Per Axbom
Ambition and power is a professional education programme. It’s directed towards design leaders and UX professionals interested in upping their game through a continuous learning journey that engages you in small chunks every week during your membership. Find out more by visiting uxpodcast.com/empower

Computer voice
UX Podcast episode 292.

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James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden,

Per Axbom
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.

James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson…

Per Axbom
…and Per Axbom

James Royal-Lawson
With listeners in countries and territories all over the world, from Myanmar to Armenia. And joining us today is product person, team leader and music lover, Christian Crumlish. Christian consults on product and UX leadership. Is the author of Product Management for UX People. And he also plays the ukulele.

Per Axbom
And Cristian is also one of the new track leaders on Ambition and Power, running the track aptly named after his book, Product Management for UX People, where you get the opportunity to learn more about applying the product mindset.

James Royal-Lawson
I guess Per, then, we need to know a little more about what product is and the product mindset.

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Per Axbom
Product Management, I think the first time I heard this, to be honest, I was a bit confused by the word product, thinking it was something physical, something tangible. Whereas most people seem to be working with digital services. So my first question really is, what is product management? And why is it called that?

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, I had that experience, too. When I first heard it, I was at Yahoo, and the user experience design team that I was part of was itself inside a product organisation. And I was like, Well, what’s that? You know? Why are these product managers who seem to be in charge of everything? And, you know, Why does every every designer’s org chart terminate in a product person if you go up high enough? And why is it called product? I mean, at Yahoo, actually, they had had a role called producer very, very early on back when there was so sort of a media metaphor on the internet as well, you know, that making web pages or creating content for the web was like, being a producer of a show or something. Yeah, in some ways, except because it was, if you think back to this, like webmaster era, they also made the page, you know, they were actually also frontend developers. So eventually, they created two roles from what used to be the producers at Yahoo. And one was frontend developers, or whatever they call them at the time, and the other were product managers, you know, that’s just in that one company.

And the product management itself has a much longer history. It does obviously come from, as you say, physical objects, industrial processes, you know, mass production. And that’s where a lot of… at least I think that’s where the metaphor of product lands, in a lot of our heads, you know, if we… especially any of us who probably lived before the internet was here. In some ways, I think we’re all leaving out the word digital, you know, we’re really talking about digital product management. So it’s, you know, it’s like virtual products, as opposed to physical products. And because we work in tech, we don’t say that part because it feels redundant, maybe. But that’s part of what’s going on. And I think that there’s all kinds of reasons why product management is in the position that it’s in. But I think part of it is an understanding that even though when you make software, it’s not a physical product that is sort of that you have to tool a factory for, specifically to make. And that once it’s sent out on the trucks, it’s done, you know, like, you know, nothing’s ever done on the web. So you don’t get to ship and then say, well, for good or bad, I’m all done because you find a bug or a problem and you’re patching it and things like that. You can’t patch the box of detergent, once it’s out in the world. You can recall it maybe but so in some ways, it’s a metaphor in some ways, it’s a literal truth.

I mean, when I started asking this question myself about why is it called product or is product even a good metaphor to be using with software? You know, I did a little the basic like looking up the definition kind of stuff that doesn’t hurt to get grounded in and I found that if you look it up, some definitions of product will actually describe it as a product or service. And what it has to do was actually more about the commodification or the ability to sort of package an experience in a way that it’s reliably consistent and valuable for people enough that they choose to buy it or hire it or return to use it again and again. And so valuable that, that engagement with a customer or an adoptee is sufficient to keep the enterprise going. And so the product managers sort of think of that whole sort of lens around what we’re making, in terms of, as opposed to say, making art with the internet or making fun sites, because it’s just your passion or your hobby. If you’re doing it for a living, then a certain commercial mindset or an understanding about how you have to meet the needs of your audience if you want to stay in business. So I think that’s what product management is kind of rooted in.

James Royal-Lawson
I noticed you mentioned a few times there, or you use the phrase product. What do we mean when we say just product? And are we referring to product management? Or is there something else going on?

