In this episode of The Optimal Path, host Ash Oliver and Senior User Research Manager Paige Bennett explore the vital role of workshops in product development. Paige shares her experience facilitating workshops in the fintech industry, plus best practices for measuring success and co-creating with cross-functional partners and customers.
In this episode of The Optimal Path, host Ash Oliver and Senior User Research Manager Paige Bennett explore the vital role of workshops in product development. Paige shares her experience facilitating workshops in the fintech industry, plus best practices for measuring success and co-creating with cross-functional partners and customers.
Join us to learn how you can leverage this collaboration tool to drive stronger decision-making, build more impactful products, and grow your career as a product professional.
About Paige:
Paige Bennett is a Senior User Research Manager at Affirm. Prior to Affirm, Paige managed the Growth and Ecosystems research teams at Dropbox and has previous experience creating strategic research projects at Medium. She is well-versed in the world of workshop facilitation and user research, harnessing the two for big business impact.
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Ash Oliver:
One of the most influential tactics involved in creating better products largely goes unnoticed from the outside.
Paige Bennett:
I think a really important workshop is an idea generation workshop, and this really happens at the beginning of the product development process. So if you think of the product development process like a road where you're going from identifying the problem space all the way through launching your product and you're in maintenance mode, an idea generation workshop is really good for that beginning stage. It can really help you set the table stakes for what you're trying to build, but also get everybody aligned on where you're starting from.
Ash Oliver:
Most organizations can recognize this when it happens. Team alignment that feels clear and focused, strategy that has everyone pulling in the same direction, and collaboration that's motivating and moves ideas into action. But the trouble is many teams experience this less often than they'd like and even more have a hard time creating the factors that make it possible.
Today on The Optimal Path, we'll uncover the powerful tool of workshops and how companies are leveraging them to generate more innovative ideas, drive stronger decision making and build more successful products.
I'm Ash Oliver and this is The Optimal Path, a podcast about user research and product decision making brought to you by Maze. In this podcast you'll hear from research, design and product leaders about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Our guest is Paige Bennett, Senior User Research Manager at Affirm. Prior to Affirm, Paige managed the Growth and Ecosystems research teams at Dropbox and has previous experience creating strategic research projects at Medium. She's well-versed in the world of workshop facilitation and user research, harnessing the two for big business impacts. I'm delighted to be doing an episode with you, Paige. Thanks so much for being here.
Paige Bennett:
Thanks so much for having me.
Ash Oliver:
So workshops, this is a topic we've covered once before on the podcast and one that you presented at the Maze conference, Disco Conf, but I wanted to go deeper, like a 200-level course since you've deemed this the "secret tool" at Affirm. And we will get more of the behind-the-scenes look at Affirm and discuss how workshops are delivering so much impact, but first I wanted to open it up by asking why workshops? What are the key reasons for incorporating them into the product development process?
Paige Bennett:
I think of workshops as this power tool and at Affirm, at least the secret is out now. So we are really building workshop requests, which is really exciting from our partners and from teams across products. But workshops have the power to do six key things and there are things that we need at any development stage when we're trying to create a product and launch a product.
First of all, they're really, really good for generating new ideas, especially if you're starting at this space where you know the problem or you have a sense of the problem but you have not gotten to the solution space yet.
The second thing that they're super good for, and I see something that's really critical now, especially when we're in these hybrid work environments or we're fully remote, and this can be a little bit trickier, is prioritizing resourcing and really understanding where you need to spend all of your time, where you need to spend your resourcing and what gets deprioritized and why.
The third thing they can do, drive alignment. Super critical, especially across your different cross-functional partners. They can help you identify gaps. And this can be gaps where there's a resourcing need, but it can also mean knowledge gaps. And when we talk about the different types of workshops, this is something that's especially helpful when you're in that earlier stage and you're maybe just starting to work on something and you don't really have a good sense of what you know and what you don't know.
And the last two things that workshops are super good for is inspiring your future experiences. Where would you go from here? What does your experience look like if your customer base changes, if they evolve, if something happens in the market for example? And finally they help you align on the actions that you need to take. So what are the immediate next steps? We have aligned on all of this great stuff, now what do we need to go do?
And so everybody leaves having a similar sense of what they immediately need to tackle and what it's going to look like in the next week and two weeks and months and so on. If you've never been to a workshop, you can look at that and think, can workshops really do all of those things? And they absolutely can and I think that that's what makes it this power tool that you can have.
