CXChronicles Podcast 215 with Steve Portigal, UX Research & User Experience Expert

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #215 we  welcomed Steve Portigal, Principal at Portigal Consulting based in Montara, CA. 

Steve works with organizations in two key ways: i) he uncovers key insights about users and customers to help drive decisions about product, service, technology, and strategy and ii) he works with leaders to build a more mature user research practice. 

In this episode, Steve and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback and shares tips & best practices that have worked across his own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #215 Highlight Reel:**

1. Understanding the core of a user's experience and how its originally designed
2. Investing in user research operations to help scale your business
3. Prioritizing what you need to learn about your users & how you can take action
4. Mapping the iceberg of your customer and user experience 
5. Getting your team to prioritize the key CTAs that will drive innovation & growth
 
Huge thanks to Steve for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Steve Portigal

Click here to learn more about Steve's new book

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today.

You know what would be even better?

Go tell one of your friends or teammates about CXC's content, CX/CS/RevOps services, our customer & employee focused community & invite them to join the CX Nation!

Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused video content & short-reel CTAs to improve your CX/CS/RevOps performance today (politely go smash that subscribe button).

Contact us anytime to learn more about CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com and ask us about how we can help your business & team make customer happiness a habit now!

Huge thanks to our newest CXCP sponsor Glance. Visit their website today at https://www.glance.cx/cxchronicles

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast 215 with Steve Portigal.mp4

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00:08) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady Chisana. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have Steve Portable joining us. Steve, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend. 

Steve Portigal (00:00:19) - Hello, CX Nation. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00:22) - So, guys, Steve has a super cool story, super cool background. Steve, why don't you start off today's show like we start off all these episodes. Give us, spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about your own personal customer-focused business leader journey. How did you get into some of the work that you're doing today? 

Steve Portigal (00:00:38) - Yeah, I've been doing user research as a consultant for 20 years, 22 years in my own practice and maybe six or seven years in an agency before that. And, you know, when I kind of came out of graduate school, this wasn't a thing and I didn't know it was a thing. And so it was sort of early days of, you know, finding some adventurous companies to work with that felt like, oh, we can learn about people before we make a thing for them or as a way of figuring out what things we should make or to figure out if we are on the right track. 

Steve Portigal (00:01:17) - If you go back into the dark ages, like I'm kind of hearkening back to, like, that just wasn't as common, which is why it was a consultancy where I found my first opportunities as opposed to, you know, a corporation or startup. And I was sort of lucky enough to, I want to call it apprentice, but it's not like any of us knew what we were doing. And there was some guilt I was being brought into. And so I guess being able to join in figuring it out, like, how do we do this work? What are the skills? How do we explain this work to clients? 

Steve Portigal (00:01:48) - How do we sell it? How do we price it? Like everything about building a business on that. So it's just been years of learning, never ending learning about the work and how does the work kind of exist in the world of business or whatever organizations I'm working with. And meanwhile, you know, I feel like, oh, it's all grown up around me. Like there's many, many, many people that do what I do with lots of experience that are still coming up and still joining the field. 

Steve Portigal (00:02:16) - But that, yeah, when I came from, you know, my origin, we were still finding the opportunity and finding the approach to take that would give us something that would be helpful. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:02:28) - I love it. I mean, number one, like what drew you to this type of space? Did you, were you always interested in kind of learning how people were using products, using services? Were you interested in the product side? Were you interested in like what, what, what was the, like some of the early draws that made you know that this was the type of work you wanted to dive into? 

Steve Portigal (00:02:47) - Yeah, I mean, a light bulb moment is going back to even my days as an undergraduate when I took a course in human computer interaction, it was like, you know, I don't know, I don't know if this is common, but I was lucky to have a class in school. I don't think of schools being like a big source of my life journey necessarily, but there was this class and this really very experienced professor and human computer interaction and library science. 

Steve Portigal (00:03:15) - In fact, I remember her standing in front of the class and saying, when you see someone who can't go through a revolving door because they're pushing on the wrong side or who trips on stairs because they don't sort of see how deep the step is. She said, that's the fault of the person that made the door or the person that made the stairs. You know, and if you're listening to this, like, you know, you might, of course, right, that is maybe more, I think we're more enlightened now, especially as kind of the communities that we're all in. 

