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Theme 3 Discussion
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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
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Theme 3 Discussion
Speakers: Smitha Papolu , Nova Wehman-Brown , Melissa Schmidt and Adam Menter
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Summary

In this session, a panel including Nova, Adam, Melissa, Ken, and others shared their experiences and advice on enhancing UX and product outcomes through effective collaboration with customer success teams and embedding research in product processes. Nova emphasizes partnering with customer success early in scrum teams to ensure customer insights shape product decisions. Melissa and Adam talk about documenting design decisions clearly and embedding customer profiles within user stories to help engineers understand issues. The conversation highlights the vital role of research ops not just as execution but empowering cross-functional teams to do research themselves. Adam and Melissa also describe challenges in synthesizing large datasets and the importance of organising before research, using tools like Mural, and creating a closed feedback loop with customers. They discuss prioritization approaches like the RICE method to avoid over-focusing on isolated feedback. Nova and Ken advise building strong relationships with product managers and coaching them to ask better questions to improve research inputs. The panel reflects on how realistic customer expectations must be managed by listening, showing progress, and co-creating product visions in partnership with customers. They close by sharing tactics such as engineering days for acting on research findings and usability labs to demonstrate continuous improvements to customers.

Key Insights

  • Embedding customer success leaders directly into scrum teams early boosts product alignment with customer needs.

  • Documenting design decisions linked to specific screens with rationale helps cross-functional teams understand trade-offs.

  • Research ops adds greatest value by enabling others to conduct research, amplifying impact beyond dedicated researchers.

  • The RICE framework (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is effective for prioritizing customer feedback and avoiding overreaction.

  • Building strong human relationships with product managers allows researchers to coach them on framing better research questions.

  • Organizing synthesis of research data prior to collection improves quality and ensures no findings are lost.

  • Closed-loop feedback systems that show customers how their input shaped product changes build trust and retention.

  • Engineering ‘head-down’ days focused on tackling customer-researched bugs or requests help close the action gap.

  • Managing customer expectations by balancing visionary co-creation with delivering tangible improvements prevents relationship damage.

  • Distributed teams benefit from virtual tools like Mural to collaborate effectively during data synthesis phases.

Notable Quotes

"I recommend you find who the customer success leader is and get them embedded right in your scrum teams at the beginning."

"We would put decisions along with each screen, explaining what we’re going to do and why, so anyone can refer back easily."

"Researchers are much more than research ops but empowering others to do research really magnifies our impact."

"We use the RICE method to prioritize requests: Reach, Impact, Confidence divided by Effort."

"You have to build that relationship first; you can’t just tell a PM they’re asking the wrong questions."

"We start organizing before the research happens so teams know what they want to learn and can identify themes."

"If customers see you’re listening and making progress, they stick with you—it’s worth the effort."

"Every six weeks, engineers have head-down days to pick up ideas from research and build small improvements."

"Show customers that you heard them by taking designs from research into sprints and then back to customers for validation."

"Doing strategic co-creation sessions is powerful, but delivering only one feature next year risks damaging relationships."

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