UXA2022 Day 2; Julie Schiller, Nika SmithAuld, Rebecca Destello, Jennifer Romano - Scaling UX Culture

Learn how to scale culture, foster a feeling of community, and empower your UX team to thrive, even when they are working remotely from different locations. As our teams grow, we must consider how we can maintain our ability to build high performing, meaningfully connected teams while avoiding burnout.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 Friday, 26 September 2022 Captioned by: Carmel Downes & Kasey Allen
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 24 within organisations and obviously based on where they work within organisations that have quite large research and design teams working in this space. Please join me in welcoming Julie, Jennifer, Rebecca and Nika to our conference. Welcome. Over to you. (APPLAUSE) JEN ROMANO: Thank you, so much. I am Jen, it is great to meet you all from afar. I am excited to share our experiences here today with you about scaling UX culture. I am currently a senior UX manager at Google. I have held roles at Facebook, I have held roles in academia and industry, I currently teach. I have been around and I have been scaling UX culture all over the place and now I would love for the panellists to introduce themselves as well and tell you a little bit about their roles and then we will get started talking to how to scale US culture. Julie, over to you. JULIE SCHILLER: Thanks, Jen, hi everybody. Happy to be chatting with you from Singapore. I am Julie, I am a UX lead at Google. I work on our next billion users team. We all used to work together at Facebook but previous to that I worked at the BBC and auto desk. I have been a researcher for 15 years. I have been excited to kind of go into a broader UX space. That is about me. Over to you, Nika. REBECCA DESTELLO: Sorry, Nika, I jumped in front of you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us today. I am super excited to be joining us. I am in Seattle, Washington and like, Jen - like Julie said, I met these three lovely ladies at Facebook. Worked there for five years and I am at Google managing the team there and in various cities across the world. I will share with you the work that I have been doing to help my teams scale for the past several years. Nika.
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 25 NIKA SMITH AULD: I am a senior design researcher at Microsoft. I have also worked at Facebook and Google but currently elsewhere. I have also worked at Concur, Ford motor company. I have spent half of my career in consulting as well. I have worked in the space of motivating and encouraging the growth of UX culture in a variety of situations and team structures. Really happy to chat with you today. JEN ROMANO: Awesome. Thank you all so much. All right, why don't we start by giving this a bit of a definition and I am going to stop this so we can all be nice and big here. How is that? Why don't we start by talking about what we even mean by scaling a UX culture? What are we talking about here? What does this mean to you? Maybe Julie. JULIE SCHILLER: I will jump in. I wanted to share a little bit, part of what I work on here at Google is our UX community and culture team. That is a team that is dedicated to thinking about how we do UX across all the different products and teams. The people that I am working with are from many different parts of the world, from India, to Sydney, to Taiwan, Japan, in the US, on the east coast, the west coast, throughout Europe and also in Africa and that broad spread of people makes it hard to connect to a cult year as a singular place or a sense of who we are and what we are doing. I think a UX culture can be characterised by a couple of important points. One, is I think a UX culture is focused on how we do our work, how do we think about the people that we are building for? The second is the process that we go through with our work itself, understanding what tools do we use, how do we communicate with each other? The last one is something more in this softer space, of like what are the norms that a team will use to work with each other and I also communicate to our partners outside. I think it is crucial to how we run
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 26 our work, that we also get really crisp on what we are doing but the how we are doing it. JEN ROMANO: Great, thanks for setting us up here about what we are talking about here when we talk about UX culture. We have been working remotely for a long time and many people have been working remotely, so UX culture is top of mind for many companies and many managers, many leaders and how do we sustain a UX culture when we have distributed teams and folks working all over the place? Can you share a little bit about what that is for you, so what is your experience, your team's experience right now, or even just over the past couple of years, maybe it has changed a bit. Can you share a bit about what that work set up looks like? REBECCA DESTELLO: Are you talking about the location, Jen, and where the projects are situated, or... JEN ROMANO: Yes, your actual teams. We talked about we are all in different locations right now but also your teams, where are your teams seated? Rebecca, you can start. REBECCA DESTELLO: I am currently in Seattle and I have a small team here in Seattle that I work with but the majority of my teams are in San Francisco, down in Mountain View and I have a team over in New York City but I also have a really large team in Tokyo and a few partners in London. You can imagine how the time zones really make it difficult for us to meet and talk to each other in a regular time that is not somebody staying up late or getting up too early. It has been a challenge but it has been a fun thing to untangle and figure out.
