The Founder's UX Playbook to Prevent Product Failure

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. My guest today is Lindsay Allard, the co-founder and CEO of Playbook, ux. Play Look, UX allows you to conduct video-based user testing and interviews with your target audience. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen it and it looks really cool.

Sean Weisbrot: Lindsay's background is in psychology like mine, so the fact that she went into product and the fact that she discovered there were problems in her industry and then went on to found a company that would allow her. To solve those problems related to product and UX research tells you that she not only understands what she's built, but she's built it with a purpose.

Sean Weisbrot: And that's why I brought her on to talk about UX research. We talked about things like. How do you know that the questions you're asking aren't unbiased? And how do you know that the feedback you're getting is good? And how do you manage that feedback? How do you manage those interviews? How do you collate the data?

Sean Weisbrot: So why don't you tell everyone a little bit about your backstory so they know why you're the right person to talk about this topic.

Lindsay: So, I started, um, my career in sales and was, you know, outta college, not really sure what to do, and got some advice and said.

Lindsay: So you can sell something to someone, then that's a good start in business and thought. All right, that sounds good. So did that for a bit and then, yeah, kind of transitioned to marketing and then into product management.

Lindsay: So kind of tried out different career fields. Product management is really what I enjoyed a lot.

Lindsay: And as a working at startups and product management, we did not have the resources to hire ux. Research teams. so I was doing a lot of that by default, kind of time strapped and realized, wow, this is really exciting. Love talking to users, love getting user feedback. But the logistics in the process of doing that is really time consuming and kind of takes away from the actual insights.

Lindsay: Um, you know, everything from recruiting people to conducting the research to analyzing qualitative research can be really, really time consuming. So that's where we kind of landed. My co-founder also was a product manager as well. But she worked at a big corporation and felt the same challenges when it came to actually doing the research.

Lindsay: So that's where we started PlaybookUX and our mission is to really help take the logistics out of the research. so researchers, product managers, founders, marketers, anyone who's. He wants to get user feedback and really focus on the, the insights. What kind of questions are you asking people?

Lindsay: Unbiased questions. Really getting deep insights and understanding what do people actually think, what do they feel? And then improving your product, your website, your marketing copy, whatever it is, rather than all the logistics that kind of go into it. So, um, that's where we found a playbook, ux.

Sean Weisbrot: When you're thinking about UX research, are you developing the user personas or does the marketing team provide you the unit personas?

Sean Weisbrot: How do you figure out who you should be talking to?

Lindsay: User personas are, one way to do it. I think it depends a bit on the stage of your company, so. You know, big organizations a lot of times already have those personas. The marketing team's done that. If you're a strong startup, you might not have a user base.

Lindsay: You might just have a hypothesis like, we think that we're going to be selling this product to, people who install HVAC units, whatever that demographic is that you're looking for, and take that and then interview people who sell, install HVAC units and see would they actually use this? Would they actually buy it?

Lindsay: the answer might be no. And then you move on to, okay, we think that might be interesting to this person. So it's really about one just. Identifying who is your user race. So for example, when we first started out at Playbook ux, we thought our hypothesis was we were gonna sell to product managers. But then we really started interviewing UX researchers, seeing a lot of them using our platform, and we're like, oh, no, no, no.

Lindsay: These are the people who spend way more time dealing with these issues. Let's. You know, go for them. It's an evolution, right? It's not like a, oh, we know these product groups and they always stay the same. It continues to involve, as you build new features that are interesting to people, you might say, Hey, this user group is really interested in this product.

Lindsay: Let's dive more into that. And that's for any product, any service, any blog that you write. You know, all of a sudden you might realize people in this demographic are really interested in what we're doing. Let's like figure out why they're interested in it. I think it's something that it should always be evolving.

Lindsay: It's not like you just said it once and forget it. Um, you should always try to understand what that demographic is that is interested in your product or who you think you can get in front of.

