The Politics Behind the Data: Navigating Organizational Dynamics as a Researcher

all right that's top of the hour so i think we'll go ahead and get started tyler since i can see your face can you give me the thumbs up if you're hearing me awesome all right welcome everybody uh to the february installment of the accelerant research virtual insights conference um i am your emcee for today bill mcdowell of accelerate research um you joined us last year for some of our virtual conferences welcome back if you're just joining for the first time um thanks what we have here is uh basically a series of uh virtual insights and research comp that we're going to be conducting starting this month and continuing on a monthly basis through the end of the year um we're going to feature you know two to five uh insights experts sharing knowledge talking a little shop and uh you know maybe we can all learn a thing or two um so if you did join any of last year's conferences uh we have rebranded so last year we were the quarantine virtual insights conference uh this year we have dropped the quarantine name out of a sense of optimism hoping that you know at some point this year we'll actually be able to get to a point where a virtual conference is an optional thing and we can sometimes get together and meet in person fingers crossed um but let's go ahead and get started um i'm going to go through forward okay if you have joined us in the past these are not going to be uh anything new to you but we've got some some groundwork rules that we operate by for these virtual conferences uh so we're doing this on zoom we are at the mercy of the tech um it tends to take good care of us so you know knock on wood that we don't have any issues but we might and if we do we are recording everything uh we will be posting all uh webinar videos after the fact in the archives so you know if something craps out from an internet standpoint if somebody kicks a plug out of the wall you know we'll we'll re regroup and circle back so no worries there rule number two be respectful um this is not something that we tend to have an issue with uh but you know the fact that we are virtual the fact that we're not face to face uh there is in some cases that sort of tendency to to troll or to not be as nice to folks as you would be in person um that's not to say that you know we can't challenge that we can't you know push back or or ask hard questions um you know all of our presenters are our researchers for for their careers and guess what we're used to you know having to defend our findings and and you know the things that we that we're sharing so so no worries um but yeah do be respectful uh of one another not just presenters but also you know other folks in the audience which brings us to rule number three um the folks in the audience this is you know obviously not an in-person series of webinars but you know to the extent possible we do invite you to to engage with one another to engage with our presenters um we've got folks that are accessing from lots of different locations we've got a zoom meeting which is i suppose the hub for this but we're also broadcasting on youtube on linkedin facebook twitter uh no no myspace to my knowledge um but you know wherever you're coming in from you know ask questions we're going to be monitoring chat on all these platforms um you know if you do have any comments questions for our speakers feel free to float with them out there um if you're accessing on social you know we ask that you use the uh the hashtag a rvic accelerate research virtual insights conference um that'll just help us keep track of of the questions and and the chatter um let's see as you can probably tell you know we are a research company accelerant research um we're not a an event planning company or a professional uh conference organization so you know what you're gonna experience with these webinars has a little bit of lack of polish to it but that's okay that's kind of the neat factor that we have going for us no what we've got is some really compelling and interesting content we're gonna i'm gonna get out of the way in just a moment and let our speakers go ahead and start doing their thing um but what you know we're starting this month and we're gonna keep on for the next few uh we should have some really really engaging topics some great speakers um so really looking forward to it um just quick overview of who we have today uh like i said for these monthly conferences we're gonna target about two to five webinars we're gonna you know we're gonna dip a toe in for this month and start you all fairly slow uh we've got tyler mangum who's going to start us off first and he's going to be followed by jason jacobs uh we'll get started in just a minute did want to give you a sneak preview of we've already got you know save the date for for next month which would be thursday march 25th go and mark your calendars um we've already got some really strong researchers already starting to to take shape and and more to come but without further ado i'm going to go ahead and step aside i'm going to let tyler mangum uh principal user researcher at oracle get us rolling with his uh talk which i think is going to be very compelling um the politics behind the data just an aside for you know the theme that seems to be taking shape for it for today is you know the the research stuff that they don't teach you in school um this is the the on the job uh training that you that you have to get once you once you get in here and hopefully with with tyler's presentation and with jason's to follow um you know we'll make make your lives a little bit easier along those lines so that's it for me i'm gonna step aside let tyler do his thing and i will circle back in a bit to lead some q a tyler awesome thank you bill i'm going to start sharing my screen here we go you should see some mountains now and now