Tamara Adlin
Navigating Executive Misalignment in UX
In the first of a two-part episode of Brave UX, Tamara Adlin reveals how alignment personas solve stakeholder chaos 🌪️, shares hard-won lessons from Amazon 💡, and explains why executive misalignment is the biggest UX challenge 🚀.
Highlights include:
- The story behind "The Persona Lifecycle" and co-authoring it with John Pruitt.
- The Amazon lesson that taught her to “let it break” when necessary.
- How “executive tornadoes” derail projects and what to do about them.
- The surprising power of alignment personas for solving stakeholder chaos.
- Why Rich Barton says Zillow’s personas still shape decisions 20 years later.
Who is Tamara Adlin?
Tamara Adlin is the President and Principal Consultant of Adlin, Inc., a UX practice she has led for 19 years 🌟. She helps executive teams align, shape product strategies, and enhance product performance, with clients including Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, and Web3 startups 🚀.
Tamara is the co-author of The Persona Lifecycle and The Essential Persona Lifecycle 📚, and her alignment personas have been credited with solving stakeholder chaos and driving long-term success.
She also advises founders through Blockchange Ventures and volunteers with Never Search Alone, a community supporting job seekers 🤝.
Known for her practical approach and deep expertise, Tamara has been called “an elite-level expert” and “much more fun to work with than most international web experts” 😄.
Her innovative approach to personas and alignment has earned praise from clients like Rich Barton, CEO of Zillow, who credits Tamara’s work with shaping decisions for nearly two decades .💡
Transcript
- Tamara Adlin:
- In my experience, the biggest problems with most products are things like it making sense, end to end are things like the marketing story and the initial user story making sense. I can't tell you how many times I have come into assess a product and in my own terms ended up focusing on Nancy Newbie, the person who is just beginning, whatever this experience is or this customer relationship or whatever.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Tamara Adlin. Tamara is the president and principal consultant of Alan Inc. A UX practise. She has led for the past 19 years helping executive teams align shape product strategy and enhance product performance.
- Her work has benefited numerous well-known enterprises, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Zillow, as well as Web3 startups like Near Horizon Bunches and Fluence. She has also worked with growth companies such as Glassdoor Radar and Smartsheet.
- Alongside her consulting practise, Tamara is an advisor to Block Change Ventures where she assists founders and their leadership teams in focusing their resources on launching products that people can understand and want to use.
- She's the co-author of two highly regarded and related books on personas, the persona lifecycle and the essential persona lifecycle. Additionally, Tamara is a named inventor on a US patent and a founding volunteer and LinkedIn live host for never Search Alone, a community supporting job seekers.
- Clients have described her as an elite level expert in our field, a go-to for transforming product organisations and much more fun to work with than most international web experts, which is my personal favourite.
- And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Tamara, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's warm indeed. What an amazing intro. Thank you, Brendan. I'm so happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thank you for making it so easy for me to tell all your wonderful stories in an introduction. Tamara.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh, you're welcome.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the ones that I left out, and it was by design was something intriguing that I learned about you while I was preparing for today, which is that you are a board member of a Rather Interesting
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yes. It's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Called Special Bunny Rabbit Rescue.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've been that board member for almost 15 years. Yes. Why bunnies?
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's a non-tech organisation, believe it or not. So I've always been involved in animal rescue. I was doing stuff with kitty cats for the Humane Society and the animal shelter here in Seattle. And then I was asked to help the Humane Society in Seattle redesign their website in 2006, and the meeting was held in the overflow room for the extra critters like bunny rabbits. And I walked in and there was a bunny rabbit that looked like one of my cats because it had little folded ears and it was great. I accidentally adopted it. Fast forward and I am now on the board of a house rabbit rescue, and I find them hilarious. Delightful, ridiculous, weird and just so interesting. So here I am. Crazy bunny lady.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So in your time as a crazy bunny lady, what has surprised you the most with your involvement with the special bunny rabbit rescue?
- Tamara Adlin:
- I think that there's this whole community that nobody even knows about and that I think it's just now transition. People, at least in the us, don't just let their dogs out or their cats out or whatever anymore. They used to when I was a kid, we would just open the door. And I think the perceptions of house rabbits are changing right now to people being more and more aware that they use a litter box, they hop around a house, they need to be spayed and neutered, and it's wonderful to watch that transition and sort of help people discover them. And I've also done a lot of thinking about when I lost my first bunny, Marvin, I was devastated and I thought about why. And the conclusion I came up with was, in your adult life very few times you are surprised by something that is 100% positive. I mean, I don't have kids, but I imagine having kids and all but the delight of discovering these strange little creatures and how fun and silly and wonderful they are was just this immense surprise that came well into my adulthood. And it is for a lot of people, and that's really fun to be part of.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sorry to hear about Marvin. I am curious to know whether he was named after The Martian.