Sean Weisbrot: So should you figure out. Why people are interested before figuring out what questions to ask?

Lindsay: Yeah, that's a good question.

Lindsay: So I think it depends on where, where your stage are. So if you're at a stage where you're like, we don't really know who's interested, let's figure that out. You might wanna have a few hypothesis. Let's see, we have a group of marketers might be interested in our product. HR managers might be interested in our product.

Lindsay: So let's interview, you know, those three different segments. We'll ask them really open-ended questions. Things like, what's your day to day look like? What are some of the biggest challenges that you have? What are some of the things that frustrate you about your job? Or something to those lines. And then you can uncover, okay.

Lindsay: It seems like, yeah, HR managers have this challenge, but it's not really at the forefront of their day. So you're kind of asking them questions where, um. You're not leading anything. You're not like, Hey, here's a product. Do you like it? Because then when you ask that question, it leads people to say, yeah, okay, they don't wanna hurt your feelings, right?

Lindsay: They don't wanna say, no, I hate it. So you wanna understand like, is this actually a problem they're having? Is this something that is challenging? I always recommend starting with those kind of concepts. Interviews first before you even dive into showing them anything. Of course, if you've done those concept interviews, then that's where you wanna get into usability, user feedback, things like that when you're actually showing them assets, prototypes, websites, whatnot.

Sean Weisbrot: So by asking open-ended questions, is that enough to de-bias your questions or do you have to go beyond. Just saying open-ended questions are okay to really de-bias them.

Lindsay: No, so much goes into de-biasing questions.

Lindsay: I think it's really hard to not jump in for someone. I think that's a really big skill. We can't underestimate, user researchers are taught how to do this. You know, if someone's kind of struggling with something, you kind of natural human instinct is to jump in and kind of say something or lead them somewhere. I think also as a founder, it's hard to hear. People say, oh, no, no, no, I don't, you know, I'm not interested in this. So I always recommend if, you know, maybe have someone who isn't involved.

Lindsay: If it's your baby, you're like, oh my gosh. Like I really want them to like this. So having someone who's a little bit detached is always good. But there's so many like little things that go into that because you could ask an open-ended question that's like, you know, what do you like about this product?

Lindsay: All right, that's leading right? Because you're already pre, you're already leading them to say that they like something about the product. They might not like anything about it. So you might wanna say something. That's more open-ended than that. Less bias than that. So open-ended questions are great to get people talking, but they don't really reduce the bias in how you interview people.

Sean Weisbrot: It's definitely something that I go through when I'm interviewing guests because I am biased by what I'm curious about. And so I'm gonna ask the questions that I wanna know the answers to because I think it's what the audience wants to know. So sometimes I have to think about am I asking the right questions that actually provide value?

Sean Weisbrot: How do you make sure the feedback users provide is valid and useful? Because you can debi your questions as much as possible, but they can still answer in a way that actually gives you nothing to work with.

Lindsay: So there's a few ways you can do that. I mean, one is how. Specific you're getting. So once you've done these kind of concept interviews, hey, we know people like this product, or we know there's something there, right?

Lindsay: There's something that's interesting to people. Now we have an actual website. We have an actual product. Let's usability test it. So if you're in the usability, let's use that example. I always recommend asking it in a question in a few different ways. So you could say something really open-ended like.

Lindsay: Spend a few minutes reviewing this homepage. Scroll up and down. Tell us what you like about it. Tell us what you don't like about it, or is there anything confusing about this website? So you keep prompting them to keep giving more. And then the next question is like, tell me three things you noticed about this website.

Lindsay: The next question is, tell me three things that could have been better about this website. So the more you kind of keep asking it. Drills people to kind of give you more. If you just ask like spend a few minutes on this website, people are gonna be like, okay, it looks good. You know, keep asking in different ways and then you'll get people to kind of open up and say more, um, and give like really interesting feedback that way.

