Janelle Estes
How to Walk the Customer-Centered Talk
In this episode of Brave UX, Janelle Estes shares the importance of executive leadership staying connected to customers, and what the best design leaders are doing to successfully scale design research.
Highlights include:
- What do UX researchers need to let go of?
- How can researchers navigate pushback against qualitative research?
- What are the best companies doing to run UX research at scale?
- How important is it for senior management to come face-to-face with customers?
- What are the dangers of unmoderated research?
Who is Janelle Estes?
Janelle is the Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, the human insights platform that helps companies to see the world through their customers’ eyes.
At UserTesting, Janelle is the voice of the industry and has significant influence on the product's strategy, key customer relationships, and the definition and delivery of the businesses services.
Before joining UserTesting in 2014, Janelle was a Senior User Experience Consultant at the famous UX consulting company, Nielsen Norman Group. There, Janelle designed and ran hundreds of qualitative and quantitative studies.
The proud co-author of the book “User Tested” where, alongside Andy MacMillan (UserTesting’s CEO), Janelle shares the stories of how the world’s best companies are using human insight to create great experiences.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Janelle Estes. Janelle is the Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting the human insights platform that helps companies to see the world through their customer's eyes. At UserTesting, Janelle plays a critical role. She is the voice of industry and she has a significant influence on the product strategy, key customer relationships, and the definition and delivery of the businesses services.
- Janelle is also the company's most visible authority on UX and CX, authoring white papers, articles, and speaking at industry conferences. She has also been known to give the odd podcast interview. Before joining UserTesting in 2014, Janelle was a Senior User Experience consultant at perhaps the world's most famous UX consulting company, Nielsen Norman Group. During her six and a half years at NNG, Janelle designed and ran hundreds of qualitative and quantitative studies using a variety of user research methods, including usability testing, eye tracking, fieldwork, competitive testing, and longitudinal studies. Janelle is also the proud co-author of the book User Tested, which literally just came out a few weeks back. In User Tested, alongside her co-author Andy McMillan (UserTesting's CEO), Janelle shares the stories of how the world's best companies are using human insight to create great experiences. There should be no surprises why I am looking forward to talking with Janelle on Brave UX today. Speaking of which, Janelle, welcome to the show.
- Janelle Estes:
- Thanks so much for having me, Brendan. I'm excited to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well likely were talking about before we hit record you you're joining the ranks of some really well-known UX people and I'm so proud and pleased to have you on the show as well. Janelle, given your background and the role that you play at UserTesting now, I want to just wind the clock a little bit back further than your time at UserTesting. If I may, just to start, cuz I understand that you have a master's in human factors from Bentley and I was curious cuz I couldn't really tell from my research and normally I'm able to get a real sense of the backstory behind people. But I was curious what led you to study human factors at Bentley? What was it that sparked your interest in human behavior?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, it's a good question and a fun story. I didn't set out to do this, to have this career. I mean, I think it's very common in the UX space, maybe less so now because there are so many formal programs. But back in the day when I was going to college, I went to Bentley College at the time, it's now Bentley University because I thought I wanted to major in accounting or finance because I thought that was where you can make the most money [laugh], so, right, yes. And they also gave me me the most money in terms of a scholarship. And so my dad is it's been an education his entire career and helped me navigate that whole, whole scenario. And we landed on Bentley for that exact reason. They gave me a fair amount of money and I felt I could get a good education, be close to home Bentley's in the Boston area.
- I live in Maine, lots of different reasons why. Anyway, I showed up there the first year or two I think I went from accounting to economics to finance, to marketing to I wanna leave this university cause I don't think there's anything here for me. And I stumbled upon this little degree called information design and corporate communication. And it was really right up my alley. You had different focus areas that you could work on within the degree itself and web design was one of them. And so that was the path I went on. The challenge was I graduated from Bentley College, Bentley University with basically a glorified liberal arts degree. All these recruiters coming to campus, looking for accountants, looking for financial experts, and no one really looking for what I had at least at Bentley. So I had a really hard time getting a job when I graduated from college.
- And I had a good friend of mine that worked at Forrester Research and I got my foot in the door over there. And actually my first year in the corporate world or in the real world was answering the phone line for customer service department and fielding calls from people, customers that couldn't figure out how to log onto the website, they couldn't find the article that they were looking for. Forester's, not a cheap subscription. So they were certainly some contentious conversations with people who were frustrated with the experience. And it sort of piqued my interest because a lot of the things that I was fielding were things that could be addressed more at scale through either the experience or some other way of customer engagement. I recognize that while it was valuable, it wasn't something that I wanted to focus my entire career on and customer service, although I do believe that function is incredibly important for every organization.
- I ended up stumbling upon the customer experience research group at Forrester, which really spoke to the degree I had and sort of the interest that I really had around the customer experience. And I had a mentor and he actually ran the Human Factors and Information design program at Bentley. His name is Bill Grins, he's an awesome person. And he talked to me about the master's program. And really it was really nice because I did four years within information design and corporate communication. And then I had to do two more years to get my master's. And I did that while I was working and sort of plugging away at that. But yeah, I mean I don't know if that, it's kind of a roundabout way of landing in this place where ultimately I was like, I'd go to these master's classes after working all day. I remember I had class from five to 10 every Tuesday or something like that.
- And just the things we were exposed to, how the human mind processes information or how you make decisions, all of that stuff is just incredibly fascinating. And what I loved about it is that it wasn't just the theoretical sort of science, if you will, behind how the mind works. It was this really fascinating intersection between that and how to design things to be easier for people to use, how to maximize people's cognitive abilities and minimize the challenges that they might have and sort of interacting with an experience. And it was so meaningful in a way where it felt like you could have such a massive impact on people's lives if you could use these superpowers to design experiences that most of the population could have access to. So it was certainly a roundabout way. I'm so glad I discovered it. There's a million little accidents and coincidence that happen along Live's Path. And if you would've asked me at 10 years old what I would be doing, I probably wouldn't have said this, I definitely wouldn't have said this but I feel it's a very special place and I'm fortunate to be part of the community.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you talked there about the struggle at university, and I'm putting words in your mouth here, so just step in and correct me if I'm misrepresenting this, but this challenge of when you're a younger person actually figuring out what it is that you want to do and you head into university often with these preconceptions about what that is. And clearly you, you've walked a different path. And it's not uncommon to hear people who have entered the field of UX. They often come at it from a tangent. And that is somewhat changing these days with some of the programs that are now available. And it's more of, I suppose it's more of a well known and perhaps a more purposeful career path than it has been. But it certainly seems to me like you managed to discover UX and it's worked out fairly well for you.
