Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing
podcast. I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am very excited
to have with me today Tamara Adlin. Hi, Tamara. Hi. Great to be here.
Nice to see you. I think we first met Nice to meet you. A million and twelve years ago at a conference
In Seattle. That's right. Yeah back when we were babies
The world has changed since then hasn't it Yeah. But not that much. In our world, it's not
well, skip that. Yes. It's changed. Yeah.
We'll we'll delve into that in the, bonus material. Exactly. So nice to have you
on. And, for those of you don't know, Tamara is very accomplished. It was
awesome meeting her at the UX training conference in at Amazon in
Seattle. She is a product professional. She's an amazing
veteran of user experience, a true expert in user experience and UX
coach, strategist. And she's also an author of the Persona Lifestyle.
Life cycle. Persona Lifestyle. Lifestyle Lifecycle. Persona life cycle. The
Persona Lifestyle. The persona life cycle. Yep.
I'm co author of those with with John Pruitt. Very accomplished. Yeah. Love it. And and if
you're you have any interest in these things, I would definitely follow Tamara.
Very knowledgeable. I know she's got some good stuff coming out in this year and
beyond. So maybe she'll get tease a little bit of that with us here today. Yeah. I'd love
it. Thank you so much. I've been listening to your other podcasts and have
noticed that they're all, of course, with hardcore marketing people.
And so if some UXers come and listen to this, I'm gonna turn the tables and
ask you a question first. Would you mind defining partner and affiliate
marketing and just marketing in this age for people who are technically
fluent, but actually hear those words thrown around and don't even know what they mean? Yeah. Well
said. And like any true user experience professional, you know, define
the terms, ask me the question. You're you're flipping it on me already. Oh, I know. I love it. Can't help it. I love
it. So I would define affiliate marketing as
a type of performance marketing. I would say performance marketing
is, a means of marketing where a brand is aiming to get their message
across to a customer to acquire or activate or retain
a customer. And it's typically they're getting a brand message out there. They're presenting
an offer. They're essentially saying, if we spend x dollars
on this marketing campaign via the media dollars they're spending on Google or with an
influencer or on a running website, They wanna see that return on investment and
that revenue, that purchase activity. So by performance marketing, we're defining it
as very measurable actions. This isn't just getting more
eyeballs hoping for a lift in awareness, but it's
it's very highly measured across a number of metrics, usually revenue tied to metrics.
That makes sense. Interesting. So yeah. Like, in our field, the roles have changed
over the years with titles and stuff. It sounds like this is a as much a title related thing
because performance marketing is how you would describe what you do as
opposed to, like, you're still putting out ads and messages and videos
and things. Right? It's just that you're measuring it differently, requiring different things of it? Yeah. I
think that's fair. I think it's a it's a rigor and a data around making sure that it's
delivering very tangible value to a brand. And I would
add that affiliate marketing is really that subset of of performance where
a brand is saying, yeah, I'm gonna get messages out there and ads out there.
But you start to kind of relinquish control, and you start to kinda let the
blogger, podcaster, influencer, writer
kind of take control of the message and say, here's what I love about this particular Nike trail
shoe. Here's why it kinda needs some improvement. This is why it's awesome. Oh, by the way, they're running a
little bit of an offer. So brands are kind of letting go a little bit in affiliate
marketing. And the cool thing about how it might tie into the UX world a little bit is that
they're saying, I'm gonna I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna get paid upfront in most cases. In some
cases, they are. In a lot of cases, affiliate marketers are saying, I'm gonna promote
this this subset of this Nike running shoe as an example, this this imaginary
trail running shoe. I'm not gonna get paid unless I unless my blog
sells a few pairs of shoes. So it's kind of a wild thing. And so a lot of these affiliate marketers are
very, very knowledgeable, very savvy. They're very careful about where they invest their money and time and effort.
And that conversion rate, that user experience that you're that you know so well is
really massively important to it. If it doesn't convert well, then your likelihood of these
affiliate marketers to promote you become a little lower. It's one factor in that at least.
So interesting. So the ways that we totally relate to each other are things like conversion
rate and call to action. You know, I'm just really fascinated with
what I think should be a much sort of better gradient between our worlds,
and you're helping me understand, some of the pieces of that. Yeah.
