Episode 32: Business Impact of Strategic Design with Ruby Pryor
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Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core. Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year.

Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest, who is working in UX design. All right. Good evening, everyone. This is Dalen, and I'm from Curious Core, and I'm the founder and general manager of Curious Core, and we're delighted to have you as our participants and as our guests for the show. Today, we actually have a very special guest.

invited guest. Her name is Ruby. And Ruby has worked for some very prominent companies, including Boston Consulting Group and Grab. And we'll be getting her to talk more about the business impact of strategic design. And you realize that she's the perfect person to talk about it because she has tread

both sides of the table, one being a consultant where she was hanging out a lot with business management consultant in a tier one firm and the other with Grab, which is a very prominent regional super app in Southeast Asia. And we're also going to talk a little bit about what's next for Ruby. We'll share a few different things, but today we're going to cover on the business impact of UX design and research. So if you're into that,

do continue listening on and what does a strategic designer actually do as well as what most organizations get wrong in their digital strategy and design strategy.

And Ruby actually hails from Australia. She has previously worked as a management consultant for NOS Group in Australia. And her career has been focused on using human-centered design techniques in diverse contexts across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to provide advice on product and service design strategy and policy. So welcome, Ruby, to the show. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.

I just want to ask, you know, like about joining Boston Consulting Group. I always heard, yeah, it's a very tough process joining BCG. I heard they have a lot of tests, a lot of evaluation and the people can be quite intimidating there. Is that true? What do you have to say? Yes, I think it was a pretty intimidating process. And I also think

like the more you want a job, kind of the more intimidating it can become, right? Because you really build it up in your mind. And I really wanted this job. Like I was brand new to Singapore. I didn't really know anyone. I was trying my hardest to find a new role, to set myself up in a new country. So I like...

I really wanted this job. And in terms of the process itself, it was a little bit different because I was in a more specialist role. So I was applying for a strategic design role rather than a standard consulting role. So the most infamous part of interviews with consultants are the case studies.

And you can read up on the internet or watch a million YouTube videos about them. Or if you've got an MBA, you probably had whole clubs dedicated to learning how to do these case studies. And luckily for me, that element was a little bit different because it was a more specialist role. So I still had a verbal case study, but I don't think it was anywhere as intense as the ones that the kind of classic consultants had to go through.

But I mean, the folks there are just super smart, really switched on and are going to ask you tough questions because ultimately that's what your clients are going to do as well. How did it turn out after how many rounds were the interviews? You know, how did you feel about the surviving the experience?

I'm trying to remember how many rounds there were. I think there were about four, like a fair number, right? Like not too many, not too few. I think it felt like a pretty good number by the end of it. And when I got that job offer, I was ecstatic. Like I literally jumped around the room, like couldn't believe it. So, so thrilled to have been offered

accepted into an organization that is so prestigious and regarded so well. And to do it as well in a country that wasn't my home felt like a huge deal. So I think all of the stress of going through the interview process and all the preparation felt totally worth it when I got that phone call that I was going to be part of the team.

That's a great segue to the question, what does a strategic designer actually do on a daily basis? Yeah, I think it's such a great question.

For me, for the majority of my career, strategic design was what I knew. So I think my background is a little bit non-traditional when it comes to pathways into design because I came from more of a management consulting background into design. And really my entry into the profession happened in my previous role. So I was a consultant at this Australian consulting firm called Nass Group, and I

was pretty new in my career. I'd had only one job before that in market research. And when I joined this management consulting firm, I was really looking to be like a full-on management consultant. Like I wanted to do financial modeling and I wanted to do public policy and like all of the really good stuff.

And I thought I was just kind of going to leave market research behind and really do a 180 and focus on a pretty new career. But as I got into the firm, it was when human-centered design as a methodology was really starting to take off in Australia. And some of the awesome people that I worked with were like, hey, you've got this skill set of customer understanding and customer insights that you're bringing with you from the market research world.

That actually is a great entry into design. My kind of first projects when I was working in human centered design, I really got my foot in the door from having that market research kind of a background. And most of the work that I did at that firm and at BCG as well was in the more strategic kind of

of a realm. Like I didn't get into design by starting out learning like UI UX, by learning prototyping tools, by learning, you know, sketch or whatever we had kind of back in the day before Figma existed. Like that wasn't my pathway into design. And to be honest, like I always have found it quite difficult to even call myself a designer because that wasn't my pathway because I came in from a, from a strategic point of view. So, um,

When I was at BCG, the kind of work that I was doing would often mean I was embedded with the kind of classics. So with the management consultants, we would all be there on client side or on Zoom later during the pandemic. And I would really be focusing on the customer work stream while they might be focusing on technology implementation or operational work stream as we're kind of working together on some kind of a transformation project.

So if you're really trying to change the way that an organization works, there are a lot of different levers that you can try and pull. And for me, I was there to try and make sure that we were really keeping our eye on the prize in terms of what do customers need? What do they want? What are their pain points now? And where can we kind of take that journey into the future? But the reason I think the work could be so impactful is that it was then backed up by people saying, okay, operationally, this can look like this. And from a technology perspective, it can look like that.

