Sarah Doody

Episode 71
Brave UX

Getting Serious About Your Career in UX

In this episode of Brave UX, Sarah Doody gives her assessment of UX education, shares how she’s helping UXers to have brave career conversations, and what it’s really like being a creative entrepreneur.

Highlights include:

Is the lack of standards in UX education a good thing?
How do you help people to have brave career conversations?
Does having a strong vision blind you from our customers’ needs?
How do we help people to slow down and focus on problems first?
What framework have you used to understand your users better?

May 3, 202201:15:30

Listen on:

Who is Sarah Doody?

Sarah is the Founder and CEO of Career Strategy Lab, the business she started in 2017 as a 45-minute lunch and learn, that has since grown into a leading career coaching company for user experience professionals.

By helping her clients to develop career skills and confidence, Sarah’s clients have secured jobs at companies including Google, Amazon, American Express, Home Depot, Harvard, Warner Brothers Entertainment and Salesforce.

Sarah has been invited to give talks and to teach workshops all over the world, including across the pond at UX London, at Start Con in Australia and at Productized in Portugal, to name a few.

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 Sarah Doody. Sarah is the Founder and CEO of Career Strategy Lab, the business she started in 2017 as a 45 minute lunch and learn that has since grown into a leading career coaching company for user experience professionals. By helping her clients to develop career skills and confidence, Sarah's clients have secured jobs at companies including Google, Amazon, American Express, home Depot, Harvard, Warner Brothers Enter Entertainment and Salesforce.
Alongside Career Strategy Lab, Sarah is also a consulting product strategist and UX designer, helping organizations to bring new products to life and to optimize the user experience of products that are already in market. In 2011, which seems like a lifetime ago, thanks to the past few years, Sarah was invited by General Assembly to design the curriculum for and to teach their first ever 12 week intensive pilot course on user experience design in New York City. Sarah has also been invited to give talks and to teach workshops all over the world, including across the pond at UX London, at Start Con in Australia (which is across the other pond) and at Productized in Portugal, to name a few. And now Sarah's beaming into Brave UX from I believe Salt Lake City in Utah. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Doody:
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. And you got it right. I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah, nestled up in the mountains here
Brendan Jarvis:
And we were just talking before we hit record and you've just literally got back from some time on the slopes and I'm very, very jealous.
Sarah Doody:
Yes, Yes. I did a bunch of powder runs this morning and a few little hikes to get to some fresh stashes of powder. So it was great. And then I had to come back, fix my hair and here I am.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, hair's looking great and I'm really pleased that you could be here. And look, this might sound like a bit of a strange place to start, but I have been trying to place your accent and I had been trying to do that through LinkedIn and I noticed as far back as I could go in terms of your education history, you studied in Portland, then you went to Texas and then you went up to Canada into a town called Athabasca. What is the story there and why am I finding it so difficult to place your accent?
Sarah Doody:
So I actually was born and grew up in Canada. So I grew up just very close to Ottawa, the capital. And I did my elementary and high school there. And then I moved to the United States, which I thought would just be a one year expedition. I'm also a dual citizen. That was very easy for me to do and I a stubborn teenager, I just thought I'm going to the United States and then here I am all those years later. But yeah, I did. Very long story short, I ended up graduating from a school in Canada. I kind of bounced around through university to different schools and to reduce the amount of credits I would lose in all my bouncing around, I basically completed my entire degree from a Athabasca University, which was one of the leading distance universities in the world at the time. So didn't, I've never actually been to Athabasca, I didn't go to a graduation or anything. They sent me a diploma in the mail and that was that.
Brendan Jarvis:
So this restlessness you used the term bouncing around. Is this, I get a sense you've got a lot of energy from what I've seen and this sort of restlessness that you've exhibited in I suppose, your earlier life when you were studying. Is this something that shows up for you in other areas of your life?
Sarah Doody:
That's a great question. I would say it's a combination. It's a combination of restlessness and curiosity. And I think a little bit of calculated risk taking [laugh], growing up I was always very creative and very technical. I was voted most creative in high school or some random thing that [laugh] other students vote on. But in hindsight, I don't think it's any surprise that I ended up doing what I do. But the idea of, I didn't even know what user experience was in high school that old. And I do remember in high school taking an entrepreneurial class and thinking to myself, why would I work for myself when I could work for another company and they would just pay me and there would be no risk. And then I worked for some companies and I guess I got restless and I thought to myself, I'm not doing this
Brendan Jarvis:
And I do wanna come to what you have done, especially most recently with Career strategy Lab. And as I mentioned in your introduction, you're also a product consultant or you have been in the past and you've consulted on a wide variety of products. But before we do that, I actually listened to your interview on the UX Usability podcast and prep for today and you said something on that and I just wanna quote you now. You said I think the world could benefit if everyone could just understand the context of where we are each coming from context is so crucial and we jump to conclusions so fast and everyone is not really listening a lot of the time stays days. Now, given that we're at the very beginning of this brave UX conversation, I just wanted to give you the opportunity to make your context clear for our listeners. And you can take this where you want, but I thought just to get you started, what does UX mean to you and why have you chosen to invest your career in it?
Sarah Doody:
So I think that for me, the reason that I ended up pursuing user experience, and it kind of goes with what you said in your intro where you said product puzzle. And for as long as I can remember, I've kind of been solving puzzles. And I remember one time my family was going on a road trip and my mom went to the toy store and came home with this advanced puzzle. And she was so excited, she thought it would keep me occupied and I sat down and solved it in minutes and she thought it would keep me occupied on an eight hour trip.
But I've always been solving literal puzzles or invisible puzzles and by that I mean people or situations for as long as I can remember, that has just been how my brain works. And so I think through all of that puzzle solving that I've been doing, it made me realize the importance of context and understanding a whole situation and not just what literally came out of someone's mouth or what just happened. Well, what led up to that moment. And I remember career counselors told me I should pursue journalism or psychology or psychiatry and things like that. And so I think hindsight is always so interesting. I don't think there's any surprise I'm doing what I do, but everything I was always curious about was in that realm of puzzle solving, sense, making, understanding people, et cetera. And that whole context thing, I'm so passionate about that.
