317 - Investigative Reporting is Product Management

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Speaker F: Welcome back to this is Product Management. I'm your host Roddy Knowles. On today's episode, I'm joined by Ari Zelmanow, head of UX Research for Twilio's communications business. We discuss a lot in this episode. Everything from how Ari's background as a detective informs his approach to gathering customer feedback to the ever present debate about whose job it is within an organization to be conducting research. We also dive into Ari's unique framework for thinking like a consultant in order to accelerate your career development. Let's jump right in. So thanks very much for joining us today Ari. I'm really excited to get into a few things, but before I grill you with the difficult questions, I'm going to start you off with some easy ones. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what do you do outside of work when you're not solving all the world's problems at Twilio?

Speaker G: Um, when I'm not at work, I am chasing around one of four kids, uh, to different activities. We live in Colorado and so I spend a lot of time taking my daughter to horseback riding or my other daughter to, uh, rock climbing or my son to soccer or my other, ah, son to swimming. So just a lot of that.

Speaker F: So, Ari, I don't always ask people about their backgrounds, but, uh, I think yours is particularly compelling and, and sort of how you got to be a researcher because you didn't come out as one. So talk to me a little bit about how you got here.

Speaker G: I did have an unconventional route into research. What ended up happening is I spent a career working as a metropolitan police detective investigating everything from financial crimes to crimes against persons. I've solved everything from aggravated assaults to homicides. And I really, really am grateful and enjoyed that work. It was a childhood dream of mine to be a police officer and detective. And I got to live that. I wanted to do a little more. I wanted to expand what I was able to do. And so I went back to school, got my master's, my doctorate, and I entered the world for a few years of organizational psychology. I just didn't love it. I missed exploring and investigating and I landed a role at a large consumer packaged goods company leading insights relative to multicultural research, foresight and trends. I was their qualitative subject matter expert. I did cross brand research and new product innovation. I just loved it. And from there it was off to the races. I ended up building a research function for Twitter's first data business. For their data business was their first researcher. Built a research team, a cross functional research team at Panasonic of analytics, research and insights. Built a team at a company called Quantave which is a scale up. And now I lead a team at Twilio of researchers and research ops. Folks, the cool thing is this, at the core, they're the same. It's about investigating things like building cases, being able to present the case in a clear, compelling way and having a jury, judge, stakeholder by the case.

Speaker F: I think that's a really interesting framework and I can really see how your background shapes your thinking. So I'm looking forward to getting into that. But tell me first about your role at uh, Twilio and what you do there.

Speaker G: Yeah. So at Twilio, I lead a small and mighty team of researchers and research operations people. We help the business make more informed and less risky decisions across a lot of different surface areas, but just super enthusiastic about that team and the work they do. They are some of the finest researchers I've had the, uh, pleasure to work with.

Speaker F: That's great. What's the most fun thing about what you do at Twilio?

Speaker G: I think the most fun is really helping businesses, helping our customers communicate with their customers. It's very meta. Right. And so I think that that's a lot of fun. And I think that the challenges we're facing as the, uh, velocity of technology continues at the rate that it was before, I'd even argue maybe even faster. But with new technologies emerging, figuring out how that fits in and how we can better serve our customers that way. I really love providing, like, the insights and the market. Like, my team is like a newsroom. We serve up internal news to our teams so that they can make better decisions faster. I just find that so awesome. It's just such a cool thing to do.

Speaker F: Absolutely. I want to come back to something that you mentioned just quickly, which is, I think, is also really cool, which is this idea of whether you're a, uh, project manager, you're a researcher, you're in product, you're a designer, like thinking about yourselves as consultants, no matter what role you're in. So talk to me a little bit more about this idea that you come up with and why it matters.