Steve Portigal (00:03:48) - But, you know, I was a computer science undergraduate in the 80s, if we're going to really date me. Like, we were into tech and knowing about tech and being smarter than other people that didn't know about tech. And for sure, that kind of person still exists, right? That is sort of the culture that you do see. But I think in business, the sensibility that I'm describing is common. But I had never heard that in my life, like, oh, it's not the user's fault. It's the maker's fault. Even in something as ordinary as a revolving door. 

Steve Portigal (00:04:20) - Forget, right, a search interface for, you know, documentation or something. And that really just, like, put a big light bulb on for me. And I didn't know what to do with that or how you would practice that or, like, you know, what path that was on. But I felt like, oh, there's something here to.

Steve Portigal (00:04:40) - To take that orientation kind of into the world and, you know, and I think everything I looked at was through that lens after that and sort of helped me again find a career that didn't exist and sort of, you know, figure out what was I good at and how could I learn the rest of it. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:04:58) - And then, yeah, I mean I know for me, Steve, early on in my career, like I would have talked about working in sales, working in ops. I think you're spot on where it took me years into the career to realize that what I really really loved about business was understanding the journey but, more importantly, being a part of crafting how you strategically design that journey. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:05:19) - So, to your point, everything has a purpose and everything there's a function to it and there's a reason why you have certain actions or certain milestones that you bring a journey or a user or a customer through, so that they're not tripping on the stair, they're not going the wrong way through the damn door. And I think you're right. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:05:36) - Like in today's world we have so many incredible people that number one are just working in user experience and user design and understanding all the intricacies of how people even want to use something or how they want to go about really kind of experiencing something. So I love that man. I think that's awesome and I think you know you've done a couple of things. You've done years and years and years of work in this space. I'd love to dive into the first pillar of T man. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:06:01) - I'd love for you to share a couple examples or a couple stories of some of the things that you've seen working with your clients and working in your business around, sort of how you've seen some of the companies that had really incredible teams or some of the commonalities or some of the things that you saw again and again and again with your clients that really had a solid handle on how they sort of built up their team, built out the different roles and really kind of stratified how their team was going to be taking care of their customers. 

Steve Portigal (00:06:31) - Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of pressure on people doing research right now to kind of carry it yourself all the way through, and I think this is such collaborative work and I just I think I've seen more success when there is some collaboration and that's a big collaboration, is a big, big term. 

Steve Portigal (00:06:53) - But one thing that you know your question makes me think of is complexity, like I think, as user research as a practice has grown, it's finding its way into many more complex domains, like, I don't know, installing and maintaining and configuring servers and network devices, not even just servers, but the whole infrastructure. 

Steve Portigal (00:07:18) - I worked years ago on credit default swap trading and you know, you might or might not have heard that phrase- but boy, just dig and dig and dig, and it's like it doesn't make any sense until you've really been involved, and you know so. 

Steve Portigal (00:07:35) - For me as a consultant- but even my clients who are on teams, like they're, they're not necessarily domain experts, and so I think this really interesting challenge comes up for whether you're a researcher or whether you're someone else in the organization that's out talking to customers is is trying to navigate that balance between, like, how much do I need to understand about this? 

Steve Portigal (00:07:59) - And so for me, I think one thing I've seen that to be really successful goes back to the collaboration thing, is when you pair up someone who's great at research- which is OK, I don't know about this, I want you to explain it to me- and someone who is great at the domain, whose job isn't to ask questions but his job is to. Their job is to. You know, hear what doesn't make sense about the technology or about the deployment or about the process, and that collaboration is really really sharp, I think, and has a great effect on you. 

Steve Portigal (00:08:34) - Know, when you're talking to customers and users, I think sometimes we're nervous because, well, we want to be seen as credible, especially if it's an actual customer. We ask for their time, we want to go talk to them. You're going to send some idiot that doesn't know what they're talking about. 

