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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:02.979)
All right, welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle. And this week we have another awesome guest with us, Debbie Levitt. Debbie, welcome to the show.
Debbie Levitt (00:13.046)
Thank you so much, Kyle. Hi, listeners.
Kyle (00:16.135)
Debbie, I'm so excited to have you and I'm so excited for our conversation. Let me do a very brief introduction for you and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. But Debbie, you are often described as the Mary Poppins of CX and UX. You are a strategist, a researcher, an architect, a speaker, a trainer, so many things. But why don't you tell us more about yourself?
Debbie Levitt (00:39.37)
Yeah, sure. Um, so I've been doing, uh, strategy, customer experience and user experience related stuff for decades. Um, my company is called Delta CX and we are basically an agency and consultancy doing projects, training, consulting, and, and all kinds of other adventures, basically trying to help companies understand what's blocking them from being more customer centric. And then of course, how to, how to be more customer centric in all areas
and service strategy and so it's from strategy down to tactics across all of their teams and domains. And yes, clients independently call me Mary Poppins. That happened about 10 or so years ago. I just kept, I had all these little short consulting gigs as I sometimes do. And when I would leave, people said,
by Mary Poppins and I said, oh, I think there's something to this. And so I like to say I fly in, fix everything I can, sing a few songs and fly away to where I'm needed next.
Kyle (01:44.435)
That's so great. And you obviously have a ton of experience in UX and CX, and we're gonna talk a lot more about that. And I'm incredibly excited to do that. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, some of the things that you may like to do outside of consulting and UX and NCX.
Debbie Levitt (02:05.822)
Yeah, I always like to joke when not doing CX and UX, I'm doing it anyway. I'm writing about it. I'm talking about it. I'm helping people with it, but no, I actually do have hobbies outside of it. Um, I, uh, I do sing. So the Mary Poppins singing thing is not really a joke. I have a bachelor's degree in music. And if we want to talk about Thanksgiving vacations, I did win the cruise ship karaoke contest. Uh, so.
I do take my karaoke rather seriously and there you go. So mostly I think people will find me singing somewhere or now that my motorcycles got fixed, maybe, you know, I'll be on my motorcycle riding around, probably singing.
Kyle (02:53.266)
Do you have a go-to karaoke song?
Debbie Levitt (02:56.386)
Many, depending upon how I'm feeling. I would say a good warmup song for me, and this will show my age, so please excuse me, but a good warmup for me is usually Heartbreaker by Pat Benatar from the 80s. I'm definitely 70s, 80s person. On the cruise ship I sang Last Dance by Donna Summer and then won the show with The Winner Takes It All by ABBA. But mostly I am singing operatic Dutch metal in English.
That's what I'm usually singing around the house. Oh yeah, and outside of CX and UX, I'm a mom to five dogs and I have an awesome husband. I should mention them as well.
Kyle (03:36.559)
Hey, well that is, it's an awesome repertoire of music. So, and great. Well, I want to dive into a number of different topics, but let's start at the beginning because you've had an extensive career and I'm interested in how you started in CX and UX and what ultimately led you to where you are now.
Debbie Levitt (03:50.99)
Sure.
Debbie Levitt (04:03.05)
Yeah, I kind of fell in a little bit by mistake. I was always that kid who was that kind of researcher personality and problem finder and problem solver personality. And so I always thought I would be some sort of medical researcher because that was how I thought I could help people the most. Um, and, uh, ultimately after I did my degree in music and I dropped pre-med along the way, I realized humanities are just more in my heart
uh, medical sciences were, and then it was a question of, well, now what? And, uh, after I graduated, uh, and again, this will tell you my age, which is not a secret. I'll I'm about 52. And, um, uh, then it was like, a friend was like, Hey, you have to see this worldwide web thing. You can make pages for the worldwide web. I mean, imagine being there at semi the beginning of the web. And so.
Then I was like, oh, holy cats, I need to learn how to do this. And so I stayed up for a week figuring out how to make web pages. Even though I don't have an artistic background, I still wanted to take that strategic approach and work from some of the psychology classes I'd taken for fun in university and think, well, how do people
Parse information, perceive information. How do I make a website so that it makes the most sense to the people visiting it? So I like to think of that as a bit of UX before I really knew more formally about UX. And so I started out in more traditional old school 1990s websites and eventually got on the proper UX and CX bus.
Kyle (05:46.299)
That's really fascinating. And I think it's really interesting, starting so early in kind of the age of the internet and being there from some of the early internet and web pages, and then you're really seeing so many of the changes. What has been your experience as so much has changed in the realm of
user experience and design, you know, what have been some of the, I guess, some of the biggest changes and maybe some of the best changes you've seen as we've evolved from those early days of building very simple web pages to where we are now.
Debbie Levitt (06:27.562)
Yeah, in some cases, nothing has changed. It's still important to be user friendly, whatever words we're using for that. It's important for it to be accessible. It's important for us to include our target audiences in our research and our work so that we're really making sure we're solving their problems and understanding things from their perspectives. And to me, really what's changed over the years is really more the technologies and the devices on which we can do this.
mobile, we, you know, that was such a huge shift at the time. I remember starting with a, uh, a Palm trio phone. Uh, and that was like, holy cats, look at this thing. You can run apps and I can do all these productive things for my phone. And, um, and so I, and then we've had watches and, and all these other things. And so I think that we just find, we keep finding new interfaces and screens and experiences. Um, but in many cases, a lot of things.
hasn't changed. It might not be your grandparents shoe store anymore, but we still have to think of our customers, satisfy our customers, do the right things by them, and where we're not, customers know we suck. We're not really fooling them. So I think in some cases, things have evolved a lot. And in many cases, we're still the same people from the 1990s trying to build a web page someone cares about.
Kyle (07:55.079)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing I've enjoyed in our conversations leading up to this discussion is, again, your unique perspective around UX, which a lot of times challenges the conventional wisdom around user experience and customer experience that we often see in our discussions around these topics and product management. Why do you think it's important to challenge
the conventional wisdom around a lot of these established patterns that we often talk about and some of this traditional thinking in user experience and product management.
Debbie Levitt (08:36.682)
Yeah, because it all keeps evolving. I mean, when we think about what the earliest ideas of the user experience was, it wasn't just a screen. It was the whole experience of, gee, I think I need a thing and maybe I'll go shopping for it and I wonder if I can afford it and I wonder if it can fit in my car and I wonder how I'm going to set it up and I wonder how it's going to get service after the sale. That used to be the
user experience. It was all of those touch points, all of those moments. And then somehow along the way, decades later, the definition got away from us a little bit. And someone said, well, UX people, you know, they're so involved in technology and digital, they're really just digital designers. They do things related to screens. And many of us came from
psychology, or some people came from human factors, or other types of problem-finding and problem-solving, or even service design. And many of us said, no, I don't think I'm just a digital screen designer. I am a larger strategic problem-finder and problem-solver. And so I think we keep changing the name of what we call those people, but that work is always there. That work always has to be done.
And so I think now when we think of who makes our digital screens, we often think of a product designer. We think that's the person with a UI background or artistic experience or branding or visual design, and maybe they know some things about UX too. But now these are jobs that I can't even get because I don't have a background in visual arts. I'm a terrible visual designer. And so if you expect your UX designer or
digital problem solver to be an artist or a branding expert, there's a whole bunch of people you now can't hire. And so I think then we have to look back and say, okay, then who are our problem solvers? Who are our strategists? And some companies say, well, that's the product manager or that's the service designer or that's something else. And I think we're just gonna keep changing these names and chasing new titles, really for no good reason, but ultimately your company has to have
Debbie Levitt (10:53.986)
somebody who is finding problems and solving problems, or at least part of a team that is heavily focused on that. Otherwise, it's just a lot of what I like to call the guessing lasagna, where someone says, Hey, we should make a thing and maybe people will like it. And I think they need this and maybe it'll raise our KPIs if we do this. It's just layers of the guessing lasagna. If we're not being good problem finders and problem solvers.
Kyle (11:21.967)
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I wanna kind of dive into that a little bit more as well. And I was watching some of the videos that you've created and you talk so much about this. And one of the examples that you put out there of kind of challenging some of this traditional thinking is, and this one kind of always has stuck with me because...
