AA180 - UX Research vs Product Management: Pillow Fighting in a Burning House

welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to. Om, I was on LinkedIn the other day, which is probably a big mistake. The dark world of LinkedIn. So I was on LinkedIn the other day because I enjoy cringe. And I encountered this post. I did not realize the enmity between. UI UX researchers, And product managers. I did not realize and specifically not just like the everyday product manager that's working, although they aren't grouped in with this group. The people selling a particular product management lifestyle is what I'm saying. yeah, there's a lot of those So well, there's a lot of them But I was shocked about at the at the ferocity of post So I thought I would take a minute out of everyone's daily schedule to talk about the content of the post. It was, it's not that long, so it'll read pretty quick, but I want to read it and I want to go paragraph by paragraph because I think it's important to talk about the poster's intent of what they're, the way they see the world. Okay, now the backdrop of this post is there's a feeling in the UI UX community that the behavioral analysis, like the deep dives in understanding user behaviors, product managers are like amateurs at this, and they're they don't really do deep dives, they don't really construct particular groups, focus groups and control groups, and they don't they don't know how to do research, they're all kind of muddling through it and guessing. Thanks for listening. And they're doing basically bad research and they're hurting their own products because they don't know how to go about product discovery. Really, we could have wrapped this discussion in the product discovery podcast that I know you want to have. Yeah. But I feel this would have dominated the whole podcast. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. So I think for, for the purpose of this podcast, let's give everybody the benefit of doubt and say, Maybe product people are not doing justice to this, right? So this is from that lens. Let's just approach this so that we can be fair to those people that are professional researchers. You know, I, I'm not going to rule out that field as such. At this point in the podcast, what happens later, you'll just have to wait and see. Well, I'm sorry to tell you, but on this podcast, I empathize with a lot of points in the article we're about to read, however, since I am the product manager, and again, since we have extensive experience with buyouts, corporate buyouts, like see episode on Private equity and corporate buyouts, right? I will tell you a lot of this for me lands on deaf ears Because I can empathize with you Understand sounds like somebody that could be on my team Expressing these frustrations and then you roll it up to like the executive level or at least a director level and they will say Stop whining kid get back to work. That's right. If you don't like this job, you can get another job Sad reality, but yeah, I think you're right. Those sentiments are exactly what a prevalent out there, but we're gonna deep dive today So we are I think I'm gonna offer the corporate Counterpoint the, the, the P E counter for the private equity counterpoint. And Om will bring a sanity to this podcast. Try to so welcome to arguing agile will argue several dimensions of this topic. That's right. Welcome to arguing agile. Hit, hit our music. You already heard the music. And you already heard the music and people I don't think anyone likes it. if you like the music, if you like the theme of the podcast being before we start talking, let me know, also again, like I prefer the podcast that we, that had no theme music, right? I agree. Just jump right in distractions. if you have strong feelings about this, let me know. That's what I'm saying. Let me know. Cool beans. That's right. I look forward to your angry tweets. First I'm going to remind about our working agreement. And now I'm going to add this post. So are we in agreement? we don't name people's names. We don't blast people on the internet. So I've cut this author's name off this post. So we're not blasting the author. I'm not going to give you background on the author. I will tell you that, their education and job role and experience tells me that they do know what they're talking about here. ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I accept that the witness is an expert in the subject matter that they're talking about. Let's just get that right out of the way. Yep. They have credibility. Okay, cool. Also, just in case, like if this is your first visit to arguing agile, that is enterprise business agility coach Om Patel, who has far more experience than I do across a wide array of fields, including software development, project management. Business agility, leadership, organizational agility, business transformation. He does his own stunts. He's, he can do your taxes. I have played all of those things on TV. He's just way too kind. He plays every sport. He'll beat you at basketball. And I am product manager. I'm a working active working product manager for several years, and I've spent 20 years in tech. So like if we're, if we're putting our credentials first, there you go. There you go. He is the product manager extraordinaire for those people listening to us in French. There you go. And, and my teams use Scrum out of the box with no additions or subtractions. They use exactly the scrum grad. So, there we go. We're getting all the hot takes and all of our