Steve Portigal (00:08:50) - Right, that isn't necessarily the reaction you'll get, but I think it's sometimes the reaction that we fear, and so it can be really a really great triangle between, you know, a user or customer who has who's a practitioner of something very complex, you know, and a person from the producer or, you know, maker side of it, the company side, who knows the domain, and someone who knows how to listen and ask questions and follow up and sort of facilitate this, you know. 

Steve Portigal (00:09:21) - And so I think, yeah, when I see researchers kind of getting immersed into a domain, they do build up some competency. But some of these things are 

Steve Portigal (00:09:30) - decades of specificity and really kind of elusive stuff. So I think, you know, just to go back to your question, I think teams where there's bandwidth for collaboration and you can bring in people with different perspectives, different domain and process expertise to create a great interview for the customer that you're talking to. Like it's a good experience to talk to a researcher and a domain expert because you just, you can watch who they make eye contact with. 

Steve Portigal (00:10:00) - As they kind of see like, oh, you're the, I've had people even tell me, oh, okay, you're the question asker and you're the person that knows that you're the engineer. Yeah, like people can figure that out. And it's a really, nobody's pretending to be anything that they aren't and it really, I think, can be very harmonious, but you have to create the bandwidth that kind of support that collaboration on the team so everybody can work together to get the insights that we wanna get from the people we're building for. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:10:26) - I, number one, I think that you're spot on. I think there's a few things. So not only when you have that collaboration piece internally with your teams and you have different subject matter experts kind of rubbing off on one another or basically sharing different points of knowledge to your point there, not only does that help the CX side of things, but Steve, that helps for me in my experience, that's one of the biggest parts of the EX part of the game. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:10:50) - Meaning like it's from an employee experience perspective, some of the most interesting businesses that I've ever had the pleasure of working at, you're absolutely right. Number one, there is capacity and bandwidth for just cross-department collaboration. But number two, I really think that that's where that tribal knowledge sharing or almost upscaling or up-leveling or just adding extra internal education to the fire. There's some awesome stuff to that. I'm also hearing you kind of lay out some of the examples that you just walked us through. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:11:19) - It makes me think about some of the times too that I've had some of our engineers on customer calls. So I would always be kind of driving some of these customer interviews and we would have some of our engineers join those calls. And I used to love it because there'd be things that they would hear that technically I didn't hear it, right? I didn't hear a technical thing where I might've heard a totally different point of reference or a totally different point of feedback. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:11:39) - One of my engineer friends might've heard them say something that they immediately drew a CTA from it. There was a call to action where they're like, wait a minute, that one part that they asked about the filters or updating that login, they hear something or see something that... So like there's that learning, right? There's that innovation that's happening live. 

Steve Portigal (00:11:59) - I love that, man. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:11:59) - I think, what do you... Has there been any examples where you've seen companies really trying to force that? Even if it was by design where X number of times a year, X number of times a month, or whether it was inside of certain account reviews, have you seen companies really try to force that strategically? Or has most of the examples you've seen kind of in your journey really kind of been more organic where it's really kind of different people from different aisles sort of trying to learn and listen and understand kind of what the customer needs? 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:12:31) - What does it kind of look like for you? 

Steve Portigal (00:12:33) - Right, I've heard, if I understand the forcing part, I've heard that this idea of like customer contact hours being like a part of your performance or something that you're expected to do. And I think maybe the nature of just how and where and with whom I work, it has been, I don't want to say it's organic, but it's more sort of initiative based. Like there's a thing that we're trying to do. And as part of that, we're wanting to talk to people. 

Steve Portigal (00:12:58) - And here's, you know, it's, I mean, I think sometimes you start these projects and in the ideal situation, a lot of people want to join on these calls or go on these visits. I think sometimes it becomes logistically very challenging. Like, okay, we have one who's available. Oh, no one's available. But I really, I mean, for me, I really do like where there is a lot of people that want to be involved. And, you know, I don't want to bring a lot of people out to any particular conversation. 

Steve Portigal (00:13:29) - I think you want to keep that very small and intimate conversation. But if we're going to talk to enough people, I'd like somebody different to come to each one. Because to your point, you know, the things that the engineers hear, right? They add value to my experience, the engineers will, because they're going to hear things I won't hear. But I add value to their experience because I can facilitate someone to talk about their use case or something in a way that they couldn't get to. 

