Dave Franchino [00:11:02] So many questions that are inspired by that. I think one thing you talked about earlier in your discussion about choices and I think it at one level, one choice, every manager, perhaps every listener of this podcast, makes is how much of our resources, time and energy do we focus on innovation as opposed to focusing on operational excellence or service or our brand or reducing costs. And I know you've got a good perspective because your team's research supports a wide variety of initiatives, not just innovation, but also areas to improve service or brand. Those sorts of things. Do you have any guidance or any lessons that you've learned over the years on what part of the portfolio of resources you would dedicate towards innovation? And I realize that's a loaded word that at some point we should probably work to define, but for whatever definition we're willing to accept -- how much focus do you put on innovation?
Julie Norvaisas [00:12:00] Yeah, I guess the way I'd frame that for our company is, as we were chatting on e-mail a little bit prior, we don't talk too much about that. We don't use that word innovation all that much. But what we do talk about a lot is like strategy versus roadmap. So, we work on a quarterly roadmap and decide collectively what we're going to build quarter over quarter. And then at the same time, we're also thinking more longer term and more strategically. So my team, we sit in the broader design team, which is called UED, user experience design, and that comprises research, user experience research, user experience writing, design program management and, of course, design.
[00:12:44] We sit within the larger R&D organization, which is a product. So, working together we do exactly what you said. We try to balance the portfolio of what our team is working on across what we call foundational work, formative work, and evaluative work. Foundational being what's feeding our strategy. And there's a lot of appetite within our company at the executive level, which is wonderful, for more foundational insight that's even removed from LinkedIn altogether, just like what are people's needs, motivations in the professional context that we can learn from and leverage and maybe shift our perspectives a little bit. You know, our vision as a company is to create economic opportunity for every member, every member of the global workforce. And in order to do that, we need to constantly be shifting our perspective, challenging our assumptions. Understanding that we are not the people that we're designing for. In the very early days of the company we were, but that is no longer the case.
So, we need to be investing in that really foundational work. But in a targeted way. And then, the second type of work we do is kind of more formative, which is once you have decided what problem you're to solve, what need you're going to go after there's obviously, as you know all too well, thousands and thousands of decisions that need to be made. From the early stages of, like how are we going to meet this need? in broader sketches, too, like, OK, now we're to the specific interactions and the flows and we need to make sure that those are understandable, discoverable, usable, all of those things. So, we do a lot of work, concept testing, from the early stages to the latter stages in the formative phases of product development. I think foundational work has a very sexy reputation.
[00:14:36] Everybody wants to be a strategic foundational work, right? Personally, I think two things. I think the decisions that are made in the formative stages are where the rubber hits the road. That is critical, critical work that really shapes the experiences that we're forming. And then, secondly, I say we do a lot of formative work. The real truth is we do a lot of foundational/formative work. We're always learning about the context of the users as we're testing concepts. So, this division between what's strategic and what's tactical as a researcher, specifically, I think is a little bit of a false dichotomy. While we do a lot of lab work and a lot of concept testing, the tendrils of that work I think spanned from informing foundational decision, strategic decisions as well as well as evaluative, which is the third kind of work that we do, which is more like usability testing.
[00:15:30] How do we remove friction from the experience? Where are people getting stuck? We do usability testing. The outcomes of that are much less vague. We call them WTFs, What to Fixes. There's really not a huge problem. We just need to fix them, whereas, you know, foundational or even informative where we're hoping to engender a conversation around those things that teams can have together to make great collective decisions and consider all the tradeoffs between user needs, business needs and what technology is, too.
Dave Franchino [00:16:04] Julie, I think that's fascinating. I'm going to give Stef a chance ask some questions sooner or later, but I'm really intrigued. I think a lot of our listeners might be looking at the foundational insight research and say, "That's a luxury I can't afford." I know you can't share specific examples, but do you have any kind of generalized examples where you can demonstrate that foundational research really does pay dividends for a firm?
