I think that there there are a couple of there are a couple of sort of competing criticisms or maybe they're on they're on the same side but one of them is yeah like if you don't start with research then how can you know you're on the right track have that's cutting out this huge important thing and the other criticism I think is that just the idea that you would try to hurry up design sort of cheapens design and it takes away all this great long slow work that has to happen to do great design so I think some people are actually reacting to even just the popularity of this term design spreads to spread them around quite a bit which is great and I think that it sounds like they're trying to hurry things up and if you're not if you haven't taken the time and I suspect it some of the criticism does come from some folks who maybe haven't actually take the time to look at what we're talking about it sounds like we're trivializing it and then really trying to press it press it down and get that part over with so that we can turn everything over to some engineering process or something that's the impression that I've sort of gotten from it and I think that the we should maybe talk about both of those but the the part about hurrying up design and trivializing design I don't think will take too long to talk about because I just don't think there's much of an argument there I mean to me that's it's pretty clear that when you start in this way you're actually bringing everyone together to make sure that what you're gonna spend your effort on is something you have confidence in that it's something that people are going to be interested in and care about and that after you've established that there's some product market fit there you're gonna you're still gonna spend a lot of time designing it getting it right you know doing all of that fine-tune detail I think that there's no sort of cutting out all of the hard design work that has to happen over the course of building a product Mike I don't think that that's what we've ever suggested so I I just don't you know I haven't even really like gotten into that argument cuz I feel like it's it's sort of a surface-level knee-jerk reaction to that term becoming popular in that term threatening when people feel that they're threatened with the way that they they do design work so I mean if you guys want we can talk more about it but I just I don't feel like there's a lot there I do feel like there is a lot there with the research question because we actually while writing the book we had some at Google Ventures some internal conversations or like sort of arguments about their friendly arguments but but about whether to talk about how we would often do research before the sprint so a lot of times my colleague Michael is an excellent researcher would go and do this Michael different Michael Michael Margolis is Michael's excellent as well Michael Margolis would go and do research with the startups before our sprint and he would on day one of the sprint say hey here's what I learned and share that with us and it was like it was like we were already doing the second spread like we were already so far ahead because of what we learned and I don't talk about that in the book I don't talk about that usually when I talk about Sprint's until somebody asks the question and that's because I think that very few teams have someone like Michael Margolis or Michael smart or someone who's experienced doing customer research and can do that in a really great way and they deliver it to people in a really great way then traditionally when people talk about design thinking there's been this encouragement that oh if you like go and you just start talking to people like these things will emerge and you'll come up with some great solution and I haven't seen evidence of that I've seen someone who's a great researcher can go out learn things and then if they're also a great communicator can share that back but I've seen that fall down more times than it doesn't so if you have someone who's really good at or if your team is willing to go together and do this research ahead of time it's great but not every team can do it and it does mean too that if you're in the situation where you're trying to level up the way your team does product design and the way your team innovates you're now talking about like we're gonna do this research process and this design spring you're asking people to take on even a bigger chunk and often even the week it's hard to do whereas if you do the whole sprint like by the end of the Sprint week you will do customer research because on by in just five days later you'll be doing research oftentimes you're gonna find when you do that research that you know it's it's so much easier to conduct those interviews like personally I'm not a good interviewer but I can do it if there's a prototype if you give me a prototype then the prototype helps me and like allows me to actually do the kind of interview that'll be educational to our team I can't do that on my own if I go out and do it on my own like I'm just I'm not skilled enough and so it also I think it it's been meant to open the doors to a lot of teams to doing research and to get people in the room watching the research so you don't have this poor researcher going out there doing the research and then trying to convince everybody else so the Sprint is kind of a Trojan horse for research if you can do it ahead of time it's great but you know I don't I don't think that you absolutely have to anyway I could go on and on that subject I think that very nice one thing by the way can you - guys stop rubbing your pants legs I [Music] can just hear like this okay yeah it's really good it's already started over again no no no no creepy it's always creepy but I've acted I think I think that's a really like first of all that's a really nice clean answer I think that let's just pretend the design sprint doesn't exist and people are still kind of you know that the whole user research thing still has a lot of problems within companies because there's one side who want to do like this very extensive you know month or two months or three month long user research sessions where they start you know doing you know interviewing their potential customers giving them Diaries but we've done all of this yeah and like it's not a census it is necessary yeah yeah absolutely if you're trying to capture patents that aren't here you know from like first time uses and things like that you know you do need to leave some how good is people I use blow outs over time I think it does paralyze the larger companies who are trying to just get into product work in the first place like like companies who are like you know what we're gonna make our first product or we're just kind of you know digitally transform and they immediately get struck with this design thinking approach to okay now we need to do the research and what happens is the designers go and they do whatever version of research they see fit and then it's not in any way it's like packaged up maybe into a PDF or it's packaged