Steve Portigal (00:13:54) - And it's really nice when someone says to me, wow, Steve, I've been talking to my users and customers for however many years. I've never had a conversation like that. It's like, and I feel like, yeah, that's the skillset. That's the craft that we kind of bring in. Yeah. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:14:15) - I love it. So Steve, let's jump into the second CxPillar of tools. Spend a few minutes kind of talking about over your journey. Number one, is there select tools that you've really leveraged to be able to drive some of the user research, user interviews?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:14:33) - that have really kind of worked very well for you, or, I'll open this question up to, or is there tools that you are constantly or continuously using with your clients that have really kind of helped to make some of the work that you're doing a little bit easier, a bit more streamlined? I'd love to kind of hear how you've leveraged technology in your trade over the years. 

Steve Portigal (00:14:51) - I mean, where I see a lot of this happening is in, I mean, a relatively new domain of research operations. And, you know, you see these research ops people sort of building infrastructure and tooling for the organization to, so that they can do research in a more efficient way. And so, you know, working as a consultant to companies, more often I'm able to benefit from infrastructure that they've already put in place. And it can be like very unsexy stuff, like, but it's super operationally helpful. Like, do we have a database of customers or users? 

Steve Portigal (00:15:36) - Do we have it in a way where we, like, can we put a query into some system among some criteria and get back who contacts are? And so you see like in an immature company, like, oh, that's in Intercom and we really shouldn't be in Intercom and because it's for this and we're using it for that. I might not be saying it right, but you can see where- I like that. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:15:57) - And how do you tend to see this? Is this drawn up in different types of maps? Is this drawn up just in different types of sheets where you're kind of aggregating it? How does it kind of, how do you actually lay some of those different pieces up? Or what have you seen worked really well for how they're doing research ops and kind of laying out all the different puzzle pieces so that you can actually start to put, connect the dots and put things together? 

Steve Portigal (00:16:18) - Yeah, I mean, I think the tool, the specific tools often depend on the organization and you see these research ops people doing a little bit of user research. Like what is the use case? Who is going to recruit customers? You know, what information do we have? And I'm sure there's like compliance and data privacy aspects and it's tied to some other implementation that was serving some other part of some other initiative. So what do we have? What are we going to put it in? Who will be reaching out to potential research participants? 

Steve Portigal (00:16:55) - Now, if you have like 30 users or have 30,000 users, you have a very different situation where you don't want to give everybody permission to independently go talk to customers. You've got 30 customers and like they're getting an email every seven days that's not related to, they don't, the person sending it doesn't know that someone else has. So there is some, I've seen them put some rails in place. Like someone won't pop up in a query results if they have been contacted in the last 30 days. 

Steve Portigal (00:17:28) - Or they're blocked from a query results if they have been in a query results in seven days. Like there's some sort of gating, I guess, that kind of prevents oversampling, over communicating to people. You know, when it's in intercom, right? If they're handling their marketing communications or launch communications or other things through that, then I think if there's a nice integrated process, it's when's the last time we as a company reached out to this person. 

Steve Portigal (00:17:57) - So there's some, I think, collaboration and negotiation among the different functions and kind of trying to align on what's acceptable, what's bugging people versus what's kind of engaging with them. And so they start creating maybe some default templates to make a request. I mean, every request is gonna be different, but at least I don't have to like, oh, I'm launching a study. I don't have to sit there and say, well, geez, how do I craft a request? What do I say? What sounds like us? You know, to start to build those reusable pieces. 

Steve Portigal (00:18:30) - And we're just like the least interesting, I mean, it's the most crucial part of research is figuring out who to talk to and getting to them. But this is not sexy at all, right? But yet you can see sort of the, kind of the bureaucracy and the alignments and the infrastructure and trying to make these pieces talk to each other. You know, I think we have to sort of figure out as a process, like, are we going to query our database and then that's all the information we need. 

Steve Portigal (00:19:01) - And then the next step is to say, will you be in a study or are we gonna get a pool of potential participants, but we wanna know something like, you know, what color hat do they wear that wouldn't be in our database? And so we're gonna have to put that into a survey, right? So there's just some workflow. Do you query your database, ask for participation? Do you query your database, get a email list, send them a Qualtrics survey or a Google form or something and get some responses and then reach out to them. 

