Research engagement: bringing leaders and product teams into UX research

Henrik Mattsson · 00:09
Hi everyone, and welcome to the UX Research Rundown podcast, second season. My name is Henrik Mattsson, and I am the CEO of Lookback and also your host for this podcast. And today we do not just have one guest with us, but we have a UX research team with us, who just started working together quite recently. And they’re here to talk about the same thing we always talk about, but we always find new things: how do you get your team along on the journey that is research?

So, without further ado, let me introduce my guests. We have Jeremy Bailey and Nadya Calderon, who are with us here today and started working together six weeks ago. So I’ll let you give us a bit of your background, origin stories as researchers, and the company you work at presently and some of the challenges and stuff like that, and then we’ll jump straight in. So, Jeremy, we can start with you. Welcome.

Meet Thinkific’s experience design and research team

Jeremy Bailey · 01:09
Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, we did just start working together. We’re working together at a company called Thinkific. That’s laser focused, hyper focused, whatever focus, the most focused on our customer, who is a creator, educator: basically someone that has, what we call unique genius, some expertise or passion that they want to share with others and build a business around it, specifically by teaching others, by educating. Similar to the way you’re sharing your expertise around research with this podcast. So we’d want to help you, Henrik, build a business around that.

And a lot of these creators really need help with that. So I lead the experience design and research teams, alongside Nadya and a couple of others. And I’ve previously worked at startups for about 15 years. I say startups because I’m still in that headspace, zero to one, and often using the customer insight to create new value in the world. And I’ve been doing that by hook or by crook, by any means necessary, often hacking together solutions. But now, at Thinkific, what’s really exciting is I have a great team with a lot of expertise.

I’ve done it every which way, with a team, without a team. Really excited and grateful to have a team. So I’ll pass it off to Nadya to introduce the research function at Thinkific.

Nadya Calderon · 02:38
Cool. Thank you, Jeremy. So I’m Nadya, and I am currently the UX research lead at Thinkific. Where did I start? I actually became a UX researcher via a path that I think is not so uncommon for UX researchers. I’ve been part of product teams for a long time. I started as a software developer, actually. That’s where my original background is. But very early in my career, I realized that I really care about the who in the equation of any line of code that I was building: who’s going to use this in the end?

So I took a long journey. I thought I was going to stay in academia, so I did a PhD in human-computer interaction. And that really marked a transition towards UX research for me. In the industry, I have been for about five years. I started working with startups. Before that, I was doing mostly consulting work and legal engagements. And then the last two and a half years I’ve been part of setting up the practice for UX research at Thinkific: understanding the creator, being the advocate, and helping leadership with our creator educator goals and purpose.

A UX research team that reports to strategy

Henrik Mattsson · 03:58
Awesome. Well, thanks. It’s great to have you here. So I heard a rumor before the show that UX sits directly under strategic leadership somehow. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, how the team sits in the larger organization?

Jeremy Bailey · 04:16
Nadya, maybe. I think Nadya is the best person to tell this story.

Nadya Calderon · 04:24
Yeah, to be honest, I feel that we have been in a privileged position, in the history of the research team at Thinkific. Because originally we became part of the experience design and research team, so under design. But because of the nature of where the organization was at the time, still uncovering a market corner and understanding who we were really going to target in the market, there was a big need for a new space for us to influence. Who are these creators, educators? Where are the problems?

And most specifically, who are they really? And so we started working closely with leadership from the beginning. And it was a matter of an equation of resourcing at that time. Given that we were just starting, setting up the practice, we decided not to get embedded into product teams, or right away work supporting product teams. We were working closely with leadership. For a while, when we didn’t have Jeremy on board, I was actually directly reporting to our chief of strategy. And so I think it was the nature of where we were at the time.

And so we had always seen UX research as more of an insights function, not necessarily directly linked to product. Now, with Jeremy as our leader, we’re still seen as part of the design and research organization. But we have this dotted line always connected to strategy, which I have found exciting. And it’s a really privileged position to be thinking about UX research from.

