#27 Aligning Focus & User Experience (UX) for Marketers, Tamara Adlin, President, Adlin, Inc.

Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing. We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.

Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am very excited to have with me today Tamara Adlin. Hi, Tamara. Hi. Great to be here. Nice to see you. I think we first met Nice to meet you. A million and twelve years ago at a conference In Seattle. That's right. Yeah back when we were babies The world has changed since then hasn't it Yeah. But not that much. In our world, it's not well, skip that. Yes. It's changed. Yeah.

We'll we'll delve into that in the, bonus material. Exactly. So nice to have you on. And, for those of you don't know, Tamara is very accomplished. It was awesome meeting her at the UX training conference in at Amazon in Seattle. She is a product professional. She's an amazing veteran of user experience, a true expert in user experience and UX coach, strategist. And she's also an author of the Persona Lifestyle. Life cycle. Persona Lifestyle. Lifestyle Lifecycle. Persona life cycle. The

Persona Lifestyle. The persona life cycle. Yep. I'm co author of those with with John Pruitt. Very accomplished. Yeah. Love it. And and if you're you have any interest in these things, I would definitely follow Tamara. Very knowledgeable. I know she's got some good stuff coming out in this year and

beyond. So maybe she'll get tease a little bit of that with us here today. Yeah. I'd love it. Thank you so much. I've been listening to your other podcasts and have noticed that they're all, of course, with hardcore marketing people. And so if some UXers come and listen to this, I'm gonna turn the tables and ask you a question first. Would you mind defining partner and affiliate marketing and just marketing in this age for people who are technically

fluent, but actually hear those words thrown around and don't even know what they mean? Yeah. Well said. And like any true user experience professional, you know, define the terms, ask me the question. You're you're flipping it on me already. Oh, I know. I love it. Can't help it. I love it. So I would define affiliate marketing as

a type of performance marketing. I would say performance marketing is, a means of marketing where a brand is aiming to get their message across to a customer to acquire or activate or retain a customer. And it's typically they're getting a brand message out there. They're presenting

an offer. They're essentially saying, if we spend x dollars on this marketing campaign via the media dollars they're spending on Google or with an influencer or on a running website, They wanna see that return on investment and that revenue, that purchase activity. So by performance marketing, we're defining it

as very measurable actions. This isn't just getting more eyeballs hoping for a lift in awareness, but it's it's very highly measured across a number of metrics, usually revenue tied to metrics. That makes sense. Interesting. So yeah. Like, in our field, the roles have changed

over the years with titles and stuff. It sounds like this is a as much a title related thing because performance marketing is how you would describe what you do as opposed to, like, you're still putting out ads and messages and videos and things. Right? It's just that you're measuring it differently, requiring different things of it? Yeah. I think that's fair. I think it's a it's a rigor and a data around making sure that it's

delivering very tangible value to a brand. And I would add that affiliate marketing is really that subset of of performance where a brand is saying, yeah, I'm gonna get messages out there and ads out there. But you start to kind of relinquish control, and you start to kinda let the blogger, podcaster, influencer, writer kind of take control of the message and say, here's what I love about this particular Nike trail

shoe. Here's why it kinda needs some improvement. This is why it's awesome. Oh, by the way, they're running a

little bit of an offer. So brands are kind of letting go a little bit in affiliate marketing. And the cool thing about how it might tie into the UX world a little bit is that they're saying, I'm gonna I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna get paid upfront in most cases. In some cases, they are. In a lot of cases, affiliate marketers are saying, I'm gonna promote this this subset of this Nike running shoe as an example, this this imaginary

trail running shoe. I'm not gonna get paid unless I unless my blog sells a few pairs of shoes. So it's kind of a wild thing. And so a lot of these affiliate marketers are very, very knowledgeable, very savvy. They're very careful about where they invest their money and time and effort. And that conversion rate, that user experience that you're that you know so well is really massively important to it. If it doesn't convert well, then your likelihood of these

affiliate marketers to promote you become a little lower. It's one factor in that at least. So interesting. So the ways that we totally relate to each other are things like conversion rate and call to action. You know, I'm just really fascinated with what I think should be a much sort of better gradient between our worlds, and you're helping me understand, some of the pieces of that. Yeah.

