In this fireside chat, hosted by Kuldeep Kelkar, Senior Partner, UXReactor, Roberta Dombrowski, a Research Partner, Maze & Leadership Coach, discusses various topics related to the UX profession. She highlights the strengths of UX professionals, such as their empathy and creativity. She also addresses areas for improvement in the UX community, including the need for researchers to develop business and strategy skills. Roberta shares insights on becoming more influential in UX and offers advice on balancing research with other responsibilities.
She discusses the challenges of scaling research and the importance of democratizing research within organizations. Additionally, she provides tips on demonstrating value and ROI in UX and discusses the role of coaching and mindfulness in leadership. Thank you, Roberta Dombrowski, for being part of this Podcast.
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Full Transcript
Kuldeep Kelkar
Today, we have a special guest, Roberta Dombrowski. Roberta is a research leader, and interestingly, a mindful leadership coach, which I’m very intrigued and want to know more about. She’s a research partner at Maze, and prior to that, she was a VP, User Research at User Interviews. Welcome, Roberta.
Roberta Dombrowski
Hey, Kuldeep. Thanks for having me.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you for joining us. I know the listeners are super excited. So tell us a little bit about you.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, I’m based in Boston, Massachusetts. Currently, I’m working full time as Research Partner at Maze. It’s a really interesting role, actually. I’m a few months into it. Essentially, I’m supporting organizations learn better and more effectively. So going in, supporting their culture change around research and best practices, doing things like workshops, consulting. And then outside of work, I do mindful leadership coaching. So I support leaders all the way from individual contributors up to executive level. So really at my core, I just love learning. And it shows up in different ways.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Very interesting. Tell us a little bit about your journey of how you got started within user experience, how you developed into this profession. A little bit of background would help.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, my background, I like to call it honestly, a mixed bag. I actually started my career in instructional design and learning experience design. So I was working at a SaaS company in Boston, and I was creating virtual and in-person training, really things like help articles, videos to help people just onboard into the platform. And I found myself getting really frustrated because I was creating help articles and all these resources. And I was like, shouldn’t the experience just be better? Shouldn’t we be building what customers want? And so, I ended up moving into product management. And then I decided to specialize in user research. Really, research is kind of the guiding thread throughout everything. Even when I was doing learning experience design, I had to talk to learners, talk to customers, understand what their needs, pain points, motivations were. And so now I get to do that full time really. It was my favorite part of my previous roles. So I’ve been on the journey about six, seven years since I decided to specialize. So it’s been a lot of fun.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, very interesting. So you’ve been there, done that across a range of different companies. And so in your mind and in your experience, as well as… you work with a lot of different industry leaders. So at a very high level, what are some of the strengths of the UX profession, just in general? What are UXers, what are designers, researchers, copywriters good at?
Roberta Dombrowski
Hmm, that’s a great question. I love that. I think at its core, we’re great at caring, honestly, that’s usually… when I look at the patterns and themes of people that I speak to, it’s that we all care very deeply about other humans. And that shows up in empathy in our work and our ability to connect with other people. I also think that we’re really great creatively. Usually we’re very like systemic thinkers. We’re very strategic. We’re very iterative in our problem solving. And so creativity is usually another thing that I see. Yeah, and just experimenting, usually tinkering around with things, learning new things, curiosity. Those are all things that I see a lot of.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, agreed. Agreed. I have never met a researcher who does not talk about empathy. I’ve never met a designer who doesn’t want to be user-centric. So yeah, agreed. So in the same light, since we talked about strengths and what UXers as a community are good at, what have you seen or heard about… what are some of the areas that the UX as a larger community need to focus on or need to improve, need to demonstrate more of or do more of? What are some of the top few areas that you think that the UX as a community should focus on?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, I think one thing that I hear a lot from people that I coach and then also from my role at Maze is, I talk to a lot of people and they say I want to make an impact. I want to see it at the table. That’s usually what they say and that’s great. And how are you going to make that happen? Why is that important? And so usually what comes with that is learning business skills, expertise, strategy skills, thinking a little bit more holistic. I consider it kind of like levels. When you’re usually an individual contributor, researcher, or practitioner, you’re usually thinking about the individual experience, how can I make this great, this one little feature. When you’re really wanting to make more of an impact, your skills have to get more broad. You’re thinking really more holistically about, what are my customers’ experiences like? What is the business experience like? How does this impact things like ROI? How are people going to sell this? What’s the go-to-market strategy? And so it’s not the thing that researchers… like as a researcher, I don’t wake up and I’m like, oh, I can’t wait to sell things today or think about ROI. But it’s kind of a skill that’s necessary in order to drive more of an impact and think more holistically across the business.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I hear a lot about, hey, increasing influence or getting a seat at the table or the proverbial table. At the end of the day, it’s about making an impact, as you rightfully said. The next question that I usually get from my listeners as well as people I speak with are, okay, how do I do that? How do I become more influential? Or how do I balance what I really love, which is conducting research, doing design, with these things like ROI or business impact? How do I balance this? How do I get started with these things? Have you experienced some of them? Do you have any recommendations?
