Applying UX Principles As A Product Owner

Claire Thornewill at UXDX Community: Europe West. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kETpq_TKYDc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

My very productive first lockdown

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I guess you've all heard that there's a global pandemic going on. I'd be a bit worried if you didn't notice. I want to talk about my first lockdown. My first lockdown was very productive and it started a little bit like many people's lockdown: it started with a simple cake. This was because for the first time I had a lot of time on my hands, and before, I never had time to bake cakes and all these things.

[00:00:31] So this then proceeded on to a more fancy cake. It was a really delicious raspberry cheesecake, it was super good. And this was around Easter time, so this progressed on to an even better cake. This was a rabbit cake and there was a lot of sugar in it. Really a lot of sugar, and I couldn't eat it, but my boyfriend ate the whole thing by himself.

[00:00:55] Seeing as we were in the vibe of Easter and feeling quite creative, we moved on to painting some Easter eggs and bringing in the Star Wars theme, as you do for Easter. And again, so much time on our hands. I used to go out to restaurants and see my friends and all these things. At this point in time we had nothing else to do and we have no TV, so I moved on to making a table.

[00:01:22] I bought the legs, I made the frame as you see. I turned my entire apartment into a building site and I was planing in the apartment, and I bought a planing machine. I'd never even heard of what a planing machine was before, but here you see the result. That's my dining table and I'm super proud.

[00:01:40] So I'm in the vibe of understanding a bit of carpentry. I bought a jigsaw. I didn't even know what a jigsaw was before, but here you go, learn something new. And because it was lockdown we got some cats, and we moved on to making a cat toilet. Because the apartment's quite small, I wanted to hide it all, I wanted to make sure that the smells weren't around and all these things, so you see that I moved on to making a little cabinet for my cat toilet. Now here I got a little carried away, because I made it high-tech and I put a motion sensor in it, with fairy lights and an air purifier, as you do.

[00:02:21] And that moved on to then the balcony. I picked up a pallet from work a couple of months before, as you do, because you never know when that's going to come in handy. I was looking online at how you could maybe buy some cushions that will fit the pallets specifically, and what I realized is that it was super expensive. So it's like, maybe I could do this myself, I'm already in this, I can do it all myself kind of feeling. So I looked it up, I bought a sewing machine, and I just made them, and this is my result.

[00:02:54] And I had some material left over, and I thought, well, my boyfriend has a bit of an obsession with Hawaiian shirts, so why don't I put the two together, and this was the result. Now this was my first attempt, I was totally winging it, I did not have a pattern or any of these things. And I thought, well, I may as well make a mask as well.

Where the jill of all trades came from

[00:03:18] So what I'm trying to get at here is that I am a jill of all trades, or a jack of all trades. And I always was, I was before the pandemic, but obviously because there's so much more time to be had, this evolved even more.

[00:03:36] The question really is, where did it all start? I've grown up very much in an environment with my parents that's really like, try and do things yourself, sell things yourself. It's really a culture that I was brought up with. My dad would rather try and pull everything apart and fix it, or try to put it all back together himself, before he would ever pay someone to do it.

[00:04:03] For me the big thing is this confidence of doing more started all here. This is my apartment two years ago. We completely ripped all the walls out, we turned the kitchen into the bathroom and the bathroom into the kitchen and the living room into the bedroom, and the rest. So I turned it all topsy turvy, and this is where my real confidence, this feeling of hey, maybe I can do this myself, started.

[00:04:32] And we learned so much here, and it took a long time. It took about two years to renovate, because we were new at this and we probably spent just as much time on YouTube pouring over the internet learning how to do things, how to do things better, what's the best quality of doing it and all these things, as much time as building. And the result is this. There you see my table as well, so pretty. I think it's pretty cool, but it's my apartment.

[00:05:06] When I really think about where all this jack-of-all-trades, general trades comes from, it comes down to three things. It's awareness: after renovating my apartment I am so much more aware that I can do so many more things myself. And then education comes after that. Once you know there are things that you can do yourself, then you know where to look, how to educate yourself. I spent many hours on YouTube. And then it's culture. Like I said, it's something that I grew up with, it's the DIY culture that I've grown up with in my own family. Particularly as kids, I know some people would get presents like a little boat that they would float in their bathtub, and meanwhile my brother and I were downstairs building these boats out of blocks of wood, and I even had my own saw. So this is something that has also been very much culture in my family.

