Behzod Sirjani, founder of Yet Another Studio and former research lead at Slack and Facebook, talks to Maze about how to democratize research effectively and responsibly and how to build organizations that learn and make better decisions.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
You can follow Behzod on Twitter (@beh_zod) or check out his website.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today, I'm joined by Behzod Sirjani. Behzod is the founder of Yet Another Studio where he works with organizations of all sizes to build intentional, responsible, and sustainable practices of learning. He's also an Executive in Residence at Reforge where he builds and leads the User Insights for Product Decisions program. For obvious reasons, I've been so looking forward to this conversation. Thanks so much for being here.
Behzod Sirjani:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be talking with you.
Ash Oliver:
Amazing. Well, I figured a good jumping off point would be to have you kind of describe your overarching experience across UX research, maybe so we can get more insight on what's going to inform some of the things we're going to talk about today.
Behzod Sirjani:
Sure. I joined Facebook in October of 2013 as a associate researcher, which was a junior role that they had for I think about five or six of us at the time on a pretty small team, like 36 people. The company was just shy of 4,000. And so we had shown potential, but hadn't had proven experience, either a PhD, or enough industry experience to sort of be driving work on our own. And we were able to learn through working alongside, shadowing, partnering with, being guided and mentored by more senior folks how to conduct research on our own effectively. And so I ended up spending about four years there. In my time there, I was a very active interviewer for the research team and I saw us passing on a lot of candidates who looked a lot like me. People who didn't have proven expertise, who didn't have a track record of a PhD or five plus years in the industry, but I thought they showed a lot of potential.
Behzod Sirjani:
And I felt like at the size we were getting to—two years into my time at Facebook we were probably 150 or so researchers—we had a broad range of skills and I felt like it was our obligation and really a big opportunity to start bringing in more folks who probably would have been like me and start training them up. And so I was really fortunate that around the same time Christina Janzer, who was the person actually responsible for kind of building the Facebook research team and later went to Slack, and then Annie Steele, who was a researcher that joined a little bit before I did and then went on to lead research at Stripe, we were sort of able to convince or make a case for actually taking headcount and building out what was originally called the rotational research program, but is now known as the research associates program.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so we were saying, "Look, there are a lot of people who are high potential who probably have a lot of skills that are valuable and relevant that are going to contribute to our practice. Let's bring them in and had them learn one, see one, do one." And so they rotated through different teams and different mentors and really were sort of brought up in the practice. That program is now in its fourth or fifth year. And there's some folks who've come through that are, I think, directors now at Facebook. And that's probably one of the things I'm most proud of in that work. I think that alongside of a lot of the ways that I was practicing. I was very regularly taking product managers, marketers, engineers, et cetera into the field with me to go and sit at advertiser offices in New York or internationally. And I had to help them be not scared to be in the room with a customer.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so I think there was both this element of like teaching and the practice of like cultivating junior talent and the practice of opening up sort of the black box of what research is for a lot of our partners that got me really interested and excited in the ways that we could just do that generally. And that my job wasn't just to go conduct a study and share a report, but a lot of it was the organizational stuff. And the way that we leveled up the ability for other people to think and engage with the customers and sort of get out of their own biases. So did that for about four years. Christina Janzer left Facebook and went to build the research team at Slack. When that happened, I was kind of like, "What's going on there?" And so we talked a little bit and as I learned more about the opportunity, I just got really excited.