It's one of those that I kind of think a lot about as well is this idea of continuous discovery and the opportunity tree model that has kind of been made a common topic by Teresa Torres. And this is something that you've challenged and you kind of talk about in some of the discussions that you've had. What is it with this model that just as an example,
that you think doesn't quite work or that is worth challenging because it's become such a, one of those common things that everybody takes as, this is what we should be doing, or this is just one of those practices that everybody should be employing.
Debbie Levitt (12:40.15)
Yeah, thanks for asking. And we did some critical thinking around this model in my episode 205. So if anybody wants to go to YouTube and look up CXCC, which is the new name of our new YouTube channel, Customer Experience, Customer Centricity, 205, you'll run right into that episode and you can check it out. But to me, one of the opportunity solutions tree has a couple of key problems, apart from it kind of just being a ripoff of an impact map. So like this already,
existed and so we didn't necessarily need a nearly identical thing with a fresh name and somebody's trademark symbol on it. But I think that one of the two main things that I tend to dislike about the Opportunity Solutions Tree is number one, the outcome at the top of the tree is usually, if not always, a business outcome. And
Theresa sometimes explains this by saying, well, no, we have to put a business outcome at the center of everything, because if we don't have a business outcome at the center, then our company's gonna go out of business, and oh my God, you'll lose your job, and it escalates fast. And it's a little bit fear-based, but I think that the bottom line is, I don't think there's anybody in CX, UX, product management, product strategy, who isn't aware that there are business goals.
who isn't aware that we need to attract new customers, make them happy, keep them, grow our business. It's not like if we don't put that in a circle on a map that we're not going to achieve those things. We have to achieve those things. But I think that when we think about what an opportunity solutions tree claims to be, because the next thing it claims is, you will identify opportunities to deliver something great to customers, then my question is,
Okay, but if you map them this way, then you're looking at opportunities to deliver something to customers in service of the business goal at the top. You know, are we still customer centric? If we're saying, but you know, we, the business needs this. Look, the business needs this. It's, it's always the cloud over our heads. We get it. We, we can't create a universe in which the business loses customers or, or has lower loyalty or whatever. We get that.
Debbie Levitt (15:00.234)
But if we don't start mapping real customer and user needs and focusing on those, I think that we end up what I like to call customer-peripheric, which is the opposite of customer-centric nearly immediately. And so Torres says you're supposed to understand these opportunities by having done good generative or qualitative research, which is typically going to be observing users doing their tasks and...
interviewing them, which is certainly what I'm calling for as well, but I'm not seeing product managers and Teresa fans fighting for that. Instead they say, but look, I know what people want or we know what people need or we have a great feature idea, let's just run with that. We're not, people claim to so admire her and what she does and then they're not even following some of the key elements of it.
And to me, that is the focus on having really good, highly qualified researchers bring you the evidence, data and knowledge that you don't have about your customer. Because otherwise you're just going to draw another map, another canvas, another framework where we look at what does the business need and how are we going to treat our customers and users as pawns we push around a chessboard to try to create what the business wants. And then we see.
all kinds of high failure rates and we go, oh wow, our guessing lasagna sucked. We did not guess correctly what people wanted or needed. We didn't make them happy and they didn't even do what we were trying to get them to do. But then what does somebody say? Trying to research this and know more is, that's too slow, even though it's what the companies we admire the most do, that's too slow. Let's just go with some more experiments in guessing.
And so I think if you really want to follow the things that Teresa says, you have to look at all of them, you know, don't turn this into religion and pick and choose. You really want to make sure you're paying attention to how often she tells you that we must have good knowledge about our users and customers. And the opportunities are supposed to be opportunities to serve them based on their unmet needs and the tasks they're trying to accomplish.
Kyle (17:19.127)
You've hit on so many good points and we're going to have to go down a couple of these different avenues because I think that it's so, yeah, it's so important. The fact that, and I think this is such a rampant problem, the fact that we're putting kind of like you said, this business outcome as kind of the thing that becomes the focus. And then it feels like we're trying to map like customer problems to that and almost force those problems into
Debbie Levitt (17:24.322)
I'll take it.
Kyle (17:48.763)
the business outcome, rather, kind of like you're saying, find those customer problems and find ways to solve them that still meet the needs of the business. Kind of like you said, we're never losing sight of the business outcomes we have to drive. Those are ever present in the world that we live in, but we're not, we don't start with, okay, here's the business outcome we need to drive. Let's go out and find customer problems that we can drive towards that. Let's...
start customer-centric. Let's really start customer-centric. Let's find the problems we can solve and solve them in a way that works for customers, our users, and also works for our businesses. And it kind of turns that whole thing on its head where we don't start with the thing, the business thing that we need to drive. We start with our customers in mind.
Debbie Levitt (18:34.402)
Cough.
Kyle (18:47.595)
And then we work to find ways that we can solve those problems in a meaningful way that also benefits the business.
Debbie Levitt (18:54.25)
Yeah, what I would add to that is even if we started with a business goal or outcome at the top, which again is not customer centric, so just know that. But even if we started with that, let's say for example, we want a higher conversion rate, of course we do. But what normally happens is we go into a brainstorming session and we go, how do we make people buy more stuff? And then we start imagining unethical things, wacky things. I've seen companies say, we're going to
take every button off the page except the buy button. That's all you can do now. And I go, who wants that? And so we just say, okay, what do we do in service of that? But what if we took a different perspective and we said, okay, we want higher conversion rates. What's blocking conversion now? What could be stopping our customers from not buying as much or often as they, let's just say ethically could, we don't wanna do anything sneaky. So.
What if we have, let's imagine we're e-commerce, what if we have crappy search results and bad metadata? If I go into a company and I say, you know, our search results are probably keeping us from having more conversions, there's probably gonna be a leader or product manager or someone who says, I'm sure it's good enough, they'll figure it out. Well, let's not pretend that we have any hashtag empathy there because that could be a real reason that we are blocking ourselves for more conversions.
What else could be blocking for more conversions? Again, maybe if it's e-commerce, people don't understand when will I get it? What does shipping cost? Are there gonna be surprise fees added at the end of this transaction that aren't clear now? Can I tell if this is in stock or not? There's so many things that we can see from these experiences where we can see this could block conversions. And so the question is not so much, what can we...
push people to do to try to make them engage. Nobody wants to engage. We all have a task we need to accomplish. Unless this is YouTube, even if this is YouTube, you might see it as engagement, but I've got something I'm trying to do on YouTube, whether that's relax or laugh or get pissed off, you know, for some of you out there or learn how to cook a thing, you know, I have a task, even if you see that task as engagement. So if we start with something the business,
Debbie Levitt (21:19.574)
wants and we gave our teams the freedom to find what really is blocking customers from this. And my version of an impact map says, let's tie a user problem to its root causes. And then let's tie that to the money we're leaving on the table, because we probably can tie crappy search results to fewer conversions.
And then we can get more buy-in for that improve our search results project, rather than somebody saying, I'm sure the search results are good enough. They'll call customer support if they have a problem, which costs us money and nobody wants to do so. I say, even if you are being told from high up, you know, create this growth or create this change or whatever, start.
using great CX and UX researchers to do early generative qualitative research to learn why doesn't that happen more? Because people like to run surveys or read NPS comments and I say do you know why people aren't doing whatever it is more? No, but we'll run a workshop and brainstorm that. No, no, you're not supposed to guess why people do and don't do things. We have research to help us know this.
This shouldn't be guessed at. This should be evidence that we're all aligned around because it's real.
Kyle (22:45.883)
Yeah, and I want to dive into that a little bit more because it's something that I feel isn't enough of maybe the conversation and it's definitely not enough of so many of the companies that I think many of us are a part of is really good research. And I think that is probably your experience from...
what you've written about and what you've talked about a lot. But what is really good research look like and how should we be doing research in the way that you're kind of discussing?