- And now you can have influence at scale clearly with what you're doing at UserTesting. But before we come to UserTesting, I was also curious to ask you about Nelson Norman Group. Now clearly it's a bit of an icon in the industry. It's very well known, mostly because of its founders. Yeah, they're very well respected figures in this industry. And I wanted to ask you if you could cast your mind back to that first day that you had at N and just what comes to mind for you? What do you remember as you left Forrester and you were just starting this new journey at Nelson Norman Group?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, I mean, I can tell you that I was so fortunate to have that opportunity and my mindset going into it was to soak it all in. I mean, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. It was incredible how it all sort of came to be. But I was one of four people hired of hundreds of applicants and just felt like, it's funny, it's probably imposter syndrome speaking, but I know it is. But I remember sending my resume over and I said, Ugh, I'm never going to hear from them. And you fast forward and you're getting an offer and you're starting the job and you're talking to Jacob Nielsen and DOD Norman, you're dinner with them, you're doing research studies for all of these prestigious companies. You're doing your own independent research to inform papers and seminars and it's like it. But I remember that that moment of, I think before you start anything that's new that's going to require you to stretch, you know, have to have that moment of self-reflection, a little bit of a pep talk, you can do this. But yeah, the experience was incredible. I learned so much in
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What do you think they saw in you? Yeah, you mentioned that you were one of four out of hundreds of applicants and that little voice of doubt on your shoulder was sitting there thinking that you're never going to hear back from them. What do you think they saw in you?
- Janelle Estes:
- I think they saw in me somebody who is hungry and curious and eager, but someone who was willing to learn from the best in the industry. It wasn't like I had 10 years of experience or 20 and had been doing things a certain way. Habits a hard thing to change, especially if you have particular viewpoints on how to do UX research for example. And so I think it was a combination of being able to mold and shape somebody into an expert. And also the willingness of that I had to take that opportunity.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking about that time, cuz you weren't there for an inconsequential amount, you were there for about six and a half years. What's the one thing that when you think about that time, that one lesson that served you really well in your career since?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, it's a really good question. The one lesson I learned was that there's a right way to do UX research,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this sounds controversial, it please tell [laugh],
- Janelle Estes:
- I don't necessarily know if it's controversial. I just learned that there are certain principles that are so critical to conducting and gathering feedback that is, has integrity, has rigor, and can be actionable. I think there's still, I am sure those listening in have seen poor approaches to this and I don't believe it will ever be perfect, but I do, my big takeaway from that was that there's a right way to go about this and I learned from the best.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you sure did. One of the pushbacks that researchers and designers get when it comes to research is the qualitative aspects of research. And often we are talking about research that's run not at scale. And as you will know from what you do that there is sometimes a bit of an eye roll when it comes to building empathy for users and the type of research that actually helps people to do that when that statistically significant challenge comes from the business to the research that the researchers are doing, which in this case I'm framing it as qualitative and not statistically significant. What are some of the ways that you have found that are effective of taking that feedback on board from the business and then reframing that and showing the business the value of what it is that you are trying to do as a researcher or as a research team and that work that you're setting up to do and improving empathy?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, it's a good question and I think it's something that perhaps we've struggled with or I know we've struggled with for a long time. I do see progression in the industry though I see more willingness and openness to do this, especially in the last few years with everybody being disconnected. But to answer your question, I mean the most important thing that I do when I'm doing this type of work or I'm working with customers is to make sure that whatever I've captured in terms of qualitative insight is actually just tied to something that the business cares about or can be tied to something that where you could make a decision to impact again, something the business cares about. I think being researchers and myself included, you can get really curious about a lot of different things and your curio curiosity can kind of pull you in different places where you can sometimes go down into a rabbit hole and then all of a sudden you're standing there thinking, oh shoot what I just learned, how is this even actionable in any way, shape or form? And so constantly bringing it back to what the business cares about. I think that is when you ask me about my key takeaway or learning from Nielsen Norman Group, I shared that with you, my key takeaway and learning from UserTesting is exactly that, is in order to be relevant, you have to show your impact. Otherwise it's just another opinion.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is a hugely important point and I know that many people that are listening to the podcast will connect with it, but just so there's no doubt as to what things businesses generally care about, what are those things? What are the things that are really important for designers and researchers to connect their work back to?
- Janelle Estes:
- Sure. Yeah. So it's key performance indicators like revenue growth, profitability, reducing costs customer satisfaction and even things like innovation and time to market. There's so many ways that you can frame your work into something more meaningful. And I find that as UX folks, we have a language and that language often doesn't translate to other functions of the business. And so being able to understand who your internal audience is and making sure that your work is tied to their sort of goals and the way they think about the world, it sounds super obvious, but I, I've, I've made the mistake several times and I see it a lot too. That all being said, I have a fun story that kind of ties this all together. So AAA is one of our customers, so if you're not familiar with aaa, they're sort of like, you know, call AAA when your car breaks down and they come tow it for you or they'll come fix your flat tire.
- Or how many times I've tried called AAA because I locked my keys in the car and it's an older business, it's been around for I think over a hundred years and they have a digital presence, clearly every business generally does. And they weren't seeing the conversions that they wanted to see on the subscription page. So there was a page that had three different plans and it was all led by price. It was sort of like, here's your middle tier sort of anchoring and then here's your lower package and your higher package and the conversions. I mean people weren't converting but they weren't meeting their goals or they weren't growing in the way they wanted to. And so the UX designer there who I have, he's my colleague I chat with, he did some initial work qualitatively that showed people weren't really resonating with price. What they really wanted to know was, can I trust you?