- Tamara Adlin:
- No, but I did put a label saying Marvin's Gardens on his condo, which I still have. And there have been many fuzzy friends since then. One currently is named a bar after the elephant in the children's books. He's very big.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sounds like he would've to be grow into that name, right?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Unless it's irony. Yeah,
- Tamara Adlin:
- No, he's enormous. He's truly big.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Beautiful. I want to talk to you quickly about some of your time as an author. And I mentioned in your introduction that you co-authored the Persona Lifecycle and then the abridged version, which was the essential persona lifecycle, and your co-author was a gentleman by the name of John Pruitt. And I understand that when you first met John, he didn't like you very much. What's the story there?
- Tamara Adlin:
- I love this story. So in the year 2000, I was invited by author and friend of mine, Scott Koon. He has a new book coming out soon. Why Design Is Hard that I'm really excited about, it's published a bunch of things. Anyway, I was doing a lot of work on personas and he invited me to come speak at an event called Design Day at Microsoft in 2000. And I came in and I did my whole thing and it was in front of 600 members of the design community who worked at Microsoft. And part of what I said is something I still believe even more heavily today, which is even in the era of the rise of data-driven personas, I very rarely do anything related to data these days. And I said, even if you just name your assumptions and make personas out of that, you're better off than if you don't. And sitting in the middle of the audience with John Pruitt and his whole team, and they were about to launch the Microsoft Vista personas, which were fully data-driven. And so as I understand it, he felt a murderous rage as much as he can. He's the most delightful person that I've really ever met. And when we first were recommended to work together, he is like, I don't like that woman Anyway, it's like a meet cute in a movie, but not cute kind of.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So how did you save the relationship? How did it all actually come to be and be a positive thing?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, we met and we started talking and he and I are, we're one of those partnerships. I mean we're not super similar, but we get along really, really well and bring different perspectives to things. And we just tried it out. I mean another, this woman, Holly Jameson Carr, who is now heavily involved in environmental work is out of the tech industry. She's the one who brought us together and he's like, well, I'll meet her. And ever since then, food became great friends
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you ended up writing a great book, one that was 744 pages long. So you obviously had much to say together
- Tamara Adlin:
- That wasn't the plan, it wasn't a plan to be a behemoth book. We thought that was
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My question,
- Tamara Adlin:
- Just stay six months.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So six months obviously blew by and you ended up writing something that was really substantial.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yeah, it took us five years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Five years,
- Tamara Adlin:
- Five years. And there's a lot of invited chapters and stuff and it's mammoth. And so that's why we decided to, I'm just looking over here because we wrote the much shorter essential persona lifecycle after that, which cut out a lot of the stuff. It's still great stuff. It's just a lot. It's a lot, a lot, a lot.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- As far as I know you were writing at least part of the book during your time at Amazon when you were a customer experience team manager, and that was in the early two thousands.
- Tamara Adlin:
- So I was there from 2002 to 2005 and 2005 is when the first book came out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What did you learn about the business of experience design during that time at Amazon?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh my God, everything. I mean, Amazon is a bit of a meat grinder. It was then it still is. And they have this bar raiser programme so that who they hire, people who they hire go through quite a meat grinder on the way in and then they end up at a meat grinder when they're in there. But at least for me, the people that I met and worked with, it was like another master's degree once I was there. I mean, it was amazing. It was difficult, it was challenging. Operating at that scale was fascinating. And also establishing one of the first, I mean the first dedicated UX teams in the company and all of the challenges of that. It was just amazing. And my boss who hired me was Larry Tessler, and if you don't know who Larry Tessler is, you should look him up. He died unfortunately a few years ago. A dear man, he invented copy and paste. He did the first user tests on the mouse, the mouse. He was at Xerox Park and Apple and I learned a lot from him as well. One classic thing was sometimes you have to let it break, which is if things aren't going the way you want them to in a project, sometimes there's nothing you can do and sometimes you just have to let it break.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is a really interesting sage piece of advice.