Speaker G: I think the role of research is going to change in the future. Right. So there's research, the verb, which is like, as a product manager, I need to conduct research. As a designer, I need to conduct research. And then there's researcher, the noun, and that's the person that conducts research. And what I find fascinating is that researchers have latched onto this idea that we have to be the ones to collect the data, and otherwise it's democratization and it's bad. The reality is research is just systematic inquiry. It's just investigating something within a framework, making sense of it, and then hopefully making recommendations or something from that. I think the job of the researcher isn't just to collect data. It's not just to present insights. It's to deliver counsel. To be the consigliere to the business, like Tom Hagen in the Godfather to Don Corleone, or, uh, the right hand to the king or queen in Game of Thrones. It's not enough just to Deliver an insight or deliver data and say, hey, you go. We should be providing some sort of counsel based upon that. And that's really a consultant's mindset. There are really two big categories of research. Er, there's the surrogate. That's the person that a, uh, business hires because they're like, well, we have 60 interviews that need to be done. We don't have the capacity to do 60 interviews. So they hire somebody to come in and just do 60 interviews. That's not a consultant. That's, you're doing part of the job that I can't or don't want to do. And then there's the consultant. That's the person who McKinsey consulted, Bain BCG, where you're like, we're our, uh, customers are leaving. We have churn that is killing our business. What do we do? The consultant helps solve that problem. Consultants are focused on the outcomes, surrogates are focused on outputs. And that's really the fundamental difference.

Speaker F: Yeah, I think that's great, this differentiation of outcomes versus outputs. So go a little bit further and like, tell me what this looks like in practice and maybe shifting that mindset from being one that is output focused as opposed to outcome focused, which is where we want to be.

Speaker G: The example that I play with a lot when I'm posting on social media is Bob the bagel guy and Michelle the McKinsey consultant, Bob the bagel guy, he gets asked like, hey, what bagel is good today, Bob? And he'll be like, oh, sesame's fresh and you'll order sesame and he'll deliver the bagel. Do you. Michelle gets asked by the CEO about the big decisions of the business. What do we do about churn or what's happening here? And the real fundamental difference is the ability to develop, present and defend a point of view. So researchers have historically felt the need to, to present a deck. And if you and I went back and looked at decks for the, did a meta analysis of decks across, ah, research both on um, the supplier and client side for the last 10 years, you're going to find that they all follow some sort of similar format. There's going to be some kind of COVID slide that tells you the title of the, the study. The next slide is probably going to be like what the objective of the research questions. Then there's going to be sample, it's going to be a methodology slide telling you what method I used. Then there's going to be a sampling frame. By the time you get to slide 6, 7 or 8 you're finally going to get to something called recommendations when

Speaker F: I'm after you thoroughly bore the audience, by the way. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker G: Uh, they don't care about any of the first part of that. Yes, 100%. Like they do not care about the first six slides. And so now, and there's some other issues with that. I can tell you what you've done is now you're putting your recommendations on the back, on the back burner and you've lost audience. That's not a very consulted mindset way of doing things.

Speaker D: You should.

Speaker G: That's burying the lead in journalism.

Speaker F: It's.

Speaker G: You're not putting the bottom line up front. It focuses the, uh, on the wrong thing. It says that I'm not an expert. I need to prove to you that I'm an expert, and then you'll believe me. Rather than showing up as an expert, act as if you are the expert and you will be treated as such.

Speaker F: I love that. And I, first of all, don't make me do that meta analysis on 10 years of, like, research reports, because that might be the, that might be the death of me. But I think researchers fall into that habit. I see it, I think even more so with non researchers or, uh, people who aren't as comfortable with data and presenting results for the reason you just mentioned. I'm going to sort of hide behind these things to prove that I actually gathered something that's insightful. But really, if you go into it confidently and you know, again, it doesn't have to be perfect to a point that you made earlier, but say I actually talk with customers, I talk to them directly. This is the feedback that I got. This is why it matters. Positioning yourself as an authority and an expert, rather than hiding behind all the. How you got there.

Speaker G: It comes down to something I teach in my course is the types of arguments that people have. And there are three. There's arguments of blame. Arguments of blame are, ari, why did you leave the toilet seat up? You're blaming, like, why did I do something? Tell me how that argument ends. There's no ever, never a good reason. There's no good justification. The second is, Ari, what kind of husband leaves a toilet seat up? Are you that thoughtless? That's an argument of value. And then there's arguments of decisions. These are the arguments of the future. Ari, what can we do in the future to get you to put the toilet seat down? That is like solving a problem.

Speaker C: Ready?