the duck uh so thanks for the the quick introduction and overview and today i'm gonna be speaking about uh politics behind the data or really the political aspect of what research and what our role is and i chose this topic because i've seen it obviously across within my role but across industries um and really just in life in general but i haven't quite seen a book um it's not something that like bill said you learn in school and i didn't even go to school for user research so i certainly didn't learn it there but it is something you see day to day and i i personally feel that this really can elevate a researcher from you know good to great and really change kind of the level of influence you have so we'll get right into it but before i do i'll just give you a quick introduction about myself here's me drinking coffee which i love but uh my my career path to get here is very non-traditional for a researcher my background's actually in physiology and sports science my career started actually with the seattle seahawks where i worked in the sports science department quantifying player health and working with athletes to try to get them back back to normal essentially which in football is a tough task to do ultimately i switched over to the product side and the research uh where i worked at microsoft predominantly on the xbox one x i'm on the platform worked at expedia for a couple years and i currently sit at oracle where i am a principal user researcher and i predominantly cover the website oracle.com and brand uh which is kind of you can think of it how we visually represent ourselves um but that's that's my current role and as i get into this talk um i just wanted to kind of i guess speak to what i hear researchers often described as and that is that we are empathetic we are data driven we are the voice of the customer we're unbiased and we're the source of reason i've heard these things about research and i am not one to argue against any of them or why these things are important um specifically you know data-driven i i personally think that you know our our decisions should have data behind them that's my career but i am here to tell you that that none of these things will matter or do matter if you can't also navigate the soft political elements of your role as well and to give you kind of an overview or more of an example i want to tell you the story of my first project at oracle and obviously this is going to be redacted for non-disclosed information and it's not actually the research topic and but it's the general overview um so when i started oracle i was given a question and this this wasn't the question but let's just imagine it was i was asked well how does oracle communicate who we are again not not the real thing but it was a large generative question and i got to oracle and i was like man i don't even really know what oracle does uh that's probably something i should learn first but ultimately you know when you get such a large generative question and you have to start piecing things together you start thinking about your methods you start thinking about like well okay let's start getting a foundation and so you know with my physiology background with my research background i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna do the research i'm gonna put on my science hat and i'm gonna go out and do it so you know i put my science hat on i was like okay got this do a card sort do some interviews look at different audiences start to kind of balance left and right get all elements you know do like foundational scientific research and this is one of my favorite researchers here so i thought i'd throw her in but um ultimately you know i got this answer from where we're going where we've been where we're going what we can do and after about two months it was a really extensive project as a question like this was um you know this was me after about two months i was like okay chin up i've got this i'm going to tell everyone like my findings and it was you know exceptionally data-driven it was objective and i came in fresh and new with a new perspective on kind of what oracle can be but in the background a little bit of reshuffling going on it was actually kind of more like a lot of reshuffling uh you know a little bit of vp changes the person who requested this project is actually getting moved to a different role but that's okay i mean the data is the data right it's just ultimately something that can speak for itself so i made the decision i said well okay i'm still going to share it it's really good data and it's you know very objective you could argue points and there are flaws of course but ultimately it should be shared so i went to the vps and i said okay here's here's where we've been and here's where we can go and the vp got this data and it was you know mixed results for positive and negative things that we've done in the past and she's like no no no larry ellison who's our owner he decides this he he makes this decision and i was like okay uh and she's like well if you want to tell larry ellison that what he's been doing for 40 years is you know either wrong or or different from what our intended goal is like you can but i would not recommend that and i was like oh um well so so my mood changed a little bit i was here you know i was like well this project uh lost its sponsor it lost the political aspect um and i kind of like you know sat on it and it has since been resurfaced but at the same time you know for months it was it was very much kind of a moot point and that's was interesting because you know this was me i was i was all of these things but the projects and the delivery and the political element it didn't land and it's really key to acknowledge those steps and the flaws and today i'll be speaking to the key takeaways that i'd like for all of us as researchers or even those who work with