Debbie Levitt (23:27.754)
Yeah, so the problem with research is it's like cutting hair. Anybody can cut your hair, but you might not be happy. They did. And there's a lot of things that people might say are research, but that doesn't mean they were good research. So some people will say, well, Teresa Torres or person X says, I just have to call three customers a week and ask them what we're missing or what would they like? And, and I say, you know,
That's a thing, but that wouldn't pass for UX research. If I were interviewing someone for an open UX research job and they told me that's how they do things, I would not pass them through to the next round of interviews. That wouldn't meet my standards. And so when you think about research, I know people can't see my entire graphic right now, but I like to remind people that good research has, of course, scientific rigor, but...
but time and expertise devoted to first, the planning of the research. So often I see other people leave that out. They say, well, I'm just gonna call a few people and ask them some questions. No, in proper research, we plan this out. What are we trying to learn? Who are we trying to learn it from? Where are we going to find these people? How many people should we be finding it out from? What's the right method? Is it a survey, focus group, observations, interviews, a combination, something else?
Then we've got to write that script or protocol. What are we going to ask people? What tasks are we going to have them do? And where are they going to do these things? Then we have recruiting. Where are we going to find the right people? You can't, if you always just call three people up, I bet you're gonna get a lot of white guys. And then we can't say empathy, and we can't say diversity, and we can't say accessibility. So.
Who did we recruit? Where did we get these people? And have we made sure that we've got a good mix of people from our target audience? Then, of course, the execution of the sessions. There's a very big difference between the way a researcher speaks with someone or observes them versus someone else who might enjoy having those conversations, but might not have that detective hat. You know, there's...
Debbie Levitt (25:46.526)
There's a reason some people are detectives. They have that knack for getting to the bottom of things. We're journalists. Not everyone is going to speak to someone or interview someone the way those people are. Then beyond that, we have analyzing and synthesizing the data, which again, many people who think research is just a nice conversation don't often think about the analysis and synthesis. We can spend days or sometimes weeks, depending upon the research.
breaking apart everything we saw and we heard and bringing it back together based on patterns and themes and how we see our original questions being answered and then eventually reporting on this and looking for the actionable suggestions that we can give to people. It's not enough to say, you know, we saw some people do a thing. Good luck. You make of that what you will. A good researcher will give you actionable
suggestions that say, look, because we saw this and because we heard this, this is something that we suggest. That doesn't mean they've drawn a screen or told you an exact solution. Research should, this type of research should be solution agnostic. But this is what good research really looks like. And it's quite different from, I'm going to call up a couple of people and ask them what they need, because a lot of people don't know what they need.
If I said, Hey, you've probably used product management or project management software before, what does it need? Now you might think in features. So you might say features, but what about the average person? If you call them up and said, what does YouTube need? You know, they don't really know. Many people don't know what their problem is. So they don't know the best way to solve it. That's why we've got all these other people. That's why we've got.
product and CX and UX and engineers and marketers and data and analytics. We are out there trying to make the best sense of people's worlds, even when they can't make sense of their own world. So I just want to caution people against anything that looks like it could be research, anything that looks like it could be data. We know that a lot of this is sending us in the wrong direction because of our high failure rates. We have incredibly high failure rates of
Debbie Levitt (28:05.67)
A-B tests, of experiments, of product launches, and it shows us we're not getting this right. And it should be a wake-up call that whatever we're using as evidence is false or not enough because our own results and missed KPIs tell us we're getting this wrong.
Kyle (28:26.315)
Yeah. I think that that's, it's so fascinating. And I'm interested because you talk about, you know, doing research right and really starting with kind of that plan of it's not just about calling people and, you know, asking a few questions and kind of this more rudimentary discovery or research or what we're calling research a lot of times. It's really about
diving much, much deeper and really understanding. Where...
Kyle (29:09.831)
I lost my question in that for a second. Give me one second as it comes back to me.
Kyle (29:23.859)
That's a really good question too.
Debbie Levitt (29:26.13)
Oh no, cold flu!
Kyle (29:27.927)
Yeah.
Kyle (29:35.76)
It's Friday.
Debbie Levitt (29:35.934)
Sorry, and I had an idea and I was waiting to see where you went with it and so I forgot to make my notes as well.
Kyle (29:46.05)
Okay. I apologize. Okay.
Debbie Levitt (29:47.871)
No, it's okay.
Kyle (29:51.375)
Oh man. So, okay. Let me gather myself here for a second. Yeah.
Debbie Levitt (29:56.278)
Well, let's roll back. You were saying about doing research and gathering the right evidence and, and asking the right questions. And, and I was thinking about how, you know, even you, you prepared with questions. You didn't just say Debbie's interesting. I'm going to make up crap when I talk to her.
Kyle (30:19.459)
Yeah, yeah.
Kyle (30:30.245)
you
You had sparked something that I don't know, I can't believe I lost it.
Kyle (30:41.798)
Okay.
Debbie Levitt (30:48.297)
Ahem.
Kyle (30:56.623)
Well, I'm just, I'm totally blanking. It'll probably come back to me in a second. So, as we do, as we prepare for all of this research that we're...
Kyle (31:19.779)
Okay, I'm interested in your take because you mentioned we have all of these different groups that are working together. As somebody who works in product specifically, how do you see research and UX and product, how do these different groups really work together collaboratively to bring all of these things together? And even some of these other groups that you mentioned.
Because like you mentioned, there is a lot of different groups within this entire experience or ecosystem. How do you see that working really well? I'm especially interested in the research and UX and product management. How do really good product managers work with UX and research to bring these things together in a meaningful way?
Debbie Levitt (32:19.23)
Yeah, to me, a really good product manager supports UX researchers and designers and other roles and makes sure that we have what we need to do great work. I mean, it's really Agile Manifesto principle number five, you know, give motivated individuals the time and support they need and trust them to get the job done. I think that some product managers are trying to put their fingers in all the pies. Ooh, I want to do some digital design. I want to do some research and interviewing. And I say,
But what if you're not great at that? Now it gets awkward. Or what if that's my job? Now it's really awkward. What are you doing in my job? You're not letting me in your job. I've never had a product manager come to me and say, hey, let's run a workshop so we can all make a product roadmap. Usually it's, hey, everybody stay off my turf. But magically when that turf is CX and UX, everybody thinks, oh, well, that's easy. I can do that. And I go, yeah. And I can cut your hair.
or I can write some code, but you won't be happy I did. And so I think that we have to find the balance between when do we let people do their own jobs, especially when it's a specialized job, and when is there room for collaboration? So the way that I like to explain it is I like to collaborate with my cross-functional teammates at a few key points.
Number one, the first thing I do is I like to run what I call a knowledge quadrant, which is mentioned a couple of times in my book. I've renamed it since then. It's episode 196 on my YouTube channel. So you can look for knowledge quadrant 196. It'll come up on YouTube. And basically it's an exercise that I would prefer to see UX run if you've got them and especially researchers. And the idea is we're collecting from our larger cross-functional team and even stakeholders.
What do we wish we knew? What don't we know? What are we guessing and assuming? What information would help us make better strategies, better decisions? Because right now it's a guessing lasagna. So what don't we know? That is a great opportunity for collaboration. Everybody gets to put sticky notes on that board and then the researcher can plan the study or studies that will answer all of those questions.
Debbie Levitt (34:39.846)
Now we can go back to our cross-functional teammates and go, we've got the answers for you. We know the things. We can now align around a common set of information about people, context, systems, internal stuff, technology, whatever it is. We got your questions answered. And then, but again, that's kind of the end of the research. Coming back a little bit earlier is once I'm doing that research plan that I just talked about,
I like to bring my cross-functional teammates in and sometimes my stakeholders with commenting access in my Google Doc to have them take a look and see this is what we're planning to do. These are the people we're planning to recruit. We want 10 of these people or 40 of these people or seven of these people, whatever it is. And these are the questions we're planning to ask them. And these are the tasks we're going to have them do. And by the end of the research.
This is the knowledge that we will have. And it's just agnostic. We don't care how it turns out. We just wanna know the things. And that's when people can, again, collaborate. They're not gonna, I don't let them steamroll me. If someone comes in and has a crappy way to ask a question, but it's a decent idea, I will reword the question.
And I will say, I'm happy to find that out for you, but I would probably word it more like this. And usually they're okay with that. Very rarely does someone say, no, it must be asked with exactly the words I wrote. You know, that's a bit of a difficult person at times, but hopefully if I can answer your question, even if I've reworded it, that's good. So we make sure again, that we're learning what everybody wants to learn. And there's no surprises later. Oh no, you didn't get my question.
And then after the research is done, there's another great time for us to collaborate. And that is when we're presenting it. So what I typically do is I will create a slide deck with the key takeaways, but also lots and lots of details, points, strategic suggestions. And then I record a video, uh, walking through that because I find some people like to read decks and some people like to hear decks, but nobody wants to go to a meeting and hear a deck.