qualifications out of the way in the first five minutes of the podcast. So, let's start with the post since I put it on the screen. it says This is why you're stressed. Why you're having a hard time finding work when you've never had the problem before. This is why the products that you use suck. This is why the industry has forgotten how to build new products. Great products. So he's, he's quite a claim. He's prefacing the article. He's trying to attract attention. I understand this link. If this is going to be the evidence based podcast, which this is not the way that I'm going to argue by the way, but if I'm going to, if I'm going to come out, He's giving me softballs to like, this, this is all generalization. You should have cut all this out of your dissertation I don't need any of this, right? Exactly. No concrete examples here. Call people out. I want to hear company names. I want to hear people's names. I want to hear teams that you've been cut from or whatever. Anyway so continuing. Okay enough with this dangerous and irresponsible Product practice it is causing so much more harm than good. We aren't building the right thing We don't have the right people in the right positions and we have fundamentally lost all process and specialization around product it's a completely random mess with failing ROI and productivity Wow Okay So with that backdrop, let us proceed further. Again, we're not naming company names. We're not naming projects. We're not naming evidence basically. Right. Okay. That's fine though. Cause that's the tone of the article. Hot and heavy coming in hot, H A W T. All right. Let's keep reading insight. Insight equals direction. So for my money, this would have been much better if he had said insight equals greater than direction. Meaning insight leads to direction. This says insight equals direction. There's something missing right there in that equation on one side of it. I think that's simplistic. It's just having insight doesn't necessarily give you direction. I think you have to interpret that and you have to lace that with intent and purpose before you get to direction. So I would have, I didn't write this article, but if I would have said inside equals, Greater than direction, meaning that insight leads to direction. If you sprinkle the right ingredients into it. Well, let's, I mean, let's, I think, I think he's using it in a more academic term, so it's, it's, it's, you've, you've, you have knowledge and you have wisdom, you've already received the two of those and you're rolling them together for insight and that insight is like the podcast that we did on intuition versus evidence. Like his insight is leading to intuition and his intuition Is basically the direction this is the same thing as we did a whole podcast on so I'm not really Yeah, that's fine. I understand the way that you take it when you first read it again, He's not laying out the evidence. You know, I mean, yeah, here's a claim So let's let's keep rolling through until we get to the main point because I feel we haven't gotten the main point yet right, so he says a, a, a, a specific high profile individual in product management and paraphrase has no appreciation for validity or the specialist skills of the product team around the individual. Which means that any product team that follows this individual's advice is likely moving in the quote wrong direction and doing so quote blissfully unaware. That's why they cut us pesky researchers out of the loop because we dare hold experience based knowledge contrary to their own inexperienced opinions. They build the wrong thing and then point the finger at everyone else, making excuses all the way. How is this any good? did we say at the opening of the podcast that this person was a researcher, UX researcher? Let's read right here. Okay, so the person that wrote this article is a UX researcher So that this person that does this has skill and experience they have talent with behavioral science and research. so what they're saying is that the things that these product people that write books that go on speaking tours and whatnot about product discovery, right? That they are going in the wrong direction and they're blissfully unaware of the damage that they're doing, basically, because they are not trained in any of this. they're kind of encouraging people to muddle through discovery and that is a problem. It is if you're a UX researcher, I suppose, but yes. I mean, there's assertion here, right, that muddling through, quote unquote, isn't a good way to explore things. Exploratory thinking is not necessarily evil. I would say that's just my opinion. Well, I mean, the problem with reading, reading pieces of the article and reacting in line is I already want to dig in. And say what team would have a UX researcher on staff as part of the team, like as part of the fully cross functional team as a full time job role. I mean, like if the, I think of all of the people on LinkedIn and all the people I see on forums and stuff like that, that developers specifically are allergic to the recommendation that a scrum master could be a full time job. They will say, well, that's, that's a, that's a role. And anybody can do that. We just do it for, you know 15 minutes every morning. What do they do after nine 30? I mean, but I'm saying that the developers on the teams that experienced this pain, you could imagine if they have this attitude, you could only imagine that the people that are in charge of hiring, what attitude they have. And now you're saying at least