researchers to understand to navigate the elements that that's not just being data driven that's not being unbiased or empathetic it's much more than that and with these kind of takeaways my hope is that we come together to kind of deliver or make the most impact obviously that we can given the political element of our job which is not just saying the results but being strategic in the ways that you do and embedding within teams as you go so to start the the first foundational problem that i ran into with this project and likewise within many any industry any role that you'll face is that we need to understand how decisions are made that's within your company and within specific projects as well but in the example i just gave you know there was a higher level decision that was made that i didn't quite understand the relationship and each company looks quite different each role and each research role and each project you work on has different levels of involvement and different levels of takeaways that you'll probably see but you you as a researcher or those who work with research do need to understand you may see something straight out of a ux textbook like the you know classic double diamond approach where you you actually do research and you use these findings to define what you're you know making in the design and it circles back and it's iterative or it's agile or whatever you want to call it with a fancy business term and you go forth and you make a solution that's pretty you know textbook oftentimes it could be a smidge more complicated this is not terribly different of a diagram that that we work with um when a decision is made and or your owner could be directly involved in this and that's okay too there's going to be projects in which you know it could be hilarious and deciding and that's where it's at or it could be ones that you have a much more traditional ux approach but it's incredibly important to understand this because understanding these politics of how a decisions made helps you understand how to best integrate your research and ultimately approach a problem in the way that you're capable of kind of optimizing for so to do this it really starts with internal research it starts with being a scientist but within your own stakeholders or within your own teams and within really kind of all elements of kind of who you work with you need to understand how decisions are made how practices overlap how different teams design and pair together who's involved ultimately and knowing this that really is politics that is understanding who to go to and when and where and why and who has influence and that's really key so i'm a firm believer of setting aside on your first rules or even if you have not done this yet uh you know within the first week two weeks even month of your practice um is learning how a decision is made prior to i mean maybe in combination with how it uh how to do the research the actual work part but this is really important to interview your own team members just so that you understand kind of what their problems are at and their relationships with others and when i first started working as a professional researcher i suppose at microsoft one of the first people i worked with gave me a metaphor uh to understand and i'm going to kind of stick with this metaphor for a little bit so hopefully this makes sense but he said that relationships and products and i specifically worked on a product at the time but it's kind of like a flower so i know that seems weird roll with me for just a little bit but at the center of a flower or a piece that kind of connects all the petals is usually a product manager and a product manager's role is ultimately to connect different practices to traditionally kind of help along with whatever the product is so you can think of the whole flower as a product and within this you have pedals and pedals are your different practices and obviously there's some overlap you have research you have design traditionally these are thought of as your closest partners you have data science dev marketing finance whomever but all of you come together to create whatever you're helping create and ultimately each company has a different structure it doesn't traditionally look like this and it's not even different companies but different teams within the same company could look wildly different there could be a much more simple structure or complex and each petal might represent a different thing in terms of how a relationship is made but ultimately we need to understand how these overlap traditionally like i said research and design are thought of as the closest partners but and that might be the case you know we often do design research where we actually just test the design and when we evaluate it we give the results back to design but it it's much more complicated than that in my opinion it's certainly where product and pms can play a very central and integral role to helping connect the dots for other practices and understanding these relationships really gets you a solid foundation of kind of how to navigate um who to deliver results to and why and it's ultimately important not only to understand how these relationships work it's important to understand what defines success for each practice uh does everyone align to the same success and how does that relate to your business and i know some companies have different success metrics for different things so for example i won't name which company but i know a very big one that defines success for engineering as the amount of things that they put you know they put forth in the world and so that really incentivizes just getting things out it doesn't necessarily mean that getting perfect things out it doesn't necessarily mean uh doing your in-depth research but ultimately once you understand the relationships and what defines the success of the role you