Building a research function from scratch at FreshBooks

Henrik Mattsson · 06:19
I think a lot of teams start the other way around. They start embedded in some very specific product problem, and then they try to move into more of, hey, we have something to say about strategy. So that’s a super interesting story. So, Jeremy, is all of this about to change now? What are your hopes and expectations for the year?

Jeremy Bailey · 06:42
Well, I think it’s funny that you share that the usual way is for it to start in some other function and try and influence. That’s how it started in my career, at least in tech, where there was no research function. I worked for 11 years at a company called FreshBooks, which has become a global company. And I was there for a lot of the ride. But in the earliest days, it was bootstrapped. We were building whiteboards from scratch, don’t ask me how. And the research function, I remember, came from the fact that I wanted to do some user testing.

And I remember my boss, who was the VP of product, telling me, no, we don’t have time. You don’t have time for that. You don’t have money for that. It’s always the same thing, right? And I was like, I’m going to do it anyway. So I borrowed someone from the support team. And I remember the first user tests we ran: we ended up demonstrating that the company was losing something like $5 million a quarter, because the screen would go black for a certain percentage of users when they signed up for the product.

And then people were like, oh, how could we do more of this? And then slowly, with various projects, I built influence for the idea that research should even exist in an organization, and eventually got to the point that Nadya has established at Thinkific, where we built an insights team outside of design. It had a quant and a qual and was helping drive some strategy. But I still think it’s a beautiful hack, from day one, to report directly into a strategy officer, directly to the C-suite.

Because that was a ten-year influence journey that I took. And I told you the nice version of it, not the sloppy political battles.

Research engagement with leaders versus product teams

Henrik Mattsson · 08:34
We’ll get to that in the podcast, to the extent that you’re comfortable. No, but joking aside, I think it’s interesting. When we talk about engagement with research, we want stakeholders to buy into what we’re doing. And not because we just want that to happen for some other reason, but it’s good when that happens. As we discussed before we started recording, the experiences of teams that I talk to are very different. Some people have a lot of this, and it works, and it’s great. And when it works, everyone agrees it’s great.

I’m yet to meet the team where it’s like, oh no, we have too much engagement with research and it’s really hurting our products. No one ever said that. But there are a lot of teams where this doesn’t happen. But I think that your case also shows: well, engagement with whom? Because you can have engagement with the leadership team, and you can have engagement with your product team, and these are different journeys. So that’s really interesting. If we go to the question about what research engagement is to you: in your experience, has one of these been more powerful, engagement from high-up stakeholders or engagement from close to the product team?

I guess they’re both important in their own ways, but can you share some of your experiences when it comes to those things? And I can start with Jeremy this time.

Jeremy Bailey · 10:05
Okay. So the question is engaging teams in research, or…?

Henrik Mattsson · 10:12
Several forms of engagement, right?

Jeremy Bailey · 10:14
Yeah. I mean, the primary form of engagement for a lot of my career was to force the engagement to happen. So it was like, go to the customer’s office, get on the phone, pick up the phone. Because specifically, there would be a conversation where there was a lot of embedded assumption, and I was like, we’d better check out some of those assumptions and make sure that they’re right or wrong. And then the engagement took care of itself after the forcing function, typically. So once the team had an excuse, and had the time allotted or the support needed, I would often joke that it was like they had come back from some kind of all-night bender, like they had just done drugs, because they would be so excited and so high on the experience that they just had.

They’re like, how come no one told us sooner that work could be this engaging, and that there could be so much to learn? And I was like, oh yeah, I did. I told you this is the way. So it’s mostly been about pushing people over that speed bump. And even in the earliest days it was about automating recruiting. When I told you I brought in that customer support person, I still got a lot of pushback from teams, if it wasn’t my own work, that we don’t have time to recruit or whatever.