I think it's the researcher's side of me. And a couple years ago I had this idea, what if we could teach basics of user research to the masses, like to non UX people and help people understand how to find context through what we do with research. So bit of a side tangent, but I really did, I wrote this book, it's not published yet, it's on Google Drive somewhere and it was all about how to find context. And I developed this framework called the three Ps. It's kind of silly, but it's also so simple. It works. So the three Ps are pause, ponder, proceed. So the idea is in any situation, especially those where you feel like I use the words, you feel like you're spiraling. So you're going from zero to end of the world in 60 seconds you receive a text message, the phone rings that looks someone's gives you.
And so this pause, ponder, proceed. It was or maybe will in the future, help people understand how to recognize those moments of spiral. Cause a lot of times we don't. And then ponder being the bulk of it, which is where the superpower of research comes in. And then you find that context to then proceed with the right lens, not the lens that is possibly invented. Because I'm really into neuroscience and I forget which podcast, but I a hundred percent can attribute this to a podcast that Bene Brown was on, I think it was the Dax Shepherd podcast. But she said that our brains need a beginning of middle and an end. So when something happens, our brains will just make up the next thing that's going to happen and the outcome because they need that. And the kicker for me was when she said, our brains don't know the difference between fact or fiction. And I thought, so if our brains don't know the difference between fact and fiction, if I could take my knowledge of user research and help people uncover fact, maybe that would be a good thing for the world. Anyway, we'll see if the book ever happens. I'm a little busy these days, but maybe I need to hire a ghost writer to bring it over the finish line.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well it sounds like the bulk of it is ready and waiting to go. So no doubt you, you will hopefully get some time in the future to finish it. And I was curious that you mentioned this pause, ponder and proceed. Yeah, because just last week I recorded an episode of Brave UX with David Dylan Thomas, who is the author of Design for Cognitive Bias and also the podcast that at the cognitive bias podcast. And something that he learned through his understanding of bias and how it shows up is that our biases are obviously our brains making mistakes, but they're based on patent matching. So it's our brain trying to remove some of the load from our decision making and our day-to-day. And sometimes it gets it wrong and 95% of the decisions that we are making are happening in the background. So it's only that 5% that we're consciously aware of. But your insight there around catching yourself when you start to spiral, yes, that pause is actually one of the same techniques that you can use when you become conscious of what your biases are and you can pause to examine them and then make a decision as to how you want to behave. So I think that's interesting. It's definitely onto something there and it sounds like a useful thing to bring to the world.
Sarah Doody:
It keeps coming up in podcasts. So the researcher in me has to pause and pay attention to that as much as writing a book book just sounds like so much work. I know cause I already did it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well you're over the hump. You're Sarah, you're, you're actually most well known for your work helping UXers to get their portfolios together. And that was through a program that you developed called the UX Portfolio Formula. But you, you've also recently taken that to the next level. I understand the portfolio formula still exists, but you've launched Career Strategy Lab and I understand that that is a much broader value proposition for UXers [affirmative]. Who is it for? What's it for and why did the world of UX need Career Strategy Lab?
Sarah Doody:
So Career Strategy Lab is for UX and product professionals really who need to learn how to articulate their skills and experience and translate that into all of those things you need in your job search. Whether it's portfolio resume, LinkedIn, and the literal skill and art of a job search and preparing for interviews. And another way to think of it, is it not for someone that just heard about user experience a month or two months ago and is trying to figure out the difference between UX and UI and is looking for a bootcamp? Cuz I know there's a lot of people out there and we will not teach you user experience necessarily. We are about getting you hired. And the second part to your question, why did the world of user experience need this? So this really came from my observations as a researcher and seeing my inbox and all of my DM messages on every single platform. [laugh],
Some people even text me, which is a little creepy, but questions about the job search, how do I get hired, how do I find jobs, how do I prepare for interviews? I've applied to 400 jobs and I've had three interviews and it all actually makes me very angry to be honest, [laugh] because since launching Career Strategy Lab, I've been very diligent about understanding who the people are that are interested in this program. And we have an application if you want to join Career Strategy Lab A, so we can filter out the people who are way too beginner for this, but B, so I can understand a little bit more about UX education these days. And I will tell you, I don't have the exact number off the top of my head. I would say at least 70% of the people that have joined this program attended a paid UX bootcamp.
Some of them were 15 or $20,000. So the problem is that despite, I would argue almost every single bootcamp out there saying they're going to help you create a portfolio and get hired and some of them guaranteeing that they don't do a good job at it and the reason they don't do a great job is because I believe it's an afterthought. So having created General Assemblies first ever program, which obviously has evolved, were we thinking about the job search? No, I mean the conclusion after that experiment was we only scratched the surface. So I can't imagine how a bootcamp could squeeze what I teach into a week or two module. And I think I filled a really needed gap and it's very rewarding when people send testimonials. I was just reviewing them this weekend. One person got hired 55 days after joining our program, another one was 47 days. People triple their salary, double their salary, so it it's need for it and it works and it kind of markets itself, which is, I mean [laugh] the dream basically [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Definitely from a creative entrepreneur's point of view. I just wanna rewind slightly and I wanna ask you, so is it you that we can blame for the birth of you expert camps then?
Sarah Doody:
So I was thinking about this the other day, am I the problem? No, I think that General Assembly approached myself and I did co-create this with a collaborator and I, I knew what General Assembly was at the time, but I think they only had the New York campus or maybe they had a few elsewhere. So I don't think I realized, I don't think there was any way to predict this, but I do think that probably a whole other podcast topic like the rise of UX boot camps and the initial wave of them which did really strive for quality and excellence and all of these things. And now I would confidently say that I think a lot of boot camps are made created by tech people who just see an opportunity and think they're going to create a bootcamp and raise money and go drinks Tahiti or something.
