Tamara Adlin
Redefining Innovation through UX Insights
In the second of a two-part episode of Brave UX, Tamara Adlin confronts Web3 elitism 🌐, shares how resistance to UX shook her confidence 💡, and explains why timing is critical for introducing alignment and innovation 🚀.
Highlights include:
- Why Tamara initially resisted joining Web3 and blockchain projects.
- The 18-month confidence knock: Facing elitism, sexism, and ageism in Web3.
- “Pre-disaster founders”: Why UX principles are often ignored until failure.
- Innovation vs. data: Why creativity and alignment often clash with metrics.
- Job-seeking advice for practitioners over 50: Focus on the value you bring.
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:
- Meanwhile, the culture of Web3 and blockchain is one of the most elitist cultures I've ever seen where either you are in the know or you're not in the know. And if you're not, then you're worthless and in the know means, knowledgeable about very complex technology.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Welcome back to Brave UX for part two of our conversation with the insightful Tamara Adlin. In the first part, we explored Tamara's innovative approach to user personas and discuss the challenges of executive misalignment. If you missed it, be sure to check out the previous episode for those valuable insights.
- In this segment, we're about to explore even more thought provoking topics. We'll delve into the intriguing intersection of UX innovation and data and how Tamara's perspective on using basic UX principles can make a big impact in various industries. Tamara will share her insights on how to balance human connection with data-driven decisions and discuss her impactful work with the never search alone initiative.
- If you enjoyed part one, you are in for a treat. As we dive deeper into the nuances of UX and beyond, let's pick up where we left off.
- You spoke about innovation and obviously we've spoken a little bit about tornado chaos here. Tornado. I want to turn our to some tornado chaos perhaps that happened in around about 2017, and that's when you became involved in the world of the Web3 startup, which you've characterised as, and I'll quote you now, being dragged, kicking and screaming into an actually pretty magical world. What made you reluctant at first to get involved?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, at first it was being intimidated by the technology because this was another Ken Sfe thing. Ken sfe was a serial is, I mean is alive and kicking and believe me, alive and kicking serial entrepreneur and e-commerce and over the years, and then started this fund in e-commerce and retail, and then started this fund in blockchain and called me one day and said, oh, you got to get involved in this and I want you to help these companies. And I was like, this is complicated. I was like, I don't want to. And I think a lot of us have felt that way and a lot of us are feeling that way about AI over and over and over again. We go through this, I don't want to, and then we find out all these arguments for why we don't got to, well, I didn't want to. Started learning about it a little bit, started trying to help some of these super early stage blockchain and Web3 companies. Then I didn't want to because they were not, and many still are not ready for us, just like ai. Many, most, I would say of the teams trying to innovate this are not ready for our discipline. They may say they are, but they're not.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You got knocked off your confidence. I think those were the words that you used. Oh
- Tamara Adlin:
- My God,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Pretty hard. I think you framed it as sort of an 18 month confidence knock. What exactly, it sounded like maybe you were caught by surprise. Tell me about that. What went on there?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, I went from worlds in which I would walk into the room and say, the sky is blue. And people would say, thank God you're here. Or saying the buy button needs to be above the fold and that's genius or whatever. And then I went into these rooms where they were telling me that I was frustrating them because I was asking them to slow down a little bit. And then the sexism and ageism started to come into play and I was basically told, well, you just don't understand the technology in ways that were very clearly like interestingly, the world of Web3 and blockchain is supposed to be a great equaliser. It is supposed to bring control and ownership and power to individuals rather than institutions. Meanwhile, the culture of Web3 and blockchain is one of the most elitist cultures I've ever seen where either you are in the know or you're not in the know, and if you're not, then you're worthless and in the know means, knowledgeable about very complex technology, that's very hard to use.