I remember, I think I read Gothelf in Lean UX, and he suggested, hey, just make sure that people show up on a Thursday. And so that’s what we did. The customer would actually show up in the office, and the team would be like, what do we do with them? And I was like, I don’t know, what are you working on? Why don’t you share? And then that became an embedded kind of thing. So it’s always been supporting, making it easy to say yes, and in some cases forcing the yes.

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Engaging leaders before the project starts

Henrik Mattsson · 12:03
Right. And it’s interesting, the story you tell about how they expected perhaps something else. Your experience was that you told them, hey, this is going to be useful, please come along on this thing. And then once they came along, they were like, oh, how come you didn’t tell us this was going to be great? I’ve seen that a lot. And I remember the first time I engaged, I was observing a research session, and I was like, this is so cool. And you say that to the researcher, and they’re like, yes, I know.

So most of it is just to get people to take that first step. So, Nadya, to the extent that you feel comfortable sharing, what’s special about that leadership team? Because I guess they recruited a research team before they even needed to do some kind of product research. They knew they were going to do discovery, and the way they were going to do that was to go in like, hey, we’re going to research it. I mean, that is pretty rare, I would say, that that’s how it starts.

Where do you think that came from? And what experiences preceded that for them, to the extent that you know?

Nadya Calderon · 13:17
Interesting. Also the question of engagement, I think there is no UX researcher that doesn’t think about these. So I wouldn’t say precisely that the story was that they thought they were going to create a new product and then realized, oh, we need to do research. The product was well established by the time a UX research function came to be. But I suppose the uniqueness was that Thinkific was in hypergrowth at that time. So it was, how do we get from being a startup with this innovative idea to growth?

And fortunately, I do remember I joined, and have always been grateful for joining, a team where I always felt there was a leadership culture and values of customer centricity. So there was not a lot of buying into how important that is. It was more a piece of, how can UX research really help? What can you do for us? And so I think at that time a leader in design took the bet and said, I think we need a UX research team. And so that’s how it got started.

And then it just happened that at the time of the decision, we decided to start working more on the strategic questions rather than the product-directed questions. And so we had the space to prove the value that we could bring to the organization. When it comes to engagement, I think, the first thing that came to mind: you’re right, it’s not only the how, but the when. Engagement takes different manifestations, if you wish, depending on when in the process we’re engaging. And so something that we have been very clear about at Thinkific is engaging early, especially with leadership.

So I have this cool example. We were getting together to start thinking and ideating about a new product. And I remember sitting in a room with the leaders of that initiative, and just by engaging them and giving them the space, the team that was going to run with the project had a download from their heads. And I remember one of the leaders in the room telling me at the end, we ran a design workshop or an ideation workshop, and they told me, wow, thank you.

I really needed to make sure that you had my download. And that was really everything they needed to feel confidence in the team. So that was a very important piece of the engagement. It’s not only the how, but the when. Because often when we think about engagement, we think about, let’s show them the interviews. Let’s show them how the user actually behaves, how they feel, how they talk. But I think we really think at Thinkific about the entire process. Because if we engage with them early, they will continue with us through the process until the very end.

And so it’s more likely that the outcomes of our research are received, because they are their direct questions. They answer the questions that they had, or have a very specific action for where they were looking to go. That said, whenever we work at more of a strategic level, obviously we do our best to bring them to the sessions, to make sure they’re sitting in the room when we’re conducting interviews, for example. So that is a very… mainly because it’s so important that they get to connect with the human on the other side.

But I would speak highly of how important it is through the entire process, not just these moments that we find very emotionally connecting, but the importance of the process.

Customer insight as the foundation of decision making

Henrik Mattsson · 17:04
Yeah, that’s super interesting. I remember I had a conversation with one of my researchers once, where we were talking about the role of reports. What format should the research report have, and whatever. And we realized after a while that it doesn’t really matter. Our role is not to help you build a report. Our job is to help you build the engagement over time that makes sure that people read the report. And it’s like what you’re saying about this long process, where you have to start early, get their download so they feel a part of it and everything.