And I think our team spends maybe a surprising I think you I think people in the UX world might be surprised perhaps, and maybe in some ways, not surprised about there are teams out there that spend a lot of time thinking about user experience and and what what happens when that user lands on that page and how many variations of a page we might test

or recommend or or aim to improve. And so you think you bring up a really interesting point of, like, what is the the gap in between our worlds, and how do we maybe bridge that gap a little bit? Yeah. I mean and just personally, I can say, like, I may be an expert in in UX and helping people improve conversion rates on products or on on, you know, the little mini conversion rates of using features and things. But I have my own content, and I have

no idea how to market it. And the whole idea of marketing it makes me wanna just barf because it seems like it's all so complex now, and there's metrics, and it just makes me completely shut down. So it's funny that even me, who is adjacent to you in the field I mean, this is my response anyway. It's kind of an ostrich approach to anything that seems hard. I just was like, I'm not gonna do it. I don't I don't wanna but

understanding it is is powerful. Yeah. It's a it's a common reaction because just like it's easier to give your friend advice on a situation they're dealing with, right, it's a lot easier to apply marketing principles and effort and recommendations to someone else's business than your own. I've I've been through that myself personally, so I absolutely appreciate where your head's at with saying, I don't wanna figure out how to market my business or myself

or things I'm working on. And there's some ways that I describe marketing to UX

teams. Maybe you can correct some of that. Do you want me to tell you a little bit about how I do that? So with UX teams Yeah. Like, I work with a lot of early stage startups who are just sort of transitioning. It's actually their first pivot away from, like, creating a pitch deck or whatever to actually launching something that everybody likes to call an MVP, but that's the story for another day.

And so Mhmm. You're creating this sort of experience with the product or you are enabling users, not necessarily buyers because they might be two different sets of people, users to get something done to satisfy some wants and needs that they have. Marketing is telling the story that brings the people to the product in the first place. There's this overlap then with this decision to buy

or try or set up a test account or whatever. And then so if if the story gets them there, if it pulls their eyeballs over, and then this sort of landing experience or whatever where we overlap gets them to click the right button, then they're gonna have expectations from that story they were told that either will or will not be satisfied by the experience that they have almost immediately with the product, which was created

by UXers. So it seems to me that marketing and UX both work best if the UXers understand the story that the marketers are telling, and the marketers really understand the experience that's enabled and that both of them are getting clear direction from above, Otherwise, it's you know, that's gonna clash somewhere. I love where you're where you're coming at from there, and I could not agree more. And I think what I've observed being

we're an agency now, but also having been in house is that those those really great teams are the ones that are doing what you just nailed as the really nice understanding communication transfer of information to really empathize with users across all aspects of the communication of a product, even in the marketing. And the marketing teams are very well versed or sitting with user experience people often, and they're listening to customers more often than maybe

some other types of marketers of the past or marketing teams now. And I would even add that it seems like there's been a a big shift. I'm not sure the exact timing, but I'm I'm sure you have served some of it and lived through a lot of it is that a lot of teams are now kinda labeling it growth as opposed to this is marketing and this is product and this is finance and this is UX. And and a lot of these things are kind of just as you're highlighting, I think a lot of teams don't do it.