the scrum master sits on the teams and does something day to day, even in the worst organizations where they're called delivery managers and they do, they're just a retitled project manager, or they actually do take a project manager and Make them the scrum master, right? Your project manager by job title, but your role now on this team's a scrum master. That doesn't happen blows my mind much But even in that I could understand why the company has a project manager in the first place This is a tough call for someone Forget small companies. Yeah, this has got to be a giant company. You wouldn't have all of these roles in a small company necessarily You know, I also think that if you think about any typical sort of team environment, you may say we have a UX expert but not necessarily a researcher, some sort of designer perhaps, right. who parlays the user journey on paper and kind of explains to the team, how that's going to go, how the user navigates through your product, but a researcher, Goes beyond that, They have other dimensions they dive into. So I don't think many teams have the luxury of having a role like that. The other thing is the roles like this don't come cheap. I imagine, right? these are scarce skill sets. I would say that they probably have some sort of post grad education and yes, I would agree. They probably don't come cheap. They probably don't come cheap, but also like, the typical business executive. I mean, they struggle with when it's time to add another developer to a team or when the ratio of QA people to develop it, like just like written there's, there's such a on Maslow's pyramid, they're down here just trying to have the roof stuff, stop leaking on their head. And you're up here talking about like, how can we be our most real self at work? Like these people are not even speaking the same language that you're speaking. So it's difficult. I can really empathize with what is being expressed in here. It's like, Hey, I see a lot of people in this job field being laid off because the same thing is happening with scrum masters and agile codes is the exact same thing that's happening here is like, well, we don't value having an additional person. We can just have our UI UX person do this. Even when you were explaining, well, we have a UI UX person. and then they have the skill set of a researcher, and if they don't have the skill set of a researcher, maybe we can pay somebody part time to come help them and train them up as the same thing that they do with teams and agile coaches, right? Right. The team doesn't understand the basics of Kanban and we're trying to not overload the process. So we want to bring somebody in and teach him how. Come on works and live with the team for three months on a contract. And then you go away or maybe go onto another team or whatever, but we're not going to hire somebody. Who's a combine coach that just stays in the team and does nothing but helps forever, Yeah, in my book, there is a space for bringing in specific skill sets to enable your teams and take them to another level to redress the deficiencies they may have, Yeah. So yes, the other areas I can think of here would be. Perhaps advanced automation testing or DevOps, right? Cause you don't necessarily have. A DevOps person on your team full time, but those skills can be embedded within the team. They can learn to do this. I can understand that's the line of thinking you've also got to bear in mind that in the current economy businesses are looking to. Save money so you don't have the luxury of putting in these specializations on your team, right? So what I'm thinking about right now is change management, right? Why not have people on the team handle that aspect Of the team, rather than have a change management, quote unquote, specialist who, even if they're not full time on the team, you have to hire them. They have to come in. They have to understand the context. Often they are also the communications person, right? So do we need that or can the team be self sufficient to do this? How about org design? how about somebody with an organizational design or industrial, but I'm not quite sure what the degree is, but you can get a doctor of organizational psychology or organizational design to come in and say, Hey, these teams are not like the interactions between these teams seems to be not developing in a way that I would like it to develop. And I just need to figure out exactly what's wrong with the teams and the team structures and why people can't make decisions and why everyone has to wait on me. You bring an expert in to analyze. This is like, this is like how consultants make all their money. Isn't it? It really is. And those strategies work. PowerPoint decks. Here's a bajillion dollars. Yeah. We'll pay you based on how heavy your PowerPoint deck is. The OD folks are not cheap either. And the really good ones are really good. But there's a whole slew of the ones that are kind of mediocre to be really bad. But couldn't you say I could take this whole article and run it through ChatGPT and say, find and replace every instance of, user research with organizational design and write me the same article as emotionally charged, post it tomorrow and get like two likes. Listen, you could do that because it is, is basically a placeholder. It's almost like a function on LinkedIn, but you pass that parameter to and there you go. The difference is nobody's got. Somebody dedicated to organizational design. So nobody would raise a fuss about it. Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't even have the UX researcher available either at hand. I could see the frustration here is like, most people don't even have this because their executives just say, just do what I say. Like you don't need a bunch of research. You don't need to spend much time. Just do what I say. I know what needs to be done. We did a whole podcast on, I know what needs to be done. Exactly. Right, exactly. That's a great podcast, by the way. So if you haven't watched it, do yourself a favor, have a cup of coffee and do that. I think we stopped with the, how's this any good? Right. Is that where we stopped? All it takes is setting the right direction and ensuring that you stay on the right course with a researcher with a researcher informing the team, but instead there's an active choice to do it yourself at whatever risk. How is this any good? It's a lot less stress for everyone when decisions are made on evidence, Not the evidence that a PM wanted to raise. Yeah, that's a tricky sentence to interpret. I think what they're saying is It's easy to make decisions on the evidence that is actually raised versus the ones that the PM's didn't raise is how I read it they raised it and you're still basing it on evidence Welcome to Brian and I'm software development company. We sold out Cash down, bro. Out. Brian is gone. Oma is still here. The PE people. Oh, y'all sunk the pe the PE people tell him. Yeah. The PE people come in and tell'em you know, they meet with 'em quarterly and tell 'em you know, raise prices, cut costs, and that. And then they play golf so yachts all around. That's what I'm saying. Yachts all around. But if I'm going to represent the think of the PE people, that's what I'm saying. so what you're telling me is we got to send everything through the researcher before we can work on anything. That's what you're telling me. there's an erosion of business agility now because we want everything. where somebody in the business world will push back against this is they will see this as an academic viewpoint. To say like, oh, well, you just want to be in front of everything and we got to pass everything through you and then Now we're back to waterfall, basically. Listen, I'm right there with you on that one. You are not only eroding business agility, you're actually injecting business rigidity right here. First of all, it gives them legitimacy, because it's kind of like It's very explicit in this article that without them, you're basically toast, right? And I don't necessarily subscribe to that view. You know, I'm on the fence. But actually, I'm on the other side of the fence. Well, you're not supposed to be on my side of the fence. I'm on the side of the fence that says UX researchers are great. If you have the luxury of having all of that extra surplus cash that you can hire one or two of these people, four or five, or if you don't, you're not going to die because you don't have this skill set available because your teams can. Make do, they can actually do this work. Your PMs can do some of this work or a lot of this work. luckily I built a gate into this fence so I can go to the other side whenever I need to. I feel like, remember that home improvement show where the neighbor was only ever shot from like the nose up or whatever I feel like that's where we're at. Yeah, I think so. You put a fence in our, in our, we need to put a fence line in our podcast now on the video. I feel like I'm transitioning to the other side now because I feel like I want to say yeah, but how do you know, what you're missing? If you'd never been trained. You know, this is like every person that hang on. I gotta figure out how to bring this up without offending half the people that listen to this podcast. Offend away there might have been a segue that I had to cut because I was ranting too much, but the point of this section was the business people at the top of the business will see this as slowing the business down, especially if they actually know what product management is. They'll see this as slowing the business down. They'll see this as slowing down their time to market. They'll see this as extra hoops they've got to jump through. I mean, these are already people that don't want to set the goal and then they don't want to be involved in anything lower than that. They want to set the goal and they want to run away. You know, they want to move a card on the combine and then they want to run away. they don't want to get drugged down into details. And those are the good business people. I'm not even talking about the golf swing guy that I've told the story about on another podcast where he was a VP of development He's never done development and he's never been a developer a day in his life. And he never worked in, I think he worked in sales. Actually. I don't remember. But he got put in charge of development because they didn't really know what to do and then whatever. And whenever a technical conversation would happen, he'd go practice his golf swing in the corner. Like, and that guy was absolutely disgustingly arrogant. And he had never accomplished anything. So, again those people, I mean, first of all, they're not even gonna read your post. They're not even gonna consider All of your experience and everything. They're not even going to take into consideration, like the empathy, everything podcast. No, they're yeah. They might be a psychopath. They're the kind of people that will waddle over to your desk with their suspenders on and go, yeah. Brian, why don't TPS report out to