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, no, that’s also an interesting question. I think I do try to speak to that a little bit in my book. I think I’ll tell you first how I learned to say product, and then I’ll kind of deconstruct it a little bit. So I learned that it sounded cooler to say product than to say product management. You know, if you just start talking about product, and maybe just because when you clip and abbreviate things, it’s a shorthand, and it’s kind of insider knowledge. And so that’s probably a little bit where it comes from. And you’ll see that people… and I think it’s some discomfort with the management part of it… of the name. Because it’s quite misleading, right, because it’s not a people manager job. You could be called… it probably wouldn’t be paid as well… but you could be called a product coordinator, and it would be the same meaning really, you know, of manager. So I think sometimes people allied the manager part because it’s not the interesting part of the name for them. I think it’s also because you sometimes have product organisations, product orgs that have product managers in them, but also have UX designers, or data analysts, or, you know, customer success people, it can be all kinds of different, you know, sort of specialties in a product org. So now you’re starting to say that word product, not just to talk about the product managers, but again, this kind of overarching metaphor that you’re imposing on the whole situation.

James Royal-Lawson
Okay, so like, yeah, that’ll give birth to the phrase, “I work with product”.

Christian Crumlish
Right. Or I’m a product guy, although that’s a kind of gendered way, but a product person is something that people tried to say more now. Or I do product or, you know, like, what do you do? product for the state of California? Like, it’s just shorthand, I guess, really.

Per Axbom
Wow, that’s really interesting. So then really, the challenge for me to understand is why are so many people who are UX designers and calling themselves that and why are they moving so much into this area that we call product?

Christian Crumlish
Right? I think it’s… I’d say my experience and my observations about the larger trends are that it’s an external thing, that I don’t think you have the sort of internally UX, theoretical, kind of or UX trends sort of movement to redefine things as being about product or to shift to a product frame or two. I think that it’s more that product management and the product role, you know, entered the stage from a different area and has predominated in a lot of the… especially the businessy end of the internet. And so I think it’s more that UX people are contending with a world where they’re in a product… they’re being put in a product context, whether they want to be or not. And, what I find actually when I speak to folks and get questions from, you know, the audience and things like that, it’s a little traumatic, there’s pain out there, people are feeling, you know, upstaged or sidelined or put in a box, you know, or it’s the old design thing of like, coming in at the end and make it pretty or do the UX when we’re when we figured it out already. I was just talking to Burn Irizarry today and she was saying that it reminds her of when IA people started to feel uncomfortable about UX, usurping and doing maybe perhaps a watered down version of their craft and mixing it with other things. You could sort of see product doing that too, kind of like cherry picking UX and mixing it with other things. And then if you’re a UX person, you’re like, that’s not real UX even. You know, you shouldn’t be telling me about UX. I’m the UX person and yet you say it’s part of what you do, I don’t get this. There’s a status control kind of thing going on.

James Royal-Lawson
Almost like a predatory thing that product management is eating up UX, like IA was kind of, UX was eating up IA back in the day.

Christian Crumlish
That’s my analogy. Yeah, and I would say I’m a product person now. So I would say that that’s the UX perception and the kind of fear and anxiety. I don’t think that product came in to try to eat UXs lunch or something like that. I think it’s just off on its own track. And it likes UX. It thinks it knows UX, but it doesn’t know it as well as it thinks it does, you know, that kind of thing. But I do think that product management because of its origins, really, I don’t think we want to go through 20th century business history and marketing and all that stuff. But product management has a fairly deep history, in the, you know, in the industrial product market, and, I think that therefore it speaks the language of business. It’s a little bit more familiar to the business leaders. And I think that’s what’s given it a leg up. Designers are either having to translate or evangelise or do something to like, package our value as UX people or as designers, in a way that will be appreciated and compensated and rewarded and included. Product Management is sort of already in the room with the business people to begin with. And I think that that is an advantage, and in a sense, that’s why I switch teams, so to speak. Because I figured I can still I can smuggle all the UX in that I need, real UX, and also learn to talk the business talk.

