Transcript of Interview With Connor Joyce

Interview With Connor Joyce

This interview features Connor Joyce, senior AI user researcher at BetterUp. You can watch it on Connor’s profile page.

Transcript

– I am back with the opportunity to chat with another one of the many speakers that will be part of Convey UX 24 coming up the last three days of February in Seattle, in person and also online. And I’d like to say hello to my guest, Connor Joyce, how are you doing today, Connor?

– I’m doing really well. Yeah, thank you Joe. I appreciate it.

– Well, I am in my home office just north of Blinks headquarters in Seattle. Where are you talking to us from?

– I’m also in Seattle. I, yeah, I’m, I’m right here in downtown.

– Well, a good place to start is if you could talk a little bit about your background and the nature of the work that you’re involved in.

– Yeah, absolutely. So I am a user researcher at BetterUp, which is a, a startup that’s been around for a little while. It is a human transformation platform company, and it is focused on utilizing tools like career coaching and other, other interventions to help people achieve the, the skill growth and the professional development that they seek. And, and again, I’m a user researcher on a team that’s focused on building generative AI throughout our product suite.

– Well, I’ll introduce your topic title, empowering product teams with UX research, organizing and democratizing insights. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we can expect to learn from it?

– Yeah, absolutely. So I consider myself a user researcher and, and I, and I’ve held multiple user researcher roles, but even more so, I consider myself a product builder. I’ve built my own products, I have worked very closely with, with startups. I’m an advisor currently and advised startups in the past. And I just really enjoy the creation of net new products. Now my angle is providing evidence so that the product team can make the best decisions for whatever they’re trying to achieve. And so that’s how I see my role in a company is, is really enabling increased sales by making sure we’re building the right thing, achieving product market fit and, and, and really satisfying user outcomes. But also by reducing costs, by, by ensuring that people are ultimately building the right thing first to avoid rework down the road and, and also trying to find the best path forward whenever there are any sort of decisions to be made. And I, and I truly believe that evidence, especially evidence generated by the people who will ultimately be using a product, is what is there, what is the best way to ultimately achieve that? So, so my topic, it really came out of my time at Twilio where I was a staff user researcher on a team. I can’t actually remember what it’s called now. I know I, I know it’s been changed a couple times, but when I was there, it was profiles. And so I had multiple te product teams all under my wing. It was much more work than I could ever do myself. And so I had to really focus on two things, organization, what does everybody need? What are the research questions that they have? What are the, the projects that are in flight that, that they may not even have research questions for yet, but that they’re going to have? And, and then what data has already been generated? Is there stuff from the past? Is there stuff in flight? Is, is there a secondary research that could be brought in? So it was all about organization of questions, data, so I could prioritize what was most useful for me as the researcher to go and execute. Now, the democratization piece is the second part of that for all of those tasks that I’m not gonna get around to, it was all about finding the best projects that I could hand off to, whether it be a product manager, a designer, or somebody else to go and execute.

– Well, I think that’s gonna be a, a topic which fosters a lot of great discussions at the conference. And I, I think everyone attending will be interested in this regardless of their specific expertise and, and specialists. But you mentioned AI as being part of your, part of the things that you do. That’s one of the major themes of the conference. Could you talk a little bit about how you’re involved with ai?

– Yeah, yeah. So unfortunately I can’t get in too many specifics right now about what I’m doing with our, our core product and, and how we’re, we’re weaving AI into our features. There is gonna be a lot of great things to come. So, so I’ll hopefully by the time the conference comes, I’ll be able to share a little bit more. But yeah, as you know, it’s a big subject right now. Everybody’s working on it. And so we’re, we’re, as we have found our unique lens, we’re also being, being smart about, without getting too, too loud about it until we’ve launched product. But this being said, AI is a huge part of my job. It is not only without talking about the specifics of what I’m doing, AI is enabling me as a, a researcher that is on a team of a horizontal team. So again, I am on a specific team that’s building technology into all of our other surfaces. And so again, this is managing lots of different product teams. And one of the primary ways that I’m handling both all of the ambiguity, ambiguity, ambiguity, and I am also handling the triage of tasks, is through artificial intelligence. So I’m utilizing it in across my, my entire workflow. Now, this being said, I always like to caveat on and say, I never let AI write my final draft. There’s still me going through it and, and, and looking out for hallucinogens. A but also just the fact that it doesn’t have all the context that this human brain does too. And so I really look at it as a symbio symbiotic relationship. We are gonna work together to ultimately build the best, the best outcome, but the scale that I’m working at is only possible with ai, with the ability, especially tools like code interpreter for data analysis, the creation of lots of interview questions to answer research questions, and then taking that kind of brainstorm of all the potential avenues and directions that one could take to answer research question, choosing the, the most effective ones from that, and then ultimately writing my questions based on it, all of those sort of things. And then I should say in thematic analysis, that that there, across that board AI plays a big role in enabling me to, to create research at the speed that I do. And, and I say this genuinely because I didn’t think it would be possible, but I remember what I used to do at Microsoft that would take me a month, two months. I then learned how to do without AI in about a month, two weeks at Twilio, which moved just much faster. And, and I had tighter parameters that I could operate in within. And now I do that in one to two weeks at BetterUp to really match the speed of the team. So AI is, is a, is a huge factor of how I’m conducting my work these a these days.