Like they're not all created by UX people. And I think it's really sad for people who are trying to learn user experience because how are they to vet these boot camps if they don't even know what user experience is? So I think it's being a little exploited right now to use blunt language. And I would say that too because we were talking about the rise of online education and online courses and things and I think we have this wave of UX becoming very popular with the, I will use the word ease and quotation marks of creating online courses and online education and those things coming together I think allowed big institutions to make their own boot camps and literally people who graduated from boot camps are making their own boot camps. And I'm like, how does that work? If you just graduated and you haven't worked in UX and now you have your own bootcamp, it almost feels like a pyramid scheme in some regards.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I wanna go into this cuz I know you've expressed strong feelings about this in the past and yeah, I'll quote you again now if I may. You
Sarah Doody:
Said, okay, I'm curious, what did I say?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, hopefully I'm not misquoting you. I'm pretty sure this is word for word. All right. You've said because the UX industry is a free for all, there are some very standardized education programs and certifications, yet at the same time there is a massive amount of education out there that is unvetted and unregulated. So because of that it makes it very muddy for people trying to figure out their careers. My question is, is this muddiness this rapid pace at which the education space around UX is evolving? Is this not aligned with what makes the field so attractive and so seemingly innovative?
Sarah Doody:
Let me see if I understand the question. So are you seeing, because the field is so in demand and there is such a large variety of options and price points of how to learn user experience, that it's not surprising that so many people are gravitating towards that. Cuz someone with the time and money to do a master's degree could get into it and someone who takes the Google certificate, which maybe there's a free version, there's also a very cheap version from my understanding, and that's all just come together and created this tidal wave of muckiness.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I suppose that is what that question is really touching on is just the pace at which the field is evolving and the lack of regulation that exists around it. Is that not one of its sources of strength?
Sarah Doody:
Is it a source of strength? I think it is great that the field has so much visibility and that I can be riding the chairlift with someone at the ski area and they ask me what I do and I say, yeah, I do use your experience. It means making websites and apps really user friendly and then they say, oh, my daughter wants to get into that, or my cousin is studying that. And so I think that is cool. So maybe if we look at the of field as a person, maybe we are in the terrible twos or toddler stage, I don't have kids, but maybe that might be a possible analogy to consider and we'll come out of these growing pains more well-rounded and mature in things. But I think there's also that challenge of companies realize the value of investing in user experience. And from my anecdotally, based on conversations and just observations when I'm reading articles and talking to people, it seems like there's not enough kind of seasoned people in management to have the time, energy, patience, and frankly ability to teach and mentor [laugh] this giant wave of people who are at the beginning of this journey.
And it's a big, I hesitate to use the word problem, I think it's an opportunity. I don't think that one person or one organization will solve this. But going back to the idea of regulation, I'm not sure that is the solution either. But concerning education, I just wish there was less preying upon people, basically [laugh] to buy so many of these boot camps, they promise you will get hired. And then I know for a fact some of them have kind of clauses where well they'll do that and they'll give you access to that if you apply to X number of jobs a week or if you connect on LinkedIn with this many people or if you write X articles on medium per week. And I have to think to myself, well now this grotesque level of regurgitated content on medium, maybe we could attribute that to all these bootcamp people being told they need to make a personal brand and have a presence.
So let me write this surface level article on medium and I realize that all sounded very pessimistic and negative. But I think about this all the time and as you can tell, I'm trying to connect the dots. And it's also a little concerning cuz when people see things on the internet, whether it's related to our industry or news or health or politics or anything, what do we know? We know that a lot of people are not, we know that a lot of people consider text on a screen to be the truth. And so there's not this vetting of content that people are consuming. And so I think that's why a lot of these people coming into the field, I know they're very confused cuz that's why they join my program because they say I'm overwhelmed with the amount of information about job search and portfolios and resume. Every Google search leads to conflicting advice and opinions. So bit of a tangent, but
Brendan Jarvis:
So this messiness, muddiness, that messiness we've spoken about, this is actually opened up an opportunity, I suppose for you to come in and provide people with a solution and to help them to see through the fog and yes actually land a career or a job first start in their career or maybe a transition point in their career through what you do. What is the largest mistake that you see people making when it comes to their UX career?
Sarah Doody:
So I think the largest mistake that I see people making is not applying product and UX and design principles to themselves treating their career and themselves like a product because I just did slides for a workshop this weekend, but one slide has the double diamond process. Everyone has seen this graphic all over. And I say there's a reason we follow that process. It's kind of like guardrails. It helps us from going too far off the road and then crashing [laugh]. So if we skip to design in say some app that we're working on, we've probably all worked on a product like this. Oh no, we don't need to do research. I understand the customer, let's just jump right to designer. Right? Well what happens, every project I've worked on that it ends up taking longer, more expensive cuz you have to redo things in high fidelity.
Or finally someone comes around and decides, okay, we should do research. So it's back to square one. So same thing with our careers, specifically with the job search. So many people, I gotta do my resume, I gotta do my LinkedIn, okay, I'm going to go to LinkedIn and start typing bullet points, just stream of consciousness. There's no strategy, I'm going to do a job search, I'm going to type UX into LinkedIn and then apply, well what jobs did you wanna search for though? Do you have specific industries or types of companies? So if we've just followed the basic, basic kind of principles and little milestones in that double diamond, that alone would I think would help a ton of people, not a mistake, but a skill that I think is missing or deprioritize these days. I think it's that skill, a couple of them, I think it's critical thinking.