Christian Crumlish
At the same time, you say that if you move into product management, you can’t really do much design work anymore.

Christian Crumlish
That’s true.

Per Axbom
So you’d have something different?

Christian Crumlish
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a good distinction. Because the UX that I bring to my role as a product manager is not the work of a UX practitioner. I don’t do the craft work. I don’t try to tell the UX designers “Oh, I was a UX designer too. So I’ll tell you how to do it”, or I’ll do some of it. But I might art direct a little bit, you know. I’ll give direction, I will sort of try to help inform the UX, if I give… if I have a critique or if I have some feedback for something about the UX, I’m able to articulate it in a way that UX people understand. So what I bring is UX awareness, UX sensitivity. But I’m not a user researcher. Even in my UX practice, I was not a specialist in research, I worked with researchers usually. So I would say I’m pretty conversant with UX research, I could explain how it works and what it is, but I don’t do it day to day, it’s not my day to day craft.

James Royal-Lawson
Just wondering about the way in which I mean, is product management, as it is now with more, I suppose, UX skills attached to the role. Now I don’t actually know if that’s standard now for product management roles that they do have UX elements to them. But I’m just wondering whether, are we just changing the the old problem a little bit where no one understands us, you know, the UX silo and the IA silo, or whatever it is we’ve been in over the years as designers that we’re, we’re kind of screaming upwards of what the correct solution is, or possible solutions are. And they’re not getting implemented, not getting accepted. So is this a new age where upwards actually does understand UX now enough for us to make a better difference? Or have we just mixed the whole thing around and ended up at the same place?

Christian Crumlish
I think it’s potentially a bridge. I mean, I think that I don’t think I’m keeping it all that secret that I think UX people can make good product managers when they want to do that. And when they’re willing to learn some things that are not UX, that are important for being a product manager. But that’s because I do want more people who’ve really been trained in UX and understand it and don’t just have a superficial, glancing, you know, knowledge of it to be in those roles. I think that that empowers the UX people who stay, who are just fully UX people and don’t want to have to do the product management, the data analysis, the staring at spreadsheets, or, you know, endless JIRA ticket grooming and stuff like that.

James Royal-Lawson
So what are the skills then that UXers should have — understanding rather of product that benefits us?

Christian Crumlish
Well…

James Royal-Lawson
Or the whole product?

Christian Crumlish
Let me try to repeat. So you’re saying what are the UX people bringing to the table for the product? or….

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, what you said about the, you know, these things about product that UXers, you know, should be aware of?

Christian Crumlish
Oh yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
What are those kind of like, you know, coming down from products, what do I need to grab hold of as a UXer and understand?

Christian Crumlish
Sure. Well, I think, you know, one thing to think about is the famous, somewhat oversimplified Martin Erickson diagram that shows you know, three circles with UX or maybe design, and then technology and then business and puts product in the middle. And you can debate this and that’s a whole other podcast probably. But you know, a simple way to look at it is to say that if you come from a UX background, you probably have a big chunk of the UX circle pretty well covered, or at least you’re able to, you know, collaborate on those things. And you therefore probably have some of that business and technology knowledge from those little parts of the overlap, you know, where you you worked with the salesperson, or you understood what your goals, your business goals were. And that helped you inform your design work. Or you negotiated with engineers, and you became conversant enough with the stack to design for it without being constrained by it, but you know, pushing it, that sort of thing where you don’t ask for kooky stuff. But you’re able to push back when the engineer says it’s not possible, and you’re like “Err, I just prototyped it, it’s definitely possible”.