Julie Norvaisas [00:16:30] Yeah, absolutely. I'm having a lot of conversations with people about this right now. And it's really, really interesting. I think that there is a direct and indirect impact from doing foundational work. When it's indirect, it can make people feel a little bit uneasy, like, "Oh, what did we get out of this study?" But it's really interesting for me to see.
[00:16:51] So I can share with you a couple of the sketches of a couple of studies we've done that are more broad. One is about active communities. I don't think it's any secret that LinkedIn is really creating a lot of exciting products that help professionals form communities and converse with each other. And this is a very human thing. It's a very exciting thing. But we took a step back and looked at like, what does it mean to have an active professional community? And did a really robust diary study and came up with a framework of how we would define a healthy, active community in that framework. This work was done, I want to say, a couple of years ago and at the time I think people were like, "This is incredible work. This is brilliant." People love the stories. They love to understand. And the framework really resonated with people. But at the same time, it was like, "OK, well, that's nice to know."
Individual teams took those frameworks and created road maps through them. OK, well, we need to make sure that we're creating a community that has parameters? What does that mean? We need to create a community that has purpose. We need to make sure the right people are there. We need to make sure those people are participating. So, it gave individual product teams something to really, really encourage. And then, what you started to see over time was at the executive level, this framework and this way of thinking had an indirect effect of really altering the course of road map and strategy over time.
[00:18:26] It's just really been interesting for me to see that influence versus impact or influence and impact like a yin and a yang. I think for foundational work, the desire and the frustration can be like, "We need to see immediate impact from this." And the truth is tthat's not even necessarily what it's intended to do, right? It's intended to change the culture, change the mindset, shift the perspective, get into people's minds, change the way that they're even approaching the problem in ways that are sometimes undetectable, which is a challenging position for research to be on.
[00:19:03] You know, another example on the enterprise side, because half of my team, actually more than half my team, works on enterprise products, not on the consumer products that LinkedIn is kind of known for by most people. And we did a very interesting marketplace study about the hiring marketplace and the dynamics between job seekers and recruiters and hiring managers internationally. It's a really interesting study. I think about some projects I did actually when I was working with you guys all the time and stuff like this was about the power dynamics between the user groups within the system and the disconnect that causes.
I'm not revealing any secrets, you know, by saying that there's a real power dynamic between job seekers and hiring managers and enterprises who are hiring that really labor, a lot of the times, the hirer and not the hiree. So, a lot of interesting conversations. And, you know, LinkedIn operates from a place of very, very strong integrity and compassion. So, a lot of conversations about, "Oh, OK, what does that mean to us?" How how do we create products now that help to level that? We're never going to eliminate it. I don't think it's necessary or even desirable to do so. But how do we level that out? How do we make sure there is a fair exchange of information in the products that we're creating that doesn't make this worse. How do we reduce bias in the system that helps to level the playing field? How do we create more equitable conversations across this marketplace? So that's the kind of thing that certainly you can point to specific initiatives that came out of those studies and be very proud of the impact that they have. But what I'm even more proud of over time is how I've seen our products shift in response to these kind of deep insights. So, you know, can you afford it? You know, is it worth the time? Is it worth the investment? I guess it depends on your company's values in some ways.
Stefanie Norvaisas [00:21:08] Excellent. A lot of the things that you just were talking about allude to a very strong culture. You mentioned values.'m curious to hear you talk a little bit about the culture at LinkedIn and how that support creativity, invention, innovation. And then, more specifically, I'm really curious about the culture you've created with your team. Because you are walking that line between trying to get people information fast -- the foundational, formative, evaluative. I'm sure that can create some tension at times. So, I'd like you to address the topic of culture.
Julie Norvaisas [00:21:40] Culture ... So, LinkedIn, when I started, was about 2,500 people at that time. Of course, I thought that was huge. Now were, I want to say, about 16,000 employees and we're a part of Microsoft, which is over 100,000 employees. So that's a lot of growth. My team, of course, grew from two to 45 people and all the teams around me, you know, likewise, growing up at a similar rate. So, I think one of the things that hasn't changed in all of that time and through all of that growth has been our culture and our values. Our mission statement and our vision statement have remained exactly the same.