So it worked best when everyone kind of brought their disciplines together and you could have the customer work stream through strategic design and you could have technology folks bringing in that angle and you could have business folks bringing in their own angle to really drive towards some kind of strategic transformation. So from what I hear you say, it sounds a little bit more high level and it also sounds a little bit more cross team where you have to actually work with the business. You have to actually work on, on,

on different pieces and you have to kind of, as you said, you protect what the customers look at, but you also have to consider the opportunities and the options from the business side of things. Does this mean you have to read up a lot on what a businessman or an MBA graduate would think about? I mean, yes and no, because you definitely absorb it by listening

living it because they're going to tell you. They're not going to be backwards about coming forwards with their point of view. And for a lot of folks, like when they go to write a strategy, when they think about a transformation, the default is kind of that MBA style of thinking. The default is to kind of go towards that.

where the numbers lead. And that's just like one way to do strategy or one way to do transformation. And I'm over there saying like, let's try it in this kind of human centered way and trying to find kind of that middle ground with where, what business folks may be advocating for versus what, what I would be advocating for. And I think, yeah, trying to do that dance and find that compromise was the challenge and the fun of it.

That's great. And I definitely advocate for a more human-centered approach in doing things. How did that resonate with business leaders? Were they open? Were they receptive? Or were they like, Ruby, show me the numbers, you know? Look, I mean...

It could go either way, right? Like there are times I think it can be really impactful, but you often have to do a lot of education at the same time that you're making change. And I think this is one of the things that could be kind of difficult. So because design is not a universal language, and I think those of us that spend...

a lot of time in the discipline, forget that. You're trying to use the tools at the same time you're trying to teach the tools. So I would often be upskilling clients or upskilling my project team at the same time as I'm trying to get the work done to show the impact. And so you're kind of teaching and running all at the same time, which could be quite challenging. But if you don't do the teaching bit and get buy-in into the methodology and into the discipline, you're really setting yourself up for a really hard time as well.

Yeah, I think that's really an excellent point over there because I think a lot of designers love to do what they do, which is designing, but sometimes they forget it's just as important to talk about the work that they do. So for teams out there who are really trying to evangelize design or trying to show the business impact of design,

Do you have any quick tips for, you know, bringing management along for the ride from your years of experience? Yeah, I mean, a tough one. But I mean, if you want a really quick tip, it's get people into your primary research. Like you want folks to be in the room or to be observing on the Zoom call and to see firsthand and listen firsthand to what customers are saying, firstly. And then secondly, also to see your expertise in action.

Because I think people don't always understand, particularly from a research perspective, that it's a lot more than just having a conversation with a user. There are years and years of expertise that go into having a conversation that is fruitful to get us the insights that we really need. And sometimes only when folks really see you in action, they go,

Oh, I get it now. Like I understand why it had to be you, why it couldn't just be anyone put in a room with a customer who's going to get to that same kind of outcome. And I feel like I've had those moments in my career where people have that almost light bulb moment when they kind of see it in action and they see it happening. So I think as a quick tip, like get folks in the room, get them observing your session so they can kind of see the magic happening in real time.

I think that's a really great tip. Definitely an advocate for that as well. And people's eyes do light up when they hear what their customers say. I'm wondering out of curiosity, have anyone ever told you, Ruby, can you help me like do a spreadsheet and justify for me like the business impact of

design what's the actual tangible impact like i'm just just out of curiosity whether it's at bcg or i think short answer is no like i've never had anyone say sit down and calculate the roi of design for me but it is something that i have been doing a lot of thinking about myself and recently um

I wrote about this on LinkedIn and tried to put a number on the value that I think that one single research study can create. And I think it's pretty significant. But I would really encourage teams to develop a kind of framework, I guess, when they're thinking about assessing the impact of research specifically. And I think this framework kind of can go through four different levels. But before you even get there, I would say a lot of these frameworks start with measuring like the output.

of the team with just like number of studies, number of users, things like that, which I think is just table stakes. Like you need to be measuring that, I guess, to manage your own team, but that's not exactly impact. So I would kind of leave that to one side. So I think like the

bottom of the pyramid of impact for me is that stakeholders are hearing and understanding your insights, stakeholders or clients. So that could be things like them coming to sessions and being observers, them coming to your share outs or your share backs. You could even check or track the number of people reading your documents. You could do this with, if you use Google Docs, sometimes you can see how many people are reading your documents or even how many folks are like commenting and engaging with the content. Or you could do some kind of like survey where you

you ask people their kind of stated behavior, which as researchers we know is not as reliable, but you could kind of try and track things like that or ask satisfaction. So I think that's kind of the bottom layer of impact is just, is my stuff getting out there? Are people really understanding the customers?

One up from that, I would say, is optimizing what's already there, particularly when it comes to things like UI design and content. So generally, this would be off the back of doing usability studies. And then you could track, for example, the number of flows that have been changed, the amount of UI that's been changed, the amount of copy that's been changed. And you could literally track this in some kind of spreadsheet. You can also then track once those changes are live, what does that mean for our metrics like task success rate?

What does that mean for things like user engagement, user satisfaction of revenue even, or cost reductions? And this is where we can start to actually put a dollar value on these things. So if, for example, you were working on like a checkout flow and conversion increased, and you can follow that through, right, with your business analysts and ask them by how much, like conversion increased by 2% or even half of a percent or a quarter of a percent,

There will be someone inside your company who is then attributing a dollar value to that. And you can talk to them about it, right? Find out what that is. And then your team can claim part of the credit for that because your insights helped lead to that kind of a change. So that second layer of the pyramid, I think that's where we start to be able to put a dollar value on some of that impact we're creating.

The next level up from that is when we're looking at influencing product roadmaps. So rather than kind of optimizing things that are already there, that's when we're helping organizations rule in or rule out certain features or certain products. So changing the priorities of an organization at that kind of product level. And here you should be tracking metrics like how many of those decisions are we influencing? So for example, we encourage an organization to build product B and not A, right?

and you should track that. And again, once that is deployed, you can firstly look at those same kind of metrics I talked about previously and put a dollar value on those. But also that's when you can start to look at things like opportunity cost. Because potentially without your research, they would have delayed building that feature for longer. And that is essentially costing the organization money. So by doing research, you bring forward good bets, right? And mean that we can earn more money faster.