Roberta Dombrowski
Definitely. When I work with coaching clients and even some of our businesses that we support at Maze, usually the first question I ask is, well, what’s the type of impact you want to make? What does that look like to you? Because it means different things to different people. What I think is impact, according to me, might be completely different than what impact means to my manager or my peers or the CEO. So that’s usually where I start first and then that will kind of influence the different approaches.
A lot of times, it’s building relationships with people on your team, using the same skills that we use as researchers, that empathy, to actually turn it to our team and stakeholders.
… and trying to understand what is… usually there’s an exercise I give people. I ask them to do a no-do-feel exercise with their actual teammates because that really helps you develop empathy with your teammates and connections. Yeah.
Kuldeep Kelkar
That’s interesting. So take the tools that we deploy with end users, personas, and deploy it internally.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yes, internally, yeah. So like I’ll say like CEO or maybe the director of product. What do I want them to know, do and feel when it comes to whatever initiative I’m working on? And then from that, there’s different ways to influence them or communicate things to them. And you have to ground yourself in things like how do they make decisions? What data is important to them? So it is using the skills that we have around empathy, just internally. So that’s usually where I have people start, is just explore your current environment that you’re in and the role that you’re in, and try to make some quick wins when it comes to influence there. And then from there, it will kind of circle and seam roll, and you’ll pick up more steam and maybe have wider scope or impact along the way.
Kuldeep Kelkar
So very well said Roberta, because as a community we are all trained in demonstrating empathy for end users, I mean that is inherent to this profession, but rarely and it might feel obvious, but it can be a little bit challenging to demonstrate empathy for stakeholders. It’s understanding the stakeholders, it’s knowing what motivates them, it’s understanding the pressures and challenges that they are facing, demonstrating that empathy, and of course asking for the stuff that we need to ask. So I have a next related question which is, okay, here’s what… I want a seat at the table, here’s what I want to do with demonstrating impact or starting to increase that influence, but at some point there could also be some scaling challenges. So let’s imagine an organization where they are running some validation research, I mean generally. I’m oversimplifying, but generally most organizations start with here’s our design, co-validate this design. I mean, that is generally the start of the maturity curve. But I know you work with lots of organizations, lots of leaders, lots of different individuals across the entire maturity journey. What are some of the challenges that you have seen that happen at the higher end of the maturity when they are trying to scale?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, the biggest thing that I’ve heard from leaders, usually when they’re scaling their organization is time. Like, when you talk to any leader, it’s usually like, what’s the biggest challenge you have in your day? And they say, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough time to work on this. Whether it’s like their own schedule, prioritizing things, planning things. So it’s like, what’s the most important thing for them to work on, whether it’s an individual or on a team level. And then usually the next thing after that is, in order to scale yourself or your team, you typically need to train or coach or enable them to do the work. As a leader, I do not want to be a single point of failure. I don’t want to be the kind of person answering every single decision for everyone on my team. And so I encourage other leaders. That’s like a one way ticket to burnout right there. You can’t be in all places at all times. And so usually I recommend that leaders learn some coaching skills in that instance. And so, it’s about getting curious, asking questions for your team, actually doing some assessments in terms of your org design and identifying what skills do my team need now versus in the future. And a year from now, depending on the rate that your team is scaling, it might look completely different. And then putting together a plan for how you plan to get your team there. Is it through hiring? Is it through coaching or mentoring or training? Sometimes it means like, research democratization is a hot topic right now. Sometimes it means actually encouraging product designers to run research, maybe usability testing or whatever it might be, but it’s really going to depend. But those are some of the techniques that I’ve seen.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Very interesting, when you spoke a little bit about scaling and certainly democratization. I hear a lot, I talk a lot about democratization. What are your thoughts around democratization? The good, the bad, the ugly, should the community do that? Should they not? If they have, if they want to democratize, how should they, I mean, that’s probably four or five different questions. So I guess let’s start with the first one, which is, what are your thoughts on democratization?
Roberta Dombrowski
I love it. You’re a researcher. Researcher. So I like to caveat with my perspective, it is definitely colored by my own journey where I was a designer and then I moved into product and then I decided to specialize in research. So at its core, I view research as learning. Right. It’s the act of going out, finding out information so that we can inform a decision. And so I am biased towards democratizing that. Allowing other functions, roles, to be able to do that because research is a skill as well as a role. It just depends on your role, whether you’re a product manager, product designers, or researchers, what percentage of time you spend using that skill.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Agreed.