[00:22:14] The values that guide us are constantly reiterated by our wonderful CEO, Jeff Weiner. Every two weeks he hosts a meeting where he talks about our top priorities, the first one of which is talent, meaning us, the people, and then trust and member value and customer value. And we talk through these every two weeks. He makes a point of emphasizing our values, right? Relationships matter. Act like an owner. Inspire excellence. Relationships matter. All of those things. So, those things are really our guiding force. And we also hold each other accountable to them. Be open, honest, and constructive is one of our core values. And that's not easy to do. When we all hold each other to those standards, you know, that's just ... The consistency and solidity of those company values has been just incredible to behold and a great lesson in leadership. You can't say them often enough. You can't reinforce them often enough.
Stefanie Norvaisas [00:23:13] Do you think any of those values that you just identified for adopting have a direct correlation or any correlation to creativity? Is that a value of your company?
Julie Norvaisas [00:23:28] Not explicitly, but we're very much a culture of experimentation and creation. We come from this very entrepreneurial, experimental startup culture. So, creation is, well, transformation is really what we talk about more than creativity. We are constantly trying to transform ourselves, our products, our company, the world. It's a very scale-able notion, transformation. So, I guess that's how we really frame creativity for the design team. Of course, creativity is super important and we just had a creativity-in day, as a matter of fact. Every month, we have one day that is dedicated to a theme. Our VP of Design was the executive sponsor of creativity-in day and it was just a lot of fun. We have a very maker kind of culture on the design team. We have maker hours that kind of inspire that creativity and innovation.
[00:24:23] The relationship between those things and play I think are very, very important. But innovation and creativity, I think, are more kind of driven by constraints, whereas, you know, pure creativity and play are unrestrained. That's where I think that interplay is quite interesting.
[00:24:45] For my team, you know, we have values that define us. We, of course, you know, anchor on the company values. But our own two values that we talk about a lot are being rigorous and experimental. Yes, rigorous and experimental, as well as being curious, social. Those are all diplomatic. Those are all things that we talk about as researchers that are really, really important to us. And rigor kind of speaks directly to Dave's point about Dave's question earlier about like how do you create credibility in the organization for this kind of work and not just think like ... Literally, once I had somebody at LinkedIn who was not on the research team say to me, "Well, we don't need to do usability testing because I talked to some people at a cocktail party about this feature and I understand what we need to do to fix it." And I was like, "That's great that you did that, but that's not usability. Let me explain to you exactly what that method is and how that works." And so we really do lead with rigor.
[00:25:43] When we talk about the work that we do, but we also don't want to be stagnant. You know, we want to constantly be transforming and contributing to the practice of research as a discipline. So it's easy to get into a routine, right? We're gonna do a lab study. We're going to talk to 10 people and it's gonna be good at it. But it's really important that within that rigorous construct, there so many methods that we can use where we can still be very, very rigorous, but also be very experimental.
Dave Franchino [00:26:11] So truly relative to that, I think a common perception among some listeners is that software and maybe the social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, that you kind of have a little bit of an unfair innovation advantage because of the speed with which you can experiment and prototype. Do you agree with that? Does that represent something that, you know, your company can take on that other companies can't, or or is that maybe naive?
Julie Norvaisas [00:26:41] I think there's some truth to that. I mean, the affordances of literally what we're designing and how we're designing it allows us to experiment thousands of times across the platform. So, do we have an unfair advantage? You know, it's interesting. I think there is, talking about tension, there can sometimes be like a rush to experiment before really understanding what the problem is that we're solving, what those needs are, what people's context is, what their workflow is, how it might work in the world, the implications of the feature or product. So, I think that there is both an advantage and a disadvantage of working in this way. And my teams, both research and writing, kind of sit right at the intersection of that. We're really focused on giving people that deep information in order to feed experiments that are both fruitful and ethical within the system. And I mean ethical and in many different respects. So, in some ways, I would say it's an advantage, and in some ways, I would say it's a bit of a disadvantage, if that makes sense.
Dave Franchino [00:27:53] Do you have any advice for our non-software listeners on how you think the basic principles of innovation discovery that you've implemented or learned could be perhaps applied to other industries.