Ash Oliver:
There's so much that you covered in that and I am excited to dive into it more specifically, but I think that it's so specific, really seeing it as that catalyst in product development as it fosters collaboration and ideation and problem solving and alignment. These are really important things especially as we traverse so much change and the company scales. So I think this is, as you made mention, such a secret power tool, maybe an underutilized tool in the industry. I'm curious if you can discuss maybe some of the specific types of workshops that you've seen effective at Affirm or maybe more specifically that could be valuable inside FinTech.
Paige Bennett:
I think a really important workshop is an idea generation workshop, and this really happens at the beginning of the product development process. So if you think of the product development process like a road where you're going from identifying the problem space all the way through launching your product and you're in maintenance mode, an idea generation workshop is really good for that beginning stage. It can really help you set the table stakes for what you're trying to build but also get everybody aligned on where you're starting from. I mentioned that one thing workshops are really good for is identifying gaps and an idea generation workshop is very helpful in you understanding, okay, what have we explored in the past and what do we not know? Sometimes people can skip that step and you really lose a lot of valuable information when you don't start in that moment of identifying what you know and what you don't know.
What's an assumption, what's a fact, what's a strongly held assumption in some cases? What do you need to go and challenge? It also can help you identify who your customers are. And at this stage to be frank, you might not really know. You might have a good sense of who your customers are, but this is going to get you to that question if you find that you don't really have a good grasp of who your customers are. The other thing that it helps you do is start to think about timeframes. So you have this idea. What is going to be your timeframe in which you're going to execute? What are those critical dependencies? What does resourcing look like? I mentioned that that's a really key takeaway that a workshop can drive. And then it gets you into the brainstorming stage. An idea generation workshop can begin to get the team into a place where they're thinking about what the ideal experience looks like. What are the possible constructs that could solve a particular problem, for example?
And so that's really where you start to get centered in. You're going to start to get centered around insights, you're going to start to get centered around mapping, and then you're going to start to get centered around brainstorming. And those are the three areas that an idea generation workshop can really help you tackle.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, that's excellent. And what you've shared really could work in any context within all different industries and companies. Is there anything specific that you would say is really powerful within the FinTech industry or the moment that the financial services or FinTech industry is at right now?
Paige Bennett:
I think there are two things here. One is that knowledge exploration of what do we not know and how does that affect who our customers are? And especially within FinTech, you're dealing with something that is highly emotional, money, and something that is ever evolving. And so your customers might even stay the same, but their mental frameworks in which they think about their money might shift. The market shifts. There's a round of layoffs that everybody is going through, for example, that might shift how they're thinking about their money. And so it's really important to do that take on, okay, who are our customers? What does their current environment look like, and what do we not know about that? Especially within FinTech, what you knew four years ago is not necessarily going to still be true today and the way that your customers are handling their money might not be the same.
And so that's super, super critical to really dig into. The other thing is thinking about the ideal experience, and I'll use an example of a bank, think about your bank, the one that you've probably been with for a decade or more. And that might be your regular bank and you might be very loyal to that bank, but when you start to think about maybe the customer experience, the app experience, is it a great experience? What we often find is that people have this bank that they've been super devoted to, they're very loyal, but that doesn't mean that their experience has been good. That's often because there's so much complexity within the FinTech space when you're dealing with money, and so thinking about what does the ideal experience look like? What would it look like if we removed these blockers, if we removed this comprehension issue, if we removed this area of complexity? What would that ideal experience look like?
If you just think about it with your own example, what would your ideal experience look like with your bank? It likely looks quite different than what you have today. And so allowing people to think about that can be a really big unblock. I think even in other areas, in other companies I've worked in in the past, it can be very easy for us to get into a space where we are building an experience with the constraints that we have today and we're not allowing ourselves to think about, well, what if these constraints were removed? How much more would that better the customer? What can we do to remove these constraints? And so getting people into that Headspace can be really powerful.
Ash Oliver:
Such an important thing to underscore and I think highlights just the power within these workshops, but also the perpetual state of this being a reusable tool. It brings up a question in terms of who might be best suited to facilitate these workshops and for what you're highlighting, especially given your role as a research manager, do you feel that researchers are candidates for best able to facilitate these types of workshops?
