When Your Product Is Your People

What makes a "user" or "customer?" For many in the human-centered community, it's a group of folks outside of one's direct interaction space. Outside of the occasional lab session, field work, site visit, or other data setting, UXRs aren't often crossing paths (at least intentionally) with the folks they are working on behalf of. Lisa Madokoro and Taylor Kim of Shopify have a much different situation: their customers are their colleagues, and the product they're improving is the culture, sense of belonging, and nuances of being a productive and happy employee at Shopify. Talk about a mind-shift.

We caught up with Lisa and Taylor to unpack what it's like working on the experience of one's colleagues, leveraging the same human-centered research approaches many of us use to grow app downloads, increase session times, and expand account growth—but for their peers. How does that shift the approach, the outcomes, the methods?

Our conversation has implications for anyone looking to do sharper, more inclusive, and impactful work that's more cooperative and less transactional. After all, Lisa and Taylor will definitely see their participants again, either in the hallway or on a video call (especially if they're doing their job well).

dscout: Most orgs have a talent or people team, few have research components as part. How did this unique structure come about?

Lisa: My career before this was always in tech, but on the R&D product side. I was a product manager/researcher and focused primarily with startups to do a lot of product market validation. I was really focused on unpacking who the users are and understanding their problems. I loved that part of my job.

At every job, I was also the unofficial “culture person.” I would plan activities to help foster connection and belonging, but I also built new programs, like an onboarding program where I ran a/b tests to get executive buy-in. Through these experiences, I realized that I really wanted to take those methodologies and the skills I had built as a researcher and PM and apply them to understanding and improving people’s experiences in the workplace. I felt that was a really untapped opportunity.

So when Shopify posted a role for a Culture Specialist at the time, I applied with that vision in mind. I remember the people I met with were curious about why I’d want to leave product and research for a role in HR and I told them, “They’re really not that different. You are solving problems for people and trying to build the best experiences and products for them. Let's get really curious about who these people at work are and really understand what their motivations and needs are so we can design the best employee experience."

Taylor: Before my current role at Shopify, I was a service designer working in-house at a financial services firm. I did a lot of work that was purportedly “customer experience design” projects but actually had an “employee experience design” component to it as well.

For example, in order to improve the customer call center experience, you actually had to improve the employee experience at the centers because they are the bridge to the customer experience. I later found this role at Shopify and it's so fulfilling to apply our UX and design skills to our colleagues' lives.

Lisa: I think when I started I had to really show the value, what would actually be the business impact of taking the time to do research? For stakeholders who weren’t familiar working with researchers, we could have just been seen as the team who slowed things down.

So instead of just doing research on the topics I was most personally interested in, I needed to tie our work to business priorities: What are the highest priority problems that the team is trying to solve? How can I meet them where they are by using research to get us to a better solution? I also thought about how I could show the impact that the research had and then build advocates. Although I sat on the HR team, I did have lots of friends in the UXR and UX side of the business. So how could I use them to elevate my work, too?

Taylor: I think that's the fun part of our roles: our deliverables directly impact our colleagues' quality of life and it leads to a feedback loop of interest. It's very meta and very tricky to navigate at times, but it's also been a meaningful way to contribute.

And as you've scaled this team, how have you thought about structuring it to serve both your immediate and wider stakeholders?

Lisa: I've gone on the same journey as other research leaders. When we were three people, we were very much an agency model. Project intake would come through me, as lead of the team, and I would do a bit of assessment and figure out whether this was something that mapped to higher business priorities, and if so, who would be best equipped to champion the research.

When we started out, we introduced a three-tier service model that continues to serve us today. The three tiers are:

1. Fully embedded researchers on projects where we champion all the research work
2. Consultants where we take on more of a teacher role, pairing on studies but not executing on the research
3. Peer-review

We are starting to shift to something a bit more embedded, but not super intentionally. I think it's just based on the nature of the work and the fact that we’re now returning to the same 3-4 big problems we're trying to solve as a team this year. Naturally, it made sense to have researchers focused on those different problem spaces. With that said though, there’s still lots of room for people to jump into different studies across those areas.

Taylor: I think as an employee doing this kind of work, the embedded model that we have been shifting to is a lot more energizing. When you are able to be continuously involved in a product launch, you can connect the dots and build deeper relationships with the stakeholders and give your old research reports another life. That's super exciting because let’s be real: no one wants to create things that just go to die on a shelf. Having the opportunity to revive and to even build on top of work you’ve done before can get you to a further point. It’s much better than having to always start at a blank slate.

When I arrived on the team, Lisa and the team did such a great job of building up the foundation. As time passes, we need to make sure the research is still fresh, but we don't necessarily always need to go back to square one. We can actually give ourselves a head start, and that's been super energizing about the embedded model.

Lisa: When we think about how to gauge success for our team, it's continuing to engage in those relationships and loop back to understand what decisions were made from the research and break down what we learned or still need to learn.

When it comes to how Talent thinks about success overall, I think what's really cool about our team is that people understand the role we're playing and they're not looking to us to solve all the problems or be responsible for all those things. But we do get to act as thought partners and consult on what success could look like.

