Team Downsized: How Do You Move Forward?

Kevin Hawkins at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/Ibj_lpRFdJQ

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.

Glovo and who is on stage

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Hi. Good to see everyone's faces. All right, okay, we're going to start the conference off on what's been happening in the past. The talk is called how do you do more, how do you move forward.

[00:00:16] How many of you know what Glovo is? Perfect, cool. I just flew in from Spain. We are Uber's biggest threat around the world; that's my favorite line. It's a good summary, because we do everything besides rideshare. We deliver food, groceries, Band-Aids, flowers, experiences. We're going to talk about what's been happening in tech; it's happened both in the US and in Europe. I'm going to be a little bit light-hearted about this, because it is a bit sad to talk about layoffs on stage in an industry full of people who are in that industry. But please loudly react, please shout, please boo, feel free to lighten the mood.

[00:00:57] Perfect. All right, how many of you followed the UXDX EMEA talk called Focus? Great, at the coffee break, so there is no overlap, I do not repeat my talk. All right, my whole thing is that we focus on people. This is my leadership style, this is the way I run the team. We run a 91-person team, and we support the company in 25 countries. We essentially are one-fifth of the global food industry; twelve percent of all food in Korea, for example, goes through our platform. If you have not heard of us, next time you go on a trip, please feel free to use the app.

[00:01:35] This is my beautiful team back in November. At peak we were 91 people. This is pre the chaos that ensued, and this is the team that I built. I'm originally from Washington DC. I now live in Barcelona, which looks very similar, except we have a beach. It's DC but with a lot better waters.

[00:02:08] Another thing about focusing on people is, first of all, who is this guy on stage and why should you listen to me? Cool. I've been at a lot of companies. People are like, "Oh wait, you have a really good skill set," or "You don't stay places very long," and it's both. I get the job done, I build a team, I launch a product, I like to move on. I was with a consultancy for a couple of years. I then was in a really weird position for a designer: I was head of customer loyalty for Gap. That was a weird position, because I didn't do any design work for two years.

[00:02:40] Then I went to Booking.com in Amsterdam. Really, really loved it. A mixture of really weird structures: designers managed engineers, engineers managed copywriters, copywriters could manage PMs. It was fully cross-functional management, very odd. They changed it, but it took them 20 years to change it. It worked for a while; it doesn't work so much anymore.

[00:03:02] And now I'm at Glovo. Our vision is to give everyone easy access to anything in their city. Can you imagine what it feels like to try to give everyone everything? In design, in real life, something built for everyone works for no one. You're building the lowest common denominator product. But in our space you're essentially cracking it vertical by vertical by vertical.

[00:03:24] What that really means is that we do food, shops, supermarkets, beauty and care, and we deliver anything within the box. But originally we were a concierge service. About eight years ago, if you wanted toilet paper and we didn't have Walmart on the platform, you would say, "Hey, I want toilet paper," and the guy would run into the store and buy it on his expense card and bring it to you. Now this sounds like what maybe GrubHub or DoorDash or other companies like Instacart did, but we were doing it first. Because we were a small player in Spain and Portugal and Italy, nobody thought much of us, and now we are of course much, much bigger.

Org structure and centralizing research

[00:04:03] First, let's talk about org structure before all the layoffs in February. Companies are either centralized, decentralized or hybrid. Raise your hand if you're in a hybrid organization. Okay, not a lot. Raise your hand if you are centralized. And then raise your hand if you're decentralized, independent. Okay, cool. There are pros and cons to all of them.

[00:04:28] My team structure was in between centralized and decentralized. I love this chart because it makes us look cool, like we're Apple, which just meant that people were stuck in their silos for a very long time and couldn't switch jobs. But actually, when I joined, I said, "Hey, let's make a program where you can transfer teams. Let's give so much more scope and the opportunity to stay at the company for people who are in our teams." And this was really great. I was there for about a year before the world changed, and the teams were structured like this: designers and researchers were embedded in teams, at most they were supporting two teams. You had designers and copywriters, and everyone focused on so much, but they really had a scope that they could learn and become an expert in.

[00:05:14] Then we said, all right, if we are going to have to downsize, if we're going for savings, even with people attached to my team, what do we do? Do we give them more teams to support? Do we rotate them more often? Do we only have seniors? Do we bring in a lot more juniors? How do you actually stay in the cash, and how do you grow the team?