– Well, thanks for sharing your thoughts about that. I, I, I know that even if people aren’t directly working with it, everybody’s thinking about how it applies to their work. And so that’s yet another dimension that’ll add to interesting discussions at the events. Most of our attendees are fairly senior practitioners. We do have a lot of people that are relatively new to the profession. Do you have a thought or a tip that you might like to share?

– Yeah, yeah. And I, I love talking to new people who are entering the field. I think that it’s always good to hear those unique perspectives before one has really been shown the realities of, of the profession that we’re in. And I, and when I say realities, I should really say like the common constraints. So I always love talking to you to to, to new people, especially fresh outta grad school and these days. And again, just being fully respectful of the fact that we have seen significant layoffs in the tech field. We also are seeing less job postings. And, and, and you know, I don’t have hard data to support that, but I’ve seen some great LinkedIn analyses and, and things like that is I try to tell people both factoring in the job market but also outside of the job market, the one of the things that I, I believe is happening is there is a convergence of multiple different disciplines. User research, data science, market research, and applied science or applied research. I see all of these fields beginning to have to work more and more together to ultimately create evidence for product teams. And so I tell new people entering the field, user research is great, I love it. It’s what I want to continue doing. But I also recommend that they don’t box themselves into this profession that they instead see themselves as a person who is there to create data, create evidence for evidence-based decision making, rather than there to just be a user researcher. And if they take that lens, then no matter their title, they will see what their mission is beyond just satisfying the responsibilities of whatever the job role is.

– Yeah. Well thanks for contributing your device, your advice, and that’ll be useful to people watching this video, whether they’re able to attend the event or not. And, and another item like that is related to books. We do have a conference bookstore that’s sponsored by a Seattle local bookstore called adas, and they’ll be at the event selling books. And there’ll also be an online bookstore. I like to ask all of our speakers if there’s, you know, a book that you’ve read recently or have been involved with that you might want to talk about.

– Yeah, yeah. So the book that I’m, I’m reading right now that’s making the most impact for me, it, it is called Write Useful Books, A modern Approach to designing and refining Recommendable Nonfiction. And it is a book about writing a nonfiction book that I found tremendous value in. I’m a very structured person when it comes to trying to approach any project. And I love frameworks, I love data. This book is filled with both of them. And the reason I’m reading it is ’cause excitingly earlier this year I signed a, a book deal with, with Pearson Peach Pit on a book that I’m writing called Bridging Intentions to Impact. And, and this book is focused on doing exactly that. It’s lots of companies say, and they have mission statements that are focused on trying to change the world ultimately, but then the impact that those products have, they may do that, but they may not. And very few companies really focus on the ways that their products change human behavior once they’re out in the market. And so this book is a, is a, is a collection of my thinking and my work from the last five years focused on really creating products that make an impact. And so it’s got a theoretical section that talks a little bit more about what I call that impact mindset and why it’s so important to focus on the impact that pe that products create. But then it comes with a practical guide, which I call the future feature impact analysis that is focused on execution of a process to build metrics and ultimately measure impact. So I’m super excited to be writing it. It’s gonna be coming out next year. I wish it was in time for the conference. It’d be, it’d be great to have it in that, that bookstore if it were to be possible. But, but it will be coming out late next year and, and very excited to, to be writing it right now.

– Well, congratulations on, on the book deal and I hope you have a great time putting it together and getting it published. And thanks also for sharing your thoughts in this session preview, talking about your work and thoughts about AI and the, and your advice for new people in your book. So thanks a lot and we’ll look forward to seeing you at the conference in a few months.

– Thank you, Joe. Looking forward to it.

– Alright, bye-Bye

– Bye.