Lindsay: It's interesting too 'cause there's also like cultural norms. Like some countries, some people are just like, I wanna tell everyone that their website's great and it's awesome as product managers. Well, it's nice to hear. You also wanna hear, hey, this is annoying. I don't like that I have to fill in my birth date.

Lindsay: For signing up for an app, why would I have to do that? Right? Like you wanna hear that type of feedback. You have to really be conscious of that and say, okay, if people are kind of on the more shy end or they just don't feel comfortable giving like negative feedback, you can write things like, Hey, it's okay.

Lindsay: We wanna hear what you have to say. Your unfiltered thoughts, your unfiltered opinions. This is how we're gonna make our product better. So there's ways to prime people to make them feel more comfortable giving that negative or not any negative cri critical or helpful feedback, because if you don't get that feedback, then how can you improve? How can you make, your product, your website, your app better?

Sean Weisbrot: I definitely agree with that, and it's something that living in Asia has been a problem for me on a personal level and a professional level at times as well, where, particularly in China, they're. Raised to not ask questions, because at least in a school setting, asking questions means that like you're stupid, basically.

Sean Weisbrot: Like if, if you have a question, it means the teacher hasn't done their job to tell you everything you need to know. And so if you raise your hand, it's like you're admitting that you don't understand what the teacher is saying. And for an American that's. Odd because it's not how we're raised, we're raised.

Sean Weisbrot: Not asking a question means you don't understand the information, and raising your hand means you want to clarify something and that's a good way to go. And so I can definitely understand how when dealing with different cultures, it could be really difficult. and so the researcher has to understand the market before getting into those questions with them and all that.

Lindsay: That can also make your product really great because if you can understand people in these demographics or even they can even. Countries, like different states in the US would handle things differently or different people who are, you know, this demographic for this demographic feel differently about your product, be the same product.

Lindsay: And then, you know, you can obviously use that to build for the people that is your target demographic and say, Hey, we wanna do things to make it valuable to these people. And you can kind of make sure you're, you're getting that really quality feedback

Sean Weisbrot: once you get the feedback. How do you manage it so that it becomes actionable?

Sean Weisbrot: For example, like if you're doing machine learning, you have to train the data, but before you can train the data, you have to clean the data so that it's trainable. Let's assume you're not working with an AI in this regard, but just a human to human. Is there any sort of cleaning that has to be done? Is there any sorting, like how do you make it easily understandable and actionable for your team to implement changes?

Lindsay: And that's a big skillset. Being able to take all the, let's say you do 10 interviews, or let's say you have 10 unmoderated tests where participants are going through your website, speaking their thoughts out loud, recording their screen and their voice, and you have five or 10 of those. That's a lot of data to analyze.

Lindsay: And then when you have something like a survey, you can easily pull out, oh, 85% of people felt this way because it's multi-select answer choice is really easy to kind of. Pull out and generate with qualitative research, you know, it's not as, as cut and dry. You're also understanding the why. Why do people feel that way?

Lindsay: What is it about this that they feel? So that, that's a big skill set and something our software really focuses on because we found that when people were conducting the research, the what they spent the most time was analyzing and synthesizing the research and sharing it internally. And that stuff can get lost really easily.

Lindsay: You know, you have someone kind of rambling on saying, oh yeah, okay, this is. I'm confused, you know, so it's not as cut and dry as just like people like it. People didn't like it. There's so much there. So there's a lot, a lot of different ways you can analyze it, especially with video based feedback. So first you, you know, probably pull some transcripts, um, you take some timestamp notes, you go through each of the videos.

Lindsay: You can tag themes so you know, you can tag things like frustrated, annoyed. Like participants, you know, maybe if you have different product lines, you wanna tag those and feature suggestions. So there's a lot of kind of like codifying the results and then you can analyze that across participants, pull those together, make some clips.