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 27 JEN ROMANO: How about you, Nika? NIKA SMITH AULD: At Microsoft we have been hybrid for a long time. The team I work on has 16 folks and many of us are in the Redmond area which is where Microsoft is based but most of us work from home. Some folks go into the office. We also have a team member who is in Rome, a team member in New York City, a team member in San Francisco. I believe one in Idaho and then our product partner teams are distributed across London, Hyderabad and Beijing. We are working across a tonne of time zones, just to stay in touch with our product teams. For me, the number one thing that has made that possible is being relentless about communication. We use Teams at Microsoft and Teams has been my number one way to stay in touch with people, both through live conversations, video calls, but also using chat and posts. It has become more so than email as the place to stay in touch and communicate and share documents and make sure that we are all following the process and that they are all being user focused and we all have that motivation together. JULIE SCHILLER: I hope you guys can hear me now. I wanted to add that over on my side of the house, I set up like a lot of you folks. It is a challenge, a lot of us work with other regions as well. We have quite a few folks across the Asia Pacific region but also a lot of our work happens back with the headquarters in the US and more and more of our work is also focusing on Africa, so yet another time zone to add into the mix. That's become tricky because it starts to effect work life balance. It starts to effect that some of your communication methods become a little irritating over time as well and that is constant challenge, to think about
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 28 how to fix it together. One thing that I think we found works really well is to use a bot that allows for casual check-ins between people to help people learn and connect in an informal way. Once you have these informal connections, then the formal work follows more closely. REBECCA DESTELLO: That is a good point, if I can add something? Once you are able to build a connection between your teams in a more personal authentic way, it helps deal with some of the gaps that we experience being remote, being in real life, being in different time zones and different cultures. There is a lot more empathy that gets built into the experience of working together and that is really important to focus on. JEN ROMANO: Absolutely. I have felt the same. I have team members in London and New York and the Bay area and we have had meetings sometimes with people in Australia and it is really difficult to work across those different time zones and some of these asynchronist collaboration tools help us to stay connected and make sure everyone is in the loop when there are important things taking place and understanding what other team members are working on. JULIE SCHILLER: Mentorship is a huge part of how you are able to connect the culture of a team and so not only giving an explicit buddy but using mentorship as a way to help people learn how to appropriately self-promote their work or how to appropriately escalate an issue. That mentorship is a really crucial and useful way for people to connect as well. REBECCA DESTELLO: That is especially important in onboarding so that the new team member can learn what are the cultural norms on the team and the tools that are being used and which ones are appropriate for what
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 29 instance. Should I ping this one or email this one, right? Really critical, I am glad you brought that up about mentorship. It is super important to help people get onto the team early on. JEN ROMANO: Absolutely. Can you say a bit more about that? I was going to ask about forming teams. When forming teams and you have new people onboarding, mentorship seems to play a role. What other things do you consider to keep the team together and to really foster culture, even though you have a distributed team across different time zones and folks aren't in person together. NIKA SMITH AULD: One thing my team does which is a simple thing that I think has helped a lot is we keep an onboarding document for new hires and this contains everything from just general welcome to the team, here is who everyone is to these are the distribution lists that you should join. We try to add new hires to everything, every team, every distribution list, every project that they need to be before they even start but if there is additional ones that we want them to know about, we let them know about those in the onboarding document. We provide primers for all the various tools that we are using and then every new hire gets an onboarding buddy who is just - it is basically like a casual mentorship but everyone can be an onboarding buddy. Mentorship can often be a little bit to the senior staff members. An onboarding buddy can be a junior researcher or junior designer, someone who is just really passionate about providing a great experience for new folks and they - throughout the week, at least once a week, just to chat about how things are going, it is your place to ask the questions that you feel are really dumb that need to be answered and you feel like you have someone on the ground helping you.