- That really threw me off because I've been through many, many, many iterations of different technologies for years it doesn't matter, but now all of a sudden it mattered and that freaked me out. And let me get you something more concrete. At one point I told the team right after that I literally had shown them value that they said, oh my God, this was valuable. I then told them, can you at least get the logic of the system literally saying, what are the nouns and what are the verbs down on paper before you build it? And they said, you don't understand the technology. That's not the way we do things in blockchain. And I'm like, I literally don't know what to tell. I don't know how to respond to that. You don't want to get the logic of whatever you're building down on paper or paper, whatever, and don't know you're frustrating us. And I did not take it well, which is important to admit. I mean, I didn't think anything could knock me off my high horse professionally. I'm super confident person I'd heard it all I thought, Nope.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think one of the most surreal things you were told and that period was you had to talk someone or try and talk someone back down from the cliff of just copying the UI of Google Drive. Oh my
- Tamara Adlin:
- God, yeah, this is a really good one. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How did that conversation go? Were you successful? Did you manage to get them back from that edge?
- Tamara Adlin:
- I mean, no. So the thing was that they were doing these things called smart contracts, which are documents, but they have code within them. There's a piece of Imagine a contract, but it's checking against code to make sure that it, and in this piece is checking different code than piece and it's whatever. So it's applications within documents. And they said, well, you're really bothering us. You're slowing us down. We're just going to copy the UI of Google Drive. And I'm like, first of all, Jared Spool has an excellent joke, which is that Google makes it easy to find anything unless it's stored in Google Drive, which I think might be the funniest thing ever said. And also you can't do that. You have applications within documents and Google Drive was made for sharing doc, and they literally said to me, well just put a button here. And I was like, I literally don't know what to, I literally don't know what to say about this and there was nothing I could do that's letting it break, baby. I was like, I can't help you. You don't want me to help you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- On the flip side of this, of these, the Unhelpable you've also previously said, and I'll quote you again now you've said arguing the tech doesn't matter. Our skills apply to everything as in our skills as UX is apply to everything may be true, but it's currently not helpful. So what have you found, because you're still involved in this space, right? So what have you found has been a more helpful conversation to have with Web3 founders?
- Tamara Adlin:
- It's when you talk to them. So I wrote a little article about pre-disaster founders, and this has to do with assumptions too. The assumptions that Web3 founders have are that they're on the right track and that people are throwing money at their faces, at least this was true a couple of years ago. And I think that the assumptions are if we are giving loads of cash venture capitalists, grownups are giving us loads of cash to redesign things like the way money works, then we can redesign everything. We can redesign the software design and development process. There's no reason to look at anything old or established because we're about reinventing everything. You cannot change that perception unless and until they fail, which is just a bigger version of this embedded assumptions in leadership. I tried and I learned my own lesson all over again, which is their strongly held assumptions and the data that they have, people gave me millions of dollars saying I could do this. I all the evidence that they need once they have failed, once something has not gone as well as it, once they realise they need traction, once they realise they need conversion and they have no idea how to get it, that's when the moment for us is there. So I think to keep from getting exhausted, we have to choose our moments
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And choose your clients by the sound of it as well.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Absolutely. Because really I was shocked, and I'm sharing this because I think sharing vulnerability is critically important, especially as we get more senior in our field. I didn't think this could happen to me. I didn't think anything could, but it did and it was such a lesson in such a shock. And I think a lot of people are having this lesson in shock just with the way tech mageddon is happening right now with the employment in tech that they never thought they would be seen as irrelevant and suddenly they are. And knowing that you're not alone is really helpful
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And also not irrelevant. I think it's easy to buy into that narrative. And by the sounds of it, you regained your confidence in this particular space. You didn't stay down in the doldrums wondering whether or not you could actually add any value here, did you?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Well, no, I did for quite a long time actually, and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up and I'm still reinventing my practise because it turns out startups don't have money. So startups isn't necessarily the best way to make a living. But certainly, yes, the confidence came back and sort of this external perspective of what was really going on here and how it had nothing to do with me or my abilities, but that the responsibility then became on me to reframe my value and not just say, you should trust me because of all these things I've done in my past, but being able to say, I can see and actually predict this, that and this problem, is that what you're facing? If that's true, then here's how I can specifically help you get past that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about value there and just interesting, just a side note that it seems like maybe it's found as more broadly, but definitely what you were describing there with Web3 founders, how they conflate funding with value.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Oh yes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Funding is the opportunity to prove value, but somehow those wires get crossed and they think that they've made it when really they've just received other people's money to provide. If
- Tamara Adlin:
- Gave
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Opportunities,
- Tamara Adlin:
- Somebody gave $5 million, wouldn't you feel like you had succeeded?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, see now that's a tricky question because do I agree and show some humility or do I take a step back and give you an honest answer? I honestly think just given my own relationship with money that I would treat that as not something that I had earned yet, given the way that I deal with money, in particular, my client's money. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask that of who knows if someone did turn around and give me 5 million, throw all that high talk out. Maybe I'd think that I was a super legend. I'm
- Tamara Adlin:
- Not sure. So let me ask you a more specific follow up question. If you had an idea for a new kind of mouse and someone gave you $5 million because they want you to build that kind of mouse and somebody came in with a bunch of data that said you should make this kind of mouse instead, would you change your plan? See, that's what, I dunno, you don't have to answer that, but
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's true. It's a tricky one, but hypothetically, I can see what you're getting at, especially considering if the profile of these founders, you talk about pre-disaster founders, which has a pretty funny origin, which maybe we'll get to, but the people that have sort of been around, been around the traps a few times, they've probably in their thirties or forties or even fifties. But I get the sense that a lot of the Web3 founders are more in that twenties, maybe early thirties bracket, and I can totally understand how you could have the blinkers on at that level of perspective that you have at that age.