Lindsay: I think clips are really, really important. So if you make little clips of participants struggling to find something that has so much impact. You can share that with stakeholders, you can share that with the development team and say, Hey, look, this is not easy. Look, look at this participant struggling here.

Lindsay: Like we need to make this experience, this user experience better. So you can make those clips, you can create highlight reels, so that that process is the longest process, but it's the most impactful because, that's where you're gonna take all this. Awesome insights and pare it down. And so of course too, like let's say you have 10 interviews, three people say the same thing.

Lindsay: That's really, really important. You know, they're saying it and they're saying, oh, I, I don't, I can't find this feature. This is really frustrating that I can't find it. Then you need to change something. So that's important too. How many people said that thing? So there's a lot that goes into the analysis side of things.

Sean Weisbrot: So if one person out of 10 complains about one thing, is that like, okay, we can forget about this thing? Or how, how do you know beyond just the number of times you hear something be complained about? How do you know what should be acted on? Because let's say someone says something that only one person noticed.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe it was such a tiny thing that nobody else could see that level of detail. But as a product owner, I would be like, oh, that thing would bother me too. Wow. I, I can't believe I missed that and I can't believe everyone else missed that. So how do you know what's. The right thing to act on once you have the feedback.

Lindsay: Qualitative research is more of an art than a science, than quantitative research because there's a lot that goes into that kind of decision, right? Especially as a product manager. As a product owner, you have to make that decision with like other business goals in mind that goes into like what it is to be a product manager.

Lindsay: So, you know, and, and the severity and the priority that you have internally too. If it's like a, something small, like a typo and only one person mentioned it and you know it's a two minute fix for your development team, then yeah, it should be acted on, right? Because. Gonna take two seconds to fix, and two, it doesn't look professional to have a typo.

Lindsay: And three, it's an easy fix, even though one person mentioned it, why have a typo on your website kind of thing. But then there's also other things where it's like a participant mentioned something that's a feature that's really crazy and you know, it's gonna take so long to build, could be high value, but it's just gonna take so long to build and really complex.

Lindsay: it doesn't yield that much return. Then yeah, then you might say, you know what, this is really good feature suggestion, let's. Tag it. Let's, save it for later as we kind of mature as a product. And then, you know, maybe we'll come back to it. So there's so much in between where you have to just say, that's something we can focus on now or that's gonna be something that we focus on later.

Lindsay: but the key that especially we really have people focus on is codifying those results. 'cause you lose it if you do a bunch of interviews and participants say something really interesting and you're like, oh, that's so cool, and like, such a good suggestion. We just can't do it. Now we have. Too, initiatives going on, but you don't wanna lose that, right?

Lindsay: And so it's really important to codify that, have a repository for your research. So when you come up with a brainstorming session a year from now, three months from now, and everyone's like, what should we build next? You can say, Hey, wait, hold on. Participants mentioned this really cool feature. Do you wanna explore this?

Lindsay: So that's a big part of it too, is. Keeping all of your research in a place so that when you're ready to kind of take some of that feedback and implement it.

Sean Weisbrot: So one of the ideas that I had in this regard is we're using ProdPad to manage our product and we want to use canny as well. So I guess what the goal would be is we can do this UX research.

Sean Weisbrot: Come up with a backlog of ideas, leave it on ProdPad until we're ready, and then put it on Kenny and have the community vote on which one of those initiatives they think is the most important, and then go and build the ones that are the most popular.

Lindsay: One of the challenges I do feel like with the upvoting is that you sometimes don't understand the why.

Lindsay: Someone might get some user feedback, oh, you know, I would love this feature, but what, why? Why do you want it? What about it do you like? What value is it gonna give to you? Um, so one thing I always recommend, if you do have those up voting systems, take that data, which is amazing data, and then see what are the top five things.