Julie Norvaisas [00:28:07] There are so many ways to experiment, right? Like in in the digital software, like social media realm, we can experiment in real time with real data, and I think that's great. And some of those are controlled experiments, and I think the earlier that we experiment, not in the system but with proxy methods, just reduces risk and is safer and better for everybody. And you don't need to be working in a software/digital realm to do that.
[00:28:37] I think this concept of tiny experiments to kind of figure out the right way into a problem can be done by anybody. Can you, you know, do it at the scale that we can do it to kind of capture those metrics and understand kind of how different changes or different experiments will impact users, create value to users, to the business. All of that stuff is very complex, but maybe you can't do that as effectively or at that scale. But certainly, the act of experimenting, you know, anybody can do it. And, in fact, I think for products and types of products and services that require more upfront investment, whether it's tooling or whatever you are doing, that early, early experiment, you're even more compelled to do that because you can't take it back if you make a certain decision and it's not the right decision and you didn't experiment and kind of figure out at a micro and at a macro level, what you're doing is useful, usable, valuable, and is going to work, right? You know, you just really created some problems for yourself.
Stefanie Norvaisas [00:29:40] So true. I wanted to circle back on once more and take another crack at culture, if you will. I know, you know, we talked about having grown from two researchers to 45. I know that you're not all co-located. Especially not in the same building, not in the same campus. Sometimes not ... Especially right now, because of the current situation, you're all working from home. But can you talk about or give some advice on what it takes to create a strong and vibrant culture in that environment?
Julie Norvaisas [00:30:16] Yeah, there's so many dimensions of that. The first one that comes to my mind is you need leaders who are willing to learn and grow and change and listen. My personal journeys through growing a team, leading the team, has been one of extraordinary personal growth. And I think that to establish a strong culture where people are going to follow you, they're going to want to be with you on your team, that you're all working together, requires that kind of vulnerable and deep commitment to leadership. And I'm fortunate enough to have a team of leaders working for me that feel that same way. So, that's really important. And then, you know, there's consistency.
[00:31:01] We have just tactical things that we do. We also have a meeting every two weeks and I have it organized. And, you know, we talked a lot over the years about what do we want this meeting to do? And at first, it was like what we'll do around table and everybody's going to talk about what they're working on. You know, that was interesting when it was like seven or eight people and then it was like totally redundant because we were always talking about the same things. And then as we grew, it's a constant reassessment of what the team needs, what they're thinking about, what's important to them. Now, our team meeting is really fun. The first thing we do is called "Me in a Minute". So every person, any person on the team, can sign up and just talk about themselves for like five minute, it's not really a minute. It could be like a trip they took or something about their backgrounds and culture or something that they're really interested in. Like one person did one on pictures of himself wearing hats over the years. Another person had recently did a really great like quiz on plant life because she's really into plants. So, it's really just like personal getting to know each other.
[00:32:01] And then we do a couple of different segments. One is called "Wheels on the Bus", which is like operational stuff, like what do we all need to do to make sure we're being operationally sound? We have a word segment, which is our UX writers, where they talk to us about the work that they're doing. And then, we devote most of the time to what we call a "Nerd Alert". So that could be somebody bringing something back from a conference that they went to and sharing something that they learned. But we've had some great ones on like cognitive heuristics and behavioral science, really reading out like deep research reports and book reports, anything storytelling. Like how do we think about storytelling as researchers?
[00:32:39] So anything anybody wants to, like, really nerd out on, we give ourselves time for that. So, we've created that together time. That's something that I know I value. One thing I forgot to mention that's super important in that meaning is gratitude.
[00:32:54] We probably spend fifteen minutes every single meeting doing a gratitude roundabout, so we just like toss it to each other." I'm grateful for this person helping me give me feedback on my presentation." You know, "I'm grateful for a new researcher running their first study and really nailing it." Whatever it is. I was grateful once for somebody retrieving a lost jacket I left in the San Francisco building, which is impossible. I thought I'd never find it. So, whatever it is, we really express that natural gratitude we have for each other.