- Tamara Adlin:
- I think there's another element here too, which is the element of how people look at innovation and invention and how that actually isn't compatible with data. So one of the things I think is that data is always looking at the past, it just is. It's looking at what happened before even ai. So I had a funny experience where I'm trying to create an image for my social channels, the name of which are going to be corporate underpants, which is a phrase I started using in 2006. Asking AI to put underpants on a skyscraper is something it has a really big problem doing. I actually took that as great news because that means it's never seen that before. It's never seen anything like that before. So that's just a really weird and funny, and by the way, the images are turning out really well. Thanks to a friend of mine who's helping me. Innovation is in many ways seen as antithetical to data, partially because we revere Steve Jobs and Fricking Who and Jeff Bezos as doing things that had nothing to do with data about the way things had been done before.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a fallacy, the more you dig into that. I had a conversation on the podcast a couple of years ago with the wonderful Bob Baxley and he gave me some insight into, while Apple might not do traditional user research, all of the people that Apple employs the profile of the people that it makes its products for. And there are initiatives within Apple, at least when Bob was there, where they were very keenly looking at how people were experiencing the devices. So it's almost like there's an intentional obfuscation of truth when it comes to certain companies stories that they enjoy perpetuated out there in these kind of forums. It's not the whole truth, at least is what people commonly believe.
- Tamara Adlin:
- And I think to your point, just building on that, if I'm arguing that crystal clear focus and mega alignment is critical for creating great products, the way alignment, there's ultra alignment in those companies because it's one person you're building for Jeff, you're building for Steve Jobs, it's ultra aligned, maybe by force, but I think it just sort of serves the same point, right?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. People buy that though. They buy into that when they go to work at Amazon or if they were working with Steve, it was a known quantity. You knew what you were getting yourself in for.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yeah, and I actually, there's another sort of thing that I tell people about the Jeff meetings that is related to fighting against stuff that you can't fight against. Whenever you went into a Jeff meeting with a design first you showed it to him the way he wanted to see it. Only then did you show alternatives because if somebody has something in their mind, for example, who the user of a product is or the features that they want or whatever, assumptions of executives, first you have to show them what they want, other whys it colours everything. And they're going to say no. And that's, we sort of think, no, no, no. We want to show them the data-driven way first, the right way first. Nope, do not do that. If they told you to show it to them one way and it's dumb, first you show it to the way they wanted it, then and only then might they be interested.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's really interesting. It's making me remember a conversation I had with Amy Jimenez. Marquez, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Amy, but she was at Apple, the Apple at Amazon at some point possibly after you were there, and she was working on the voice team for Alexa. I don't think she was part
- Tamara Adlin:
- Of, that's really after me. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So I don't think she was part of the original voice team, but very soon after, and I believe she was telling me a story about how Jeff's original idea for Alexa was that it would be based on the computer for the enterprise and Star Trek. And
- Tamara Adlin:
- I think, yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe even the early voice was kind of leaning that way. And then of course it somehow it ended up being a little bit more consumer friendly and a little less niche and geek there. But I can almost see what you're saying there with the presentations to Jeff that initially maybe the voice was very much like the enterprise's computer, and only later after people were able to demonstrate an alternative that it change. Now that's all
- Tamara Adlin:
- Hearsay and picture that if he's sitting there excited to hear the voice from the enterprise, any other voice, he's just going to say, where's my voice?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. It's childhood dream being realised in that moment. And this comes back to some things you've said previously, and I think other guests have echoed and certainly I believe this too, which is that we are in danger many times of forgetting who our users are, our internal users
- Tamara Adlin:
- Of the work,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Work that we do, users.