- Tamara Adlin:
- It really is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When have you put that into practise that you can recall and were you surprised by the outcome?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh gosh, probably a lot. I mean, certainly mean one of the reasons I left Amazon was because I let it break. I was brought over to start the user experience team when Amazon was branching its technology to be a platform for other e-commerce sellers. And unfortunately at that time it was the sales team who were promising a lot of great things. And then the first team that these amazing clients would encounter after that would be me and my team. And there was a lot broken that I had to then be the one to announce the news to people. And finally it just became too much for me. And that was, I mean, the breaking in that point part was like, I can't fix this and because I can't fix this and I can't tolerate it, I have to go, there's only so much you can do to try to fix things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's almost counter to one of the prevailing narratives that many hard charges within tech and design we tell ourselves, right? It's like we can fix anything. We've got this. We just had to figure it out. So that must have been quite the internal struggle to actually realise that actually it's time for me to step aside and to go.
- Tamara Adlin:
- I think now that you said that, I've never put it together before, but I think it highly relates to my whole focus now, which is instead of fighting against stuff that our industry and our leaders are spending a lot of time figuring out how to fight against, it might be more interesting to do something other than fight. It might be more interesting to lean in or accept. And I'm here, I'm talking about the reliance on assumptions versus data, and we're going to get a lot more into that, but I never put that together until you just said that. So that's interesting. I think sometimes we get blinded our own battles and we end up coming across as whiny instead of problem solvers. And maybe that's because some problems can't be solved and that there's a different way then to approach that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is definitely worthwhile contemplating. And you did take a different approach. You decided after Amazon that it was time to become an independent consultant and you probably could have moved on to many other great jobs at other great tech companies after that, but you chose to do your own thing. What was the big driver? What was the big motivator behind going rogue?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, given my bank account compared to other people who did different things, then it was a huge mistake, but personally, I actually think it was a big success. The motivator was when you write a book, really the way to capitalise on that or a good reason to write one is because you want to become a consultant. You certainly don't get paid back for the hours unless you're an amazing bestselling author, which we were not. You don't get paid back for the hours, but you can become a consultant. And to me, I had already, in a way, my role at Amazon was almost like an internal consultant to multiple teams because our group served all of these different teams across the technical. At that time, Amazon was a technical organisation and a retail organisation. I was helping on the technical side with all these product teams and products were things like features on the site.
- So I had gotten used to and really interested in how do you come in from the outside with a perspective that might help get past some of the barriers or confusions or whatever that are in the way of a team within an organisation. Also, when I left, I had friends that had scattered to really fascinating companies. My dear friend and colleague, Katie Reminder had gone to Apple. She brought me onto a project at Apple. That's when I met Ken Sife, who's the managing founder of blockchain and a serial entrepreneur before that. So I had all these people doing interesting things and I wanted to come in and play along. And so that's what I did.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And one of the things that's difficult or can be difficult for external consultants like myself as well, is you don't have the same support system that you get within a larger organisation if it's a good one, right? You don't have your colleagues necessarily sitting right next to you to sort of get support from or seek external perspective on an issue that you are dealing with. And I read one of the posts that you'd written maybe a couple of years ago now, maybe even slightly longer on medium, called Elation, deflation, and you were talking there about the challenges that women face in technology and how your squad, and I'm putting that in inverted commas, for those of you listening has been invaluable in helping you to navigate those. I'm not sure if you still have that squad, but if you do, what is your squad?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh, absolutely. So Katie's one of them. I mean, these are women that I have known for a really long time and they may or may not be people I worked full-time with or some of them started out as clients. And I think especially for women in tech right now, the big challenges are with diversity, equity, inclusion, and also designing for people with abilities, other abilities or challenges in their physical or mental state. Back in the day, 20 years ago, the huge challenge was even just letting women in to the whole thing. And so those fights, we had to fight for ourselves and for me, this idea of a squad was, I just realised there were certain people that I would always call when I needed help making a decision or where I realised that I might be caving a little too early. And you can't do all this stuff on your own.