- Can I get value from you, will you provide me safety? Those types of more emotional questions. And when he learned that he proposed back to the business, Hey, I think we should lead with this potential way about it. So leading with the sort of things that really make people tick emotionally when they're making this decision. And they ran an AB test because they didn't wanna flip the switch completely cuz they're like, well I'm not, it's just five people or eight people or however many he interviewed and we're not really sure. And they ran an AB test and this design that was focused more on the emotional parts of making the decision outperformed the price led version. I forget exactly what it was, but it totally blew by
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Magnitude,
- Janelle Estes:
- Blew it out of the water. Yeah, I think that's just a good example of the type of work. To me that's the ultimate value you can provide. Understanding your customers on an emotional level, building empathy with them, and then suggesting designs and experiences that meet those needs and then tying it to something the business cares about, which is converting people is it's our superpower.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is. And it's also something that we talk about a lot and clearly on a podcast like this, we talk about it almost exclusively, which is this ability for user experience research and researchers to provide that lens of empathy to the business that enables them to make better commercial decisions. So this might seem as a slightly strange question, maybe a bit out of the ordinary, but do organizations need to do user research in order to treat their customers with empathy? Is it not enough for them as business people to just not sociopaths, not put things out into the world that are sociopathic and just to really consider what it is that people need? Do they really need to be doing user
- Janelle Estes:
- Research? It depends on how you define user research. And I think about it as this very defined approach to engaging with and empathizing with your customers. I mean it's super valuable, but there are other ways that you can be building empathy with your customers if you're not even, you're doing formal user research. So I'm sure we've all heard examples of people who have, or companies that have call centers and they send people from the product team or people from the marketing team to go sit with a call center rep for the day and listen to the phone calls that they field and the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Questions that it's a harrowing experience, right? It sure is. [laugh] these brave people that man the phones.
- Janelle Estes:
- Exactly. There's also other ways that you can build that empathy with customers that don't require you to do that formal kind of UX research approach. I'll give you another example. I was visiting a major fast food company global company, and this was, gosh, this was probably five or so years ago, really at the height of social media where every corporate or company had a presence and social is still a very important part of many companies strategy and approach, but this was just the start of it. And so I remember walking by, there was this room and it was a fishbowl, so it's all glass all around it, you could see, and there were a bunch of people sitting on beanbag and they had these monitors up on the hanging down from the ceiling and they're tracking the Twitter feed and the Facebook feed and the sentiment analysis on top of it. And they're just like,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I can almost say it totally
- Janelle Estes:
- Into it. And I remember thinking, walking by, imagine if you just had a feed also of real customers just telling you about the last experience that they had with you [laugh] or what they love about you or what drives them crazy. That to me is not really defined. Sure, maybe you could define it as UX research, but really what it is is humanizing the customer. That's really what we're trying to do. And I think with all of the data that we have, whether it's social media, whether it's data analytics, whether it's the KPIs that I'm talking about, that the business is tracking and living and dying in these dashboards, where is the customer in this conversation? It's like we've on all of these ways that we track. And so do people have to do user research? No, not necessarily. But they should be pulling that customer in as and representing them as a human being wherever they can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really removing an abstraction that we have placed between our organizations and the people that they seek to serve. Yes. And it's almost like we're uncomfortable, and I'm speaking generally here, clearly not everybody is, but it's almost like there's a discomfort with actually being faced with the reality of a customer. And I do a lot of work with the financial sector and there are many bankers in particular, I'm thinking of a couple of bank banks that I've been working with who have worked for the bank for decades and have very rarely ever come across a customer since they left that frontline role. And you have to wonder what that means for the types of product and design and experience decisions that are being made. But I also wanted to sorry, you had had something I
- Janelle Estes:
- Was just going to say I can relate to that. I was having a conversation with the head of e-commerce at a major retailer and he had grown up with the company, so had been there for 20 plus years when they were just storefront and now most of their sales are, he to your point, used to interface with customers all the time in the store because he was running a store, he was a store manager. But then as he got promoted and moved into the sort of back office, if you will, of the company back office probably isn't thrive. I think you, you know what I mean? He's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Internal. I know you
- Janelle Estes:
- Mean to Yeah, he's helping run the business. He and his team don't have a practice regularly engaging with customers. And so you can imagine his mental model of who the customer is is very likely shaped by the interactions that he had in the store 20 years ago.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. And that trickles through to the small and the lash decisions that are being made. Exactly. I know you've just released a book and I do wanna come to the book but I did just want to touch on this particular thing that I watched in your virtual book tour, which was yourself and Andy who's the CEO of UserTesting. I mentioned I think in your introduction, who comes from a product management background. Cause I feel like what we've just been talking about here is quite relevant to this and he said, and I'm just going to quote him now in this video, he said, companies are realizing that users are so critically important. It's a challenge to say, how do you do that? How do you get folks into this process? One of the things that really struck me when I joined UserTesting was that there's this whole industry of people who have been focused on this.
- It was really illuminating to listen to folks like Janelle talk about how this could be done. Now this really struck me because prior to UserTesting, Andy was c o o of products at Salesforce and he was also a VP of product management at Oracle. So these are quite large global product-based businesses that have customers all over the globe. But what does it say about user research and the sort of acceptance and state of it or the importance of putting the customer front and center if it's seen by executives who are as seasoned as Andy as still a bit of a novelty only as recently as 2018 when he joined U UserTesting?
- Janelle Estes:
- I love this question. So it's so funny in this process of UserTesting, we just went public in November and we're out talking about the business sharing our value with potential investors and analysts and oh, talking to just your average business person, if you were to average out the knowledge of customer understanding across all roles, you're sort of in this place where people think of customer research as focus groups or as surveys or things like this. So it's funny, it's like we would talk to 'em about what we did or we'd show them a video clip of somebody reacting to a digital design. It's like once they saw it, they were like, they couldn't unsee it and oh my gosh, I had no idea you could do this. And also we should be doing this on X, Y, and Z. And so it's broadly this really strange awareness problem that I see with especially people who are leading different kind of business units.