Behzod Sirjani:
She had a lot of buy-in from Stewart Butterfield, the CEO, to sort of not be accountable to design our product in terms of like "you're just a service organization", but to actually shape at a leadership level, like, what are the things that we really need to be paying attention to and how can the organization be more thoughtful about understanding our customers, engaging with the world, and building products. And so I was really fortunate to go and join her in late fall of 2017 and start on a team that was like five at the time, which was really interesting because we were small and scrappy and we implicitly had to say no to a lot of things that came our way because we just couldn't do them. And when you're in, especially a B2B organization, you realize how many people are talking to customers because there are giant sales teams, there's customer support teams, there's people in marketing, et cetera. Like, customer meetings are all over the place.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so I think that was where I started really confronting the fact that for us to be effective, we couldn't think we were going to own all of the insights or all of the customer conversations. Because even as we were helping product teams, we were regularly collaborating with others and talking to them about what was going on and what they were learning. And we would see surveys that go out that are just written poorly and it's not anyone's fault. They just never were trained in surveys. And so we started to be better partners saying like, "Oh, hey, let us know before that goes out." Or like, "We'd love to partner with you on this and give you a template." And as we started chipping away at some of these things, about two years into my time there, we had some folks leave the team in some roles that were coming open and we realized that we needed to scale the practice, but we weren't really going to scale the headcount, especially the way that Facebook had.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so I advocated for us actually shifting some of the headcount around and hiring in a research operations person that I would manage to scale some of the things that we were doing in terms of helping others, things like office hours, templates, et cetera. And so the things we needed to do was start to build more of a foundation for the practice and help other people see us as partners, not roadblocks, in a lot of the things that we were doing. So I was able to actually hire someone in from Facebook. She and I basically split the world where if things were research-centric that needed to be operationalized, I sort of drove them. And things that were operation-centric for the research team, she drove them. So I owned things like the tracking surveys and she owned things like vendor relationships and budget and communications. What happened—because I was in San Francisco and I had friends who were at early stage companies—was I started getting more folks coming my way to do that kind of stuff for their teams.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so it was, "Oh, hey, we're sending out a survey. Can you help us think about how to do this?" Or even just friends who are founders, like, "I don't know how to talk to customers." And so I realized that there was a lot of opportunity for researchers to have impacts in those stages, but we didn't have a very good model for what hiring that looks like. Because I think historically we don't hire researchers until there's a little bit more of a mature product organization. And then very often, we distribute all of the responsibility of understanding customers to that person, and then they're overloaded and they, again, can't talk to everyone or do everything.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so what I started to realize was that it felt like there was an opportunity to play sort of a coach guide mentor role to some of these organizations and that if I had enough of them together, I could probably bundle it into a job. So I left Slack and kind of tried to do that and just kind of started building the studio that way, really with the hope of proving out that research is really valuable at early stages, but we just don't have an idea of how to hire for it or what to do. And it looks a lot less like consistently running research projects and more helping people adopt a research mentality in the ways that they are doing things. And that is a very, very long story that takes you from about 2013 to now.
Ash Oliver:
I really appreciate you sharing the full story because you can clearly see the through lines in your career. I think it's really tremendous that you have this natural ability of connecting over the teaching aspect and kind of spreading what you're doing in volumes outside of yourself, but also what's driving that, which is the learning and the research, which is just incredible to see. So one of my questions was to ask, what do you think that research has looked like in most cases? Where does the learning take place? And I think you started to answer that in kind of the difference between enterprise organizations at scale versus earlier stage companies. Are there other patterns that you've observed?
Behzod Sirjani:
Yeah, I think there's probably a handful of different ways it plays out. And I think that the two or three characteristics that have the biggest influence are who research reports into, because as much as org charts are communication devices, they also are incentive structures in some ways. I think the leadership's perspective on and support of research has a big impact on that work and what it looks like in the team. And then I think the individuals on the team's ability or even desire to do work, like, what that work looks like. And so I think you have a whole spectrum of things from, you know, research as a service organization where requests come in, they do work, they hand it back, and that's sort of their whole world. And then I think you have other teams where in the best case scenario, you have research as a thought partner where sometimes the important thing for them to do is going to conduct more research.
Behzod Sirjani:
Sometimes the important thing for them to do is actually bring a bunch of stakeholders together and facilitate a conversation. Sometimes it's just sanity checking with things that exist in the world and they don't have to do any new work. They can just say, "Look, here are patterns that we know are true or things that are real." And so I think you end up with a pretty big spectrum of those things. I think I was fortunate. At Facebook, we reported into design, which had pros and cons. At Slack, we reported into product and I think that had some different trade offs. I think generally in a lot of organizations product is seen as having a broader mandate. And so research reporting into product actually gave us a lot more leverage to go broad and say, "We are going to do the thing that is best for the product." Which may be helping the design team. It may be helping customer success. It may be helping none of you and actually going out and doing this kind of work.
Behzod Sirjani:
I think we were also incredibly fortunate because Stewart had a lot of faith in the work that we were doing. I think the fourth aspect that is really important is our relationship with data teams. Slack was incredibly unique because research and analytics were one team. And so we didn't have to fight about methods. We were always asking ourselves, what is the best way that we can gather evidence to make this decision? Out of the incredible wide skillset that we have, whether it's qualitative research, quantitative research, data science. Whatever it is that we want to do, all those skills sit in our team. So there's no territorialism. There's not like, "Oh, well, data science is going to answer this." No, we are all one team and we are going to help. And I think that the thing on sort of the individual side, and this is probably where I like to say reasonable people disagree with me when we get into kind of democratization, is like, "who should be doing research and what is research accountable for?"