The three challenges with UX

[00:06:04] Hi, I'm Claire Thornewill, I'm a senior web performance consultant, and today I want to talk to you about why being a jill of all trades really helps me, and how it helps me apply UX principles in my everyday.

[00:06:19] I want to start with you with my biggest challenge generally. I'm a UX advocate, I think it's super important. I've worked in product, I still am in digital, so this is to me one of the biggest challenges. The biggest challenge about the difference between UX and UI is not necessarily that, but it doesn't matter how many different ways you explain it to people, you always end up here. And it can be really frustrating.

[00:06:53] So I asked myself, why is this? And what I've learned very often in so many different teams and different projects and different companies is that very often people don't really understand what UX is. I have a unicorn here, because most people are like, yeah yeah, we need a UX designer, but then they're the ones who write the job description of UX/UI full stack developer, and you're like, that's kind of missing the mark.

[00:07:21] And then you've got challenge two, which is that it's really tough for UX designers on a daily basis that they have to justify their existence more than most other roles. There's always, what is return on investment here, what is the real value? I think that's a big challenge that UX designers face, but also I face when I'm trying to convince people that we need a UX designer. I've worked in a product team without a UX designer, and having to convince the head of product to get a UX designer just baffles me.

[00:07:57] And then challenge three is that good UX is the responsibility of the UX designer only. Now this is also a little bit confusing to me, because if everybody just concentrated only on their own part it would be very confusing. So this is what I saw on Instagram the other day: UX is the result of the entire team.

[00:08:21] I felt that this resonated with me so much, because these three challenges that I constantly have really fall into this, because everybody has a misunderstanding or a misalignment of what UX actually is. This results in a huge misalignment within the team, which can cause quite a few problems along the line when you're in your project. And if everybody actually thought this way, you might avoid this situation.

[00:08:50] Now this is 10 people in a project seeing the definition of a swing 10 different ways. Then you see the customer explained it this way, and it goes all the way through to what the customer really needed, with all the people in between. This is the issue that I really see across working in product teams and generally in digital: we all want the same thing, but there's a huge difficulty with misalignment.

Awareness: align with your team

[00:09:22] So the question really comes back to, what does it all come down to? And I come back to, it's really about awareness of UX, or just awareness of what your team needs. It's about education across the team as well. And again it's about culture. These are the three main things that I have realized really influence a lot of my daily work in product, it really influences my team, and so I want to talk about these three things.

[00:09:54] But what I've also learned is that awareness and education are two things that you can basically control now, and culture is something that takes a long time to influence.

[00:10:07] So I'm going to start with awareness and talk about the things that I've learned and maybe wish I'd known a little bit sooner. For me the biggest, most important thing is align with your team, identify the status quo. You need to sit down with your team and really understand: what do you actually know, what is your understanding of UX, what is your understanding of all the things that we need to achieve, and are we on the same page?

[00:10:37] Because we might all be thinking about, it comes back to the swing picture, thinking about birds. Think about a bird. You might be thinking about a pigeon, I might be thinking about a stork, someone else is thinking about an eagle. They're all different but they're all birds. So this is where it comes back to, what exactly is UX? Understand and identify what the status quo is.

[00:11:01] Another thing that I found super interesting and super important is know what your team's needs are, and this is where jill of all trades really comes in. The more I know about what my team needs, and I mean also on a technical basis, so the more I know for example what a front-end developer needs, the better I understand how to do my own job. I'm not saying become an expert front-end developer and become an expert back-end developer, but what I'm saying is it's super important that you understand what they need to deliver, what they need to be successful in their roles.

[00:11:39] And you can bring those two together and then define some team principles. I found this to be super helpful, because it constantly brings you back to what the team's goal is, and you could argue that it acts a little bit like personas. Personas are just there as a tool to constantly bring you back to say, hey wait a minute, is that what our persona really wants? And these defining principles really are similar in that way: you might go off on a tangent and say, hey, actually that's not what we defined, let's bring it back.

[00:12:15] And the last thing here is that I think it's super important to be transparent. I have found particularly in the past as product manager, product owner, that the more information I give to my devs, the more they are invested in doing a better job, the more context they understand. So I found very often in groomings as such, I give them context, I give them the business reason, I give them the why these decisions were made and how they were made. And with them knowing that, I've had so much more interaction with my developers, I've had so much more interest, I've had so much more even input. Because they know what it's about, they then bring ideas as well and say, I see what you're saying but maybe you could do it a little bit differently. If you don't give them this context then they'll just deliver and not put too much thought into it.