can start to understand how your how you can best help those who you work with so understanding what makes success of these different branches and different teams is critical because then you can understand how to integrate within those decisions and ultimately the politics of kind of how you're working and what i like to say with this data that we provide is that we traditionally you know once we have data we obviously have directional data of well we have a desired outcome or at least we have you know recommendations we get this these results and we say how or potentially how to make it better so we we try to connect it but ultimately our goal and how i think we can be the most impactful is understand everyone's relationships to this desired outcome so how does data affect you can think of these as different practices maybe engineering or design or whoever how does data affect these roles and ultimately how does it come together and this is why understanding how decisions are made matters it's really because it's important so that you can understand what makes everyone successful so that you can embed and ultimately help them as much as possible that's being much softer in the skill but comes from that foundation of understanding the relationships and what defines success for them and your business that you work with now sometimes you may look at the process and it doesn't doesn't quite look right maybe it to in your perspective it looks a little bit more like this so i'm sticking with the metaphor so we're still rolling with it and you might at any level whether you're the owner or partner whether you're an ic1 just starting you might recognize hey maybe this isn't the smoothest process maybe maybe i see that you know people are looking over and honestly everyone has a different perspective a new vp can come in and say let's let's shake it up or you could start to you know build out your own practice as the first researcher at your company and you need to kind of help shape and change it it's really important to note that you don't need to do this on your own everyone wants maybe a healthier flower in this sense maybe everyone recognizes that it's broken but we can go about doing this in a very savvy and political way in that sense so changing a process is incredibly difficult it takes obviously time connections and ultimately experience in which you know if this is your first role and you're just starting as a researcher it's very difficult to say i know what the ideal situation is and ultimately you know this being my third professional role i've seen what's worked well at other companies and i'm not going to lie it's very helpful to understand what has worked and has not worked in the past but ultimately the goal is to help you know maybe shape this a little bit more so checking talking a little bit about the the techniques to change a process or at least be a part of the process to help make your role a little bit easier um the first is to understand obviously the perspectives and needs as i was speaking to but this integration is key and integrating in a team is no small undertaking traditionally research is thought as either two one of two models an embedded model or a service model a service model is where you get a request and then you go out and do the request and then you give the results and that's kind of the end and you go to your next service that is much harder that's to integrate in the team because by design you're you're not part of them you're acting as a service but embedding and integrating and understanding those steps is really the first step in in a sense to kind of understand these processes and understand these perspectives and understand the relationship so that you can identify when to help so that's that's really the first step in my opinion the other thing we can do is research is to show the value of your work you don't always need to just say i can do this or i think it would be important to add a study or to get data you know you might get pushback on timing and it's important to obviously not block these people as much as you can maybe sometimes it's necessary but showing the value of of why research is important and ultimately relating it back to the success of the business is one of the most key elements to help integrate and change a process so that relationship back to the team and in the team individual goals and business goals is very difficult to do but if you can successfully if you can share and show that your insights helped the business then you've obviously secured your role pretty foundationally but you'll get more and more requests you'll get more and more integration and you'll get a better understanding of from others into how to leverage kind of what you do and who you work with there are some key things to to avoid when trying to start up this this rehydration or this you know evaluation this change of the process and the first major hindrance i should say or major stumble that i've seen and i'll give you a quick story from this is to try to convince a team of their needs without explaining why we're understanding the process and i'll give you a story from a very technical company from a friend of mine who's a technical pm and they had one researcher on the team and he was building a very technical thing very back end system and she asked him uh she is she the researcher asked him the technical pm have you thought about the user experience and his response and he told me about this because you know i'm a researcher and he's working with her for the first time said it doesn't matter like why you know she did she the researcher went forth and tried to uh you know not explain why this either could matter or how this could help but she ultimately also didn't understand the way that these people made decisions and this is very risky to do because you might end up alienating