I think it's writing and I think probably if I had to throw in a third, I think it would be research, basic research. And that doesn't mean become an expert in the latest research software. That means being, for me, being more mindful and being more observant, take software out of it. It's what happens in your brain as a researcher. I wish I could just plug that into everyone, but a lot of what we do in Career Strategy Lab, yes we will teach you how to make a resume, but I don't run, send me your resume and I will rewrite it for you. Service. I don't do that and I don't believe in that because that's nice. It might get you your next job, but then what happens when you need to get your next job? You still don't know how to write a resume. And so I've realized that career strategy lab is really a container for allowing me to, I guess I'm kind of laughing now, but I guess do everything I just said. I wanna do teach people how to be more mindful, think critically and write because at the end of the day, that's what we end up doing in Crew Strategy lab. And that's why people come out with portfolios that don't scratch the surface that actually tell a story of not just what they did but how they did it, why they did it, what happened, all of those things. So that allowed a light bulb to go off in my mind now I kind of did what I've subconsciously wanted to do.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh good. I feel like you've just self-actualized on both UX.
Sarah Doody:
Yes. This is actually those things I just said. I guess we do that [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Awesome. One of the things that I know that you do do at Career Strategy Lab is you help your clients to create what's called a career roadmap. And this sounds like one of those pause, ponder, and then proceed type exercises that people go through. Now I also understand that this involves them going to former colleagues or clients depending on how they've been working and asking them questions to help them to see their own blind spots, which when I was thinking about this and I've done a similar exercise a few years back, that requires you to be up for some fairly confronting answers. You may not always get them, but there's the possibility you're going to hear things that you currently don't align with and that are going to cause some internal friction for you. How do you prepare people to have those kind of conversations with those other people so they can get that feedback and really learn and improve their current state?
Sarah Doody:
Yeah, that's a great question. And off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who has at least verbalized to me that they did this exercise and then discovered, I hesitate to use the word negative, but areas of weakness or things like that. Maybe it has and maybe they haven't told me, but it's all about how we frame this to the people in career strategy lab because this whole exercise is meant to be a research project on you. And a lot of the people have never done research. If you're a UX writer or an interface designer, design systems person, maybe you've never done a user interview, that's fine, you don't have to. But when it comes to understanding where you have come from and getting that perspective from other people who, the idea is sometimes we're blind to things that we are great at or we're not so great.
And I think that in doing this because people know the information they retrieve will be used to inform their future. I think it feel, I hope if they receive, actually you're not so good at this, if they receive that feedback, I hope it's maybe less of a sting because they realize I am a researcher right now, I need to take this information and then we're going to create this roadmap really so I can design a career path that allows me to do the things I want to do that plays on my strengths and that I can identify any skills gaps and experience gaps that I might need to fill in to get to that ultimate goal of being a research manager let's say, or chief design officer or something. So I think it's about context, it's about knowing how will this information be used. Right, right.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was actually curious because if you are the person coming up with the exercise generally, and this is an assumption, so correct me if I'm wrong, [affirmative] generally that comes from a place of personal experience.
Sarah Doody:
Oh
Brendan Jarvis:
Yes. What have you learned, what have you learned about yourself having done a similar exercise if you have to this career roadmap?
Sarah Doody:
So the roadmap is a bit of a tangent, but the roadmap initially came to be because early in my career I worked for a couple of startups, neither of which exist anymore and definitely we're floundering. And one of them really just had a lot of people issues, let's say. And so I always found myself every three, four months at this one company not having people not know what to do with me [laugh] because imagine a small startup, the founder is a designer and what's going to happen? They want their hands all over my design stuff cuz I was the director of UX.
So it's like I would do work and then I'd work myself out of a job cause it would get to the point where the founder could then swoop in and play around all that to say they didn't know what to do with me. So they kind of threw me over to the marketing team, said, you're going to be the marketing department. And then they said, actually you're going to go beyond the tech team and develop this natural language processing thing that the tech team was working on. I was like whatever. So I did that. It was kind of interesting, I couldn't explain it nowadays, but in all my spare time I had back then when I wasn't researching natural language processing, I made a roadmap for my own career. I thought, heck, I don't wanna do this again. So I remember talking to former bosses and friends and gathering this information.
But another thing that we have people do, which was equally as powerful, I call it, what did I give it the name of? I made the name mentor mirroring what we call it inside Career Strategy Lab. Basically thinking to yourself, who are the people I look up to that inspire me that I read an article about them in Fast Company and I think, man, I want their job someday. So I literally made this keynote presentation for myself. I actually found it on the weekend by accident and it has Marissa Mayer, it has this shoe designer from Nike, some other people, I forget who they are. But looking at that and having forgot about it and looking at what I'm doing now, I mean it's darn right, creepy to see [laugh], what I did almost well 15 years ago at least, definitely influenced what I'm doing today. It really is. I should do a workshop about it or something cuz it's pretty creepy how similar it is. And the process I just invented really in this moment of desperation at the time. And then I just went and executed on this little keynote presentation I made about what my career would be and that was that.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you made some big changes in recent years in the last five years to do what you've done with career strategy lab. You're now a creative entrepreneur and you were a consultant and on the tools, so there's quite a shift there. So I was curious, what was that watershed moment for you? What was the piece of feedback or that realization that you had that the mm-hmm [affirmative] career path that you were walking down was not aligned to what your ultimate goal was?
Sarah Doody:
So I believe I started consulting officially quit the full-time job and went for it in 2012, so 10 years ago. And I did that for five years or so on my own as well as I was a contractor for a friend's UX agency in New York City. And this whole notion of trading dollars for hours was always very frustrating to me, especially when I was a consultant, contracted out for someone else's agency. And so I thought to myself, I think I really have a few options. I think I either have to make my own agency because then I kind of scale myself or I have to figure out how to not be doing this project work and productize what I'm doing. So I kind of tried to productize what I did consulting wise. I really productized the idea of UX audits, which I still get asked to do from time to time.