[00:05:32] Big changes. The first thing we said is we're going to centralize research. By a show of yays or boos, what do you think this did? Boo. All the stakeholders said, "Wait, you're taking my researchers from us." And how many of you know how lovely it is to be a researcher? People often don't take you very seriously. You do amazing work and they're like, "I didn't like the 17-page report you sent me." But then you take them away and they freak out, because they do know the value; they just don't want to acknowledge it sometimes.

[00:06:06] When we centralized research, we said, "Hey, every single person in product and in tech needs to be on this ladder. You've been delegating this to research for so long, you've been delegating this to the UX team. Your team is actually very, very far away from the customer." So we started this whole strategy called voice of the user. Can you speak the voice of the user? Is it just UX doing this, or can all of you do it? Can PMs do it, can engineers and editors do it, can data analysts do it, can product marketing do it? Of course you start with asking what they do, asking them to tell you about the past, but you have to go further. You have to show them things they've never seen before: test new concepts, things that are in design, things that are in engineering, beta testing, small city testing, batch testing, all of the above.

[00:06:46] Somebody said, "If we're going to get on this ladder, there are a couple of things we need to do." We already support a large repository of over 15,000 research studies, insights and recommendations. We already have the journey maps, and we do so many other things to provide resources, and we see very low adoption and engagement. If we ever reduce this team, or if we centralize this team, who is going to maintain it, who is going to contribute, and who is going to keep the quality of all the research if it gets democratized or centralized?

[00:07:13] We said, well, we probably can't do as much. Maybe at the very least we make a new asset called a UXR blueprint. This is the combination of a journey map, a deep-dive market analysis, some product management like PRFAQs, PIDs, the RFCs: what's feasible, what's desirable and what is scalable, or something that's valuable for the company to do. These blueprints have a way for everyone to contribute. You can contribute market analysis, you can contribute a customer phone call, you can flag a customer service complaint, and it became a thing that everyone could contribute to.

[00:07:48] How many people think that the quality of research done by non-researchers is the same as researchers? No. So we said, cool, we're going to build this amazing Airtable. The first thing that happened is IT called me: "You just added 8,000 users to Airtable. That was not in the budget." I was like, "It's the new tool, it's going to save us money in the long run." They're like, "Okay, well, this quarter is screwed."

How the industry got here

[00:08:15] And then February happened. How many of you know what I'm talking about? How many of you saw the crazy headlines, the LinkedIn posts? We were like, "Hey, we're already trying to save money, we've got this." And then we're like, why is everyone just firing people? That's not the first option. That can't be the only thing you do in this situation.

[00:08:33] Let me give some color to that. How did we get here? Back in 2019, 2018, pre-pandemic, everyone was spending money, everyone was making money. Everything was up and to the right, up and to the right: revenue, GMV, profit. Not profit in terms of actual profit, because tech companies don't like that, but profit in the sense that we had money to spend and no one was asking how we spent it. Everyone was doing super, super well, and spending money, and acquiring companies, and building new teams, and growing and scaling.

[00:09:03] One of the big things that annoyed us was that we had this one player. It was Uber, DoorDash and Delivery Hero, and Delivery Hero was in every market Uber wasn't, and we couldn't grow anywhere. Then they gave us an offer we couldn't refuse, and we joined Delivery Hero. Delivery Hero, with the combination of Glovo, is the largest delivery player in the world outside of China: 74, 75 countries, about 20 million orders a month on our platform alone, in just our countries. Globally it's about one order a second in every country.

[00:09:40] We said, oh, money is no longer a problem. We are now this big behemoth, we've merged, they take our debt, we're good to go. We're going to optimize, merge costs and move on. Then the CEO, Necklace [?], gave this amazing thought, which is presented in this graphic here, about how we need to be focused on local economies, local markets and communities. We need to do what works for them. And we built this massive expansion fund.