yourself where you might be perceived as an extra step you might be perceived as this person who doesn't understand how i make a decision so why should i leverage what you have to say so it's really critical to not say hey you need research here it's much more important to understand the decision process and understand how you can fit in in that sense prior to setting sail on your own um and that that brings me to my next point of like this is not research is not the centralized point it can help guide the points but ultimately it's it's really not the way in which we uh work we are partners we are helpful we do not you know direct or we can but um it's traditionally a team and to my firm perspective that we integrate as a team or we work together as a team and that's being very savvy about how you do it so these you know setting sail on your own you can obviously do the research on your own but i'm just saying i'm just gonna do this and not explaining or not getting buy-in is can be a pretty big mess so once you've integrated understanding within the process you can ultimately start building a map and you can ultimately say okay well if you're going to make these kind of decisions here's where i can help and you can adjust to the timelines there's going to be times when it that's not possible sometimes you know this turnaround times a day and a half and it's it's just something that's not scalable but ultimately you can start building these relationships of yes no's x y z's kind of like saying okay at this time here's the kind of work that i can do and then people that you work with might have a very good understanding of how to leverage data and how to be crafty about it as well and that's the key takeaway ultimately you can build something fun like a gantt chart this is very similar to things that some people on my team do it's starting to i'm not sure if you can all see this it might be a little small but you can actually block out time for being research and this just getting on a timeline and a map prior to a product getting out um is a pretty big step in my opinion and to do so to get to this point to have them understand where they can leverage this and why is many months of work and trust in understanding the process and embedding as well it's not it's not just they say okay you need research it's much more than that so understanding the process really allows you to identify when you're needed and being reactive it's so next level research is not really answering the questions that you're asked obviously you need to do that as well but that's that's what's called being reactive and that's reactive research in that sense but ultimately being proactive or identifying questions um identifying when you're needed independent of the ask you know you still may be asked things um that's really taking that next level leap and understanding that process throughout and that that really allows you to be the most effective as possible ultimately you will need to do work you'll need to do your research and this this talk is not about methods i'm not really a methods expert so i'm just going to say do solid work uh we'll get on to the more fun parts after that but it's to really be sound and be confident as you do it you're the experts you do what you do you'll you know i'll skip this slide or i'll skip this section just because there's other methods experts i'm sure on this call the next key takeaway is that we need to take so we've done the research now we need to scale and adapt to our audiences and each audience may look slightly different you could have something like this with your product team you could have a research team meeting where it's just researchers you could have different levels of involvement from different executives maybe some people are missing but the key thing you need to do and ask yourself is what does my audience need to take away from this report this is key this is being strategic in a different way you've already done the work and it's really key to also set the stage appropriately for whomever the audience that you're working with is so i skip head but set the stage and i'll give you a quick example and if anyone on this call knows me very well you'll know i'm a huge portland trailblazers fan so i'm gonna gonna roll with another kind of good example so not all presentations and recommendations need to be the same across all audiences so to highlight this i'll give you a quick example of some data and i'll give you a bit of context as well first of all damien lillard dame is a professional basketball player for the portland trailblazers uh shooting from beyond the arc which is this line here it's a kind of slang it gets you three points instead of two points if you shoot within here and square the bucket and when you're playing basketball you can take a shot two different ways you can catch and shoot so someone passes it to you and you shoot it right away or you can go off the dribble meaning you create the space yourself it's more difficult to do and dame last night who also hit the game winner just saying uh with six for eight from the catch and shoot sorry from the being off the dribble the league average is 34 is very impressive and i'm telling you this story because i assume most here are not familiar at least to this level of depth with the nba in general and i'm giving you a lot of context but if you're someone like i think someone on this call named jared who might be in the audience and i were just chatting i would say something much more like well dame went six from eight from beyond the ark with all attempts being off the dribble that's my whole slide it's the same data it's just different context it's the same story but a different way to say it and that's because it i'm actually just recognizing and being crafty and political in the ways that i'm presenting my story you do not need to tell