Paige Bennett:
I think in many ways we are, and some of that comes down to the skillsets that we have to employ in our research work. For example, we are often moderators in interviews. We're moderating a lot in what we do, and a really critical component of success in workshopping is having a good moderator and making sure that your team is moving along. And so I think that definitely tends to be a strong suit and why user research tends to lead these workshops. We partner very closely with and so we've been in many workshops where we've had designers lead the workshops, and we find that that is also something that we've had success with. Designers can really excel at leading workshops. When our partners have either not been part of a workshop in the past or they've never led a workshop, but we see an opportunity where they could, and that could be because of many different reasons, maybe resourcing, maybe we need to be in another workshop or somewhere else.
We find that it's really about teaching your partners best practices and giving them the tools that they need for what a successful workshop looks like and then they can lead a successful workshop. So I would say that researchers are oftentimes wonderful at designing and moderating, leading workshops. It's probably going to feel natural to you in a lot of ways, but do you consider your cross-functional partners as possible moderators and look to them as having a leadership role in workshopping? Maybe not right now if they've never done it, but consider it an area of opportunity, and we might talk about this a little bit later, but one measure of success or one component of success in workshopping is to make sure that everybody has a role that they're playing. And so you are essentially training your cross-functional partners every time you have a workshop to eventually lead one because you're hopefully giving them a very active role. There may be the note taker, the timekeeper, maybe they're moderating a small group within the larger workshop. So they're building these skillsets that they might need to one day run their own workshop.
Ash Oliver:
I love that, to be not just an involved participant but also be building skills while playing a role. It makes me wonder how you got to this state. It's very clear that Affirm has taken on and seen the benefits from facilitating these workshops, but it's also not someone's sole role, which is interesting to see actually across the industry that there's companies like Airbnb that are now hiring for full-time internal facilitators for this very purpose. So I think this is where maybe Affirm is ahead of the curve, but I'm curious how you built the momentum for workshops and what challenges you may have encountered. What obstacles did you have to overcome in order to get the buy-in from putting forth these resources?
Paige Bennett:
I'm lucky in that I've been able to have a healthy experience with workshops at different companies I've worked at. So when I was at Medium, there was very much the sense that workshops were important in research and design. I think I've been really lucky that in the past I've been able to utilize and moderate and run workshops at different companies. So it was a very big part of the Medium design process and then Dropbox had a very healthy workshop culture. And I learned every time I was at a different company from wonderful facilitators. There were some amazing facilitators at Dropbox. I learned from one of my fellow colleagues, Jennifer, who was a fantastic facilitator and just really was able to hone my workshop skills and I saw what they could do at different types of companies too. Medium was very small. Dropbox was obviously quite a bit larger, but I saw the power that they could have.
And so when I came to Affirm, I knew where we wanted to get the research team, where we wanted to evolve the research practice and our partnership with product and with design, and I knew that workshops had the ability to do that. And we also were building out our teams and as we were bringing more people into Affirm, those people had also had experiences with workshops and so I was able to create a little team of advocates and build a case for workshopping. And then what you have to do with workshops is you have to prove through doing. So we would run a little workshop and we would show the value that it was able to have, the impact that it was able to make, and that allowed us to make the case for the next workshop and the next workshop and now we're in a place where we don't really have to make the case for the workshop anymore because they've seen the value. And so it takes time, but it's been a really fun journey to see it evolve.
Ash Oliver:
I love that you had this little workshopper squad doing this roadshow internally to be able to, as you say, show, don't tell. I think that's a great technique to deploy, especially for workshops. Was there any objections that you came across in terms of the time? 'Cause I can't help but think of the scenario where we've seen the age-old we don't want to run research because it's going to cost us too much time. I could see the same kind of adage being applied to workshops even though we know that it pays dividends down the road. So was there those kinds of objections that you faced initially or not so much?
Paige Bennett:
There definitely were objections. I think that you'll tend to find that you're going to really battle with a couple of things. One is attention, one is time for sure. The other can be budget. And so I think that time, absolutely you get pushback on investment of time and I think that there are a few ways you can address that. One is that you can align on what the goals and outputs are beforehand so that that is very clear to your partners and so that you're able to show them, okay, we want to get here, so here's what we're going to do to do that. The other thing is to communicate expectations and timing. So show them the expected outputs. So we are expecting to be able to do these three things from this workshop. We need an hour and a half of your team's time. And sometimes when you put it in that way, they're able to see that an hour and a half is very little time considering the amount of outputs that you're expected to clean.