At this same level, this is where we're preventing organizations from taking bad bets, where we're preventing waste and where we're reducing risk. And again, we can put a dollar value on this because building a feature is not cheap.

It takes time in terms of design resources, engineering resources, product resources. That's people who have a salary and that costs money. So you can calculate how many days it would have cost to build that feature, how much each of those folks earn, multiply that together, and like, boom, that's a number and that's a saving that you can attribute back to UX research, like a hard dollar figure.

So that's the next layer of the pyramid. And then right at the top of the pyramid, I would say is influencing strategy. So that's when you're influencing things like the vision of the company, the problems the company chooses to solve, the markets the company chooses to play in. Like these are really big questions and really big bets.

These are harder to measure. Like you're not really easily going to be able to put a dollar value on those things, except in the same way the whole strategy is measured. Because any strategy at the end of the day is going to have its implementation plan and each of those steps are going to have metrics.

And you can, as a team, as an individual, take some credit for those ultimate outcomes, depending on how involved you really were in it. You can think about what makes sense and what's fair, but there will be hard metrics at the end of the day from that strategy. And if you as a researcher or a designer or as a team were really involved in the creation and implementation of that strategy, it's a whole other raft of metrics that you can take credit for and include in the impact of your team.

I just want to acknowledge that and I think very often as designers we place a lot of pressure on ourselves especially these days like how do we differentiate our portfolios? I know you have another post about portfolios but we can talk about it later. So we place a lot of pressure on ourselves in delivering business impact to the organization and justifying our existence as UX designers.

And a lot of these things are a little hard to track because number one, they might not have a baseline metric to track at the start. So it's kind of hard to see what's the incremental improvement from a metric perspective. But number two, our teams even tracking these metrics at such a detailed level, right? So I think we feel the pressure of like justifying growth, revenue, whatever it is. And

I think the way you explain it to me is that, hey, actually, there are a bunch of things that we can still track internally, like opportunity costs is one of them. The cost of actually doing something stupid, that's also another thing we can track. Or even some of these other expenses that we incur from the research and what's the return in terms of how it's being circulated and the return of

in terms of the engagement on this piece itself. I think those are also very, very tangible metrics, which never heard anyone explained it in a way that you do. So I just wanted to highlight and acknowledge that. And I'm just wondering from your end, when you're

Talking about strategic design and doing strategic design, what kind of attributes or what kind of qualities do you think someone needs to have in order to be a good strategic designer? When it comes to strategic design, one of the main activities that I was doing was real generative research. So when it comes to user experience research, it tends to be on a spectrum from generative to evaluative.

Evaluative is things like usability tests where there's already something that exists and we're evaluating whether or not it's doing the job it was meant to do. So can users actually get through and purchase the product that they're supposed to be able to purchase?

The other end is that generative research. And that's where we're asking really big questions like, in this space, what do consumers need? Or what do users really need? What are their jobs to be done? What's driving them? What's working for them? What's failing them? What are their pain points? These like much bigger and much more open questions. And so I think to be a competent strategic designer, you need to be really comfortable playing down this generative research.

end and really good at asking these open questions. But within those, still getting stakeholders actionable insights that they can do something with. Because

every project wants to see some quick wins. And I think that's always a really central tension, honestly, in any strategy work where there's often these kind of really big efforts or these like large transformations that need to happen, but whoever's paying the bills wants to see some impact quickly. So it's very helpful even when you're doing generative work to come out of that with some quick wins that you can kind of share with stakeholders, kind of

immediately with some more tactical recommendations on top of your strategic ones. So I think the capability and the comfort doing generative research is really important. Another really important skill I would say is facilitation. So workshop facilitation. I think in strategic design, you end up doing a lot of these kind of workshops around things like

ideation, around things like defining problem spaces, prioritizing initiatives. So if you have the ability to bring folks together, have productive discussions that are engaging and inclusive, that skill set is extremely valuable when you're talking at this strategic level. And also from a kind of career perspective, it can often get you in the room with

really senior people, which does great for your own visibility and your own kind of career progression. So I think that workshop facilitation skill is sometimes I think overlooked, but in my career, I would say it's been one of the skills that I've really anchored on in terms of accelerating my own career growth. And then lastly, I would say the ability to structure problems and insights, like build frameworks that help structure out a problem space or structure out

insights. So these are things like being able to do ecosystem mapping or journey mapping, if you're really in kind of the UX side of things, but even the ability to just structure a problem in terms of a hierarchy and break it down into all of its component parts and understand what are the different solutions that will solve each of these small parts that then ladder up to solve the bigger problem.

And I often see designers kind of overlooking this skill. Like if we think about the double diamond, discover, define, design, deliver, this is the defined skill. And this is so often glossed over when folks are taught the double diamond. It's like, yeah, yeah. And then you write some how might we's and you prioritize them and then you move on to design. It's like, what?

whoa, wait a second. Like if you are really good at crystallizing that problem space, zeroing in on where a business can and should play and where they can't and where they shouldn't, that is actually a massive skill set that you have. So I think those three things like generative research, workshop facilitation and structuring a problem space are really great skills for a strategic designer to have.

Yeah, thank you for putting it in such a manner. And I would say these are all very, very relevant skills and they all seem like it takes years to master each and every one. Would you have any advice? Let's say, for example, hey, I'm not so great at generative research or generative design. What can I do to get better? If let's say my organization doesn't provide me such opportunities either. Would you have any advice?