everyone the same thing in the same way and you can actually take your data from your reports and shift them and shape them in a very savvy way so you can deliver the most impact and it all comes back to the question of asking what does my audience need to take away and there are things you can change within the same data to adapt to your audience and just one last shout out to dame he's very he should be the mvp this year but uh variables you can change from your audience and adapt include context tone details delivery and relevance to the partners that you're working with and all of these things really depend on who you're presenting to but in specific in team meetings you know i can see uh i've seen those who don't give enough context because you know i'm not part of a product team i need a little bit more you know a little bit more background as i gave you with that story about damian lillard or uh maybe a different you know tone might be applied i could be a bit more formal when i speak to an exec but when i'm talking to my product teams i could really just like you know just talk the real talk i suppose and everything really matters at the right level of relevancy to the partners that you're working with so scaling and adapting different ways and ultimately the main thing that you can do as a researcher is say what you need to say and this is something that i've actually adapted as i've grown in my career i'll give you two examples of the insights that i you know used to write but or examples in general which is you know at microsoft i would say something like you know three out of six we're unable to discover a button and you know i know low end usability issue 50 reflects the population blah blah blah um not just that three out of six doesn't sound too bad but now when i write an insight when i'm at oracle i just say this is a problem it is both both pieces of information are saying that it's a problem but one's being a bit smarter in a way at delivering it and one's being a bit more impactful in an ideal way um that can be relatable and that's that's more of a politics soft side that's much more of an interesting tidbit of information that can be really impactful and that will influence um how you work in general or how your work lands i should say and one of the final takeaways that i see or often see a big miss from researchers is that we fail to empathize with our stakeholders we fail to understand their perspectives and we traditionally are really good scientists i keep bringing this up we're very data driven many of us are extremely introverted like myself i love you know just being in my own reclusive bubble but ultimately we don't understand the perspectives of where our stakeholders are coming from and that's key as well it's not just understanding their perspectives you know we always empathize and are very careful with the way we phrase our questions to our customers we try to not lead but we should do the same when we work with our partners as well and ultimately i think bill brought this up at the very beginning of this talk was that you may get pushback we get lots of pushback with our results and you know anyone who wants to push back on any of these points feel free to bring them up that's part of my job and you might get questions like can you really know that well people do analytics say people do click on this uh when i used to work we in this we did these kinds of studies like my favorite ones like i don't think this is true i've got no i've gotten all of these probably within the last week or two uh they're pretty common but ultimately my perspective that political aspect is to not uh push back immediately and not say well actually you know nielsen norman describes three out of eight being as a significant issue and i'm pretty confident because i'm the method expert that is a big miss in my my humble opinion it's uh there's softer political ways to navigate this that i think there we should all start with as a foundation prior or at least once we get this kind of pushback and the first thing that i like to do is take a group first mentality it's to take a step back and generally we all have the same goals that we align to we're all in this together you might in your career get one person who's just maybe not but it's very uncommon and everyone has individual success this relates back to the first point of understanding what success is but we have the same goals and generally they're not your partners are not out to get you if you get pushed back and saying i'm not sure that this is true or like you didn't use enough people it's not a personal attack on you it's just you know perhaps a temporary disagreement so first we understand our partner's perspectives and that's that's fairly key and when i get pushback or when we do research in general there's really two kinds of mindsets that you can approach with and this is actually a takeaway that a business each term that i took away from microsoft that really did land which was approaching a mindset from a fixed mindset which is not what i'm recommending um or a growth mindset a fixed mindset is one where you only do things one way and that it's the right way or a growth mindset is seeing the problem as a challenge and an opportunity to learn more and a growth mindset like research there are not easy simple answers to get or simple methods to get like the answer there's usually a variety of ways you can come about approaching the problem and likewise working with with stakeholders and you know ultimately when i even when i interview candidates i ask exceptionally hard questions with no correct answers and that's the majority of tech interviews in general but one of the main evaluative tasks for me is to understand can this person that i'm interviewing or speaking to understand you know multiple approaches can they take it from a perspective of maybe