Education: never stop learning

[00:13:10] So now I'll bring you to the education part. This is really the one that sticks true to me: jacks of all trades never stop learning. So teach yourself new skills every day if you can. This is something that you'll see with the story that I started off with. I didn't know how to make a table or a cat toilet that had a motion sensor with fairy lights. I mean, who knows how to do that? So it's really about teaching yourself new skills on a regular basis as much as you possibly can.

[00:13:44] And then don't keep it to yourself, share your learnings with your team, enable your team to learn what you have. It's really spreading the love, if you want to call it that, and helping them to learn. This is also something that if you are the pioneer in your team for teaching yourself new things, then you can also almost control what your team is also learning.

[00:14:09] Which brings me to: be a mentor. I've had a mentor that has been super super helpful to me. It's not only helpful in the direction of career but also trying to find your way through, you know, what do I want to be when I grow up. And this I think is super important also to pay it forward. So I've got several people that I mentor, not that regularly, but they're actually old colleagues from past jobs who were great people and wanted to stay in contact, and we share things all the time. I have a huge amount of Instagram channels that I follow that I constantly am sending to my ex-colleagues.

[00:14:51] And then the last thing that I think is really important is, tools can be learned but experience must be lived. This is something that really speaks true to me as well. I got rejected from a job once because I was told that I didn't know the tool, and the tool was Shopify. I was confused by this because I've worked with Adobe Experience Manager, I've worked with WordPress and Squarespace and Wix, and you name it I've probably worked with it at some point.

[00:15:23] And the person who was employed instead of me was someone who'd worked with Shopify for two years but had way less experience than me, and I just thought this was really confusing. And then I realized the person who was actually doing the recruiting also was fairly inexperienced and maybe hadn't learned this yet. So tools can be learned. I've grown up using Illustrator, and then Sketch came along, it wasn't really that hard to learn, and yes, I'm not a power user, I'm not an expert. But then Figma came out and it's all along the same lines, it's all trying to do the same thing.

Culture: know the business priorities and ask why

[00:16:02] So this brings me to culture. Culture is super important, and whether you're talking about your company culture, your family culture, your national culture, it doesn't really matter. It's all quite deeply ingrained, it's something that you've grown up with or has developed over a long period of time.

[00:16:23] So something that I find here is really important: if you're trying to influence your company's culture, your team's culture, really know what the business priorities are. Really understand that. This will give you a starting point, because essentially I see this as a UX problem. It's know your audience, it's identify who you're talking to. And with these things, when you know their priorities and you know who you're talking to, you know how to influence them, you know what the problem is, and then you figure out the solution.

[00:16:57] This to me is quite important, because you can't be coming up with great ideas for someone who has no interest in investing in it. So I think that's super important. Also, if you're trying to give an investor pitch, know who you're pitching to, know what their needs are, know what their priorities are, and that will really help you along.

[00:17:21] And then foster a culture of asking why. I have had so many times someone come to me and say, we need to make this page new. And you're like, okay, well why? Well, because I made it a long time ago and it's old and it needs renewing. You're like, okay, is there anything wrong with it? Does it not work, is there a huge drop-off rate, what's the problem there? No no, it's just old, it just needs renewing.

[00:17:52] So many times, and I'm sure many of you also feel this as well: just change it. And particularly UX design, if you're a designer, make it pretty. And that's so frustrating. I think the most important thing that you can do is start really cultivating this culture of why, and then get other people to ask why. This is something that I think can be a little bit annoying for people at the beginning if why is the only thing that you ask, but until they understand that why is a really important question, keep asking.

[00:18:27] And then with all these things you can put it together and define a plan to make that change. And again, like I said before, it's really a UX problem. Understand your audience, understand who you're trying to talk to or trying to convince, and then put your desired outcomes in there and basically try and solve the problem.

How I got here

[00:18:46] So how did I get here, and why am I doing a presentation at a UX community event? Just a quick thing about myself. I started with a bachelor's in arts and design. I then moved on to a master's of management, as you do, and with these two together I ended up in marketing. When I was working in marketing was the first time I'd ever come across UX, and I was like, ding ding ding, that is exactly what I want to be doing.

