Judd Antin: preference

Transcript context

…Maybe just one last question along this thread, also a big question, but any advice for how to evaluate these skills/interview for them? I know this is its own deep topic, but any advice for someone trying to find this person? I've interviewed hundreds or thousands of researchers, and the way I usually approach that is you want a researcher who's got a Swiss army knife, because if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. And so if you give in the context of an interview, let's say, a researcher, a pretty juicy, open-ended research question, and you want to see how they handle it, and a good answer is usually multi-method. We're not going to handle it in any one way. We're going to say, "Well, here's a couple of ways we could deal with this. Here's how we could do this in a day, or a week, or a month." We usually don't have a month, but sometimes big research projects go on for that long. "And here are the different sets of methods that we can use." So see where they go. It's actually pretty simple. Most researchers are deeper in one than the other, and sometimes you can make up for those five tools with the team. So you have experts who are t-shaped, but maybe deeper in one or several of those ways. But when I built a team at Meta and at Airbnb, that was my goal, is individually as researchers build up those tools and then as a team build deep expertise that would fill all the gaps. Coming back to the main premise of your post, one of your big takeaways is, "Researchers need to be much more business oriented, thinking about what helps the business versus the user." Which I think to a lot of researchers will feel really weird. Can you just talk about your takeaways there?…

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