me? I mean, if we go along with the stats of. 10 percent of people are either sociopaths, psychopaths, or narcissists, and you factor the sheer volume of those people that make it up to the top, the tippy top of corporate America, there is a high chance that one of those people is a narcissist. In those seats that do the hiring for exactly what you're talking about. it's not the product manager influencers that are trying to sell a book and go to a breakfast and eat a donut and shake some hands. those people are just trying to do their best. The ocean that you're trying to boil. go read the toyota way And then come back to me. Amen. Come back to me and had this discussion again because in the in the toyota way one of the things expressed in that book is Most of the executives most of the people that are at the top of the japanese companies are the opposite of their American counterparts, where in order to get to the top, you've got to be charismatic and you've got to have this magnetism about you and you've got to talk like this and this is how we talk Om! But the Japanese leaders are all humble and they're all soft spoken and, they are the opposite of charismatic. they're very Boring type of people, dare I say, but that's exactly what you want in your business leadership. You want a stable, steady pace, a calming influence over the one adult in the room over the long haul as you're focused on the horizon. Yeah, these are the people that really foster the empowerment culture rather than the blame culture. Right. You know, and we don't have that, for the most part, we don't. There are some pockets here and there, people tell me. Again, I don't know where this person lives works, was brought up, but I mean, that's the real a lot of those Silicon Valley people, they they're trying to live a lifestyle. They're trying to rebrand their story about, like I went on a hike, and I invented this company, and I realized that it wasn't going good, and I said, how did it get like this? My goodness, who inflicted this on me? Oh, oh, crap, it was me. You know, it was you the whole time what, what, what is this hero story where you overcame something or whatever. Like it was you the whole time, it was you against yourself the whole time. Exactly. And people that they dump on, like I said, they have something to lose. These are the people that aren't just simply putting out a theory or a book.'cause you look into the history of these people, you find most of them have actually trodden the path themselves. Not like these guys that you say. You know, we're it, right? Without us, you're toast. really? Are we? Can you show some evidence? Yeah. These are the exact same people that do this, by the way. They're saying that, they're turning the table. So they're saying, it's not good to be not evidence based. You're the ones that are not being evidence based right now. not the other side. I can't believe we reversed position. I completely agree I would, Find great benefit from having a trained scientist on my team being able to challenge me to say brian Why don't we break up this finding and break it up into our hypothesis? And then we can break up our evidence and I will not allow you to give Circumstantial evidence I would like only detailed observations from actual behaviors that comes from quantitative data through the actions in the applications or whatever experiments or whatever, like I'm not going to say, well, Brian thinks that the users did it this way. So let me say a couple of things here on that topic. So first of all, I'm for it. I'm for it. Listen, if you have the luxury of having. You know, these people that you can afford it. Yeah, but I'm for it. Same. Right. But if you have that, yes, look at that data. And I'm even going to go a little further than just say quantitative. If you have data, you could. You could infer some things out of that. That might be qualitative. I'm okay with that. I'm okay to, to go out on a small limb. Okay. A little, but I've never had the luxury of having these unicorns available to my team. Oh, that's not where I thought you were going with that one. Because I thought we were, I thought I was about to have to break through this fence and be on your side because I thought you were going, we can have all the data in the world. And then this executive is going to walk in and say that that's a throw. Those are outliers. Throw that, throw that data. I don't believe that user, I don't believe that experiment anyway. I feel like again, I will tell you. I had a whole different podcast plan for today, looking at the CrowdStrike failure and analyzing that whole thing. Because again, this, this harkens back to my, that's right. I used to work at Harken. This harkens back to my experience as a QA manager, because as a QA manager, I would say like this, these are the areas of code we were observing more defects. I think there might be a problem. And then the developers will say, let me see all those bugs. let me look at these bugs. Let me look at, well, that one's not a valid bug because we're that no user reported it and that was not a valid bug because no, that's not a realistic test case and that's not a valid bug because no user is going to generate that kind of data and that's not a valid bug because this one's too hot. This one's too cold. No true Scotsman again, I understand. The frustration, because as product manager, when my organization fumbles a ball with organizational design, I just sit there and shake my head and like, how can you not see something so