- You can't be great at managing your career. You can't be great at your profession. You can't do all of that without some kind of support. And you can't always hire that support. You can't always work with that support. It just reminds me of one of the things we talk about in startups all the time, which is CEO is the loneliest job on the planet. There are some ways in which the work that we do, especially as we become leaders, becomes quite lonely. And people in your own company are part of a political system that is part of your problem. And so having people who aren't part of that is, I wouldn't be anywhere if I didn't have those people. And for me, they're mostly women. They're not all women. John is one of those people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've been doing this for a while now, right? You've probably many things that you have seen in that time, you're very experienced at what you're doing. You're an expert. Do you still need a squad?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh my God, yes. Even more. So here's a great example. Sometimes client, I'll get an inquiry from someone who wants to be a client and something will be bothering me, but maybe I don't have that much work and I'm really inclined to take it. Well, there are a couple people I call when I have that little not sure and they help me say no when they know this is not a good idea. This is not the kind of client that works well for you. So the pressures of like, well, I'm not super busy right now. I don't know where the next client is coming from, can lower me get you traps. And they know me and they get me out of traps. I think that's also part of this whole idea of behind never search alone, which is that you have a job search council, a council of peers that help you with the really hard work, emotional, literal work of getting a new job. There's huge power in community. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, there is. Yes, there is. You mentioned 20 years ago, thereabouts that the big thing in tech was making it more inclusive of women. Thinking about where we sit now, has that job being done, are we there when it comes to women in tech?
- Tamara Adlin:
- No. I mean we look a lot better. I don't think salaries are better. I still don't think there's enough women in leadership positions in large companies. There aren't enough women in boards and there is no cavalry coming in. We have to make these fights for ourselves, and it's not, oh, no way is it done? No way is it done. And it's way worse for people who are marginalised in any way, shape or form, and especially women who are marginalised in any way, shape or form. It's just not not done.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just before we move on to other things, out of say the last 10 founders you've worked for or with, how many have been women?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, I've worked with in one of the larger organisations I worked with, absolutely. The women I was working with were major players on the C-suite. They weren't the CEO. There is one woman I'm working with now who is an early stage founder in the blockchain space. Certainly not enough because it's taken me a minute to figure that out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Interesting. Anyway, let's turn our attention to personas.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Everybody loves to hate personas. Let's talk about personas.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I know this has been the topic I've been most looking forward to getting into with you because I know you've got plenty of wise things to say here. And one of those things, and I'll paraphrase you here, is that you've previously suggested that there aren't many wildly successful persona efforts out there. In fact, there are plenty of efforts that have fizzled out and never really achieved the impact that they said they would. Why do you suspect that is
- Tamara Adlin:
- Because data doesn't work and they're not solving and there's bigger, it's like Maslow's Pyramid of problems, right? And the idea of personas is super duper correct, which is that we are much better as human beings for building empathy towards and understanding and remembering people not stacks of bullet points. And that kind of focus on people and wants and needs is desperately missing from the technical design and strategy design and development process. And Alan Cooper is a genius and introducing this idea and bringing it into the world of UX. I mean the idea of specific people that existed before then, but into the world of UX in the 1999 inmates book, absolutely genius. And then, I mean one of the reasons John and I found each other was because everybody started trying it and all these persona efforts started failing, and we were like, why is this happening? Well, let's just fast forward to what I think now. What I think now is that there's something bigger and earlier that is a much bigger and earlier and more systemic problem that personas cannot solve and they cannot fight. They're not big enough to fight them. That's what I think now. Now
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've got me curious, what is that problem? What is the thing that's before the persona effort that if it's not understood leads to persona failure?
- Tamara Adlin:
- I'm going to answer this with analogy, A mental image for you in our world, and I'm going to use a house analogy, how can I not? In our world, it's like we're building a house on a property, the plans, we are participating in creating the plans. We frame the thing up and a lot of our field is about how can we optimise the building of this house? How can we optimise the design of this house, the choice of where to build it? And we can be doing great doing that and optimising. We have the right contractors coming in at the right time and we're busy making it better and better. Better. What if there's a tornado? A tornado ruins everything, and a tornado has nothing to do with how well we've optimised the process. A tornado has nothing to do if it's on the right side, if it's the wrong design, tornado ruins everything.
- There is a tornado that we don't think we control. I think we can lessen the impact of it. And the tornado is highest level stakeholders and decision makers who can change their minds and their minds changing. Cause tornadoes for projects, it doesn't matter if you've optimised the general contractor, if hurricane force wind come through and those hurricane winds can come through because somebody's niece sat next to somebody else who works on games and is talking about how important games are to kids today. So then that C-level person comes in on that Monday and says, I think we need to make this look more like Pokemon. That's a tornado. It doesn't matter how much we optimise what we're focused on, if we don't look at and figure out the tornadoes, and I think we can.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about that, the chaos of the tornado, the executive tornado, the changing of the mind, you suggested that we might be able to control it or at least mitigate some of its effects. Where do you start? How do you start to do that?