And then the last thing is, and this is going to be something you have to prove through doing, but surface the time saved. So once you're able to get buy-in for that one workshop, when you are communicating the outputs and eventually the impact that it's made, also communicate the time that your team was able to save. So you were maybe able to save a few weeks in revving through different explorations, and that can certainly help because you're able to show your partners that we're saving you time, we're really saving you time in the end. And so that's how I found success in that. But you are going to get timing pushback. And even in a company that loves workshops, you're still going to get timing pushback depending on the state that the team is in. And so being able to do those things, aligning on the goals and outputs beforehand, communicating time saved as examples from past workshops and communicating on the expectations and timing, it's going to help make your case.
Ash Oliver:
Those are great recommendations. I'm wondering if we can dive a little bit deeper on the measurement of success. So it sounds like for sure this is set up in the expectation and alignment in the beginning, being able to showcase the value in the time saved. I'm wondering if there's any places that you've been able to showcase the success of the workshop as to how it led to improved product outcomes. Has there ever been any tie back to the workshop in that regard, how it's made an impact in changes in the products and results?
Paige Bennett:
Definitely, and I think that there are two stages where you measure success too. And so one is going to be right after the workshop has happened and that's where you're going to measure did it meet the goals of the workshop? Did everybody participate and contribute? That's an internal measurement of success for you as a researcher. And then there's the measurement of success that's going to be at the end of whatever product stage you're in. So depending on the product stage, let's say you're in idea generation, you want to be able to measure, did the workshop help identify the direction that you're wanting to go in? Did it help you understand who your customer base was and what their problems are and use cases? Did it help you address a pain point or did it help you iterate on an experience? And so depending on the product stage, you want to be able to show how the workshop led to those outputs.
And then it's about communicating it back to the team and to the partners. And when your team is taking that next milestone step and they're now on an experience based on what you were able to identify in a workshop, then you communicate that back to the team. You communicate back that you are really excited about this next milestone and you love to see how the workshop was able to lead to this. When something is eventually able to be shipped, then when you're partnering with maybe your PM, maybe your designer on maybe that initial ship communication where they're talking about everything that they've done and here's the team involved, advocate for a line in there where they mention like, we identified X, Y, Z initially in this workshop, because that'll communicate it out to a more broader audience as well and partners or your cross-functional stakeholders who maybe weren't part of the workshop. And so you're just beginning to almost play PR for workshopping and make that case and shopping it around your company as well.
It is up to you to make sure that you're drawing those lines because realistically not everybody might make them just naturally. So you do need to look for those lines, draw them and then communicate them back to your team. And eventually it's like a muscle, eventually your team is going to get to a point where they just know the value of workshops. They're going to be looking for those lines between what they've been able to do and how the workshop led to that and you're going to have to spend less time making the case.
Ash Oliver:
Such great specificity there in terms of the tactical ways that people can do that. I think that's a bit of a gray area. Maybe if you've led a workshop before or you've participated in one, you may be a little less familiar with how to be able to quantify that and get buy-in for conducting more of them, so I think that's such great advice. I'm curious if there's maybe a story or an example that stands out to you where a workshop that you were involved in had some sort of tangible outcome in the product at Affirm, if there's maybe a story that stands out.
Paige Bennett:
I can think of several. I think if you look at our product today and the things that we've been able to share and ship, much of that experience, especially I think recently, has come from user research. It has come from workshopping to get to those insights. I think when we look at how can we drive retention of our experience, for example, we held a workshop that was an insights and brainstorming workshop, so it was a little bit of a combo and we wanted to really understand one, can the solution that we want to build be used and two, how can it be improved? And so the team went through an exercise where they selected the two insights that were most problematic to customers and they were then able to find these offensive and defensive solutions. A lot of times in workshops we use themes and in this case I believe the theme was a soccer game.
So they were brainstorming these offensive and defensive solutions. Those solutions eventually went into the product themselves and are helping to drive that retention, and so I think that we're able to see those connections that were made now between the product experience that's out there and how we got to that product experience, which has been really exciting. I think for a researcher, you do need to understand that it's not immediate, especially with our work when we're doing any research that's more let's say foundational or exploratory, there's a long tail. It's not always immediate, and so know that if you're doing this workshop and the expected outcome is to build a solution that you are then going to put into market, that's not going to happen tomorrow. Know that there is this timeframe in which you will be able to measure ultimate success and be realistic about it.