- Tamara Adlin:
- And I think we're also in danger of fighting things that aren't, we shouldn't fight. Instead, we should do the whole trees bend with the wind. And if we lean into assumptions, if we respect them enough, we respect their existence. It doesn't mean you have to like them, but you have to respect that they exist. You have to respect how powerful they are. You have to respect that there is plenty of data in the heads of stakeholders supporting their assumptions. And until you know what they are, and until they all see for themselves that they're not the same, and until they have a different way of talking about it, like by talking about Ian and Trey instead of whatever else, they have a new vocabulary, they're not going to get past them. They're not going to see them, they're not going to. So help them, help them, help them, and then you have a chance for all of our wonderful stuff that we do on the construction site to get better and better because you've mitigated the tornado risk
- Brendan Jarvis:
- 100%. Just coming back to, before we wrap things up briefly to the Web3 founders side of things, how are the movie the world according to Garp and Web3 related?
- Tamara Adlin:
- So this shows my age two. The world according to Garp was a Robin Williams movie based on a really awesome book. And so in this movie, Garp, which is the name of the male protagonist and his new wife are out looking for a house, and they are looking at a house with a real estate agent. They're standing outside, it's a gorgeous house, and you hear this plane coming in the distance and it's puttering and it crashes into the side of the house and everybody takes cover. And then the pilot shows up from the second story and the huge hole in the house waving down saying, everybody all right? And Garp stands up and says, we'll take it. And his wife says, are you crazy? And he said, no. What are the chances this is going to happen again? And that's what I like to think about.
- That whole idea about when you talk to founders and if they have been through a process where they have done everything just the way they thought it should be done and it didn't work, that's when they're interested in other people who have been through it before and know some better ways to get around those problems. It's timing, it's understanding the very human qualities, not necessarily thinking that they're all sociopaths necessarily, and Tom wasn't saying that, but just really stopping and really thinking about what is it like to be an executive? It's not what we think it is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it sounds like as far as people coming from our world of UX who might be interested, getting involved with Web3 projects that finding founders that are pre-disaster is possibly a good starting point for places that may be more receptive to the type of expertise that we bring,
- Tamara Adlin:
- Or the other approach that I have taken in the past, and I'm not as heavily into Web3 right now. I just want to do stuff that people want to do wherever that is. But my approach was I did a couple of presentations at conferences on really basic fundamental UX stuff that could be useful to Web3 people, whether or not they did it right. Just some really basic ideas. And I think we have to make ourselves usable. We have to make our knowledge usable, we have to get off of our high horses. I was pushed off of mine, but other people have a different opportunity and stop whining. We've been whining since the late nineties about everything, and we can't do that anymore. We still will. But I think figuring out how to continue to make ourselves and our ideas more usable, even if it means that only a small percentage of what we know gets used and it's annoying, God, is it annoying? That's just where I've ended up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yep. We just have to let some things go, that's for sure.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of letting some things go, I better let you go soon. So my final question today, Tamara, is to do with your volunteering at Never Search Alone. So just to recap for people, it's a community that aims to help job seekers find good jobs,
- Tamara Adlin:
- And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I saw your last post, I think it was a video post or one of your last posts on LinkedIn where you were looking at a session for job advice for those people that are seeking in the over 50 years old category. And as we've talked about a little earlier today, the UX job markets, but upside down right now, and there are a number of very senior and very talented practitioners and design leaders that I know of personally that have been finding it very challenging to navigate. And I was curious to understand from you, maybe it's your own personal story or insight or something, that story of someone else that you've been told or heard recently, what's the best job seeking advice you've heard lately for people that are in that over 50 age bracket?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Yeah, okay. Well, first of all, just for context, never Search Alone is a book. It's written by someone, a dear friend of mine named Phil Terry. All the information about it is that pH y l.org that's filled with a Y. And the reason that I'm willing to put my energy, my volunteer time, my reputation behind it is because it's not a scam. You buy the book or you get it from a library. Every other thing is completely free. And it is about creating these little job search councils where you go through this process that's in this book to think through who you are today and what you want and how best to get that job. It's sort of like a career coach that you provide for each other for free. You asked me what the best advice is for people over 50. The one that's really sticking with me right now is when you think about your own elevator pitch.