Behzod Sirjani:
And the kind of protectionism that goes into like, "Well, if I'm not doing a study, I'm not valuable." And I think that mindset has seeds of truth, that there is definitely work that other people should not be doing. And there are certain things that we need to be very intentional about owning and driving because we are the people to do that work. But I think in a lot of cases, that protectionism comes from fear and fear that the artifacts of our work are the way that we derive value. And I don't want to be a researcher if the number of research reports I do is what determines my worth. I think we can do so much better than that. And I guess the entire thing I'm doing with my career now is putting a stake in the ground and sort of pushing in that direction. So I'm very biased, but yeah.
Ash Oliver:
No, really this is one of the most interesting aspects of research. And that was one of the questions I was going to ask you, like, I imagine this resonates really strongly with researchers.
Behzod Sirjani:
I think it resonates with some researchers. So I was on a call yesterday with a director of research and she was referred to me through someone I had worked with before and was just kind of like, "I think you can maybe help me. Can you tell me more about what you do?" And I was like, "Sure, but let me level set with you because I believe things that I think are not heretical in the industry, but some people like strongly disagree with and I'd rather you know where I'm coming from and what my biases are." And I walked through it and she was like, "No, no, I'm super on board. Yes. My manager is also very on board." But when I gave a talk in 2020 at the UXR conference... I gave a talk called You Are Not Your Research Report and there were a lot of people in the Slack chat because it was prerecorded and so there were people commenting live that were very uncomfortable or frustrated by what I was saying, because they're like, "You think that other people can do our jobs."
Behzod Sirjani:
And it wasn't that I'm saying anyone can do research the way that researchers can do. I'm saying that we are protective over a set of activities that we are not uniquely qualified to do. But there are a lot of things that other people do that are research activities. And instead of trying to own them, we should try to make them more rigorous. And I think there's still probably work I need to do on how to communicate that, but I think that there are a fair number of people who have seen it go poorly, and I've seen it go poorly. I'm not saying that this is going to work everywhere in every sense. One of the things that I talk about is that tools and training and ongoing support are a huge thing.
Behzod Sirjani:
The way that you move things forward is you educate people on how to do this work. You enable them to do it and make it possible and safe. And then you have to empower them. All of those things are like outside of conducting research. So you not only have to understand how to conduct the work, you have to know how to talk about how to conduct the work. And then you have to know how to build a structure, to make it safe, train people, and then encourage that. This is hard. This is not an easy thing. But I do think that I've had the fortune of many people at a leadership level having this resonate because the thing that they're confronted with is, I have an obligation to our customers and to our organization to help move the needle in how we make decisions and to be more thoughtful and rigorous and responsible and respectful of people's time. I cannot hire enough people to do all this work. And so the two choices I have are: ignore it or look at where else these things are happening in my company and figure out how to make that better.
Behzod Sirjani:
And so one of the first things that I do with a lot of clients is sort of an audit because I want to figure out, where are these things potentially causing harm and how do we build guardrails against it? Because the first thing you want to do is make this safe. The second thing you want to do is make it better, right? Like, it's happening in lots of places that people are unaware of or aware of and it's not going well, and that's bad for the customer and it's bad for the business and that needs to get fixed.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, totally. Well, maybe we could transition into that because that kind of brings us into what does it mean to build an organization that learns. Because really what you're talking about here is extending it beyond just the confines of research, which I feel, I'm not a specialized UX researcher, but I could imagine a place where, for everything that you're talking about the numbers don't add up. So being able to equip the other aspects of the business to level all, you know, high tide raises all boats kind of thing should be pretty compelling, but it's definitely not easy work as you've described. So what does it mean to build an organization that learns?
Behzod Sirjani:
Yeah, that's a great question. When I think about sort of important aspects of building an organization that learns, the three things that I talk about most often are having intentional, responsible, and sustainable practices of learning; having an operating model that enables everyone in the organization to participate meaningfully in learning for whatever way they feel safe; and really making that learning visible and accessible to the organization. And I'll spend a couple minutes talking about each of them because it's a lot of words. But when I talk about being intentional, I really talk about gathering the right data, the right frequency with the right breadth and depth to make those decisions that you're trying to make with confidence, and having subject and method experts in the right places in your organization to scaffold that learning.