Per Axbom
[laughs]

Christian Crumlish
So it’s really more about those two wings. Going deeper into that and further away from design, you know, not abandoning design, but going into areas that designers traditionally haven’t had to know about. And sometimes temperamentally have not wanted to know, to deal with. There are UX people who already have probably the full range of skills to be a product manager, just because they are fascinated by those things, and they’re, you know, learning about it through working with their adjacent colleagues, or maybe working in a small enough team or a startup where there just isn’t a product manager. So they ended up sort of becoming a product manager and picking up those additional crafts along the way. And that’s partly how I got better at product management was by having to do both jobs at once. Which isn’t a great idea in the long run, but it did force me to learn stuff.

But for instance, like I had mentors who filled in gaps, for me, that definitely made a difference. A big part of it was data analysis being you know, things like understanding growth and retention revenue models, and being able to, you know, instrument the product properly, so that you can figure out whether the goals that you’re shooting for are happening and so that you can analyse, say, the funnels or the user journeys through actually having, you know, legitimate at scale data about what’s happening. I think, as a designer, as a UX person, I didn’t really, I was aware of those things. But it wasn’t something I spent a lot of time working on or thinking about. And I don’t know, a lot of… and when I started doing data analysis as a product manager, we didn’t have a lot of the tools that we that we’ve since developed. So like things like Mixpanel, and Amplitude, or even Google Analytics weren’t there yet, or weren’t in the current form. So I was taught a lot of things to do with spreadsheets, you know, like, like cohort analyses, where you had to pull the numbers down, and then kind of parse through them yourself with formulas and things like that. A lot of this has gotten a little bit more automated, but there’s not a tonne of designers who want to be in spreadsheets all day, you know, that’s, you know, it’s just a style thing, if nothing else. And so, but there are some, you know, like geeks like me, you know, who like, like numbers and don’t mind fiddling around with them, and things like that. So but a lot of it is like understanding business concepts, whether that’s operational, or financial, or market, addressing the market, finding a market sizing a market going to the market, product, market fit.

Those are all things that you might have glancing familiarity with as a UX person, but you probably would need to brush up on them. Or, again, if you’re in a product context, you know, on a product team, and you’re a practising UX, and you don’t want to become a product manager, but you just want to be in the conversation and effective, I think it’s still behoves you to be conversant with those things in the same way that you want to be conversant with your engineer. You shouldn’t have to write the code. But again, you should know kind of the ropes. You should know the basic concepts and how to talk about them. And, frankly, I think, as UX people in general, you know, we’re supposed to be good at empathising with other people, and learning how they think and meeting them where they already are, rather than making them come to us. And I found that you can do that with your product colleagues as well.

Per Axbom
I think this is what I really love about your book, is that you’re being so honest about all the things that makes a good product manager, and especially the things that might feel not something that designers would love to do. For example, spreadsheets, you also mentioned the air table as a tool. And I love that also, because that’s not as intimidating as Excel, I feel. So sometimes there are these it’s true techniques and tricks to get into it. And you mentioned, there’s lots of things that are more automated as well. But there really is this core message as well, that I tend to agree with that in UX design. We don’t get into data the way, that we perhaps say that we do. We are very good at qualitative research, but not getting into the hard numbers and hard facts and figures as much, which are the ones that perhaps affect the bottom line and we can react to sooner.

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, I think actually, that there’s if anything, there’s a posture for very legitimate reasons of championing qualitative data, which is often ignored for for quantitative data. So, you know, a lot of UX people, I think, what they experience is perhaps not very sophisticated sort of metric chasing, that feels like it’s forcing the design or the direction of the product to go its distorting the way things should be. And there’s a concern about that it’s reductive, and it claims to explain why but it’s really just telling you what you know, and things like that. And you really do need to do qualitative research to understand. To test whether your theory or hypothesis of what’s going on, actually bears out. But I think that leads, that ends up kind of swinging the pendulum too far the other way for us in UX sometimes.