And I think our team spends maybe a surprising I think
you I think people in the UX world might be surprised perhaps, and maybe in some ways,
not surprised about there are teams out there that spend a lot of time thinking
about user experience and and what what happens
when that user lands on that page and how many variations of a page we might test
or recommend or or aim to improve. And so you think you bring up a really interesting point
of, like, what is the the gap in between our worlds, and how do we maybe bridge that
gap a little bit? Yeah. I mean and just personally, I can say, like, I may be an
expert in in UX and helping people improve conversion rates on products or on on, you
know, the little mini conversion rates of using features and things. But I have my own content, and I have
no idea how to market it. And the whole idea of marketing it makes me wanna just barf because it seems like it's
all so complex now, and there's metrics, and it just makes me completely shut down.
So it's funny that even me, who is adjacent to you in the field I
mean, this is my response anyway. It's kind of an ostrich approach to anything that seems hard. I just was like,
I'm not gonna do it. I don't I don't wanna but
understanding it is is powerful. Yeah. It's a it's a common reaction because
just like it's easier to give your friend advice on a situation they're dealing with, right,
it's a lot easier to apply marketing principles and effort and recommendations to someone
else's business than your own. I've I've been through that myself personally, so I absolutely appreciate where
your head's at with saying, I don't wanna figure out how to market my business or myself
or things I'm working on. And there's some ways that I describe marketing to UX
teams. Maybe you can correct some of that. Do you want me to tell you a little bit about how I do that?
So with UX teams Yeah. Like, I work with a lot of early stage startups who are just sort of
transitioning. It's actually their first pivot away from, like, creating a pitch deck or whatever to actually
launching something that everybody likes to call an MVP, but that's the story for another day.
And so Mhmm. You're creating this sort of experience with the product or
you are enabling users, not necessarily buyers because they might be two different
sets of people, users to get something done to satisfy some wants and needs that they
have. Marketing is telling the story that brings the people
to the product in the first place. There's this overlap then with this decision to buy
or try or set up a test account or whatever. And then so if if the
story gets them there, if it pulls their eyeballs over, and then this sort of landing experience or
whatever where we overlap gets them to click the right button, then they're gonna have expectations
from that story they were told that either will or will not be satisfied by
the experience that they have almost immediately with the product, which was created
by UXers. So it seems to me that marketing
and UX both work best if the UXers understand the story that the
marketers are telling, and the marketers really understand the
experience that's enabled and that both of them are getting clear direction from above,
Otherwise, it's you know, that's gonna clash somewhere. I love where you're where you're coming at
from there, and I could not agree more. And I think what I've observed being
we're an agency now, but also having been in house is that those those really great
teams are the ones that are doing what you just nailed as the really nice
understanding communication transfer of information to really
empathize with users across all aspects of the communication of a
product, even in the marketing. And the marketing teams are very well versed or sitting with
user experience people often, and they're listening to customers more often than maybe
some other types of marketers of the past or marketing teams now. And I would even
add that it seems like there's been a a big shift. I'm not sure the
exact timing, but I'm I'm sure you have served some of it and lived through a lot of it
is that a lot of teams are now kinda labeling it growth as opposed to
this is marketing and this is product and this is finance and this is UX. And and a lot of
these things are kind of just as you're highlighting, I think a lot of teams don't do it.
A lot of it's converging, and and product is really owning a lot of the big
decisions on marketing, what what what we call growth, making
sure that UX is has a seat at the table, making sure finance has a seat at the table. It's a
it's a kind of a wild I found this concept of growth and this silo
decreasing fascinating in the last ten years, definitely. I'm sure
you've seen it as well. Yeah. Any any thoughts on that? Okay. So I work
with really early stage startups where the silos aren't there simply because there aren't enough people
or really big companies that wanna behave like startups and,
you know, can can afford to hire me for my help or whatever. And I love the idea
that it's merging more into growth. I personally haven't seen it exactly.