- Tamara Adlin:
- You start earlier than you think and you start very carefully. So here's the deal. People who are in high level positions in a company, good, bad or indifferent are there and have, you can call it subject matter expertise. You could have a domain expertise, you could business expertise or whatever. They're both right and wrong about a lot of things. They were hired because ostensibly they convinced somebody that they're good at something. As Tom Griever on your podcast said, stakeholders are people too, and they have a lot of instincts and they have a lot of bias and they have weird opinions. The only way you can handle this is by not fighting it and by not fighting it, you say to yourself, if they have weird opinions and weird assumptions, I can either try to battle that with data and changing their minds, or you do try that and then when it doesn't work, why doesn't it work?
- It's because if you don't know what somebody's opinions or assumptions are, you cannot change them. And data doesn't work. And here I'll give you the example that upsets a lot of people. If data worked, people wouldn't still get married. Data says bad idea. But why do people still get married? Because they think their own ideas, their own passions, their own insights, their own personal specific situation takes into account so many things that are beyond data. It is exactly the same. If you are a high level stakeholder executive at a company, data doesn't matter. And it's so easy to get around data and to push it aside. And we refuse to admit that in our industry. We keep thinking if we just get the right data and present it in the right way or build trust or do our presentations in a different way or put people in front of users, data doesn't work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Is it that data doesn't work or is it more that only the data that people already agree with works?
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's that data doesn't work until you know what you're trying to displace. So if people have strong assumptions about the way something should work, then first you have to know what those are. You have to get them all aligned on them because they're tall talking past each other. And then you can say, we understand that you guys believe that whatever is this problem with the product or that we should really do this to catch up with the competition well or that a really important user to us is somebody in a marketing department in an enterprise company. Well now we've gone out and now we can show you actually this person doesn't exist or this person doesn't want that. The same data will have a much bigger impact. If you know what you are trying to solve, you always need to know the problem you're trying to solve before you use any tool, including data.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've previously said about stakeholders being out of alignment, and I'll quote you now, if you ask two of them, they're going to think the goals are two different sets of things or one of them, it's not even going to know what the goals are and certainly can't raise their hand in the meeting and say, I don't know what the goals are. So if that is the case, which I believe it is in many cases, how do you highlight this level of lack of alignment tactfully in such a way that isn't career limiting?
- Tamara Adlin:
- So the way, that's one of the reasons I'm an external consultant because sometimes you can't do this from within. However, there are ways you can do it from within incrementally, but only one or two steps above you only your boss and your grand boss or your boss and your great-grand boss. But you can't do it all the way up to the executive level depending on where you are. What you need to be able to do is to ask a series of questions that are totally legitimate to ask, even though you know that the answers don't exist. In a way, it's like a lawyer preparing for a trial. The rule is you never ask a question you don't know the answer to. Well, in this case, you're asking a question where there is no answer, but you do it in a way that makes it possible psychologically, sociologically possible to get the answers that you need.
- So let me give you an example. Like I said, I think we always, we need to be more metrics driven and goal-driven. So when I say goals, I mean on a project level like you're working on feature X, what numbers have to change by how much to let you know that your project to improve feature X was successful? And it will be things if you ask, it'll be things like increased revenue and decrease calls or decrease call centre calls or whatever there whole be. They won't be prioritised. They won't be at a project level. And if there are numbers around them, not everybody agrees on those numbers because you can't raise your hand in a meeting and say, I don't know what our goals are anymore. And the way goals are set in most companies is at a business or organisational level at the beginning of the year, and any time more than one executive is together in a room, something shifts and no one writes it down.
- So what you need to be able to get to is we will know this will be a success if we decrease subscription cancellations by 20% within three months of the relaunch, things like that. The only way to get, if you're from without, you can say, oh, I wrote a book on this and slam the book down on the table and do it. If you're within, you say, I know I'm wrong, but here's what I think I hear the goals are and the priorities of them. Can you please correct me? You send that to your boss and they say, oh, poor Brendan, look how dumb he is. But they send it on to their boss. They don't know either and say, can you help me correct Brendan?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That is what sounds like a rather ingenious level of deference to authority with quite a clear objective. What you're saying is give them something that isn't going to be right, but by doing so, they can edit or reframe what you've already framed for them. So you're actually setting the boundaries for the conversation around the objectives to happen.