Speaker G: I'm going to put it in research terms. Why did you only conduct six interviews what kind of researcher makes decisions only on qualitative insights? Okay, with the data and evidence we have today, what are we going to do moving forward? There's a very big difference between those three arguments.

Speaker F: I totally agree, and I think it's important to parse those out. Something else that I want to dive into a little bit more handed out is like, what do you actually do with the data? So you talked about outcomes, you talked about having a position and sort of how you present it. What guidance would you give about thinking about what you actually do?

Speaker G: So a good consultant, like the researcher of the future, is going to do three things. They collect evidence like a detective. They report insights like a news anchor, and they broker outcomes like a hostage negotiator. So what I mean by that is you're going to collect evidence from, um, across the business. And maybe that's interviews that product managers did. Maybe it's customer success tickets, maybe it's product analytics, maybe it's primary research you did. You're then going to look at facts, insights, and your point of view, and you're going to present those in a deliberate and compelling way. Instead of hedging on those, though, because remember the first six slides that I talked about before, when people are leading with that, that's hedging. You're basically giving yourself an out. You're looking for ways to defend before an attack even occurs. So rather than do that, what I have built is something called a level of certainty. It is a way for you to assign a level of certainty, a weight of certainty to a fact, an insight, and a point of view so you don't have to hedge, but you can still report it. It's like having a breaking news report. When the news initially breaks news of what is actually happening, there may be a lower level of certainty, but as time goes on and more information becomes available, the level of certainty increases and that does that. And, uh, then finally it's about mediating or brokering good outcomes. So what ends up happening? I saw a post on this today. It was very interesting where the researcher felt like they had to convince the stakeholders. Like, how do we get stakeholders to where we need them to be? It sounded very adversarial. Negotiating good outcomes is about principled negotiation. Everybody wants the same thing, a reduced ch. They want same five things. Growth, value, adaptability, risk and speed. They want the business to grow. They want business to have an increased value. Usually that's through increased customer value to increased business value. They want to be more adaptable. They want to mitigate risk and they want to move faster than the competition. And if they can do those things, they win. So why do we create this adversarial relationship between stakeholders and researchers where we're like, we really need to get them to buy into this. That uh, suggests that you're on opposite sides of the table. What you need to do is scoot your chair to their side of the table and work toward the same outcome.

Speaker F: I see this a lot and product to trying to make decisions. And I like the analogy and I want to come back and talk more about this news and newsroom analogy in a minute. But I like what you said about there's news that's breaking and you know, limited things and certainty increases over time. But it doesn't mean you wouldn't want to report the news. Right. It doesn't mean you don't want to talk about what you just found out and what might be most pressing. Because oftentimes when we are building products, we need to make decisions quickly and we need to be able to react to what we know now and not wait until we collect all the information, have 100% certainty about what we're going to do to move forward. So I think that analogy is really, really relevant.

Speaker G: And I think uh, the word I was thinking in searching for is pushback. We're getting pushback. Well, if you're getting pushback, it's because you're treating it like a two sided argument and really it should be a one sided argument. And maybe there's different ways to attack it. There's different things. And then I think to your point again, to really drive this home is that just because evidence was collected in a less than ideal way doesn't make it relevant. Evidence might reduce the level of certainty on it. One of the things that I believe research teams should do is you have a fact. Like a newsroom. You don't report a fact until you've corroborated it in some way. You need two data points before a fact is a fact. That's an important distinction. So it does. It shouldn't matter. The analogy I use is you have a group of people outside. Some are detectives, some aren't. Somebody gets a, ah, shooting. Would you only take statements from the police officer, witnesses, or would you take statements from everybody? Now put that in research terms. Are you only going to get evidence from researchers or are you going to take evidence from everywhere, weight it, triangulate, corroborate, build a case, tell the story, negotiate the outcome?

Speaker F: Absolutely. I want to dive into the newsroom thing, because I think that's really compelling. But I want to ask you one more question before we move on, because I think it's. You summarize things, and you said, correct me if I got these wrong, but really, three things or five things. A business focus on growth, building value, being more adaptable, mitigating risks and moving faster, being more efficient. So, like, I think it's really important just to anchor on those things. And maybe we can talk about the value part a little bit, just because sometimes we, I think, obscure that. But if it's not adding actual value, then what's the point? I know that's something that you think about when you're thinking about. Where do we actually focus on when you communicate? So what if we just talk about that for a minute?