This really resonates with me. So I want to play into it. I find it so interesting that I have two people in the same room now that have slightly different experiences of their journey to building engagement in teams. It’s rare that I have both perspectives in a podcast. So sorry if I’m typecasting. But, Jeremy, when you hear this stuff about how it works over there, is your experience still as common a journey, or do you think that what Nadya is talking about is the new way, or more common now?

Can you talk a little bit about how this is shifting in the industry, if you have a perspective on that?

Jeremy Bailey · 18:23
Yeah, I can certainly share from my personal perspective, working across a few companies, and even my own title and how that’s shifted. I started out as an art director, actually, very unconventional, and then became a creative director in a product organization. People didn’t understand what that meant. And then I eventually had this title, Head of Experience, and came up with it with the CEO at FreshBooks, because of the influence that we were building within the organization from the design function. We didn’t want to limit it, and this had been true for my entire career, to product specifically.

We were trying to build experiences for the customer. And they didn’t care about Conway’s Law. They didn’t care what department we were in. They just wanted a good experience, and they didn’t care what department delivered it. I’ve always been really passionate about that. And so for me, the evolution has been clear for going on two decades, because I started out in market research way, way, way back when. And actually I was a research assistant before that, in sociology. So I have some research acumen, but it was always in service of delivering this unified experience.

And so from my perspective, that’s actually the evolution: insight as the foundation. And we have chief data officers, and I feel like they almost took the lead in terms of establishing, hey, data is really important to companies. The quants won on that front. But the evolution of an insights function, to me, is the data side that has evolved and the UXR side coming together to become the foundation of decision making, period. Whenever I’ve requested a UXR role, I always say, this will really improve our decision making.

And an organization wins or loses by its ability to make good decisions, right? Because every day we have the opportunity to make a right or wrong decision. And in my experience, the decisions that are informed by customer insight tend to be correct. I don’t know why, I wonder why, but it turns out business is nothing except a handshake scaled up to 300, 400, 10,000 people. And maintaining that handshake, that look in the eye, that trust, across 10,000 people requires a really strong foundation and connection to the customer.

And I think that’s where the evolution of an insights function in a business is. I’d be fine if Nadya didn’t report to me. And frankly, I see the future as Nadya, or someone like her, in a strategic position within a C-suite or executive function. Because it’s so important, and I don’t know why it’s taking so long to get there, but that’s where I see the end game. Because that’s every CEO’s first job. And the executive functions that exist in most companies are the CEO scaling themselves, right?

Firing themselves from various roles, and then hiring different functions, like people officer or strategy officer or marketing officer. It’s only going to be a matter of time before there’s an insights officer. And there’s already data officers, right? So probably that role gets combined at some point, because we’re like, what the fuck? We’re just trying to make good decisions here. So I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on the podcast, but it seems…

Henrik Mattsson · 22:00
You are allowed. I’m Swedish, so I was thinking also…

Jeremy Bailey · 22:00
It’s taking a long time, but I can see it coming. We’re almost there.

Henrik Mattsson · 22:11
Yeah. Interesting. Anything to share on that, Nadya?

Nadya Calderon · 22:18
Yeah, I think the original question was if this is the new norm.

Henrik Mattsson · 22:24
Yeah. Where is this going? The evolution of how engagement happens.

Nadya Calderon · 22:28
I was just telling Jeremy that it’s such a vivid and important discussion at this time. Every time that I join the Learners conference and UXR Conf, there are always some talks about strategic research versus tactical research, and even the role of tooling in it. When we think about Lookback and everything that it allows us to do in evaluative research, bringing participants in on the ride, I always think about what scope of research we’re talking about. And I have heard so many good speakers sharing experiences of how these insights teams have shaped around not only being UX research, but mixed methods for the win: the combination of quantitative data and behavioral data in product with the depth and the richness of what UX research can bring.

So I am a believer. That’s the type of career that I want to build for myself. That’s the type of organization that I would like to continue working for. So I do hope that that is more the future of our roles. I don’t know if the space is there for all organizations at this point, but yeah.