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's kind of like looking at them and saying they don't know. I mean, I go around saying, I had this face palm moment of thinking. If I ask the right exec or stakeholder the right question at the right time, they just tell me what they wanted. They don't know. Having a C in front of your name doesn't make you any better at knowing. It just makes it riskier to have an opinion. It's just true. So if that's the case, how can you make it easier for them to give you what you need to do? A great job to me, rolling over and showing your belly. I mean, this is tricky. This is especially tricky for women and marginalised people, but there's a method to the madness and the method is saying, here's what I think. If we move these needles by this much, I think this is what you guys are really looking for. Can you just course correct me here? Because if I'm mistaken, probably some other people are too. And the wonderful thing about business goals based on metrics is that they're never inappropriate to ask for. You just should never assume that they exist for a project.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is probably not surprising for some people listening to this, but it's possibly surprising for many others that there is this assumption that we have that the people that are in positions of greater authority that have the C in front of their title do know what's going on.
- Tamara Adlin:
- I mean, if you think about it for a second though, it starts to sink in. First of all, we've worked with enough of them to know that not all geniuses, and if they are geniuses in something, all that genius is threatened by the political environment of being senior in a company. And I mean it's career suicide to ask some of these basic questions after a certain amount of time has passed because you look like an idiot.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've talked about the dangers of misalignment here with the executive or with senior stakeholders, and you've framed it, and I'll quote you again now in a certain way, you've framed it as my controversial hill to die on is even if the assumptions everyone has about users are incorrect, the danger of misalignment is far greater than the danger of designing based on assumptions. Just like designing for everyone is more dangerous than designing for the wrong persona. So what makes this misalignment more dangerous than invalid assumptions?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Because in my experience, the biggest problems with most products are things like it making sense end to end are things like the marketing story and the initial user story making sense. I can't tell you how many times I have come into assess a product and in my own terms ended up focusing on Nancy Newbie, the person who is just beginning whatever this experience is or this customer relationship or whatever. And if you look at it through her eyes, you see unbelievable barriers that are hidden in plain sight because these different experiences belong to different groups in the company. So what I'm suggesting is not that you would end up building an experience that's meant for Einstein and you'd end up building it for a cat. I mean, you're never going to be that far off if you focus on the basic wants and needs that people have with respect to understanding a product or using more features or seeing the benefits because there are so many fundamental problems with products that are hiding in plain sight. And because this exercise usually ends up looking at the very fundamental wants and needs of human beings trying to get things done, the risk is actually very low because at least it'll make sense to somebody. So I've kind of wandered on that answer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The thread that I can pick up on there though is this focus on Nancy Newbie and what you've previously talked about in terms of just how game changing for many organisations having these alignment personas are. So these are the personas that are pre-validation or pre-data, right? The ones that you haven't gone out and done the research to validate or invalidate the assumptions that you've packed into them that it's 2024 last time I checked, and these types of personas are still revelationary for many organisations. And your experience, how surprised are you by that?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, I'm less surprised to it being sort of revolutionary to the company than I am surprised it being revolutionary to us as experts. I know that data is super important, and I know that rigour is important, and I know that putting people in front of users is super important, but I think we haven't spent enough time understanding the particular problem that we actually need to fight, which is that executives think they're in lockstep when they are not, and that causes tornadoes. It also causes them to change their mind. It also causes the problem of they're very clear about what they want and in the first design review they say that's not what they asked for at all. Wandering minds of executives and wandering shifting priorities are such a huge, massive danger to the work that we do that they're bigger than let's say, focusing on the wrong human being. Even the whole idea of personas is that if you pick one and it's in the right neighbourhood, you're not going to pick the wrong one. That's part of the original idea of personas. My suggestion is that if you can get the executive team to actually talk to each other and get actually on the same page and get past the circular conversations that they're constantly having and change their vocabulary and come up with what I call the magical sentence for all of us that are downstream of that,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you are talking with clients and they're engaging you to come and do some work, are they actively seeking alignment as in are they actively acknowledging that they have this problem or is it something else that they think they need some help with?
- Tamara Adlin:
- No, and this is one big problem for me is that I solve a problem everybody has and nobody admits to, and nobody is shopping for a solution to, right? Because, so either people approach me because they want to do personas and they want to do this giant data-driven persona effort. Then they have $250,000 for research, and I'm like, well note to solve, I probably should do that a lot of money. But what I tell them is I do something in a completely, I do this in a different way, and I say, can you tell me what problem you're trying to solve with the personas? What problem are you trying to solve? And every single time within five minutes, we're talking about the fact that the chief marketing officer and the chief product person will not be in the same room together, or we're talking about how some board member keeps pushing for some stupid feature and nobody knows how to push back on it.