[00:10:06] And then we saw this. Delivery Hero as a group, and Glovo as part of Delivery Hero, was doing very well. Foodpanda is in the group, we have Fedora [?], we have Woowa, we have tons of companies you've probably never heard of. And then there were small players like Deliveroo and Just Eat Takeaway, and we said, "Hey, if they're doing layoffs, they're probably just too small to be able to get through this period." And then it kept growing and growing and growing. Focus a little bit on this section right here, where you see it ramp up to crazy levels. This is after the pandemic gave us tons of money for the food industry and for delivery overall. People were ordering groceries and food at record numbers.

[00:10:45] And then suddenly the outside opened, and we said, "Oh, well, maybe we shouldn't have tripled the size of the engineering team, and opened 15 offices, and partnered with Katy Perry," and things that Just Eat was doing. And we said, okay, what are we going to do? And then you saw this. It was just non-stop cuts.

Making one cut and caring for people

[00:11:12] So we made a small cut of our own. Of 5,000 people, we cut 250. This is a much smaller percentage than most of our peers, but it's still a huge impact. If you've never been a manager who's had to cut people, or been in the layoff, it is demoralizing at the very least. I had to train managers who had never fired someone, let alone laid someone off, let alone told someone who had just moved halfway around the world that they should move back with their family and kids two weeks after starting. The idea of rescinding an offer didn't exist in the minds of people who had never been managers before.

[00:11:46] I've been a director now for three and a half years. I was at Booking.com when the pandemic killed travel, so I had seen it, I lived it. I had gone through burnout, I'd gone through therapy, I had gone through having a great manager and then having a shit manager. So I said, let's do this a little differently. But also we need an action plan, because if we are going to have to do this, we need to figure out what happens next. How do we move forward, but also take care of the people we have?

[00:12:12] If you make cuts, you don't want to be one of these people who cuts multiple times. I think it's very sloppy what Twitter did, I think it's very sloppy what Amazon did. I think you should make cuts, and then everyone who remains should go back to having peace of mind, financial stability, the ability to plan a family, buy a house, to work and not have anxiety all day. So measure three, four, five times, cut once.

[00:12:40] Then I said we need to focus on the people. My focus is on people. We have friends who were impacted, like me, in the local communities. What can you do for your allies? DoorDash, Uber: we already were supporting and working with Uber, both in Ukraine. In Ukraine, in the war, we are the delivery player delivering all food, groceries, everything for the UN, the Red Cross. We said, "Hey, you guys are hurting, we're hurting. What can we do to stop fighting each other and wasting money marketing against each other, and spend money on our teams and our people?"

[00:13:09] So there were friends, and then there were some friends with benefits. They were still competing with us. Just Eat hired Katy Perry the day after the layoffs. We were like, "What are you doing? I thought we agreed not to do this to each other."

[00:13:26] Then their families. We went through the list of people and we said, "Hey, who's having a kid, who just had a kid, who has families, who has a visa, who needs to move back to their country, whose apartments are we paying for, whose relocation would get rescinded?" And we said all policies are going to be wiped: keep all the money, keep the relocation, keep everything possible. If we have to send you back, we will cover the flights.

[00:13:46] This was a hard one. Essentially this meant cutting more people to be able to give better packages, but it also meant that everyone who stayed would have perfect peace of mind. This is probably the hardest thing to explain to a junior manager: "Hey, I need you to fire this one person. I know they are not a low performer, I know there's no reason you would ever get rid of this person. But they are in Spain, they can live here, they can stay in their home, they don't get sent back to their country, they have no kids. We're going to give them three, four, five months of salary and introduce them to a new job we know exists down the street."

[00:14:19] Now that seems like a lot, and it was also not the easiest call. People were like, "This is terrible. You could just not fire them. Why? We could just cancel all coffee. Why isn't the CEO taking a pay cut?" There are lots of things you can do, and we tried everything, and then again, 250 was the number we reached.

Partners, local teams and HQ

[00:14:36] We said, okay, look, the service providers are also hurting. Imagine being an employee at a company, or being the owner of a restaurant, and then suddenly the recession hits, everyone's getting fired, you're not getting sales. You still have rent to pay, you still have your mortgage, you still have your kids, your family. You don't want the whole neighborhood closing down and emptying shops. For the companies on Glovo, we are probably somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of all of their revenue and sales. If we close a market, they are going to have to figure out how to make half of their income overnight. If we shut down too many teams, they will be unsupported and will probably struggle to make ends meet. So it goes both ways. Being a marketplace is very tricky, not just in the product but also in the business.

