In this episode of The Optimal Path, Reggie Murphy joins host Ash Oliver to discuss how Zendesk scaled UX research, elevating the practice from a supporting function to a strategic partner to the business.
In this episode of The Optimal Path, Reggie Murphy joins host Ash Oliver to discuss how Zendesk scaled UX research, elevating the practice from a supporting function to a strategic partner to the business.
Reggie shares how he led the development of training programs, automated processes, and ResearchOps to enable cross-functional teams to conduct research independently. Discover how democratizing research creates a more customer-centric culture and how these changes have shifted UX research from a gatekeeping role to a more collaborative, strategic position.
About Reggie:
Reggie Murphy is a seasoned strategic research and insights leader with over 20 years of experience leading teams to understand human behavior and create innovative products and solutions that meet the needs of their users. He has a proven track record of success across various industries, including technology, media, finance, and healthcare. He's currently a Senior Director and Head of UX Research at Zendesk. Prior to his current role, Reggie has built and led research teams at USA TODAY, Facebook, Vanguard, and Twitter.
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You can connect with Reggie on LinkedIn or get mentored by him on ADPList
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Ash Oliver:
Much like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, organizational transformations can usher in a new state of existence, yet it's not a mere event, it's a deliberate and ongoing journey aimed at driving high-value impact at both individual and organizational levels.
Reggie Murphy:
At Zendesk, we believe in being customer first, and everything that we do is focused on trying to best help the customer achieve their goals. Democratizing our work is in service to that. We're going to develop the best tools that we can to help the company, to help others in the company conduct research.
Ash Oliver:
Today on The Optimal Path, we're taking an inside look at the research transformation journey at Zendesk, uncovering the reasons why and the art of how they scaled their practice to successfully democratize and become strategic partners to the business.
I'm Ash Oliver, and this is The Optimal Path, a podcast about user research and product decision making brought to you by Maze. Our guest is Reggie Murphy. Reggie is a seasoned strategic research and insights leader with over 20 years of experience. He has a proven track record of success across various industries, including technology, media, finance, and healthcare. He's currently a senior director and head of UX research at Zendesk. Prior to his current role, Reggie has built and led research teams at USA Today, Facebook, Vanguard, and Twitter.
I've been really looking forward to our topic as we get a behind-the-scenes look at Zendesk's research transformation journey, so thanks for being here.
Reggie Murphy:
Thanks for having me, Ash. I really appreciate you inviting me.
Ash Oliver:
I thought it might be best to start by going back in time. Maybe you could set the scene for what research looked like at Zendesk when you first joined.
Reggie Murphy:
Let's define research so that we can understand the area that we're talking about here because there are several teams that conduct different types of research at Zendesk. We have our market intelligence team, and they primarily conduct large scale surveys across the market into our customers. We also have a competitive intelligence team, who's looking across the industry and trying to stay on top of how our competitors are doing. We also have a team that's responsible for collecting customer feedback through online surveys and product interactions online, et cetera.
Our team UX research, that's the focus here because that's the team that I was brought in to lead. So what the team looks like, we are part of the product design organization, and that is within the larger product organization, which is about 1,800 folks. About a third of the company is the product organization. The UX research team is responsible for working with product and design engineering leaders to understand how our customers are experiencing Zendesk, and to help inform the product strategy about what we're building and shipping.
We had eight researchers ICs, and two managers, and two research operations managers, so a team of 12. What was important at that time for the company was we had to build and ship. When I stepped into the role, I noticed that our team primarily operated as a supporting function to the product and design organization. What I mean by that is that we were sort of quasi-embedded into different work streams, so agent experience work stream, admin experience. These are some products that we have at the company, guide, explore. We had a mobile group.
I believe that the research that we were conducting was primarily tactical. We were doing some foundational research, but it appeared to me that our work was primarily tactical. I didn't believe that our team was appropriately sized, number one, to be embedded, but just how we were configured didn't set us up for success. It just set us up to have requests coming in and we do our best to fulfill them. Over the last couple of years, we've obviously changed it, but that was the setup.