Debbie Levitt (36:56.01)
So I make sure that this is an asynchronous delivery where people can run it at 2x if they want and blow through it. And then I create another board. This is usually Miro stuff with sticky notes. And I say, as you're going through it, however you like to go through it, write down some follow-up questions you have after the research. And then what we'll do is instead of a meeting for me to read the darn thing to you, I'll hold a meeting to take questions about the research and what we found.
And again, that includes the last one I held had 43 people come or something. You know, we had an amazing turnout because we invited what I like to call the outer circle and some of the higher level stakeholders and people had lots of wonderful questions. And so we were able to answer those and now they're working on prioritizing the things that we suggested, which is fantastic. It's exactly how it should work.
And so I'm lucky that I've got a good job right now and I'm seeing many things done well, but I think that there is a difference between collaboration, which is I'm doing my job, you're doing yours, but here's where you can come into my world a little bit and give me some angles. But without you trying to say, well, this is how you should research and you should do a survey and it should have this many people and I want it done in 37 seconds. And...
To me, that is an immediately bad relationship, especially between product managers and UX. We want to hear that you understand the value of what we do, that you're not asking us to prove our value, that you know why we got hired, you know we have value, and you want to support us getting good work done.
Kyle (38:39.651)
You bring up such an interesting point there, and I wanna touch on that a little bit, because the value of research, I think so many of us know that or feel that or have experienced that, but I think that there's another side of that where a lot of people question the value of research or question the time that it takes to do research, or it's one of those things that it feels like it's going to take way too much time to go out and do research. So let's just...
do our best guess and we can test it as we go, or even high level executives, why would we invest several weeks into doing customer research or anything like that? You've probably heard all of those different things, probably a lot of variations on those and even more than I even mentioned. One, what is your response to that? And two, how do you get people to buy in to the value of research, especially early on when
Debbie Levitt (39:26.678)
Cough cough.
Kyle (39:39.035)
we have a lot of this mindset and you even talked about this and written about it, that let's just go fast and let's make our guesses and let's test them out that way rather than do research early on.
Debbie Levitt (39:52.118)
Yeah, the amazing thing is, again, we have so many books by so many authors from so many backgrounds and domains that tell you research first. And some of us are old enough to remember R&D departments, research and development departments, which is really how in many ways Apple still gets it done. So many people admire Apple.
who spends roughly 6% of their annual revenue on research and development. And then we say, no, we don't have time for this. Now the problem is that a lot of the, we don't have time for this came from books from 12 years ago about what we thought startups should do if they were trying to get an investment soon. If you're trying to get an investment soon, then you've got to prove that you make software and you can get it out fast because an investor wants to see that. But that doesn't make sense for most of our companies. And in reality,
companies do value research. They do market research. They want to know people's opinions and reactions. They want to take their temperature. They want to get a score on things. They want to read their tweets. Our companies do want knowledge. We do want research. But when someone like me says, hey, you know what, to really answer those questions thoroughly and to really get to know what people need, I think it's going to take six weeks.
Someone spontaneously combusts and says, six weeks, oh my God, that's ridiculous. But of course, if an engineering team of six, eight, 10 engineers wanted three sprints to do something, we would say, yeah, that's development. Yeah, that's about right. Yeah, sure, they need two or three sprints to do that. Let's just plan for it. And so the weird thing is we have this bizarre double standard where when somebody needs a reasonable amount of time to do something,
our underwear catches on fire. We think it is absolutely sacrilegious for one UX researcher to want six weeks, but 10 engineers to want four or six weeks, totally normal, absolutely agile, super lean.
Debbie Levitt (41:53.454)
Great way to go. So thing one, we have to just watch very carefully and I've been telling people, I like to see three researchers working on something at a time. It's a great way for research to go faster. Yes, it might still take four or six weeks, but this is where having more heads on something can be great, especially when someone gets the flu or goes on vacation to win the karaoke contest or whatever. We still have people working on that project. But...
The reality is that it doesn't take too much time. These are things that we've made up. These are just things that we say to each other. And when I ask people, how do you know research takes too much time? I've never had someone give me a really solid answer. I typically get, well, it just does. It takes too long. And I say, how long should it take? And they say, less time. And I say, how do you know it's taking too much time? And they say, it just is. And so we're in this world now where our arguments don't even...
makes sense. The reality is that if we were to actually measure the amount of time and money we've wasted on bad guesses and the guessing lasagna, it's got to be less time and money than we would spend on research. Let's say six weeks of research for three researchers, one well-paid more senior person, two more junior people making less money. What might that come?
What might six weeks of three people's work cost our company? $40,000? Again, thinking American money. You know, you know what people are paid if you have to deal with budgets. 40,000 if they're really well paid. 50,000? Maybe more, maybe less. Then we think about how many engineers are on our team and what a week of their work costs us, at least.
more than the three researchers, we're talking about six, eight, 10 engineers. As soon as you start realizing, now, how much time would we have to save an engineering team from either building a mistake now, or having to delay stuff later and fix mistakes later, this has to be less. And so the problem is we've gotten caught up on things like velocity. We think that if we don't go really fast,
Debbie Levitt (44:15.102)
We must not be good or agile or whatever it is, but think about your customers and users. Even think about yourself as a customer of various companies. What's more important to you that the company put out something good that worked well, that worked just the way you expected it to. You opened the box, you took it out, it worked. You signed in, it did what you expected. What's more important that the thing just works and is a positive experience or that
They released faster. Most of the world has no sense of a release cycle or an agile cadence or any of these things. They're not thinking about that at all. But yet, how many apps will your phone update each day? Ten? And how many times is that because we have new amazing features for you? Almost never. The release notes say bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes, because we had to go back
and take something we thought would be good enough and try to un-F it. You know? And so I think that we have so many disaster projects at our company. We have so many things that have wasted time, wasted money, burned customer support, burned customer trust. Someone can do the math on this. In Lean Six Sigma, it's called the costs of poor quality. Someone can do the math on what our...
Mistakes, our poor guesses, our rushing out garbage really cost us. And if we could do better, even saving a few sprints of work for the engineering team, that research more than paid for itself. And so the value is there. We know the value. Scrum talks about being evidence-based. Lean talks about delivering value to the customer.
Agile talks about our highest priority is customer satisfaction. And yet what did we take from these methodologies? Go faster, go faster, go faster. And that is not the road to quality. And you're gonna have to pick one. I would rather see a company go a little slower and release that thing two weeks later, a month later, next quarter, and for it to be freaking awesome and for it to sell itself.
Debbie Levitt (46:35.23)
And for sales to sit there and go, I don't have to do shit. This thing just sells itself. People freaking love it. And you're going to take my money. This is so much better than, oh, it looks like we need to get something in the backlog that will prioritize later to fix this thing because we released it. And we knew it wasn't that good. Hands up. We know it's not that good when we release it. We're not fooling ourselves and we didn't fool our customers. So what are we doing? Seriously.
or we're failing so often. And then we go, oh, high failure rates, that's good learning. Is that what you would say to your child if they had high failure rates on a test? Well, you know, good thing you failed, you're really learning. No, you're not. You're really guessing. You really don't know the material. High failure rates are a sign that we're getting a lot wrong. If we were smarter, we would learn from these failures and we would have fewer failure rates later, but we're not even being smart.
We just go for another round of fast guesses and experiments. And I'm sorry, I'm on fire and at some point I'll let you talk, but sweet, holy Lord, we have all the information we should need. I've done a business degree, nowhere in the business degree did they say, celebrate 50 to 90% failure rates. Cause that's good product strategy. It's not.
Kyle (48:00.159)
I absolutely love so much of what you said. The fact that we need to normalize this idea of taking some time is, it resonates so much with me. Not just for development. Because like you said, it's such a normal thing for us to say, yes, a few sprints of work, that's totally normal. But for everybody else in the chain, we have not normalized that yet. And
Debbie Levitt (48:27.86)
Cough.