Lindsay: Okay, now let's. Look at those things. Let's actually interview people and talk to them. What would you do with this feature? How would you use it? Um, what value would you get from it? And make sure that you're really understanding the full totality of that feature. 'cause sometimes it could be like, oh, someone just said, oh yeah, that would be nice, right?

Lindsay: There's a difference between, oh, that would be nice and. Hey, I would promote this to every single person. I know this would be a game changing feature for your team. And then with the qualitative research, you can understand that difference between Oh yeah, yeah, that's something I just suggested and oh, no, no, no.

Lindsay: This would change the game for our organization because there is a big difference. Um, so yeah, that's how you kind of pair the qualitative and the quantitative research together, which is really great.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you approach users? To kick off this feedback session and how do you identify what is the right user?

Sean Weisbrot: So not based on the persona or anything like that, but you may have 10,000 users on your platform, and let's say there's a hundred people that you think might be good, but in, in essence, there's only 20 of those people that are actually like the right people to talk to. How do you identify who they are so you know that the conversations you have with them are valid and correct for your team's needs?

Lindsay: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So there's, well, there's two things with that. One is, like you mentioned, you can use your own users, you can get feedback directly from your user base. There are some challenges with that. One, people might not wanna give feedback. You have a lot of like low response rates.

Lindsay: It's also awkward to show them maybe designs that haven't been fully flushed out yet. 'cause we always recommend put. In front of people as early as possible, so you don't go down a whole path and you know, say, oh no, now we've gone down this path. We realize people don't actually want this. So sometimes people can feel uncomfortable with having their current user base looking at, you know, really early stage prototypes and stuff like that.

Lindsay: So there are softwares like ours and others that. Do help you recruit your target demographic. And there's a nice thing about that One is that you can just put stuff in front of people. You're like, no one, I can target them specifically. Like, oh, let's say I'm an insurance company and I need people who are currently in the process of buying a car and they need car insurance.

Lindsay: So we can target that level of specificity. And then, you know, you don't, you can just say, you know. One, it's faster, right? These people are trained to respond and give feedback and stuff like that. So that's one. You can use a panel, participant panel. There's plenty out there. And the other is, is targeting your group.

Lindsay: There's so many different ways you can go about that. A lot of people like to use like HubSpot, their sales. Force, like things like that. If you've tagged customers and, and maybe your, your CRM softwares, that way you can say, okay, this customer, they currently are using this product and they've logged in 27 times in the last month and they've used customer support chats this many times, so it seems like they must be frustrated or something like that because they keep chatting our customer support and we wanna speak to people who, you know, are struggling with our product right now because we wanna improve it.

Lindsay: That's one way you can do it. Um, you can use kind of your CRM data, your customer chat, you know, maybe if you use intercom or other customer chats, that's another way to do it. You can always, you know, ask people to give feedback. That way. They jump on an interview with, um, with our team. They wanna give feedback.

Lindsay: I always recommend compensating people for their time because then they feel it's equal on both sides. It really depends on what your goal is. So like I mentioned, you might wanna speak to the power users who love your product 'cause they're the early adopters. Or you might wanna speak to the people who decide to unsubscribe and talk to them and say, what was it that made you unsubscribe?

Lindsay: Or how come you try to support so often? Like, what could we have done to, you know, limit that and made it easier to you for you to self-serve. Once you kind of decide what your goal is and your initiative is, then you can kind of splice and dice the data and figure out. How do we target or how do we find those people from there?

Sean Weisbrot: Those are all really awesome tips and I'm definitely gonna have my product manager listen to this episode. You mentioned something that I want to talk about, which is compensation. I know your platform allows people to just pay cash for people's time. What do you think about offering. Discounts on your product if they decide to use it.

Lindsay: That's always a hard question for me to answer because it depends on your user base. You know, if you have people who, if your product's a graphic t-shirt shop and you say you get your next T-shirt for free, and you have these loyalists that love those graphic t-shirts, they're like, sure, I'll jump on. I'll do it. That's great. If you're a.