Ash Oliver:
That's a great snapshot. I think that's going to be very resonant because I think a lot of organizations have either been on their own transformation journey from a similar place or are in that moment in time right now. Certainly, by taking a look at the organizational components that allow research to happen and to scale, I think, is a major undertaking. How did you approach the conversation to start towards shifting how you could move more into an embedded model?
Reggie Murphy:
At that period of time a couple of years ago, the market dynamics, I knew that there were going to be constraints on adding new headcount to my team. So we had those limitations from an organizational standpoint. If this is all I have and we're not growing, how can we create more efficiencies in the team? So I connected with our research operations team and I said, "Hey, look, we need to modify," and they were all in because they were feeling some pressure and strain of being just a two-person team and having to help the researchers recruit, incentivize, and all of the operational parts of what is UX research. They were feeling some strain just based on how we were constructed.
So I said, "Well, first, let's try to understand what types of research we're conducting." So the first three or four months that I was a leader of this team, we did an audit of just what types of research are we conducting, both qual and quant tactical foundation. We looked at all different types. We looked at all of the usability tests, the concept tests, contextual micro array, everything that we could learn about the way we were working current state. That's what we did, so basically a snapshot.
From this audit, I learned that over half of the work that we were conducting at that time was focused at the end of the product development life cycle, and that only about a third of our work was around the beginning of that cycle. So in the problem definition, if you think about the way products are built, it's like, are we building the right thing and then are we building the thing right? I believe that we needed to shift the focus of our team's work to the beginning of that cycle. Are we helping our cross-functional partners identify the right problem to solve and how do we know it's the right problem?
In order to do that, there were some things that we needed to change just about how we were working. Number one, we needed to operate more as strategic researchers, and that is working with our partners and helping them understand what is the problem that we're really trying to solve for the customer, and out of all the problems, how do we know that particular thing is the right problem that we needed to focus our attention on? Number two, we needed to develop deeper, more collaborative relationships with our design product and engineering leads.
What I observed is that while they were meetings that we had with our cross-functional stakeholders, these meetings need to be set up on a more consistent cadence. I'm talking about the key strategic meetings where roadmap conversations are happening. My observation, we weren't necessarily connected to those consistently. So I believe that that to me is where research can have a lot of influence.
Another thing we started doing was something that I borrowed from my days working at the company now formerly known as Twitter, X. We had this exercise called I Wish I Knew, and it's essentially just a brainstorming exercise that it's really important to do at the beginning of roadmap planning cycles, quarterly or at the beginning of half. We started instituting this as a way of bringing together everybody that's on the product team. What are all the different questions that are still outstanding in our mind that we believe that we need to answer in order to achieve, in order to be successful reaching this OKR? So this exercise we began to do with our partners, and it really hit the markup very, very well. I believe that our researchers were excited to do this because it was literally helping build what could become a research roadmap.
One of the things we did is I began to evaluate how we communicated our insights across the organization. I saw that we're sharing findings, we were sharing insights, but how much were we really helping guide the team in expressing what, based on the research, the team should do? So we started writing POVs that complemented the research deck. It's like, "Okay." At the very beginning, okay, so based on all of what we know about this problem that the customer is having, here's what we believe you should do. Here's what we should build and ship. Here's what we should not build or ship." I believe once we started doing that, it really, really helped provide strategic consultancy that, as I mentioned before, that I believe that we needed to have to have more impact.
Then finally, we needed to be more strategic and thoughtful in where we aligned against the work streams and the company priorities. It was my goal to align the research team against those priorities. Now, it wasn't like we were not going to do any other work, but with the team, as small as my team was at the time and pretty much still is, in order for us to work more efficiently and to have more impact, we need to be aligned to the work that is the most critical that the company is conducting and create partnerships there. That was really, I think, a big, big piece of this transformation is aligning ourselves more appropriately to the most important work.