Behzod Sirjani:
So if you are doing work that has, you know, you're doing work with children or you're doing work with victims of trauma, you should have someone in your organization who is able to make sure that the work that is being done is respectful of that person and those experiences and has prepared you. Otherwise you are not doing that intentionally. And that's, I think, where a lot of people feel like this gets exploited because that's true, right? You really need to be supported in this work. And I think the responsible thing is often about balancing. On one hand, getting answers and getting insights. And I think about that as answers being things that give you a sense of where you are and insights being a sense of how to move forward. So let imagine you and I are going on a run together. An answer is "how far have we been?" And the insight is like "what does the path ahead look like?" And so I think there's times where teams need those different things, right?
Behzod Sirjani:
They just need something small to like acknowledge a temperature check, whatever. Sometimes we need a framework or a bigger thing to move forward. And actually, a year ago, I wrote an essay on the studio blog called The Organizational Appetite for Research. And I talk about, like, sometimes you need snacks, sometimes you need entrees, and sometimes you need a feast. You want to balance the amount of time that goes into the research based on the size of the output, but you also want to make sure the team has enough time to metabolize what it is. A lot of people ask for a segmentation, which in my mind is a feast and then they don't have time to digest the feast. And so it's like, "Was that really the right thing for us to do?" And I think it's irresponsible to do that kind of work if a team doesn't have the ability to sit with it and digest it and metabolize it and actually do something, right? It's disrespectful to your participants, it's disrespectful to how you prioritize, it's disrespectful to the organization's resources, et cetera.
Behzod Sirjani:
And I think the other thing that's important when you're being responsible is you make visible to other people what you believe to be true and why. I think it's really important that you call out your biases and gaps in your knowledge that in some ways help you understand what could go wrong or why you're moving in certain directions. And that way you can reevaluate. When things don't go well, you can go back and say, "This is what we thought was true. To what extent was that reality or not?" And the last bit, when I talk about research being sustainable, I think this is still my Twitter header image, I like to remind people that all research has a cost and not just one cost, but a cost to you to plan and conduct, a cost to your participants to engage in—probably many more than you're really thinking about—a cost to store the data, a cost for your team to think about it and process it.
Behzod Sirjani:
There's all these costs. And you really want to make sure that your research is ROI positive for everyone involved. And I think most of us think about, is this helpful to the organization? We don't ask, is it worth it for the people who are participating to spend time with us? Or how could I make it such that them spending time with me is worth their time? And I think that gets into really interesting questions of power and attribution, but I think it also means that you have to keep learning, which means you need to protect your customers in both necessary like legal and responsible ways. Treat them like human beings. And I think we're not always great at that. We like sending really long surveys because we need all that data. And I've gotten surveys before. I'm like, "This was too long." And somebody didn't think, "What would it be like if I received this?" And so that's often a question I pushed people on.
Behzod Sirjani:
The second thing I talked about was building an operating model. Earlier, we were talking about how there's like learning going on in all kinds of different ways. I think it's really important to think about where should research be responsible for doing the work and where can you hand off and empower and enable other people to do that work? I think one of the most effective ways of doing that is starting by really auditing your organization and saying, "How do we make decisions?" Both think about the different time scales and also the different fidelity. What's different between a feature decision, a product decision, a product area decision, or a business decision and who's involved? What data gets used, how is it used?
Behzod Sirjani:
What's not involved and why? Is it because you don't have those things, you don't want those things, you move to quickly to leverage them? But I think having that audit is really helpful to just make sense of what's going on in our company. And then I encourage folks to do two things. And I think this is in The Organizational Appetite for Research blog post. But on one hand, I tell them to think about their research team or their learning related functions. And just ask like, who, what, when, where, how and why? What can you do and who can you do it for? And how much can you do? And when can you do it, and where can you do it? And why is that staff worth doing? What kind of learning are you able to participate in or facilitate?
Behzod Sirjani:
And then, because you've just thought about your organization, you can ask the same questions. What evidence does your organization need to make their decisions? Who uses it? How often do they use it? How much do they need? When and where do they need it? Et cetera. And that helps you identify where the gaps are between those things so that you can start to figure out how you prioritize building the structures for other people to participate. Because your team probably can't do everything and your organization needs things that the team can't do. And so the question is, are we focusing on the wrong things or are there gaps in coverage that we need to sort of help other people account for? And so a really good example of this is when I was at Slack, we had the customer success team sending surveys to their own accounts because they needed to gather feedback on different stuff.