Steve Portigal (00:19:35) - So I think there's all these, it depends pieces that have to be kind of worked out. And again, like you think of research ops as trying to eliminate waste as one thing that they might be trying to do. Like the more you can templatize this and sort of standardize it and make, you know, people aware of it so they can reuse it. It's just so they don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. And I think like it takes time to build that up. You have to have somebody dedicated to that and make a lot of decisions. 

Steve Portigal (00:20:10) - So it's a short term cost, but a medium term, like a huge, huge win.

Steve Portigal (00:20:17) - Yeah, I don't know that. When you say tools, that's kind of what. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:20:19) - What I start to know. I love it. I think you're right where it's like number one. It absolutely takes time to get good at some of this stuff. It also takes time to actually be able to have enough of those interactions where you can kind of see which which messages work, which templates work, which which cohorts or segments of people that you're trying to actually get some feedback from, which have the highest response rates. Which, like what, what type of response rates are actually adding color? What type of response rates? 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:20:47) - Are you not getting any type of color besides some type of like account? So, like you're right, this stuff takes a long time. The other thing too, I don't think for our listeners. Honestly, Steve, I've seen there's some really big, incredibly successful companies that when it kind of comes to that feedback point, there's a ton of work to be done, there's a ton of improvement that can be made, and then, yeah, they might be doing their NPS, they might be doing their CSAT, they might be doing some type of product satisfaction scoring. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:21:11) - But to your comment a little bit earlier at the start of the episode: like you're asking for that stuff so you can figure out how to iterate and improve quickly, and you're asking for some of that feedback to try to highlight some of the big actionable CTAs that you can bring right back to the team and start working on. And, honestly, there's that takes a long time for companies to get good at it. I think. One last thought: your comment about just having all these different, either silos or groups or internal divisions in your team. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:21:39) - I think that makes it hard too, because just trying to relay some of that information back to each team, each department, each executive leader that owns those, that's one of the hardest parts of our our work is like storytelling across all those different facets, some of the findings of the learnings, and then trying to again to your point, continuing to get better and better and better with with with each time you're reaching out, trying to get additional feedback from people. So, okay, I'd love to jump into the third pillar of process. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:22:08) - Normally, Steve, normally people, people say this is the least sexy of the pillars: the process, billard. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:22:13) - But I'd love, I'd love to hear from you, man, spend a couple minutes kind of talking about how have you wrangled process, or how have you thought about building either living playbooks or SOPs, or how have you been able to kind of sort of sink your teeth in over the years with all the different clients you've worked with and be able to start identifying some of the some of the top opportunities within the UX and the UI, the research space, based on what type of process they've already been able to kind of build out? 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:22:38) - I love to just kind of hear you talk about process. 

Steve Portigal (00:22:41) - Yeah, I mean, I think about the user research process and I, you know, I mean I'll just- I'll describe it like this because I think it's something that I have honed in a way that I can describe. I mean there's, it always varies, but it's something like this: what's the business? So there's, I think there's some alignment, planning, staging, you know, putting a statement of work, scoping all that. What are we gonna do? Where you got to ask a couple of questions: what is the business challenge or the business opportunity? 

Steve Portigal (00:23:14) - And that's that's inward and facing like, what are we grappling with? And then there's what is the research question: what do we want to learn from? I'll just call them them. What do we want to learn out there so that we can take action or respond to our business challenge? And it's those two pieces, and I think they- and then the third piece is like: what are we gonna do, what action are we gonna take? Or what research method are we gonna use to get answers to our research questions so we can take action on our business challenge? 

Steve Portigal (00:23:46) - And I think you have someone like me. Give it it as an ABC. It always sounds very clean. But I think when people start thinking of something, they might think about a method, and then you have to say, well, what do you want to learn from that method and why do you think learning this information is helpful? What do you, what do you want to do? You have to kind of go back up, or sometimes you have to go middle out. Someone says: we want to answer this research question. You have to say why, like what is happening in your organization. 