Ash Oliver:
There's so much to what you just shared. I think it's such an enormous endeavor, shifting the way that the research is done, where it's done, advocating for the mindset and the beliefs that are shifting, the change management that had to occur, honing the communication and the relationship building that's involved. I mean, there are so many elements. Honestly, each one of them could be its own mini masterclass. I'd love to know where you encountered some resistance and maybe how you approached any of the obstacles.
Reggie Murphy:
Yeah, that's a great question. Anytime there's change, especially as a new leader coming in, there's going to be some resistance, "Is our research going to take longer? Is it going to cost more? Is it going to be too complicated?" I think there's always those questions, and some of those popped up. The environment was already set. We already hit a threshold that, "You know what? It's not sustainable for us to work in this current model," like, "We've got to change in order to deliver a more impactful experience to our stakeholders, to provide better information to help them make decisions." People were open-minded to us changing how we worked.
Part of how we had to work was, "Hey, we couldn't do all the research that was needed." So there was going to have to be some element of self-service. When I say self-service, I mean democratization, like we were going to have to try to figure out a way to enable others in the organization to do some of the more small types of research studies. That particular change is hard because, first of all, it's like, "How do we set it up? What's that enablement and education system look like?" especially for non-research people who as by profession aren't experts in conducting research. So how will we tackle that? We had to work with legal in order to help produce those things for us so that we made it easy for our cross-functional partners who are going to conduct research and a DIY model. You want it to be able to provide that information for them so that you can have it really easily.
So the key here is that we just needed our two-person research ops team to create a different working model because they were spending a lot of time on the recruitment part of research, recruiting and scheduling. There were some other technical challenges where our systems weren't as streamlined and our processes weren't as automated. So we needed to build a system where it was more turnkey, more templatized. We were able to provide information that we could just pull off the shelf. So that was our strong partnership with legal was able to help us do that. That was essential for us because with a small team, the research operations team, I needed to shift them into a configuration where they were working on the most important things in the ops practice. I think that that was a huge obstacle at first, but we did what we needed to do to tackle it.
Ash Oliver:
This is so resonant, and I think really speaks to the moment meeting the demand for research that is outpacing the volume of researchers. Re-ops is an interesting focal point, that being an aspect of its own transformation journey. Maybe this is where a lot of this research operations practice has gotten its start maybe being in service to the research organization, taking on a lot of the recruitment processes and the scheduling and things as you've mentioned, but moving that part of the organization into more of the enablement aspect, really helping to up level the entire research practice. It's tremendous to see how we've been able to do this across such a large organization and with such a small team to begin with. What mechanisms and processes are in place to support the non-titled or non-specialized researchers to be more effective in their own self-service of this research learning?
Reggie Murphy:
Maybe month three or four in this role, I had completed all of my company training modules in the learning management tool, the code of ethics and all of that stuff. You have to go through all of that training. So I just completed that. We were at a meeting talking about a way that we can realize this vision of enabling more people around the company to conduct our own more small scale research, and I said, "Well, why don't we build a training module in the company learning and development program, the learning management tool?"
At that time, we didn't know if we could even do that. I asked that question a lot, "What if we constructed a end-to-end DIY training program so that it's in the learning and management system and all we need to do is send the link and we would essentially require anyone who wanted to conduct research, they had to go through this training program?" It took us a while to pull it together, to plan it and pull it together, but it has really changed the game for us in many, many, many ways.
We created four or five modules, which first one just gives a nice overview of what is user research, why is it important, what's the value of it. There's a module on sampling and how do you sample the right audience and what tools do you use. We provide all the templates that you would need in order to execute there, then a module that is literally a how-to module on conducting a usability test. Literally, it's an education program.
We thought, "Wow. If we built this, we'd be able to easily scale it across the product design org as well as the larger product organization, and we would have a bunch of enablement sessions in order to help folks do it." So it was really important in terms of scale and in terms of being able to just create something that we're proud of to help enable a team to conduct their own sort of DIY, self-service research. It's been great.