Yeah, I think a great question. So one thing you can do if your organization is providing those opportunities to someone else, like see how you can kind of be part of those projects. So maybe as another team member helping out, maybe just as an observer, but see if there's any space for you to be part of teams or to work with an individual who is doing more of that generative stuff inside of your own organization.

Another option and something that I would tend to do quite a lot at Grab is if, for example, I had a usability test and generally you often book in kind of an hour with your participants, right? Like that's pretty standard across research, kind of minimum an hour. And if I knew the content that I'd worked with the designers on was actually only going to take like 45 minutes, I would then think, what can I do in the rest of these 15 minutes?

And sometimes that would be another really tactical piece of work that I'd known has been on the minds of my PMs or maybe myself, like that I wanted to validate or something from another piece of research. But see maybe then if you can take that 15 minutes and do something more open and do something more generative.

So like if you were working on an e-commerce and had been doing like a really specific usability test about product discovery, maybe in those last 15 minutes or at the start, even if it made more sense, see if you can do some of that zooming out. See if you can have more of a look at the person's context and what they're doing and how they're making decisions and all of these type of things. Like the time you have with your users is an absolute gift.

And if you know that your objectives aren't going to take that full hour, really think cleverly about what you can do with the rest of it. And everyone's going to be happy about that because you're not costing the business any more money. It's not like you've requested 90 minutes then to kind of add on your own objectives. You're just being a really responsible steward of the resources that you have. And you can end up, I think, making a lot of friends by doing that kind of thing.

That's very excellent advice. And let's say if I'm kind of shy, I haven't had many opportunities as someone junior to do facilitation and it's always my boss doing the facilitation. What kind of advice would you give someone to kind of be more

a little bit more proactive in seeking such opportunities, whether it's internally or externally? Great question. So, I mean, I think my own workshop facilitation journey took quite a long time to get to the point where I was the lead facilitator of these, you know, hours long engagements or multi-day engagements. But at the start, I would just be the observer. So I would be the person going along and, you know, I learned,

back pre-COVID, right? When it was all in person. So I'm the one cutting the post-it notes over there and like pouring water for everyone and taking notes, like the pretty unglamorous stuff. But it gets you in the room with the person who is doing the facilitation that you can learn from. So I think the first thing is just making sure that you're in the room.

The next step in my journey was then being given like one group that I might facilitate. So there might be like five tables in the room and the other facilitator would kind of do four of them, but I might be sitting with just my group and taking them through that exercise. From there, I would then maybe lead the entire room in a single exercise. And then from there, eventually lead the facilitation itself.

So I think if you can come to your manager or you can come to the person that you know is running the workshop and say, hey, here's a couple of different ways that I could be involved. Like I can just be an observer note taker or I'd love to facilitate a breakout room or a single table or maybe just a single exercise and kind of give them this little menu of options of ways that you can help out. Makes it really easy for the person who is running the workshop to say, oh,

Oh yeah, sure. Like that's fine. I'm happy for you to run the ideation exercise in my workshop because you've really taken the mental load away from them in terms of having to think, how do I support this junior person's growth? You're coming and you're being really proactive. And then I think the other option is if you can take over whole like forums or meetings, like your team meeting, for example, can you ask to facilitate that end to end? And can you try something creative and different in terms of how you do a team meeting?

And I think often managers are super open to this, like running a team meeting is not something most managers are thrilled about doing. And if you say, just give me the objectives and let me try it out, I think a lot of managers would be like, sure, great. And that's facilitation. Very, very excellent career advice, which I heard that early in my career.

And last of all, you mentioned analysis and framing the problem properly. Is there a good way to do more of it? Because as you said, a lot of people

people when they learned UX in school or they just learned UX through work. It's like, "Hey, let's just craft a 'how might we' statement and let's call it a day." What can we do to kind of be better at this? I think this is where I look to my friends, the consultants, because they are the best at this. Like this is where they really put a lot of the emphasis of the craft of management consulting is about structuring problems.

So I think there are heaps of resources, like the Pyramid Principle is the key resource that every junior consultant is told to read. Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle. And it talks a lot about how you should structure problems and how you should structure pieces of writing that you're doing. And I think these types of skills are just really, really valuable. So I would look up...

I look at the pyramid principle and also this concept MISI, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So this is something I learned back in my consulting days, but it's still absolutely something that I use even when I have more of a design focus. So sometimes, for example, even when presenting insights from my research, I'll structure them in a MISI framework.

So trying to make sure it's mutually exclusive. So I've got some meaningfully different categories, but also taken all together, it's collectively exhaustive, meaning I have covered the entire scope that I should have covered. Like good personas, for example, should be MISI or good archetypes should be MISI. Good multiple choice questions, those should also be MISI. And once you're starting to think like this, once you're starting to see frameworks, you

They're really everywhere. I'm so glad you mentioned these things because we actually do share them in our program. And sometimes even when we work with clients and maybe our clients in the corporate side are not exposed to these, we do just share and tell them, hey, this is what's going on. And you're right, all first year management consultants learn this. I'm also very curious, what else did you learn from your management consultant friends?

Like, did they like recommend you, oh, Ruby, go read this book or like, you know, this is like our secret. Don't tell anyone else. Is there anything exclusive? You're not a management consultant anymore. I was wondering, is there anything exclusive you can share? I don't think there's anything exclusive, but you do learn really good PowerPoint skills. Like I can make you a really beautiful slide real fast.