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 30 JEN ROMANO: I love the idea of a buddy, because if someone doesn't feel comfortable reaching out to the whole group, we are using some of these tools to ask others what they are doing. They have one person they can reach or talk to at any one time. I find the pairs persist even after the new period has run out, you really end up with a buddy at your company for quite some time, for - even after you leave the company sometimes. NIKA SMITH AULD: Yes. JEN ROMANO: Anything to add there, Julie and Rebecca, about forming teams and various things to consider? JULIE SCHILLER: I was going to say that one of the things that we have also experienced, perhaps many of you as well, is new people coming in from the outside into the company but also teams grow and shift and I think you might have heard guys out there that the economy is not so good. There is a lot of changes going on in our world right now and being receptive to new team-mates coming in with their own cultures, helping them understand differences that might exist and being open to adapting and changing the culture on your team, to best fit the new group that you might find yourself in is really important to think about as well. REBECCA DESTELLO: I agree to all those things and I think they are helpful. I want to add another thing I found helpful is setting up milestones for the new people joining your team so they know what is the most important thing to do first. For me it is always go around and meet the people that you are going to be working with, the people who make the decisions, get to know them and the things on their mind. Since I am
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 31 in research, one of the questions I have people ask is their background in research, ask your stakeholders what kind of experience they have had with research to figure out what you are going to be working with - do you need to get them to buy into your work? Do they need to get introduced to how you do it? I am about to onboard a new team member in Tokyo and that team hasn't had research yet. They have been around for a few years and they are hungry for research. We have been talking a lot about how to prepare that researcher as they are coming in because they are going to get flooded with all sorts of requests. I am already doing a preprioritisation exercise with that team to make sure they are not throwing everything their way. I think that is going to be really helpful in giving them the scaffolding to be more successful as their onboarding into the team. I think the trick to this as well is this person is coming from Hungary and will be going to Tokyo, so there will be a cultural shift that they will have to learn and deal with. There is something that has been helpful for me, I will mention it here and maybe if Annabel, I don't know if you can share this with the conference but I think I link people to this once a month. But a researcher that did some work to figure out how people are different - different working areas across different working culture and you can compare them. You can bring up Hungary and Tokyo and I think there is five dimensions, how do they show up at work and what are they like and what do they expect? What are they worried about? I use that often as a cheat sheet to figure out how is my working culture different from someone who is coming from another part of the world? I recommend checking that out, it is a free resource online. JEN ROMANO: Thank you for that. You have all had careers and experiences where we were not in this modern hybrid world and now we are all in this - we at least and many folks on the call and in the audience
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 32 are also in this new world. Can you give any examples of new practices that were put into place as a result of this new hybrid environment and, in general, what kind of feedback it generated, whether it was performance-wise, morale-wise, if things were taken well, if you had to tweak things? What are new things you had to try as a result of this new hybrid working way? REBECCA DESTELLO: I bet everybody was trying happy hours at the very beginning of all of this, right? (LAUGHS) NIKA SMITH AULD: That was the first thing that came to my mind that changed was we started doing virtual happy hours with those online tools where you can play Hangman or Pictionary or whatever through Zoom. It helped a little. JULIE SCHILLER: One thing we found was really helpful is to get Airbnb experiences or something similar like this, where you can invite the team to all virtually go somewhere and experience something together. I think a lot of people were very creative and continue to be quite innovative in how they are sharing that, even now in a hybrid environment we are seeing a lot of success with this. The team wanted to learn more about Nigeria and its culture and the many diverse people that live there, so at a point when travel wasn't possible, some people were already back in the office in Singapore and we had 20 people in the office and then we also were able to dial in folks from around the world at the same time, to listen into someone giving us a tour of their neighbourhood and talking about the history there. That was a great way for people to both be in person, as well as to be hybrid with that as well.