Maybe I'll do them again, but I'm a little busy. But I really, really saw the opportunity with online courses. And actually the first course I ever taught was all about user research. So you can still grab that, it's this complete toolkit and course of how to decide what type of research to do, how to write a screener or how to find people to participate in your research, goes through everything in a lot of detail. And once I dip my toes into that and how to successful initial launch of that, I couldn't even tell you what the numbers were. It was so long ago, once I saw the results, I thought this is how I can not be tied to dollars attached to hours. And I have a digital product that I can sell infinite copies of and it doesn't take any more of my time, especially if it's a self-study program with no office hours. So that's what I did.
Brendan Jarvis:
And it sounds like you've never looked back.
Sarah Doody:
Never really. I mean, yeah, I just keep looking forward to my demise sometimes too much, too far forward in the future. Well
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm going to ask you to cast your eyes back just momentarily for me. I want to go back to the time before you started the UX portfolio formula, or as that was starting now, I understand that you were helping at that time you were consulting, helping products to find market fit, helping these existing products to shape themselves into better products so that they could actually be successful. And you had this observation during that time, and I think it's an observation that is somewhat shared across the UX community that there was this will to just come in and sprinkle, I think is the words you used some UX into the product and all would be okay. And you had described that in terms of your engagement with founders at the time. So you'd mentioned there, you just touched on the fact that you were working in a couple of startups. Do founders and business people more broadly that are outside of design, do they really believe that they can just come in and sprinkle some UX or is there something else that's actually going on there?
Sarah Doody:
That's a great question and it's also very timely because sometime in the past week I tweeted [laugh], something along the lines of how frustrating it is to use a product and then have that product raise either 15 or 25 million, I can't remember [laugh] raise all this money and ignore they're paying customers begging, literally begging for basic features inside their community and then have that company announce funding and announce all these hair brain features that no one asked for. And that're totally useless in my opinion. So the point I'm trying to make is I do think that some founders and companies have the mindset that we just need UX to come in and make it look pretty, cuz that's kind of what they mean. I do think there's also the challenge of companies, especially newer companies, once you take money then you are accountable to investors and things like that.
So in the case of this one company, which I'm not going to name, although I'd love to, but [laugh] in case in the case of them, I'm sure now they have founders breathing down their neck and it's less about give your power users the features they need to do X, Y, and Z with their power user needs and more about how do we get those new people in the door and handhold the newbies. So a lot of these features I see, and I can think of two products off the top of my head that I actually use that do this. It is a clear shift in messaging and marketing around getting newbies in the door to use their product and a complete disregard for customers that have been there for years who have large businesses built on these products. And we have to click our heels twice and go back and forth with support for two weeks to do some basic stuff that their engineers have to do in the background for us. So that's kind of like a two-part answer. I think it's a sprinkle UX and it's also this seesaw that happens when you raise money and the impact that it has on your actual customers.
Brendan Jarvis:
I had a conversation with Indy Young a couple of months back and oh, what came out of that conversation is probably no surprise to people that know Indy's work is that people are generally quite uncomfortable when it comes to sitting with the problem. And you've touched on this in the past as well, and I'll just, you again, you've seen, you've said we need to ditch our premature rush to build things and it's that rush, it's that momentum or that pressure that we feel to actually make something that is symptomatic of us not being comfortable sitting with the problem. Now I understand, and it's no secret that in business there is the profit motive and if you've taken funding then there's a runway that will eventually run out. So there's no surprise that the pressure comes on when it comes to those environments. But how do we put down, what I'm framing up here is the solution candy bar in favor of problem problem broccoli, because that's the problem. That's the the equivalent that I can think of is that problems are broccoli to people. Oh yes. Where the solution is that sugar rush in that candy bar to build. So how do we help people to become more comfortable with taking some time to really understand what it is that they need to solve for their customers and avoiding the situation that you've just described where current customers needs get put on the back burner because people are rushing off to build the next big feature.
Sarah Doody:
I love how you use the analogy of the solution is a kit in a candy store. Because I think when you rush into solution mode, I think people do this because solution means pixels on a screen, it means you can see progress, you have that hit of progress for a lack of better word. And when you have to sit with the problem, there's just a lot of, it's like quicksand, it's not fun. There's lots of just confusing ideas going through your head, you're trying to connect the dots, you think you're onto something and then this fork comes in the road because you interviewed these new people and you learned something new. And I think sitting with the problem is very uncomfortable, especially in this world we live in where people want instant progress, they want the quick fix, they want the diet pill, they want this, that the other.
They want to change their life overnight by doing X, Y, and Z. It's so simple. So how do we get people to see the value in really embracing the problem? I mean when I encountered this challenge with startups, one thing I would always try and help them understand is the cost of not understanding the problem. So what is that cost? So on teams, on product teams for example, it's not just time and money, it's also potentially morale and employee retention. Because if you have this culture where you're constantly building stuff that launches that doesn't get traction and then everyone gets mad and you have to reduce stuff that's not good for morale and that's not good for retention. And so I think shining spotlight on that is very important. And I love how you said that rush to build. And when you said that I kind of had this moment where I thought I was the complete opposite because I actually resisted building this business I've built for so long for many reasons and I was very slow.
I would not say I was slow to execute on it, I was quick to execute, but I executed very small SLRs along the way when I first created UX portfolio formula, which I guess is a nice literal name, although I kind of think it's cheesy now, but everyone gets what it is. So when I first had the idea for that, I did a survey, I sent it to my audience, I got hundreds of results back then. I said, okay, I'm going to tell everyone that filled out this survey that I'm going to do this workshop. Did I have the workshop ready? No. But I made a sales page and hooked up a credit card thing and told people I was running a workshop and I thought to myself, I forgot what the number was. I think it was 30 people. If 30 people don't buy this, we're not doing it and I'll just refund everyone.