Ash Oliver:
I love the in-house training and onboarding, being able to conduct research. I mean, the program that the team created, it's clearly generated a massive impact and is a huge factor in your success for scaling research. A lot of the conversation around democratization or empowering non-specialized researchers really is trying to walk the line between that empowerment towards self-service while also being able to ensure the quality and the rigor is there, and that there are well-understood and well-defined boundaries around where there could be risk if in the hands of less experienced individuals with research.
So it's clear that the onboarding and training programs that were created help to not only provide the level of education that's needed, but ensure that there is an ability to maintain the research as high quality. Were there any other resources or programs that you provided to support this or to check in routinely and ensure this quality was maintained?
Reggie Murphy:
In addition to creating this DIY training program, we refined our research request process. We had a way that people can reach out to us, but the problem was people were reaching out to us for research requests on Slack. It was too much. We were just receiving research requests in multiple different ways. So we streamlined that to have ... There's one way now that we triage research request. So let's say someone who isn't partnered with a researcher, they'll put in their request and say, "Hey, we have this question that we want to solve or answer. Can you help us?"
In that moment, we will offer them some options. One option is going through the DIY training program and their answer to their question, we say, "Hey, you can do this yourself. Really easy. Go through this." So that's one path that they can go at. The other path is perhaps they just need some consultation with us. So we have a Office Hour system set up, and so they can come to our Office Hour, talk with a researcher, and maybe we have already conducted research and answered the question that they're trying to answer. So we then point them to our research and insight center that we built as well.
The other is, "Well, this sounds like a question that you really need to partner with," and then if we have capacity, we'll work with them. That's the model that we now have in place. Now, to answer your question more directly about the quality of research and how do we maintain that with, let's say, if they decide to go in the DIY route, we still have checkpoints for them to reach out to us if they have questions or if we need to intervene. There's still a whole lot of enablement that we need to do around this to help ensure the quality of the work, but I would have to say that for the most part, I think we have been successful in the research that we've seen being conducted by our cross-functional partners.
Ash Oliver:
That makes sense, and I think that this is something that is in discussion as well for researchers, especially in light of the democratization topic, perhaps moving more from this single source of truth and insight in the team around research, and research really only being conducted by specialized researchers to shifting the researchers into more of a guide, allowing them to empower more people within the organization to learn. Was that something that your research team naturally was motivated by or did that take some convincing and some discussion around the democratization change?
Reggie Murphy:
It's challenging for us, especially those of us who've been doing it as long as I have to give it up and have somebody else do it. I look across some of the other functions and I'm going, "Is the engineering team doing this also? Are they letting us, people like me cohort?" So I've gotten past that. I know this is important. At Zendesk, we believe in being customer first, and everything that we do is focused on trying to best help the customer achieve their goals.
So given that big company philosophy and mandate, I believe that we have to sometimes make adjustments in how we think our working model should be. So democratizing our work is in service to that. We are a 10, 12-person team, so we're not able to do it all, and that's the reality of it. I think our team was up for the challenge to say, "Okay. This is all for helping our company become the best customer first company that we can be." Absolutely we're going to develop the best tools that we can to help others in the company conduct research.
I think that Zendesk is on a learning culture curve. I believe that not only are we really interested in building and shipping out great features and functionality to help our customers win, we're also interested in really understanding the problems that they're having and how we can help best solve them as much as possible, and that's done through research. It's my belief that everybody at the company can be a researcher.
I believe that the research team can be more than what we sometimes think that we are, and we just have to think a little differently about it. If that means teaching others, non-researchers across the company, some fundamentals so that they can conduct some research, that's one or maybe leaning into some other opportunities where we can help facilitate conversations that we're having with customers.
Ash Oliver:
I love your philosophy there, and I think it's evident that Zendesk has a culture of customer focus, and especially if that is embedded within upper management and leadership, that moves mountains in being able to translate that into becoming a company that learns, but the research team, as you've described, is such a fundamental component in making that possible. I think that's where the promise and the inspiration may come in researchers because they're not being removed from that process. It's just a different shape to their role in the company and maybe what some of that work looks like.