[00:19:14] So I did a lot of research and I did a lot of courses and taught myself all these different things, and I started applying for jobs in UX. And I got rejected from most of them, because most of them said you don't have the experience. At this point in time they wanted the experience of a degree in interaction design or a degree in human computer interaction, which at the time I was studying didn't even exist. And I was a bit confused, because I was like, wait, I have the design and I have the business knowledge, doesn't that bring it together?

[00:19:43] Never got the job in UX, so I ended up as a business consultant at a company, and actually they then just put me onto a project as a requirements engineer, which is how I actually came about understanding what is product management. And then I realized, I'm still doing UX. Everything that I do is in UX.

Being a generalist, and four UX principles

[00:20:07] With this career path, and obviously with all my table making and cat toilet making, I end up here. I'm sure many of you have seen this before as well, it's T-shaped, it's range of skills at the top and level of expertise, and I kind of pride myself on the fact that I'm a jill of all trades and I have a broad range of skills.

[00:20:34] But then I was working in a job at some point, I got promoted to senior, and I got told, well, now you're a senior, you have to specialize. And this really broke my heart, because I was like, what? But I'm a specialist at being good at a range of things. That is my skill. And it actually caused me to walk away from a job, because I was really confused. I didn't know what to do with that. I'm like, where do you want me to become an expert? I'm an expert at being good at lots of things.

[00:21:10] And society will have you believe that being a jack of all trades maybe has a little bit of a negative connotation. Society didn't finish this sentence, it just cut off this sentence where they felt it was convenient. If you read the whole thing: jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. This has positive connotations. So it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a specialist, I never will be a specialist, I don't intend to be a specialist. I am a generalist, and I'm pretty good at most things I do, except for anything to do with musical instruments.

[00:21:58] So this made me realize that actually I do not need the job title of a UX designer. I really do not need it. I work in the digital world and I work in product, and now I work in web performance. All these things are UX on a daily basis. And this really comes back to the quote before: UX is really the effort of the entire team. I am part of that team, so UX is in my blood, if you'll have it. I think that was one of the biggest realizations that I've had throughout my career: I don't need the title to be doing UX every day, and to be creating great products, and to be supporting UX designers and getting help from them.

[00:22:44] Which brings me to the four principles, and kind of summarizes everything that I've been telling you today. This is how I apply these four UX principles in my daily life.

[00:22:55] One, know your user. I know you're probably thinking, no, Sherlock. It's the most obvious one, this is nothing new, of course, but it's the number one principle. Know your user, and this doesn't matter if you're also talking about product or people. It comes back to, as I was saying before, know who you're talking to, know who you're trying to convince. If you're trying to get a pay rise from HR, don't come in guns blazing. You want them to be on your side, so really know how to talk to them. And it's not what you say, it's how you say it.

[00:23:31] Two, feedback really matters. You can't improve your product without feedback, you can't improve yourself without feedback. That's just the rule. I go out of my way to give people feedback, and I also ask for people to give me feedback, and I think that's super important.

[00:23:48] Three, context really matters. It matters in product. You can't be designing a super high-tech, really fancy app that really needs a fast network for a client in India, who are known to have somewhat slower network, and then that's a really bad user experience for them because they're not getting the whole spiel. And this also matters, as I said before, give your team as much context as possible. The more they know, the more they will invest.

[00:24:19] And keep it simple, stupid. I think that's just the rule of thumb for life, is keep it really simple. This applies to product and this applies to life. What do you understand better: push the door, or apply your hand on this item and then apply some pressure? Do you really need to be saying all of that? No.

Wrapping up

[00:24:39] So this brings me back in full circle, that all these things I've learned I've put into raising awareness, I've put into educating myself and helping other people educate others as well, and it's really helped me influence the culture. These are the three things that I think are super important to think about why people are maybe misaligned in your team, and these are the things that I have learnt over the past that you can maybe help to influence.

[00:25:22] So if you enjoyed my presentation, I'm going to be speaking again at the Women Tech Global Conference in June, and this presentation will be about knowing your worth, which kind of plays into coming to terms with the fact that it's absolutely okay to be a jill of all trades. And if you're interested to continue the conversation or want to ask me any specific questions, come add me on LinkedIn and I'm always happy to have a coffee with you guys. Thanks for listening.