So I didn't even have the workshop created, I had a vague idea and then I sent the email and next thing I know, 85 people signed up for this thing and then I had to shut it down and have a wait list and I had to make it. So I think we could all benefit from move fast but also move in small increments, if that makes sense, that allow you to validate along the way. Because if 85 people did that workshop and they all said it was terrible, I wouldn't have done it again. But 85 people did that workshop, then they said this was awesome, the 45 minute workshop, can you do it again? And they literally said, could you make it four weeks long? I thought yes, and we'll charge it, charge more. And people started to get hired. So that was the validation that maybe subconsciously I was hoping it would fail so I wouldn't have to pursue this idea. But it worked. It worked and it was just like the little nudge I needed to keep going. But I think too many people keep going without that nudge. Does that make sense? They just keep going cuz their ego's like go, go, go. And I basically had to be shoved down the product path to keep going by this validation.
Brendan Jarvis:
I was curious about what you've just explained there and the role, if any, that vision had for you and what you were creating. And I don't necessarily want you to post rationalize the vision, but if you take yourself back to that moment in time where you're actually preparing this landing page, you are putting something out there for a course that you haven't yet written. How concrete was it what you were going to create now 10 years later with Career strategy lab?
Sarah Doody:
So I think at the time it was very concrete in terms of I wanted to make the best step-by-step actually how to program for creating a portfolio. And that was it. The reason was there was so much content out there that was all just tell a story, show your process, make it easy for the hiring manager. All this stuff that yes we know, but when you sit down to actually do it a lot harder. And so this is literally step by step cookbook recipe, detail level instructions and how to make a portfolio. And that's all I did in the office hours that happened after this product kind of expanded while naturally people started asking questions about resumes and about interviews and about this and about that. And in the back of my head I thought, well, I should obviously create a resume course and a job search co course and all this.
But I knew that if I did that, two things are going to happen. It's going to create a marketing problem because we had this portfolio brand and all this. And also, I mean I was a one woman show, I didn't have time to do office hours and review portfolios for hours on ND tweak and make the best resume curriculum. So I consciously, consciously stayed in the lane of portfolios from 2017 until, I don't know, I'm guessing 20 maybe. And then I made very MP M V P versions of a resume and job search course just honestly because I do not repeating myself. And I thought if I do this, I won't have to talk about it on office hours. I can just send everyone to this portfolio or this resume course. But then after a year and a half of that, I finally had some breathing room because I had well actually I didn't have a team, I had my assistant [laugh], I didn't have a team until this October, but I had some breathing room and I kind of deprioritized sales if this makes sense, to spend my time to develop this new program, the career strategy lab, knowing that if we had some sales dips for the months I was working on this, it was fine because once I got this career strategy lab outta the gate, it was going to cost more and it would be game changing.
And that worked. But I think even now, I just was talking to my maybe director of ops we're kind of feeling each other out right now, but she said this doesn't just have to be for UX people, it could be for accountants and software developers and graphic designers and we should take this. Y didn't, I said, you're not the first person to say this. I've thought the same thing too. But we are then competing with a big wide audience and it's kind of nice to be the big fish in the small pond of UX. If all of a sudden we say we're career coaching for everyone, it's almost like no one's going to hear us cuz it's so noisy out there. So maybe five years from now we'll be talking about the white label version of this. I have no idea, but I think we could do it. It's really a business decision and a lifestyle decision. For me personally, how big of a company do I wanna build? Because we were saying I was skiing this morning and if I had a team of 30 people, of course I'd have reports up to me, but I think it would be a lot harder for me to just ditch if I see a snowstorm coming and block off three days in a row. Cause I'm going to be on the mountain. So apparently everything I do is designed [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the hardest choices that people have to make and in life and in particular with their careers and their businesses is what not to do. And there is a pull in our culture to try and do more to scale, to raise money, to build a big team. And it can often be a harder decision to stick in one's lane and continue to add value to those people that you've chosen to serve. I asked you about vision because you'd said something else in a talk that I'd listened to you give, which was, and I'll quote you again. Whenever you have a new idea for a product or a feature, it becomes this big dream. You have this five year vision of it and that's great, but people only need their little solution that's going to help them with that struggle. And this is interesting to me and it's interesting to hear your story as well about your business and the vision as that unfolded for you as you've worked on it. Because we also hear in our culture that you need these grand visions, but it actually seems at least anecdotally to me that the shaping of the products and services that we do in design as UXers or as creative entrepreneurs, actually that vision may actually blind us from what's actually important and from what our users need in the now. What thoughts do you have on that, if you've can relate it back to the journey that you've been through with your business?
Sarah Doody:
Yeah, so I think it's so true that I remember a founder coming to me years ago and laying out this idea, which I think had to do with sports gambling or something. I'm not even sure, sports gambling and maybe cars were involved also. And I remember he said to me in at least one of our first three meetings, he said, this is going to be the next Netflix and I know this is going to be my family's legacy or basically trust fund. He was trying to say that. And I thought to myself, this is not going to work. And it's true because if he couldn't identify the one product, the one thing person that was going to buy that in the beginning, I don't know how you're going to become the net. Netflix. Netflix, it just, it's, and I get it because I get that some people are more visionary and we need those types of people in the world, but we also need those people that kind of serve as check and balance, who are making sure that in order to get to that proverbial destination, we are making the right stops along the way, meaning we're making the right products and then we are being patient.
I think that's another key thing here, being patient enough to sit with that version of the product until it's ready to go to the next destination. Kind of mixing a lot of analogies here but this, because there have been many times when I looked at our, so we started with kind of version one of the UX portfolio formula, which was a 45 minute workshop. I then turned that into a four week workshop, which I taught live. So every day for four weeks or not every day, every week for four weeks, I would teach it live. And then when I felt comfortable with that, I made some changes and I recorded it. So that was game changing. And then I sat with that version and the beauty of it was people would go through it, make their portfolio, submit questions for office hours, and I had this literal loop of feedback telling me, people don't understand this, people don't understand how to write a case study or what makes a presentation, skimmable and scannable and all these things.