Know that, okay, in five or six months I'm going to be able to see if the experience that we built into the product has moved the needle at all. So that I think is super helpful, just being able to be realistic about the timing of when you're going to see the final batch of results from the workshop.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, that's a compelling story as well. It seems like there's so much workshopping that's happening at Affirm and clearly have built a culture and championing for this to happen more often. It's really exciting. I'm again, just excited to see how more companies and teams start to adopt this. I'm wondering if maybe there's some sort of artifact or tracker that you've used to document the outcomes from the workshop. Is there some sort of repository of things that you use in order to do that?
Paige Bennett:
Dovetail is our research repository itself that we have all of our reports in, but we also have our research projects or scoping docs in there and workshops are part of that. And so what we like about that is that Dovetail, it has a pretty robust search function and so you can search a keyword and be able to pull up all of the work that's associated with that. What I like about that is if you search for a keyword, let's say repayment, and it pulls up all of the research around repayment, it also pulls up all of the scoping docs and workshopping plans around repayment. So you're able to see this history with how the team got there and not just the research report but the work that went into that research that was ultimately done. And so that's one really, I would say, easy way for us to have an artifact. Probably the easiest way for us to have an artifact that we can point the team back to because all of product has access to Dovetail so they can all go in and see that, so that makes it really easy.
I think other ways can get a little bit lost if you're trying to incorporate a FigJam board into something every time. We use FigJam extensively and workshopping, but because we are utilizing Dovetail as our single source of truth and we're including those workshop plans in our scoping docs, it allows for people to see that history, that paper trail, and that can be super helpful. It's almost like I was thinking about when you took a math class and you have to show your work between how you got to the answer. It's like that.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, and I love that that's just built into the workflow and process. You have the systems and tooling in place to be able to... I love how this is a very clear example of the maturity around not just workshops, but workshops that have been built into the research and collaboration processes at Affirm. So thinking about this kind of collaboration across teams and workshops being the vehicle to do so, this is very clear that Affirm has a point of view around its customer centricity. Have you ever done any co-design or collaboration with users or customers inside of workshops? Has it ever gone external?
Paige Bennett:
Yes, and this is probably some of my favorite workshopping, has been when we've been able to bring in users. And I did this at Dropbox too. The Dropbox example was pre-COVID, so we were able to be in person and we set up this workshop. It was an idea generation workshop that we set up almost like a Design Sprint in that we held three of them throughout the week. And so we held one on a Monday, for example, with our customers. Iterated on the experience. Then had the iterated experience on a Wednesday once again with our customers, iterated on that experience and then presented the final iterated experience on a Friday with customers and it was such a cool experience. We've done something, although we were in person, quite similar at Affirm too, and it is super helpful.
Co-creation is actually something that I utilize in my interviews, in my one-on-one research interviews quite often if the question that I'm trying to get to would be really helped by that method, and so I love incorporating something like a co-creation with a customer into a workshop. It can be so powerful, especially if you have people attending the workshop that are not often in front of customers. It can be a super, super powerful tool. So I am all for it. It is a little bit more complicated logistically. It is going to require more time, but it can be super powerful.
Ash Oliver:
And I think that the balance that you're talking about here is important as well, and I think as people might build their skills in workshopping, they'll be able to tell what type of workshop for what scenario. Not everything needs to be a workshop.
Paige Bennett:
Exactly.
Ash Oliver:
When are the appropriate moments to maybe do this co-creation with users? What a force multiplier. Honestly, there's so many things that you just mentioned in there, the connection with customers, the deep insights, how much ground you're able to cover in just one week. You can see how this would create so much impact. I want to talk a little bit about the techniques involved here. Are there any collaboration techniques or maybe best practices that you've seen consistently work well over your time in facilitating workshops?
Paige Bennett:
I think that the collaboration tool that you're using is super important, especially now that we are often in a hybrid work environment, and so occasionally we will do workshops together in person much more often than we are all remote, and so the collaboration tools that you have are really, really critical to your success. In our case, we're using FigJam. One of the really important parts to making sure that your workshop is running smoothly is to make sure that all of the participants in the workshop are understanding and able to access FigJam. You might be listening to this and think, well, I know FigJam like the back of my hand and so does my designer. Awesome. But let's say that you have some salespeople in your workshop or somebody from your risk team or even your customer ops team and they're not as familiar with FigJam.
You need to make sure that they first of all have access to everything they need to have access to and know the tool, know what it can do, and are comfortable with it before the workshop. You don't want to spend valuable time in your workshop making sure that they know how to pin a post-it. Taking some extra time beforehand and making sure that there's a little tutorial you can give them so that they are familiar with the tool is really critical for success. The collaboration tools in themselves have been really, really important. I think if our collaboration tool isn't working or if it wasn't as robust as it was, it would have been a really big pain point in our ability to have a successful workshop. And so I think that that's something that's always top of mind for us.