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 33 NIKA SMITH AULD: One other thing. I work in both the software and hardware space. I work on mobile devices and we have a hardware design lab which - now that we are hybrid, some folks are going into to do their design work in the lab instead of at home which I imagine was challenging to do at the beginning of COVID but because not everyone is in the office at the lab to see the cool physical prototypes that they are working on, the team has started to build these video reels, we call them sizzle reels that are sexy and they show off the prototypes and they are just usually like the quick two to three minute videos that are really easy to consume. We can show them in every meeting that it is relevant to, so that everyone, regardless of location, can see what is going on in the design lab and that has been really great, as somebody who doesn't go into the office but is eager to see all this cool stuff being built, to have that connection with the design team, virtually, when previously it would have all been done in person. JEN ROMANO: Yes, awesome. One thing that we did that was different from when we were working in person was we talk a lot more about burnout and how to stay balanced and tips and tricks and strategies to step away from your computer and put the work away and being OK with that and not feeling guilty because it is in the middle of the workday and you're expected to be at your computer, expected to be working but when you are on your computer all day going back to back with meetings all day, that can be really stressful and we had a bigger focus on burnout than I have had in my entire career. We have a few questions from the audience. Feel free to put your questions in Q+A, as they are relevant, I might grab them or we might come back to them at the end. We have a question here "What are some regular types of team rituals, bearing in mind the time zones and what
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 34 kind of cadence do you have for running those?" Some team rituals. JULIE SCHILLER: I will jump in on that one. I think the preplanned weekly meeting, where everyone stands up and talks about what work they have been doing, I have personally found those to be really soul sucking when it coming to being online, a pit performative as well. You leave the meeting and you are like I don't know if I learned anything coming out of it. Some teams I have worked on have shifted that to be digital, all the updates have been in a shared document or on a channel that will help people discuss - even reply to the things that people are sharing and instead of using those team moments to focus on things we all need to discuss together. What is there new information that the leader needs to pass down? Is there maybe some new change from another team that we need to hear about? Having a discussion and focusing the format to an active discussion use of the time we found to be really helpful. I think that has been one way to make our work side of our culture in our relationship a little more productive, whereas maybe being in person it felt a bit different, a stand-up was nice and everyone shuffled in with their coffee and chatted for a bit and then you were literally standing so could only last for so long. The online meetings for me have felt a little performative. REBECCA DESTELLO: In regard to meetings, it feels like now that we are all mostly remote in my role and a lot of my team members have a mix of between remote and in the office or a little bit of both and I am finding this problem where our back to back meetings don't allow for those people who are actually in the office to get to the next room, the next floor, whatever it is, stopping to get a drink on their way to the next meeting. I can just click and dial into my meeting, I am waiting for five
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 35 minutes for the other person in the office to get into the call. What we have started to do is booking over meetings to effective minutes past as a buffer. It is brilliant. It gives me time to stand up, get away from my desk, take care of myself, do something else for a change of scenery or whatever and it has given that other person time to adjust and get ready for the meeting as well. That has helped a lot. It has made a big difference in the way that I feel at the end of the day even. NIKA SMITH AULD: My team has been doing the same things. We started our meetings five minutes late for 30 minute meetings and 10 minutes late for hour long meetings so everyone has time to stretch their legs, check in on chats or emails in between meetings, get their head on straight, which is definitely something I need. We have also moved a lot of our weekly sync - updating to a digital format and focusing the team meetings on the pieces of information that really matter and basically the places to have a session where people need to complain or weep over a reorg and build empathy together. That is what we use meeting times for, instead of using a meeting to cover everything. JULIE SCHILLER: I like that a lot, Nika. That emotional support can be good in these. One thing I think would be a great new edition is looking at new forms of recognition of how to reward and highlight the great work that is going on for teams. There is a number of ways that people can do this, whether it is like a kudos board or people like just saying out loud their thanks for someone. Some teams have internal reward systems or tools. For all the leaders in the audience today, I put a challenge out for you to try and be intentional, in doing this even more than you had been before because people can feel very isolated and remote, whether they are coming into the office, whether they are fully remote or somewhere in
14. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 36 between, so being intentional about the recognition you are giving out on the team and making sure that people are being recognised for good work they are doing. Very crucial these days. REBECCA DESTELLO: Yes and to add to that, the state of the world is so stressful right now. There is so many things going on outside of the work that we do from day to day, so being sensitive to that, I think is really important and then figuring out how your person needs you to show up. Not every one of your team members is going to want you to ask about their weekend. Maybe there is one that really wants you to know who their partner is, know about their kids and when their birthdays are. Really figuring out what helps that person feel like they are supported and caring for is something to double down on in the beginning of your check-ins with that person because they are bringing a lot into our meetings and it can add to the burnout that they feel. JEN ROMANO: Absolutely. Another thing we have done is, within each time zone, still have - now that we are back in person - still have some in person events, so a team dinner, recently we went bowling. It becomes difficult when your team is dispersed so I have asked - I only have one direct report in the Bay area but we have other peripheral team members, so I have asked them to form a pod so they could get together in person every so often. I have felon her out so she could join us in New York before, to be part of our team, so really being creative about how we can still stay in touch and have that in person feel, if that is an option. It may be too costly to fly your an tyre team, if everybody is completely dispersed but even if there is just a couple of people, encouraging them to do something together in person so you are still growing those relationships in a way that we used to. That is not just on the screen.
15. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 37 We have talked a bunch about our teams and building teams and whether that is our direct reports or peers. Let's talk about stakeholders and people who are outside of our direct team, let's say. Any tips for working with stakeholders in these different time zones? NIKA SMITH AULD: This is a passion area of mine. I will jump in. I love having a great relationship with my stakeholders and I have known for building relationships with stakeholders that are difficult and stakeholders that don't understand research that maybe are a little hesitant about research. These are like my favourite types of interactions and it is challenging building that relationship when you're hybrid, virtual but it is still incredibly important, especially as a researcher, to make sure that you are plugged into what the PMs are thinking about, the engineers and designers are thinking about and making sure they know who you are. That has really been the number one step for me, is just making sure that my stakeholders know who I am, or that they know who my direct reports are and just setting up regular one on ones to just get to know them. We don't even have to get down to business but that first one on one is going to be about who are you? How long have you been at the company? What else have you worked on? Where else have you been? What are your hobbies? What do you like to do in your spare time? Just getting to know them. I know this sounds cheesy but it has worked for me so many times, to just show you are a human and you are a human, we are going to work together and let's get to know each other and then we get into what is research? What is your experience with research? What do you think research is? Asking these types of questions to see what level they're at. Then from there being able to maybe correct some misunderstandings or level set, explain what research does and doesn't do and let them know specifically this is what I am going to provide to you. This is what my
16. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 38 team is going to provide to you and here is what I need you to provide to me in return. Making a deal and then all future one on ones are about checking in to see if we're maintaining that deal. That has been really successful for me, just to make sure that the stakeholders I work with know that they can come to me any time they have a research question or an idea, the designers are come to me when they want to make sure that I am included in providing design feedback, they want to hear my voice because they know that I care and that has really helped us get through these challenging times, regardless of our location. REBECCA DESTELLO: I have a question for you, since your teams are based all over the place, do you have any pockets of teams that they just don't feel that connected to headquarters and if you have that, or if anybody else on the panel has this, what do you do to resolve that? How do you work around that? I am having this problem in one of my locations. NIKA SMITH AULD: That is a really great question. I feel like the teams that I work with have pretty good presence. I am thinking specifically India, London and China but those are major office locations for us and there is a lot of stakeholders there across discipline. Julie, maybe you have some thoughts here? JULIE SCHILLER: Yes, absolutely. I sit a 16 hour flight away from a bunch of the people on the team and from headquarters. I think probably, like many of you in the audience today, that really effects how work gets done. Even unintentionally, things can happen at 2 in the morning and maybe like many of you, I have often had to set an alarm so I can make a meeting at 4 in the morning because it just can't be moved, for many
17. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 39 perfectly reasonable reasons to another time. That result, over time, builds up a feeling of being disconnected. One solution we have seen that could work well is making sure that leadership is showing up and they are aware of their responsibility to help include different sites as well so that involves training for them, also holding each other accountable. It is hard work. It is not easy to make everybody feel included and connected but it has to be done in an explicit way and there are real specific skill sets people can use. There is your casual ping, there are all the sorts of tools out there. Even just joining in some of the fun events that are happening can help keep different groups from feeling disconnected from each other. I think this UX culture we have been talking about from the beginning, we should all be aware it is not evenly applied across everyone at all places, at all times. People's engagement with that culture can rise and fall. Our stakeholders engagement in that can rise and fall. It is tricky. I would put the responsibility for that on us, on the leaders who are thinking about how to include those sites and encouraging people on both sides to make that better and work. JEN ROMANO: I couldn't agree more. If there is Budget, I would fly folks out. This year with the opening of many offices in many of the world, we have had a lot of team off sites and summits, planning for next year and things like that. Those in person events have really gotten people to gel and feel like they are part of the team, with so many people starting during the pandemic, they never even set foot into one of our offices, so there was a disconnect in terms of feeling a connection to the company and headquarters, so having those in person meetings has been really helpful. JULIE SCHILLER: There is a great question on the chat about how to
18. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 40 encourage people to turn on their cameras. It is a small but significant way of helping people connect. One thing we did is - we sent small knickknacks with the company branding on it to peoples' homes and we would say "Now everybody bring out your little stuffy or bring out your little nick knack or whatever it was" and people could show each other that thing and we encourage people sometimes to encourage and share their home set-up. Take your phone and take a picture of your work set-up there is kind of a fun way to get to see people from a new perspective. NIKA SMITH AULD: I am going to push back a little bit on this question. This is something that I think is really important. It is a great question but one thing that we need to think of is being inclusive of all the folks in our team and there are many people, including people who are neurodiverse, who are uncomfortable with turning their cameras on, or turning their camera on can actually create a distraction, it can overstimulate them and can cause them to be less effective in a meeting. The general rule that my team has is, when you are in a one on one with someone, if at all possible turn your camera on, at least for a little bit to say hi, but then let the person know "Hey, I am going to turn my camera off now". In bigger meetings it is OK to have your camera off and it can be better to keep your camera off if it is a meeting with more than 20 people because seeing all the different little cameras shifting all the time can be distracting to anybody. It is better to just have the people who are speaking and presenting have their cameras on, again if they are comfortable and everyone else can have the luxury of being camera off. I would say it really depends. Sometimes it is OK and we should lean into it being OK for people to have their cameras off, if they have a reason for it.
19. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 41 JEN ROMANO: I agree with that, Nika. And maybe there is an opportunity back to the onboarding, so when onboarding, you can establish these norms, like when you are speaking it is preferable to have your camera on or say hello and turn your camera off but if you're not comfortable, take care of yourself by all means. That has come up in our company during working at home and the burnout and being on the screen all day, it is OK to turn off your camera while you are in a meeting. It is polite to say "I'm here and I am just eating" or "I am here and going off camera" so people know you are there. Maybe coaching with new people, that is a good way to set those norms. We are quickly running out of time. This always happens when us four get together. I will turn to some of the questions and we have got two streams. We have the chat and the Q+A. I will go to the Q+A because we have some questions that have been thumbs up and have gone to the top. I encourage you to check those out and if you want to give any of those a thumbs up, please do. I don't think we will get to them all. There is a question about onboarding product owners. We talked about working with stakeholders, Nika, you had a great example of how important that is to you. How about any tips for onboarding product owners who have a project delivery mindset and prioritises and focuses on delivery and not discovery? Any recommendations on how to onboard these kinds of product owners? JULIE SCHILLER: That is a tricky one, because as UXers, regardless of how you are practising your craft as a researcher or designer, program manager, writer, engineer, whatever you are doing that is your take on UX and a contribution there, I think depending on the company and the culture and peoples' background, there can be a transactional service-based perspective to our work. I think one thing that I have used in the past to help combat that is the hardest word, which is "No" and if
20. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 42 you can come back to these people and say "I hear your request, I want to be able to support you, maybe give visibility into your backlog". But you could also give some clarity "This is a great request but in my expert opinion, this would be giving us a plus or minus" or however you can phrase it. You can be diplomatic about it but you can push back on these and I think that is a good moment. It is early in the panel, someone mentioned how important it is to give education about UX to your stakeholders as well. Maybe they are coming from a different place, were UXed in different things and maybe haven't worked with UX before or in a long time. Giving an explanation of how you want your team to be working, maybe sometimes I have had teams with a little case study or some place where you can say "These are examples of ways we have worked in the past that have worked" and we want to do more like this. The hardest word but I think probably one of the more impactful ones is to push back. REBECCA DESTELLO: I think it is really important to make sure you gain alignment with the product owners that call the shots. I have worked with lots of PMs who are metric-driven and only want to think about how to pull levers to move metrics and get their promotions or whatever. Usually my line with them, I try and figure out the slow roll, how do I get to know what is really important for them, what are their hidden agendas that I don't know about? So I can wrap that into my research program. Let's say project manager A is really concerned about growth, right and maybe growth isn't like a focus for the team at that moment but maybe there is research that is happening that is related, so making sure that they have full buy in to the work we are going to do around that and if you can add their specific questions to the research and inviting them in. My experience has been once your product people see a session or three or
21. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 43 whatever or a series of sessions, they get so excited about it and they start to get this craving and they want more of it. Building that momentum is really important with people that are like that, I think. Start with trying to get alignment first and figure out what is important to them. JEN ROMANO: Great. Switching back to online meetings. Do you have any tips for how to manage and find space with overpowering extravert types? I can start. I call on people who aren't speaking, maybe that extravert is overpowering or exerting themselves as they do but then I will be sure to actually call on people who may not feel like they have the space to make sure their voice is heard. NIKA SMITH AULD: Absolutely. REBECCA DESTELLO: There may also be a need to talk about - sorry, Julie, you go ahead. JULIE SCHILLER: There is a lot of really great tools that you can use to kind of solicit broad team invite. You can use - in Zoom there is so many great polling tools. In the set-up, there is all different ways of ensuring everybody has a chance to interact. You can send out the agenda first and give people space in that agenda document to write their feedback first. That helps all sorts of people come prepared and be ready for the conversation. By having that, people get a chance to think before they talk, it helps balance out the team dynamic. Over to you, Rebecca. REBECCA DESTELLO: It is a challenge and one of the benefits of us being in video calls is that you have those tools accessible to you. When you are
22. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 44 in the room it is all about getting a seat at the table and not along the sides but it is still hard because there is no way for you to raise your hand, except for you to actually really raise your hand. I have heard some people using like a proxy in the room to make sure that whoever who is online and not in the room themselves, the person in real life is representing people who are online, that is one way of seeing it done. To really get those people with the big personalities who want to just control the room - we have all worked with them - it is like a culture shift to get everybody to feel empowered enough to step in and take up space when somebody else is taking up so much space. It is a really big challenge. It could just be like you talk with them and say "I don't know if you have noticed but so and so doesn't speak up very often, can you help me make sure they are able to have space" to the person who is taking up space so they are more aware and looking for people who maybe want to jump into the conversation. NIKA SMITH AULD: One thing I will add is I totally agree with Jen. Calling out - or calling on the folks in the room who are a little more quiet, making sure that they have a chance to speak. Another good tactic that we use a lot at Microsoft is if someone just really has their point that they want to drill down on and they are not letting it go, somebody in the room usually someone senior will say "Hey, that is a great discussion, let's table that and take it offline". It is completely acceptable in the culture of my org for folks to say "OK, yeah" and it is a little nudge, like this is going a little too far, let's take this offline. No-one feels bad about it and there is no hard feelings. I think that is just something that you get a couple of people who are comfortable with doing it and then now everyone feels comfortable with saying "Let's table this discussion" and other people feel comfortable with not getting offended by that and saying "Yes, I will take
23. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 45 this offline". JEN ROMANO: I have had that before where we had the sand box or whatever we call it, even in live meetings when things come up that are out of scope, we write it on the white board. Rebecca, you mentioned the raising of hands. I have been in meetings where some folks are in person and some folks are online and in Google Meet we have the raise hand option. If you encourage people to raise their hands, whether it is in person or physically raise your hand or online, you can encourage people to use the raise hand feature, that is a way to make sure people feel comfortable and other voices are heard. In our last minute, you touched on back to back meetings. Any tips for blocking out time to actually get hands on and do the work and focus on a project? REBECCA DESTELLO: I was just trying to type out an answer to this. Really quickly, at Google we have in our culture that you put DNS and "Do not schedule" and child pick-up or something and you block that time off. Within the culture, they have to respect that and don't usually put meetings that are important for you to be at over that time. When I was at Facebook that was not the case. It was hard to block off time. I would block off morning or the end of the day and then I would write in the title "Please ask before scheduling", so people understood this was head zone time and it was something I don't want to be scheduled over. Try that, it is hard and it takes a culture shift of the teams that you work with but it is worth keeping at it and making sure you have the heads down time because you can't go meeting to meeting and expect yourself to be really effective.
24. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 46 JULIE SCHILLER: Say no to meetings also. I know that sounds easy to say and it is really hard to do in practice. You can fight for your time to get your work done. Ask for meeting notes to be taken. Ask for things to be recorded. Asks for someone to be your proxy in the meeting. That can help you carve out time and evaluate your schedule and set it, rather than being reactive for how other people and have them set their schedule for you. How much can you really say no to meetings that are out there or get the same content a different way and still be part of that conversation. JEN ROMANO: There is a principle I learned that is like a mantra, if you don't own your calendar, someone else will. REBECCA DESTELLO: I want to get to director so I can have an assistant own my calendar. Let's just be honest. (LAUGHS) then they can tell everybody "No". JULIE SCHILLER: That is a good point, Rebecca. Sometimes we are not the ones empowered to make the decisions about our own calendars and that does require a need to be flexible. In the times when you are able to, it is really important to own that. I want to call out for people who sit out in APAC, you are probably getting called all hours of every day to get these things done possibly. It is important for us to protect our own wellbeing, our mental health and ensure that you are taking the time you need to get your work done and to disconnect. JEN ROMANO: It looks like we are a couple of minutes over. I think that is a wrap. We are here as resources to you all so don't hesitate to reach out if you want to ponder these things or if you would like tips or if you
25. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 47 would like to share yours, we would love to hear them. We are always growing as well. Thank you so much, everyone, for having us here today and have a wonderful rest of the conference. STEVE BATY: Thank you. (APPLAUSE) STEVE BATY: There is a big speaker over there and I should not turn my microphone on standing in front of it. Apologies. That was super interesting, thanks Julie, Jennifer, Rebecca and Nika. That was super interesting. Our next talk is from Kerry and Catherine who will be talking through a case study of their innovation sprints that they have been implementing at their organisation, so without any further ado, I will hand over to Kerry and Catherine. Thank you. (APPLAUSE) CATHERINE GLEESON: Hi everyone. Kerry, how are you going there? KERRY MATHESON: Good. I don't know if you can hear or see me yet? CATHERINE GLEESON: I can hear you. STEVE BATY: We can hear you but we can't see you yet. I think that part is going to get switched over ...now. There we go. CATHERINE GLEESON: Oh, I can see me. KERRY MATHESON: Let's kick off. CATHERINE GLEESON: Today is about slowing down to speed up the Accidental Innovation but before we do that I'd just like to acknowledge