- And so Andy for example, when he was at prior companies, he would do this type of work, but it would be the traditional way where you'd hire an agency and it would take eight weeks to get 120 page report, which by the time you got it, you had already made the decisions that would have that would've impacted anyway and it costs lots of money. And so him as a former product manager or as just a product person, when he first stumbled upon this idea of UserTesting, he always tells a story. It was just sort of like, holy crap, where was this when I was a product manager? But yeah, you're right. It's really fascinating to me that we've got this community of people that know this inside and out. I mean literally, I would say that it is another language. It's so funny when I first joined UserTesting, they used to pull me onto calls with customers and this was with a sales force that was fairly new or account managers that were fairly new to the industry. And it's like I'd just go off and running with the customer, we'd talk about a million different things and then I'd hang up and I'd call the person from UserTesting would call me and be like, what were you guys just talking about? What was that? And so I think I do find it fascinating that there is this sort of audience that knows this so deeply and then so many people who just don't know that it exists.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And that brings me to the book because you've just written with Andy the book user tested and I couldn't help but wonder, is this part of your contribution in terms of raising awareness? And clearly it's aligned with the business, right? Sure. So it serves more than one purpose, but is this part of your contribution to try and raise awareness of this sort of magic that platforms like UserTesting and the practices that people who use the platform do and learn and know so well? Is this part of your contribution to raising that awareness? Yeah,
- Janelle Estes:
- That's exactly it. And it's interesting, I, I've gone through a little bit of a, I've wrestled with this a bit in full transparency. I mean ultimately the book is not written for UX people, it's it, I mean UX people will likely find it valuable in different case studies and use cases and approaches that maybe I've learned in my career and can share back with them. But ultimately the book is geared towards making this approachable and accessible to anybody who has a customer. I mean, the reality is anybody who has a customer should be getting customer feedback in the way of face-to-face, human to human conversation. The challenge that I wrestled with while writing this and going through the process of publishing it is that it is not something that is new. It's actually a well-defined field that has existed for decades. I don't ever want people to think that I'm coming up with some new idea cuz it's not a new idea. What I am doing though is trying to your point, raise the awareness, make it approachable, make it accessible, and allow anyone who wants to connect with a customer, give them a guidebook for how to do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. There's no point having a great idea if you don't tell someone else about it. All that value is only worthwhile and only realized once it multiplies. And
- Janelle Estes:
- I mean how feels there a bit of evolve too? There's bodies of work that then new bodies of work build upon that. And it sort of like, it's just this process of raising that awareness.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was just thinking though about the challenge that faces research in terms of the specialists that practice research. So the field of user research now we are talking about making this more accessible. We've talked about ways of building empathy within organizations that might not be considered to be traditional user research. So just having those stories, people sitting on calls, those sorts of things. But I also, I get the sense from researchers that sometimes they feel like this growth is a little outta control and that they're unsure whether or not the fidelity of the findings that's happening or the decisions that are being made off the back of research scaling valid. And perhaps it undermines some of the rigor that they apply in their own practice. Sure. Now I understand that you used an analogy, I think your daughters at the time, this is going back a few years ago, were a big frozen fans and there's this song called Let It Go, right? So, oh, you watch one
- Janelle Estes:
- Of my talks
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I have, and my son loves this song as well. He's only three and a half. But what is it that if the field is going to evolve, yeah, what is it that we need to let go of?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, so it's funny when you asked me earlier on what was my key kind of learning from Nielsen Norma Group and my response was, there's a way to do this. There's a rigor that's approach to this work. And when you compare that to the evolution of the field and the sort of premise of the book as we just talked about, it's kind of not in line with what I said. I guess you could perceive it to be that way. But the reality is I think UX researchers UX user researchers need to start thinking about themselves as a catalyst for making more of this work happen. And when I see some of the best and brightest companies in the world that are delivering some of the most innovative solutions, crack the code on this. I am a true believer that there is a way, I call it method to the madness of empowering other people to connect to customers in a way that retains the integrity of the work and allows them to make sound decisions.
- Now it's not easy, it's a journey, it's an evolution. It requires a ton of setup and support. But my feeling is that you have two options. As a UX researcher, you can become an enabler and empower somebody who can help make more of this happen while you're still doing a lot of the work. Yourself, yourself. It's not like all the work goes off your plate, haven't talked to a single UX researcher that's looking for things to do. But if you don't embrace that shift, the other only other option is that people go rogue and they just do this stuff on their own. The proliferation of all of these technologies, I mean the age of Zoom alone could be considered [laugh] a competitor of usability testing or user interviews cuz you can literally just hop on cust with a customer on a Zoom and ask them whatever you want. So the reality is like this stuff is already happening, we need to get on board and help activate different teams, otherwise they're just going to do it on their own and we're really not going to be happy with [laugh] the results of that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what we're really talking about here, and if we focus in on the role of the research leaders, whoever is in charge and organizations of research, what we are really talking about is scaling research, but doing it in a way that is valid still, in a way in which the researchers or the designers can be proud of the decisions that are being made. Off the back of that, it's very easy for people as you've just touched on there, to use a platform like Zoom or even UserTesting for example, without the full knowledge of what it is that they need to put in place to ensure that the research is being run well. So what have you seen in your best clients, the ones that are really making progress with this at scale, this research at scale? What are they doing? What fundamentals are they putting in place?
- Janelle Estes:
- So I've seen a lot of evolution and shift and I think when this concept or approach was first being developed of empowering other people, it was a lot about control. It was a lot about turning everybody into a researcher. It was a lot about how do I make sure that everybody who's doing this has the depth of understanding and knowledge that I have or some level of that in order for me to be able to trust them. And I think early on, this was when there wasn't a lot of tech involved in the process either. So just letting people go off and meet with customers or do home visits or what have you. And I think as we have the proliferation of technology, as we have ways that we can start to capture learnings over time, it starts to become less about turning everybody into a researcher and more about giving everybody access to a customer perspective either directly or indirectly.
- And so what I haven't seen successful is trying to turn anybody who wants to empathize with a customer into a researcher. What I have seen successful though is giving people opportunities to be exposed to customers at the right places in the right times. And so I think be aside from that, that that's generally been a shift that I've seen in sort of the industry. But aside from that, I mean the best programs that I've seen are the ones that pull the customer perspective into key processes. There are different parts of a workflow that a product team follows and a marketing team or a content creation team follows. And there are appropriate places where you want to pull in customer insight. Typically, you see in the less mature organizations that they're focused more on empowering designers to test the prototypes, which is a great use case.