You've alluded to some of the research work for the specialized UX research team to move upstream a bit and focus more on strategic and maybe more generative research, but I think that's another component where the value of a specialized and trained researcher also lives and being involved a bit more on the strategic side of the organization. I don't know if there's anything you want to speak to there.
Reggie Murphy:
Companies who have teams like ours, I believe, value our expertise. My team wouldn't be the size that it is now if Zendesk didn't believe that we, as a research professional, we didn't have value. I think that we just have to continue upgrading how we work, and that means we have to seek opportunities and be proactive in seeking opportunities where we can add value. Just conducting user research isn't the only way that a user researcher can have value at a company. Our team is on a maturity curve there, and I believe that we're seeing a lot of benefits in showing up as a strategic research consultant.
What does that mean? Well, we can sit down and really help you understand what is the problem that we're trying to solve for the customer. How do we know it's a problem and how do we know how big it is and what does the world look like for that customer if we solve it? How do we measure success? These are the types of conversations that researchers can have and should be having with their cross-functional partners. That's how you become a true partner, and you move out of the research requests 100% framework.
I think a team can have a way for teams to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we need this," and we deploy what we need to deploy to help them, but I think the majority of the work that we should be doing is really sitting down and helping the cross-functional leadership of a work stream tackle the big problems and issues that our customers are having.
Ash Oliver:
It's very motivating and inspiring to hear that this is just a moment of evolution within the practice, so there should be some anticipation towards re-imagining how this work and value is constructed. So beyond successfully scaling the research and learning culture across the company, how else has this impacted Zendesk, and were there any unexpected benefits or insights gained from empowering your cross-functional partners to conduct more research that maybe you didn't anticipate originally?
Reggie Murphy:
I think that, first, I believe that our cross-functional partners realize now that there's a difference in the research that they can do on their own and the research that they need an expert researcher to do. So I think that now they sort of see, "Well, you all have really hard jobs." It was a benefit to us because it proves our values. Another benefit has been our team is now becoming better at balancing speed and rigor, long-term discovery work versus short-term tactical work, being better and me being more thoughtful in determining the types of research that is needed for different programs. We're helping our work stream teams understand and make decisions about what is best and needed for the particular problem that they're trying to solve.
Some cases, we may need to prioritize speed so that we can help get some customer understanding to get us to a certain point with some directional insight, to help us make a decision quickly. In other cases, we have a little bit more time, the situation is appropriate for that, and we have to construct a research program that goes a little bit deeper to help bring more learning to help us make a decision. So I think overall, this transformation helped us become better at making these types of trade-offs and determine what's best work that is needed for the particular situation.
Ash Oliver:
Thinking about that, in terms of the maybe moments that the researchers are brought in and how these cross-functional relationships and collaborations occur, what kinds of impacts have you seen this make on the future of the product or the product roadmap or decision making that's being done at the product level where we've seen that evolve?
Reggie Murphy:
There was a moment recently where we're working with some stakeholders for a very important product area, and they were having some challenges. One thought was that, "Oh, we may be having a retention problem." After deeper research, after working with them very closely and having the time and dedicating the time to some more strategic exploratory work, we discovered that we didn't have a retention problem. The problem was actually an adoption problem. This is where, I think, UX research really brings value to a company is through our work we discover that, "Whoa, we are thinking about the problem in the wrong way." A retention problem is definitely different than an adoption problem.
So it was a pivotal moment for this particular team, a big win for research for coming to the table and helping them understand this realization. So they completely changed how they were looking at their roadmap as a result of this work. That was a huge moment for us, and it showed the impact that we're having in this new construction of our team.
I think another example is I think because of the value that we've brought to decision making across the org, since we've gone through this transformation, I believe our product development teams, as they plan and look at their strategic roadmaps, they are calling out specific areas of exploration that research can lean in. I think that was a huge development for us, and it shows the impact that our team is having.