Behzod Sirjani:
There was no way we were ever going to own all of that. And so we went to them and we said, "Hey, we're increasingly trying to compare our data and your data." Again, not maliciously, they were not trained. They're asking same questions between people on their teams using different scales, different language, et cetera, "Can we partner with you to standardize all of these things?" And we spent six months working together to sort of standardize these templates, build a survey question bank, put together training and loom, and roll this out to the team, we had a help channel in Slack. And they were able to send out thousands of surveys basically without our intervention, which was a huge win. And it freed us up to do the work that we were better positioned to do. We brought our subject and method expertise to the work they were trying to do, and they're able to still do their job, and hopefully do their job more effectively.
Behzod Sirjani:
Then the last thing I was talking about was making learning visible and accessible. I think most research repositories are unkempt gardens. There are things that get planted there that are not tended to. And one of the things that I think researchers are particularly bad about is stepping away from their work and asking, "How are people going to receive this, or what is the most important thing here, and how do I provide different layers of detail so that people can engage at the depth they need?" So something that Slack did was while we had our lists of all the studies and everything that was done, we actually wrote kind of one pager of sorts—we call them what you know about pages—for some of the most important topics. And they were written as Q&As.
Behzod Sirjani:
How do people feel about Slack? Set of responses, including citations, links to studies, specific slides in those studies, images, et cetera. Because what we wanted is for you to go and to get the answer in a very clean, rigorous, cited way that didn't necessitate you knowing that the work was done, knowing when the work was done or knowing how to find that work. I think there's probably a lot of folks who work in research ops that have better practices for this. But I think it's a very nascent thing where we've over indexed in a lot of organizations on, "Let's make certain quotes visible and just tag them with customer." And it's like in a lot of cases they're taken out of context. Data has a half life. And so if you're not regularly pruning the garden and weeding and cleaning, those things go bad, they rot, and they sit there ,and it becomes this tangled mess. And so we very often worked to make sure that when you join the company, you could read 10 to 15 of these and have a pretty good understanding of where we thought... what we believed was true about the world.
Behzod Sirjani:
And then every quarter, at the end of the quarter, we used to have a party and we would just go through and make sure all of the things were updated, and the studies were there. We did it on an ongoing basis, but it was more of like, "Again, we're just going to garden for two hours. Like, what's changed, what's new, where's the roadmap?" And I think that folks, you know, you get done with the research and that's the start of the next chapter. Then it's like, "How do I actually take this and help people go and make the decisions they need to make? And how do I also archive it so that we have an understanding of like, this is what we learned at this moment in time, things are going to change in the world, and some of those conditions mean that this is no longer true or relevant, but let's just acknowledge this was the best thing we had at that point."
Ash Oliver:
The Genesis for creating an organization that learns. Everything that you're talking about here reminds me of practices that might be coming to play with organizational design. Where could maybe researchers borrow from that, or how can even non researchers help to try to build some of these institutions and practices?
Behzod Sirjani:
That's a fantastic question. A couple things come to mind. One, I think when you shift from trying to just be a team that learns to an organization that learns, you realize that you have to, again, externalize some of these things and make some of these possible in other places. And so you then have to ask yourself like, "What's the priority in which we help other people start to do this work?" Very often, it'll be, we'll find a partner team who has a strong appetite for this work and a close relationship with us. So like the customer success example. We had really good relationships with that team. We could go and prove that we could partner with them and do this work and then go and do that with other parts of the company. So then we started helping the HR team with our broader pulse survey. It's kind of like you get a win and then you can sort of expand.
Behzod Sirjani:
But I think one of the easiest places for folks who are in research to think about organizational design is, what are the different flows of information that come from customers? Who do they flow to? What tools or artifacts are they stored in? And how limiting or accessible are those to others? There's one company I worked with that actually, you know, part of what I got brought on for was this sort of org design of like, "We are probably talking to customers in too many different ways. And we want to make sure that there is less unnecessary redundancy in the system." And so what I ended up doing was talking to something like 10% of the company, folks from product design, sales, customer success, research, et cetera, just let's talk about your process. Where do things come in? Where do they go? What do you do with them? Et cetera.
Behzod Sirjani:
And a lot of what I shared back was, look, we have different tools that do similar things, but in different places. There's a lack of awareness, a lack of visibility. And so in some ways it was research on the organization in service of the organization of like, we have all this redundancy that is actually antithetical to what we're trying to do. We're trying to help people have a better, more holistic understanding of these different customer needs, but we're taking stuff and splitting it out into different places. And so a lot of the design exercise there was where do we centralize and where do we leave sort of other stuff, and what are the both rituals and artifacts that we needed to shift?