Speaker G: One, uh, hundred percent. So you mentioned in the beginning, like, what do consultants think about? This is such an important point that I want to drive it home. Businesses care about those five things. Anything in the business, like, whether you're looking at pirate metrics or submetrics, or even lower, like, churn or thing acquisition numbers, all of that ladders up to one of those five everything ladders that consultants don't speak about. You're not going to have a McKinsey consultant coming in and saying, okay, what we're going to do is build empathy here, because empathy is means to an end. Empathy is a means to generating business value. To truly be heard by an executive audience, you have to speak that language. And I saw somebody railing against this the other day, like, speaking the language of business. No, that's the job of people who conduct research. We're not doing research to, like, just do it. We're not building an inert body of knowledge. We're building knowledge so that the business can do something. A researcher's job is to work out what's happening, why it matters, and what it might mean and what to do with it. And then they need to present it in a way that, hey, this is what's happening. This is why it matters to you. This is what you should do next. It's that simple and that direct those five metrics, like, everything. You allude to it, and I want to drive it home that you can't leave those things implied. I see a lot of research where they're like, we've reduced friction. Okay, why? Like, what is reducing friction do? It doesn't make any sense for a business to create a delightful experience if it costs the business $1 million and only makes them a thousand. Anybody in UX, any product manager, any research, anybody can go out and build the best experience ever that costs $1 billion but doesn't make any money.

Speaker F: Sometimes it really is that simple, but sometimes we lose sight of that. So I think it's really, really great to hammer that point home. When you're building new products or developing features for existing ones, one of the most valuable tools you can have at your disposal is feedback. Feedback from the customers you have and the customers you want to have. If you build what they want using the Disco CX platform, you can have the power of Disco's massive consumer audience at your fingertips, enabling you to gather feedback from millions of people in minutes. To see how this can help you build confidently and more quickly, check out disco.com that's D I S, Q

Speaker G: M.

Speaker F: I've been wanting to get to it for a little bit because I think it's really compelling, your idea of a newsroom or a news function within an organization. So I love for you just to talk for a few minutes about how you came up with this idea and how you put it into practice.

Speaker G: I came up with the idea because obviously I am a retired police detective turned market research leader or, uh, UX research leader. And so I always used to play really heavily on the detective angle. Like it's all about collecting evidence. I realized that the word collect is wrong. And sometimes I still slip back into that. When researchers say they collect evidence, it's really, yes, they collect it. But what's more important than collecting evidence is interrogating evidence. It's taking evidence that comes from anywhere and validating it. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that researchers are really like investigative journalists. The reason why is they're building a story that explains a phenomena and then tells the business what to do with it. And that's just like editorializing, which happens all the time in news. And I'm not talking about like the polarizing news sources. I'm talking about the news sources of 20 or 30 years ago that were anchor persons sitting at a table talking about what's happening in the world, the facts, and then connecting the dots. And then sometimes at the end, like having somebody editorialize that in some way, shape or form. What I find is that it's important that we are reporting on the things that matter most to the business.

Speaker F: Today.

Speaker G: I've heard the argument that people will make that research doesn't slow product management down or product development down. That's bullshit because it does, or people wouldn't be saying it like researchers Might not want it to slow product development down. But if that conception didn't just come from thin air, it came from it actually happening somewhere at some time, and then it didn't become pervasive because it's some myth. It's because research projects generally followed a very linear path that followed an academic model from like, okay, we're going to generate research questions, we're going to do a lit review, we're going to do a paper, we're going to do a summary of the results, and then you're going to deliver a report which ended up being a deck for us that's a very linear way. And then agile came into the picture and the way that research countered that was like, we're agile. So they took that linear process and they compressed the same linear process. What I'm suggesting and why newsrooms are so compelling is that, okay, what is the news today? What's breaking today? My team, we have research story prioritization meetings every week where we talk about what's going on throughout the business. We highlight the most important stories to chase down. And like an investigative journalist, the researchers go talk to product managers, designers, business leaders, they get product analytics, they pull all sorts of evidence together, they find out where there's gaps, they do primary research to fill in the gaps, and then they report the story along with their point of view, insights and facts. And because we're doing it that way, we are actually agile because you're always on top of the breaking news, because as something breaks, we're reporting it.