Ash Oliver:
I want to take a quick moment to just say only two years at a company and all of this transformation has occurred. I know you're not the only person involved here, but that is just an incredible evolution to help champion over just two short years there.
Reggie Murphy:
I'm proud of my team. I'm proud of what we've been able to do. It's been a lot of work, a lot of available grease, but I'm just proud that they've bought into this vision of becoming a much more strategically focused research team, and you can see the impact that we're having.
Ash Oliver:
You can tell from the way that you articulate this all the way down to the tactical detail of how you've been able to achieve it. It's obvious. I want to circle back to your point you had made earlier. How does crafting a strong point of view and narrative fit into the work that the research team does, and how does it enable you to communicate and socialize the impact that you're having as a team?
Reggie Murphy:
Oh, I appreciate you asking this question. Over the years, I have seen many research presentations for the various companies I've worked for. I've seen many that fall short of expectations, and 99% of the times, the reason they fall short is because they simply just share a summary of what we observed, "Here's what customers said. Here's how they reacted." All of that is good stuff, but as I mentioned earlier, so what? What should we do now? This is what our cross-functional partners want to know from research. Out of all the research I've conducted in my career, they want strategic guidance about which way they should move.
So crafting points of view and installing them in our research presentations, I think, has been essential because what we're saying is out of all of what we know about the problem at hand, all the research, all the qual research we've conducted, all the quant research we've conducted, all of the historical research that we've conducted on this topic, out of everything, here is now what we believe you should do.
I know it sounds odd. You may think that, "Oh, are you not bringing an objective view to this?" Well, of course we are. We're researchers. We have to. Now, there may be a moment in a conversation with our cross-functional partners where what we are saying in our point of view can't be debated. Maybe there's disagreement, but that's okay. I believe that a POV, what it helps us do is bring a point of view into the conversation to spark discussion and where that, "Hey, maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle there," but I feel like that's where our teams bring our most value. So I think that that is an effective way to communicate research and insights, and I think we're on our way to doing that even better each time we go out and share our research.
Ash Oliver:
I absolutely love that. I think that's such a tremendous and powerful thing to focus on, and just fascinating to hear how you've started to hone and develop that across the team. It leads me to think about what advice you might have for other companies and teams looking to mature their research practices and transition from more of a request-based model to more of this self-serve and democratized and strategic research approach.
Reggie Murphy:
Well, I think the first thing, all research teams need a vision. What do you want to be? In part, that's based on what does the organization need, and so different organizations need different things at different times. So look in your particular organization and say, "Okay. Well, what is our vision? What do we want to be? What does our organization need?" These are hard questions, so you have to really ask them hard questions and then, "Do I have the resources to achieve this vision? If not, do I have the ability to acquire those resources?" Starting there is essential. You're setting a vision.
Number two is that I believe that, especially if you're a new leader coming into a group, is that you've got to assess the current state. What are your team's skills right now? What are you currently doing? What does the operations look like? Do a full assessment. I spent probably four or six months when I first joined Zendesk doing this, and I think it was really helpful because at the end of that, I developed a point of view around what we needed to do.
If you have been at organization for quite some time, maybe it's an opportunity to sort of step back and say, "Okay. Look, we need to do a reset," and part of that should include, "Let's assess the current state of our team's skills right now and how are we doing against those skills and what do we need."
Then the third is that I believe that a research operations team for UX research team is really essential. I know, obviously, resource constraints and some teams may not have the benefit of having a research operations team, but I think having a vision, making sure you assess skills appropriately, and then having a plan for your research operations team so that it doesn't overwhelm them, I think that's the advice that I would give folks.
Ash Oliver:
Such great advice, truly. Looking ahead, what are the future plans and aspirations for UX research at Zendesk, and do you have a vision for maybe the ongoing evolution of the research practice within the company?
