Judd Antin: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, man. Okay, a couple more things. A lot of this started with a lot of layoffs within user research. And I think between the lines, there's a sense of teams don't need as many researchers as they hired during the ZIRP era. I think a question in everyone's mind is just like, "How many researchers do we need? What is a good ratio?" I imagine there's not a simple answer, here, but just what's your general advice to companies of how many researchers is it right? This is a thing I've thought a lot about, especially in my role as the head of the design studio, that was my fundamental question. It's like, "You have all these writers, designers, researchers, how do you structure them, how many, and where, and who works on what?" And the organizing principle for me was always relationships. You know you have enough when the people who need to have a concept research partner have them. And I would much rather create pain in that situation than spread someone too thinly. So my advice was always like, "Don't try to create a researcher to cover this entire product space. Pair a researcher up with somebody who's going to involve them in a consistent, engaged process, and let them go to work, and see the impact they're going to have, but protect their time. And then other people are like, "Wait a second, that person's doing great work. I want some of that." And creating that pain for them, because it's a pain of loss, is the number one way to grow headcount. That's how I always approached getting more headcount, was not arguing abstractly for why research is important, but by asking partners who wish they had it, to do the arguing for me. And so you're right, there isn't a clean answer for like, "Hey, this is the right ratio," because it really depends on the nature of the product. Like, "Is it a early stage product? Is it a late stage product? Are we talking about a startup or a late stage company?" But I would argue there's always room for a researcher. Lenny, I'll tell you, and I used this in a keynote talk I gave lately. You published recently a list of, I think it was about 20 B2B companies and their first 10 employees. Do you remember doing that? Absolutely.…

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