- The more mature successful ones I see pull that sort of feedback process and empower people like product managers or even designers to understand the problem space, stay in that kind of squishy area to really understand who are our customers, what are their needs, what's the right problem for us to solve? And getting teams to programmatically pull in feedback there. But again, that's an evolution. Usually you have to I was just reminded of this today, when talking with a customer, prioritize, where do you think you're going to have the most impact and focus there? Pull in eager teams, people who are hungry for this, don't force it. And then once you have some key wins, start socializing that and bringing other people along because that's what gets people excited and wanting to engage with you and the team.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think this is a key insight of yours and I've heard you talk about pulling insight into existing processes before. It's often not the thing that people initially want to do. Generally people in design are more excited by the novelty of creating something new. But there's something really mature and sensible and smart and pragmatic about starting with an existing process rather than railing against it. Sort of working with the business to get those wins before you actually then go about making a more substantial change. In your experience though, working with your clients, have you ever seen the opposite be more effective where there is a need, there is a pressing need or there is a desire to make a massive shift from the get go?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah. Yes, I have seen it. And it's funny, the point about workflows, I always think about if you think about even just this notion of integrations within a product, if you think of yourself as integrate yourself into what's already happening, cuz that's where you're going to be able to build the most momentum, showing up where people already are versus making them go somewhere else to do something totally different outside of their workflow. That being said, yes, I have seen companies do this well, and it's really interesting because what it ends up being is less of here's an approach to do a usability test of a prototype or usability or a concept test of four different ideas or it's less about reacting to a stimuli, if you will, and more about just making a connection with a customer and having a conversation with them. So global consumer goods company they are, which could really be anybody, but bear with me
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Here I understand,
- Janelle Estes:
- Make things like toothbrushes and those types of things, razors. And they had such a rigor around how they developed their product and went to market. And essentially what they tried to do and what they were successful in doing is coming up with a program called Customer Connect and it required everybody to connect with one customer a month. And it was sort of like this was just something that didn't baked into what you were already doing. It was a new activity, but it exposed a huge number of people to customers who hadn't done that before. And it wasn't like they were doing anything actionable based on the conversation wasn't like, oh, I talked to a customer and they told us to move forward with this idea or concept. It was more like, oh, I talked to the customer, I'm like, I understood their needs and while I was talking to them, the doorbell rang and a kid ran in and I got to know them on more of a human level. And there's something about that people connect with that narrative and it's super powerful. And I like to think about that as building more of your customer intuition and building. If you did 12 customer connects a year, one a month, imagine the level of knowledge or empathy you would build with your customers versus just continuing doing what you're doing and not talking to customers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this idea of I'm, I'm not going to label it correctly here, but this contact time, this notion of making it a repeated practice of spending time with customers to develop that empathy and get a better idea of what is going on for them ideally so you can make decisions that are going to serve them better and therefore increase revenue or profitability or whatever it is that the business cares about. That seems to me that the programs that do that without necessarily a direct correlation back to a metric, rely somewhat on executive belief. Yes, there has to be some, well this, my assumption has to be some sponsor or someone that's willing to go out on a limb here and actually commit the resources, particularly on a global scale to make something like that a reality. I suppose the most, I'm going to use the word brave here, the most brave design or customer led leaders doing that is enabling the rest of the executive to believe in that. How are they selling this basically is the question I'm curious about. How do you get something like that across the line when there's no direct tie back to the bottom
- Janelle Estes:
- Line? I, and absolutely you're right in that many of these initiatives that are broader about building this connection with a customer are absolutely executive led every single one that I've been engaged with. To answer your question on some of the best business leaders, I'd say Satya Nadela at Microsoft, I mean he's a huge believer in empathy not only in his personal life but also in building customer empathy as a business because it just helps you be more innovative and meet those unmet customer needs. And there's no way you can identify those if you're not getting exposed to customers and building that customer empathy. So I would say he's the current leader that I look to and his viewpoint of how he talks about this, and I mean of course there's been other leaders, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, both of which aren't running those companies anymore obviously, but they also had that very sort of customer obsessed approach starting with the customer and working backwards or being customer obsessed.
- And what's interesting, it's funny, when I was thinking about writing the book, I thought about having the Title B beyond lip service because I think that many executives talk about the importance of customer centricity. And yes, we're investing in customer experiences, competitive battlefield, and it's how we're going to differentiate ourselves. But when you go actually talk to teams and you ask them how customer centric are you? I mean, we know this because we survey people annually at UserTesting and just the disconnect between what executives are saying and what's actually happening is staggering. And so when you ask me who are the best leaders that are doing this, again, the one I know of is Satya and some of the others that did this well, but there are so many that are saying it, but not actually investing in it or doing anything about it or empowering people to do anything about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I've have heard you talk about this too, and it is true. I mean, it's a reality that the teams on the ground are disconnected from what the executives are saying about how important customer experience is. So if the people who hold the purse strings say it's important, but then the reality for the teams that are charged with delivering that experience aren't seeing that trickle down into investment in the area. How does that reality shift, if at all, how is there any danger that empathy is going to become table stakes at the rate that things are going? What is it that needs to shift or change in order to make that a more readily reality for more design teams or more research teams, more
- Janelle Estes:
- Companies? Yeah, it's like that disconnect between this is important versus the people who are making the decisions and working on experiences every day. And I think I've said this, and you may have heard this before, no one is arguing about the importance of customer experience and listening to customers. What they're struggling with is how to actually do it, how to operationalize it, how to do that at scale. And I think to be fair, research ops and integrating into design processes and product processes is a very good step in the right direction. I mean, there are fabulous research ops leaders that are changing the culture of companies and product development. So I think it's those types of change agents operating in different pockets of the organization. But I mean ultimately it's about holding everyone accountable. And again, the best programs that I've seen where it's like, hey, this is important to us as a business and we're going to ask you to do these things on a regular basis, or make sure this feedback is integrated before you make decisions or go live like that. Ultimately, unfortunately, is a lot of ways the motivation happens is holding people accountable and ultimately they build that muscle and it becomes part of their behavior because they see the value and they can't imagine doing it differently or going back to the way they did it previously. But yeah, I guess I don't have a silver bullet or answer for you on that. I think there's multiple tactics to use and think, I don't think we've perfected it yet or really figured it out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you get the sense that there's an overreliance on metrics like NPSs and cset?