Ash Oliver:
The tooling and logistics is not to be overlooked. I think that that's an important component to making everything move smoothly. Have there been any instances where you've had to do a hybrid workshop wherein some people might be in a room together and some people are remote?
Paige Bennett:
Yes, very much so. It's really important that the moderator make sure that they are bringing in the remote participants and that they are being heard and that their face is perhaps pinned up on the screen so that everybody can see it consistently. Making sure that everybody is aware that there are remote participants, making sure that you're calling on them. Maybe you have to record some of their feedback or notes for them, just making sure that the technology that you have is there so that they're able to be seen and heard and participate. That's a pretty, I would say, normal circumstance where when we'll have team on sites, but they'll always be a few people who are remote and when we're running those workshops, that is the case. And so as a moderator, it becomes a few extra steps that you need to take to make sure that you are incorporating those people.
One thing that might be super helpful, as I mentioned a little while ago, that you want everybody to have a role in your workshop, so tagging somebody who's in the room with you as their sole role is to make sure that the remote participants are seen and heard. And so it takes some of the weight off of you because you're also going to be moderating many other things and that person can be responsible for making sure that the room is listening to them, incorporating their feedback, looking at their post-its, that they are feeling involved. And that can be super helpful.
Ash Oliver:
I think having the in-person individual play that role is a way to get them involved, but also a good bridge to the people that are participating remotely. Thinking back to the example that you shared where you had that co-creation portion throughout that week, how much momentum that must have generated and enthusiasm and engagement, how do you keep that going post workshop and drive this continuous improvement?
Paige Bennett:
That's a really good question. I think one of the things that workshops can help you do is align on actions, and so having those milestones that you're setting before your workshop ends of check-ins that you're doing with your team progress reports, whether it's like a weekly sync of some sort and making sure that you're already aware of those and those can be really good for driving momentum. Making sure that you are already thinking about the milestones that will drive momentum. I think that it's really nice that a workshop, especially one in which you have a co-creation session with customers can provide momentum for a good long time, but I think that having those milestones already built in where you're going to come back with the team in two weeks and do X, Y, Z. Oftentimes workshops are creating additional research, so an outcome of that workshop might be that you are doing this research project so you have momentum that is already being built in there where you're going to be then kicking off this research project or you're going to be testing this wire frame, just knowing what those are.
What you don't want to do is have a workshop where you haven't aligned on any actions as next steps and you don't have any milestones because that's when the momentum fades and that's when it becomes a lot more vague as to what value people got out of that workshop.
Ash Oliver:
I think that's really an important aspect. There's a lot of planning that goes into this so that it doesn't just end when the workshop ends, as you mentioned. I want to circle back to a concept that you had introduced more at the top of the episode around the skills and certainly being able to draw the parallels for UX researchers that might be well positioned to facilitate workshops. What do you see workshops contributing to the professional development or the skill enhancement of team members involved in product development?
Paige Bennett:
That's a really good question. A few different things I can see as helping really tie to their growth and their career development. One is their presentation skills. I think that it's great for a more junior researcher to step into a moderator role. And really the way that you become a better moderator is by doing, so I really encourage my researchers on my team if they don't feel comfortable moderating, if they're nervous, the way that they become more confident is by running more and more workshops. And so it's great for a junior researcher who's wanting to build out their presentation skills because they are going to be speaking a lot. They're going to have to think about succinctly communicating with their team, and they're going to have to think about not just spoken communications, but written communications beforehand and after. And so those are all really good areas to refine their skills with.
The other thing that it can really be helpful for is especially when you're trying to tie your workshop to a strategy like my product team is taking on this strategy, they're deciding on this direction as an output from my workshop. That is super powerful because you are going to have to make the business case for your work impacting strategy when it comes to promotion cycle time, especially as you're wanting to grow from a mid-level researcher to a senior researcher. It's going to be expected that your work is impacting strategy. If you're able to show how your workshop was allowing your team to decide on a direction, that goes in your promotion packet. And so that can be a really powerful area for somebody to lean into as well.
Ash Oliver:
That's incredible. I wonder, is there any resources or training that you've pointed your team towards or that you yourself have used in order to scale up in facilitating workshops?