How does structure shape or inform the questions your team tackles?

Lisa: Everything kind of cascades down from Shopify-wide business objectives. So we first have to understand what Shopify's priorities are at the business level. We're part of the Talent team, HR in some other organizations, so they sets our major priorities for the year to support the business in reaching those things from a people perspective.

Then what we do is assess, across those priorities, what our priorities for the year are as a research team. One of them this year is helping to understand and design the future of work now that we're a digital-first company. That was a very clear, obvious focus area for our team, and it ladders directly up into the larger business priorities.

Other times, some of our priorities for the year are things that are very proactive. Things that maybe the business isn't necessarily asking us for yet but we're thinking about as a research team. So for example, how can we as a team scale up so we can push out more proactive insights into topics we know the business is going to care about before they have to ask? It's a balance of letting the business' priorities set ours and also trying to anticipate their needs.

Taylor: I feel that we've done a great job of building research capability in our peers, helping socialize our work so they feel more empowered to connect with us on questions or opportunities. We nurtured this habit, because when we do a project intake, we would challenge our peers to answer, "If we did research and we did know this data point you are asking for, what would you do with it?"

We’ve asked that so many times that now, it’s become routine. We’ve now reached a beautiful place where stakeholders are bringing us into their projects and I don't even need to ask that question anymore because they proactively say, "This is why we want to have this data, so that it can inform XYZ." This is always so lovely to see.

We recently did a project to improve the parental leave experience at Shopify. It was a big project that involved many teams including Payroll, Benefits, Talent Operations, and many more. It was cool to pair with all of those groups and do some discovery research on, "What are the pain points? What does it mean to go on parental leave? Where can we offer employees more support?"

We did a deep dive into the current state and then we took the research insights and made some stimulus for co-creation workshops to design a future state that's way better. So that's being built out, which is fulfilling.

The pandemic upended so much, including our workplace culture, modality expectations, onboarding...the list goes on. What trends are you observing and researching at Shopify in this space?

Lisa: We’ve been doing research since the start of the pandemic to understand what factors could impact an individual’s experience working remotely. What we’ve found is that it really depends on the individual, but there are some broad demographic factors that can influence it, like age, previous commute time, and caregiver status.

I think it's also dependent on the stage they're at in their work. If they’re in the early days of a new project and they would really benefit from that synergy of being in a room together and rapid white-boarding and bouncing ideas, people probably crave that as humans, and that's the best way to get stuff done.

But what we're finding is that once they go more into heads-down work and executing on the vision, people are really enjoying the remote work because there are less distractions. So it's really about where they're at in life and where they're at in their project work. The coolest part is Shopify is thinking about ways of improving these experiences for employees, and so we get to continue to do research on this topic.

One project example that comes to mind for me was when I partnered with our Learning Acceleration team to redesign our previously in-office onboarding program. At the start of the pandemic we didn't even know what the future of work would look like, but we knew that we needed to think about how people would onboard remotely in the meantime since we no longer had that luxury of being together physically.

We needed to figure out what that experience is like onboarding remotely, and what are some changes that we can make immediately so that these cohorts of individuals who are starting during this time of so much turmoil in the world still have a really strong first impression of Shopify.

So the team and I led qualitative research with new hires and leads of new hires to understand the experience of onboarding remotely or leading a new hire who started remotely. From there, the Learning Acceleration team leveraged our research findings to redesign their onboarding program for a digital audience.

One of our major research findings was that one of the things people miss most about that in-person onboarding was getting to know people in-real life and feeling like you could build an organic connection to another human. As a result, one of the areas the team focused on was creating systems to support connection building and a sense of belonging remotely.

How has being remote affected your research practice?

Lisa: One thing I miss is the cues you would get from being in an office. You would be able to pick up on the intangible energy shift. If there was an announcement that went out, you could feel and hear things around the office and in the lunchroom. That would often sometimes be the trigger for us to be like, "Should we explore this problem more? Is this a one-off, or are we onto something," and being able to run with that. Now, it's harder to get those cues. We can still get them, and Slack is a great place to get them if people are willing to post in public channels. But you just can't pick up tangibly on it the same way.

Taylor: I'm very bullish on the fact that remote work technology will catch up, but we're not there yet. For example, right now, co-creation workshops just feel like another video call, and it’s hard to recreate that super-energizing experience of ideating together in the same physical space. But humans are creative and we’re figuring it out. There are some Miro templates and other tools that can take you quite far, but it's not quite the same.

But, I don’t think we should be aiming to re-create the exact same in-person experience. The worst digital experiences are where we just try to port the offline experience online without adapting it for a digital context. I’m seeing so many cool new tools come on the market. I’m very hopeful that we will see adoption of workplace technology that will allow us to create an even better experience than the ones we had in-office.

How has this work—internal facing UXR—evolved or shaped your practice? This was the focus of your recent UXRconf Anywhere talk.

Taylor: I think the beauty of our team setup is the fact that we're in-house so we have access to past research and pair really closely with our data science team, which is called People Analytics. So we love to mix and match different methodologies, we're not purists in terms of a certain methodology that has to be the sole way.