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, absolutely. But the challenge is, I mean, I think we could probably have a 90 minute discussion on NPS [laugh]. The challenge is it's such a widely accepted metric and when you remove it, what do you have instead? NBS is absolutely not my favorite metric, but it is a way to elevate the conversation with executives. And so when you think about tying your own work to something the business cares about, there are so many companies that are looking and tracking their nps and rewarding teams based on shifts, positive shifts in nps. And so unfortunately, until we come up with something that's a little bit more, in my opinion, actionable and more of a leading indicator of the experience, there are some tactics that I've seen teams use such as an experience score for the top flows that you are looking at on a regular basis. There are different ways to do it and I've seen them be effective, but I just haven't seen anything socialized at the leadership level that's more pervasive than n p.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Nothing quite speaks to the people with the money than the metric. Mm-hmm. Nps. Mm-hmm. Now let's come to your role, because I understand that your role, you're now a publicly listed company, UserTesting, and there aren't many chief insights officers out there, not least that I'm aware of. What is it that you spend most of your time and energy doing?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, so you're right. If you look up, I always joke, it's a little self-deprecating humor. If you look up chief Insights officer on LinkedIn, there's like three people with my title. So yeah, it's very rare, but think of me,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a rare club
- Janelle Estes:
- And I need to think I connect with those other chief and officers. Probably the reality is it means different things to different people depending on the company that you're in. But the long and short of it is that I consider my role to be the evangelist for our customers and our industry externally for UserTesting. Yes, I mean there's the book, the podcast that we do, there's speaking and all of that, but I find the most value and the highest impact when I can turn those learnings back into the company, both at the executive and board levels as well as within different planning and strategic initiatives that we have. So when we're thinking about what are we going to be in three to five years, or how do we wanna show up in the market being able to share my perspective in that way is where I find a ton of value, if you think. So I joined UserTesting, gosh, it's almost been seven years, and I was employee number 96. I think we're now I think over 800. And so as the comp would, and it's actually not, that 800 is not huge, it's, it's a decent sized company, but it's not like we're operating at the scale of a couple hundred thousand employees. But the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Reality, it's half the population of New Zealand. So it's fairly up there.
- Janelle Estes:
- The reality is that there are so many people that have been hired to run and scale the business. It's a SaaS company and there aren't as many people that truly understand the industry and are customers. And so it's a little bit of a meta, to be honest with you, to be being, I say I have the researcher's dream job, which is I get to research how other research teams are doing research and then pull that back into something meaningful for the company to help them better understand, to help them better empathize with who our customers are. To build that sort of narrative for them is where I find a ton of value.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about that because people will look at UserTesting from the outside and they will recognize it as a leading platform in this space. People will have various views on it, I'm sure as all companies do with the products and services that they put out there. But what are you doing to help paint that picture of empathy? Empathy for the people that are making decisions about the product day in day out, what role do you play in helping them to really see what those experiences are like for their customers and their customers customers?
- Janelle Estes:
- Sure. Yeah. So I think it was in 2020 we kicked off an initiative call. We call it ut at ut. So mm-hmm. What we do is we have found different areas of the company to integrate human insight into different workflows and decision points. So we started actually with the marketing team and the marketing team was able to look at their kind of content creation process, their campaign process and figure out where are the places where we can get people to react to different campaigns or different positioning or even we went through pricing changes and getting feedback around that. So many different places to be getting customer insight. And I can share with you, we haven't been in existence for very long and we also have been maturing the way that we listen to our own customers over time. It's all part of the journey and evolution.
- And it is, as I mentioned before, it's a very meta experience. We moved into the product team with UT, at ut, so they have a product development process they follow. And similar to the example that I shared with you of what are the most successful companies doing, we've integrated ourselves into our own product process. Certainly things that could be improved or optimized, but it's part of the narrative now. People know that, oh, okay, if I'm in discovery or solutioning, here's a handful of ways that I could use our own product to get what I need. And we've moved into our people team too, so focused on the employee experience, the recruiting, interviewing experience, and there's so many use cases. And so that's a big part of what I'm focused on, is continually bringing that to the company. Now, beyond that, there are different tactics that we use at UserTesting that I kind of run with as well.
- So we start every company meeting with a video of a customer, talking about a recent use case or win or success story. And then we have Slack channels set up that we are able to, if we gather interesting customer feedback, we're able to share that to build this shared understanding of who our customers are. And so finding different ways, again, to show up where people already are, to expose them to customers if they're not directly interacting with them, if they're not on the marketing team or the product team or another team that's using our product.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's almost like an implicit expectation of a company like UserTesting to be eating its own dog food. And you mentioned that this in the child
- Janelle Estes:
- Drinking our own champagne.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes. That's a better, I like that one. That analogy is much, much better. I definitely prefer champagne of dog food, but there is this sort of outside in, there's an expectation, or at least that I'm projecting and placing on UserTesting that it's going to be world class in the way in which it builds customer empathy into its products and users research and its own tools to do that. But I was just curious, cuz you mentioned there that really only kicked off in 2020, and I'm assuming there were things you're doing beforehand, but was there some sort of tension or realization in the business as it's been growing and scaling from 96 up to 800, that, and this again is a totally loaded and not a research question, but was the business in danger of losing its way? And has there been a decision made or some tension to overcome to really put this back at the heart of what the business does?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, when we think about our long-term vision for UserTesting, we think about being able to bring the human perspective, the customer perspective, to any decision. And the reality was that we weren't banging on our product enough to uncover the pain points of average people who don't know UX research inside and out to use our product. And so, you know, go into UserTesting and if you have this idea of what you wanna do and who your customers are, I mean, it's not a hard to use product. It's like three screens and then you launch your test and then you probably have some way that you look at the results. But if you're just somebody who's never done this before is wondering, I don't know, think of a really broad business question we wanna rebrand, which we did actually go through a rebrand. How do I gather human insight about rebranding?
- You log in and it's like, oh geez, I don't know where to start. I don't know what questions to ask. I don't know who I should be asking these questions of. And so what we were trying to do is break down that barrier of, again, making this more accessible to really anybody who had a question that they wanted to answered. So there are different things that we've introduced to our product based on those learnings. So a big part of it are templates, and it sounds super straightforward. I mean, if you log into any SaaS product, whether it's Canva or a mural or you know, name it, there's usually a template gallery, and we didn't have that at UserTesting. And the way that we introduce that allows now anybody to kind of go in and say, oh yeah, that's my question, or that's resonating with me.
