16.  What is the future of Democratization of Research?

Joe Marcantano: Drew, welcome to another episode.

Drew Freeman: How you doing, Joe? it's an exciting day for us.

Joe Marcantano: It is. It is a first for us and for the show, and I'm really excited about this one.

Drew Freeman: Yeah. So let's, skip the banter and get right to it.

Joe Marcantano: Awesome. So let me introduce you and the audience to doctor Ari Zelmanow. Ari, welcome to the Inside UXR podcast.

Ari Zelmanow: Hey, Joe. Hey, Drew. Thanks for having me. I'm pretty excited to be here.

Joe Marcantano: So, Ari, I'll have you kind of talk, through your resume and your credentials. I've known you for a long time. Drew is meeting you for the first time, as is our audience. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Ari Zelmanow: yeah. So, hello, everyone. My name is Ari. I like, to go by the Sherlock Holmes of consumer and market behavior. I currently lead a, I guess, as of today, I lead product and ux research at Twilio. and, I have led and built research teams at a lot of companies that people may have heard of, like Panasonic, Twitter. Indeed, a company called GTM Hub, which is now quantif. and prior to that, I was actually a police officer and detective for better part of a decade of my life.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. And that's actually how you and I first met. Was back on the streets when we were both policemen.

Ari Zelmanow: So a lot of the skills that we used as police officers, are definitely applicable to research. So a lot of people kind of think of research in this academic model, and I like to think of it more as this abductive, evidence based approach to building knowledge.

Drew Freeman: I was just talking with teammates today. Like, I know that we're all perfectionists. Our people, our clients are not paying us enough to give them perfection. We're paying them to. They're paying us enough to give them good. That's it. Go for good enough.

Joe Marcantano: You know what?

Ari Zelmanow: It's funny you say that, Drew, because I think the biggest challenge facing research today is that there's absolute misalignment between what businesses and product teams and UX teams want and what researchers want to deliver. So I would argue that the number one requirement is speed. And some, I've seen people respond to that with like, well, rigor. Rigor is the most important thing. And while I'm not dismissing rigor as important, I think that's just kind of a necessary component. It's already built into what we do. So, like arguing that you have to trade off rigor for speed, to me, that's the job of the researcher. You need to move fast. I need to find the best way for you to move fast with the tools that I have in my toolkit.

Drew Freeman: Right. You need to match the rigor for the speed that you need to hit one.

Ari Zelmanow: Ah, hundred percent. And product teams, I'm telling you right now, product teams and engineering teams are not going to stop the presses waiting for research. Ever.

Drew Freeman: No, I've never, ever had a product team tell me you're moving too fast. Never.

Ari Zelmanow: No, never.

Joe Marcantano: This is kind, of related to what we were, what the theme of today's episode is what we were going to talk about. Because I think that a lot of times this need for speed when it comes to research is related to the fact that there just aren't enough researchers at a lot of companies to tackle all the problems. So we have this bucket of problems that's huge. And it becomes, how do we answer as many of these questions as we can as quickly as possible?

Drew Freeman: Yeah. So, Joe, why don't you kind of lead us in with our question for the episode?

Ari Zelmanow: Yeah.

Joe Marcantano: So the question for today's episode is, what is democratization of research? It has kind of become this flashpoint and it's kind of a buzzy word, but what does it really mean and what are the implications of it? And so, Ari, you, and I have talked at length about this, and I think that you and I have both shifted positions over the last 12, 18, 24 months, probably more than once. I'd love to hear kind of a, if someone has not heard the word democratization before, what, what is democratization of research?