[00:15:22] We have international teams who, when inflation goes up, get paid a lot less money. Everything costs a lot more, but they get paid the same. And then we have local ops and logistics here. They're super happy, because we're telling them that they're going to be taken care of. Oftentimes at companies of our size, customer service or ops are not employees. You don't give them benefits, you don't do severance packages, you outsource. We said, "Hey, we're treating you like everyone else. We have one blanket policy for everyone. You're getting taken care of."

[00:15:51] And HQ, we told everyone: you need to hit these targets, you need to bring all your costs down. I know you like your fancy coffee, I know you like flying economy premium, I know you like all these things. Cool, Marriott can wait. Everything gets cut. We need to spend zero dollars every day until we get revenue back to the numbers we had before. And that was super, super hard.

[00:16:11] Then we looked for innovative partners. We said the goal is not to replace people; the goal is to be able to exist and be able to afford to pay the people we have. So no growth, sustainability. We looked for partners in drone delivery, we looked for partners that could deliver for us, we looked for expansion plans with UPS and FedEx and things like that.

[00:16:30] And then we said, all right, it's going to be a big deal to get this change approved by the HiPPOs. I don't even know what HiPPOs are. The highest-paid person's opinion. These are the two founders of the company. Imagine you ran a company for eight years and then you sold it for 40 billion. Are you going to be the first person to feel the price of milk go up? No. Are you going to be the first person who knows everything HR needs to do, because your company didn't exist during the last recession, the last layoff wave, any of the bad downturns in the market? No. So we said we need to make sure that they understand why we're doing it this way.

[00:17:08] Part of the autonomy at my company is that each director, each VP, was allowed to build the team that they wanted and also build the policies they wanted. Which meant that mine is super international, super diverse; other teams are super local. So we had unique challenges, and therefore I had to pitch a unique proposal. And that was great.

[00:17:25] We said everyone impacts UX, so we need to align all cuts across the business so that this makes sense. You can't just suddenly cut all of CS and then think the NPS score won't go down. You can't cut all of the account managers and think the partners are going to stay on the platform. You can't just blindly make these decisions in silos. It needs to really be a group decision about how you do this, and how we treat people, and how we want to be known for doing this and handling the situation.

What to scale up

[00:17:49] We needed to scale up a couple of things. Any guesses as to what happens when you take a team of 90 and you take it to 70? What do you have to automate, what do you need to do differently? No guess is a bad guess. Process.

[00:18:12] The first thing we said was we need to do more empathy building. We're paying for all these tools, we're doing a bunch of work to really test the product. We have 5,000 people; why don't they test the product? Why don't we get the CEOs and the VPs and the directors and every single person in the company going out being couriers, going out helping the restaurants fulfill orders, going out and figuring out the pain points of having a bag of 84 meals rip in the middle of a staircase when you're trying to deliver it? Go out and actually solve the problems that are going to be hitting them today, as they make less money, as they get fewer sales, as they're worried. Go feel the pain and let's solve it that way. Don't use the playbooks of yesterday for the problems of tomorrow.

[00:18:57] We needed to scale up self-service research. This was my most painful decision: bringing the team of 23 researchers to nine. We had a researcher in almost every group. Now we have a centralized research team that essentially focuses on the entire company, which means that a lot of people were either going to ship high-risk, low-traction product, or they were just not going to do research at all. So we said we're not going to democratize research fully. We need to give you the access and the knowledge and the training of how to do research, and what to use from what's already been done, to avoid waste of time and money on things you could just reuse.

[00:19:36] We also needed to scale up research operations. Research operations is my favorite team. Research operations and design operations really are the magic. They are the nitro in the car, they are the wind in the sails. Everything runs much smoother when you have people taking care of all the things that drive us crazy, but they go above and beyond that, especially in times like this. They're renegotiating processes, they're changing the ways of working, they're hubbing the work structure, they're doing rollouts, they're doing trainings, they're getting us new, cheaper font licenses, they're negotiating with Figma to include FigJam so it's not charging us five dollars a seat. There's so much that they help with.