Where we end up dismissing the data as if it’s just completely a pack of lies or, it can never be as rich and meaningful as qualitative research. When, as you say it, they’re two different sides of a coin. And, you know, I wouldn’t want to fly an aeroplane without instruments, you know, just like they used to do with just their eyeballs and gumption or something like that. I want to know how far we are off the ground right now, you know, and then are we straight? Or are we at an angle? And so for me, instrumenting my product is like, I sometimes think, how did we ever do this before? Well, we didn’t know like, whether people were clicking on a thing or not. But the other thing I’d say to designers into UX folks is that, these are the materials that you’re working with just like, you know, you need to understand technology, because you’re not designing shoes, or houses or, you know, amusement parks, you’re designing, you know, software, and it’s made out of out of bits and bytes. And so you need to have some understanding of that material, just as a potter needs to know about how grainy the clay is, you know how wet or dry it is, you know, how long you have to fire it to make it strong and things like that.

And I think that, the other thing is that a designer needs to understand their constraints. It’s really, in some ways, you can argue that design is nothing but working with constraints, you know, because it’s art otherwise, right? I mean, it’s making creative things. But design is about crafting a thing that meets, you know, that meets the needs and also works within the limitations of the situation. I had an architect friend years ago, who liked to say that his favourite kind of project was not like the big master plan for the university or something like that. It was a small kitchen remodel, where there wasn’t enough space really, because then he had to really be clever and figure out a beautiful solution that you didn’t think was possible that took advantage of the quirks of the space and that didn’t try to force things into it that just weren’t gonna work at that scale. So I find data to be a constraint like that, too, like knowing how the product is doing or knowing about the the trends, how are we performing against our OKRs or anything? Those are things that I don’t want to wallow in them as a designer, but I want to be aware of where the wall is and not run into it.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, yeah, I mean, that the following of the metrics, the checking the metrics is something which I see. Yeah, I’d understand that it’s clearly something I’d expect the product manager to have his or her fingers on. But I wonder if we’re saying that, or what we seem to be implying, is that UX researchers lack skills, or interest in the quantitative side of things. Because now we’re talking about understanding behaviour as well. So not just the following the metrics, we’re talking about the research aspect of data? And, you know, is it your place as a product manager? So we’re doing data research? Or is it a missing?.. Or do we need data analyst to do that? Or is it a missing part of a UX researchers role that we can then should be?

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, I want to be careful not to overgeneralize there are certainly incredibly data savvy UX researchers out there, right. And also, people are practising different mishmashes of subsets of all of these things in different combinations on different teams. And so having said all that, I think that Well, and that’s part of the answer to because I don’t think I’m in a position to say this role should do this job and this role shouldn’t do it or something like that. I think that is to be negotiated among teams based on the skills available and things like that. I think that what you do need is coherency among these different like approaches. You need some kind of bringing together, like what you often find is that user researchers are doing user research and product managers are doing, you know, getting outside the building and talking to customers, often in a kind of a half baked way compared to the practices of user research. And without talking to each other or in fact maybe resenting each other, or stepping on each other’s toes. Like I just talked to that customer Why did you bug them again? and you know, things like that. And that’s a sign of that kind of incoherence, you know?

The decoherence, or something like that you need. And I think the product manager often has to do this, and is often the one failing to really make it happen. But you need to bring all these things together, get the research agendas compared with each other figure out, where can you piggyback? Should we send two surveys? No, let’s send one and I’ll put my questions in yours. Or maybe the product manager wants to do a survey, and the researcher needs to explain to them that a survey is not always the right thing to do, or, you know, there needs to be kind of like coming together and recognition that there’s a shared interest in discovery, product discovery, if you want to call it that, and that it partakes of all of these different modalities, right. And I do think the product rule has to be a synthesiser, but I still would challenge anybody in that system, to be able to be in the conversation, you need to know enough about the person sitting next to you’s world, that you can help them and also receive their information and put it into your work.

James Royal-Lawson
Right. Yeah. So you’re you’re trying to achieve, not just collaboration, but also a balance in the team you’re working with?

