Management philosophy
My philosophy centers on bridging human empathy with business impact by empowering researchers, removing constraints, and driving strategic decision-making across cross-functional teams.
People come first
People first, projects second
I’ve seen leaders build great software, but decimate the team in the process: people are left burnt-out, disenchanted, and ultimately unhappy. A core tenet of my philosophy is that success includes people. Treat team members as individuals with unique career trajectories rather than resource units. Protect their time, foster psychological safety, and advocate for their long-term growth.
In practice: each researcher sets one goal focused on a skill they plan to improve in the near future, naming the skill and how they plan to develop it, alongside their work goals.
Servant leadership
I am only successful as a leader to the extent my team is successful in their work. To be successful, I must empower my team and seek avenues for them to genuinely share their successes.
In practice: I led the creation of an AI Summit at Workday, designed to enable researchers and designers to genuinely share their work, with the goal of improving the organization’s understanding and use of AI.
Impact over activity
Focus on business impact
The value of a researcher’s work is not in what they did, it’s how that research changed the business. I encourage my team to begin their quarterly goals with an impact statement about their work: what they will make better about the product for its users, or about how we operate as a business. The second part of each goal is the things they will do this quarter to move the needle on that outcome.
In practice: how my researchers write goals
- Aim for about five goals: three work-related, one community-oriented, and one career-oriented.
- Each goal has two parts: the outcome you hope to achieve (often starting with words like “impact,” “influence,” “drive,” “change,” or “improve”), and how you’ll make progress toward it in the next quarter to a year.
- Every work goal ties to a team, organization, or company objective.
- Review goals quarterly. When the to-do items are done but the larger objective isn’t, re-enter the objective with new steps, or agree it’s no longer a priority.
Strategic advocacy
The team’s output should focus on enabling actionable decision-making, not simply data reporting. One of my responsibilities is to translate company strategy and executive priorities downward, while elevating the voice of UX research upward to executive leadership.
In practice: every research request starts with three questions. What is the decision you need to make? What do you need to learn about customers to inform it? And exactly how will the answer inform your decision? (“If we learn X, we’ll choose Y. If not, we’ll choose Z.”)
How the team works
Pragmatism over perfection
We must navigate real-world constraints (time, budget, and access) using frameworks like “Good-Better-Best,” ensuring teams deliver timely insights without burning out.
Empowerment and trust
Lead by example with genuine honesty, clear context-setting, and zero micromanagement, allowing researchers ownership and autonomy in their craft. I spend a lot of effort organizing how work flows through the team (where it’s coming from, who we are partnering with) and where and how it is shared (how we are impacting the business).
In practice: how work flows through the team
- Research needs go into a shared backlog, prioritized with product leadership based on leadership goals, workload, risk, clarity, impact, objective alignment, effort, and partners’ skill sets.
- Work in progress: two. A researcher can handle about two projects at a time, so we work on the two most important to the organization, and reassess every time we pick up new work.
- Partners can always get an estimate of when we’ll get to their request.
Partnership
Good research doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in partnership with Product, Design, and Engineering. My best work has involved a tight partnership between those groups and researchers.
In practice: when I interview product managers, I look for three things: whether the candidate prioritizes customer value in making product and design decisions, whether they prioritize user research to understand that value, and whether they would be a good partner in the research and design process.