What research tools can and can’t do

Henrik Mattsson · 23:49
No, and I actually think that is why tooling is limited. And I say that as a tool person. For these insights to lead to better decision making, the contact surfaces where that better decision making is happening are so complex. And that’s why we’re seeing, with Figma and tools like that, this real-time collaboration. And this idea that a tool will generate an insight, you can just open the tool and here’s your insight, I don’t really think that that can be possible. I think what tools can do is support teams in ways of working together that allow them to start early, that allow them to build engagement over time, that allow them to do these things.

So that’s what I think about when I hear you two speak.

Nadya Calderon · 24:44
On that topic, one other note is how important it actually is that the right tools help us researchers free some of our cycles and our time to do these other kinds of research. For example, at Thinkific, don’t get me wrong, not everything that we do is these big strategic problems. We were also working a lot on enablement. How do we help others do research? PMs, designers, product marketers: how do we enable all those others who do research to face the same challenges, like recruiting better, bringing along their teams, engagement with their teams?

And so tooling in that case is extremely important, because it helps us build better processes for them to run slightly leaner, and for research not to be perceived as a blocker. So it’s extremely important.

Where insight comes from: inference, bias and the three-voices rule

Henrik Mattsson · 25:40
Yeah, yeah. No, thanks, I agree. But I just think it’s interesting, and it’s been super interesting to have both of your perspectives on this: where is the insight truly produced? And here’s my proposal, and it might be wrong or simplified, but I think it is produced in the complex day-to-day interactions and relationships in a team. And this idea that we can have insights tools that generate insights, I think is flawed. Tools can help this. And that’s my critique against tools like my own. We can help.

Helping researchers stay on target and do relevant things, instead of manual Excel file participant management and stuff like that, that’s obviously something we can help you with, and making all of these flows. But I’m not sure that tools can generate insights. So I don’t know.

Jeremy Bailey · 26:42
Yeah, no, I do. Do I get to go first? Or, Nadya, it’s actually your turn to go first. I’m always ready. I’m always reminded of a researcher who… and this is something I guess I missed in school, but a researcher on my team at FreshBooks reminded me of it: reality is unknowable, right? So if we start from the assumption that research is only helping us widen the straw a little bit, so that we can see reality, again, from a very subjective point of view. Maybe I’m a postmodernist in that sense, and people are going to come at me with objectivity.

But the postmodern condition is that we can’t possibly really know reality, but we can seek to better understand it. That really plays into this equation. And therefore, when you say teams, you’re talking about multiple straws adding up to make that straw even wider, to synthesize a more accurate view of reality. I also once took a research workshop with a master synthesizer, and they said, yeah, you have to make inferences at some point. At some point, some human being has to make an inference about what they heard.

And another word for that is a best guess, based on the observation and the lived experience of that individual. But they’re not immune from the ladder of inference. And so just acknowledging that we make inferences is part of giving the team permission to actually think critically. And so, in my opinion, that’s where the researcher plays a huge, huge role: in confidence building within an organization, not around opinion, but around observation, learning to listen, and how to make inferences while acknowledging bias. Anyway, that’s my art answer to that question.

There’s probably a more practitioner point of view on this thing, but that’s what I’ve observed as well.

Nadya Calderon · 28:54
I have no argument against that. I believe in that as well. And you’re right. Any person that is deeply in the qualitative realm will say that at some point we’re all making inferences, rather than having a crystal ball that is telling us the truth, because what is the truth? But we do believe, once again, in the tooling and the right practices. For example, we created a method or a system where we teach or we help others. I think confidence is the right word, because how do we feel confidence in the inferences that we’re making?

In the academic world, you do that through peer reviewing, or through intercoder reliability, with multiple people looking at the data and finding that you are coherently getting to the same place, or coding it in the same way. But we can translate some of those things to our industry practices. And we have built this, we call them at Thinkific “walk the walls.” I think they’re known from I don’t know what design practice back in the day, but when we came to 2020 and the digital world, we just became masters of building this beautiful Miro board full of stickies.

