Balancing busy work with getting real work done

Vincent Feeney at UXDX APAC. Video: https://youtu.be/D0gnJhBfVrQ

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.

Introduction: not a productivity talk

[00:00:00] Thanks so much, everybody, for being here this afternoon and letting me speak to you a little bit more about balancing busy work with getting real work done. My name is Vinnie. I'm a product design manager at Zendesk. I've been working at Zendesk for about 18 months now, and I'll talk a little bit about some of the prior experience I have and why it's led me to giving this talk today. Before we get into it, though, there are a couple of things I wanted to say right up front. This is not going to be a productivity talk. It's not just about managing your calendar or your workload. Really, the focus of today is thinking about how to get your focus off a lot of the internal admin tasks that can take up a lot of the time in our days, and making sure that we're spending enough focus on our customers, the outside world and the context in which our business operates. Hopefully I'll give you a few tools to help you do that in your work.

Why scale makes collaboration harder

[00:00:54] I've worked at companies of lots of different scales. When I started as a UX designer, very much on the tools, I worked in some smaller agencies: we're talking three full-time staff. I worked in another agency with about 10 full-time staff. I've spent some time working at startups, one fintech startup in particular. It was a really early-stage startup, but we did have about 30 employees at the time. That was a really different experience from working in an agency with three people in it. And the last five years of my career have been spent working in much larger enterprise companies. I worked at MYOB, who make accounting software here in Australia and New Zealand, with 3,000 employees and about a million customers. More recently I've been working at Zendesk, which is even bigger in terms of employee scale: we've got about 5,000 employees, and we're operating much more globally, not just building software for one particular region.

[00:01:51] What I find is that as the business grows, whether the business itself grows or you move to a different business which is bigger, it can get really hard to do things. Let's look at that agency again: when you've got three people, there are three relationships that we really have to be worried about inside that business. If you add two new people, you're actually adding seven relationships. So the complexity gets bigger very, very quickly. If you scale this up to 3,000 people, I'm not going to try to draw all the lines in there, but I will tell you there are about five million relationships that we then have to deal with. Of course, if you're in an organization of three thousand people, you don't need to maintain five million relationships to get work done, thankfully. But as you start to work on projects that involve more people and more teams, hopefully you can see that it naturally gets much more complex to do things, and the amount of collaboration that we have to do really rapidly increases, which can really slow things down.

[00:02:52] It's not just about pure numbers, either. I took this GIF from the Zendesk website, and it shows some of our offices across the globe. If I go into Slack at any time of day, there are going to be people online doing work. If I'm trying to collaborate with people on the east coast of the US or in Europe, the time zones make this a really big challenge for us. This is also a little bit outdated, in that it assumes people are in offices. Today Zendesk is a digital-first company within the countries that we operate in, so people could be all over the place. Even if I, say, flew to San Francisco, it's not like I'm going to get to sit down with the whole West Coast team in one room, because now we're much more broadly distributed across the country. It's great with remote working that we can get talent from all over the globe and be operating 24/7, but that can make it really challenging to collaborate.

When the business becomes the center of your world

[00:03:44] All of a sudden, your activities start to focus around the business that you're in. I don't know if this day looks familiar to anyone on the call, but it could certainly be an example of a day that I'd experience. You've got some kind of training you have to do in the morning, maybe you've got a sync with some VPs, you might have a team all-hands. I'm going to be generous and say you're going to have time for lunch, which isn't necessarily always the case. You might have a design critique session if you're in the design team, a sync with a product design team, a skip-level one-on-one, a manager one-on-one. These are all very real meetings and rituals that we have, certainly in teams that I've worked in at different companies. The one thing all these have in common is that they're very much internally focused around your business and your rituals, and they're actually not all that focused on the customers. Where, for example, are the customer interviews in here? Where are we actually going out and talking to customers?

[00:04:38] It's really easy when you're working inside a business to start to distort where the center of the world is. I spend all my time working for Zendesk, wearing my Zendesk hoodie, logging into Zendesk software, having the tabs open on my screen all day, talking to people about Zendesk. It's really easy for that to become the center of my world. We talk about third parties that work with Zendesk, and we look at products like Stripe or Salesforce or Shopify, and it's really easy to see ourselves as the center of the world, with these other products all just hanging off our product. When we actually go and speak to customers, though, that's not always the case. What we often find is that our customers have some other tool that they use, often a purpose-built thing, and then they're plugging in all these different SaaS products to work in it. Zendesk is part of that, but we're just one of the cogs in the wheel. Sometimes, for some customers, maybe we are the center of the world, but there are a lot of instances where we're not, and it gets really hard, when we're so focused on and wrapped up in our internal thinking, to remember where our place is.