Paige Bennett:
That's a really good question. I think there are some good resources out there that are written. I think Google has a really robust Design Sprint practice, and they've written on their Design Sprints a lot, and there's obviously a lot of correlation between Design Sprints and workshopping. So I think going back and reading some of their resources, always super, super helpful. As well as I'm obviously biased, but reading articles on Medium around workshopping is super helpful. Really you learn by doing and by asking people to. One thing I would do at Dropbox is I was very privileged to work with some excellent senior and staff researchers and they were very seasoned in their ability to run workshops, and so I would draft my workshop plan and I would send it to them and have them look at it, and the feedback that they gave me was so super valuable.
So I would say in addition to reading some different articles out there, also identify somebody. If they're not at your company, then maybe do a little bit of working and find and see if they have availability on LinkedIn or if you're part of something like ADPList and allow them to share their feedback with you. Write up your plan, send it to them, let them be able to give their feedback. That is so helpful. I learned so much from just having them read my workshop plan and say, this works, this wouldn't work, and why. And also observing them, just observing how they facilitated, how they took surprises and things that we wouldn't expect to happen and they just ran with it. It's similar as to being able to observe seasoned researchers moderating an interview. We just learn so much. I would highly recommend either getting feedback from your colleagues or finding somebody in the field that is knowledgeable about workshops and see if they have the ability and time to provide feedback for you.
Ash Oliver:
Great advice. I think for sure there's a lot of resources out there, and to your point, the Sprint book even by Jake Knapp is a good place to get started, although it's very specific to the design process. There's a lot of adaptability from that. Certainly a lot of books on facilitation techniques in general that are just going to help aid you even further, but I think that the best technique there is to start trying your hand at that and leverage the people that have maybe done this before to help provide that guidance. That's great advice. I want to ask you some forward-looking questions because I think if you're in the workshop facilitator space, there's a question bouncing around in terms of how AI might be incorporated into workshops or how it might reduce the need for workshops, for example. So I want to touch on AI in a moment, but to get started, how do you see the role of workshops evolving in the future of UX research and in product development?
Paige Bennett:
I think we'll be moving into a space where it's not just solely the researcher/designer's role, but our PMs are doing it, our PMMs are doing it. I think we're also going to see a space in which we get regular participants from maybe roles that are already regularly [inaudible 00:41:30], for example. And so I can definitely see that taking place in the next few years.
Ash Oliver:
I see that being a next step as well. And it makes sense also that this would permeate into other areas of the business as maybe research and design is a little bit more adjacent to adopting these types of techniques given the design and UX process, but I see that definitely being an aspect that can be shared across any part of the organization. Now, thinking about the emerging trends and technologies, even Big Jam, for example, and Miro both have AI types of functionality within their whiteboarding and workshop tooling. What do you believe the impact of AI might have on workshops in the coming years? Do you have any thoughts in that regard?
Paige Bennett:
I do, yeah. I think it could become a very powerful tool in terms of competitive research, and so oftentimes, let's say an idea generation workshop where you're trying to really cover that knowledge base of what you know and what you don't know, competitive research is likely a component of that. What third party research is out there that could help us with this? What do we know about our competitors' experience? And so I can definitely see AI as a tool for being able to gather and synthesize that. I think as AI becomes better and better about pulling in relevant and responsible and trusted material, it can become a powerful tool. And being able to gather that and having that already ready for you, it could cut down on the timing of pre-planning in your workshopping, and I could definitely see it as a power tool there.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I agree. And these metaphors have been used for AI in other areas as well, how AI is being utilized in UX research, for example, or in design. I don't see it as a replacement, but certainly as a powerful sidekick so it'll be really interesting to see how this emerges. And potentially could be an accelerant as well, where the rise of workshopping taking place is akin to the rise of AI as well. So we might see that happening more and more.
Paige Bennett:
I don't think it will be a replacement because part of the power from workshopping is getting the people in the room and thinking about this, getting them out of their own heads, getting them to think about explorations that are not privy to the constraints that we're having to deal with, or getting them to take a strongly held assumption and realize that that's what it is. And so I don't think that AI will ever be able to replace that ability, but it can become a really powerful tool in shortening the timeline, which could be an even better business case for companies where that's a big factor, is timing or resourcing it, or I don't have time to pull together all of the competitive research that I need to do before this. And so if it could accelerate that, then it might mean that it opens up workshops to happen even more frequently at some companies.