Ari Zelmanow: Well, let's start with the elephant in the room and saying that it is okay to change your opinion or position on something as you learn more information. And so the reality is, let's start, but we'll come back to that. But before we do that, let's talk about the term democratization. First of all, let me start by saying it is such a loaded

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Ari Zelmanow: term. That's like calling somebody who, that's like saying that there's vegetarian and anti animal people. Like, it's, you either like democracy or you don't like democracy. It's crazy. the second thing I'll call out is on. For purposes of this, we should talk a little bit about what the definition of that is. And so, going back to our police world days, there's people, I've heard people say before my house got robbed. Well, your house can't get robbed, okay? Like, your house gets burglarized. A business can get robbed, but they're different. There's different definitions of those things. Until we can operate on the level, the same level about what the term actually means, we can't actually have an intelligent conversation about it. And so democratization, really, if you read about terms that I've read online, it's that, ah, anybody can do research. And if that's the term that anybody can do research, it's a dumb argument. it's kind of a pedantic, navel gazing, anal retentive, ridiculous thing. The reality is, yes, anybody in the business can do research. Now, the way I would go into this, and there's lots of threads here, is that when you go to a doctor, a general practitioner, they know a lot, a little about a lot of things. Researchers know a lot about things depending on their areas of specialization. So, like, the reality is, if somebody needs to be able to do basic usability testing or basic interviews, we can train people to do that. And thinking that we can't is crazy. And this, like, gatekeeping of researchers, where they say, well, only researchers can do research. The reality is, Drew, you, I. We all learned how to do this. We didn't go to Hogwarts. We, like, were able to come in and, like, learn the job. And to say that, that product managers and designers can't do that, I don't know. That's kind of insulting, if you ask me. Like, you're basically saying you guys aren't smart enough to learn the secret powers of research. It's crazy.

Drew Freeman: Ari, I love that you use the doctor's office example, because that's the exact metaphor that I have in my head, but in a slightly different capacity. The way that I think about democratization of research, or sometimes I like to call it the decentralizing of research just to get around that, you know, everybody loves democracy, so obviously it's good argument, is that at a doctor's office, we've decentralized a lot of the doctor's work to nurse practitioners, to medical assistants, to nurses, so that the doctor can spend their time focusing on the thing that only the doctor can do. So that's kind of how I think about it, like, in my head when decentralization is or democratization is done. Well, I, as the researcher, am, offloading some tasks so that I can focus on the ones that most need my attention.

Joe Marcantano: Let me play devil's advocate for a second here. And Ari, you've heard me use this metaphor before. When it comes to decentralization or democratization of research, I think of it like landscaping, like mowing my lawn. Sure, I can mow my lawn. There's nothing magical about mowing the lawn that, I can't do. But I don't think anyone would argue that when a professional landscaper comes in and they do the edging and the aerating and fertilizing, the lawn looks better. So what would you say to someone who says, sure, anyone could do research, but there's going to be a significant quality issue if you allow people who aren't researchers to do research.

Drew Freeman: The question is, are you willing to pay the cost of having an expert do it?

Ari Zelmanow: And I'll challenge both of you with a stone cold reality in business, and that is this. We can all sit here and say, well, we like it. I'd rather have the better lawn. But none of that matters if product teams and UX teams, the people who are holding the purse strings for these roles, aren't hiring to make their lawn nicer. So the reality is, it shouldn't be a question of is democratization good or bad, or does it, is it better? Like, sure, a trained researcher who does this 40 hours a week is going to be better at research or asking interviews than somebody who doesn't do it 40 hours a week, hopefully. That said, I think that, when you have a product team that has to do research and they're not hiring researchers to do that, it's not a matter of if we should do democratization or decentralization. It's how. So it's really thinking about those things and using Drew's metaphor of, like, the nurse practitioners and the pas, I would even argue that it goes the other direction, too. If you go to the doctor and you're having, like, chronic chest pain, they're going to send you to a cardiologist. If you have kidney stones that are persistent,

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Ari Zelmanow: they're going to send you to a nephrologist. Why? Because those are specialists in those areas. If you needed a study today, a heavy quant study, you'd want to go to a quantitative researcher. But if you're doing usability testing and testing evaluative things or testing or basic interviews, I think, we need to go to your point, Drew. In the other direction. Let's allow the pas, the nurse practitioners to do the things they need to do to keep the business moving.

Drew Freeman: Totally agree. 100% agree. So the question is, how do we do that in the best possible way while also not decentralizing ourselves out of a job?