[00:33:21] So, I think having those forums for authentic conversation. And by the way, you know, recently you may have heard our CEO is moving into an executive chairman role and we had some really significant leadership changes. So, because of the tone that we have at our team meetings, I was so proud that that forum was used for really honest discussion about how people were feeling. What they saw. What they felt. What they were worried about. We could share that with each other in a really open way. And as a leader, like, I didn't always have all the answers, but I was so grateful for the questions and for the conversation and committed to bring that to my leadership and holding them accountable.
[00:34:00] Being true to our values, as well. So, I'm really, really proud of that. The other thing I do every year is I look at the organization because it changes so much. And I come up with like three words, two or three words, for the team to kind of anchor on every year. These are things that I think are gonna help us be successful. Things that I think we can work on together. And this year there were three words. One is consistency. So, as we grow and scale as the team ... we have a growing operations team, which is incredible. And we need to work together to make sure that our work is consistent and rigorous.
[00:34:38] And the second one was curiosity, which seems like a natural thing for a research and writing team. But really doubling down on like we need to work with other insights partners, data science, market research, do secondary research. Like look out into the world. Like really lead with curiosity and also be curious in the moments of tension on your projects, right? Lean into that. Lean into your daily life with curiosity. Don't make assumptions.
[00:35:05] And then the third one is courage. And I think we in the tech world right now as we face the issues that we do and as a design field, I think courage is really, really important right now. It's very important for us to be able to listen with courage. Listen with the desire to be heard, to be changed by what you're hearing from other people. Listening takes a lot of courage. Changing takes a lot of courage. And then speaking up, saying what's really on your mind. We talk a lot about diversity. At LinkedIn diversity, inclusion and belonging, creating diverse teams, creating a diverse workplace. But in order to really realize the benefits of diversity, it requires every single person involved to be very, very courageous in the conversations that we're having with each other.
[00:35:51] So courage was a really important one for us. You know, I work with the team and I observe and I use my research kind of instincts to identify the needs for the team and then rally people around some concepts. And people really take to that. They like the words. They use the words. We have training, learning, and development that kind of circles around these different themes for the team and we try to be real consistent about that. So, yeah, culture is everything from like a real deep internal journey to like specific tactics and reinforcing the things that you talk about as leaders.
Stefanie Norvaisas [00:36:21] It's really clear from your conversation and from some of the opportunities I've had to observe LinkedIn at work by visiting you there, it does have a very strong culture. It's visible on the walls of the building and in the way that people interact with each other. And I really appreciate, a lot of what you talked about had to do, or at least illuminated for me, these tensions, right? That it's not that simple: follow this formula and everything will be great. It's about understanding where these tension points are and, in a way, celebrating them.
[00:36:59] So being rigorous, but also being experimental, being consistent, but also being curious. There's a lot of these things that people might feel on the surface are opposites, but are in fact, both critical for success. And it appears that that's embodied in the leadership at LinkedIn, in general, but specifically and more pointedly to the leadership that you portray with your group.
Julie Norvaisas [00:37:25] I think I'll add one more thing about culture, which kind of ties to what I was saying about courage a little bit, but it'll be more pointed about it. You know, we talk about culture as being this rock-solid thing and this anchor that we really rely on, and that's really true. But it's also, as you invite new people onto the team, especially people from diverse backgrounds and diverse races and different parts of the worlds, different cultures, you have to be open to changing your culture. Your culture is changed by every single person who joins your team.
And if you have a monoculture that isn't willing to change as you bring new people into that culture, and if leadership isn't willing to evolve, change and shift and grow with that team, that is not a living culture. That is a stagnant culture that is going to cause people to feel repressed, like, "Oh, you've invited me to be part of this team, but you actually don't really want to hear what I have to say. So you don't want to be changed by my perspective." But really, we do. So, the trick is finding that balance and that tension between, like, "We know who we are, we know what we stand for that is unwavering. You can actually help us live those things even better than we do today by what you're bringing to the table and by challenging the way that we do things. And we need you to do that. We want you to do that. It's the only way that we're gonna actually achieve our objectives together."