Kyle (48:28.215)
for us to say, yes, research that's totally normal for two sprints or three sprints of research, that should be a normal thing. And I'll even go further and say, for a product, taking some time to actually develop a roadmap and strategy and all of the things that go along with it, taking some time to do that, that should be a normalized activity as well. Actually,
putting thought into these things and not rushing through. Because I feel like all of the things along the chain are just absolute rush things until you get to, okay, we're gonna take weeks or months to actually develop the thing. And that's the normalized thing, but everything else is like, that's taking too long, it's taking too long. And why are we saying we have to, you have two days to do research, you have one day to figure out what your goals are.
for this product or this thing you're doing, and then we're gonna take the next six weeks or eight weeks to build it. That's just, it's insane to me. And I feel that kind of pressure all the time where it's like, hey, can you get all of your goals and metrics and KPIs in the next two days? And it's like, well, who can do that? Who can do the research? Who can put all of these things together in such a short period of time?
And then like you said, why are we rushing things out? Like I don't ever open an app on my phone and be like, you know, think that, oh, it has this functionality, but it's garbage, but at least it has it over. Oh, it has this and it's really great and I love it. If something is garbage, I'm not going to use it. I'm not going to open it up and be like, oh, this experience is terrible. I'm going to continue to use it even though it's absolutely garbage. I open it and if it's a terrible experience,
I'm not going to use it. I would much rather open something, use it, and have it be a very good experience and a usable one. Otherwise, I close that and I'm like, well, they need to fix this. Otherwise, I'm not going to use this at all. It's completely worthless to me. And that's the experience that I think most people have.
Debbie Levitt (50:42.73)
Yeah, and no customer says, no customer opens up our website or app or system or walks into our physical location and says, well, this is pretty terrible, but you know they got it out fast.
Like we have no sense of what fast is. I have no idea if you've been working on something for two years or two weeks. Like, you know, we have this weird idea that other people have a sense of our timing and we have to get stuff out fast. And, and I, and they say, oh, we have to beat competitors to what? To mediocrity?
Kyle (50:58.252)
Yeah.
Debbie Levitt (51:19.35)
Congratulations, you know, congratulations. You got it out first and you suck. Meanwhile, Apple doesn't do that. They're rarely first to market. They love to let other companies experiment with stuff first and put theirs out a year or two later and claim that it's the original or the best or whatever. And I'm not falling for that, but fine. There's something to be said for not being first to market and for being great to market. You know, we forgot about...
product market fit. Once we're not a startup anymore, which most of us are not at startups, once we're not at a startup anymore, we stopped saying product market fit and we should because I want to know if every feature you're planning for your audience is that.
Is that going to have product market fit? And how early can we know this? We shouldn't be guessing at it and making engineers build it and then find out it sucks and it doesn't have product market fit and it's just another failure, there's got to be a way to do this better.
Kyle (52:23.951)
Yeah, I absolutely agree that it's only us who are seeing this idea of it has to be so fast, otherwise we're failing. The only people who see this as a failure if it's not fast are us in the company. And then if we put out garbage, the people using it and seeing how bad it is.
Debbie Levitt (52:48.586)
Yeah, we're again, we're not fooling anybody. You're really not. Unless you think your customers are non-intelligent, but somehow we always think they're non-intelligent geniuses who will figure out our crappy product. But we're really not fooling anybody. And again, I find that almost everybody I talk to says, yeah, I hate all these apps and all these websites and all these systems and all these services. And I know they're not good enough. And I know they're this and that. And then I say, and then you go into your job the next day.
and what do you do? You continue cycles of mediocrity. You say the customer will figure it out. They have to stick with us, you know. They'll call customer support. You bring upon other people what you hate being brought upon you. We don't even have good selfish moments right now where nobody's going, wow, if I were the user, I would freaking hate this. I would walk right out the door.
We've completely lost sight because we are under so much pressure to just go fast. But newsflash, your customers aren't counting how fast you are. They want to see how good you are.
Kyle (53:58.831)
Yeah. You're so right. The irony of it is we all go in to work and we all use the apps that everybody complains about. Literally, I'm in the office and we're all using the apps that we're forced to use because that's what we have. The things like Teams, because we're forced to use it and everybody's like, this absolutely sucks. And then we're working on things that we know
Debbie Levitt (54:03.478)
No thanks.
Kyle (54:27.811)
and we're trying to push them out super fast. And we're like, we know this experience sucks, but we've got to push it out super fast because that's the deadline that we're on. And we're pushing out an experience to our own customers that we know is going to be bad because we have to do it fast while we're complaining about using the same kind of experiences that we know suck. Like this is just, it's like a never ending cycle and the irony is just terrible.
Debbie Levitt (54:34.442)
Why?
Debbie Levitt (54:53.842)
It is.
It is. And what I remind people is the digital world needs to catch up with the physical world in that if you think about a factory floor, think about where they build cars or phones or something like that. You can't turn your factory floor up to a zillion. You can't just say, just turn the machines up as fast as every machine goes and go. Because eventually there's going to
Debbie Levitt (55:25.672)
one station to another, there's going to be gears that go crunch crunch, and so then we go, okay, why don't we dial that back a little bit? Maybe we need to go, what if the machines ran at 90% speed? Okay, that went better, this stopped crunching, this whatever, but now we have this problem over here. Okay, maybe the, maybe the, remember, this is the difference between speed and efficiency. Efficiency is about how do we combine quality and outcomes with
having gone relatively fast and we've forgotten about efficiency. We think fast, but even a factory floor is not going to be turned up to 100. It's going to be turned up to the fastest point at which the machines are efficient and don't create problems because when you're making physical objects that we have to deal with physical objects that are now garbage, they're defective, we can't use them, we have to remelt them or whatever it is.
but we have just as much garbage in the digital world. We have code that we have to throw away. We have code that has to be removed later. We have stuff, we have all kinds of crap lingering in the backlog. There's almost no difference between the kind of physical assembly line universe and our digital world, but we think we're so much better than they are. And we're not, we should be taking a page from the efficiency.
of machines, the efficiency of an assembly line, because ultimately we are an assembly line. And we should be looking at how we can work efficiently, which was Agile's original idea, was be on a reproducible cadence because you know how long it takes to do a thing well. And we've forgotten to do the thing well, and we've forgotten about the reproducible cadence, and we're just trying to take all the people on our team and turn them up to 100, whether or not
breaking stuff and making mistakes and causing us problems and wasted money later. We have to be smarter.
Kyle (57:27.107)
Yeah, we absolutely do have to be smarter. I completely agree. And I wanna talk about what you've, we've touched on this a couple of times and you've written a book about so many of these topics and it's, it is the title, Customers Know You Suck. And I am about halfway through it. So I am in chapter 12 and I'm highlighting it all over the place. You can kind of see, I'm reading on my Kindle.
Debbie Levitt (57:45.727)
Yes.
Debbie Levitt (57:53.166)
Thank you.
Kyle (57:55.723)
And it talks about so many of these things that we've been touching on. And so many of the topics that you have mentioned, the fact that customers know you suck and research and has a whole bunch of interviews with other people as well within the industry of user experience and customer experience. And even mentioned some of the facts that you mentioned that Apple spends about 6% of its budget on R&D. And it's one of the companies that we look to as an exemplar of.
the things that we love and yet we don't follow its lead and things like that. And one thing I was just reading today, the fact about if research is important, why didn't we research first? Researching first takes less time than guessing first and things like that. So tell us a little bit more about this book because it is an exceptionally good book for anybody who likes user experience and research and is looking to learn more.
Debbie Levitt (58:25.287)
Cough.
Debbie Levitt (58:49.038)
Thank you.
Kyle (58:53.959)
Tell us about it. Tell us about why you wrote it and what users or what readers could expect to find in there.
Debbie Levitt (59:00.278)
Yeah, I mean, to me, it's a book really about product and service strategy and about customer centricity. It's about how do we adopt and satisfy and retain and grow customers, not by manipulating them, not by making guesses about them, but by really trying to find their unmet needs and serving those as best as we can.
This shouldn't be, this shouldn't even be a book, but for whatever reason, we've gotten so far away from this that we need to be reminded about what's blocking us from being more customer centric and how we get there. And so the book is called Customers Know You Suck and it's available on Amazon and Kindle and I've narrated the audio book, which you can find on Audible, but all the links to the book are at cxcc.to.