- Or, oh wait, I didn't know you could do that. I wanna learn, I wanna do that with that template. And so to answer your question, it wasn't, I guess the impetus for doing it was more around how do we make our product easier for everyone to use and more approachable and accessible. When you put it in the hands of a people team, an employee team, employee experience team, a marketing team, you quickly realize that things like, oh, the way that we train people who are new customers that come on board is so research centric. It uses all that language that I was talking about. We're trying to turn people into researchers. We learned so much about our onboarding and training process. We were like, okay, if we're talking with this sort of team, we can't talk to them that way. We have to speak to them in their language. It sounds kind of funny to hear that us as a company is realizing that, but again, the reality is we're growing and scaling a company and pulling in customer feedback, but as we grow and mature, pulling that in more programmatically is really what we're focused on.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what I think about the growth of the platform, and you've outlined a couple of uses there of the platform. So one in particular could be to test some brand concepts for a company that is looking to rebrand. Now I get the sense, given the sort of pedigree of your user research training and experience at NNG and what you've done subsequently, that there is some tension here within the business as it grows to acquire different types of customers. You've spoken there about we can't talk to these people who wanna do the rebrand in the same way that we talk to our specific user research teams that we had initially started with. And I get that businesses need to grow and they need to evolve. What, from your origin or your genesis though, as a user research and insights platform based in really solid principles, do you wrap around these templates and these experiences that marketers and other people that are coming to the platform to use it for other things? What are you doing to ensure that when they're collecting or harvesting opinions, for example, that they're actually then able to separate the signal from the noise and they're actually able to make sensible and sound decisions based on the information that they're capturing? Particularly when it comes to opinion-based research, which can be a little fraught when it comes to smaller samples and what people say versus what they actually end up doing.
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, absolutely. So when we are building templates for those types of use cases, or we consider them to be templates that might not be a UX research audience or mm-hmm. Perhaps one that we would like to it have more people get exposure to. We typically start with what are the outcomes, what's the question that you're ultimately trying to answer here? And then how do we build backwards from that? So thinking about something we went through, actually we rebranded and I think of this little test we did of our old logo versus our new logo. And we had done some quant research on it, but we also wanted to get actual feedback and opinions. And so what we did was we used one of the templates and kind of worked backwards from there. We were looking at things like, how appealing is it? How attractive, so things like more quantitative in nature, but with a qualitative sample size, if you follow me.
- But then there were other things that we asked people use three words to describe the logo or how it makes you feel. And so these were more qualitative in nature and subjective in nature, but when you looked at it, you could ultimately see all of those things were bubbled up to the top. And that was because you were focused on choosing the kind of question you ultimately wanted answered. And then we did all the work behind the scenes. The templates are actually built. I would say that there's probably maybe a couple hundred questions in the template bank. It's not that complex. There aren't that many ways to ask somebody their opinion or feedback on something. And so these are sound research questions that we then have built this database where we can start pulling them into templates where they make sense, where the goal of that template or test is to answer a specific question or have a specific outcome. So that's really kind of how we approach the templates, is focusing on the output first and putting less of the onus of the person who might not know UX research in and out on asking them to craft the questions. All of that is built, the templates are built with those little building blocks, if that makes sense.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So they have guardrails in place to ex Yes. Sort of accelerate this
- Janelle Estes:
- Simpler way to put it. Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Got it. It, there's this perception out there that UserTesting, and I'm talking about the approach, not necessarily the platform here, that it's slow and that it's expensive, is it?
- Janelle Estes:
- No, no. I mean, even before technology slow and expensive. I mean, I remember sitting in a lab in Bethesda, Maryland with a team of designers where I was running the UX research and we were doing rapid iterative testing where we would test a design with a couple of people and then we'd go away. And I mean, I'm probably really aging myself here, but we had laminated prototypes that we then scribbled over with markers. There wasn't even a Figma or an Envision or anything involved. I was very sort of hyper based. But the idea was we were able to get through three iterations of a design within a day and ultimately move forward with something that we felt more confident with that was going to perform better. Now, I mean, you fast forward to now, and I mean it doesn't matter if you use UserTesting or you set up four interviews through Zoom on Wednesday morning before your staff meeting, you can gather that same level of insight.
- Now, the challenge does become with analysis, I think that's the hardest part and arguably the most subjective part, especially if you're s, your approach is the same for every interview or you have the same set of questions you wanna ask people or the same set of tasks. You can't really screw that up. If you do it sound and you sort of have your method and your approach that's been tested and optimized, the challenge then becomes like, okay, this person said that. How am I supposed to interpret that? And I don't think we'll ever get to a place where that can be truly automated. I think we can get to a place where we can get to what people said faster and more efficiently. We can have meaningful conversations about it and we can align around it. But I don't see any place in the near future where it is something that I'm machine model can create for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is something I have been thinking about, and very early on, I think it was episode three would've been late 2020. I interviewed Dr. David Travis, who's a UK based user researcher. He wrote or co-wrote the book, think Like a UX Researcher. And he's been in the field for about 30 years. And I remember speaking to him about the rise and it was accelerated by Covid, the rise of platforms like UserTesting that enable people to run research in an asynchronous fashion at scale globally and also through unmoderated means, right? You can use an unmoderated method. And his perspective was that he felt that there was a risk that the pandemic and that platforms, this would, would make us overreliant on unmoderated research and we would actually be at risk of losing that close connection that we have with our participants, with our customers by running research asynchronously. Is there any merit in that concern or have you observed through the way in which people have been using UserTesting that there has been an alarming, and again, this is a loaded question, but has there been an alarming shift towards research that is asynchronous and unmoderated, and are we losing anything as a result of that?