Oh man, I was expecting like some other superpower, but okay, I'll take PowerPoint skills, that's one.

Yeah, so you were talking about PowerPoint. Like, okay, let's go into that. I'm not going to ask you how to do great PowerPoints, but you know, like a lot of people do PowerPoints and they present their work and they talk about stuff. What is something that you've learned from the consultants that you think designers would really benefit if they just implement this way of approach or thinking when they're doing PowerPoints? I think two things came to mind immediately. The first one is,

What's the so what? So in consulting, we would constantly be asking ourselves this question. Every time you would put a piece of data on a slide or an insight on the slide, the question from the partner would always be, what's the so what?

So for example, you're saying that, you know, only 20% of people can recall that this product exists. And like, what's the so what? Like, what does this mean for the client? What does this mean for the stakeholder? What should they actually do or what should they actually change? So being able to add a so what or a recommendation on each of your insights or each of your pieces of data, I think is a really important skill to learn. And writing good recommendations is not easy.

easy and I don't want to pretend like that's something that is super easy for anyone to do but at least understanding that hey something needs to go here and I need to be able to articulate what the so what is even if I don't know actually what the answer is I know that there is a question here that needs answering I think that would be a really important thing for designers and

The second skill that you really learn when it comes to presentations, and I would say sharing information back to a client, is how to structure a storyline. You see this sometimes in the way that folks structure a Word document or a PowerPoint or whatever their kind of medium is, that it doesn't necessarily make sense that

why one slide or one section of a document is before or after another one. And as a reader, it can kind of be a little bit jarring as to why are we moving through the document in this way. And one test we sometimes used to apply in consulting world was, could someone read only the slide titles and still understand your presentation?

And so you would often see in consulting slide decks, if anyone's seen one, often the headings are not things like methodology. The heading is like, we spoke to 15 users across two markets. So it's like, great. Okay. Obviously that's your methodology, but I can just read the slide title and I'll probably get enough to move on.

We sometimes used to joke that like the CEO would only read the slide title. CEO minus one might read the subtitle and then like down, down, down. So like, you know, the more senior that a person is like often the less time they genuinely do have to engage with content. So absolutely the more important it is for you to make it really snappy and really straight to the point. So this idea of could someone just read the slide titles, um,

helps you also then really logically structure your information flow because it has to make sense why you're kind of going from one side to the next, to the next, to the next. Generally very excellent advice and really, really

cool that you're sharing all of these trade secrets from consultants. And I think there are some really great books to read and recommend, like Barbara's Mentos Permit Principle. She has an entire book talking about it. She taught the McKimsey management consultants how to structure their presentations. Let's talk a little bit more about Grab. And I'm very curious about your work at Grab and how strategy works.

plays a role in shaping your work at Grab? So at Grab, I worked in the design strategy and research team. That was the name of my team. And I was a UX researcher. That was a kind of specific role I was doing under that team.

And I would say at Grab, kind of a lot more than my previous experience, really ran the full kind of bandwidth across that spectrum of generative all the way through to evaluative research. So there was a lot more usability testing, like definitely more than I'd ever done in my career. And honestly, I kind of really enjoyed that because you do get to see the results of your research much faster. Like

Like you get to then work with the designer, update the flows, and then you get to see that, you know, launched in the real world. And for someone that had spent my entire career working on strategy, I kind of loved that because strategy can take quite a long time to actually see the results. And sometimes even as a consumer, you might not, right? Like you might not see the results of the fact that there's been this big, you know, backend technology change in your banking provider. Like

what's that to you? You might not necessarily notice it. So I think there was quite a bit of this tactical work, but there were parts of that that honestly were quite thrilling. On the other hand, I think in terms of the more strategic work, there definitely were times, you know, when I was working with teams to ask,

bigger questions about the type of products that we were providing, about what the vision for the future of certain products looked like as well. And definitely generative research could play in this space, but also things like looking at exemplars in the market. So looking at best practice, like what are other types of organizations doing and what are the things that we can learn from those organizations? Also sometimes looking at academic research. I think

UX researchers often have a really strong academic background. I think it's one of the professions with loads of PhDs. And I definitely had amazing colleagues with those really high qualifications as well. And there's often some really great learnings, I think, that can be had from doing desktop research and looking at more academic sources as well. And they can help you think more strategically and more broadly too. And also target market, like thinking about which types of consumers

will our offering resonate with most and doing kind of customer value proposition testing with different types of consumers and really trying to narrow down where are these products going to kind of fit the most so I think a lot of different types of activities that can fit under that more kind of strategic element as well thanks for sharing I know you can't exactly share the specifics of your work at Grab because of NDAs which I think recently in your LinkedIn post you said

something around that, that people were requesting for portfolios and they wanted to see the insights and all of those things. So I'm not going to ask you to share the specifics, but I want to understand a little bit what's the proudest work? Because obviously you've done a lot of work.

for Grab over the years. And what's the proudest piece? You know, like, did you, like, you helped them make more money? Was it like you helped them avoid a costly mistake or something else? I don't know. Like something you're super proud of that is still in the Grab app today. What would that be? It's a really good question. But part of what I'm the most proud of, I think, is the culture that I helped to build.

Like the best piece of feedback I've been given in my entire career was one of my colleagues said, I feel more empowered when you're around. And that was incredibly moving to me that I was part of creating a culture where she felt more empowered and she felt she could be herself. And outside of the work that I was doing, I think,

The other thing I'm really proud of at my time at Grab was I was the co-chair of Women at Grab. And we did a lot to kind of build the community of Women at Grab and do advocacy and host panels where we talked about some really difficult topics sometimes. And that work I'm super proud of and the type of culture and the type of impact that I was able to have that was a lot bigger than just myself as an individual or myself as a researcher. Yeah, I really love that. And

And if I could ask you to elaborate even more, especially the stuff on women empowerment. This is kind of reported quite widely that women salaries, especially in tech, there's some discrepancies when they compare it with men.