Ari Zelmanow: So a team, this is an interesting problem and my suggestion is this. If you think about the double diamonds in product development, there's the discovery side and then there's the build side, right? Discovery. Should be done by researchers. It's, it's open ended. There's a lot of ambiguity. The way you ask questions is really going to matter, but that you're really answering three primary questions like what do we build, who do we build it for and what is the value it offers to customers who then in turn are going to transform that into value for the business. So that's let's call that section of the diamond product research, the other side of the diamond. So now we've made a product roadmap. We need to build it. Let's call that Ux research. That's the experience. You're building the experience. You've already decided what to build, who to build it for, and the value it's going to create. But now we want to iteratively refine that. That is where I think democratization lives. That's where I think that it is a safe place to start a, I'm going to call it a decentralization program because I like that, Drew. A decentralization program where you're saying the researchers are going to work on strategic media issues. We are going to train, enable, otherwise prepare people with the tools, everything they need to be able to do basic usability tests on the build side.

Joe Marcantano: It sounds like moving forward because I think you're right. I think, you know, whether or not we want democratization, it's happening. It's going to happen. It sounds like moving forward though, there's going to be a, a fair percentage and maybe this percentage will be higher for some people, lower for others. Where your job is really training, teaching, coaching, mentoring non researchers and how to do those basic usability stuffs, how to set them up in unbiased ways, how to run an interview, how to set up a quick card sort, something like that. And researchers will either specialize in like I help with the decentralization, or it'll be, I help with the, the product discovery side.

Drew Freeman: I don't know that it'll, that most teams will get to that level of specialization. I think the one piece that you might be missing from that group as well is research ops, creating processes and one pagers and guides and materials to help those decentralized researchers or product people or developers or whoever follow, you know, stay within color, within the lines.

Ari Zelmanow: Yes. And so here's where it gets a little fuzzy. So if you're talking about big legacy or big tech companies that have budgets that can do that, what we'll do is we'll. It's two different job roles, as Joe kind of pointed to. One is, like, more teacher, coach, consultant, advisor, educator, and the other is more researcher. And I think that in bigger teams, you can have that. But, Drew, as you're alluding to, the problem is that those companies also could have research operations team. Where this gets a little sticky is when you have small to medium sized businesses that don't have a research team, they've hired researcher number one. They're not going to have ops. And so how do you split that role to make sense? And so what my argument would be is that it's less about headcount at that point and more about explicit definition of a program, like lines of demarcation. So, like, for me, the line of demarcation is if you put it on the product roadmap, that falls to UX design and product. Now, if it's not on the product roadmap, researchers should do that. And then what I think will happen, the natural evolution of that, is that we will have a resurgence of the usability research teams, where you'll have, like, lower level research. And I say lower level, I mean, like, newer. It's an entry point for people who want to do research, do usability testing on the UX side, and as they gain experience, they become product researchers. So, like, the staff level, principal level researchers are on build and the new, like, the junior researchers are on ux. And that's kind of the evolution or the way that I see that happening.

Drew Freeman: I mean, that's essentially the career path that I took. I would love to see us kind of get back to that.

Ari Zelmanow: We are working toward that at Twilio right now. Like, so the reality is, is we have split our team. I have split our team into a product research function where we have very senior level researchers

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Ari Zelmanow: doing, like, the, like, the discovery, the meaty problems, the jobs to be done, like, really understanding, like, the problem space. And now, we are actually hiring that democratization person as we speak.

Drew Freeman: So, Ari, you mentioned kind of the product versus ux split, that can happen. What do you think about something like a method split where maybe if it's usability testing or unmoderated testing, it might go to one of that, one of those decentralized folks. But if it's something a little bit more involved, like, I don't know, a card sort or, you know, an in depth interview, a contextual inquiry, how do you feel about that kind of potential split?