- Janelle Estes:
- I'm sure there's always a challenge with using technology to fuel things that we're typically done by humans. I think the reality is as long as you are actually watching the videos and hopefully seeing people's faces and seeing their emotions as they use an experience or comment or answer your question, if you think about the sort of consumer economy that we live in right now, I mean, how many, it's probably a bad sort of comparison, but I mean, if you follow certain people that you're fans of on TikTok or Instagram and you're seeing videos of them all, sometimes you feel like you're part of their life. And so I challenge that We could probably do the same for our own customers. Imagine it sounds a little outlandish, but imagine if we had a TikTok feed [laugh] for customer feedback. Sounds weird, but I have imagined that as this idea of when we think about not turning everybody into a researcher, but also giving people direct exposure to customers, where is that middle point? And I think that where we can learn a lot from the things around us that people are really kind of tuned into. But I mean, I understand the kind of concern, and I think if you're doing on moderated and you're not watching the videos and you're just looking at metrics of a survey question, that's one thing. But if you're sitting there and you are consuming the videos or at least drilling into the parts that you believe are going to provide you with the most value I don't see a huge risk of losing that connection.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What work do teams need to be doing who have been working remotely and are running research through the platform? What do they need to be doing in terms of integrating their synthesis or their perspectives on the synthesis that they do when they're watching or participating in this research?
- Janelle Estes:
- So I've seen some really amazing examples back in the day. If you think about when this used to happen in person and we'd all be sitting behind the mirror watching a session happen, and there'd be a bunch of people, the stakeholders behind the scenes with sticky notes and we're doing affinity diagramming in real time, and that just mm-hmm. Doesn't exist really
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In Bethesda. When you were talking about that rapid testing you were doing, and I love rapid testing and I love doing it in the lab because it's too, there's just something about it, right?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, exactly. Well, it's funny, right? When you're, it the, the ability to sort of tweak the design in real time is so valuable. Many, I don't know if you've had this experience too, but you're like, okay, we signed up for two days of testing and we have 12 people coming in to test the same prototype. By the time the 12th person comes through, you're like, I know what they're going to say. I know what they're going to get tripped
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Up on asleep. Yeah, yeah, we've seen it before. Yeah,
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, exactly. So that freedom to adapt and adjust is amazing. But in the age of covid or digital disintermediation between not just our customers but us and the people that we work with, I've seen really creative uses of whiteboards, digital whiteboards use to collaborate in real time and watch a video together. I've seen it synchronous and asynchronous. I'm a big fan of synchronous because that's where you can start to have some of those discussions, right? Because everybody's coming at this. And I think that that's why this is so hard to sort of think of a world where you can automate this process of, if you and I were to watch the same thing and maybe three other people, three listeners, and summarize what happened and why we would all come at it with a little different perspective. And it's about talking through that perspective of where you align people in a team and then build this urgency to do something about it or fix it or change it. It's really hard to replicate that when you're either doing it asynchronously or looking at results independently and not really talking through it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I a hundred percent agree is that whole ladder of inference comes into play here. And if you don't have the ability to synthesize what you are all taking in the immediate, it becomes more difficult to achieve that than if you're doing that asynchronously. Now I'm just mindful of time and needing to bring the show down to a close. Now, Janelle, I have been listening to you talk clearly today, and I've also just been somewhat curious about the fact that it's not that long ago that you were listening to people complain about the website experience at Forrester. Yeah. And now you are c i o, chief Insights officer of a listed UX company, and there's not many listed UX companies out there. And you present to executives, you present to boards. You're clearly someone who's very confident and competent in terms of your ability to communicate with clarity. What have been the practices or the people, maybe it's mentors or the personal learnings that have helped you go from that person that was you, but you back then answering the phone to someone who's now confident enough to stand up in front of boards of multinational companies and give them some insight into this space of ours.
- Janelle Estes:
- Wow, I hadn't even actually thought about my [laugh], my career evolution in that way. So thank you for putting it in that perspective. I mean, there's been so many learnings along the way and so many sponsors and mentors that I've had to help me get to a place. I also feel like I've had the right opportunities. There's going back to this idea of being in the right place at the right time and being somebody who is open to having the opportunity to try something new and take risks. There's so many things that go into it. But I would say in terms of my most effective communication styles of how I even talk to my peers at UserTesting or I talk to other folks who, within our customers who are trying to understand what value could UserTesting or this idea of talking to our customers, provide to our business, it's all about storytelling and the narrative.
- It's about owning the conversation, obviously welcoming engagement and collaboration, but coming in with a strong perspective and the ability to tell stories, to give examples, to show people real grow customers as human beings, to help people come along with the story. And I think we always talk about in the field, what is the statistic? People remember stories like five x more than they remember numbers or data or try. I exact forget exactly what the statistic is. And I think we need to lean into that and we perfect opportunity to do it because we are talking with customers and building these narratives every day. And so bringing those to life, whether it's through synthesis across many of them, whether it's just highlighting a single experience and talking about why that matters. But I would say that that's been one of the main things that I've leaned on in terms of success.
- I also think of other big part of it's just asking for what you want. I mean, I think there are a lot of people who are afraid to do that, especially women. And so being able to say, you know what? I think I'm ready for this opportunity, or I think this is how my role should shift, or I think we have a need for this as a business. Again, having a perspective showing up and being confident and just asking for it. You don't get what you don't ask for. I would say [laugh] another kind of lesson I've learned over time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Janelle, you're a great storyteller and you're also a great role model out there, particularly for women that may be, I suppose, reticent to put their hand up and ask for what it is that they want. And I really think your story is a great example of someone who has managed to get to the C-suite and do it in such a wonderful and human fashion. I've really enjoyed our conversation today, Janelle. I really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with me.
- Janelle Estes:
- Thanks for having me, Brendan. It's been fun talking to you, and I'm honored to have been a guest on your awesome podcast.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome. And maybe in the future we'll do another episode when the next book comes out. I'm sure you've got something in the works eventually. Yeah, we'll see. Janelle, if people. Yeah. Oh good. We'll, keep me informed. If people wanna find out more about you, more the book, more about UserTesting, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Janelle Estes:
- Yeah, I mean, looking me up on LinkedIn is a good place to start. And then I also have my own website. It's just my name JanelleEstes.com that has a lot more of my work and information about the book and my podcast, so
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thank you, Janelle. I'll make sure that I put a link to LinkedIn and your website and all the good things that you've been doing in the show notes to everyone that's tuned in. It's been great having you here as well. As I've just mentioned, check out the show notes because they'll have plenty of good links in here, as well as a full chapter breakdown of our conversation. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great stories like this with world-class leaders and UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are very helpful. Subscribe and also pass the podcast along to someone else who you feel would get value from these conversations, these stories that we tell on this podcast. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes as well, or you can just find me on LinkedIn under Brendan Jarvis, or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.