Debbie Levitt (59:56.88)
including the name your own price PDF and the link to the audiobook. I now put it on my YouTube channel for people who don't want to buy the audible version. Fine by me. So it's up on YouTube for free. But to me, it's, it's a book for everybody. It's not just for your CX person or your UX person. They know a lot of this already. To me, this is really for the product.
managers, product strategists, engineers, marketers, some of the people who think we can get by with the minimum viable research or the minimum viable customer knowledge or that guessing and experimenting are just great and they're not really looking at the outcomes. We say outcomes over outputs and then we ignore all the bad outcomes we have. We have incredibly terrible outcomes.
And we ignore those and just go for more cycles of fast guesses. So to me, the book is for anybody who wants to think more about product and service strategy at any level from sea level all the way down.
Kyle (01:01:03.291)
That's great. We'll put the links in the show notes so anybody can check out that. You can find, again, on the different physical copies of the book or the digital copy like I'm reading and the other links to it as well, the audible version or the narrated version, which I love listening to narrated versions, which are great. And I'm interested in...
You mentioned it being for a lot of people who may not necessarily be in CX or UX specifically. And I think there's a lot of really great information in there for everybody and specifically for those of us who aren't doing UX research on a daily basis or kind of frequently. How can...
You know, those people who aren't, and you talked a little bit about, you know, working, you know, product managers working with UX researchers and other UX people, but how can those people outside of UX research really continue to contribute to research in general? You know, what are some of the general things that-
everybody outside of the research field can do to contribute to more research in general in our companies and in our teams who may not necessarily be doing the research on a day-to-day basis.
Debbie Levitt (01:02:42.454)
Yeah, I think you don't have to do the research to support the research. And I also think, especially for some product managers and others, it's important to know when this is just not your strength. I understand it might feel fun. I understand it might be fun to talk to customers, but if you're asking them the wrong questions or things in the wrong ways, you could end up helping stuff go in the wrong direction. So I just want to warn people that, you know, research is not a toy and not everybody.
is great at it and I want to see more people stand up for other people's jobs and specialties so I would say specifically to product managers instead of acting like my job is so easy that you can do it even if you're kind of bad at it I would rather I'm gonna have a much better time working at this company when you say you know what your research work is important what do you need to do a good job
What do you need to do your best job? Okay, we might have to negotiate this a bit, but what's the time you need? I wanna work that into my roadmap. What resources do you need? Do you need more people? Do you need certain tools? Do you need access to certain customers or users? UX and CX researchers can get so much more done when we have those allies. And very often we don't have those allies because either the product manager is on the do it fast.
I don't care if it's good bandwagon or they kind of wish they were us and they say, oh, you X, you know, we don't really need you. I'm going to talk to customers and you can't. I mean, I get told that constantly by people with UX jobs that they're not allowed to talk to customers. They're not allowed to run the research they want to do. Or sometimes they're only allowed to run what we call evaluative research, which is we have a design or a prototype. Let's see.
how people are reacting to it. Okay, but we need a lot more evidence, data and knowledge before we're designing something. How do we know that we have the right solution or concept or idea? And how do we know what people's problems even are? So I think the best way that product managers and product owners can get more involved is almost to not get involved and just figure out ways to support us.
Debbie Levitt (01:05:07.686)
and speak with us much earlier. If you are planning a quarter of work or a sprint or whatever it is, I want you to come to me and say, what are you working on? Or what do you need to do to get these questions answered? Like at my current job, someone came to us a few weeks ago and said, oh my gosh, some deadlines changed and there's absolutely something we need to know before November 17th and everyone disappears for Thanksgiving.
That gave us two weeks to plan and execute a super short study that included asking people some questions to learn some early stuff and showing them a prototype to get some feedback on a design. So it was a kind of combo thing. And we did it within two weeks. Now we had to put other things on hold, stuff got postponed, but this was deemed the high priority. I don't always need six weeks or months of something.
This was something that we turned around fast that then was able to feed stakeholder decisions and priorities and strategies. And I need the product manager or owner who says, you are empowered to get this done for our team because we shouldn't be moving forward without this knowledge and these answers.
Kyle (01:06:25.243)
I think that's such great advice for product managers and for anybody really involved in any of the work is one, empowering the UX and research team in order to do so much of this work. So building it into the roadmap, building it into like the timeline of what we're doing, turning over the ability to talk to customers and talk to people. Sometimes that's...
product sometime, that's the sales team or the customer relationship team, like empowering everybody to be able to have that ability to talk to the users. And then making sure that those teams, that the research team has all the things that they need, like you said, that it's really about.
Debbie Levitt (01:07:02.99)
Thank you.
Kyle (01:07:20.051)
finding out those answers and then collaborating effectively on, you know, this is one, this is what we need, this is the information and here's everything that you need in order to do your job effectively. Here's what we need to do our job effectively and what can we do to help you do your job effectively. If I feel like that maybe there are so many...
product managers who haven't had the opportunity to work with good research teams and don't know what it's like. But once you have had that opportunity, you won't want to do anything but work with good research teams because being able to hand over those types of questions and not have to honestly not have to do try and do that type of research is it's so much. Yeah. It's so much more effective.
Debbie Levitt (01:08:12.466)
You're busy enough.
Kyle (01:08:16.583)
to have actual researchers in an organization. I feel like many organizations just don't even have that. And so often it's one of those things where it's just whoever does it just ends up doing it. But if you have the, if you honestly have researchers in your organization, like empowering them to actually do customer research and then leveraging that is, it's just, it's so much better and it's so much more meaningful.
than whatever it is that teams are doing, whether it's just like calling customers or sending out a survey and being, or just guessing and being like, this is what we're gonna do, let's just build it and hope that it works.
Debbie Levitt (01:08:58.462)
Yeah. And I was going to also jump in and say that, um, Oh no, now I forgot what I was going to say, but, oh yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to say that, um, if you don't have any researchers, I think that makes a lot of product managers, especially, and sometimes engineers and others think, well, you know, I can pick up research. It's easy to talk to customers. I'll do that. But I think that it would be even better if someone said, say, someone says to you as a product manager, Hey,
We don't need to hire these researchers. In fact, we're going to lay them off. Who needs them? Anybody can do this. Product manager, you do it. It would be great if that product manager could say, I don't have time, or this is not my strength, or I'm too busy with other things, or...
research is a specialized job and I wouldn't be as good at it as a specialized researcher, but I find that a lot of people are just afraid to say that variation of no. They think, oh my god, if the company asks me to write code, I better start writing code. If the company asks me to get into Figma and design, I better start doing it. And I think it's important to be able to say, look, I could do this, but I'm not that good at it.
And are we sure that's who we want doing it? Because this is the type of thing that doesn't have to just get done and you check it off a list. This should be done well. And that means bringing in the specialists, then the experts and the people at different levels to build up these, these teams. So I do recommend that PMs not just say yes to everything and just remind people that they just can't take on.
everybody's jobs, especially if it happens to be in an area that you might still be learning or might not be good at. Design isn't easy. It only looks easy because amazing people have made it look easy. But good design is hard. Accessible design is hard.
Debbie Levitt (01:10:54.914)
Great research is hard. Crappy research is easy. So that's something that I want. I want to see more product managers say no to stuff, say no to crappy strategies, no to crappy KPIs, no to crappy deadlines. You're not supposed to be order takers, you're supposed to be strategists.
Kyle (01:11:15.087)
Absolutely. I think you're spot on with everything that you said there. And the fact that no one should realistically, no product manager should realistically be expected to go in and code. I don't know of any product manager who would be like, sure, I'll jump in and start coding, or I'll jump in and start doing.
uh, sales or, or other things like these are just like, they fall so far outside of, of what you would be doing that, uh, you would just on its face say no. But then when it's like, oh, research, well, it's like, uh, okay, I guess I'll, I'll do some research. Like, no, that that's in the same category. These are sped. It's a specialized thing that like it, there's the overlap. It feels like there's overlap still, but these are, it's like you said, it's a specialized
field with specialized skills. And so like there's a distinction and we need to make that more. And like you said, say no, like we need somebody even if it's not even if right now we don't hire somebody full time within the company, like bring in somebody who's specialized in this to help so that we can have research done effectively. And then eventually, you know, maybe that becomes like a full-time thing that we have, even if that's not the first step, but we should have somebody doing research for what
we need within our organization.
