Rosenfeld Review Podcast

But Do Your Insights Scale? with Katy Mogal

When stakeholders have access to real-time data about millions of user interactions, how can qualitative researchers articulate the value of small-sample studies for product and business strategy?
Katy Mogal, UX Research Lead at Google Assistant, joins Lou to offer a preview of the case study she’ll share at Advancing Research 2021 (https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/sessions/but-do-your-insights-scale/), including learnings about how human-centered researchers can effectively collaborate with functions like data science and business strategy, and how to persuade analytically-minded stakeholders to embrace rich qualitative data about people’s needs and motivations as an input to business strategy.
Katy recommends:
• Ideo University’s course “ Insights for Innovation” https://www.ideou.com/products/insights-for-innovation
• Jump Associates’ workshop on how to move from data to insights through a synthesis process: https://www.jumpassociates.com/learning-posts/insight-action-making-connection/
Register for AR2021: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/register/
About Katy:
Katy is on a mission to help product teams develop and ship experiences that make people’s lives better, through building and leading research teams that deliver synthesized insights with a strategic point of view. While working in marketing at Warner Bros. in London, Katy became fascinated with the idea of using survey and analytics data to understand and build for human needs. After graduating from the Wharton School she joined strategic consultancy Lieberman Research Worldwide as an account manager, where she led insights-based strategy engagements for clients including Nike, Weight Watchers and Viacom. Later she moved to Cheskin Research, a design and marketing consultancy that was a pioneer in applying ethnographic research to problems of design strategy. Exposure to a wide variety of data types, and experience bringing them together to tell a holistic story of user needs, became a theme that has run through her career in research and insights. She went on to build and lead UX and Design research teams at Fitbit, Facebook and most recently at Google, where she currently leads research teams on Google Assistant. Katy’s current focus is on developing the research function as a strategic partner to UX, Product Management and Engineering, and as a force for culture change in product organizations. Her side hustles include teaching product design and design research courses at Stanford Continuing Studies and California College of the Arts, and frequent speaking engagements at conferences such as UX Week, UX Lisbon, FlUXible and People Nerds. In her spare time Katy enjoys throwing weights around at the CrossFit gym in San Francisco’s Mission District, where she lives with her husband, son and two rescue dogs.

Promise Theory with Jeff Sussna

Lou and Jeff Sussna, author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy, examine the relationships between Design and Operations, DevOps and DesignOps, and DevOps and Agile before wending their way to promise theory, which looks at the “promise” made between a product and its user. Color Lou convinced on the promise of product promises!
• Watch Jeff’s presentation at the 2017 DesignOps Summit: https://youtu.be/uWZxsul8Rek
• Read Jeff’s book, Designing Delivery: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-delivery/9781491903742/
• Listen to Jeff on a previous episode of the Rosenfeld Review, DesignOps in a Post-Industrial World: Crash-Coursing Complex Systems: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designops-community/archive/designops-jeff-sussna/
• Jeff recommends: Mark Burgess’ Thinking In Promises: http://markburgess.org/TIpromises.html
Jeff is Founder and CEO of Sussna Associates, a Minneapolis consulting firm. Sussna Associates helps software teams and executives meet the demand for continuous service delivery.
More about Jeff: https://www.sussna-associates.com/about#jeff
Twitter: @jeffsussna
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsussna/

User Science: Product Analytics & User Research with Marieke McCloskey

Want to help make better product decisions? You’ve got to combine qualitative human insights from user research with data analytics and experimentation. Questions about how many users do something goes to analytics, questions about which design might work better goes to user research. But what if you partnered with those other teams to answer the questions together? In her session at Advancing Research 2021, Marieke McCloskey, UX Research Lead at Humu, will share how, as a qualitative UX researcher, she’s partnered with analysts to identify high-growth opportunities and gain a deeper understanding of users.
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Marieke offers a glimpse into her presentation, and what led her to the insights she will share at the conference.
• Marieke recommends: No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
• Follow the authors: https://twitter.com/lizandmollie
• Attend Advancing Research 2021
https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/register/
• About Marieke
https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/speakers/marieke-mccloskey/