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, absolutely. And I think a good team is actually coaching and teaching each other all the time. Right? So you’re levelling up, you’re… if you’ve got data people on your team, and you’re a little bit data shy, as a designer, you know, make friends with them, tell them like, I find this stuff really intimidating, where should I start? And, and they love it. They’re like, they want to show you their numbers, they want to talk about it, you know, and then you might somebody might be okay,enough. now, if I did want to know that much. But you know, you’ve got a conversation going, now you’ve got a buddy. And that can lead to all kinds of things.

Per Axbom
You mentioned earlier that the product manager doesn’t manage people in that sense. But you also say that one of the most important traits of a product manager is to love interpersonal dynamics, which is part of this is that you are the person who perhaps can help people understand each other better, and work together in a better way.

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, I really think that’s true. And I think that when I, when I’ve been a people manager, I think that I, I tend towards what they like to call these days service management, or sometimes servant management, but an idea of not a manager, as somebody who’s sort of standing up on a pedestal saying, We will win, you know, or something like that. But somebody’s more like in the scrum with the with the team noticing who needs help coaching people getting other people unstuck. Telling people, they need to talk to each other, and just basically unlocking people, you know, giving them what they need help making giving them enough boundaries, so they don’t run off the roof or something like that. But then mostly just like empowering them and letting them go. But noticing when things are starting to get out of out of skew, or when there is a miscommunication and intervening, I think that that’s a lot of what a good product manager has to do. And it’s not, it’s not like managing a person doing their review, deciding if they get a raise, it’s none of that stuff. It’s just understanding the people you’re working with. And what they need to be effective together.

James Royal-Lawson
Its a question I didn’t want to ask this young. One point in the book, you have the line that the word hypothesis scares the shit out of people. Now I love using the word hypothesis, and hypothesis based design. So I’m really curious, why does the word hypothesis scare the shit out of people?

Christian Crumlish
Because it’s Greek? I mean, maybe I mean, there’s a lot of, you know, $10 words, that it’s fun to know a word like that, right, that has a specific meaning and is in your trade. And you sound smart when you say it, you know, right? But the people who aren’t really sure what it means or what it means in this context, are somewhat intimidated by it. And it really just means, like your idea of, you know, the thought you had for why something is happening. So I’m not saying you have to use, you know, single syllable words, and you can’t say the word hypothesis. But it’s just, I mean, in fact, I think in the context of the book, I’m telling people, like, don’t be afraid of that word, you know, you can you can get in there and be part of the experimentation process. And you should be, frankly, if you’re doing experiments, and you’re not working with UX people, then that’s insane.

James Royal-Lawson
I agree about that one. So is the hypotheses, the fear of hypotheses, do you think that’s more designers that are a bit intimidated by it? Or does it stretch out into the organisations as well?

Christian Crumlish
No, I would think probably for a lot of people that’s a slightly academicky sounding term that might not be all that warm and helpful. I’m not, again, I’m not against the word I just think it’s not communicating that well to a lot of people. Also, I think there’s another element here which is not about the terminology, which is the heavy the, the model of doing a lot of experiments, especially if it’s just a lot of AB tests, is another thing that’s kind of anathema to designers. Because it you could be, as you say, polishing a local maximum, you know, you might be just like optimising some tiny thing without realising there’s a much better thing over there. And it’s sort of a matter also of, you know, “oh, we don’t need to plan or design anything, we’ll just ship something and then start tweaking it and experimenting with it, and it’ll get better”. And there’s a little bit of truth to that. But if you go 100% that way, you basically have just gotten rid of your UX team, because you don’t need them. You just need some people to make screens for you. But you don’t, you know, you’re going to let the customers vote on everything. And so that’s not a very comfortable idea. I don’t think that’s really the way to do experimentation. But I think in some shops, that might be what’s actually happening.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I know, there’s a figure that goes around with what was it? seven or eight out of 10 experiments fail. And I know a lot of designers feel it’s kind of disheartening, when you see kind of all that work going into experiments, you know, there’s only maybe two of them actually show some positive impact. And I think most UX designers would probably like to think their work is more successful than that most of the time.