What to scale down

[00:20:17] Then we said there are things we need to scale down: things we can spend less money on and things that are costing us money. Silos. How many of you know what silos are? These are actual silos, but the silos in our company always show in the product. They show in how you do releases, they show in how things ship, they show in the politics. So we said we need to actually have a concerted effort against the silos. This is getting a little crazy. No matter how pretty the silos are, they're not going to help.

[00:20:44] We also said redundancy. How many of you have seen Office Space? Cool. Hopefully none of you have red staplers, but this is the guy from Office Space. We said there are a bunch of things we're doing that are the exact same thing the next department's doing. We had BPMs and PPMs and all that. We had eight different kinds of product managers, and every department had to have their own, and they had program managers. We're like, "Wait, so your job is to coordinate efforts across the other teams, and then their job is to coordinate with you to coordinate jobs across the teams? So you're maybe doing the same job." And they said, "No, no, no, I do it from the technical side." And we said, "Is it the same thing?" And they said, "Well, you don't have engineering degrees." And we're like, all right, maybe we should just merge your teams together. No one gets fired, but maybe you should do this together. So we merged them.

Tackling it like a design thinking challenge

[00:21:34] Then we said, all right, we've reorged, we've centralized research, we've merged program managers. Now what? First things first, a little happiness. This is our mascot, Glovito. He's a pineapple. We have emojis for him. That emoji with the coffee and the house on fire: this is what we all felt. We're like, yeah, all these process changes, more work, more stress and more work at the same time, yay, this is fine. This is what we all felt like. And then I was on stage smiling, being like, "It's going to be fine, it's going to be fine, this is fine." Also there's no more coffee, so just fire.

[00:22:15] Then we said, hey, maybe we should tackle this like a design thinking challenge. What we've been doing has been so focused on function, scale, things running as we think they should run. What if we put more fun into this? What if we prioritize a bit more what people want to do, and not just what we think they need to do? So we used the same MVP model you use for your products for the business.

[00:22:36] But then we also said we're going to get less done in the product. We're going to move slower, the agility will go down. We need to add more delight. If we're going to be adding fewer features and less functionality per month, per sprint, at least we can make it amazing, make it something worth talking about.

[00:22:53] We also said we need to really ramp up our tooling. I'll give a little shout-out to Rally, because we automated how we do recruitment, we automated how we do screeners, we automated how we do compensation. We automated the entire research process in terms of scheduling, recruiting candidates, getting them to show up on time, doing reminders, paying them. Because we said we have better things to do, and we had a lot of work to do with all these process changes. This team can't just be stuck doing the same exact job day in, day out. Is it cheaper for us to buy software or for us to do it ourselves? And it was much cheaper for us to just buy software.

[00:23:31] Then we said, all right, democratizing research for basic research. We looked at UserZoom and a couple of other companies that do the same thing, so I'm not shouting out just one company. They ended up getting bought by UserTesting, so we're like, "Oh yay, contract renewal next year." But the most expensive company buys the best products. We said we should definitely be using it. Eventually we will have the ROI go down, because this is going to be super high, but at the beginning we gave every PM, every data analyst, every researcher, every designer direct access. You could run a research study on any public app within 30 seconds. You could run SUS, QX score, any usability score testing on your own app within days. We said that is way worth it to reduce the timelines and get speed up, while we end up having to reduce headcount.

Localization, shadowing and scoring ourselves

[00:24:18] Then we said there are going to be tons of issues if we do these cuts. Naturally, the company is going to look for the people who cost the most: big international teams, massive relocation packages, expansion plans being cut. We are going to be much, much worse at supporting local markets. So we said localization testing has to be key. We made playbooks and training for all of research, all of localization, how to work with design and all the new structure, and then we trained everyone. We did a ton of work.

[00:24:49] We said you need to go meet with no less than five users a quarter. Every PM flies to a market and meets with five customers, five partners, five couriers, five of someone who they are directly building product for. So does data, so does engineering, so does design. And then we said we need to also shadow internal users: account managers, customer support and sales. While we had programs for this before, we made it mandatory. This was key for us to be able to move fast, still have good insights, still de-risk, but without having the same size team.