Debbie Levitt (01:12:44.778)
Yeah, the way that I usually explain it is imagine that we opened up a job at our company for a specialized CX or UX researcher. And let's say the product manager is thinking, oh, research is pretty easy. I think I could, I could do the researcher. Maybe we don't even need a researcher. Um, or I'm going to make them my assistant or whatever the heck. And my question is, okay, have some self-awareness. If you applied for that open researcher job, would you get it?
Would you make it through the first interview? Would you make it through the second interview? I find that your average product manager probably wouldn't make it through a series of interviews for UX researcher or designer, but yet they have the confidence that they can do this. This is easy to do. I just need to use Figma. I know how to put boxes on a page. And I say, okay, I know it looks easy. So it is cutting hair.
But the bottom line is.
If you wouldn't make it through the interviews, if you wouldn't qualify to get a job in this at our company, I kind of don't want you doing it. And I kind of don't want to teach it to you because that's the other problem we run into where there aren't enough UX researchers or designers and someone says, well, teach the product managers to do it. And I go, thing one, how did they get so much extra time to learn a whole other job? Really? They have nothing to do? They can learn my job?
Thing two, do you understand how long it takes to learn to do these jobs well? You're usually not starting to be really good at these jobs until years into it. This is not like learning pivot tables in Excel. This takes serious time. And then third, which do you want me working on? An impromptu school to try to teach you so you could do this two hours a week? Or getting my work done? Like if you understand the value.
Debbie Levitt (01:14:46.822)
of UX and especially if you're open to people being trained on it, bring in UX apprentices, bring in UX juniors. Right now a lot of companies won't even hire a UX junior because they go, oh, they need training. We want people who know what they're doing. And then they tell us to train the product managers. And it's like...
Is no one paying attention here? This makes no sense. So we have to get back to thinking more clearly. And if we're going to train anybody, let's train the people who are in that, that universe and let product managers do their jobs. And if this is a company where we can't tell what a product manager's job is, and it's so fluffy and amorphous and doesn't have good boundaries, fix that.
Kyle (01:15:32.931)
Yeah, absolutely. Please, for the love of everything, don't add more to the product managers. There isn't more. It's too much already. Everybody has too much already. Everybody needs to focus and we'll all be better off on those specific things.
I'm interested, for those who do want to get into UX, what advice would you have for them?
Debbie Levitt (01:16:06.194)
Yeah, my current advice is don't get into UX. You know, here's the, it's a bit of a tough love moment. We've, as we've seen over the last couple of years, there be significantly fewer UX jobs and those that exist, the salaries have gone down. So, and we're recording this in December, 2023 for reference. So my advice currently, and this could change in the future, but it has been, if UX is not burning in your heart.
Kyle (01:16:08.595)
Thanks for watching!
Debbie Levitt (01:16:35.326)
it's probably not the right thing for you to transition into because right now it's an incredibly ugly, thankless job. We're being laid off more than we're being hired. We're being circumvented, overruled, and ignored more than we're being utilized. And there are so many product managers out there who say, you don't need those UX people, I can do the work. And now we're finding ourselves, our jobs don't exist. I think I saw a statistic like our jobs are down like,
70% like there's just been a huge cut of UX people. And I think a lot of that is because other people at the company are sure that they can do this. The product manager got Figma and says, I'm a designer. They call up a customer and ask them what we're missing. They say I'm a researcher. So I would say if UX is not burning in your heart, find what is because UX is really ugly to get into
right now. I know very few people who are happy with their jobs and most people are just trying to hold on even to a bad job because of the economy. I know, I don't know any UX person who was superfluous or unnecessary or had spare time. Everyone was overworked and running uphill battles and then their companies say oh we over hired we really didn't need you but of course
those projects continued and they just told more people to do more people's work. And it's just all fear-based now. So I think it's going to take some time before things settle and we get away from some of the false narratives and bad authors and bad waves we're on right now where everything has to be faster and high failure rates are fantastic. Let's keep failing. Failing is great. Eventually someone's going to care about quality.
the quality of our work, the quality of our outcomes, the quality of customer experiences. And that's when I think CX and UX will rise up again. But I think that for now, there is no good way in. A lot of companies don't want juniors, they don't want apprentices, they don't want to train you, but they do want to train a product manager. So UX doesn't have a good way in. They
Debbie Levitt (01:18:57.366)
wanting newbies and juniors. Now we don't have real seniors. You know, who has five, seven years of experience in UX? It's so rare to meet that person because how did they get in? So I'm sorry that this is an extremely long answer, but I want to be quite clear with people that there is no good course. There is no good, you know, having a degree won't help you. I'm seeing people with degrees still need years to find their first job.
We've really just closed the door. If you have a job in a company, help open that door. Hire UX juniors and apprentices. Make sure they have seniors and leaders and managers who can support them. And that way, if you wanna get into UX, there's a path for you later. But there's almost no path right now. So I've been warning people, if this is not absolutely burning in your blood, find what is, you'll be happier doing that.
because UX is not easy to get into. Our jobs exist less and less, and they're paying us less and less because the message is, anyone can do this.
Kyle (01:20:05.699)
Interesting. How much of that do you think is like the current tech landscape versus more something more systemic like you said?
Debbie Levitt (01:20:18.026)
I'm not sure what the difference between those two are. I think that we have a current landscape that just wants to make everybody an endless generalist. Hey, we want a developer who can do front end and back end and DevOps and databases and API calls and you should be able to do your own QA. For some weird reason, companies...
went from being very into specialists, highly into very specialized jobs, into now thinking everybody's replaceable. Well, sure, if you're gonna keep laying people off, then you want a team of utility players where you can say, hey, we just cut all the QA people, but you can do some QA, right? Get on it. Do your job and their job. So when you have a landscape and an environment in which you...
plan to just get rid of people randomly or non-randomly, then you want utility players and generalists. We see this in UX too, but that just means it's even harder for you to get into UX because now they want you to be an expert artist, which I'm not, so I can't get those jobs, an expert UX designer, which many people aren't, they're just good artists, an information architect, most people don't even know what that is anymore, but that used to be a specialized job.
a researcher, now maybe also a writer and content strategist. And then sometimes they think UX should be able to do front end dev. This doesn't make sense. Nobody is going to do this job well. Your priorities are always going to be shooting arrows at a target. And so I think the problem is the landscape is we're just going to cut people whenever we feel like it. So hire as many jacks of all trades as you can.
And I think that has also made our quality lower because we didn't hire the amazing specialists, the amazing researchers, the amazing scientists. We said, no, we don't want the amazing scientists. We want the cool person who can do a little research and a little information architecture, a little UX, a little writing, a little art. And now we just don't have, it would be much better if you had those strong.
Debbie Levitt (01:22:38.118)
specialists. So I think it's just a it's the current landscape, but it's bolstered by a lack of care for quality and a lack of accountability. If there were accountability where you could be in real trouble for what crappy research led to or what poor design led to, if we really were held responsible for these outcomes, we would do things very differently. But we're not being held responsible for our outcomes.
We can waste time, we can waste money, we can burn customer trust, and everyone says, this is good product management.
Kyle (01:23:18.555)
Well, yeah, I think it's unfortunate. And I think that you've touched on something that is I think systemic in technology right now, as far as some of the themes that I think we've been talking about, as far as the lack of quality and the focus on too much generalist.
Debbie Levitt (01:23:20.694)
Sorry.
Kyle (01:23:48.487)
just to focus on generalism instead of the specialist, more of a specialist focus. And this idea that we don't need as much.
Kyle (01:24:05.111)
expertise in certain areas and we can get by. I think maybe it's just kind of a general attitude of getting by, which leads to a lack of quality. Yeah, and it's good enough, which I think is rampant in so many areas, which can be exhausting, I think, for many of us. Like this idea of it's good enough, it's good enough, it's good enough. Well, yeah, it isn't. Like we can do, yeah.
Debbie Levitt (01:24:14.354)
It's good enough.
Debbie Levitt (01:24:29.922)
And it isn't.
And we know that you're not fooling anyone. Yeah, we could be so much better. And yet, there are companies that say, ooh, how do we get our satisfaction up? How do we get our NPS up? And we go, why don't you take some of that crap out of the backlog and actually fix what the customers were complaining about? Why don't you look at your one-star app reviews and do something about those one-star app reviews? And they go, nah, it's good enough.
Kyle (01:24:35.111)
We can do so much better. Yeah, yep.