Roberta Dombrowski
When what I encourage teams to do is to take a step back before they… because it’s essentially kind of leading with the solution of why are you trying to democratize? What’s the challenge here? What’s the view of research? What’s the perception of research, the skill that you need? Because there’s a lot that needs to be put in place to be able to do it well. So usually that includes brainstorms and strategies to kind of guide that. The culture that I created at user interviews when we were democratizing research was… I led the research team. So these were our experts. These were the mixed method studies. These were the higher risk decisions, like real business strategy questions. That’s what I wanted the researchers working on because that’s where their expertise was most valued and needed. And then what that meant was training the product designers, product managers to run things like usability tests. Did we give them the keys to the kingdom? And so they’re running things all willy-nilly. No. I put together training and coaching and a whole program in place. And then it was a lot of giving them feedback and like case studies around research and how to facilitate. So there was a lot involved.
If there’s one thing that’s driven my career journey, it’s the belief that everyone should have access to learning [and research is learning].
And so I believe that’s still to be true as I’m in a research role and building research teams as well.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Wow, well said. Research is learning, and then once you think that it is learning for the wider organization, well, guess what? Everyone should learn. What I also loved is the, it’s both an activity and an approach or a mindset and the percentage of job. So product managers, designers can’t be researching 100% of the time. They have other deliverables, but that shouldn’t prevent them from doing that for 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever is the right percentage for each organization. Well said. The next topic that I generally hear a lot of questions around are somewhat related to that influence, but also ROI. So let’s say we are scaling research, we’re democratizing, or the researchers are handling some high priority questions. Any recommendations you have, what worked for you in the past, or just in general, any recommendations on how should a research leader, how should a design leader, for that matter, demonstrate value to the organization?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, again, it’s going to come back to how the team is defining value. When I was at User Interviews, I put together an impact framework that our team used, and it was based on the type of research that we were running. So at the time, my team was centralized, so I reported to the CEO. So we did everything from product market research, buyer discovery, all the way through user research, discovery questions and stuff like that. And so I basically, in this impact framework said, depending on the decision that we need to run, here’s the way that we’ll measure impact. So if it’s a buyer study or we’re focused on go-to market, we will measure impact related to things like ROI and sales and how many deals are being closed, et cetera. If we’re looking at things like user research, like usability testing, then we’ll look at things like impact metrics, success metrics, benchmarking studies to measure change over time. So it’s really dependent on the type of study that we are running. But usually, whenever we kicked off a study, I would always say, what’s the decision that we have to make and how is this related to the wider business goals? And then that would funnel down to how we tracked it after the study was completed as well. I had a spreadsheet and everything with levels. So, yeah.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Interesting. Any recommendation on timing? Is this a pure project thing? Is this a quarterly thing? Or both?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, yeah. I feel like I keep saying it depends. It’s definitely going to depend. The way that I typically did it… so, my team, because I was managing the vision, the strategy, the cadence, and operations and everything, I would set up things like OKRs, Objectives and Key Results at the beginning of each quarter. And that was aligned to the product areas that we were running projects in. And then as we were running a study, I would map out, all right, what’s the decision? What’s the goal? And then at the end of the study, be able to look at it over time. So it was typically like beginning of the quarter, end of quarter, and then just keeping track of each study along the way. And then by the end of the year, I had this spreadsheet and you could literally see all the impacts throughout the year. It’s super helpful.
I really trained my team to focus on that because, especially at User Interviews and even Maze, we have such visibility into the wider market. Before the economy started to go into a downturn, we could see the volume of studies kind of going down. And so being able to track your impact, especially when there’s layoffs and stuff like that, it’s really valuable. It’s something that you can also add to your portfolio when you talk about the impact that you’ve had in your work and your team. Because a lot of researchers that I see talk about methods and like, oh, I ran this study, I did usability testing. Like that’s great. Like those are excellent craft skills, but that tells me absolutely nothing about the impact that you had in your work.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, so your recommendation here is essentially just very simple tools, Google Sheets, or Excel, or something, every project by project. What was the project about? Who was involved? What impact did it have? Different classification of that type of impact. It is essentially a running list that can be summarized every 90 days or at the end of the year. And that then becomes the document which… that artifact can be narrated in a variety of different ways in front of different stakeholders. And then that becomes the impact statement in itself. Fabulous, I mean, simple, but highly effective.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, impact statement. Yeah, impact statement for your portfolio, for your team, for your projects, anything. And yes, it takes some time, but in my eyes, it is kind of like if we think about a learning loop, it’s a way that you’re integrating what you’re learning on your team. If you don’t take a step back to say, what did we learn? What was the impact of it? What do we want to do differently next time? Then you’re kind of never getting through that whole cycle.