And so then I did another version of it and then just, I don't know, 18 months ago I did another version of it. And now we have drastically seen the number of questions that come in relating to all those early problems. And our office hours and critiques are less about here is how to do they're, they're less me teaching and it's more actually critiquing. And maybe that's a good example of how we stuck with versions of the product that I knew weren't as good as they could be. But in the grand scheme of being a C E O, you're bouncing time, money, this, that, the other energy I had to just let kind of an not so nice, not that's the wrong phrase. I had to let a version of the product that was good enough [laugh] sit until we had the time and space and feedback to redo it. That feedback part is key.
Brendan Jarvis:
It doesn't sound very glamorous.
Sarah Doody:
I'm glad you said that because I think if someone had said to me, you're going to be this portfolio person and turn into a career coach, I would not have believed this because someone, if you asked me to help you with your resume five, 10 years ago, in my head I would be thinking, how do people not know how to write a resume? And when in 2017 before the 45 minute workshop, I had this special folder in my email, which was like, how do I make a portfolio emails? And I would see one and I would just drag it in there. And I fully intended to reply to all these people someday, but I know I never replied to many of them because in my head I was thinking, how do people not know how to do this? Isn't a portfolio, a UX project? And yeah, it's not a website, but it's content in a presentation that is trying to communicate something and it has the goal of helping someone see your skills and experience [laugh].
Like to me it was just so black and white. So zero one, how could you not know how to do this? And it's that, I forget the exact phrase, but that idea of when you're an expert at something, you don't realize the deficiency that other people have in that skillset. And I guess it made me realize how much of a natural storyteller and designer I am, because I will say in many of the companies I've been in either full-time or consulting and people I've collaborated with, many of them would say, oh, Sarah's the storyteller. Sarah is the presentation maker. You need a deck, have Sarah do it. So if you want wire frames that are not Laura and you could throw in front of an investor and they're actually going to get it with real content, I can do that. So it's not surprising.
Brendan Jarvis:
There's actually a bias that David Dylan Thomas taught me about where I think it's a French word and I won't do it justice, but basically it's this bias, and I'm not going to try and say it where we spend so much time in our professional career and our track that we see the world around us through only that lens. And what I mean by that is that we can often have blinkers on and not be aware of why other people can't see what it is that we see and solve the problems that we solve. Obviously you saw that problem, you had that folder on your email, you were collecting those responses intending to get back to them, and you have your reply to them was actually to create the business that you created. It wasn't individual replies. Yeah, but it was something more substantial that could use to help them with. But I understand that while you were going through this process of forming this business over this period of years that you have, that you had a framework that you used during your user research to help you to better understand what the world was like for the people that you were intending to serve. Now I understand it's got three parts and I wanted to ask you about this because this is, to me anyway, it was quite a useful way of framing up how you can better understand your users. So what is this framework all about?
Sarah Doody:
So I think the framework we're talking about is just these three really simple questions that you know could ask to understand. I think many situations. And the first, okay, imagine you're on a river and you're on one side and the other side of the river and there's the river in between. So the first question is, where are we now? Or where are my potential customers now? What is their current reality? What are they doing? How are they trying to solve this problem? Are they trying to solve this problem? Do they even know it's a problem? Who are they currently paying to solve this problem? So what is my current reality? And we actually use this framework in career strategy lab when people think about their career. So where am I now? Or where are my people now? What is the proposed future or dream state?
If we could wave a magic wand, what does an easier, more productive, more useful world look like for them? More fulfilling, et cetera. So what's that desired future reality? And then we have to think, well, what's stopping them? What's in the middle? So the middle is the obstacles. Is it time? Is it money? Is it, in our case, it was lack of available and trusted, detailed step-by-step instructions on how to make a portfolio that was missing. Because we heard that there was too much surface level vague advice just saying to tell a story, but no one was telling how to tell a story. [laugh] how to show your process. What does that actually mean? And it's funny because if we think back to our beginning of our conversation, we talked about research and how a lot of people like to skip research and things like that.
But this is such a great example of how just sitting down to answer those questions, I would consider that research. Research doesn't have to be, you hire a research firm and they charge you tens of thousands of dollars and it takes six or eight weeks and there's all these formal presentations and meetings and emails and stuff. Just simply answering those three questions could start dipping your toes into that research and understanding those people. And I would even argue, maybe it causes you to stay in that research mode longer than you thought you would. It's almost like you have one piece of candy and you say you're only going to have one and then you have 10 pieces of candy. So I think for a lot of people who've never done research before, especially founders, what if they did that exercise? They might actually have fun and wanna keep doing it to get understand more and more and more. Especially if you can tie that with the consequences involved in building too fast together that might be convincing enough to get people to buy in.
Brendan Jarvis:
And that's coming back to what you were saying earlier about taking risk out of that process. What's the cost of not understanding these people? Now, presumably answering those questions actually involves going out and interviewing and getting to know the people that you're seeking to serve.
Sarah Doody:
And I will say a lot of my early research for this, it was not one-on-one conversations with people because I had all their emails that they sent me. Some of them, what I remember, I cut and pasted into Google Docs to see how long one person's email was. It was 2,500 words. I promise you. I didn't read the whole thing cause I was too busy. But I had so much research ask people about their careers and they will write their entire life story and their childhood relationships and all this stuff. It's kind of mind blowing. But research early on in this product also involved me being very observant about what was happening on social media and in online groups. This is one of my favorite forms of research. I don't know what the official word is. I call social media listening. Or you could call it stalking maybe.