up it's put on the walls and this is something that's really hard for them to translate into product features yeah and I think that that I've never seen okay but like you said there are some really excellent really talented teams but I've never seen a good team being able to take that research and turn that logically into features what generally happens is they have the package they have the user research and that's kind of like almost like a check mark so they can say they've done it and they ignore it anyway and you start the way that they want to so they they kind of use their hunches anyway but they have it and I think it's like often very very often used as an excuse so internally it's a use them as an excuse to if the product fails you can kind of say well the research said we should have done this which I really don't like it takes the responsibility off the product team and I think that one of the reasons it's so prevalent is because agencies want to do these really long research phases and companies take that habit and try to make it work internally and I can totally understand it because we used to do exactly that I used to ask we used to tell our clients that we wouldn't even start a project unless we did a few weeks of research because we genuinely thought that that was the way you had to do it and it didn't really matter if we did the research we still end up the team and I still ended up going with our hunches anyway and then whether you still at least but make your hunches somehow tangible like you say it's like now you couldn't do the research and still people are gonna have like a few vague ideas but you still need to make this prototype and put it in front of people anyway so it almost didn't make it it didn't make it it didn't shortcut our way to the to the to the prototype you just often thought well we could have just made that yeah yeah already it was that in front of you I think that the I mean I kind of for the people of listening to the podcast constantly talking about the Sprint but I think it's an interesting anchor to talk about this from because I think that's currently if you look at the like on Twitter at these designers getting very very angry about the research part of it oh did you hear that produce I heard that birds like in my ear this was not a phone to added in Optimas that was an actual birds yeah I think it's I think it's interesting because on the one hand I think okay it seems like a lot of the people who are getting very annoyed are worried about losing these long contracts on one hand and on the other hand it's like maybe they just don't believe it maybe because they haven't because that's the way they work now and they just don't want to change that but I I'm not really convinced that every single project I mean let me just actually go to something more blunt if you look at products that are successful right now like Airbnb like slack like a lot of the things that these companies want to kind of be these high-growth products these didn't start with the user research phase these things actually came out of thin air the founders ideas and hunches very very focused on these hundreds what they had built it something internally to satisfy their own exactly found out okay like you do it like this we'll repurpose that idea exactly and I think that what happens is that other companies see products like this they go on to their blog and they read read about the research they do but this is the research they're doing research they're doing for granular fixes like it's like you know how would we improve this feature or how do we improve the onboarding actually sometimes it makes sense to do research for these parts and I think that companies sometimes see that and say we need to do the research from the very start we cannot use our hunches that's told like it's illegal to use your hunches and UX because you know you have to understand the user and you have to have empathy also by the way the stupidest job advice in the world from designers is how do I become a good designer you have to have empathy you know what how do I you have to have empathy okay thank you very much right that's a really great advice I think it's like it's kind of it's just being skewed people are seeing these products and they're just assuming that there was very serious thought going behind it based on user research but if you look inside some of the departments in Google and you ask these people like we had an event recently where we interviewed one of the hardware engineers and I was asking how they how do you guys come up with this and how did you before he went into manufacturing how did you know that it was the right thing and they were like yeah we tested it in the cafeteria after we built it and this is a successful product yes it's not like something that just failed and I think that that that approach is not to be ignored as well like that you're Hunnish can also be right but then testing it with real people even if they're just in the cafeteria immediately gave them feedback to fix it and it's it's I think it's I think there's like this almost romantic view of how UX and product design is supposed to work based on a lot of the things that agencies put out there well yeah and I don't think even that when people criticize a sprint or when worried about people not doing research I don't think that that's actually like how like there's any malicious intent there people are trying to mislead anyone I think that you you do what you do and when you get good results doing that you you know I think it's easy to forget in some cases for agencies to forget how hard some of the things they do are I think it's hard to to understand how I like doing that research in the right way is difficult not everyone can pick that up and do it well and finding a situation where the person who does the research is credible and able to match the results to what the business needs in order to make decisions that's that's hard and I've seen that that failed many times inside organizations and we're sophisticated because it's very difficult if you come in you know as an agency or if you come in with like a company that's already doing it really well and you look at those examples you think I'm sure like it's it's great so they may be getting value out of doing it but I think to say if you don't do reading you know your design process in this way you're doing it wrong it's it's it's unfair and it's and I think they're just forgetting how hard some of the things that they do actually are and they you know I think sometimes people haven't questioned whether they really have to do all of the stuff in order to get to the outcome you have to have your 12 personas before you do anything yeah yeah for so this would be a topic for another but in the way you say it there Jake it's interesting because you can you can say that the design sprint like you said it's very hard to come across people let's say like Michael who can you know not only go out and ask the right questions and be comfortable with that but then turn that into a communicate that