Steve Portigal (00:24:11) - So this is kind of planning, it's like the pre planning process. But once you have at least a stake in the ground about that, then you can say, okay, so we know what our method is. Who do we want to be involved? This goes back to that: querying our database, if what we want to do is talk to current customers. 

Steve Portigal (00:24:28) - Maybe we want to talk to people in an analogous industry or we want to talk to people that are not yet customers. We're looking maybe more future. We want to talk to people that are using our competitors. So I think that infrastructure can kind of force your process if you're not careful. So you're going to break it. If you come back and say, hey, we've got, we can query customers, but what I want to do is talk to firefighters that have eight or more years of experience, well, now you need a different bit of process to... of tooling to do that. 

Steve Portigal (00:25:03) - So planning, what do we want to learn? Why do we want to learn it? Who are we going to talk to? What are we going to do with them? So we're going to go talk to these firefighters because they're going to be some kind of analogous experience for a use case that we're interested in. So writing up your questions. So research questions, what we want to learn, you can call them like interview questions is what we're going to ask. And I think sometimes people don't see those as they're very different. 

Steve Portigal (00:25:35) - We want to learn, I don't know, what are the key changes in the industry that firefighters are expecting are going to change their job performance. That doesn't mean that you do or don't sit down with your firefighter and say, hey, what are the key changes in the industry do you think are going to change how firefighting emerges? You're going to talk to them about stories. What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? Why did you choose this profession? How do other people do it differently? Give me an example of a time where this happened. 

Steve Portigal (00:26:04) - You're going to get their story and you're going to walk away from that interview so that you understand the answer to your research question. But you may never have asked it. They may never have said it. So you write a set of questions that you think will help you get to an understanding of the thing that you're, you know, of that objective. Then you do the interview. And guess what? The interview looks nothing like your plan. Which is good. 

Steve Portigal (00:26:32) - I mean, an interview where you ask your seven questions and get seven answers, you know, could have been a survey, right? If you want to ask follow up questions and hear the thing that they're not saying and, you know, get more detail and, you know, turn it into this really emergent improvisational magical thing where you really get some interesting unexpected stuff. If you knew everything to ask, again, it would have been a survey. It's what you don't know that you don't know. So that conducting the interview is kind of a next stage in the process. 

Steve Portigal (00:27:03) - And then making sense of the data. What do you do with this? I think the newer to research folks who sometimes are rushed and kind of want to be quick and dirty about this, just kind of write up their takeaways, their debrief. And I think what people don't realize is it's like the iceberg model, like the part that's above the water is a small part. There is so much to be drawn from looking at all these interviews in a more methodical way. I'm not going to unpack the entire process here. I don't think we have time for that here. 

Steve Portigal (00:27:43) - But I will say that people say, you know, the estimates are like the ratio is two to one for every hour you spend gathering data, you can expect to spend two hours making sense of that data. Big inverse. Yeah. And I think what typically happens is for every hour people spend 0.1 hours. So it's really an inverse and that, you know, there's a lot to be pulled from it. And, you know, your initiative has to be worth it. Not everything. If you have a clear question, you get a clear answer, you're done. 

Steve Portigal (00:28:16) - But the more you're looking for, I don't know, trying to innovate or get into a space that you're not into or a behavior or, you know, a work process that you just don't get, it's not really clear to you as an organization. The more of those, you know, two to one kind of investment can be worth it. There is it is an iceberg. There's so much down there, but you got to dig into it to get it. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:28:36) - I love that concept of the iceberg because you're right. Like I think that so many people take feedback or they take some of this user research at a face value and they forget. Well, one of the biggest things they forget, the customer or the user taking that time in the first place to even talk or or storytell about their experience with your product, your business, your brand. That's gold. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:28:57) - Right. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:28:57) - That's pure gold. The value on just having that. That opportunity is massive. The other thing, though, I just want to call out, because I think a lot of our listeners, Steve, probably feel this way. Your two to one concept, like most CX and CS leaders, I think really a big part of what we're doing outside of just taking care of customer relationships, managing your team, managing our tech stack, it's storytelling, it's storytelling the lower iceberg that's under the water. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:29:21) - And it's trying to get people to realize, OK, we understand our top three things or our top five things that we all talk about at a company level.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:29:27) - that's sticking out of the water. Like, okay, we all get that. But what about all this other stuff that's down here? And I know in my own journey, a big part of what I was doing was trying to storytell. Storytell, yeah, the things on top of the water equal X, Y, and Z. But a lot of the things that are below the water actually have an effect on some of your reoccurring themes, your reoccurring items, some of the good stuff, some of the bad stuff. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:29:51) - And I just think that one of the biggest points of value that CX and CS leaders really give is what you just said. It's the ability to storytell. It's the ability to actually take time to dive in and dig in way deeper than just what a quick and dirty survey says. So, all awesome things. Perfect. 

