We hope you’ve enjoyed it!

If you’re a leader and/or senior practitioner — you should subscribe to our newsletter Quiet Stories. We bring you curated articles to help you deal with the messy space where strategy work, delivery work, and research work overlap.

No fluff — just useful, applicable information delivered to your inbox every other week. Check out the archive if you don’t believe us.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Most Excellent New Year!

Kathryn & Adrian

“After several research projects and across 25+ in-depth sessions with teams tasked with engineering transformation, as a psychologist for software teams, I think we’re fundamentally failing to prepare engineering managers to handle the sociocognitive work of triage.”

“It is an open secret that the vast majority of attempted digital transformations fail. Companies spend millions of dollars and years of effort, yet fail to make meaningful change. The only real question is why?”

“The UK’s Government Functional Standard calls programmes “unique, temporary, flexible organisations created to coordinate and oversee the implementation of projects and related work”. In brief, they are there to produce a set of pre-specified changes or outputs, and then vanish.But where programmes are implemented in order to create a service, or transform a service, this programmatic approach carries a cost.”

“As soon as people learn that I’m an archivist/librarian working in UX Research Ops, they ask me, “How do I create a Repository?? OMG my team really needs one — we can’t find anything!” In many cases, these teams don’t actually need a repository (yet). They need to get their own house in order by applying principles of knowledge management.”

“The problem is most of the existing roadmaps are not in this state. They’re in early confidence states. They’re mostly based on opinions and what I call anecdotal evidence, which is usually either the CEO talking to a few customers, or we are copying this feature from the leading competitor assuming that they know something we don’t.”

“We communicate in so many different ways, in so many different channels. We send emails and slack messages. We have face to face meetings and 1:1s. We do presentations, workshops and demos. But beyond that we also have so many different people that we want to communicate with: there’s lots of different languages, different cultures, different backgrounds. And there are different ways of perceiving and interpreting messages. Sometimes you need to take the time to understand what it is you want to get across, so that you can design whether it will have the right impact.”

“I have been around working in IT for quite a long time now and only a few times have I ever seen really truly high-performing teams. […] In this session I will discuss some of the behaviours and characteristics I saw in these teams, what held back other teams from reaching the same level and how we purposefully worked with a couple of teams over a one-year period in 2022 to really help them become that highly engaged and happy team able to perform at ever higher levels.”

“Collaboration is essential for all teams and departments. However, as our study revealed, UX teams may face more significant challenges due to their relatively less established position compared to that of other departments. […] The strategies for addressing these challenges are not one-size-fits-all. Instead, they serve as a starting point to raise awareness and support the development of customized approaches tailored to each unique circumstance.”

“When a relationship has very little trust, you tend to interpret everything someone says in the worst possible light, or you may hear hostility, contempt, or dismissiveness where none exists. On the other side of the exchange, the conversation becomes a minefield, where it feels like everything you say gets misinterpreted or turned against you no matter how careful you are trying to be. This can turn into a death spiral of trust where every interaction ends up with each of you hardening against each other a little more and filing away ever more wounds and slights.”

“How do we know what’s going on when we’re working in remote or hybrid organisations? How do we get the right information to the right people, find what we need and bump into ideas that can lead to something else? Distributed workplaces make it hard, but not impossible.”

“To drive effective Continuous Discovery and ignite the engine of product discovery, organizations need the right infrastructure. That’s why they should invest in Research Ops. By crafting a scalable participant sourcing process, helping minimize bias in interviews, triangulating insights, recording and preserving knowledge, and fostering continuous ideation, businesses can make the most our of a Continuous Discovery practice.”

“Next time you have to make a decision, go back to this simple mental model and ask yourself: do I have all the right information to gather these 3 people in the room? And if not, how can I get clarity about who is the decision maker, who will bear the consequences, and who knows most about the problem?”

“The biggest challenge that a team has is understanding the answer to the question “how are we doing?”, Tomer says. Dashboards aren’t clear, and there’s no clear answer to this question and so teams focus on detailed metrics rather than high-level metrics.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that while there are several key personality traits that can help someone become a great product manager — emotional intelligence, adaptability, and intellectual horsepower — there’s another skill that’s often overlooked: cross-disciplinary learning.”