What I have seen, at least in larger organizations, is people trying
to grab as much of the other one as they can, in a sort of political
empire building kind of way as opposed to a you know,
politics are are huge and rampant and not talked enough about, I think, in either of our fields and how they
impact our work. But if it could all come together, it would be great. Because it's like,
the way I see it sometimes now is, like, there's a there's a movie that the UXers sort of
helped to put together. But then it's like, there were these means that went around of, like, like, a horror movie
that they took the trailer and they overlaid voice over and music as if it was for
kids. Right? And that's what it feels like sometimes. Like, welcome to a
world where, you know, whatever. And then and then the movie is actually something
completely different. I'm a big meme fan fan, and that's one of my that's a really good
one. It's really funny. And, unfortunately, like you said, unfortunately, that happens sometimes when
one one department's intention turns into a completely different scenario for
another team. And both are doing it. It's not like there's any ill will or or I
mean, even if everybody's working their absolute best to get their jobs done, if those things don't
mesh, then, you know, sad things happen. I mean, in your I was just
telling you earlier that I was listening to some of your earlier podcasts, and Joe Black was talking about KPIs.
And he was about having to balance between new customer acquisition and long term value.
Basically, are you focusing on pouring water into the bucket, or are you focusing
on making sure there's no holes in the bucket? Right? And so with the best of intentions, these groups can
be working a little bit against each other or at least Absolutely. They're not making the most of each other, you
know? Absolutely. I think you'd find, some of the people in resources
and education that Reforged has put out just fascinating because I think it's
very education focused. They're not necessarily having to, you know, focus only on
one business where you're, hey. Am I doing my job? Am I kind of covering my
butt to some degree? Anyway, the the learnings from that have just been fascinating. I think one of the
things they talk about a lot is the the fact that and I was I was
actually taken aback by how often they emphasized that alignment and that buy in
from executives that even at the most successful companies sometimes was very hard
to grasp to your alluding to what you, you know, experienced. And so coming
from some of these growth and product and marketing and and even a lot of
UX people in this community, The amount of times it was referenced to me kind of leads
me to validate and support where you're saying that, hey. In a lot of orgs, and I and we've all been
there. It isn't happening. Or some of those intentions are happening, but
there is a degree of misalignment or maybe a degree of, hey. We're not able to support
x y z enough. So I'm curious to know maybe more yeah. What are your thoughts on that? I mean,
misalignment is my big thing. Right? So I'm this UX person who and, you know, people know me for
personas. They know me for UX and startups and things like that. Really, what
I've become focused on is executive misalignment. But it's not like anybody's out there
shopping for a solution to executive misalignment. But what happens what happens in the world
of UX or or at least did as I was coming up is that, you know, the field was
young and everybody was figuring it out. And there was this whole notion of swimming upstream, meaning
how can we get UX people and usability people or whatever they were called at the
time involved earlier and earlier in the product design life cycle because it would be
helpful instead of, you know, in the beginning with usability testing. It was like
testing whether or not the baby was ugly. It was a little late. And and even if you found something was
unusable, then what are you gonna do about it if it's already designed and prototyped and ready for code or already
coded? So as as we swim upstream, we kept looking for how can
we insert ourselves earlier. And I found
myself, especially in the early stage startup work that I was doing, essentially swimming all the way
upstream to the c suite. And I had this face palm moment
where, you know, I had thought as a UX person, if I just asked the right executive at the right time to tell me
what they wanted me to build, they would tell me. And the face palm moment was they don't
know either. So simply having a c in front of your title doesn't
mean that you know exactly what you want people to build or
to market or to message. It just means that it's risky riskier
for you than most people to say what you think because you're putting your neck on the line, and
the chances of you being wrong are high. So if it's if it's true what I'm
saying that they don't know, if the executive team isn't any clearer
than you are, then as a UX person for a while, we just whined about that. And then I
thought, well, no. If we use our tools, then maybe it's our job to help them figure it
out. So what do they need to feel ready to
make a decision that they're also ready to stick with so that the seagull
management swoop and poop thing doesn't happen as often to projects, which are the things that
really sort of drive everybody crazy and and ensure that products that are launched aren't as good as they could
be. And so that's where I started getting super interested in executive alignment.