Ash Oliver:
And that I think could really be a, like I said, force multiplier for what is able to be accomplished. So it's very exciting to think about. Paige, this has been great. I totally think that this has been an even deeper dive into this topic. For anyone that didn't catch your Disco Comp presentation last year, they should check that out. I think it's a great accompaniment to this episode. I share your love and enthusiasm for workshopping, so it's been really fun to talk to you about it.
Paige Bennett:
It has been. Thank you so much.
Ash Oliver:
I want to transition to our last segment of the episode. This is where we ask some personal questions just to get to know each guest. And my first question for you is what's one thing that you've done in your career that you think has helped you succeed that few others do?
Paige Bennett:
So I used to be a news reporter. My background is in journalism, and I was a TV reporter right out of college. When I transitioned into user research, one thing I did was I still looked at my stakeholders, anybody that I was speaking to, presenting to with my research insights as my audience, just like I would think about when I was a news reporter. And we knew many things about our audience. We knew, for example, what grade level comprehension they usually set at. So when I was taking really complicated information... I was covering, for example, some very complicated insurance stories right after a major hurricane, and I had to really put it in layman's terms, and I did the same approach in thinking about my stakeholders and people that were perhaps at the time, very skeptical of research. I studied them as if I would study my audience, and I communicated to them with that knowledge.
So I didn't go in with my own communication style and expecting it to fit to them. I really did hone it to how I thought that they would best take that information like I would have if I was a news reporter. I thought about what's my headline? I'm not necessarily competing with a remote control and then turning off the TV, but I am competing with a lot of other stuff. So what's my headline? What's the hook? And I did that and continue to do that, and I found it to be quite successful in my communication because communication is so critical for success as a user researcher.
Ash Oliver:
That's tremendous. I love the transferable skills there. That's great advice. My next question is what is the industry related, and feel free to use industry related in broad strokes here, but what is the industry related book that you've given or recommended the most and why?
Paige Bennett:
So it is definitely Jan Chipchase's The Field Study Handbook, and I give it to people who might never ever be on the field. And I think especially now in this post COVID world, a lot of our field work has gotten paused. This isn't paused, but coming from a television background and then I did ethnography in the Middle East for several years, our customers are not using our products in isolation. There is a whole environment happening around them and that is affecting how they use our products, whether it's the Subway or their home or their internet connection or a million other things. And even if we're never going to be able to get into a room with them and physically their environment, understanding those factors and how we can observe and understand those factors and understand how it affects their behavior with our product is really, really critical.
And I love that The Field Study Handbook, it gets you into that mindset of people are more than just their actions, the mental frameworks, the cultures, all of those aspects that are impacting their behavior. And becoming this student of observation is even more difficult to do in a remote environment, and that's why it's even more important. And so I love that book and I recommend it to anyone, even if they will never step foot in the field, so to speak, they will only ever do research over Zoom. It is still, I think, so valuable to read.
Ash Oliver:
I wasn't actually familiar with that one, so I'm really excited to check that out. My last question is, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Paige Bennett:
I have an unusual skill, when I was thinking about this, that I actually bring it to my work. This was going to sound so random, but I tell you there is a tie here. First of all, one thing I love is listening to... I'm in New Orleans, so maybe this is just par for the course, but listening to jazz music in the morning as I am going through my emails. Love it. I turn on my little lamps and my candle and I just have a good old time before my meetings start. That's something I love. Unusual skills that I have. I gained in the time that I was working on the field in several countries throughout the Middle East, and that is that I'm not making this up, I'm a trained hostage negotiator. I have skills to negotiate should I ever be in a hostage situation. And I gave a talk a year and a half ago about ties between the skills I learned as a hostage negotiator and how we work with our cross-functional partners.
And there's a lot of good ties that I could go into, but a lot of it comes down to observing, understanding your environment, communication. And so I've been able to bring that into my work here, which sounds ridiculous but true. And so I just think that's really funny. I always get a little cackle out of thinking about that.
Ash Oliver:
I would've never guessed, but I could also say you're such a poised and articulated and calm person and presence, so I feel like you must have been very successful at that. Paige, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you being here and sharing all of your experience across all of the companies you've been a part of and how you've been able to lead workshops there. So thank you so much for sharing this.
Paige Bennett:
Thank you so much for having me. I loved chatting about this.
Ash Oliver:
Thanks for listening to The Optimal Path, brought to you by Maze, the continuous product discovery platform designed for product teams. If you like what you heard today, you can find resources and companion links in the show notes. If you want to hear more or subscribe to the podcast newsletter for exclusive content, you can find The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. And send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@maze.design. And until next time.