A good example of this is when COVID hit and we had to do lots of remote life research. We actually knew which areas to do deeper qualitative on based on the quantitative data that our People Analytics team helped us collect. For example, based on the survey data, we knew where we had to do deeper using qualitative methods. Ultimately, we were able to have a sharper tool—we didn’t waste time diagnosing where to poke.

Lisa: A lot of the topics we dig into are quite personal to people. When we are doing qualitative inquiry, we try to do more one-on-ones versus group sessions, just because we have to immediately establish a lot of trust and safety in that room. We’ve also explored co-design workshops depending on the type of project and the stage we're at.

We've even done some ethnographic observations. I actually traveled to our Japan office a couple years ago to understand what the experience was like working over there. I did the same thing for our San Francisco office and just spent time there and really focused on observing and understanding what the dynamics were like before I did any interviews with those teams. I started the interviews once I established rapport and trust.

Taylor: One practice that our team feels very strongly about is that we need to loop back with our participants regarding the data we collected. It is their data after all, so they need to know what's being done with it and what we learned. At the very end, before we wrap, we always make sure to loop back and tell them, “This is what we learned from the research and this is what we are doing next based on the learnings.”

We're lucky because Shopify has a default open-internally philosophy, so we can link to a project board and tell our research participants, "Hey, and if you want to follow along for more details of what is being done with the research findings, click this button and you’ll get project updates.”

Lisa: Ethics are super important for us in terms of how we recruit and store the information, so we have ethics principles. The org psychologists who have been on our team have really helped us evolve that thinking especially, and anyone who joins the team covers this in depth in their onboarding. Because we have these principles and speak to them when recruiting participants, we find that our research participants are more open because we’ve made them feel safer to do so.

When designing a research study and recruiting, what we think about really depends on the purpose of the study, the objectives, and the research questions. We'll consider different demographics depending on what the study needs such as tenure, location, their experience with remote versus in-office, or diversity of the participants themselves from a dimension of diversity perspective. Our team actually used to be part of Shopify’s Diversity and Belonging team, so diversity and belonging is really at the forefront of everything that we do.

How has this work changed you as a colleague, coworker, and person at Shopify? Your success is their success; how has that affected you?

Lisa: Three things stand out for me: First, really thinking about the importance of diversity in a sample and how all those dimensions could impact someone's lived experience.

Second, how do I leave space for that person to share and for me to understand their experience, but not try to solve it or take it on? I think this is really an important nuance because being internal, we know some of these colleagues, we see them in the virtual halls. How do you leave space for their experience, but not take it on and internalize it as ours? This is so important to maintain our own sense of wellbeing as researchers.

Finally, being conscious of the bias that we all carry around with us. Because we can definitely benefit from some of the new initiatives that emerge from our research, we may have opinions on which way something should go. So how can we be aware of the biases we're bringing into the studies, name them, and incorporate peer review to help eliminate the bias as much as possible?

Taylor: We have to be mindful of how we present the research to our “clients'' or our Talent colleagues. My job is to represent the employees, and sometimes, employees can have strong views about certain things, things that my Talent colleagues have spent a lot of time working on.

My challenge is how do I represent the employee voice in a productive way so that our colleagues are able to hear feedback from them and are motivated to do something with it? While at the same time, not dilute the research insights to the point where they're not useful or that I'm not actually representing the employees. Learning to balance those things is definitely a great muscle to build.

This work really challenged me to think of a new definition of collaboration. Before, I used to come from a place where as a researcher you don't want to be too prescriptive, you don't want to have too much of a point of view. I was tied to a very narrow definition of “collaboration”.

Like some idealistic scenario where collaboration meant that it was a kumbaya moment where everyone co-creates the insights together. I've since shed some of that thinking, and I actually have a new definition now, coming with the point of view but also still willing to be challenged on that point of view is the definition of collaboration. So that's where I've landed.

What advice do you have for organizations looking to create and grow a sense of belonging and purpose with their employees?

Lisa: I have two pieces of advice, one that's really practical and one that's a bit more high-level. So the practical piece of advice is to think about your employee life cycle. Think about how you're hearing from people and really understanding their experiences at those pivotal moments.

There's a lot written online about what the key moments of an employee journey are, but they are also probably going to be somewhat personal to you and your organization. I think that's a good place to start and assess what information you are collecting, what themes are emerging from those insights, and what areas of your organization need the most attention.

The second piece of advice that's more strategic is to show versus tell the value of this work. When I started out, I was so excited I thought that building a convincing enough argument would get me a seat at the table. I realized I needed to anticipate business needs, and demonstrate the value of research by actually doing the work and using it to make stakeholders’ lives and decisions easier. How can you show stakeholders the importance of research and help highlight what the user needs instead of telling them?

Taylor: I think a big reason why this team has been able to be so successful is because we're good at productizing our ways of working. When you're deep in a certain project, you might be like, "Okay, this is a one-off." But, trust me, more often than not, it's not. Since you're doing it that time anyways, productize it: create a template, codify a workflow, do something for your future self so you can run with it faster next time. This is a practice on our team that's served us really well.