results yeah even of all results right yeah and it's almost then you're saying Sprint is the user research it's like making dummies like John and I and being able to actually succeed at user research because in in some way this print is using yeah and that was what's so cool about what it what Michael is doing it Google Ventures was he was doing this kind of research over and over again but he was also trying to teach the the companies how to do it for themselves right and so in the sprint process we tried to sort of like get this sort of as Michael's brain like in there so that if you just did it you would get you know it's not as if you were gonna all of a sudden have 20 years of experience doing research but you will get this this one really good interview you can do it like and and it's it is harder to do that in context where you don't have a prototype that's I also think huffin that people you know you guys both made this point about like building confidence like often hunches can turn out to be right and I was talking to this is a little name-dropping but I was talking to Tim Brown is a CEO of IDEO about design Sprint's until was saying like one thing that he thinks is really cool about design Sprint's is that it he's seen many cases where their designers in the first their first thought about how to solve a problem somewhere in those initial sketches will be the thing that they ultimately produce and and you know it's it's the early seed of it but he said one thing that's cool about it designs Brendon's it gives our designers a chance to go with those hunches and go further and faster with those hunches and sometimes maybe give away ahead and and they you know we all want to feel confident feel like we've done all of the steps and just like you guys are saying in the early days of aj and smart you wanted to be diligent and do the right process I certainly felt like that earlier in my career and I feel like the design sprint was kind of like boiling down can what is this stuff and if you don't have to have it to get to a good result like don't keep it in there and long drawn-out research I I don't know there's I'll give an example though this this company we talked about in the book flat iron health and they super complicated they're making software for cancer care clinics Michael did a bunch of research before we did this friend to understand like how are they making this just basically to help us do the map and if you do research ahead of time ahead of a design sprint and you can deliver it in the form of like here's what I suggest you use for the map yeah here's what I suggest are some of the sprint questions you might think about and Michael got I mean he's sort of led us in even the formation of the steps we do on Monday but that mapping of the research output to how you start a sprint is a great way to do it and to do that by preliminary research and really saying in a design sprint it's that it's that just like it's that sometimes a huge PDF or like that long you know boring slide that we've all been that's what you want to avoid and that's where research credibility really drops and like it it's sometimes it might work if you are an agency and they're paying you to come in but it like it doesn't necessarily work internally so I like that daughter that's almost like for the Monday I mean for us as element it's like you can almost think of this Monday as the executive summary yeah of yeah you had a visa yes like just basically what is the customer Julian or we can do the whole empathy map yeah just like and I love in the book as well how you talk about like can you do this enough you recognize patterns almost regardless of what industry you're working in or what product you're kind of working on at that time you know this like that kind of triggered discovery you know these kind of like bits their customers moved through you just start recognizing these patterns after a while and it's nice to have that formula like you say like if you just have this executive summary pulled out of all of this research there and start with that then we can then we can start letting our initial ideas somehow bring them to life right I'll follow those what did Michael actually do what sort of research to do did he interview people yeah he went around with some folks from the Flatiron team and interviewed interviewed people who work at cancer care clinics understand like what what is like what's going on when you when a patient comes in and you have to make a decision or about treatment what are the steps yeah and you talk to a few different clinics and then pretty soon and he's got like okay I know what the map sort of look like I know what questions are asking in different stages you guys still have to redraw the map on the Monday yeah cuz we still had to learn it we start to like understand it and get it booted up and you drive a short-term memory yeah right but you know the other thing another trick that Michael would do for sort of pre research is in fact he wrote a blog post about this called I think it's like if you search for like free prototypes Michael Margolis you'll find it he would basically run the sprint the kind of research that it talks about the end of the sprint where you show people prototypes he would use that with other companies products that were in this face no prototype at all I mean he would just say like oh here's these you know for products or three products that I found get people to look at those and talk about I mean compare them and in a couple instances we would start the Sprint in like the Friday before basically watch the research watch him conduct those interviews and it was as he put it he's like those other products are like fruit prototypes you don't have to make them they're already there you can learn from them before you even start and that's that's like also a way to kind of get a head start but that is gonna be sometimes a harder starting place for if you're a facilitator if you're trying to introduce it you have to have that credibility Michael came in with that credibility yes from the investor he's been doing this forever it's it's not always easy inside the team to start there so that's why I like the research question is a really rich one because the people who criticize criticism like they're not wrong I didn't you should if you can start with research you'll probably be ahead of the game but you don't always have to tonight that's a great I think that's a perfect place to end this episode yeah okay cool so thanks so much for watching or listening and goodbye from California Baja adios as they say just thanks for listening to the product Breakfast Club with Jake Knapp and Jonathan Courtney you can check out past episodes wherever you listen to podcasts we have many more great discussions coming soon be sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date and if you enjoying the podcast please like share and leave us a review the one thing that would really blow our minds is a five-star review Wow that would be really 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