And then, of course, because, you know, I was so interested in personas, crafting
away a sort of a different kind of persona exercise that would help and
enable execs to discover where they were misaligned, craft goals that would
stick, and then change the conversation so that they were talking about descriptions of people,
which suddenly you know, it's a longer story than that, but which suddenly meant that they weren't arguing about who
was the smartest person in the room. And that where the pop ups were cut and
where I was the person saying, I don't know what our business goals are, even though none of them really knew
what they were either. Wow. It's so funny because I Patrick Moran came on the
podcast. I think he's now at Robinhood, and he was a entrepreneur resident at Reforge, and he
had similar concepts talking about how your boss is just a human,
and they're not necessarily all knowing to your point about the c suite. And
so using those UX skills to kind of, like, let's
start from some foundational principles to understand shared language, and I
think that's really fascinating. A hundred percent. Because I imagine that it grossly
impacts marketers too. I mean, if if some executive goes off for the weekend and and hears
about some feature that your competitor is building, the likelihood that that's gonna impact you at work the
following week is high. Right? But if it really, you know, it really it
really shouldn't. These whims and these fears and these anxieties and
these all of these things shouldn't be impacting marketers or UX people or product
people as much as a really solid shared understanding of what our
own finish line is. And the thing about the thing I like to say about I mean, and and then that
should be expressed as business goals, which are what needles need to move by how much in
what time period, in order for us to say this was a success. So do we need to
increase the number of people who sign up by twenty percent within the next six months? Do we need to
decrease the number of calls coming into the call center that last over six minutes by fifteen
percent over? And you would think that those exist at a project level, but they
don't. Because even if companies set year long goals or whatever or set
them even quarterly, Two days after the goals are set, if more than one executive is in
a room, something shifts and no one writes it down. So then everybody acts like
they're aligned and nobody it's career suicide to be in a C level meeting and raise your hand as a C
level person and say, I'm not sure what our business goals are anymore. And so because of all these human
reasons, everything gets foggy and no one admits it.
Right? And the impact is is catastrophic. And it's really an
emperor's new clothes kind of situation where the team below the execs has
this misguided impression that the execs are super clear on what they want you to do,
or the whole team knows that they're not and is trying to deal with it. Or you
have execs who are Acting like they're really clear, but they keep changing their
minds or both. I don't know that there was a natural or there. I think I lost track of my thought for a second, but that
kind of thing. And see, it's an example. Same thing. I lost track. They do too. I love
it. Where do you see executive misalignment happening most?
I mean, you talk we talked a little bit about company size as a factor. Are there other
factors that kind of seem to be maybe a characteristic or a pattern to
watch out for? Oh, I think it's every single company. I think alignment
exercises are and should become part of the product life cycle
going forward for everyone. Now and I say executive misalignment. It can just be stakeholders. It can
just be your grand boss and your great grand boss and your great great grand boss. Right? Like, I'm not saying that that
coming in and trying to do alignment workshops with the executives of a Fortune five hundred company is gonna solve your
problems in developing a feature for one of a suite of products. It'll get you fired, but it's
not gonna do much other than that. But alignment exercises with stakeholders one or two
levels above you does amazing things because it also enables those
people to get clarity from their bosses without
putting their jobs and their reputations at risk. So any alignment
is better than no alignment and any numbers. That's
why I respect your field for getting so tied to metrics.
Our field, my field, UX, needs to get more and more tied to numbers. And
if we do this together, then that's a pretty powerful force. Wow.
I love that concept of your field, UX, being more tied to numbers.
How would you maybe categorize it now versus where would you like to see it go to?
You kind of alluded to it. You know, I have my own alignment workshop process that I've created, and the very
first step is business goals, and getting clarity on what the business goals are. And I have this little
Mad Libs format for anybody old enough to remember Mad Libs. It's that
you you start with word increase or decrease, some important metric like number of
people who sign up by some actual amount with a number in it, like twenty percent
within some time period, six months. Now, obviously, this is not rocket surgery. It's not
like I'm like, oh, Tamara now knows, you know, because she said that we know what a goal is. Obviously
not. But by sort of forcing that structure that does a couple things,
increase or decrease is simple. The metric is often tricky
to come up with, and they may not even be instrumented for it. But then what really gets
interesting is the number. Because when you do an alignment workshop, if you get agreement that you
nobody's going to disagree that we need more people to sign up. But what you find
when you do the workshop in the right way is that the CEO is thinking that it has to