Speaker F: This is super cool concept and, uh, I love everything that you're saying. How do you actually put it into practice? So, like, make it real for me. Like tactically, what are you doing to make this newsroom available or to get these out? If you have any stories about, you know, successes that your team has had, I'd love to hear them.

Speaker G: Yeah, so there's a few things. One is you have to have some sort of anchor. This won't happen organically. Um, and you can't just have like people throwing insights across the business. Otherwise what you're going to have is you're going to have like the social media version of it. You're going to have a lot of noise, you're going to have slack scrolling it like light speed. You're going to have emails that nobody's reading. So you have to have an anchor. The anchor should prioritize the stories that are coming in. So there's a few ways to do it. Is you have individual, like customer Success helps kind of knows what's going on in customer success. So you have researchers assigned to those specific beats. So let's say you have a researcher that's assigned to customer success and sales. I'm going to use this as the example without expanding to a researcher covering a product or ux. So customer success in sales, that researcher is plugged into what's happening. Let's say one of the stories that's happening Right now is Q2's customer satisfaction scores came in and they're low, uh, they're lower, they're declining, and they look back and they see it declined in Q1 also. So now we see that there's a trend that's a story. So at that point the researcher will go look at the story, they'll go listen to that, maybe they'll talk to customer success people, maybe they'll look at, at the tickets, maybe they'll even spin up an interview from that. They will then write what we call a top line news report. Top line news report is about a six page document that has a headline. It has either a point of view, insights or facts with levels of certainty. We color code them green, yellow, orange, red, green being like we're very certain, red being we're not certain at all. From there we then distribute the news on a cycle. Like our research projects only are two to three weeks long. We accept the risk of generating insights at that cadence and speed. Because here's the analogy I'd use to explain why that works. Let's say you have to build dig a hole and the two methods you have are going to take the same amount of time no matter how you do it. The old method that research followed was the backhoe method. The backhoe goes, you go, you get your research questions, you talk about all the stuff, then you go and you conduct the research. And in one scoop you do all the research. And at the end, sure, you might deliver a top line report right before you deliver the major insights. But at the end is when you deliver the thing, that hole is dug. What we do is we dig the same hole, we just do it in shovel scoops. So first, shovel scoop, not a high level of certainty. Second, a little more, third, same amount of time. So if six interview, if you were thinking about 60 interviews and it was going to take 10 weeks, all, uh, we're doing is six interviews a week. And we're just reporting as we're going. So the headline continues, allows us to move pivot change if we have to. So the reason I say that is because every two to three weeks we're delivering a news report to the business through Slack or through whatever channel works for your business. Then what makes this super powerful is just like Nielsen ratings, we're measuring how it's impacting, uh, the business. We're using, I commandeered and copied a copywriting framework to measure. It's called ada. Attention, Interest, decisions, action. Let me explain how this works. Attention is, are people reading the news? And through. If you use Google, you have that metric. I know when people are opening our documents. Interest. Are you commenting? Are you like asking questions? We know that because Google tells us decisions to act. Are, are the things that we're talking about ending up on product roadmaps, marketing plans, are they solving problems? Are they being incorporated in? This is all real time stuff. Because you see this happening. The only lagging indicator is action. And that is one where you're looking three to six months back and saying, okay, what was used and what happened from that. There is one final gold star metric that most firms will never get to, but it's one to aspire toward. And that's a connection of that work to growth, value, adaptability, risk and speed through metrics. Now, most companies will get there, but because they will get there, they don't even do the first four. They're just like, oh, fuck it, we can't get any of it, so we just won't do any of it. What I'm suggesting is to get to number five, you have to go through the first four. So why not just get as far as you can in the first four and work toward five and then from there, because we have this constant flywheel and feedback loop, we're then able to like, know what's happening today, what's important, and adapt as the business adapts.