Ari Zelmanow: So a few ways to think about that. One is if you have somebody who is focused on training enablement, you can have that person work with teach, coach, mentor, somebody to teach them how to do it. So that next kind of like the, see one, do one, teach one kind of thing model. or if I do agree with you, Drew, I think the other part of that is that the most important thing is to have those lines drawn and then like, say, hey, for unmoderated testing, you're going to, you will do that for moderated stuff. We'll help you. Whatever the line is, I think you just have to be explicit about it. But I think you also have to, it's not as simple as just saying, like, okay, I'm gonna. Interviews are actually pretty simple because we could say, like, okay, here's the tooling. You could probably do an interview on Zoom, record it, transcript, load it up into Marvin or insert tool here. I'm gonna give Marvin a plug. Cause I love them. but the other issue is when you're, when you're using more complex tools, like you talked about, like, if you're using something like a card sorting tool, or where you're using user testing, or where things get really complicated is with qualtrics. Yeah, you've got it. You're gonna have to set up guardrails. And I don't think guardrails are a bad thing or you have to set up training. But, I think it goes back to this idea of democratization. And if we start with the definition of we want to enable people in the business to be better scientific and analytical thinkers, which is what I really think democratization, decentralization is, then how do we do it? And as long as you write out a plan and execute toward that plan, your program is probably going to be successful. It's when you don't set up a plan and people have no idea what they're doing, no idea what they're supposed to do, because people are left to their defaults. Like, they'll just default around research. Right.

Joe Marcantano: I mean, well, I think that's what we're seeing. you know, there are lots of folks out there who will say, we shouldn't be democratizing. We should be hiring more researchers. And the fact of the matter is, though, especially after the layoffs that we saw in the last 18 months, businesses just aren't going to do that period full stop. And so now it becomes, do we want to move forward with some research that is done by somebody who's not a researcher while being coached or overseen or supervised by a researcher? Or do you want these folks making decisions in the dark? And the fancy term for that is guessing. Do you want folks guessing?

Ari Zelmanow: 100%. And again, it goes back to you mentioned the layoffs. Well, when people say there's a resurgence in jobs, the thing that I think the context that people are missing is, would a resurgence in jobs look the same to them if I'm telling you that companies are still trying to reduce operating expenses, and rather than hiring roles in the United States, they're looking at lower cost geographies. So is that a one for one trade? And the second thing that I think that you and I have talked about outside of this is AI, other tools that are making things more efficient that, while I'll stipulate, are probably not there today, are still creating efficiencies. And the reality is, these teams, if they can get around hiring a headcount to do things, they're going to do that. And the second thing that I would call out is, if research is just data collection, we're all in trouble. There's a human element to it, but that human element can be taught. And to your point, I would rather have people asking me intelligent questions about research and research collection than these ridiculous, like, confirmation, bias challenges that we get when you see people that are what I call work in the roadmap.

Joe Marcantano: You know, I've talked several times before about how I think the most important thing that a researcher does is the communication after the research does not matter how good your research is. It doesn't, matter how many methods you know and how well you know them if everybody ignores your research. And so I wonder if this decentralization to steal Drew's new term will help solve some of that, will encourage folks in product, encourage folks in design to listen to the research a little more, if they are

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Joe Marcantano: the ones attaching their name to the research.

Ari Zelmanow: Yes. And I think to, your point, I think that research. We've thought about research in terms of, like, this academic model, right where, okay, we're going to come together, we'll write out research, questions and objectives, and then we'll do like, we'll figure out like, who the sample frame is. And it looks a lot like an academic project. And the problem, is, is that that model doesn't necessarily work for research overall. and it touches on what you just described, which is the communication issue. And so no democratization program would work without a communication issue. There's three things every researcher and research team needs to know how to do. They need to be able to collect evidence like a detective. They need to be able to build business cases like a high power trial attorney, and they need to be able to deliver or communicate their findings and point of view like a primetime news anchor. If any of those three things are missing, you're leaving money on the table. And the reality is that I would argue, similar to you, that communication is probably 95% of it. Like, if you don't communicate your findings well, it doesn't really matter what, what methods you did, how statistically significant something was, how amazing your project was. If people don't get it, then it's dead.