- That's the kind stuff we're talking about, human communication, power-based issues every time, or if I'm talking to early stage startups, they don't even come in for personas. I have to be recommended in by somebody that's powerful like a VC or something. I call myself a UX vampire in that regard. They have to be told they need me and I have to be invited in. And then what I find, they're like, oh, well, we need to create a plan to make our product convert better. And when I dig into it for five minutes, there are these political battles and disagreements that there hoping to solve with some process or artefact, or they're hoping to hire a chief product officer to solve it. That will never solve the core issue. If the core issue is that they're arguing data doesn't solve the fact that they're arguing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you're effectively running therapy. How do you flip after that first five minutes? And you've sort of gotten the sense of the political struggle that's going on here or whatever, the messy interpersonal stuff that's disrupting success at the company is Obviously you're an external, so you have the benefit of being paid to help them solve a problem. But talk to me about the dance that you do around going, Hey, well, you thought you needed this, but actually to get where you want to go, we're going to need to do this other thing over here.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, so that's a great question. First of all, it has to be fast. It has to be cheap. It has to be structured because any of this work, we know that fighting for time, fighting for money almost never works. And so what I've done, I mean even since 2005 when the first persona lifecycle book came out, I've actually been doing something else, which I've codified into this. I call it executive alignment in five conversations. It's what I do as workshops. It's a book I should be writing. It's a course that I'm creating, but it's very simple and it's fast. So the way it works is I come in and I ask them conversation. One is, what are our goals related to this specific project? Not the entire company, but what are our goals? What numbers have to change by how much in what time period in order for this project to be a success? No one can say that, that's a bad question. What they say is, we already have those. So you can cut that out of the contract. And I say, send them over, and it's crickets. It's like, Brenda, do you have that deck that we did last week for the whatever? And they don't have it. It's either too broad or it just doesn't exist. And then I force them to use my format. I mean, listen, there are experts in KPIs and Theresa Torres,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Christina Vacca,
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh my God, exactly, Christina Lucky, I mean amazing people on this. And I just have my own dumb little way of doing it where I say it has to be in this format. The first word is increase, decrease. The second is some important measurable thing. The third one is some amount with a number in. It can't just be increased. It's like is it 20% or 150? And then the last one is within a time period after launch or within a time period. And the reason for that is to remind everybody that numbers don't change the second you launch something. So I end up with goals. We have to get at least two deals live on the platform, at least two within three months to raise this money. What happens when we have those conversations is first of all, there's a lot of discussion about the metrics. Then there's discussion about the number. Because one executive is going to say, we need two, and another one's going to say, we need 30.
- And my point is what I say it's not true. What I say is I don't care what number we end up with unless I just care that it matches. So when people talk about aligning these Jode Stoddard on your podcast, amazing conversation, and she talks about talking to stakeholders and getting them to be aware that they're not necessarily on the same page, but the devil is in the tiniest details. They are not aligned If they think that they need to get deals live on the platform, and one of them thinks two and another one thinks 30. So it's driving all the way down to that and then prioritising. So there's three goals and they're prioritised and believe it, and that never happens in a single conversation. I always have to take it offline to finish because it is asking DNA level questions that nobody's been brave enough to ask them before, but I tell them, we can't make this happen without.
- So that's the first question, goals. Second one is, how are we talking about users today? The third one is gathering those. There are a bunch of sticky notes, sticky notes, all those descriptions of user, like a guy who wants to deal with his sports injury by doing yoga or whatever, and then a mom who doesn't have time to exercise, whatever it is. Then we gather those under statements that start with, I want or I need. So that's called the I want or I need that section, transition us from thinking about users to users because I want and I need come out of the mouth of users. Then we create these super quick personas that are based on motivation. And then the last step, the fifth conversation is if these are our personas, Ian Inpo, seeker, Quinn, quick hit, Dana Deep Dive, and our main goal is to decrease subscription cancellations by 30% in three months. Which one of these do we have to make ridiculously happy to hit that the
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Forcing function, you're forcing them to make a choice. Here.