simple, but they don't have my experience in failing organizational designs, but being on teams that are designed badly or seeing management meddling, and then they can't see it. And I can't just tell them like, Hey, you, these are terrible decisions. Nobody hears that. They have to feel the pain themselves so that's an interesting point. People that are in charge of being able to influence or drive organizational design, the direction it's going in, they've never experienced the pain. And if you tell them, they're just going to discount and say, yeah, whatever. Yeah. This is the same thing. How can you tell that data is bad? How can you tell that? I tell you, 90 percent of users that enter our application, click on this page first, and then one of these other two pages second. They don't click on this other page that you think is important we just launched a feature. This is a real example in the mobile world from when I was in mobile development. We launched a feature that the individual lobbying, I'm not even gonna blast who the person was. Not even a blast. That's not how we roll either. Yeah, yeah. That's good. That's how I roll. It's like, yeah, send me a tweet. I'll tell you exactly who this person was. This person lobbied for the change. Got to have this change. Got to have it. Everyone says they're going to use it. And actually this is anybody who works in a sales led company. Sales will tell you, Oh, no, the users have got to have this new feature. When you say sales led, I hear sales driven. So they're the ones that are saying this is what's needed. Yeah. They have no evidence for that. Right. Correct. Yeah. It's, it's not, this is what's needed. Okay. I'll take your hypothesis. I'll bake it into our roadmap. And over the next two sprints, we'll find time to test it for you. Like I'm going to take your hypothesis. I'm going to roll it into my roadmap basically. And we'll test it. We have a framework, we keep bandwidth for testing ideas in our roadmap. We keep bandwidth in our sprints for it or whatever we use. Right. We have a mechanism that takes ideas from all around business and we have an ideas board somewhere that people can see the current status of their ideas and stuff like that. Again, I've only, one organization I have ever seen has even tried something like this. So I'm amazed. I really am amazed that this person is this upset about it. Because again, for 20 years, I've not actually operationally seen this executed anywhere. I, yeah, I mean, look, my experience is the same. I've not seen this. I mean, they're real. I a hundred percent believe that the big social media companies. Have behavioral researchers they do. However, having said that And I don't have any insight into how they work operationally Are they really using these people in the way they're supposed to be used right? They should be used or are they simply? Quote, unquote, paying lip service to say, we're listening, right? we're listening. We're taking feedback from our audience. we're doing behavioral design, all of this stuff. I don't really know. I'm not saying they're not, I'm just saying, I don't know. Right. I mean, I would posit to say, since he's saying they're all being laid off. I would guess that, again, the same thing happening at Scrum Masters is happening to these folks is yeah. Their value proposition is a little wonky right now. The leadership and, and whomever is listening to what they're saying, what looking at the evidence. Paying lip service and saying, you know what, I'd rather have another developer. Sure. I can have four for the price of one. So I think that's where we're go. Maybe four offshore, maybe , near shore. I don't think these people get paid quite, quite that much. They have PhDs and whatnot, so they probably pay that pay more than anything. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, I agree. A PhD working for a university gets you like yeah, I I get that. I get that. Yeah, these people are criminally underpaid. I'm not saying that the university system takes advantage of people, but also, you're also saying they, yeah, So I'm gonna continue. It says I'm now at the end of my tether with regards to the, this individual's style of product management. It's flat out wrong. It's flat out wrong. Too open to interpretation, too offensive to any evidence driven mindset or data driven team. It's just amateur hour. It's actively watching a slow long term car crash happening in front of our eyes. It's hard to watch. It's hard to experience. And it's all completely avoidable. There is an active choice to do the wrong thing. Let's be absolutely clear about it. The longer this perpetuates, the longer we are delaying success and over focusing on a single author's ideas rather than. extensive experimental practice knowledge. So again, it's another emotional plea which I'm not, I don't know. I'm kind of over the emotional tone of this. I mean, they, again, it's difficult to evaluate. The actual argument that's happening here. I kind of want to just finish the article and then we can just talk about the rest. You're right. I mean, so far it's laden with opinion, right? All right. let's finish the article. So let me make sure he doesn't. Okay. Yeah. manage this stuff out, take the bull by the horns and actively manage the situation. The tail is wagging the dog. We're on a negative trajectory. Fixed product management. Productivity and profitability and that's enough. they've had a good long go at P. m. And it isn't getting any better just worse time reverse to tend