A lot of it's converging, and and product is really owning a lot of the big decisions on marketing, what what what we call growth, making sure that UX is has a seat at the table, making sure finance has a seat at the table. It's a it's a kind of a wild I found this concept of growth and this silo decreasing fascinating in the last ten years, definitely. I'm sure

you've seen it as well. Yeah. Any any thoughts on that? Okay. So I work with really early stage startups where the silos aren't there simply because there aren't enough people or really big companies that wanna behave like startups and, you know, can can afford to hire me for my help or whatever. And I love the idea

that it's merging more into growth. I personally haven't seen it exactly. What I have seen, at least in larger organizations, is people trying to grab as much of the other one as they can, in a sort of political empire building kind of way as opposed to a you know, politics are are huge and rampant and not talked enough about, I think, in either of our fields and how they

impact our work. But if it could all come together, it would be great. Because it's like, the way I see it sometimes now is, like, there's a there's a movie that the UXers sort of helped to put together. But then it's like, there were these means that went around of, like, like, a horror movie that they took the trailer and they overlaid voice over and music as if it was for kids. Right? And that's what it feels like sometimes. Like, welcome to a

world where, you know, whatever. And then and then the movie is actually something completely different. I'm a big meme fan fan, and that's one of my that's a really good one. It's really funny. And, unfortunately, like you said, unfortunately, that happens sometimes when one one department's intention turns into a completely different scenario for

another team. And both are doing it. It's not like there's any ill will or or I mean, even if everybody's working their absolute best to get their jobs done, if those things don't mesh, then, you know, sad things happen. I mean, in your I was just

telling you earlier that I was listening to some of your earlier podcasts, and Joe Black was talking about KPIs. And he was about having to balance between new customer acquisition and long term value. Basically, are you focusing on pouring water into the bucket, or are you focusing on making sure there's no holes in the bucket? Right? And so with the best of intentions, these groups can

be working a little bit against each other or at least Absolutely. They're not making the most of each other, you know? Absolutely. I think you'd find, some of the people in resources and education that Reforged has put out just fascinating because I think it's very education focused. They're not necessarily having to, you know, focus only on one business where you're, hey. Am I doing my job? Am I kind of covering my

butt to some degree? Anyway, the the learnings from that have just been fascinating. I think one of the things they talk about a lot is the the fact that and I was I was actually taken aback by how often they emphasized that alignment and that buy in from executives that even at the most successful companies sometimes was very hard

to grasp to your alluding to what you, you know, experienced. And so coming from some of these growth and product and marketing and and even a lot of UX people in this community, The amount of times it was referenced to me kind of leads me to validate and support where you're saying that, hey. In a lot of orgs, and I and we've all been

there. It isn't happening. Or some of those intentions are happening, but there is a degree of misalignment or maybe a degree of, hey. We're not able to support x y z enough. So I'm curious to know maybe more yeah. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, misalignment is my big thing. Right? So I'm this UX person who and, you know, people know me for personas. They know me for UX and startups and things like that. Really, what

I've become focused on is executive misalignment. But it's not like anybody's out there shopping for a solution to executive misalignment. But what happens what happens in the world of UX or or at least did as I was coming up is that, you know, the field was

young and everybody was figuring it out. And there was this whole notion of swimming upstream, meaning how can we get UX people and usability people or whatever they were called at the time involved earlier and earlier in the product design life cycle because it would be helpful instead of, you know, in the beginning with usability testing. It was like

testing whether or not the baby was ugly. It was a little late. And and even if you found something was unusable, then what are you gonna do about it if it's already designed and prototyped and ready for code or already

coded? So as as we swim upstream, we kept looking for how can we insert ourselves earlier. And I found myself, especially in the early stage startup work that I was doing, essentially swimming all the way upstream to the c suite. And I had this face palm moment where, you know, I had thought as a UX person, if I just asked the right executive at the right time to tell me what they wanted me to build, they would tell me. And the face palm moment was they don't

know either. So simply having a c in front of your title doesn't mean that you know exactly what you want people to build or to market or to message. It just means that it's risky riskier for you than most people to say what you think because you're putting your neck on the line, and the chances of you being wrong are high. So if it's if it's true what I'm

saying that they don't know, if the executive team isn't any clearer than you are, then as a UX person for a while, we just whined about that. And then I thought, well, no. If we use our tools, then maybe it's our job to help them figure it

out. So what do they need to feel ready to make a decision that they're also ready to stick with so that the seagull management swoop and poop thing doesn't happen as often to projects, which are the things that really sort of drive everybody crazy and and ensure that products that are launched aren't as good as they could be. And so that's where I started getting super interested in executive alignment.