[00:25:27] We said we need to score ourselves when we do this testing internally, and score our competitors, and make sure we're not falling too far behind just because our team is smaller. You can use any number of scales, but we use the QX score scale and set at least 85.5 for when the market's at 90 or 91. Obviously the benchmark moves: 95, 97. Shout-out to the QX score, because it's a mixture of quantitative and qualitative, task-based and behavioral. If you've not heard of it, check it out. You can do it without using UserZoom; it's just really mixing these tests on the left with your similar NPS survey research on the right.

[00:26:04] Companies that really win at this are Walmart and Asda. It's a really good metric, because the NPS only shows you, oftentimes, what's going wrong, but not what people are missing or lacking or want. So the combination in the QX score was quite useful.

Advisory boards, tiers and meetings

[00:26:20] We started to launch advisory boards. We said if we can talk to fewer people, if we have less research capacity, the least we can do is bring in the best restaurants, the best grocery stores, the super-user customers, the best couriers, and let them directly advise product roadmaps, let them directly give feedback on what we should and shouldn't build right now. So we changed the way we actually built priorities.

[00:26:41] The second to last thing is we started to say research can't help everyone. If it's a big project, long-term, deep investment, we call it a gold project. You get a dedicated research team of two to three people with a lead researcher, and they embed with you. Everyone else gets fractional support.

[00:26:58] And then one last thing is we changed our meeting structure. You hear all these process changes and you hear meetings, meetings, meetings, more meetings: review meetings, QBR meetings, MBR meetings. We said no, we're going to do one-on-ones with the manager bi-weekly, every two weeks, and drop the meeting cadence. We're going to do newsletters for research to the entire company. So less show-and-tells, fewer share-outs, but more access.

[00:27:24] And then we said we need to revamp our structure. Hotjar for web, Blast Box [?] for mobile. We're going to give everyone direct access to UX KPIs, friction reports, what is happening in session replays, so you can go watch and see exactly what the issue is. This is how we again federate a little bit of research back into the business. VPs, anyone, can just log in. A customer support agent gets a log right now and they see a bunch of things like iOS 13, iPhone Plus, "I had a problem with a crash," and then they can go watch what they were doing before it crashed. So again, just massively changing the way we distribute UX insights.

[00:28:03] This is how we've been able to go forward. This is how we were able to move forward. I think the main thing is that we are not going to suddenly go back from this. I think these are changes that were overdue in some cases, and even if we get the scale and the budgets back to scale, I think we will end up keeping these practices and just scaling them along with the team. That is the positive, rosy outlook, and I'm open to questions.

Q&A

[00:28:36] Host: Awesome, thank you so much. It was incredible to listen to you talk so empathetically about something that can be really stressful. I really enjoyed how, sometimes when you have these massive cuts and layoffs, you can expect people to just do more work, and you really approached this through the lens of supporting your team, creating new processes, and really going back to the basics of empowering every single individual to get closer to the customer. I love that. Now we have some time for questions in the audience or from those online. We have a throw box and a UXDX shirt right there, so raise your hands and we will come to you.

[00:29:23] Audience: Hello. Could you say something about whether you do less research or more research now, and how it impacted the quality of the research you do?

[00:29:34] Kevin: At the beginning we did less research. The reorg, the restructure, was a huge toll on morale. We canceled work for two to three weeks to give everyone vacations, and then we said let's come back and replan roadmaps. We cleared all of the research roadmaps, and we said director-level feedback is going to dictate the priorities from the business, and then the UXR team should propose the other half of the roadmap based on their own knowledge of the business. It was a complete wipe of the slate, so much slower for Q1, and now in Q2 we are doing much, much more research.

[00:30:08] The quality, I would say TBD. We'll know when we ship something based on this research whether it is as predictable as it was before or not. But I think that we are much better off this way.

[00:30:26] Host: You can just toss it right back. It's like a beach ball. Perfect.

[00:30:32] Audience: Hi, thank you for your talk. I'm curious: in one of the later slides you talked about how some products are gold products, and you go down the line for the amount of research that they get. For those teams or products that don't get as much research, what is your relationship to secondary research?

[00:30:48] Kevin: By giving everyone the tools to do self-service and access everything that was done before, there is less of a need for us to do net new research. This was a big issue we had before, because researchers were going in being asked to do things and we already had that. So we just ramped up that access through the self-service tooling.