I don't know. In a nice way. Snooping, lurking. Yes, lurking. So I'm in a lot of UX groups, on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Facebook. I, I've also seen myself discuss, discussed in groups and I've just not commented cuz it was such a fascinating experience. But that was an amazing way for me to figure out all the challenges that people were having. And to this day, I'm still in these groups and on a Saturday morning I might see someone asking for advice about portfolios. And I think I tweeted this weekend as well. But something to the effect of, it's so satisfying when I see a question that someone has and I can just cut and paste a link to an article or video I wrote and it's spot on and it saves me time from writing the answer out over and over again.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sarah, I was curious also about when you first started off, you mentioned just cast your mind back to about five minutes ago, you mentioned that you mm-hmm emailed out your contact list now, just so people have some context for this, I understand that that list at the time, back in 2017 was around 10,000 people. But nowhere have I been able to uncover what it was that you did prior to build a list of that size to actually go out to and then test your idea for this product.
Sarah Doody:
So I don't know when, but sometime in, I would say probably around 20 10, 20 12, something like that, I realized as I was going down this entrepreneurial path as a consultant, I thought I need an email list so that I can talk to people and if I have a product one day I'll have people to tell about this. So I set up MailChimp and I started doing a weekly newsletter. And I don't know what number we're on now, but it's definitely in the 300 s. So it's been going for a long time. And I kind of became known for this newsletter called the UX Notebook. And it's just five or six articles, some pondering of mine at the top of the email and the occasional event or random thing in there. And people love it. And that's how I was able to have that list. And I think for anyone listening who is an entrepreneur or thinking or a consultant or thinking you might possibly go down that path, the number one thing I think you can do is build your own email is because you can have Twitter followers, you can have a, all these things, but unless you have the email address, you do not have a direct line to those people.
If Twitter went away tomorrow, if Facebook went away tomorrow, if YouTube, if everything went away tomorrow, I would be fine because I have an email list of tens of thousands of people. So I think everyone gets so excited about the next social media platform and the clout that is perceived because you have this many followers is kind of a vanity metric because if that went away, you can't contact those people.
Brendan Jarvis:
So true. And just being mindful of that and of time, I better go and go and build my email list because I've neglected that. But before, well
Sarah Doody:
MailChimp is a great place to start. I did, but I did graduate, I did MailChimp and then I graduated and I went to Convert Kit. And then from Convert Kit, now I'm on something called Active Campaign, which is much more e-commerce oriented and kind of automations and everything. But there's so many easy ways to do it. And it doesn't mean you need to email your list every single week. But in the beginning we did have a weekly cadence and that helped us, me become top of mind for people.
Brendan Jarvis:
Clearly. Sarah, you are someone who's quite determined and you've shown up repeated repeatedly and reliably for many years now. Clearly you put a lot of energy and effort into what it is that you are trying to create into helping UXers with their careers. And you've been pretty open about how that has been successful for you commercially. But if we put the commercial success and aspects to the side for a minute, what is it that you wake up for every morning? Why do you keep doing this day after day, month after month, year after year?
Sarah Doody:
I think for me it's kind of twofold. I think going back to what we said in the beginning, I feel like I wake up every day and I know kind of what's going to happen, but I also know that I will probably learn something new or find, fix a problem, troubleshoot something in Zappier or something [laugh] like. I like the kind of thrill of adventure and discovering and solving problems. So I think that's part of it. I think too, like I said in the beginning, how important it is to treat our careers and our lives like products and be really intentional. And I totally recognize that I'm in a really lucky situation where I had the flexibility and space to create this business that also gives me the space to live the life I want to live. But it was very much by design because I needed to have these programs, for example, that would allow me to not be doing client work.
Cuz if I do client work, my calendar is just a bunch of meetings. So I think that's really what keeps me going on this constant adventure, continuing to live this lifestyle I wanna live. And of course, when I started doing all this, I was not thinking about the impact that we were going to have on people's lives. Did I think we would help people get hired? Yes, of course. But I didn't anticipate getting emails from people saying, one guy said something to the effect of, I got a new job, doubled my salary, and I just told my parents and my fiance and were all crying. And I was like, oh my gosh, if you increase your salary by 20 or 30 grand, that's life changing. Cause you could pay off debt or down payment for a house. Or I think one of my friends is a financial planner. And I think, well, amazing if we compound this out for 20 years, you think of the retirement contributions and your next salary and your next salary, you've just catapulted yourself into a new tier of finance. And so when I think about, it's not just the money, it's about the massive change that it can have in people's lives. So that's really fulfilling and I think now that I have time to really absorb those testimonials, that's really fun too, when those come in the inbox or our community.
Brendan Jarvis:
Wow, that's a great place for us to finish up. Sarah, what a great conversation. I've really enjoyed spending some time with you today. Thank you for so generously sharing your insights with me.
Sarah Doody:
Well thank you. This has been a great conversation and we'll have to do a follow up sometimes, see what's new in couple of years, [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Definitely. Yeah, let's do it. We will make that happen. Sarah, if people wanna find out more about you and Career Strategy Lab, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sarah Doody:
The best way is to go to career strategy lab.com. If you're curious just about me, I have my own website, SarahDoody.com. And then on social media, so Twitter and YouTube, I'm @SarahDoody and Instagram, it's SarahDoodyUX. I locked down my personal one, but I have my SarahDoodyUX one for everyone else.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Sarah. I'll make sure that I link to all of your social medias and to Career Strategy Lab in the show notes and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you listen to this conversation as well. As I mentioned all Sarah's contacts will be in the show notes as well as all the other good stuff that we've covered in terms of detailed chapters for YouTube. If you've enjoyed the show and you wanna hear more great conversations like this with world-class experts and UX, design and product management, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, give us a review. Those are really helpful. And also pass the podcast along to someone else that you think might find value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just type in Brendan Jarvis and I'm sure you'll find me. And there's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and the podcast platforms. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Sarah Doody

Getting Serious About Your Career in UX

Subscribe

Who is Sarah Doody?

Transcript