Lindsay: Company that's like a B2B software, and you're like, oh, you get like one month free. And they're a person who has no control of the billing. They don't, it really is irrelevant to them and that their company's gonna get a month free on their billing. That may just not matter to them because they're like, well, I'm not getting anything from it.

Lindsay: It's my boss. You know, his boss's boss is the one or procurement deals with, that. So it doesn't really matter to me. So I think it really, really depends on who your user base is. B2C brands, I probably would say that that's more appealing to use. That's just like a generalization, but that's more appealing for the most part, unless you're.

Lindsay: B2B brand that works with like freelancers or people who are like directly getting that benefit. But it really does range. There's some B2B softwares that people just absolutely love and they're so diehard that they would do it just for free or they would do it because they just altruistically wanna give helpful feedback.

Lindsay: So it's a bit of a range. I think it's more about knowing your user base and what motivates them. It's also an interesting question too, like what's interesting to them. But yeah, if you can give stuff away, that's always great. Um, you wanna make people feel valued, um, and make them feel like they. You know, actually did help because that's, that is, it is so helpful to give that type of feedback.

Lindsay: Without that, it's so hard to build really, really awesome product.

Sean Weisbrot: We haven't gotten to this point yet, and so it's something that we've been thinking about how we can get the users to want to take part in not just beta testing, but alpha testing new features. And then, you know, once they went through it, then we would release it to like the beta test group and let them see it, and it would be more refined.

Sean Weisbrot: And then when it's done and give it to like everyone else. How do you incentivize these kinds of people? Because I, I've heard of people just doing it out of love for their product

Lindsay: personally, if. The A tool that I'm using all the time is like, Hey, I have this awesome new feature and you can get first look at it and you can start using, it's gonna save you 20 minutes outta your day.

Lindsay: Sure. I'm definitely gonna start using it. Um, and I'll give them some feedback. That's great. So I think if you can show that there's some value to them for doing that, right, they're gonna be able to save time, they can save money, they can do something because they're getting access. Um, of course if you have people who absolutely love your brand and just wanna give feedback because they are happy to see it grow, that's amazing as well.

Lindsay: So it's kinda one of those roots back. Back to your user base and what, you know, what people are interested in and whatnot. That being said, I think it's always nice if you can give them something, um, for their time because, you know, it's always just like a good way to make people really, you know, happy and say, yeah, hey, this is awesome.

Lindsay: Like, I already loved this company and they gave me a, a free t-shirt and they gave me a, you know, an extra compensation. Like, it just kind of creates those really, loyal customers. But I mean, it's really up to you. How you, how I wanna handle that.

Sean Weisbrot: It sounds to me like someone could do a pretty good job making a career out of testing products and giving feedback

Lindsay: If there's compensation from all those companies, we can definitely do that. Um, there's a lot of people looking for feedback, you know, especially, and there's other like, parallel industry stuff. Where's surveys, right? People taking in answering surveys. There's. Plenty of people who, um, give feedback that way.

Lindsay: Some companies don't want people who are like doing it all the time. They want person who's not trained, you know, knows exactly how to give tests and give feedback perfectly. but some companies want those people who are like really trained 'cause they know what to look for and they know, Hey, oh wait, red flag, let me alert that team right away.

Lindsay: And it's also exciting. I mean, I, I love. Giving user feedback. I think it's fun. And I, as you, especially if you're into it, it's, it's a fun thing to do. Kind of go through someone's website or product and be like, oh wait, this could be better or that could be better. especially if you're not on the responsibility for changing anything, it's nice to be able to just say like, oh, you can improve that and have no consequences of, what, what that actually means as a product manager.

Lindsay: You're know, you're the one who has to actually implement that, and the developers and the designers and the re researchers have to actually implement that. But yeah, I think it's, it's fun to be a tester for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's something that I'm kind of a natural at. Like whenever I'm talking with people for the podcast, I'll usually go through their website and profiles and see like if there's any little things that I noticed that they've missed, any typos here and there, or problems with bugs.