be eighty percent, while the market CMO is thinking ten percent would be great,
while the CFO says if we're not tripling it, we're doomed. The fact that those
people I don't care what the number ends up being. If it's twenty percent, eighty percent, I may
or may not be able to do that, but at least I need to know what you're aiming for as a UX person, and then I can push back on
it. What I care about is that everybody says the same number by the end of the conversation. Because
if I start working on increasing the number of people who sign up thinking that
twenty percent would be enough, I'm gonna get great responses from the CMO,
terrible response from the c well, a bummed out and and a freaking tsunami
of rage from the CFO. And yet, I was trying to do my
job. Or in the beginning, if I get but but if we do it my way, and I say I don't
care what the number is as during the alignment workshop, then UX has a chance because I
can say then, Oh, I see that you all agreed that this has to triple in six months. I can't
do that for you, and here's why. So there's so many benefits
to that. And so that's the way I'm asking UX people to do this, is to create those Mad Libs and
then even just to write those down for for this project. If you're working on
this landing page or you're working on this feature or this checkout cart
experience, not for the whole company, just this one. Get to those numbers
and ask for clarification on them. That way, your boss isn't gonna know those
numbers either, but your boss can forward your email up the chain and say, oh, poor Tamara
isn't clear on exactly what our metrics are for this. And can you
help poor Tamara understand this rather than get themselves in trouble. All
of this is also tied with politics. And Yeah. I mean, I'm just,
like, so blown away from an perspective because I think
that it's surprising how many people on any field. And so it's almost like
saying to marketers, hey, You can apply some of these Tamara
UX principles to framing the work, clarification on
goals, just as an example of your if then statement
that sounds so simple, yet every stakeholder could think through these terms. Every leader could think through
these terms so that I think it would just be a really awesome tool to remind and help
people with. In some cases, they're not doing it at all. In other cases, they're maybe doing some
of that. I think it's a really great reminder of alignment for a
marketer that is our audience, a marketer that we talk about on this show. I mean, I think
a marketer like a UX person can design for anything as long as we know what it is.
We can try, we can do our best, but we can't do a dozen different things at the same time.
Right? And we also can't reach a finish line that is foggy and moving.
So then the trick becomes, how do you enable
I'm just gonna say executives. It can be stakeholders, whatever, to have a conversation that
is politically extremely dangerous for them to have without help. And the way
that I like to do that is to present I write them myself and say, I know I'm
so wrong. And then they can argue about how wrong I am and misguided
I am. But still, they're getting to something that's going to help me. See what I mean? And then also by doing
this sort of persona portion of this, then they're arguing about how important Genevieve is to the
business versus Bruce. They're not arguing about which one of them is smarter
than the other one. Are you having to come in as a third party to kind
of facilitate these conversations in all cases? I love doing that. But it's also
true that this alignment persona workshop that I have, I'm currently putting together a free course
on it right now on my site. And the reason I'm putting together a free course is because I think it needs
to be a tool in the UXers toolbox, and it certainly can be a tool in the marketers toolbox. And
I think there is a certain amount you can do from within, you have to be careful and you
have to do a dry run first without important muckety mucks in the room. But
if you do this the wonderful thing about getting clarity on goals
is that it's never inappropriate to ask for them, but they don't
exist. So if you say, so I'm I'm doing this class series so that
because I want everybody to use this because I think it's really smart and I'm proud of myself and I you know, and lots of other
practitioners have used it and really liked it. Of course, sometimes having me, the
author of the books or the method, come in from the outside as a consultant is really
important because I'm the one who can slam the book on the table and say, listen, you executives. One, two, three
eyes on me and not get myself in trouble. So I want people to start trying
it. Even if you just do it with your own team, with all friendly faces,
it's going to change the way you understand and then
reflect back expectations on the important decision
makers in your organization, which will also here's the here's the thing. This exercise
gets to what I call a magic sentence, which is if our goal is x
to increase sign ups by twenty percent within the first six months, and we don't make
Genevieve ridiculously happy, what the hell are we doing? That's a magic sentence.
Genevieve is different than Bruce. Bruce may already have an account or something.
Genevieve does not. If you're able to say, we know our number one goal is is
that number, and we know that if we don't get I mean, if we Genevieve's new. If we don't make her
ridiculously happy, what the heck are we we're never gonna get to this number. And everybody agrees
on that. Then when that C level person goes to the
Hamptons and comes back saying, we need this feature that our competitors have,
you, the lolly littlest person in the whole team can go, how does that help Genevieve?