to revert to a known good. Sorry. Time to revert to a known good and reduce all this crazy risk and stress. The difference between good and bad product is behavioral insight. We have behavioral researchers to acquire this insight for you, employ them, use them, involve them. You will build better products and be a better product manager. That's it. Well, there you go. If I could clip the bottom and put it at the very top of this article that would improve the article 10 times over. I agree. that last paragraph that he's saying, I don't disagree with that, right? I mean, you'd be silly to ignore that, I think. Where I can. Take a little bit of a different stack on this is who does that? Do you really need these people? Well, do you want them? Do you desire them? Those are different questions, right? If you could afford them, if you desire them and can afford them, sure. Go for it. Right. There's nothing to lose and everything again, probably, but assuming they're of good quality and all of that, but do you want them, you might want them, but you can't afford them. So at the end of the day, can you do what they do? To the best of your ability, right? Given what you can pay for, right? That's where I'm going with this. I'm glad you're going there. I don't know if I'm ready for my final arguments because there's like a bunch of stuff that we haven't talked about how do you measure ROI on these people? if I'm going to go with a PE firm, just if these are the softballs. The softballs. These are absolutely, yeah. These are the same people that ask how you measure ROI master or agile coach or whatever until they have giant problems and then they bring in organizational consultants. They bring in McKinsey or whatever and pay them millions and millions of dollars to fix it. And then nobody asks what the ROI is. right. So, so the, you already got me with the, we need more data thing. Cause again, like anybody in a startup is going to push back on that and say like, we can't afford to wait on this decision. We need to get more data. And then there's an underlying current here that isn't, wasn't touching any of our previous counterpoints. Which is there is a balance of short term profit. Oh, well, there's no balance quite honestly. Like corporate America is rigged for short term profit. We don't care about what's going to happen in 20 years. Corporate America believes that nobody's going to be here in 20 years. We're all going to nuke ourselves out of existence like that. That's corporate America's retirement plan. Sadly, that is true. I say sadly, so I lament that. So if you're making the, any claim that you're making of this is good for long term profitability. To build our brand over time to really understand our users and go deep with them and whatever. I'm with you as a product manager, but trust me, my management and my management's management and the investors that go with them, they are not. And also I would argue, like take a broader look at the U S stock market. And I would say they are also not with you because the P ratio is also decoupled from reality and anyway, like how is it possible is because the stock market has become disconnected from actual value, you know? so like, I understand what you're saying. Hey, let's build something real. Let's go build a real log cabin with our hands. And actually assemble something that will last for a hundred plus years or whatever, but also the stock market is like woo tendies, like buy or get next yacht, cash out, bro down. like there's a lot that is working against. So This is one of those arguments. Like I got a lot of empathy. I want to be with this person just like I want to be with every agile coach. I want to say like, yes, companies are super short sighted, not understanding. Like you can't just shortcut your way through organizational design. You need to get an expert to help you because I know that you're not an expert at it. I did this for years with experts who actually were experts who dedicated their careers to this stuff and took it very seriously. And even they struggled. So I know that an executive who doesn't dedicate any time, read any books. Try to do it, you know for years and fail and succeed in varying ways and they're not asking for help and they don't value help. They're not looking beyond the end of their arms really? I mean it is really short term thinking that plagues all of us, right? Yeah, the only thing in short term and again, this is Sorry to be pedantic everybody, but this is this is Straight out of the Deming book of if you only care about short term Deming short term was like Three to five years. I mean that yeah sure. I was short term for him So if you only care about the short term and your managers You know turn over every two three years you're never going to have a deep organizational dna And you're just going to go from the latest fire to latest fire, you know Yeah, you'll just be muddling through yeah, by the way, there'll be a deming podcast coming to a podcast near you Real soon. I don't know. So, so like there's a couple other ones that we can talk about here, but I think we beat this one up enough. That the point comes across like UX research again, just like Scrum Mastery. Actually. I feel pretty confident now. I wasn't sure going into this. Because again, I've never worked with a UX researcher. I tried to stay away from this topic. We've never talked about it on the podcast. I would be open to having a UX, if there's any that live in the Tampa area. or that listen to this and want to