Sean Weisbrot: I was talking to a potential investor, he was like, hey, check out the website. We did some changes to it, and I was like, oh, the button's broken. I was like, well, the button's broken. Like, oh crap. Thanks for letting me know. So I love doing that because. It helps people go, oh wow, this guy's, you know, he, he cares like, you know, he just doesn't want to use me for my time or my knowledge, whatever, like he's actually giving back to me.

Sean Weisbrot: Something like that. So, I dunno, it's just something that I can't turn off. My mom trained me to notice tiny details and if they're off, I do notice these details and I do point them out to people when. You know, they don't notice. And oftentimes people don't notice these things. I've seen so many websites or or applications that people have developed and it feels like the CEO has no idea.

Sean Weisbrot: Like they're just not looking at the platform or they're not looking at the website, or they're not looking at their LinkedIn company page. And so there's always little problems that I notice, but a lot of people don't notice. And so I feel the need to just tell people.

Lindsay: It's interesting, you know, as a founder and also as a product manager, you are so ingrained in your products.

Lindsay: And that's all you see. So you think that everything's obvious to everyone else. Right. And so, you know, I just remember writing our first website or doing our first product. I was like, oh, how could no one not understand this? You know? Meanwhile, I've been living and breathing this for every second of every day, so I'm like, this is so obvious to everyone.

Lindsay: That's why it's so, so important to put it in front of users, because you have that bias yourself as someone who's so dedicated to this. You kind of blinded by some stuff that you think are obvious, you think is so obvious. So that's why you have to put it in front of testers because you're like, you do research and you're like, oh, duh.

Lindsay: Like, I should have seen that. But you just get so into it that that's really why it's important to get it in front of people who are seeing it for the first time, who have never experienced it. And I always, every time we do research, I, I always think it's so funny, I'm like, no way. We're gonna have like crazy feedback.

Lindsay: Like, we, we've scoured this thing, we, you know, we know this. And then we come back and there's like 20 bits of feedback that I'm like. Oh my gosh, that should have been so obvious to me. Like it's just because you're so ingrained in it and it becomes an assumption that you make versus, oh, you should have a label here, defining what this step is.

Lindsay: You know, stuff like that. So that's even more the reason, um, to give feedback because it's not that people don't care, it's not that people don't love what their product, it's just that, you're so dedicated, so focused on it that it's hard to see what someone who's never seen it before thinks

Sean Weisbrot: I'm completely aware that I'm biased about.

Sean Weisbrot: The way my product looks and feels. I also am hopeful that the first iteration of our design makes sense to people, but I'm also aware that there's a high chance that there's gonna be a tremendous amount of feedback that goes, no, you're wrong.

Lindsay: Yeah. And sometimes there's so little stuff. I've realized it's always the little stuff, and that's, that's the best part about this type of feedback. It's just. I need a header here or a label needs to be a little bit more clear, or I need to learn more button here, because people just wanted to know a little bit more. So it's not always these big overhauls. It's a lot of the little tweaking, little iterations, little improvements for a relatively low cost.

Lindsay: It's. So valuable, right? The alternate of not doing research is put something out there. We get in front of people, they struggle to understand it. One of two things. Either they contact our customer chat, they get frustrated because sometimes they can't figure out what they're looking for and then maybe they term or they just don't contact customer chat, which.

Lindsay: Is worse, right? And then they just turn on their own and say, oh, I give up. It's too frustrating. Meanwhile, all that could have been is like one little tweak of a, a learn more button, right? And then a help center article or something like that. That could have just been an easy fix. So my pitch is that the amount of money that you save, because just doing a little bit of research and getting that feedback versus the unintended consequences of so much downstream.