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, and I guess it’s very interesting, given that you have the insights and you worked at User Interviews and Maze when both of these products and companies and SaaS softwares are focused on the user research market. So it says this is quite meta, researching on platforms used by researchers. Interestingly, I worked at UserZoom and UserTesting with very similar approaches of researching products, looking at products, working with researchers, providing services to researchers who are using research as their primary tool. So quite meta. Very interesting to chat with you. But the next set of questions that I have historically heard from the community. So influence, yes summarizing, but then also budgets and investments. I mean, any thoughts around, especially in this market right now, around budgets and investments, how should UX leaders, how should research leaders justify or ask for higher investments?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, I always break it down to identifying the risk around the decisions that need to be made. So right now it’s like the end of the year. I’m not sure when this episode will come out, but typically this is like planning time for many organizations. So because you’ve built that foundation of trust with your product partners, other stakeholders in the business. I literally will around planning time ask, what’s keeping you up at night? What do you think is the biggest risk to the business right now? What are you afraid that we potentially might fail on in the next year? And I’ll ask that to stakeholders and see what the common themes are. And then I use that to inform the roadmap and what areas I’m prioritizing and asking us to focus on. And so, usually it’s kind of like taking… it depends on the level of risks and how they’re spread out. But usually it might be like, Oh, I want to make sure we’re focusing on the biggest risk thing for the business. And then I want to make sure that we’re kind of doing some usability studies to make sure we can keep doing the things that we’re already doing so great. It’ll depend on the culture of the organization. Like, are you scaling? Are you a startup versus are you just kind of like trying to protect for the time being. Right now I’m encouraging teams, it’s unfortunate. It’s been really sad to see that research has kind of been, teams have been decimated to put it bluntly. But I actually see it as an opportunity around research because there’s still so much risk, there’s more questions than ever. And so making sure that you’re aligned with the other business leaders and seeing what needs they have and then the research, you’ll identify the patterns and see where the biggest need is, and you can help guide where the company is going from there. There’s always going to be more opportunities than there is enough time to work on things.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, thank you. Those are very actionable recommendations and tips. Really appreciate it, Roberta. One area, and given that you do a lot of leadership coaching and mindfulness. Want to tell us a little bit about it? Because I’m very curious about how you got started, what is that service? I’m sure the listeners would love to know more.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier, my career started in learning experience design and I moved into research. One of the things that I noticed within all of my research roles that I’ve been in was I was doing a lot of things like democratization, education, training around research. And I was also coaching people internally, whether they were product designers, product managers, researchers. I just loved connecting with people, asking them questions, getting curious. That’s really what coaching is all about. I often describe coaching on a scale. There’s like mentorship on one end and there’s coaching on the other. Mentorship is like, oh, I want to connect to someone who’s been in a similar role before. They can answer questions about challenges. But coaching is really about holding space for somebody to figure out their next steps on their own.
When I work with people, I tell them I’m an expert in coaching. I’m skilled at coaching. You’re the expert in your own experience. So when I’m working with people… typically, they’ll come to me, maybe they’re confused about their career path. Do they want to stay an individual contributor? Do they want to move into a director role or a leadership role? Maybe they’re having challenges around impact or building connections with people on their team. Usually, there’s some type of challenge that they’re encountering that they want support on. Sometimes they’re like a team of one and they don’t have other people on their team. And so they want a coach to be able to support them. And so as a mindful leadership coach, I bring a lot of mindfulness practices into it. I have been a mindfulness practitioner for over 10 years. So I’ve taken meditation teacher training. It’s called MBSR, Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. And it’s been a huge influence on my own path as a leader. I’ve struggled with things like burnout and just recovery and like how can I create really an intentional way of working? And so I incorporate those practices into how I work with other people too. So sometimes when we’re talking about a career path, I’ll do things like guided visualization or a meditation so that people kind of get out of their head a little bit because we have, especially as researchers, the ability to overanalyze things rather than tuning into the body and just saying, like, do I like what I’m doing? Like, does this give me energy or is it draining me? So a lot of it is like using intuition and wisdom and just noticing the energy of your body as you’re going throughout your workday.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Wow. That’s amazing. I’m sure we can chat for hours on pretty much any of the topics that we just spoke about. Very insightful, Roberta. Thank you very much. If the listeners want to reach out, if they want to find you online, LinkedIn or other places. Any recommendations on how to follow you or subscribe to any of your channels?
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, for sure. I have, I can share links for all of these things too, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter, my handle is RobertaLearns, LinkedIn, and I just started a TikTok today as we were talking. I also am on Substack as Mindful Work. So you can find some posts there as well.
Kuldeep Kelkar
For the listeners, at least on YouTube and other channels, we’ll include all the links that Roberta will share offline. So that was amazing, Roberta. Thank you so much. All these practical tips, tricks, your experience working at a variety of organizations, various roles from product to design to research to democratization to influence. Very, very helpful. Thank you very much.
Roberta Dombrowski
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you listeners for tuning in. Look forward to the next session. Bye .