Because you said Genevieve was really important. The the point is that exec has the power to
say, oh, Genevieve is no longer the most important. That's fine. But at least you know, and at least they have
to take on the fact that then there, it has implications for something all the exec team signed off
on. It changes the vocabulary and the conversation. And that's what I mean,
I get goosebumps about this stuff. It's like the usability of people and teams and
organizations. And if we get fluent in their language, then
and marketers will be great at this because you guys are great at audience just like we are. And if
we team up, oh my god, an alignment workshop with
members of marketing and tech and UX
and product and finance, that's what gets
flipping exciting. Yeah. It's the holy grail. Well, and so what I wanna do is put
this method out there for free. Of course, I wanna make money, but I'm not trying to build a huge agency. I'm just me. I'm gonna
get enough consulting or coaching gigs out of this anyway. What I want is people to be like, oh my
god. This is so cool. And try it. So that's why I'm gonna put up this
free course that people can take and just try it if they want. I love
it. Well, thank you. When you kind of assess where a team is at from
an alignment, goal, clarity, usability perspective, when
teams are doing really well on the spectrum or maybe better than most
you see, what have they done right in your perspective? What what are they
Well, you know, I'm super biased because I've been working on this alignment stuff forever. And
so to me, if there is some kind of finish line
that they have somehow made hard to move in a positive
way for the company, that's good. If they have tools
that make sense and help team and and also if they look at the
teams around them as their users also. So we have users of products. But as human
beings, we have users. Right? The members of our team or whatever, and we put
out artifacts that are either usable or not usable. That's why in UX, a long time ago, people are like,
let's stop doing these big reports because nobody's gonna read them. They're not usable. Even if a
team has figured out how it can be most usable to the other teams that are out there and not be a pain in the ass
from the engineer's perspective, but actually a relief, Those teams that really think holistically about
this, I think, do better. And also who have managers who
are much more about being the umbrella to keep
stuff off their teams versus anything else, which
which requires, I think, a certain amount of EQ from the manager who you know, how do you make
a name for yourself, which everybody wants to do while mostly serving serving your
team and enabling them to do great work? It's a long answer. That's great. No.
It's a very great answer. With this free tool that you're rolling out and releasing,
can you maybe share more of, like, what types of people, types of teams do you think would
be a no brainer for it? Oh my god. All of them. All of them. So this alignment persona
stuff. Okay. So traditional data driven personas as introduced so smartly by
Alan Cooper back in ninety nine, were about solving a problem in the design and development process
right downstream a little bit, which is, you know, we need more data and more empathy down there. This
alignment persona workshop that I've sort of evolved over time says that's not
the problem we're trying to solve. Yes. That may be a problem, but the reason so many persona
data driven persona efforts fail or buyer personas or marketing personas, and we could talk on
another time about the differences, is because they don't resonate for the
leadership team, and they don't serve as a way to keep the leadership team from
seeming to constantly change their minds. And that's why the persona efforts don't work
because they don't I have this analogy where if you're if you're building a house and everything's working
great for building the house, that's fine. What I'm more interested is, you
know, in your process and you have personas and your house is your product. What happen if a
tornado comes through? I'm more fascinated by the tornado, and the tornado is executive
teams making decisions. There's nothing you can do down here in your design
development process that can fight a tornado, and you're it's
gonna stop if a tornado comes through. So what can we do to prevent the tornado?
Expect it and manage it. Your question was different. Your question was, what kind of teams
can use this? Any team that has experienced a tornado, this can help
because it tries to control the weather a little bit before it gets out of control.
Right? It tries to be able to say, oh, before you become a tornado, large large
front of wind, perhaps we can redirect you over here. Or perhaps we can put our
entire project under a dome so that the tornado doesn't blow it to
pieces. So I don't think it can hurt any project
to get more clarity at the beginning. And it doesn't take data to do it either. It takes
wrangling everybody's assumptions and lining them up. What you'll find, it's it also
pushes all the hard questions earlier. It takes some time and it's hard because
asking people to clarify goals is like a DNA level question that
takes time for the people above you to sort through. It's not easy to get to this
alignment, but it's magical when you do. And the investment
of time, couple weeks maybe, still isn't huge. So I think
every team should try this on a tiny scale. And then what happens if you're able to
do a project or a product that performs better than anybody expected, then you can say, here's
how we did this and create a pull. Wow. Maybe we can try that for team over
here or team over. Just start small. Yep. One landing page.
One of your, you know, little projects within a project. Yeah. When
you get that hard earned agreement, which obviously takes a while and there's clarity,
and then time goes on and storms arise as you reference the analogy.