Lindsay: And then, you know, obviously the development time and the product manager's time and all that. But yeah, I think it's, I think the best part about it's, it's a lot of little tweaks. It's a lot of little iterations and improvements and no one's user research is perfect. I always say that like everyone always has something to improve, to make better.

Sean Weisbrot: my team can definitely vouch for the fact that I've found mistakes and tried to change them, and they're like, we, no, we have to finish the product just. We can wait that, that can wait. It can happen later. I'm like, but no. And they're like, you gotta wait. We have to finish this, you know, release. We have to finish these features so that we can launch.

Sean Weisbrot: But as you say, yeah, I'm, I know that there's going to be a huge list of things down the line where it's like, oh, you're missing a tool tip here. Or, oh, the shadow on this popup is different from this shadow. So like things that, that require standardization. Sometimes you just miss that stuff in testing and you know you can do your best to design it, but sometimes the developers aren't a hundred percent on exactly what you told 'em to do, and the testers may not catch those things.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's not until you start to use it or people start to use it, they go, Hey, like, why is the shadow different here? Maybe they don't notice that, but you know, my, my concept of these kinds of problems are standardization issues. As well.

Lindsay: Yeah, and I think with the standardization, it's always funny because, you know, we're very much a product-led growth company, so as a founder, that's what I spend all my time, you know, obsessing over, I get so annoyed when one shadow is, or this button's different than this button.

Lindsay: The user does not most of the time really care, to be honest. Like we've put it in front of so many people and they're like, oh yeah, I. Really notice that. But they do notice when they can't figure out, when they get frustrated, it's hard to balance that, right? 'cause if you're obsessive about your product, that's where you like care about those things.

Lindsay: But that's why I always try and say, as much as you can, put yourself in the user's perspective, like what's actually frustrating to them. You know, a button color a, this color. Yes. Those things can improve experience. There's a whole industry around AB testing what should be tweaking and perfect. Um, but as a start up stage, most of the time there's gonna be inconsistencies.

Lindsay: But having that bad user experience where people just can't get through the signup flow or they can't start to launch something or start, then you're gonna lose them. And that's obviously more important, um, than that. And so that's also another thing is what stage of a company you're at, you've been around for 15 years, the tweaking and the.

Lindsay: Perfection. And the AB testing can be, that's the most important thing. And and especially if you, you have that scale, that tweak and those changes, you know, obviously they always give the example of Google changing their blue button 47 times variation a week or something like that. But it obviously makes an impact.

Lindsay: But as a startup is, you know, that sort of thing. Your biggest impact is people like not being able to figure out what, what you do, what you're about, how it works kind of thing.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there something I haven't asked you yet that you wish I'd asked or something that you'd like to add upon?

Lindsay: One thing I always.

Lindsay: See is a lot of startups resistant to getting user feedback, customer feedback, even though people preach it all the time, like get user feedback, put it in front of users. And I think it's always been, you know, oh, that's why don't they wanna get user feedback.

Lindsay: Always wanna say it's hard. It's really hard to put yourself out there and put it in front of people.

Lindsay: It's scary to watch those recordings. It's scary to be like, oh my gosh, we really like slaved away on this. Just. Really worked ourselves on this and now people hate it. I think it's like a muscle, you gotta practice it. You gotta just say, you know what, we're committing to it. We know the value of it, and it's okay that people aren't gonna like things.

Lindsay: We want people to not like things because it's worse that it's gonna be live and people don't like it. Versus it's, you know, in a prototyping phase and people don't like it. Then you have time to change it. Then you have time to make, you know, those tweaks. So I kind of, as someone, I always like to kind of, say, you know what?

Lindsay: I know it's scary to get that type of feedback, especially as someone who cares a lot. but it's okay. You know, the more you do it, the more you get the feedback, the less scary it becomes because you're like, this is just part of our process. We know we're gonna get some. Valid constructive feedback. So as much as you can kind of just say, you know, we gotta do it and build it into the part of the software development lifecycle.