- I think most of us think, well, we've got to get as much of our resume into two minutes as we possibly can. But if you turn yourself around and look at yourself as a recipient of that, if somebody got in an elevator with you and spewed their resume, your eyes would glaze over. You got to look at yourself as the user of this stuff too. Nobody wants to hear that, and yet we all think it's the right thing to do. When you go out there to say you're looking for a job, you'll say, I'll take anything in product because of course you think I'll take anything reading that you don't know who to introduce that person to. So instead, getting more specific and creating versions of our experience that aren't about our experience, it's about the particular problem we can solve for a particular type of role in a particular type of company, as Phil calls it, the candidate market fit statement.
- And there's data involved in there too, but the more specific you can be about what you're looking for and the benefit you bring, the business value of you as a product, the better off you'll be. And I think those of us of a certain age, I'm 55, almost 56, I still think I have get as many, oh, I have to say Amazon, I have to say Zillow. I have to say Microsoft. I have to say Web3. Nobody wants to hear that. But if I can say, you know what, I can really help. If there's some kind of problem with your product and you're not quite sure what it is or how to fix it, I'm the person to call. And even that's not really good enough, but
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get where you're going. Yeah, that's the hook. That's the thing that's tied into the immediate need. And it sounds
- Tamara Adlin:
- Like it's about them. It's about them. It's not about you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like that advice actually might be applicable to anyone, any age group.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Absolutely. It's so much less frantic also than the ways of trying to mini resume people, forcibly mini resume them. Nobody's going to remember that anyway, and it sucks to listen to. You have to be like, oh, sounds very impressive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This ties back into what you've been saying all through the conversation, which is data doesn't work, and delivering a resume in that way is just a data dump. And what you're really looking for are those moments of human connection or things that humans respond to, whether it's meeting someone's expectation with the sound of Alexa in terms of Jeff, or whether it's just understanding what people are currently struggling with and tailoring your message and telling a story around that. That's the stuff that gets the synapses firing and people paying attention.
- Tamara Adlin:
- Data doesn't work the way it should at the times we think it should, but if we put it at the right time in the right context, then we give it much more power. So anybody who would respond negatively to me saying Data doesn't work, I would ask you to think about what are the biggest battles you're fighting and look carefully at those and the things that make you angry about that statement. There's ways around that, and sometimes you have to let it break, and then you look for other doorways in
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What a great place to end our conversation. Tamara, thank you. This has been a hugely valuable and salient conversation. Really appreciate all the stories and insights that you've shared with me today.
- Tamara Adlin:
- What a huge honour to be part of this podcast with all the amazing people you've had, and you just do such a wonderful job. So thank you, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're most welcome. Definitely my pleasure, Tamara, and for people who want to connect with you, there's been many great things you've shared today, and I'm sure people are wondering, how do I find out more, learn more, get in contact? What's the best way for them to do that?
- Tamara Adlin:
- Probably following me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Tamara Alan on LinkedIn. My website is on there too, and send me messages saying, get off your ass and create that course. That would be the most helpful thing to me because I'm working on it, but oh my God. Anyway, I'd love that. And anybody interested in the alignment persona process, it's something that I'm looking for beta testers for the course and all of that good stuff, so get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Tamara, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered, as usual will be in the show notes, including where you can find Tamara and everything that we've spoken about will be fully chaptered.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management, and of course design, don't forget to leave a review. Subscribe to the podcast. It'll turn up every two weeks for you and tell one other person if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me also on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.