Speaker F: It's really insightful and I think you hit on something that, yeah, happens a lot is, uh. Well, we can't possibly really measure the impact of research or this question, what's the ROI of research? Is a really, really hard question to answer. So a lot of people just give up or assume like it's just not possible. What you are doing here, even if you don't get to the fifth point, if you get through the first four, is you are measuring the impact. You do have things that can measure impact even if you maybe you can't totally quantify the roi. So I think that's really, really insightful there.

Speaker G: And Roddy, I gotta add the way we're measuring is like actual measurements. It's not like fuzzy bullshit numbers that like I see a lot of these people are like, okay, well the cost of a researcher is this. The cost of a development team is this. And all of that is very like theoretical hand, wavy like stuff. And what I say is an executive, they're going to see through that. They see that as like, okay, you're making an argument for research. What I'm saying is we also are in the process now of doing this. We are going to report out these Nielsen metrics or these Nielsen type metrics to the business so they know, hey, research is being read, research is being used, it's being incorporated. But what the other method that you talked about, like where people are like putting together fake numbers and other stuff doesn't account for is pertinent negatives. So research doesn't only tell you what to do, it tells you what you shouldn't do. And if you don't catch that, you're missing a huge chunk of what research does.

Speaker F: I totally agree with you and I think, personally, I think that's the most valuable thing research can do for someone in product is tell you what decisions not to make, tell you what ideas to kill, make sure you don't go down these paths. And that's a really, really hard thing to measure. Before we move on, Ari, uh, one other question. Something just occurred to me as you're talking about this, and I think this applies to any type of research that you're doing, whether it's product focused or not, is it seems like when you're reporting the news, you're making sure that everyone knows what your team is working on. So you're not only reporting back when a project is finished, but so people, you know, oh, what is this team doing? What are you working on? It seems like to solve that question. And if you're working on something that's interesting to the business, also get people engaged and want to either, you know, stay abreast of the re, participate in that research moving forward. Is that a fair assumption or am I over reading into that?

Speaker G: It's a fair assumption and it's a natural response to what we're doing. Because you can't possibly be talking about the thing that you can't be breaking headline news without talking about the things that are happening across the business. And what's really interesting about it is it breaks down the organizational or org chart silos that exist in, in a lot of cases where researchers are only focused on UX issues or only focused on, on product issues, where those issues might be important to those individual functions, but they might not be the most important to the business. So researchers are focused on the highest impact areas to the business, but they're aware of all of the things happening because they're working their beats, they're listening to the product managers in their respective areas. So they always know. And then what's really cool is they're coming back together in these pitch meetings, talking about their pitching stories. But they pitch stories in a way. I, uh, guess I'd be the executive producer. They're pitching stories, and we're picking the right ones to run with. And what's funny is what I tell them is, even if you're wrong, even if we pick the wrong story, we're only in it for a few weeks. We're not like, in it for six months. So you report something now, have I seen that happen? No, I haven't seen it happen once. I accept that as a risk. And going back to something else you said about pertinent negatives in product management and being able to say no, this method allows for you to point back and say, look, what we reported on actually didn't end up on a product roadmap. And so it was a win. So, like, we are now reporting the actual news on the news. Very meta. I know.

Speaker F: I love that. Well, before I let you go, I want to come back to something that we've hinted out a couple of times that I know this is something that you're passionate about, and I think you've been on a little bit of a journey. You're sort of oscillating pro and con, if that's fair. And that's democratization of research. So I'd love to get your current thinking and, um, could be subject to change on sort of democratizing research, sort of how you got there.

Speaker G: Yeah, So I don't think my thinking is going to change. I used to be very, very pro democratization, and then the pendulum swung and I became very against democratization. And today I think arguing about democratization is like moving the furniture around on the Titanic. It is the wrong argument to be having. I think that democratization is defined as anybody doing research. Let's just define it as that really broad here is fine. Because again, it goes back to this one word. Is the job of the researcher to collect evidence, or is the job of the researcher to interrogate evidence? Like, do I need to collect everything that I use and anything that I don't collect, meaning that I don't collect product analytics? So should I not use that Anything that I don't collect, I just need to interrogate. I need to make sure that it's good enough quality to incorporate into my story or corroborate it, triangulate it, make it good enough quality, or attach a level of certainty to it. So going back to democratization, I think that as researchers, we should want everybody collecting as much evidence as possible because then that evidence can help us build better stories and then we can report not just the news, but why it matters, how to respond and ensure that the news is of great quality. It also eliminates the arguments that people are having with product or with design or with marketing about who should be conducting research.