Drew Freeman: And if that communication only has to happen in the brain of the person designing the product and now doing the research, think about all those potential problems that you've eliminated. Another thing, Joe, that I like that you mentioned is that not only are you giving that designer, that developer more ownership in their own process, you can't help but kind of let research best practices seep into your everyday thinking. We all understand and have picked up things about people in general or specific users that we've done research on simply because we've done research in the past. So I can tell you, well, I have a pretty good guess that someone's going to respond to this stimulus in this way. So maybe I don't even design it poorly in the first place because I look back at my past research and go, oh, yeah, I can guess how this is going to work.

Ari Zelmanow: It comes down to thinking about research in terms of, like, these complicated methods. And really it's about, it's a scientific method, it's having some kind of hypotheses, ruling out things and then being left with what is left is like the likely explanation for what you are. It's very abductive. And I think all of those things can be taught to people in a business, for sure.

Drew Freeman: I mean, that's essentially my job at our agency. I'm the UX research trainer. So yes, I'm training researchers on how to be better at their job. But like I can do that for other folks, too.

Ari Zelmanow: 100%. Yeah. It goes back to what I said in the beginning when I was kind of on my tirade, is that, oh, what? we can't. Product managers and designers aren't smart enough to learn these methods. I mean, that's crazy. It's so insulting. It is so insulting to be like, no, researchers need to do this. Well, you know what? Before I was a researcher, I wasn't exactly.

Joe Marcantano: So one of the things that I think about when I think about a designer or a product manager kind of doing their own research, it's in my spiel, when I do in depth interviews, is one of the first things I tell a participant is I have no skin in the game. I wasn't involved in developing it. I wasn't involved in building it. You're not going to offend me if you tell me you hate it. And I'm wondering, how much do we need to worry about? Or do we need to worry about, essentially, folks who are that close to the product itself, introducing a little bias, even unknowingly, as they design their research.

Ari Zelmanow: Awareness of that helps them. But really, what's supposed to happen is there's independent confirmation of facts. So if they're confirming something, they should be following a method to kind of. It's either through, like, what we would call theoretical saturation, it could be through, statistical methods that show that there's some significance. There's all sorts of ways we do that. I think the other thing is, is transparency and the ability to let others interrogate what they found. I, And I think that, that those things, there's. It's still going to our law enforcement days. Think of it like a courtroom. Yeah. You bring a case forward, but then there's a case, there's a way they try the case in court. I don't think it's any different than that. And I would argue that, like, detectives do this all the day, all day. When you have a victim that was severely, injured in a crime, you don't not care about that victim. You're not, like, so impartial that you're like, oh, it doesn't matter. You're aware of the bias, but you follow the facts wherever they lead, even if you don't like where they go. I think that people can be

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Ari Zelmanow: taught, you and I were taught that we were able to do it. I think others can be taught that. And I would also argue that you, in an agency environment you're describing is right. You're separated from like the outcome. I have no skin in the game. In many companies, that's not the case. Designers are embedded with their product teams. They're working alongside them every day. They do have skin in the game. And the reality is, think of, their skin in the game is worse than most because they're incentivized to ship. Shipping things is what is good. And so they operate with Goodhart's law. They do whatever it takes to get things to ship fast. When they ship, they're rewarded. When they don't, they're punished, regardless of if what they ship is shit.

Joe Marcantano: I wish folks who are listening to this could see how furiously I was nodding along with you as you were speaking.

Drew Freeman: I think the other thing that doesn't get mentioned is, yes, there are benefits to having an impartial moderator, but there are also benefits to having a moderator that knows the subject area really deeply. Like, no matter how good an interviewer I am, I simply don't have the context to be able to ask as nuanced follow up questions as an expert in the area might be able to. I have to make up for that in other ways.

Ari Zelmanow: Drew, that's a great point. And as detectives, when we were working a case, you don't just go walk in with no information at all. You've done a lot. You've done your homework. You know, you've got. You've got what we would call in research a hypothesis. But there, it's called a, case theory. We have a case theory. We kind of believe we know what happened. We still might be fact finding. And you never go into an interrogation without knowing. Knowing what you know, like, so to your point, that depth of knowledge is valuable. And as long as you're. As Joe and I started this call talking about, you're allowed to have strong beliefs, loosely held, meaning that, okay, I'm coming in. This is what I think it is. But you can sway me. You can prove me wrong. And it's not a reflection of me. It's a reflection of the evidence. That's all it is.