How do you encourage and and enable people to
point back to that as the little mouse voice said earlier? What about Genevieve?
How do you encourage those that maybe don't aren't naturally able to
point back to that? It's a bit of a, you know, detailed minor
question, but maybe a big one. Like, how do you encourage it? It's not a minor question.
When you do these workshops for real, you do them with the stakeholders,
and they are in the room. This isn't about gathering data and trying to change people's
minds. This is about trying to get people to dump their minds out on the table so everybody can
see where their minds are. So if this is if you get stakeholders or executives
together and they collaboratively go through these five conversations, which is number one is the
business goals. Number two is how do we talk about users today. Number three is how can we
group those descriptions under sticky notes that start with the words I want or I need.
Step four is to sort of gather those together into motivation based personas. And step
five is to prioritize those alignment personas based on the business goals.
So, again, that that's how you get to that magic sentence. Our primary business goal is x. If
we don't make Genevieve ridiculously happy, we'll fail. They were in
the room. They were in the room. And so you also tell them,
of course, you can change your mind about which is our primary business goal because
you're in charge and the honcho of all honchos. But at least we need to
know that it's changed because then when we flip over to do some projects
for Bruce, we'll be able to tell you these four things for Genevieve we can no longer do. And we'll
be able to show you the impact of this. But the fact that they're in the room, even though there are some
resistance at first, it's a relief to them to be able to talk about Genevieve and Bruce,
because nobody's given them a different vocabulary before. Right? If you throw
personas over the wall, even if they're driven by data, data does
not get rid of people's assumptions. It is not as powerful as
we think. It never is. Because if you have a strongly held assumption
and you're a senior level person, it doesn't mat you're gonna find ways around that data.
Oh, it wasn't collected right, or they're not considering this, or the market has changed. One of my
favorite quotes of this podcast, data does not change people's assumptions.
It doesn't. Here's a gotcha. Ready? Ready? Ready? People still get married.
Why? Why? Because I know that's a hardcore one.
Because I ours is gonna be different. We have something unusual. Nobody
else understands what we have. Yep. It doesn't matter that there's data
that says this might actually not be a great idea. And it's it's the same
power. It's the same I love this stuff so much. You know, I see you smiling and I'm like, it's made me
happy. And maybe getting married is the right thing to do for a lot of people, but it's the same point.
The data doesn't change your assumption or your strongly held beliefs. When that happens
in a workplace function and you've seen that, and and maybe it's a redundant question,
but let's say the data is presented to a discussion around UX. How do you
combat those assumptions when the data aiming to combat it was delivered and
cleared and had the statistical significance and had all the things? You're
asking some of the most the smartest question that of somebody I'm talking about this with for
the first time. So when we were in seventh grade in United States and we were starting to learn science, what's the
first step of doing any experiment? Hypothesis. Exactly. But when we do research
in business, I don't think we clarify our hypotheses enough. In fact, we have a lot of reasons
that we're told not to because it's gonna bias the research or whatever. What I'm saying is that
if you get everybody's assumptions out on the table, you line them up so that everybody suddenly agrees
through this process that if we don't make Genevieve ridiculously happy in the next release, we're not we're we're
not gonna do well, and here's why, because we have this very important goal.
Now you have Genevieve, you have Bruce, you have whoever. Now you can go out and validate
or invalidate those alignment personas based on data. You can
say, I know we had great conversations about Genevieve, but we went out there, and we
found out that Genevieve doesn't like washing her socks by hand
and never has. But then at least you're all talking about the same person.
You're not just throwing in these bullets that say, you know, women between the ages of
twenty seven and thirty five who read the O magazine tend to
enjoy outsourcing undergarments, care and control on a yearly
basis. No. You're saying we found out Genevieve doesn't like a washer, washer socks. And suddenly
it's, I mean, it's a weird analogy, but it's more relatable, and people then can
have that conversation. Oh, wow. Interesting. I love it. Kinda winding down. I
feel like we could talk for hours literally, and this has been already, I think, super informative.