I wonder, was that something that your community discussed about? And what are your thoughts around that? Yeah, big question. I mean, I've always been a feminist and it matters to me a lot that we are building an environment where women are given access

to the same opportunities and where we try as hard as possible to ensure there's equity in the outcomes that we're getting as well. And my understanding of the research around the gender pay gap is that it is absolutely a systemic issue. So this is not an issue that can be fixed with advising women to negotiate their salaries better.

The research shows that women actually ask for pay rises at about the same rates as men. Men are just more successful in getting those pay rises. So it is absolutely the onus on the folks setting salaries and folks who are part of those negotiations on the employer side to make sure they're creating an equitable

equitable work environment. So unfortunately, like as an individual, like as a woman going into a salary negotiation, of course, you should do your homework and you should go into that negotiation, like really well prepared and have your strategy in place.

But really, the person that needs to hear this message is the one who's setting the salaries and who is making sure that there is equity across what their staff is being paid. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. We got some very interesting questions streaming in. So I'm going to jump onto some of these questions. What's a typical week like for you at Grab? Great.

Great question. I think it's really important that people talk about like the minutiae of their work, because particularly if you're from a totally different field, it's really difficult to get a sense of what that could look like. But I mean, full disclaimer, so I don't work at Grab anymore. I was recently affected by the layoffs at Grab, so my role was made redundant. But I can tell you what a week was like prior to that all happening.

The main folks that I would work with on a week-to-week basis were designers and product managers. And so I would often spend quite a lot of time with them talking about what their research needs could potentially be in the next kind of weeks and months. So sometimes that would be kind of responsive where I say to the PM, like kind of what's on the roadmap and what do we need to make sure where we're getting out ahead of and maybe do some concept testing if it's in an earlier stage or making sure we're booking in for usability testing once the designs are specced up.

Or it could be down the other end where I'm saying, hey, I noticed this thing in an interview a little while ago and I really want to circle around and kind of double click on that and make sure we're really understanding what our consumers were saying or our merchants were saying when they brought up these things. So kind of negotiating what the research might look like across a whole bunch of different stakeholders. And this could be done like asynchronously through Slack or it might be done in meetings as well.

Um, if I had researched that week, um, then that might be like one full on day where I might kind of smash out like five UTs in one day, or it might be hopefully spread across a couple of different days. Sometimes that might be in person in Singapore. Sometimes that might involve traveling to another market. Sometimes that might be, um,

maybe interviewing like merchants in Jakarta, but I would be remote and kind of listening to a translator, moderator, for example, just depending on what we were working on. And then of course there would be a synthesis process of the back of those insights, creating a deck or a document and then finding time to share that back as well. There

There would often be also kind of review meetings where we might look at designs that are coming up and provide kind of feedback even before they've been tested because you really know your users already, right? So you can have a pretty good sense of, hmm,

I think the way this copy is, is going to be quite confusing or, or I don't know if it makes sense that the flow kind of looks like this. So giving kind of early and often advice based on what you already know about your users. And then there might also be kind of trainings that I would be developing. So either for my fellow researchers or also for designers about how to do research or how to make the most of research insights or even things like kind of stakeholder management skills and stuff like that.

And then also the kind of work I was doing with women at Grab as well. So really kind of varied, quite fun work environment. Yeah. And also just to be clear that women at Grab thing you volunteer for, that's not part of your job scope, right? That's just something you volunteer extra time for. Oh,

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, because some organizations have like official, you know, lean in kind of initiatives and just wanted to make sure that that was like something that you're very passionate about and that you spend extra time on it. And someone asked a question around the intersection of strategy and design. Where do you see most frictions?

Right. And how do you kind of recommend navigating it? I think that's a good question. And I think the question assumes that those things are being done by different people as well. Whereas in my case, like I was kind of the one person doing both of those things. So sometimes I would say there isn't necessarily a huge amount of friction. Other times there can be.

But I think what that friction can manifest in sometimes is as designers and as folks who are using design thinking, we often want to really think about the future and we want to think about big bets, right? Like real innovation means doing something that probably hasn't been done before in your company or potentially in your market for that type of organization.

And that's really hard to convince people to do and requires getting a lot of folks on board. And so I think the friction can arise when folks don't realize how radical their suggestions are.

Because if you know that you're suggesting something really big, I think you approach it in a slightly different way because you then do all of your stakeholder management and get other people on board and kind of test the waters. Whereas I think sometimes designers, we can assume everyone is right there with us in thinking with these like huge questions, really transformationally taking these really big bets, which isn't always the case. I mean, particularly when you're working with

like ops folks or PMs who have OKRs or KPIs that they've got to hit. And so it can be a really difficult discussion then to be talking about, well, we want to rethink this product from the ground up. And someone saying, yeah, but I've got a target for whatever, monthly active users. So I think there are times when folks don't realize yet how big of an ask they are making and

and who they're making that ask to, how many teams it's going to affect. So just having that kind of knowledge and also sensitivity about what you're really asking for. I have a follow-up question, which is related to something that's part of the theme and topic for tonight. And that's about digital strategy. You've been a management consultant before, and I'm sure you've been advising on companies on

you know, the view on design, customers, digital related strategy. And I'm just wondering, you were mentioning that sometimes it takes a while for the strategy to translate into something tangible. Where do people get it wrong from you working with these companies? Where does it start to get...