- Tamara Adlin:
- You're forcing them to make a choice because then later on, if they have said, in order to hit our main objective in the next three months, we have to make Trey ridiculously happy. Then when the tornado happens with the Pokemon later, anyone on the team can say, can you explain to me why that's valuable for Trey and keeping him from stopping the subscription? At which point the executive is not being told they're dumb. The executives being reminded of, I respect the decision you already made executive help me understand this. So the language, the conversation, the reference points, this is what works magic. And let me just say the role of data here. If they come up with Ian and Trey and Dana, now you can do research and you can then come back and say, guess what? Ian and SP Seeker is no longer looking at online magazines for inspiration. Here is data to show that Ian Inspir Seeker spends 97 of their percent of their time looking for inspiration on TikTok and other social platforms, not online publications. That is the only way to get rid of Ian Inspo seeker if there's any chance at all to get rid of him. It's only after you know who he is, because if they're old school, they're going to be like, oh, we could totally lure him back to our online presentation, our online publication to get inspiration. Then you can tell 'em, well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're trying to bend the world to your will instead of just letting it go and going where you need to.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, and if they decide they still want to go after Ian, that's fine. It's their decision,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- But it's a clear decision.
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's a clear decision. And then you can say, okay, well, if you really want me to go after Ian, here's what I would do to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a testimonial on your website, which I would say flawed me. That's probably a little bit too evocative, but it certainly made me pause and think about some of the work that you've been doing more deeply, and I wanted to ask you about it. It's by Rich Barton, who's the CEO of Zillow.
- Tamara Adlin:
- I know. That's a good one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Right. So he says, and you'll know this, but others don't. So I'll quote him now, he says, I literally think there is never a meeting at Zillow where one of the personas Tamara helped us create in 2006 is not cited by name. Is that typical? Can people expect to get 20 ish years out of their personas?
- Tamara Adlin:
- No. And let me just say, I may have helped them create them in 2006, but there has been a huge amount of effort by people who have been part of their teams over those many years. Absolutely putting data behind them, absolutely putting research behind them. I would not be able to give you details about those personas today, so I may have helped start them, but the reason why they've survived is because the executive team co-created them and then was tolerant of data being added, and they weren't rocket surgery, they weren't any of this stuff. But I think now that all these years have passed, I can tell you one aha moment from those exercises, which is that maybe there's no such thing as a second time home buyer in any interesting way, because every time you buy a home, you're kind of a first time home buyer again because something big has changed your city or your family or your budget or what the interest rates or how you can buy a house or whatever. And so that discussion about that possibly non-entity of a distinction helped end some of the tornadoes before they started, and it had nothing to do with data, and maybe it was wrong. Who knows? They may have found out since then it was wrong, but it certainly helped align them all and focus their efforts, and it was helpful enough that they kept using it. But there's a million ways for execs to kill personas unless they were involved in creating them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And sometimes some people, no matter what the evidence in front of them is, want to charge ahead and do their own thing. I think you've got a really interesting personal story about a gas heater in your house where you embodied the same behaviour, and maybe we can touch on that later. But before we just finish up on this particular topic with Zillow, you've also talked about how alignment isn't an event, it's a discipline, and it sounds like Zillow managed to put him to practise a discipline that kept them aligned and kept the personas having value over time. So if the initial creation of the personas is the event, the alignment event, what does a healthy alignment discipline look like?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, that's a great question. I mean, I've actually looping back around with various clients over time to see how well they survived or not. I think honestly, the biggest discipline is creating an environment where people actually use the names because it's easier than not using the names. So if Rich and then Spencer Soff found it easier to say Beth than they did buyer because it was more specific, that's why they survived, right? And if saying, Beth evoked some very specific things which have changed, I have no idea what it evokes today, then that survived. And people then ask questions about who is Beth? What does Beth want? What does Beth need? And those questions then can get answers. But the word buyer, the word user, any of those words can mean different things from one second to the next. So you asked, what is the discipline around alignment for innovation? It is creating a world where these names are better than the alternative, because that's another one of my favourite self quotes, which is the alternative to alignment around assumptions isn't a alignment around data. It's misalignment around assumptions we have to look at compared to what? And compared to what is this sort of tornado chaos.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, that brings us to the end of part one of this insightful episode of Brave UX. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with a brilliant Tamara Adlin as much as I did from her thought provoking work on personas to her reflections on executive misalignment, Tamara shared some valuable wisdom that any designer or leader can take to heart. This conversation isn't over yet. We've barely scratched the surface, so be sure to join us in seven days. For part two, Tamara will be back to dive even deeper into the nuances of user personas, the dynamic interplay between UX innovation and data, and how fundamental UX principles can drive meaningful change across various industries. Thank you for listening to Brave UX. Stay tuned, stay curious, and stay brave as we continue to explore the ever evolving world of user experience. Until next time, take care.