Christian Crumlish
Right? And it helps if you never check.

Per Axbom
[laughs]

Christian Crumlish
Then you can keep thinking that, but, and frankly, you know, an experiment that fails teaches you something. For one thing, it teaches you that idea is not going to work, don’t don’t spend any more time on that idea, or at least not that way. So I don’t consider an experiment that didn’t get the result to be a waste of time. I mean, if all of them don’t get a result, that’s a waste of time. But if you get any wins at all, you can bank those and the losses you can walk away from and go back to what you were doing before.

Per Axbom
Because one of the traits you also mentioned for product managers is being courageous, and making mistakes. And I feel that this is part of it. Realising that it’s okay, because you are… there’s a potential to learn so much from it.

Christian Crumlish
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, look, we all want to be great at our job, right? I mean, I think and that’s admirable, we shouldn’t be ambitious to try to do great things. And that, but that can lead to perfectionism, too, and a fear of making mistakes and a fear of failure. And I think that that then leads to much less innovation.

Per Axbom
Yeah. Perfect note to end on. Thank you, Christian, for being with us.

Christian Crumlish
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[music]

James Royal-Lawson
I always find this quantitative and qualitative balance, battle, misbalance, really fascinating. I mean yeah, and Chris said in the interview as well, “I want to be careful not to hang out an a group”. And then you go but, having said that, experience says that UX researchers, by and large, tend to favour the qualitative side of things. Now, the empirical research, research with people interviews with people research, usability testing with people directly. And that’s not. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a really, really good thing, because that’s how we learn.

Per Axbom
And it’s not surprising, because people, I mean, people in UX are interested in people, that’s what’s really attracting us to this profession, which means that we are going to be better at that part of the job because we enjoy doing it.

James Royal-Lawson
And if you do come from the, I suppose if you’ve come from the more artistic angle of UX in your previous work, or education, we talked about, like art directors who’ve become UX designers. Or then we talk about people with other backgrounds, and maybe more business backgrounds, that’ve become UX designers. And there is a little bit of like, where you fall on the coin to it. But yeah, generalising, but it’s still you need both of these things. And it was an excellent. I do like the example he gave, you wouldn’t want to fly a plane without instruments. That ties into when I’m teaching about analytics that I normally use a boat rather than an aeroplane. But I say, “Yes, you need to know whether your boats heading for the rocks”. And you need to make sure you’ve reached the right harbour. But that’s not enough, you still need to know where it was, you know, how was the experience for your crew and passengers? Because you could you could be flying like the clappers across a really choppy, you know, bumpy sea, and everyone has an awful journey. But you still got there.

Per Axbom
Exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
So you need to know both quantitative and qualitative.

Per Axbom
And it made me think of like just designing a web form, a critical web form on a website and how in UX, we tend to focus on helping people fill it in and understand the labels of the form and filling it in successfully. And once we’ve done that, and we’ve done usability testing, we feel confident that we yeah, this form works for people, we release it. Whereas flying the plane part would be “do we get any indications that the form isn’t working?” Because things could be happening that we could not possibly anticipate within our usability testing, which means that we need to be looking at that data. But it’s far between when I hear people say that we need to put those systems in place that give us the real life data about how our, well, our product then is actually performing.

James Royal-Lawson
And that question about whether it should be the product manager that’s doing the quantitative side of things, the data analysis. Or whether it should be researchers. And I think Chris is right, there. It’s got to be a balanced team. And if someone is on your team doing that kind of research then great. And maybe as a product manager, you back off a little bit from that. And maybe you’ve got other things you need to report or look at. I mean, there are no 100% correct answers to any of these things. It’s all about knowing who’s around you and….