Drew Freeman: Those are the most fun times in research. When you come in and the data tells you 180 degrees of what you thought it was going to tell you, that's the most fun for me.

Ari Zelmanow: I agree. I think that is. That is the fun of the job, and that's why. But. But I think that anybody can be taught to do those things if. But I do think Joe made a very good point. For this kind of stuff to work, the incentive structure at a business can't be to ship, because then it doesn't matter who's doing the research, because at that point, what you're doing. There's two outcomes. In a company that is incentivized to be a feature factory, there's two outcomes to research the outcome. One is product managers have made a roadmap. Research validates that roadmap. Everybody celebrates. Cheers. The research validated my opinion, and we ship it. Outcome two is research goes, does research on the roadmap shows that it's a bad idea. Product manager says the research is shit and then they ship it anyway. Shipping, that's always the outcome.

Joe Marcantano: Hey, folks, Joe here wanted to take a quick second to ask for your help. We want to hear from you, our, listeners. We'd like to know what you want us to talk about. What questions do you have in order to make this show be the most beneficial for you? We want to talk about your questions. Send those in to insideuxr@gmail.com. you can remain anonymous if you'd like, and you'll get to hear us talk about your questions. Thanks all. 

Joe Marcantano: Ari, I think we all know, and, we are all on kind of the same page here, that this is going to happen, correct? It is. There are probably, like, a lot of things, several right ways to do it and several wrong ways to do it. And you've talked about a way that you think is the right way, the way you are implementing. What do you think is the biggest landmine, the biggest, thing that seems obvious that is really the wrong way. What's, what's the easiest wrong way for a company to do this?

Ari Zelmanow: The easiest wrong way to do it is to act as if it's not going to happen to ostrich yourself. Put your head in the sand and pretend like this isn't a reality for, I would say the large, like the majority of companies, the bell shape of companies. Sure. There are going to be companies that are like, well, we don't need to democratize. We have all the money we need. We can hire all the researchers we want and you're gonna have some that are like, we can't even hire researcher one. It doesn't even really matter. I think that is, that's landmine one is just ignoring this and pretending. I think landmine two is continuing to have these academic arguments about, like, should we have democratization or not? Because what that does is all researchers are doing is arguing with other researchers. We're not like, actually moving the needle forward. Product teams aren't listening to that argument. They don't care. and I think landmine three, is the landmine is to

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Ari Zelmanow: be frozen like a deer in headlights. So the philosopher Rumi, one of my favorite quotes is, as you walk, the path will appear. And for a democratization program to work, I think what you have to do is you have to put it into the world, test, iterate and repeat. I don't know that there's going to be a one size fits all approach for every company, but I do know that if you're not testing, iterating, measuring what you're doing, like, even if it's qualitative measurements, you're never going to know if it works. and that's kind of the way we've been operating for a while, is trying to figure out what fits and what doesn't. And the biggest landmine is, not getting started with something. And by not getting started, I mean, like, it's not throwing spaghetti at a wall, it's writing down a plan of action, saying, like, the problem is, is we don't have enough people. The outcome is we want everybody to be better analytical thinkers. Here, the solution is this decentralization program that's going to be split this way. However you're going to do it, here are the two, first two to three steps we're going to take. How we're going to measure them to make this happen, because the risks of doing nothing, are that your business is not going to be using research. Not, they're not going to be customer centric, they're not going to, they're not going to do the five. If a research team isn't focused on the five things a business cares about, they're going to fail. Okay. Research teams that don't talk about growth, value, adaptability, risk and speed are doomed to continue to, like, work on non important problems. And so I think those are the things not doing those things are the pitfalls.