Debbie Levitt (01:25:00.146)
Isn't there something else we can do to raise our NPS?" And I go, what do you expect me to have? Like some sort of weird magic wand or is, you know, give them a coupon and your NPS is going to go up? Like, you might deserve that crappy score. So you're going to have to get, you might actually have to be better. And I think that's the bottom line is we don't care about outcomes, no matter what poster we've put on the wall.
And then we have no accountability so that when we have poor outcomes, nobody's in trouble. Nobody's in trouble. People are more often put on a performance improvement plan because they tried to think critically and asked for more time and asked for a better work situation. They're being punished and gas lit, but yet we don't want to do better. Why not?
What, when did we decide that being mediocre is great? It's not.
Kyle (01:26:04.547)
Yeah, I absolutely agree that we can and should, yeah, can and should do a lot better with just our overall, I think, experiences generally for both within our organizations and then for our customers. I think that there's just, there's so much that can and should be better. I couldn't agree more with that.
Debbie Levitt (01:26:07.39)
Thank you.
Debbie Levitt (01:26:30.167)
It's so obvious and we all know this. This is not, you know, in some ways I'm not breaking new amazing ground by telling you these things, but I am the weird person who has to show up and say these things out loud at a company. And people look at me like, you know, how could you say this? This is so blasphemous or whatever. And it's like...
It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be blasphemous to say you're saying outcomes over outputs, and then you don't care about any of the outcomes.
Kyle (01:27:04.292)
Yeah. Yep. Well, Debbie, this has been a really, really fun conversation. I feel like we could probably go on for at least twice this long because I have a number of other questions and so many other topics I feel like we could delve into. So we may need to do a part two at some point. Yeah. We'll...
Debbie Levitt (01:27:15.187)
Yeah, sorry everybody.
Debbie Levitt (01:27:27.091)
Part two.
Kyle (01:27:31.143)
go on to another area. But as we kind of wrap this up, I do have a couple other questions that we usually like to wrap up with. But before we get to those, where can people find out more about you, about the things that you talk about, Delta CX, about your book, which you already mentioned, and more about you?
Debbie Levitt (01:27:45.294)
Thank you.
Debbie Levitt (01:27:52.882)
Yeah, thanks for asking. I, the easiest website to go to is just deltaCX.com. Cause right there on the front page, I'm kind of like, Hey, what do you hear for? You know, are you here for our online community? Go over here. Are you here for our books and stuff? Go over here. Are you here to possibly hire us or check out our services? Go over here. So I think whatever people are interested in the DeltaCX web page is a good place to start. Um, outside of that, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I usually don't add people as connections, but I hope they'll follow me.
I hope they'll subscribe to my newsletter since I do write a lot of articles and continue getting stuff out there. Certainly our YouTube channel. We welcome everybody there. We don't assume you work in CX or UX. We just assume you care about product and service strategy. So that new channel is called
customer experience, customer centricity. It's a little long, but I wanted to say both so you can find it on YouTube as CX-CC. So I would say, so those are some of the key places to find me. You're always welcome to send a private message or an email, especially if you're thinking there's something that I or my company could do for or with yours.
Kyle (01:29:04.443)
Okay, awesome. And we'll put all of the links in the show notes as well so people can check those out. And I'm interested, now we usually kind of wrap up with a couple of just fun questions and these can be product or UX related, but they don't have to be. If you've read or watched or listened to anything recently that you'd like to share.
Debbie Levitt (01:29:26.186)
mostly watch things for fun. You know, the world is so not fun that I don't really engage in a lot of reading and watching that's going to bring me down. So I think if people want to have some fun in their lives, I recommend Ryan George on YouTube. I'm a big fan of Ryan George. He's very funny. He also has a channel called Pitch Meetings. I love the Pitch Meetings if you've ever seen those.
Um, one of my favorite bands is called Toe Hider, T-O-E-H-I-D-E-R. His name is Mike Mills. He did our YouTube theme song. He's an absolute genius. Um, these are the things that I'm into to kind of, you know, walk away from, from the realities of the world.
Kyle (01:30:17.755)
Nice, I'll have to check those out. I am not familiar with them, so I will definitely check those out. Cool, and then any products that you're using and enjoying or maybe not enjoying. So you can give a shout out or a gripe to anything. And those, they can be a physical product or a digital product.
Debbie Levitt (01:30:30.803)
Cough cough.
Debbie Levitt (01:30:36.458)
Yeah, the gripes would be endless, but I would have to say for stuff that I actually like, I think many people know that I'm a big fan of Disney parks and hotels. That's kind of my central obsession. I'm not so into princesses or movies or TV shows, but I think Disney parks and hotels, especially in Florida, are the beyond gold standard for customer experience and things like that.
Um, as for more digital, I am a wild fan of monday.com, uh, hashtag not sponsored. Um, I just happened to, where's my not sponsored message. There we go. Not sponsored. Um, I just happened to, to love their system and use it for everything I possibly can. I pay them. They don't pay me. This is not sponsored. Um, but yeah, that, that's kind of one of my favorite digital.
Oh, and I must also say, earlier this year, I treated myself to a new webcam because, you know, I'm on so many podcasts and I do my YouTube show and I wanted to upgrade my camera a little bit. And this camera, unbeknownst to me, came with an AI filter. And so the amazing thing is I'm not wearing any makeup, but it's set to look like I am.
And this has been like a giant life and game changer for me. I'm saving money on makeup. My skin is better because I'm not covering in makeup. I'm ready at a moment's notice to be on somebody's podcast because this is fake makeup. And in fact, you can even catch it. And I love to give my secrets away. And you can even catch it because if I cover my mouth when I cough.
Kyle (01:32:19.938)
Oh, get your lip, yep.
Debbie Levitt (01:32:20.202)
You can actually see it's put fake, because it's fake lipstick. And I freaking love this thing. And so I've been really happy. Like this is some AI I actually like where I'm feel like, um, you know, this is, this is doing a great job of, uh, fake makeup on me, but I did have to turn down like making my eyes bigger and making my face narrower and some of the
more deceptive things that I didn't want to use. So that I'm happy with my fake face.
Kyle (01:32:56.755)
Oh, that's, no, that's great. I, yeah, I think anything to like make it easier to like just get up and get onto meetings because that is super helpful. I feel like sometimes for me, it's just like camera off. I don't know how helpful it would be for.
for me in general, but I love that. I feel like too, I don't know if you have like a, like if it drops down into your screen or if you're just like really good at like focusing, but I was noticing too, like you're like looking at the, like the focusing on the camera. So I don't know if like the AI is helping with that as well, but like it seemed like it was really good with that. Okay.
Debbie Levitt (01:33:37.946)
No, no, I'm just so like I have a giant TV screen on my desk and I just have the camera sitting on top of it and a ring light behind that. So I've got I've got three lights pointed at me and a light behind me so I a window out on the lighting set up when the pandemic happened. But I'm just used to talking to cameras, you know, being on YouTube so much and stuff like that. So, you know, it feels like eye contact, but I just have to look.
Kyle (01:33:44.957)
Yeah.
Kyle (01:33:57.378)
Okay.
Debbie Levitt (01:34:03.958)
right at this camera. And so no, it doesn't help me with that. I have seen that somebody is doing like AI for people who don't make good eye contact and they'll look over here and it'll put their eyes up there. That'd probably be a little creepy, I think. But, and I think it's okay if people don't make eye contact. People have different levels of comfort talking to a camera. So, you know, it works for me.
Kyle (01:34:28.143)
Yeah, well, that's great. Those are some great recommendations and great products as well. All right, well, Debbie, again, this has been a great conversation and appreciate all of your insight. Appreciate the writing, the book that, again, I'm halfway through and it's been a great read. And so appreciate all of the discussion that we've had. It's been great. So it's been great. And look forward to part two, because I feel like this is probably a multi-part series, but we'll put all the links so people can find out more about you and...
Debbie Levitt (01:34:44.066)
Thank you.
Kyle (01:34:57.338)
all of the work that you're doing, which is just incredible.
Debbie Levitt (01:35:00.406)
Well, thank you. Thank you, Kyle. And thanks to the listeners for listening to the 12 inch dance remix long version.
Kyle (01:35:08.478)
Okay, yeah. Thank you everybody for listening and we will talk again next time.