they're not the only right there's not a single right way to do things and you know that's a good foundational question because i think this is really key for researchers to approach a problem or perspective in multiple ways and that can help really elevate your research as well so when i do get pushback or even before i do there's a couple techniques i like to use uh when staying empathetic with my stakeholders and the first is that i like to predict the questions especially if i think that there's a sample size problem um or at least that i could foresee that others might think that there's a sample size problem i like to address those before and so i i love calling out flaws and biases of my own work in fact i use this technique at the start of this talk um i showed you an example of when my research didn't land when i wasn't political and that is really key because it helps instill trust of like oh i understand that you know you recognize that there's more points to this that there's more elements that you can actually navigate or that you know your research isn't a single truth and maybe it's part of the same you know coin there's multiple elements um and if you recognize that then i then i as a stakeholder understand really what's important uh what what the take away that you're trying to drive is and that's pretty key also staying flexible uh is really key as well and not saying that your results or your research is the foundation i mean it very well might be uh but that flexibility and mentality is really key as well and then keep everything in the picture this i keep bringing up this point of how it helps others or partners is really drives that empathy because then you understand what their success is and you relate it back into ultimately helping and that's that's very crafty that's very you know it's not just saying that there's a problem but saying there's a problem and how it helps the people that you're working with is exceptional ultimately there's going to be disagreements and one of my favorite techniques to use is just saying you know that's a great question and i'll circle back with you offline um if all else fails i you know like i had an svp say uh essentially it was a usability study that i did and she's like well it would have been better with 50 participants and most people in this call know six is fine uh and i said great i'll circle back with you on that but uh let's just keep moving on and that person was like okay that's fine uh but ultimately we didn't quite circle back on it i mean the results really landed and we changed the products that i was working on with the people that the results that were shown um but if there is a very big pushback don't elevate this in a meeting you can always circle back if all else fails one thing i took away from my last manager some a term that he used uh which actually really kind of resonated with me was to sail up celebrate that you have find found something you know maybe incorrect or you found a problem in your own products or your own work and by celebrating and saying like this is a good thing it helps change the perspectives of those that you're working with as well because ultimately people engineers marketers designers are are making things and you are effectively maybe not directly but effectively tearing it apart helping people other people be judgmental on it and that can be really harsh to hear but instead and many you know most that i work with you know don't take personal offense but some might that their hard work isn't understood uh it's not approaching it in that way of saying well that was bad it's saying it's a good thing we found this and that's really a change in mentality and it's just the way you deliver an insight as well and the last uh point in this section or second to last is to establish trust and this is this is a real this entire talk could be on this point so i'm not going to go into how to establish trust but ultimately it comes with time it comes with quality work it comes with relationships and it comes with the demonstration of impact and this is a very common interview question as well is how do you establish trust there's no right answer this again this whole talk could be on this lastly with empathy and this is a surprisingly big mess that i see in many researchers amongst their careers is that we in general need to be kind we it can only serve you for the better and this just doesn't go with your delivery of your insights but just in life in general one of my first mentors i'm not sure if he's on this call right now but he was you know principal at microsoft at the time i was working just starting my career as a contract and i reached out and he was one of the very few people to say let's grab a coffee let's sit down let's just chat and i you know from that we made a lifelong kind of connection and i still seek to him for mentorship um but ultimately when a in a practice that i use today with my stakeholders with my pms with design it's not just asking about the products that they're working on it's making sure that they're doing okay as you know as 2020 and 2021 has brought us it's making sure that you're connecting on a different level because that helps establish trust as well ultimately the the last kind of in summary and making sure i'm good on time i think i really am it's to apply these you know not just in research but in life and beyond and i've seen this everywhere i've gone in different elements of uh you know academia in my many weird professional careers but politics and levels of influence really kind of reign supreme and kind of how everything works and integrates as your jobs and as your functions even understanding how a decision is made amongst your professors really helps you understand what to deliver to them likewise in any role that i've worked in it helps you kind of build this process as you go so these