talk about this topic. I'd be open to talking about this. Cause, just cause I completely admit, I don't understand UX. You know, I've never worked with an, I never work with one, although I, I do understand the need for behavioral psychology in the products that we build and, and teaching us skills that we don't understand how to do better research, how to understand the user behaviors, how to really understand them, how to ask questions where you're not biasing the answers. You know, I'm 100 percent on board with that. I researched that stuff so I can do a better job and I know that I'm not the best at it. Well, I think if you're a product manager, listen to this podcast, I mean, to a certain degree or the other, you probably have been doing this yourself. Right. And again, given a blank check, you would also welcome a UX researcher, I'm sure. Right. So if you're a UX researcher, please, please reach out because we'd love to hear from you and have you on a podcast. I would, but maybe not for the same reason that you think that I would. Even if they could only temporarily join my team, join my team for a couple sprints or whatever, then bounce off. They would leave my team with an advanced skill set that I know that no other team has. You know what I mean? The same thing as if I could have a DevOps person come on and just work with my team just to help them set up pipelines and orchestrate their stuff through the production or if I was to have a DBA come on to my team, like a real DBA, not me, like adding new tables or whatever you know, and just adding random indexes where I think an index should be, right? I index every column because that's, that, that helps our performance. Right. Let's run some tests. Let's add the index. Let's run some text again, I'll show you how performance happens and it'll just be magic. Sure. To you that that has never even seen that before, and you show that to your team, then it really takes 'em to another level. Right. And that's great. You know, DBA could start with like, here's the before execute plan. Yeah. Here's the after. yeah. So I would be willing to do that because I would be willing for anybody that can advance my skillset and give me some skills that will stay with me you know, somebody that comes onto my team and says. Brian, you say that you think users want X, whatever. But here's the experiments you might think about running in order to confirm or refute that here are the things you can do without biasing your users and then it's up to you, Brian, once you have the evidence to make the right decision based on the evidence that you're seeing you can advise me, but you can't really. Tell me to do that. You know, unless you're saying UX people should be the VP of product everywhere. And I, and if you, if that is what you say, I'll say, whoa, whoa, calm down because Gary from sales, he firmly has that on lock. That's his next job. Oh, I like our friend Gary from sales. So I'm with you on that. If you can have. Somebody like that, even temporarily join your teams, they would really enable the team and take them to a different level. I've never had the opportunity or the luxury to be able to have people like that on my teams, even for a short period of time. You know, you go back to that whole thing, like you said earlier, why do that when you can have a developer for five sprints instead of having somebody for one sprint or two sprints short term. Exactly. Yes. I mean, that's where I'm trapped with this. That's where I come away from the podcast. if you strip the emotionality out of this, like the emotional plea out of this and you shiver back to the elements that it's actually trying to convey. I agree with it. 100%. We should have these people that are experts in behavioral analysis and what it takes experimenting with what it takes to change behaviors and really understanding and driving with data. In the small companies, your product people are going to be the people that are tapped to do that. So if they don't have that skill, they should reach out to experts to teach them to do that skill. But in larger companies, maybe they can hire somebody like this and share them across programs. That's a best case scenario. I assume that what's going on in the market now is a general drawdown of this type of position, which is really, I think the genesis of this post, right? I agree. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what tomorrow brings, but keep keep all of these options open. I mean, don't, don't, don't belittle these people that are UX researchers. If you are one, like I said, please reach out and we'd love to hear from your standpoint where we're at. I think there's also this thing from where I sit, it's like the over specialization of specific skill sets like that. Maybe you want to empower your product people to harness some of these skills themselves. Right. You know, again, I'm not saying that there'll be at the same level as a dedicated UX researcher, but maybe it's good enough. UX coach coming to a LinkedIn near you. That's right. Exactly. And along with product coaches and agile coaches and DevOps coaches and yeah, org design coaches and yeah, psychology coaches, we draw the line at org design coaches. We can't have that. Can't have that. No. All right. Well there's no ROI in this podcast, so we're done. We are done. Hopefully this has been worth every penny you paid for. Let us know what you think. Other topics you know, could be that you'd be interested in. And don't forget the like and subscribe down below.