Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 16recommendation 4evaluation 3preference 3observation 2
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
28 published records
“I recently read a business book by Barbara Kellerman called Bad Leadership. And what I love about it is that we spend a lot of time talking about good leaders, and she really dives into the worst leaders and what makes them bad leaders in a way that I think is really valuable for everybody. I'd also recommend, I read a lot of fiction, so two recommendations, there. One, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It's an outstanding read that also is really sad, and moving, and illustrative, especially if you want to understand rural poverty. And then completely other side of the fiction spectrum, if you're interested in science fiction, which I am, read the Murderbot Diaries, it's about a sarcastic killer robot. And who doesn't love them?”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“" We deify startup founders who pivot appropriately, but I think that is what we would might call moral luck, where we deify the ones who got it right, and even though they made exactly the same decisions as the one who got them wrong.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I learned that lesson from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and just the importance of thinking about these circles of you can control, you can influence, and you have no control over, and there's no reason to think about those other things.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“On the other hand, your advice is integrate research from the beginning, make them more involved throughout. And I think that might confuse people.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think I said to you earlier, and I feel some pressure as maybe the first conversation that you've had specifically about research on this podcast.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Obviously, if everybody has the same sources of information, then it doesn't matter how many people are out there.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think a lot of PMs listening to this are going to be like, "Hallelujah." This is exactly what I've been trying to convince people of.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“The main reason that I wanted to do a podcast episode with you is that you wrote this piece that was titled The User Research Reckoning is Here, which I understand caused quite a stir in the research community and I think adjacent communities.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think of the PM role in a similar way, even though people won't have these meetings with PMs, because they're often at the center of lot of the stuff, but you want to be a PM that people want on their team.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Beautiful partnerships between data scientists and research and insights people are, I think what we're going to see in that next evolution.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“To close out on this, and I have just a couple more questions on this thread, I think one of your big messages to researchers is, "You can be empowered.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Thank you for sharing that. It's definitely come up a bunch on this podcast, so I think that's an important lesson for people to take away.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Rebecca Grey, who leads research at Fair, Hannah Pileggi, who I think was leading research at Duolingo, Louise Beryl, who leads research at Figma, and then Noam, who was leading research at Wealthfront.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the reason why so many PMs ask for those middle range questions is because they haven't really gotten deep with their researcher in a way which can leverage it for maximum impact.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“However, crying about our lot is not going to get us anywhere. So I think the point of the article for me, and this is advice I give companies all the time when I do consulting with them, is like, "Hey, we can set this up in a different way, which responds to the current environment in a way which will drive a huge amount of impact.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I wanted to ask about, there's this tweet by Patrick Collison that I've brought up a couple of times on this podcast, that I think is really interesting.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You can't interact in a world of AB testing without knowing basic statistics. And then in the old version of this, the fifth tool was SQL, because I think good researchers need to be able to run their own queries.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think we need to get back there as an industry and be like, "When you make a product easier to use, when you discover problems with functionality, business metrics we care about will go up.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“It's hugely common, I would argue. It's work we do to signal to each other how customer obsessed we are, not because we want to make a different decision.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“That was obvious." And I think a lot about this book, which I would recommend to your listeners.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“It also creates this issue that people complain about, that PMs and product teams don't want to just make a decision on their own. They're like, "I will get this additional data point and make sure research tells us this is the right answer instead of just trusting there.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I would argue every researcher has probably had to do executive listening sessions because a lot of PMs, founders, product people, but designers, too, they want to get close to the customer.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Think of a topic that you had to explain lately that was the most complex, and then explain it to me like I'm five. And there are a lot of ways to vary that question, but the reason I like it is because I think, and I've asked this question to VP and C-suite candidates in multiple disciplines, and sometimes it's related to a conversation, like I might ask them to explain something complicated about quantum computing, or music theory, or it could be a complex business decision, but I want to see if somebody can break a complex problem down in a really simple way, and give me an intuition for it in a short amount of time.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Because I come from a tradition of user experience research or user research, but there are many insights disciplines in many industries, and they all wanted to claim one type of research or another, and say, "Oh, well, we overhear in consumer insights or market research have been doing that well for years.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast