The UX Research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta)

User-centered performance refers to customer obsession or user-centered practice that is symbolic rather than focused on learning. It's hugely common, I would argue. It's work we do to signal to each other how customer-obsessed we are, not 'cause we want to make a different decision. If your, like, listeners are like, "I don't do that," I'm kind of like, think about it for a second. This is extremely common. Every time a PM comes to a researcher at the end of a product process and says, "Can you just run a quick user study, you know, just to validate our assumptions?" That's user-centered performance. It's too late to matter. We got to ship it, right? What they want is to check the box. One of my big kind of mantras was, we don't validate, we falsify. We are looking to be wrong. Many PMs, many designers are not in that place. They do not want to be wrong. They're looking to validate and that's user-centered performance.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Judd Anton. Judd helped build the user research practice at Facebook, he was a long time head of research at Airbnb, and his direct reports have gone on to lead research teams at Figma, Notion, Slack, Robinhood, Duolingo, Fair, and other amazing companies. These days, Judd spends his time consulting, helping companies with organizational challenges, product strategy, design, research, hiring, onboarding and crisis management. In our conversation, we unpack a conclusion that Judd has come to recently about how the user research field is going through a reckoning and what needs to change both within the user research field and how companies leverage user research going forward. Judd shares what the user research field has gotten wrong over the last decade, how PMs and designers rely on user research too often and to answer the wrong questions, where user research will continue to provide significant value and how to best leverage your researchers, why it's important for researchers to think about the business goals more versus just what the users need, what to look for when you're hiring a user researcher, how PMs can be better partners to researchers, and also a phenomenon that I love that Judd describes and often witnesses that he calls user-centered performance where everyone acts like they care about the user, but they're just doing it for show and already know what they want to do. This episode has a lot of spicy takes and will probably upset some people, but Judd is sharing some real talk here that I think we all need to hear. With that, I bring you Judd Anton after a short word from our sponsors. This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor, Teal, comes in. Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search. With an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, cover letter generator, and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards, Teal is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. There's a reason nearly one million people have trusted Teal to run their job search. If you're thinking of making a change in the new year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms. Get started for free at tealhq.com/lenny. That's tealhq.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. (instrumental music) Judd, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.