[00:38:51] So I really enjoy the notion of culture, as, you know, a collection of people making choices together and changing their environment and changing their community and changing, hopefully, the world through what we put out there.
Stefanie Norvaisas [00:39:05] Really well spoken and way to tie it all back to the beginning about choices. One thing in particular, you said that I'm going to walk away with and use going forward is this notion of listening with the desire to change. And that is just a different way of listening to what people say, not listening to think about what your answer is or how it fits with your current construct, but really listening with a desire to change. Thank you, that was really great.
Julie Norvaisas [00:39:37] Of course. I can't remember exactly where I heard that, but I actually heard that recently and it made a light bulb go off for me, too. I'm trying to practice that. Yeah, sure that I love it too.
Dave Franchino [00:39:49] Julie, this has been fantastic. I mean, being respectful your time, maybe time for a couple more questions. You talked to a little bit about the challenges the tech industry is facing. Really, all firms are facing, as we grapple with issues of diversity, inclusion, and fairness. And it's one thing we passionately believe here. Can you help me for our listeners build evidence that a focus on diversity, inclusion, and trust actually has an impact on an organization's impact to innovate?
Julie Norvaisas [00:40:18] Yeah, absolutely. There are so many examples of how not having diverse teams creates problems for people out in the world. You know, I think an example over that we talk about a lot is when hand dryers were designed, they were designed exclusively by white people. So, they don't recognize darker skin and then they don't function for people of color.
[00:40:48] If you had had a diverse team building that product, that would not have happened. If you had brought diversity even into the testing process, if you had taken a diverse and inclusive approach to the research, even in the absence of having a diverse team of engineers and designers building it, that would never have happened.
[00:41:07] So, I think there are the downstream effects of not having diversity in the business case for that are both, I think, moral, of course, but if you're eliminating usage of products by vast swaths of the population because you haven't considered either excluding them from the ability to use your product altogether or creating products that are offensive to them to the degree that they won't participate in them, that's just not good business. I think it's pretty clear and at least, you know, in the tech industry, we especially, I can only really speak for LinkedIn, but we find that to be very, very clear.
[00:41:47] But then how do you do that? You know, one of the things that the research team is doing, I just kind of alluded to it, but every company in tech has a quote-unquote, diversity problem, which really simply means that we haven't hired enough women, people of color, people from underrepresented minorities. Our workforces do not reflect the population of the people. That was the point. That's a problem. And that's something to be worked on. And we really, really are. But as we work on that, it is incumbent on researchers to create inclusive practices so that when we are testing our products and building for a very diverse population of users, we are including those people in the process.
[00:42:28] It's kind of a shift of designing for versus designing with, which is what we want to be doing a lot more. It helps certainly reduce risk. Expand your user base. Avoid PR issues. The laundry list goes on and on. The benefits of diversity. Plus, if I can just say it's more fun, it's way, way, way more fun. Rewarding, enjoyable, exciting to work with people who are from different backgrounds, whether that's gender, age, race, culture, whatever, you name it. It's just a lot more interesting and a lot more fun. And I think that the products that we put out into the world reflect the experiences that the people who are building them are having with each other. That's a direct correlation in my mind. If a product is made by a dysfunctional team who's not working together, who's not diverse, it's very easy to see that.
Dave Franchino [00:43:23] Very, very well-stated and inspiring point. Well, I think in the interest of time, we probably ought to wrap this up, but Julie, I really enjoy it and appreciate it. This is a tremendous conversation, some excellent insights for myself. I know that we are going to be having a gratitude component to our upcoming staff meeting as a result of this. Lots and lots of great strategy, as well, in terms of really focusing on culture and innovation.
[00:43:50] Once again, Dave Franchino here and I've really enjoyed this conversation, joined by our Vice President of Strategy, Stefanie Norvaisas, and delighted with our conversation with today's guest, Julie Norvaisas, Senior Director of User Experience and Research at LinkedIn. And Julie, so thank you so very much for your time. We really appreciate it.
Julie Norvaisas [00:44:09] Thank you, Dave and Stef. I really enjoyed the conversation.