Behzod Sirjani:
So are there different meetings that we need to have or different practices that we need to enact so that people are sharing or reflecting on the things we're hearing? And how do we actually capture the stuff that comes in? Like, if we have a Twitter web hook that goes into a Slack channel, but only one team is in that Slack channel, is that very helpful? And so I think a lot of organizational design questions are really that. What you think about the different people in these systems? How do you design flows of information and communication practices and other things that allow us to work more effectively without creating unnecessary overhead? And I think most researchers are pretty good at asking some of the questions. They just don't often point them at the organization themselves.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, absolutely. It's exciting and I'm very fortunate to have the opportunity to speak to you about this. Because whenever I'm thinking about these things, you're definitely the person that comes to mind. So I love it. I want to transition into my last three questions for you. These are just personal questions that we ask every guest. They are called hat trick questions. What is one thing that you've done in your career that you feel has helped you succeed, that you feel very few other people do?
Behzod Sirjani:
I write in public to get feedback. I share things that I have strong enough conviction about that I want someone to respond to. And so I write almost as an invitation, not because I think I'm a 100% correct, but because it reflects experiences or things that I'm thinking about and I want people to push on it. And I think that came from probably a lot of different places. I was on Twitter really early and benefited a lot from meeting just really interesting people who were also on Twitter really early. I also moved around and traveled a lot as a kid. So I was very often writing. And so I think for me, writing is a really helpful way. I journal very regularly. And so it's a good way of bringing my thoughts together and just starting to do that more as a practice and saying like, "I don't know that this is right, but this has been swimming in my head."
Behzod Sirjani:
Someone pushed back. I probably get half the people who come to the studio for work because of essays I've written and are like, "Oh, that's really interesting. How would you apply it for us?" And so that, I think when I was at Facebook, I used to write a ton of notes about culture, about work that we were doing, about research as a practice. And that opened really interesting doors for me. And so I think I don't do it because I want the audience. I think that a lot of things I write are kind of niche and weird, but there's this great metaphor. And I forget if it's Kevin Kwok on Twitter, but the best metaphor for Twitter is, like, tapping a tuning fork and seeing who resonates. And I think my writing is that. It's I'm putting these things out there. And some of the most interesting people I regularly talk to, some of my closest friends are people who responded to my writing and we just chat now because, even if we're in different domains, we're intellectual sparring partners at this point.
Ash Oliver:
Yes. I absolutely adore that. That's amazing. Okay. What is one of the industry related, and this could be very broadly industry related, books that you've either given or recommended the most?
Behzod Sirjani:
Great question. It is Jan Chipchase's Field Study Handbook. It's fantastic. Jan is a super wonderful individual. You just look him up because I'm going to do disservice if I try to explain who he is. But I would say that the book on the outside is a book about how he conducts research in the field. And he has a very long history of his practice and has been very thoughtful about a lot of things, and I've learned some of the best kind of frameworks and approaches from our conversations. I think the book is actually about how to move through the world and be a citizen of the world, engage intentionally with the spaces that you work in. And I think if you read it as like someone's telling you... Someone's encouraging you to look differently at the world that you're in and it's framed in the context of how to run a research studio, it's a really fantastic read.
Ash Oliver:
That's incredible. Yeah. I'm definitely taking note of that. All right. My last question for you, Behzod. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Behzod Sirjani:
Ooh, I feel like there's lots of absurd things I love. So I am a drummer. Been playing drums for a very long time. I recognize that me drumming in lots of situations is not productive for other people who I am near. So actually incredibly, I fidget with a lot of things now. I used to have a camera on my desk and I would play with my camera as a way of fidgeting. And then actually, I think I tweeted something about it. And Joe Thomas, the CEO of Loom, who's a friend, actually got me a set of fidget balls to spin in my hands. And what that's evolved into actually is I grew up from a very young age playing Magic The Gathering.
Behzod Sirjani:
I learned when I was like five and now I shuffle magic cards while I'm on calls and I'm thinking. And so sometimes you'll just see me kind of going like this. And some people ask and I'll just like flip a card and that's sort of a way of like, if you know, you know, and other people are like, "Oh, that's pretty hard." And other people are like, "What is that?" And it leads into interesting conversations, but yeah, it's a funny habit now where I just have a deck sitting on my desk, I'll be shuffling.
Ash Oliver:
I love that. It's woven into the fabric of your being. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by myself, Ash Oliver, and brought to you by Maze, a rapid user testing platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to the Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening and until next time.