[00:31:07] The second thing was, it's not that the entire project or team is considered low priority. It's a project-by-project basis. Essentially anyone who runs research sends a ticket, I know, I love those, sends a ticket to research operations, and they do a quick analysis with some AI help to say, "We have this already," or "This is net new. Here's a researcher for half a sprint to make a research plan, and they're going to give it to you to execute." In those cases the PM and the designer execute the research, and they synthesize, and they submit it back to the repository, it gets reviewed, and then it's actually saved.

[00:31:39] For silver or gold, it's just a matter of time. You get a dedicated researcher, but if you're gold you get it for the entire quarter, maybe two or three researchers, maybe a travel budget to go fly and visit the problem and observe. For silver we try to optimize on costs as much as possible, but you still have a dedicated researcher who's an expert, and not afterthought [?] sessions and things like that.

[00:32:01] Host: Awesome, right there.

[00:32:05] Audience: This is kind of a question for everybody here. I'm just wondering how many of us have been laid off in a UX role? A lot less than I thought, like a third. And how many were in the last year? Okay, thank you.

[00:32:30] Audience: You described a really thoughtful and human-based approach to a really tough business situation, and you compared that to some of your competitors who maybe didn't approach it that way. I'm just wondering if you received any pushback in your organization to having that approach, and how you handled that.

[00:32:53] Kevin: Yes. People who know me know that I am what's called spicy in a corporate environment. I'm pretty unfiltered. I prefer my salsa that way, I prefer my work that way. It is not what everyone wanted us to do or wanted me to do. It is what I thought we should do.

[00:33:11] The original list was a spreadsheet filtered by salary, highest to lowest, and they said, "Reach this number. Look at the teams you have, spread it out, but reach this number." And I said, "Okay, great. This person who makes the most money is the person we just hired. We've spent 20K relocating their entire family and doing visas and paying for the first apartment. It doesn't make sense for the company to get rid of this person, even for my business case." Eyes opened. And then they're like, "Okay, okay, well then here it is filtered by the business case and this factor." I'm like, "Cool, okay. This person just had a baby, so no. This person just bought a house, so no. Give me more than just a spreadsheet of numbers and grades and salaries and equity packages. Give me what we found out during the interviews."

[00:33:58] I already have a practice of having one-on-ones with my entire department twice a year, so I have pretty recent knowledge of what's going on, no later than five months old, for every single person in the team. Then I asked my minus-ones, without their knowledge, which is a bit creepy: "Oh, so how's this person doing?" You have to catch up and ask more about what's happening recently. Then I made the call. It's a lot slower, it definitely was not advised, but I'm much happier with the outcome. I actually was able to rehire three people. Everyone who left at first was very angry, lots of public complaints and things like this. 85 percent of them have new jobs now, mostly assisted by us.

[00:34:45] Audience: It's a very practical question. You talked about suddenly releasing UserZoom to your whole organization all at once, and you mentioned a playbook. I just want to know what you did. Could you talk briefly about how you enabled that and made that happen?

[00:35:04] Kevin: This was a crash course. We said the platforms that don't charge per seat are the best, because we have no idea what it's going to be like after this Armageddon. So we said UserZoom was great, well, the platforms were great, because they didn't charge per seat, they charge per usage, so we could give everyone a seat.

[00:35:27] Second, we said we need to do training. There are PMs who are great at UXR, people who have had research dedicated to them before, people who have never had it, people who don't want it, people who want it. First, any corporate executive buy-in: I got my boss, the CPO, chief product officer of the company, to make it an all-hands topic. We said research is not unimportant just because we cut the majority of the team. I was like, "Why would you say that? That sounds bad." But she said, "It's equally important, and if you ship things without research we will flag it, and it will not get you the marks you think it will get you in your performance review. You need to de-risk, you need to evaluate, you need to validate."

[00:36:04] Great. Second, training them in UserZoom. They have an amazing academy, they have amazing account managers; that was the third thing. The fourth thing we did is we actually made everyone go through and launch a task within the first week, and then present the findings, and then we course corrected. We're like, "Oh, you're biased, you found what you were looking for, you did a confirmation bias thing here. Actually the customer never mentioned the solution; the customer mentioned a problem. There are multiple solutions to this problem." So we tried to teach them how to be junior researchers.

[00:36:34] Host: That's great, thank you. Thank you so much, Kevin. Please give another round of applause.