a little fluffy because sometimes people will say hey you know like strategy you just give me a bunch of presentation decks right so so i think i'm sure you're all very mindful of that and

and very professional in what you do at BCG. So I'm just wondering, where do people get it right? Where do people get it wrong? Actually, I'm more curious on the wrong side of things. Yeah, great question. And I think you've articulated one area already where people get things wrong, which is keeping it way too high level. Like a strategy isn't just a vision statement, right? It's got to be

also followed up with a sense of, well, how are we going to get there, right? It's got to be the vision plus the plan. That's when you're really starting to talk about what strategy is. So I think not making it really tangible enough because folks have to understand like, what does this mean for me and my role? So I think that's one thing probably is keeping it too high level. A second one I think is not really making...

a strategy. So you see this sometimes interacting with online services where they've just digitized something, but they haven't actually made it digital. Like once I was filling out a form and it asked me to submit a photo front and back.

Like that doesn't make sense in a digital world, right? Like that is obviously a hangover from a physical form that someone has put online. So I would say like maybe the mistake there is not really having a digital strategy, but just saying, hey, we know we've got to modernize these systems and just kind of skipping over that whole thinking about what information do we really need? What does the consumer really need to do in that moment? And just kind of just putting something that was physical and making it digital. I would say another potential challenge

or mistake that folks make in digital strategy is kind of over-indexing on technology and not thinking enough about the customer experience. Like AI is the real buzzword of the moment, right? And it's really interesting looking at what companies do

are telling you they're using it versus what companies are just using it. And I think this is always kind of the challenge. Like, does it matter to the customer if you are using like blockchain technology, if you're using AI, or does the customer really only care about the experience that they are going through?

And I think sometimes organizations get so excited about firstly pursuing a technology before they really have a use case for it, but then secondly telling the customer they're pursuing a technology. And it's not clear if you need either one or kind of both of those conditions.

And I think also like within that, when we're thinking about the customer experience and particularly when we're talking about industries that have a physical presence and are thinking about what that online space looks like or maybe what that metaverse looks like, you've got to really make sure you understand how are your customers using your physical spaces? Like if you're a library, for example, people aren't just going there to get books, right?

They're going there for community. They're going there for activities. They're going there for other information seeking, to talk to a professional librarian. Like there are so many other reasons that folks are using that physical space. So I think that can manifest in strategies not going so well if you haven't done that proper kind of customer discovery.

really understood how is it that people are really using my product or my space and how am I going to transform that? Which of those needs am I going to take into a digital space or not? And I mean, that's also a fair choice, right? Like to say we're going to optimize here and not there.

And then lastly, I think it's really important to call out accessibility. So I think this is an afterthought for some organizations. They don't think right up front how we're going to make sure that the products we're designing are super accessible and how do we make sure that folks with different needs have equitable access to what it is that we're providing. And that should be kind of front and center in decision making rather than way down the list on a roadmap.

I think you raised about, I counted about five points and those are really, really important. And if I were to kind of talk about the essence of it, it sounds like not making assumptions and being extremely looking at the data, you know, listening to your customers and just making sure that before you make any decision, make sure that's there. And of course, actually translating whatever you learned into actual tangible plans that you can execute on.

So those are really good. I have a question from someone who's a researcher herself, and she says, in cases where impact is not immediately evident or something that is perceived to be more intangible like culture, how can UXR practitioners effectively communicate the value of their work to stakeholders and the broader organization? Really great point. And I think, yeah,

Yeah, like when Daylen asked me the thing that I'm the most proud of, it's something that's very hard to measure. And I think a challenge I had when trying to put in my CV, like how do I say like increased feelings of empowerment by 35%, like very, very difficult. And if you did try to measure it, you end up just wasting your time by trying to come up with measures to show something that we all know is there. So I really feel you is what I'm trying to say, Sharm. Like I understand this challenge that you're up against.

One piece of advice that I was given is you don't have to fight this battle alone. Like it's perfectly acceptable for you to message your stakeholders and say, hey, I did this research project for you four weeks ago. How have you used it? Because they were a party to that research, right? Like very rarely does a researcher just spin something up all on their own. Often it's a request from someone or co-created alongside a client or a stakeholder. And it's totally acceptable for you to go to them and say, hey, how

how have you used this research? What decisions have you made differently off the back of this research? What metrics are you tracking off the back of this research? Do you have updated numbers now? Or if not, when can I expect them? Because it's not just on you to track your own impact.

the organization really cares overall, right? About the impact of all of the different teams. So it's absolutely a team effort. So roping your stakeholders and ask them to as well. And I think there are some of these also kind of interim metrics that I talked about at the beginning that you can potentially start showing straight off the bat. Like you can say, you know,

The presentation was attended by 20 folks, including two super senior product leaders. And that's already like a good start that you're going to be making that impact later. You can also talk about the number of different teams. So in terms of cross-functional teams, like if you had design, if you had content, if you had engineering, if you had product operations,

five cross-functional teams like already you're then starting to show kind of the breadth of your impact as well so don't be afraid I think to count things that we're often taught kind of not to count or no one's ever told us to count before like you totally can do that and you can also talk about like the speed with which you're working as well like if you're working fast

You can say like, my team is optimizing our research processes, improving efficiency by 10% if you're noticing your studies are going faster and faster over time. So some of these operational metrics as well can be good ones to kind of start that conversation. But you do need support from usually like analysts and PMs if you are going to get those kind of like harder numbers that are really super valuable, but make it a team effort.