Steve Portigal (00:30:11) - Can I be slightly pedantic here? I want to be slightly pedantic because I think digging in is its own step. And then you said, I think, what the next step would be, which is, so we've got to dig in and spend that two to one and go under there and figure it out. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:30:24) - That's hard work. 

Steve Portigal (00:30:25) - And then I think it's worth calling out what you said as its own step in the process, which is storytelling, engaging people, creating information and experiences that people can access and helping them see the world in a fresh way and inspire them. And that is hard work as well. But it's a different part. It's a different step in the process. You need to dig into the iceberg to figure out what to do the storytelling about. And you've got to really commit to spending time to put people to do that storytelling. So you called it out really well. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:30:57) - Steve, I'd love to dive into the fourth and final pillar of feedback. And we've already kind of been on this on this topic. But so for you, I have two different questions. So number one is just I'd love to hear kind of just your own take on sort of how you've thought about not just collecting and assessing but acting upon feedback. So the first question is just I'd love to kind of have you share some stories around sort of what you've seen work really well for actually taking action on feedback. That's the first part. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:31:25) - And then I definitely hearing your last part of the story, I want to know what mediums or what some of like the most interesting ways that you've actually been able to kind of get a bunch of customers or employees around a table, whether it was research groups, or whether it was going doing user studies. But I'd love to kind of hear how you think about feedback. And I'd love to just kind of hear some of the things that have have really kind of worked well for you over your journey with kind of managing and leveraging that feedback to take action. 

Steve Portigal (00:31:56) - I think I might have one answer to both the both prongs of the question. Is I think I'm a big fan of workshops as kind of a format and a medium to to drive action. And I think, you know, it depends kind of what your role is and where you are in the organization. But there is this question, I think that goes around, like, is the job of if you're doing research is your job to make recommendations? Or is your job to, like highlight needs gaps, you know, gather feedback, synthesize and so on. 

Steve Portigal (00:32:30) - And, you know, I think just given where I sit and who I work with, I want to facilitate and empower the people I work with to come up with solutions and prioritize the solution. It's back to that thing about the engineer hears things in the story that that that you don't hear that I don't hear. And so when we sort of identify a gap or a need, just to use sort of jargony words, you know, what can we do about it? How can we respond to it? My clients like they live in that space. 

Steve Portigal (00:33:08) - I mean, so, you know, if you're listening, then you might you that might be you. For me, it's not me. And so I'm trying to create an experience. And even if it is you, I think it's helpful to have other people kind of have a take on it. Yep. So I like to report research. Like, here's what we learned. Here's what we saw. Here's the gap. Here's what people didn't understand. I have sort of explored over the years kind of trying to boil that down to a handful, like three or five sort of statements. 

Steve Portigal (00:33:46) - And people might be familiar with the phrase, how might we how might we as kind of a prompt? I think what goes after the how might we you've got to craft that really, really carefully, right? How might we, you know, increase conversion by 6% is not a good example, right? That's like a that goes back to that business question. Yeah, I think if you can ask a how might we that's about your customers experience, how might we, you know, reduce friction for customers who are choosing between two options in a high pressure situation.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:34:20) - Yeah. 

Steve Portigal (00:34:21) - So we're talking about them, we're not saying what the solution is, we're just stating the problem or the gap in a really clear way. 

Steve Portigal (00:34:29) - How might we invites us to think divergently? 