[00:05:43] The world outside your business is actually where everyone that matters is. That's why you've got a job and a business in the first place. If you spend all your time thinking inside your business, about all the rituals and things that you're doing internally, you really miss the opportunity to see what's happening in the outside world. And the outside world is the market. That's where you're operating, that's where all of your customers are living, and more importantly, that's also where your competitors and other people are lurking. If the world outside your company is changing faster than the world inside your company, the end is near. So it's really important that we have some kind of external focus and that we're not just wrapped up in the internal workings of our company.

What a startup gets right and wrong

[00:06:26] I said I worked at a fintech startup for a while. We designed software for mortgage brokers, and naturally there was a much more external focus. I had mortgage brokers at my desk; I had really easy access to customers. I was able to sense and respond quickly: I could prototype something, show it to the mortgage broker, get feedback and implement it right away. There was no red tape I had to go through, and there was this real sense that everyone was really hands-on and focused on our customers. Everything was focused externally, it was all very customer-centric, and we weren't having lots of these internal sync meetings, which was definitely much easier as a result of our smaller size. That makes sense, because when you're a startup, the focus really has to be external to survive. If we think about the scale between your external and internal focus: as a startup, you're seeking product-market fit, you're looking for your place in the world, and you need to be quick to adapt. Therefore you're naturally biased to have this external focus. So some of the things I'm talking about around internal focus aren't necessarily as big a problem in that startup world.

[00:07:28] However, it's not all amazing. There were lots of great things I loved about the experience I had working in startups, but we only had 20 customers at the time, and it was actually probably fewer; I think I'm being a little bit generous saying we had 20 customers. What that meant is we had to do a lot of guessing that the stuff that was working for our 20 customers was actually going to scale to a much broader audience. And this was really high-stakes stuff. It was high stakes for us, because we had a certain amount of cash that was going to run out unless we had success. But the people who became early adopters and started to use our product were mortgage brokers who were running businesses, and their businesses relied on having software that worked, so it was high stakes for them too. The reason they were early adopters is that they saw some benefits to their business and they wanted things from us, and that became really tricky to navigate when you had these people really demanding particular things from the business.

[00:08:25] And while I loved not having any red tape, one of the things I love about my job at the minute is that we've got product ops teams and design ops teams that really take away a lot of the admin work that you have to do. So while there were probably some internal meetings that we didn't have to have in the startup, you do find yourself wrapped up in a lot of admin tasks just because there's no help with operations. So it's not all amazing. I've had great experiences everywhere that I've worked, but I've found more recently, for my career right now, that a bigger business just brings a bigger opportunity, and that's something I really relish: the opportunity to make products that impact millions of customers, not just hundreds of customers.

[00:09:06] So I think while there are some challenges in bigger businesses, there's also a lot of reward on the other side of it, and it's all about finding that balance. If we are having all these meetings internally and thinking a lot about ourselves and our business, there are things we're going to have to do internally, but how can we shift the balance so we still have that external focus on our customers? For the rest of the talk, I'm going to talk about five different ways which will hopefully help you tip those scales. If you're suffering from some of these problems and spending a lot of time thinking internally about how the business runs, hopefully you'll find some of these ideas help you out.

Clear the decks and own your time

[00:09:48] First things first. I promised it wasn't a productivity talk, and it still definitely isn't, but you can't do any of this stuff unless you have the time for it. So you need to clear the decks and make sure you've got some time allocated to focus externally. Put a time limit on rituals. Whenever you go and set a recurring meeting in your calendar, whatever your calendar of choice is, we use Google Calendar, there's a little option in there which says repeat forever, and you should never have that box ticked. Even if it's a meeting that you think is always going to be valuable, limit it to two or three months and see if it's still valuable. If it's still valuable, you can just click a button and get it going again. So try to avoid these rituals which just run on forever. If you want to go extreme, you could do what Tobi, the CEO of Shopify, has done a few times, which is cancel every single recurring meeting in the calendar every now and then. It gets people a little bit upset for a day or two, but it makes them question all of their meetings and whether they're valuable. A bit extreme, but something that I certainly appreciate.

[00:10:48] I think the bottom line here is you've got to own your time. You've got to be really cautious about the things that you're going to, and not just automatically say yes to every single meeting that comes your way, and really put some effort into how you're designing your calendar and giving yourself some focus time to do really good work. I love this quote from Peter Drucker on this: "Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events. And without checking to re-examine the plans as events unfold, the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and which are only noise." The executive in this case is just a knowledge worker. I love this idea of the prisoner of events, and it's a concept I think about a lot when there are a lot of meetings in my calendar: am I a prisoner of events, or do I have some control over what's happening? I think that's a really useful thing to think about.

Talk directly to customers, often

[00:11:39] Okay, so we've got some time in our calendars. What are we going to do? This one is very obvious, but I will still say it, because it's also the most important thing you can do as a product person, whether you're a designer, a product manager or even an engineer, and that is: talk directly to customers, often. Sho is a product director at Figma. He's got a few really good threads that I've followed on Twitter, and this is one that really stood out to me: "There's a difference between a politician who gets their information through polling and focus groups versus one who's really out there pounding the pavement and shaking hands. Voters can tell the difference. Users can too." It's great to go and watch back the recordings from people who have done user interviews. It's great to view decks with lots of synthesized research that other people have done. It's really different to actually be there one-on-one. Ideally it's in person, but it can be on a Zoom call too. Actually being there live with the customer is a really different feeling, and something there's just no substitute for. So spending the time and the effort to actually talk to customers one-on-one, understand their problems, and go there without necessarily a set agenda is really critical, and of all the ways we could be spending our time, probably the most valuable thing we could do.

[00:13:03] Teresa Torres talks about evolving from a project mindset to a continuous mindset. It's not enough to just listen to this talk, go and schedule some user interviews next week, tick the box and move on. This should be something that's actually baked into your process. Rather than going from project to project and talking to customers on a project basis, how do you ensure that you've got a constant stream of customers coming in and you're constantly taking in their feedback? Teresa has written a great book about continuous discovery, and it's certainly a methodology that I think is really interesting and that we've been trying really hard to implement as well.

An example: what organizations were really used for

[00:13:39] To give you a really brief real-world example of this: we had a feature at Zendesk called organizations. It has been around in Zendesk for a long time, and we spun up a team who was going to do some work on this feature and wanted to make some improvements. The first thing we did was go out and talk to some customers who were using this feature, to try to understand: how is this feature working for you today? What might be some improvements that we could make? And just generally to better understand it. How organizations work within our software: UXDX might be an organization within the Zendesk software, and really it's just a way to bucket together users that belong to an organization. Vinnie, Elena and Jess are all customers that belong to UXDX. They've got the same domain, and in this instance it just makes sense that they're all together. I can then manage UXDX as an organization and send messages to all three people together, or whatever it is that I need to do. So it's very much modeling how organizations work in real life: the organization in Zendesk is just like an organization in real life.

[00:14:48] However, when we went out and started talking to customers about this feature, certainly some customers used it that way. But interestingly, what we started to see was customers with organizations with names like "APAC region" and "VIP customers" and "trialists." These are not organizations, certainly not in the way we had imagined organizations to be. Essentially, customers were finding that an organization is just a way to group together a bunch of end users, and there was no other way in the software for them to group together end users. So this was basically a workaround: they were lumping their VIP customers into an organization and calling it "VIP customers," because that's the only way they were able to do it within the software.

[00:15:35] As a result of this, we found that, yes, there's work we can do to improve organizations, but this is a whole different problem space that we need to unpack. We were then able to push this up to leadership and kick off a whole different stream of work, which was helping people manage end users within Zendesk, which wasn't what we'd set out to do initially. It's just an example of something that came up because we went out to speak to the customer. We weren't going there with a particular agenda, just looking to learn more, and we learned a lot about what we needed to improve just from seeing the customer's workaround. So there's really no substitute for going out and talking directly to users.