I never thought of using productivity metrics as something to talk about, but that's really good. And I think someone in the audience is also sharing that we should be open to ask how it affects the performance of things from others and also sort of influences decisions and save time, right? If it saves you time or it saves someone else's time, that's also very, very tangible metrics and impact. And

And that's money. Time is money inside of organizations. Like if you're doing anything that is saving an organization time, it's actually super easy to calculate how much money you're then saving. Like if you are helping your team and say there's like 1 PM, one designer, one engineer, and you're helping them make decisions like 10% faster or one day faster. And each of them makes like $10,000 a month or whatever, like $300 a day. And then three of them, that's $900 that you're saving like every month. Like it's very,

Very, very easy to go from time savings in organizations to dollar savings. And just like, don't be shy about doing that. Like, just go for it. Yeah, excellent suggestion. So we got a lot of great questions tonight. And I want to end off with maybe one or two final questions. And this is one topic. I think we had lunch and we were very, very passionate about it.

Are academic resources primarily how you keep up with the industry requirements or do they lag behind? Is there a noticeable gap between what we learned in academia versus like what's being practiced in the industry? And that's sort of like this assumption that academia side tends to be slower. What are your thoughts around that?

I mean, my experience is that academic researchers just work in a really different way to those of us in business. So my academic background is primarily in psychology and psychology studies take a lot longer to do than UX research studies take inside of organizations. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Like the things that you are trying to make decisions on, the things you're trying to find out about if you are a psychologist, in

incredibly important and deserve a very high threshold of certainty before we make a decision about different psychological treatments that would be appropriate for different populations or about how the brain works or about neurochemistry and neuroscience. There should be a really high threshold to make those kinds of decisions and say definitively, we know this, it's proven or it's disproven. On the other hand, as much as I think all the work I've done in my career is super, super important,

requires a bit less of kind of a threshold in order to make a good enough decision that we should keep moving forward with our strategy or with our product. So I think, yes, academia is slower, but it kind of needs to be because of the type of things that those decisions are about. Thanks for bringing that nuance and perspective. So we're definitely not trashing academia. We operate very, very differently in

And just wondering, I think a second part to his question is like, you know, do you notice a gap, right? People coming from academia, joining, being a UX, UXer in this case, is that sort of like behind? Is that what you notice? I think

I think often the biggest gap is language. Like I think a lot of folks, particularly with advanced research degrees, have been doing very similar things that UX researchers would be doing, including soft skills. So often that's the gap you hear about. Folks say, oh, it's the soft skills. Like that's what academics don't have. And that's what like in-house or consultants do have. I

I mean, academic environments require so many of those same soft skills, like being able to get folks all together to, you know, agree on a direction for your research paper. Like you often do that by yourself, right? Like there's multiple different co-authors. You've got to manage the peer review process. You've got to get funding. You've got to get grants. You're often working in teams. You're working potentially with other academics and with students and with, you know, visiting professionals and all these different stakeholders, right?

But I don't think I've ever heard an academic say they were doing like cross-functional stakeholder management. But I think a lot of them are actually doing that. So I think it's often a gap with the way we talk about the skills that we're building and the skills that we're developing. And I think sometimes it can mean folks that come from academia

almost sell themselves short on those kind of soft skills because they're kind of technical skills often absolutely top notch from the research that they've been doing. But they have all of these other amazing kind of adjunct skills that are really valued in the world of business, but not necessarily the same language that business folks use to talk about them.

Thanks for sharing that. And we have actually helped students transition from their PhD or master degrees into UX research or UX design. And we do notice that trend as well, like the soft skills part, positioning themselves, selling themselves.

commercializing or explaining the commercials and impact of the work that they did, right? And trying to draw parallels between the two has always been challenging. Just wondering if you have any advice as a last question to people trying to

do what you do or enter the UX industry. It's super tough right now. Lots of competition and yeah, lots of layoffs happening. Do you have any general advice for people, whether it's from a technical perspective or from a mental perspective?

I think there's so much good advice out there already. But when I reflect on my career, I think I started in a firm that I'd never heard of before I interviewed there. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I think sometimes graduates or folks really trying to get into a field, they set their hearts on wanting to work at the biggest and brightest names. And there is nothing wrong with aiming high, like go for it, you know, shoot for the stars.

But there are also so many amazing growth and learning opportunities in smaller startups or in smaller agencies. There can be great opportunities to really get your hands dirty and learn lots of different parts of the craft. So I think, um,

Don't be afraid to kind of start somewhere that you've never heard anyone else starting at because you might just be the person that transforms the way that company does design. That's amazing advice. And with that, thank you, Ruby, for coming to our show and sharing your insights. I'm sure lots and lots of takeaways, whether you are in strategic design or you're not, or you're actually thinking about getting into it. I hope your evening or your hour has been better because Ruby shared what she knows and

Last question. I know the layoffs have happened. What's next for you? What's next on your plate? Yeah, thanks, Dalen. So next on my plate is I'm actually starting my own company. So I'm going to be building a platform for consulting and for education as well in the design space. I'm really excited to help designers increase the impact that they're having in the world.

That's my new mission. That's awesome, Ruby. And we're looking forward to working with you on one or two of our workshops as well with our new product launch that's coming on this Thursday, which is our annual workshop pass. And with that, thank you, Ruby, for taking time to share with the audience. And thank you, everyone. You're more than welcome to connect with Ruby over LinkedIn. And with that, have a good day, everyone.

All the best, Ruby, for your next new endeavor. Thanks so much, Jalen. Thanks, everyone. This was super fun. Awesome. Thank you, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you.

Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.