How Creativity can Help Remote Teams Collaborate with Denise Jacobs

We’re bringing Creativity Evangelist Denise Jacobs to our virtual workshop lineup this year! Here, she chats with Lou about how the current era of “doom-scrolling” means it’s more important than ever to unlock our creative minds and make meaningful connections.
One challenge of working remotely is the loss of a sense of personal connection. Having tools that allow you to collaborate in a virtual environment and overcome isolation is a way to expand the collective creativity of the whole team.
Her workshop (https://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-ux-workshops/master-creative-collaboration-and-communication/) is an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, skill set, and be inspired by creativity and collaboration using new and different tools to figure out how to add extra life to the work-from-home environment.
Denise’s three day workshop this February (10 hours over 3 segments: February 2-4, 2021) will focus on leveraging collective brilliance, becoming confident in sharing your ideas, and learning to be an excellent listener. Next comes “the fun part” — how to use improvisation to make collaboration feel like a game, and not like work.
Denise Recommends:
° Restore Yourself by Edy Greenblatt https://www.amazon.com/Restore-Yourself-Antidote-Professional-Exhaustion/dp/0981929915
° Around the Writer’s Block by Rosanne Bane https://www.amazon.com/Around-Writers-Block-Science-Resistance-ebook/dp/B0085DP1LM
About Denise
Denise Jacobs is a Speaker + Author + Creativity Evangelist who speaks at conferences and consults with companies worldwide. As the Founder + CEO of The Creative Dose, keynote speaker, and trainer, she helps individuals in companies unleash their creativity through banishing their inner critic and hacking their creative brains. Denise’s keynotes and trainings give A Creative Dose™ – an injection of inspiration and immediately applicable tools to help people do their best work. Through working with Denise, people become engaged contributors, synergistic collaborators, and authentic leaders. Denise is the author of Banish Your Inner Critic, the premier handbook on silencing fears to unleash creativity. A web and tech industry veteran, Denise is also the author of The CSS Detective Guide and co-author of the Smashing Book #3 1/3 and Interact with Web Standards. She is also the founder of Rawk The Web and the Head Instigator of The Creativity (R)Evolution.

Research as a Vehicle for Organizational Transformation with Natalie Hanson

After abandoning the world of academia, Natalie Hanson found an innovative way to connect with other ethnographers: she founded a new community (Anthrodesign)!. This year, she brings her community-organizing talents to the second Advancing Research conference as Lead Curator. She joins Lou to share her own story and the story of the conference, offering a sneak peek into what we’ll cover — and what the conference might look like five years in the future.
Join anthrodesign: https://anthrodesign.com/
Follow Natalie on Twitter (@ndhanthro) and Instagram (@faeriewigs)
Learn more about the Advancing Research conference this March 10-12 and get your tickets: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/program/#tab=day-1&type=conference-session
About Natalie
Natalie Hanson has been working and researching at the intersection of business strategy, technology, social science, and design for fifteen years.She is currently a Principal at ZS, where she leads the User Experience practice. The UX team at ZS engages in research and human-centered design for enterprise software and custom client solutions. As an anthropologist, Natalie’s research has focused on work practices and work environments. She has a special interest in how institutions respond and transform in response to macro-economic, industry, and regional trends, and how the resulting organizational changes affect the lives of employees. You can learn more about Natalie at http://www.nataliehanson.com, and more about the online community of ethnographers she manages at http://www.anthrodesign.com.

Scaling a Design Team Across the World with Wendy Johansson

What’s it like to build out a design organization that spans many countries, languages, and culture? Wizeline co-founder Wendy Johansson discusses the insights she gleaned when opening a second Wizeline office in Guadalajara, then a third and fourth in Vietnam and Thailand. From different societal norms to language barriers, her story can inform your own ways of collaboration with new people and cultures, whether abroad or just within your own team.
Wendy recommends:
• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Map-Breaking-Invisible-Boundaries/dp/1610392507
• David Hoang’s Career Hype Doc https://davidhoang.substack.com/p/your-career-hype-doc
Follow Wendy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/uxwendy
Wendy is our next DesignOps Community videoconference guest, January 21, 4pm-5pm EST: “Designing a Design Team Culture When You're Decentralized at a Consultancy.” Join the community for an invitation: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designops-community/

The Humanity of Technology: Furthering the Greater Good with Jamika Burge

Though trained as a computer scientist, Jamika Burge admits she does not have the heart of a programmer; rather, she’s interested in surfacing and connecting with the humanity of the technology we create. Jamika has taken that approach in her past work, including a stint at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), where she studied the impact of games on learning. Jamika now leads AI Design Insights at CapitalOne, and is also one of the Advancing Research 2021 Conference curators. Here she shares the story of her career path, and the work she is doing with blackcomputeHER.org (pronounced ‘black computer’), an organization she co-founded that is dedicated to supporting computation and design workforce development for black women and girls.
Jamika Recommends:
Gendershades.org, a project by Joy Buolamwini, Lead Author and Timnit Gebru, PhD, Co-Author
Keep up with Jamika:
JamikaBurge.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JDBurge
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j.jurious/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamika/
More about AR2021: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2021/

Discussing Design Education with SVA’s Allan Chochinov

Allan Chochinov, Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, joins Lou to discuss how his program approaches the education of new designers—from the belief that grades can hamper creativity and risk taking, to the need for his students to learn the art of careful listening. After eight graduating classes, Allan offers surprises and insights about different career trajectories for design students, and clear evidence that career paths are often non-traditional.
Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995.
More about Allan: https://www.allanchochinov.com/
Allan Recommends:
•Girls Garage by Emily Pilloton https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44601186-girls-garage?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ghIzeV0mbb&rank=1
•Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6260997-half-the-sky
•Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible by Jamer Hunt https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51203318-not-to-scale
•Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff https://rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/
•User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41940285-user-friendly
•By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons by Ralph Caplan https://www.secondsale.com/i/by-design-2nd-edition-why-there-are-no-locks-on-the-bathroom-doors-in-the-hotel-louis-xiv-and-other-object-lessons/9781563673498?gclid=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0KLamLylKCGMu5u7Sz-ZM8lyn8ZgDdugGTwGC7dHJgHBEu_vqp2OL-waAmPQEALw_wcB