Per Axbom
…what they are interested in doing, what their competencies are, and making sure that somebody is responsible for it, really,

James Royal-Lawson
So, to summarise there, we understand how product management people end up doing the numbers part, the data part, but it’s not necessarily what they have to do. I think it moves us nicely on to the thing about just the phrases and terms and expressions that we have. We brought up in the interview about hypotheses because Christian in his book says the word hypothesis scares people, intimidates people. Me and you we’ve looked at this and talked about this for the amount of different phrases you might have argued we do about phrases, titles, and what they mean and all the rest of it. And it’s a really good point about how intimidated we can be by all these expressions of phrases we throw around, and we have stamped on our email signatures and so on. It’s daunting undermines your confidence.

Per Axbom
Yeah. And it can help make people feel insecure. And they might think they might have an idea of it about what it is. And then they realise, “well, I haven’t gotten [it] exactly right”. And then they get this imposter syndrome thinking, “Well, I’m not really doing the right thing, because I’m not speaking the right language”. So many things going on with it. Within what how we are scaring ourselves.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, just what we said there about the right language. I mean, just giving an example of of this podcast, over half the people listening now. Don’t speak, probably don’t speak English as a native language.

Per Axbom
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And the whole of our, well, at least from an English perspective, everything we have out there is in English. And if that isn’t your native language, then it’s an additional layer of intimidation that you’re adding to all this. You’ve got to work out what it is, in your culture, your language.

Per Axbom
Exactly. And exactly what you said, Now culture and your culture, because that is the whole thing with it is that language brings with it cultural references. And if you don’t have those, you’re not gonna understand.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and if Chris, Christian is, oh we didn’t actually ask him, I don’t know if he speaks more than one language. But let’s just say that he performs most of his consulting work and training and so on in English. It means that, if he gets an experience from the people he comes into contact with that these kinds of phrases are intimidating, then we can be pretty sure that it’s even more intimidating when English isn’t your first language.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
And I really think it’s one of the big challenges that we’ve we have on a global level, with user experience design, or product design, or whatever you want to call, the thing we do making digital stuff, is sharing the understanding, in a way that isn’t prescriptive, isn’t kind of like “this is how you do it”.

Per Axbom
Yeah

James Royal-Lawson
You’ve got to still understand that you’ve got to allow people to absorb this into their own language and culture.

Per Axbom
Exactly express the thing, they might be doing the same thing, but just expressing how they do it in different ways.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah.

Per Axbom
Which brings us full circle, I think to one of my biggest takeaways from this interview about how important again, communication is and communication internally. And agreeing on the things you’re talking about. And making sure that everyone’s on the same page. And empathising with the people who you work with. Both your team and the other people within your organisation. If you get better at that and you spend more time on that, then it’s going to be so much easier just doing your day to day job,

James Royal-Lawson
And also the way that you distribute tasks or I suppose specialisms. Looking back to what we said about if no one else is doing the quantitative side of data analysis, then yeah, someone can step up and do that. What did Christian say there about, you know, going like, what to think about, questions to ask or things to kind of make things work better. It’s like understanding what your neighbour does to kind of help them. You know, we can be better at our jobs by understanding what our neighbour’s doing.

Per Axbom
Exactly. You found some recommended listening as always, James, you do a good job of this.

James Royal-Lawson
Thank you. Oh, I think what could be nice for everyone to listen to now is going back to Episode 192. One of our Kim Goodwin interviews. 192 is the one where, one called “Values are the experience”. And in that chat with Kim, we do talk about this, about understanding our organisations and the values of our organisations. And how we can use that and our UX skills to change the way in which decisions are made and design decisions are made.

Per Axbom
And this interview was conducted in collaboration with Ambition and power. And it was live, in front of a studio audience as we call it. And if you’re curious about Ambition and power and the continuous learning programme that they offer, visit uxpodcast.com/empower. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

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James Royal-Lawson
So Per, where does a mountain climber keep their aeroplane?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, where does a mountain climber keep their aeroplane?

James Royal-Lawson
In a cliffhanger.

Per Axbom
[laughs] Pretty good

James Royal-Lawson
[laughs] Thank you.