And we said, for something to become an inference, you have to have at least three different voices representing that statement that you want to make. We made it part of our practice. We call them “I statements”: I feel, I want to do this thing, I have a problem with this. But for something to become an I statement, you have to have three different voices representing that statement. And it’s not three different stickies from the same person, literally three different voices. And so there’s always the role of inference, but also of good practice in the research, and the importance of researchers bringing this.

Weekly customer contact as a muscle

Henrik Mattsson · 30:52
It’s very insightful. What both of you are saying makes me realize when engagement probably happens. Because engagement means that everyone needs to want to play along by themselves, right? And I think creative people that build stuff together want to play along by themselves when it feels meaningful and helpful, and if they’re a part of it. And one part of making that happen is to start early with people. Don’t call them when everything is done, and it’s like, this is what I found. But another part is also, and I’d love to have your perspective on this, I see that in highly functioning teams, we’re creating space for each other’s inferences and feeding off each other’s inferences.

And we’re like, all right, that makes me think of, oh, yeah, this. Okay. And so I wonder if the key to research engagement is in setting up that game. And I think that research leadership can have a huge, huge role in that. So what do you think?

Jeremy Bailey · 31:57
Nadya, I think it’s your turn to go first. What’s worked for you?

Nadya Calderon · 32:03
Yeah, I keep going back to this. I feel researchers are well equipped in understanding the levels of inference, the strength of confidence and reliability that you can have, depending on the methodology that you’re deploying, depending on the problem that you’re facing. And so it plays a huge role in bringing that to the practice, and enabling that for the organization. But I wouldn’t say that researchers alone can do that. Every single time that a decision is made, there are so many players involved, so many perspectives: the business perspective, the product perspective, the research, the design.

Jeremy Bailey · 32:48
Absolutely. I think the only thing I’d add, and this is more my practical tilt, would be that cycle time really matters in terms of continuous engagement. We often measure our products by active usage, but research could also be measured by active usage. And teams get really uncomfortable when I talk about this. I’m sure my team is going to listen to this podcast and be like, you bastard, Jeremy, just to make our lives miserable. But again, speaking of the forcing function I mentioned earlier, I have found that if teams are not engaging weekly, at least, with a customer…

And this is true for myself, by the way. I notice it in myself, and it’s taken many years for me to notice this in myself, too. It’s like a muscle that relaxes. The fitness of thinking in relationship to the customer, versus assumptive reasoning: you can lose that muscle. And so it requires continuous practice. And so I think a research team plays a certain role, but teams that delegate the function of research to a researcher entirely tend to become some of the worst teams I’ve ever worked with.

Because they’re spoiled in the worst ways possible. And then they also disregard the research, and the researchers try to convince them again that this is valuable. So the best teams I’ve ever worked with were continuously engaging. And by the way, sometimes we’re forgoing quality, and that’s a problem. I don’t want to pretend it’s not. Users lie to you. That’s a thing. And a bad research practitioner will be like, “well, the user said to do this, we’d better do it!” They drank the Kool-Aid and they got poisoned.

But it’s better than the alternative, which is no connection to reality at all. So I’ve tended to try and mix it up continuously, but make sure that there’s a constant training program, and that people are doing things continuously.

Henrik Mattsson · 34:55
Yeah, totally. We were talking about how CEOs gradually fire themselves from different jobs. And one thing that I found is that I just speak more and more to users. I run demos of our product now, and people always ask me, what are you doing in the demo? Don’t you have people to run the demo? But I feel like the more I do this, the more I need to be in almost daily conversations with people that are using the product. And it’s exactly what you’re saying.

And you can replace that to some extent with observation. And yes, there are some risks. Of course, I’m not a researcher. If I actually think that I’ve done research, I can get us into trouble, because I’m like, well, I asked them what they want, and they said this thing, so let’s go build it. But I think that’s a problem I saw many years ago in our industry, when we didn’t do a lot of research. If you talk to five customers in a month, and three of those were your CEO thinking that they were a researcher, then you have a problem.