Speaker F: I think that's great. I'm glad we're finally on the same team here, listeners. I'm firmly in the democratization camp and I see that a lot of times there can be protection of like, you know, uh, I should be talking to customers because I know the right questions to ask, I have a sound methodology in doing it. I'm going to eliminate bias, all that stuff. Well, that may be true, but I think there's value in that research if it's imperfect. And what everyone should be talking to customers. And if you're doing something as, you know, an insights, uh, part of an organization, research, part of an organization, prevents people who should be talking to customers, people in product, people in engineering, people in design, then you're really doing the whole business a disservice.

Speaker G: It comes down to not if democratization should happen, if we're using that word, but like, what can we do to make it a better set of circumstances? Like if we're worried about quality of rigor of research, then let's offer training. Look, should every, anybody in the business be doing conjoint analyses of data? No, that's not the argument. But can we teach the lay product manager or the lay designer how to do interviews better? Yeah. And you know how you know that? Because I learned how to do it better and you learned how to do it better. And other like, it's a skill that can be taught. I think the argument is wrong. I think that we, it's not about like, is it good or bad? It's we want as much evidence and data as possible to build the best possible story to build in the best possible context so we understand what's happening. If I was going to sum up why that people are resistant to it, in a word, it's fear. It's people are afraid of losing their job. Like researchers have historically attached their value to outputs the deck, doing the research. There's some tangible thing. Product managers have PRDs, designers have figma prototypes or prototypes or researchers had nothing. And I'm telling them now today deliver decisions. That's a terrible. Like how uncomfortable is that that I don't have anything to point to when layoffs are coming. We can't point to like the things which I'm telling you we can because now we have a way to measure. But this is the problem is that they were like democratization was taking away their job fear.

Speaker F: I totally agree on that one. I don't want to end on a fear note. Let me end on a more fun question that I oftentimes end with, which is what have you been listening to, watching, reading that's been entertaining you recently? You got a podcast movie band recommendation for our audience.

Speaker G: I really, really loved Ted Lasso. We've watched it a few times. We watched the Last of Us, episode three of the Last of Us. We've watched that several times. It's just such a beautiful view of humanity and like it can stop you. I went back and read an old favorite of mine, Animal Farm. I do that anytime. Ah, an election cycle is starting again and uh, I really enjoy that. I think those are the main things and I uh, you know, like a lot of kid books because my kids

Speaker F: last question is if someone wants to find out more about what you're up to and sort of your thinking and where could they find you?

Speaker G: So a few places. One is you can find me on LinkedIn, which is a good place. The second is to really connect with me. Influential, uh, researcher.com you can get on my mailing list. Also get a really cool communication tool that I give away. It's called the poster frame. It helps you communicate ideas to an executive audience. That's atthe influential researcher.com or influential researcher.com I have both to make sure that they land in the same place. Aries elmanau.com you can actually get me there also. And probably the best way to get like this idea of like re building a research newsroom and developing being a consultant is the Influential Researcher. It's a course I teach on Maven. You can find it on the uh, page, my LinkedIn page or reach out and I can get you a link

Speaker F: to that great stuff. Well, we could keep going for you know, half an hour, an hour more. But I won't take more of your time and I really appreciate it. Thanks Ari.

Speaker G: Thank you.

Speaker F: I found Ari's newsroom framework to be really compelling and applicable to a range of roles across product research, marketing, and more. It really pulls back the curtain on how decisions are made within an organization to deliver maximum value to customers, and this should generate interesting ideas on how similar approaches could be utilized, no matter what part of the organization you're in. That's a wrap for today's episode. You can learn more about Ari and his work@theinfluentialresearcher.com or connect with him on LinkedIn. I'm Roddy from DISCO. I'll catch y' all next time.

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