I love the bridging of the gap between UX and marketing, which is obviously predominantly what
we talk about. But when you assess an opportunity to coach or counsel or support
a business or an entrepreneur or a team, how do you what factors do you look at to say,
hey. I'm I'm gonna take this project over this other one? So in terms of the startup, I wrote
a I wrote a an article about why blockchain and
Web three UX is gonna suck for a while. And part of it is because
I was surprised, although looking back on it, it's not so surprising to find that
the people starting these new companies in this disruptive technology were sort of starting over from
scratch and they had the same run fast break things. We're inventing everything over
again that the people in two thousand, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand one had. And both of you, you and
I were working at that time. But since, you know, since then, early two thousands, people like, oh, yes. Usability,
product design. Oh, that all makes sense. And then it was like, bam. All that got thrown out the window. So
when I look at startups, one of the things I look for and I help assess
opportunities for a venture firm too. Like, is this first of all, is the founder pre
disastered? Meaning, there's a there's a movie, old movie with Robin Williams called The World According
to Garp. And he Garp and his young wife are looking at a house and they're and while
they're looking at this house to buy, a small plane crashes into the house. And
Robin Williams Garth Garp says, we'll take it. And his wife is like, are you crazy?
And he said, no, no, no. It's pre disastered. What are the chances this will happen again? So
if a founder or a team or a person looking for coaching has been
through the disaster part in a previous portion of their life, then they are going to
understand the value of looking at something in a in a different way or and or the value
of looking at old lessons that might be valid now. And
so because of my experience, you know, I can talk to young founders quickly and figure out
whether they know how far away their product is from being great, whether they're capable of thinking
in the way that's gonna make the right changes. That's experience. But a shortcut for that is to
look if somebody has been somewhat pre disastered and therefore has
a desire to get past the assumptions that are driving
them inside, and telling them they're right about everything. Love it. Wow.
That's fantastic. What advice would you give folks maybe interested in the
user experience, what realm, and maybe not familiar with it, like how to get into it, how
to start thinking about it, maybe even applying some of the principles to what they
do now. Well, I guess I would have specific advice based on who's
probably listening to this podcast. If it's people in marketing or people getting into marketing,
I would say, don't just think, oh, I'm gonna switch to UX because then you're gonna like put your there's too
many people that come out of these boot camps and whatever. Instead, make it a one plus one
equals three look for the overlaps between marketing and UX. One
of those overlaps is gonna be in the field of personas, because there are traditional
data driven product personas. There are marketing personas that evolved after
that. There's a concept I've seen out there called buyer personas. There's proto personas of all these things. So
these descriptions of who users are or who purchasers are can be a great
field, a way to overlap and start the communication between you and
that other team, whether it's a UX and marketing team or the other way marketing and UX. Or as
a marketer, you can start looking at what if the thing I'm
designing doesn't stop at the CTA on the landing page? What if through
truly understanding the story, the full story of the movie
and impacting that because I know what people actually want is the thing that's gonna make
me make this trailer a lot better and offer to
help and find, you know, even create a glossary. We started
this interview by me asking you to create glossary definitions for the
people listening in. So if you're a marketer interested in UX, why don't you do that? Start by
creating a little glossary of terms and find where the overlap is. Yeah. We have a nice,
growth glossary on our website. I love where you're thinking. What a great idea. Great
advice. Cool. Right? Maybe we should do that. And Yeah. And that's a way to approach as
part of a solution to the UX team that's also struggling. You're all struggling with the same
stuff. Love it. Tamara, this has been amazing. Where where can people find you
and learn more about you and contact you? Yeah. Well, I'm on I'm the only
Tamara Adlin on LinkedIn, t a m a r a a d l I n. And then my last
name a d l I n I n c dot com adlin inc dot com. That's where I'm
going to post this free course and I'm still recording and people will be able to access it and
also information about the services that I have and availability. I love speaking or
being on podcast. So anybody out there, please feel free to reach out. Tamara,
this has been amazing. When I first met you years and years years ago, your your talk
at Amazon was with some of the heavy hitters in user experience. It was it was passionate. It
was clear. It was inspiring. This talk was as well. I we went fifty
minutes, and usually, I'm kind of, like, counting time and and saying, is this over?
And this went this went by. It felt like twenty minutes. So so thank you. And,
I'm really excited about your free course. I think it might be something our team might look at and look
at maybe as a learning, maybe as something we introduce. And so, highly recommend
folks in the marketing world, in the UX world, in the startup world, reach out to Tamara and
learn more. Thank you so much. It's been so fun talking to you and reconnecting with you.
Likewise. Have an amazing weekend. You too. We'll talk soon. Bye.