standards i've really seen across industries this kind of like the main takeaways from this were to understand the key needs of those who you're working with understand how decisions are made do good works pretty important um you know don't don't just make things up although i have seen that um but you know probably don't do that um establish trust adapt to your audience and of course uh my favorite is to be kind be inclusive uh be the person that you obviously uh want to work with and it's that that last point will speak more to politics than really anything else that i've said or in as much as anything else that i've said so those are really kind of the softer skills the overall summary of kind of what i've navigated through my career and it's something again that i just don't see us talk very much about can really help influence those we work with um so at this point i think that was i actually know that was my last slide and i wanted to make sure that if we have time for questions obviously none of this is rooted in anything else but my experience and those that i've worked with and seen so i'm happy to follow up with questions happy to just open up a conversation floor uh to talk about what's well or what's not worked well in the past but ultimately i really think that these can help um influence kind of how you can do your job and how you can be the best person you can be and that i think was my last night so i that's all i got all right very nice tyler um anybody has questions for for tyler feel free to submit them now we have had a couple of comments that have come in as you were talking uh first one was from kim and it's i love this analogy especially especially as a cavs fan perfect way to share stories for your audience um yeah i hate you all both cats and blazers you have rings i'm a charlotte hornets fan and i'll i'll never know what it's like the blazers were in the early 70s i can hardly count that as a ring it still counts as opposed all right we've got a question from priya which is uh how do you keep yourself accountable cool that's a tough question um i think all of these all of these principles come with a level of introspection all of these uh you know being kind or recognizing your own biases really just uh you have to keep yourself in check in that sense of kind of continuously asking yourself are you you know recognizing that you are uh maybe not understanding how a decision is made maybe not understanding this process um but ultimately my favorite technique to to keep myself accountable is trying to predict my own biases trying to predict where my flaws are at and what my research is not delivering it's i to use an analogy in chess you really have to predict not what you're trying to do but what others are trying to do and so that recognition of what others are doing or how they're kind of behaving in that sense that's really more more important than what you're trying to deliver because it's not just you you know taking an attack or in chess you kind of moving forward it's what others are doing as well so it's really trying to recognize what others are doing um or how they're behaving or what questions they're bringing up or what challenges they're bringing and that keeps myself really grounded and keeps my research grounded as well as delivering those insights that matter um so just just not keeping scope on myself keeps myself accountable in that sense i hope that makes sense nice um let's see we also had a comment from catherine um on techniques excuse me for a changing process i'd add shake hands and kiss babies which i love um to explain you know maybe maybe not this year well yeah and blow kisses to babies i don't know um i work in a complicated environment with a lot of business stakeholders without a direct connection to specific research projects research is a final addition to the product design process here so i use these encounters to share a peek behind the curtain and treat everyone in the business as a future stakeholder really help extend our reach into some great strategy conversations that's great yeah i mean that that ultimately comes but down to you know every to extend the metaphor that every flower and every decision and the pedal is different amongst different companies and agencies if you're working in an agency it might be a much more simple and less political structure in the sense of kind of who you're working with and what the delivery and the ask is it could be that you're you know you're only working with the clients and they they demand things and that's a much different way to approach it and a much more binding way i suppose than working at a big in-house like oracle uh but you know hearing just just what you're doing is you know the right steps is what else can you do with that sense but it's very it's it's different amongst companies and a lot of different challenges and i personally i really loved your your commentary around you know be empathetic be kind understand the your stakeholders that you're working with internally i've always found it amazing that as professional listeners we often suck at listening to the folks around us um you know especially you know you can't always control the news that you're given in your research and sometimes you're delivering bad news but understanding you know who you're delivering it to um what they're up against you know if they pour their heart and soul into something you do want to have an understanding of that right absolutely all right let's see last check to see if any other questions have come through don't see anything so i think we've got about five minutes left before the next presentation so perfect it's good give everyone an opportunity to grab a coffee or hit the restroom we will go dark for a few minutes and then return at the top of the hour tyler thanks so much this was great awesome thank you all for attending