Reggie Murphy:
There's a couple of things we're doing. So we're going to continue to collecting feedback, and this is feedback on how we're doing so that we can iterate all of the things that I've talked about in this podcast, our research request process, our DIY program, how we are communicating insights. One of the cool things that we're trying to do is up level how we communicate the work. We know that our leaders are very busy. Oftentimes when we share out resource presentations, especially research presentations with 20, 30 slides, sometimes they may not reach the audience in the way that we want them to reach. So we want our work to land better.
So we're now experimenting with some short form videos, two, three minutes long in a TikTok format to add a little creativity, a little sparkle, a little teaser to say, "Hey, these are what we've learned. To learn more, click the link," that kind of stuff. I think that we're experimenting with some of this now as we try to elevate how we are communicating not only with our cross-functional teams, but everybody else top and bottom within the organization, especially our senior executives. We'd like to have our research land better there, and so we're racking up some efforts in order to do that. The other plan is to continue evolving how we are working on the most important priorities of the company.
Ash Oliver:
It's so cool. I think it's such a great testimony to where the team has been, what you've been able to accomplish in your time there, where the team's headed, and really exciting to hear about how research is poised and positioned to be able to help in the future of the company.
So I want to transition to the last part of the episode, just a series of questions that we ask every guest just to get to know you personally a little bit better. So my first question for you is, what's one thing that you've done in your career that has helped you succeed that you think few other people do?
Reggie Murphy:
I would say mentoring, it takes time, and not just only mentoring, but really spending time helping people with specific challenges that they're having in whatever level there are at their career. I learned early on in my career, if you want to get to where you want to be, you help someone else get to where they want to be. People did it for me, and so I try to go that extra step and do it for them.
Ash Oliver:
I'm not surprised by your answer, honestly, just given the character and how you've been able to describe what you and the team have achieved. My next question for you is, what is the industry-related book you've given or recommended the most and why?
Reggie Murphy:
This might be a little different than what you expect, but I usually recommend two books and I recommend them together. The first one is Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and the second one is The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson, and here's the reason why. So the Radical Candor book, it shares advice and tips about the importance of giving constructive and clear feedback. The second one is about creating psychological safety in the workplace. Now, these books might seem to be geared to more managers, but I believe everybody can benefit from these books because everybody, if you're working in any company across any industry, you're in a situation where you're working with people. You may have a moment where you need to share feedback about how someone is working or how someone is communicating with you.
Sometimes we may, in certain companies where a culture hasn't been created, where people feel free to share their ideas, and that's heartbreaking to me, but I know people who have worked in environments like this, and I just feel like these books, if you go through them and take them to heart, it will help you as a IC individual contributor, and it will help you greatly as a people manager.
Ash Oliver:
Two excellent books. Both are very resonant and top of mind for me right now. I love asking this question not just because I'm a huge book nerd, but because of this exact reason. I love seeing how books are able to underpin people's thinking and philosophy and approach, and it's very clear to see how that has informed your work as a leader. My last question for you is, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Reggie Murphy:
Most of my friends know that basketball is one of my first loves. I enjoy playing. I enjoy watching. Before I play, I have a warmup that I do, and one of the things I enjoy doing during a warmup is I juggle three basketballs. It's a little bit unusual in the gym because people are looking at me thinking, "What is he doing?" but it just helps hand-eye coordination. It loosens me up a little bit, and I can have a little fun, but it is a little unusual, I would say, as a warmup. Yeah, I bring three basketballs with me to the gym, and I do it.
Ash Oliver:
This is probably one of my favorite answers to this question. So Reggie, this has been amazing. I deeply appreciate you spending the time sharing the story and the details on how you and the team at Zendesk have navigated this transformation journey. I think it's been incredibly valuable to learn from your point of view and experience. Thank you so much for this.
Reggie Murphy:
It's my pleasure.
Ash Oliver:
Thanks for listening to The Optimal Path brought to you by Maze, the user research platform that makes insights available at the speed of product development. If you like what you heard today, you can find resources and companion links in the show notes. If you'd like to stay connected, you can subscribe to the podcast newsletter by visiting maze.co/podcast, and send us a note with any thoughts or feedback to podcast@maze.design, and until next time.