Joe Marcantano: And I think that almost counterintuitively, this notion of letting non researchers do the research, teaching them how to do it, empowering them to do it, there will ultimately be more researchers working. I think that there are a, there are a ton of companies right now that have zero researchers working for them. And that could be for a variety of reasons, but I'm sure for a fair percentage of them, it is the fear of cost. It is, I don't have money to hire three, four, five researchers. And when these smaller companies learn that they can hire one person, two people that can help empower their entire team, that is going to be in a net increase in the number of researchers working in the research field.

Ari Zelmanow: It's exactly right, because if you think about, like, one of the core functions of research, it's. It's evidence collection, and then there's connecting the dots. But if you think about evidence collection and you teach your teams that at the bottom of the evidence hierarchy, like the weakest evidence is assumptions, anecdotal evidence, fermi estimations, empirical observations, like actual facts, insights, and then experiments that validate those things, if you teach that hierarchy, then it becomes very valuable, because at that point, they're thinking in terms of evidence and how to weigh that evidence against other evidence, and then, ah, how to build their own cases from that evidence. And why that becomes so powerful and effective is exactly what you said. Now, I don't have research, one researcher collecting evidence and giving it out to the business. I have everybody collecting evidence. Research now has more evidence to collect, to build insights and a point of view from. And the reality is this, you and I both know not all evidence is created equal, but just because somebody in a crime scene brings me a piece of evidence doesn't mean we disregard it just means we interrogate it differently. And I think that's the way that businesses should be looking at this.

Drew Freeman: Yeah. Ari, you've mentioned how you would want to see businesses go about this. For, for someone who's kind of on board with the this is happening, how do I help my company best shape it? I've heard, like, two main things that you would do, which are create a plan and then come up with a process so that people can follow that plan. Is there anything that you would add to that for a researcher who's thinking like, I m want to be a part of this conversation rather than getting left behind?

Ari Zelmanow: Yeah. So I think that I'm going to give you a phrase I use and, that people should remember. All researchers should use it's treatment without diagnosis is malpractice. So what they should do is listen to what the business needs. So the fundamental problem with research today is researchers are so focused on building the product and service that they want to deliver that they're not listening to the requirements that the customer is. So if you think about research as a product or service that we are building together, the requirements of that become very clear. If you start talking to product managers, designers, customer success, sales, others throughout the company, and you'll see that, like, okay, we need speed, we need it to be delivered, we need it to be ubiquitous, whatever those requirements are, and then build the program around those requirements, and then I build measures of success. So start by diagnosing. So you can't, treat the problem without diagnosing

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Ari Zelmanow: it. Diagnose it, figure out what the root cause is to the best of your ability and the primary symptoms, and then do things to relieve that root cause and primary symptoms with measures in place to see if you're doing it. If you follow that pathway, you're going to build a democratization program that is absolutely better than what you are to where you are today. 100%.

Drew Freeman: Yeah. And I think the. The thing that I would leave people with is decentralization. Democratization is happening, has happened already, will continue to happen. It's not as scary as you might think it is, but there is a lot of opportunity to shape it so that it's done in the right way for your company.

Joe Marcantano: Ari, this has been a fantastic conversation. It's been awesome to hear you on the podcast, on the show with us. I know that you post a lot on LinkedIn. If somebody wants to hear more of what you've got to say, where can they go? Where can they find you people?

Ari Zelmanow: If they're interested in kind of connecting with me and following my work beyond just what they see on LinkedIn? Influentialresearcher.com, is a great way to get on my, mailing list. And also, you get a really cool, point of view template that teaches you how to put together a business case, really, in less than 60 seconds.

Joe Marcantano: I'm not gonna lie, your template is still something I use to this day, and you showed it to me two years ago, three years ago, and I.

Ari Zelmanow: Still use it on. I used it today on this, here while we were talking, too.

Joe Marcantano: Ari. It's been awesome having you on the show, folks. If you want to hear more of this, give us a, like a, follow a subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have a question that you want to hear us talk about, you can send that question over to insideuxr@gmail.com if you want to follow us on all the socials we're at inside_UXR. If you want to support the show, you can do that through the link in the show notes with that, I'm Joe Marcantano. 

Drew Freeman: I'm Drew Freeman,

Joe Marcantano: And we'll see you next time.

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