But if you’re doing continuous research, and some people run out and do some bad research, it kind of drowns in all of that collective thing. So yeah, I really like that. Cool. We have reached the part of the podcast that is my least favorite part, where I think it’s all super interesting, but we have to call it because we’re running out of time. But I would like to give everyone here an opportunity, based on the discussion we’ve had today and your personal experiences of this: can you share something with our listeners, who are often coming into the space, or they’re in places where this hasn’t worked so well?

Perhaps they’re in an earlier version of your journey, Jeremy, when you were trying to get everyone to even show up. Could you share some things that you have learned, that perhaps gave you hope that this is possible? Perhaps some people that you can ally with, some tips. It could be anything, really. We can start with Nadya, and then we’ll finish with you, Jeremy.

Advice: bring stakeholders into problem definition

Nadya Calderon · 37:14
I will go back to that first piece that I was reflecting on: the importance of looking at the entirety of the process, not just this moment of the interaction with the customer. Really, the interaction with the customer starts when we have a good problem to go and try to solve with them. And so I was reflecting on how important, when it comes to decision making, the engagement with every stakeholder is. Someone said that a problem well defined is a problem half solved. And oftentimes it’s not just a researcher defining what a good problem to go and solve is.

It requires all of these different voices, from product and business. And so I would say that not overlooking that piece has been really important in my career. We always talk, generally speaking, about engagement with your stakeholders, but for us a really important part is at the beginning. When I was just getting started, I thought it was more about making sure that they were following my research. But it’s really bringing them in as part of the problem definition. That really is where everything starts, and you build from there.

I would say that.

Henrik Mattsson · 38:32
I love it. Thanks. Jeremy, no pressure. Last words.

Customers want to help build your product

Jeremy Bailey · 38:36
Okay. I’ll go back to the beginning of my career, like 25 years ago. I worked in market research, as I mentioned, and I remember it was youth market research. And I did trend forecasting for Tropicana orange juice or whatever. But one of the things we would always share with clients back then was that kids these days, and these are now middle-aged adults, really want to talk back to the brands. They want to participate in the creation of your products. And by the way, at that time, this was a radical insight that we were sharing.

And we would build these customer panels, where the teenagers would log in and share their diaries and lives with the CEO at Tropicana. And it would blow their minds every single time: wow, they just want to give, and share, and co-create. And I remember at FreshBooks, when I encountered the same hurdle of the team being like, well, it takes too long to recruit and stuff, I was like, well, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to send an email to all of our customers asking them whether they’d like to talk to us.

And would you believe that 15,000 people said they’d like to talk to us, and that those people were available within 48 hours most of the time? So what I’ve learned over and over and over again is that your customer actually wants to participate in creating a better product. It benefits them, right? And I think a lot of teams have this assumption that they’re abusing the customer or taking advantage of them, when for 25 years at least, I’ve had the insight that the world generally wants to create something greater together.

And so, yeah, Obama wasn’t wrong. There’s hope.

Henrik Mattsson · 40:26
Yeah. Well, beautiful. I completely agree. I’m going to add my own little tip here, since we’re at it. I had a colleague who told me once: when customers are very upset with the company, that is passion. It generally comes from the fact that they care about you. They care about this product. They care about the experience that they had. And they’re disappointed. And if you can engage with them and make them co-creators, you’re going to get that passion, but the other way around. And it has been true, I think, every single time.

Whenever customer support has a really angry customer, I’m just like, give them to me. I’m going to turn them into co-creators. So, a lot of wisdom, and I love both of those things. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining. It was just fun to have a full team. I wish you all the best of luck with your new collaboration. Just based on this, I think it’s going to be great. So good luck, and have a healthy and nice 2023. Happy researching, everyone.

Jeremy Bailey · 41:42
Yeah, thanks for having us.