Meet customers where they are

[00:16:14] Beyond that, it's important to find out where your customers are: go and meet your customers where they are. I previously worked at a large accounting software company here in Australia, MYOB. At MYOB we had MYOB Partner HQ, which is a Facebook group. You can see it's got roughly two and a half thousand members, and they're all accountants and bookkeepers who are partners of MYOB.

Q&A

[00:16:38] Host: Thanks, Vinnie, that was a really great talk. I really like that. I have a question, because it's one of the challenges I always face: that calendar looks very familiar, with all of those sync meetings and all of those kinds of things. I remember getting that feedback before: you need to control your time, you need to decide what you're attending. But everything looks important, and everything seems like, "Oh, well, if I miss out on that, then something's going to happen and I'm going to find out about it three months too late." Do you have any tips for how you can actually free up time, so that it's not a case of dropping the ball in certain areas, but actually being able to free up the time and still do your job effectively?

[00:17:31] Vinnie: Yeah, absolutely. It's a really tricky one. I recall this particular tweet I saw where someone talks about this endless cycle: you have a meeting for a while, then you say, "Actually, this meeting is useless, let's move it async." You start doing updates async, and then after a few months it's, "Actually, we really need to kick off a meeting for this. Async isn't working, so we're going to kick off a meeting again." I think it's a little bit like that. For us, we really struggle with time zones, because we've got people working all across the world. One of the defaults I've noticed, and it's certainly different going to Zendesk from my previous company, where we were all based in the same location, is that everything is recorded. When we've got larger meetings of groups of people, we tend to record everything, and that means if for whatever reason you can't make that meeting and something really important comes up, you've generally got a recording to go back to.

[00:18:30] So whenever we're using these digital tools like Zoom all the time, I think things like simply recording meetings make it really easy to go back if you need to. Honestly, I don't know how many of those recorded meetings actually get watched, but it certainly means that if something really important comes up, it is there, you can go back to it, and you don't have that feeling that you've missed out. So I think that's one really practical way of doing it. Another, as simple as it is: recently one of my teams had some new leadership coming into the group, and we just did a meeting audit. We said, "Okay, what are all the times that different people in our group are actually meeting with each other?" We found that this meeting has design and product, but then this one's got engineering and product, and so on. There are all these different subsets of meetings, and when we had it literally in a Google Sheet, in one big list, it was quite easy to say, "Hey, we can combine these two meetings, remove this meeting, and try to clear it." So something as simple as a meeting audit, whether it's once every six months or something like that, is a really practical thing to do.

[00:19:43] Host: That's great, I haven't heard of that one before, but it makes a lot of sense. The other thing with recording meetings: there are quite good AIs for doing transcripts, and I've seen places where they get dumped into Notion or Confluence or something like that, which people can search. So yeah, that's great. The other question I had was around that shift, as you were saying, from project to a more continuous nature, and going to where your customers are. A lot of people struggle with that as a first step, because there's the question of, "Well, how do I find these people?" They don't even know where to start. What would be your tip to somebody who's not used to that more continuous reaching out and finding people? I know you said you've got your Zendesk community and your Facebook group, but what if you don't have those?

[00:20:40] Vinnie: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It was certainly harder at the startup I talked about, where we just didn't have very many customers. I remember one of the tools that we were working on in that particular instance: it was software for mortgage brokers, but we had a consumer-facing side where we were looking at home loans. I remember quite literally going to a bakery around the corner and offering to buy people their morning coffee to check out our home loans website and give us some really quick feedback, experimenting with that guerrilla usability testing. That's not necessarily possible with B2B, but certainly when you're looking at consumers, you can do some of that guerrilla usability testing.

[00:21:23] There are also tools out there which can be used. For example, I remember in the past using a tool like Airtasker. Airtasker is usually where you go and ask somebody to come and wash your windows or something like that, but we constructed a task for getting feedback on a particular bit of software. You can be a little bit creative with how you word the ad and get people with the right experience applying. So I think it's about getting really creative with those channels in to people when you don't have that scale. It's definitely a challenge. I'm not going to say there's one really easy way, but I think you just need to try a bunch of different things to get some success, and usually you'll find that one is going to work better than the others.

[00:22:12] Host: Excellent. Well, thanks for sharing all of your insights and your answers to the questions there. Hopefully that was useful for people who, like me, have been struggling with a calendar full of meetings and no time to get the real work done.

[00:22:28] Vinnie: Great, thanks so much for having me. Cheers.