Steve Portigal (00:34:33) - And if you create the right kind of, this is why it's a workshop and not a quiz, right? I think there's lots of creative stuff that people can do if you temporarily remove the blinders from them and say like, anything's on the table here, this is a safe space. 

Steve Portigal (00:34:48) - How might we reduce this friction? 

Steve Portigal (00:34:52) - Well, we're going to reduce our price by 80% or we're going to bundle it with every copy of the Slack desktop client, or we're going to get the post office to send DVDs out like AOL used to do. We're going to do these things. And those are all probably really crappy ideas for obvious reasons. 

Steve Portigal (00:35:18) - But it doesn't matter right now because we're trying to get to the heart of like, what kind of action could we take? Because for every AOL DVD we're going to send out, someone else in that workshop is going to say, yes, and another cliched but powerful phrase, yes, and we actually have a trade event coming up and we're looking for stuff to put in people's hands. Instead of a mousepad, maybe it's something functional. There's a new idea and then people are like, yeah, that's good. Let's put that down. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:35:53) - It builds upon each other and innovation is happening live right there. 

Steve Portigal (00:35:58) - And you build a divergent set of things that are good or bad ultimately. And then you prioritize. So you go back and say, well, we're going to lose money. Well, that's actually bad for business. 

Steve Portigal (00:36:09) - That's not tactically feasible. That goes against regulatory constraints, whatever. You prune it back. So what I think we're doing here is coming up with some actions that we can take. But what we're also doing here, and this is subtle, but I think is really, really powerful. It's not like anybody I work with hasn't been in a brainstorming session before. And you sort of see, I've watched those meetings and they just circle around with like, we could do this, well, we tried that. 

Steve Portigal (00:36:40) - There's nothing to guide that activity. 

Steve Portigal (00:36:43) - But when it comes from, we've learned these things. We have these like five or six clear prompts that are from a brand new nuanced under the iceberg, under the water iceberg model of what's going on. We are all aligned, not by what we think we should do as these different groups kind of argue. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:04) - We're aligned by them out there, outside of the building, the people that we're trying to take care of. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:09) - And so I think it serves as a great facilitation tool to use the research insights to drive the brainstorming. Now we're not just being creative, we're being creative in response to a thing that we now all know and hopefully kind of agree on. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:25) - But it also serves as a handoff of the research insights. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:28) - Like I'm a research person. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:30) - I know what's kind of in this deck and what we learned and so on, but I'm helping other people create muscle memory. Starting to translate these ideas into stuff that should continue after the meeting is over. 

Steve Portigal (00:37:44) - And maybe they don't go back to that deck and maybe they don't remember the top five takeaways we want them to learn. But maybe they do remember kind of in their muscles or in their brain muscles, if you will, that translation activity. They had a different kind of frame in mind and insight and they worked it, they built it into an idea. 

Steve Portigal (00:38:07) - And I hope that that has some like organizational change longevity because I haven't done that. They've done it, right? 

Steve Portigal (00:38:15) - And so that's, I think, where that handoff can happen. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:38:17) - I love it, man. I love it. Steve, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before I let you go, sir, where can people find out more about you and your work and all the incredible content that you've done? Give us a place where people can kind of reach out to you and connect. 

Steve Portigal (00:38:32) - Yeah, and I'm gonna just be really cheesy. No, there it is. Hold up my book. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:38:37) - Congrats. 

Steve Portigal (00:38:39) - This is the second edition of Interviewing Users. It's just been out a few weeks from when you and I are talking. Yeah, it's the first edition was 10 years ago. So this is available from all the places you buy books online. But I would direct people to my publisher, Rosenfeldmedia.com. They sell it. My own website has stuff about the book and I blog and write about things. 

Steve Portigal (00:39:03) - I'm thinking about research and that's portugal.com. 

Steve Portigal (00:39:08) - So you know my last name. You know my website and LinkedIn. I post stuff on LinkedIn and I'd love to hear from people there and connect and continue talking on LinkedIn. I love it. 

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:39:18) - Well, Steve, number one, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us and all of your experiences. It's been an absolute pleasure and I will look forward to keeping this conversation going forward into the future, my friend. 

Steve Portigal (00:39:29) - Thank you so much. Great to chat with you.