And then, of course, because, you know, I was so interested in personas, crafting away a sort of a different kind of persona exercise that would help and enable execs to discover where they were misaligned, craft goals that would stick, and then change the conversation so that they were talking about descriptions of people, which suddenly you know, it's a longer story than that, but which suddenly meant that they weren't arguing about who

was the smartest person in the room. And that where the pop ups were cut and where I was the person saying, I don't know what our business goals are, even though none of them really knew what they were either. Wow. It's so funny because I Patrick Moran came on the podcast. I think he's now at Robinhood, and he was a entrepreneur resident at Reforge, and he had similar concepts talking about how your boss is just a human,

and they're not necessarily all knowing to your point about the c suite. And so using those UX skills to kind of, like, let's start from some foundational principles to understand shared language, and I think that's really fascinating. A hundred percent. Because I imagine that it grossly impacts marketers too. I mean, if if some executive goes off for the weekend and and hears about some feature that your competitor is building, the likelihood that that's gonna impact you at work the

following week is high. Right? But if it really, you know, it really it really shouldn't. These whims and these fears and these anxieties and these all of these things shouldn't be impacting marketers or UX people or product people as much as a really solid shared understanding of what our own finish line is. And the thing about the thing I like to say about I mean, and and then that should be expressed as business goals, which are what needles need to move by how much in

what time period, in order for us to say this was a success. So do we need to increase the number of people who sign up by twenty percent within the next six months? Do we need to decrease the number of calls coming into the call center that last over six minutes by fifteen percent over? And you would think that those exist at a project level, but they

don't. Because even if companies set year long goals or whatever or set them even quarterly, Two days after the goals are set, if more than one executive is in a room, something shifts and no one writes it down. So then everybody acts like they're aligned and nobody it's career suicide to be in a C level meeting and raise your hand as a C level person and say, I'm not sure what our business goals are anymore. And so because of all these human reasons, everything gets foggy and no one admits it.

Right? And the impact is is catastrophic. And it's really an emperor's new clothes kind of situation where the team below the execs has this misguided impression that the execs are super clear on what they want you to do, or the whole team knows that they're not and is trying to deal with it. Or you have execs who are Acting like they're really clear, but they keep changing their

minds or both. I don't know that there was a natural or there. I think I lost track of my thought for a second, but that kind of thing. And see, it's an example. Same thing. I lost track. They do too. I love it. Where do you see executive misalignment happening most? I mean, you talk we talked a little bit about company size as a factor. Are there other factors that kind of seem to be maybe a characteristic or a pattern to

watch out for? Oh, I think it's every single company. I think alignment exercises are and should become part of the product life cycle going forward for everyone. Now and I say executive misalignment. It can just be stakeholders. It can just be your grand boss and your great grand boss and your great great grand boss. Right? Like, I'm not saying that that coming in and trying to do alignment workshops with the executives of a Fortune five hundred company is gonna solve your

problems in developing a feature for one of a suite of products. It'll get you fired, but it's not gonna do much other than that. But alignment exercises with stakeholders one or two levels above you does amazing things because it also enables those people to get clarity from their bosses without putting their jobs and their reputations at risk. So any alignment is better than no alignment and any numbers. That's why I respect your field for getting so tied to metrics.

Our field, my field, UX, needs to get more and more tied to numbers. And if we do this together, then that's a pretty powerful force. Wow. I love that concept of your field, UX, being more tied to numbers. How would you maybe categorize it now versus where would you like to see it go to? You kind of alluded to it. You know, I have my own alignment workshop process that I've created, and the very

first step is business goals, and getting clarity on what the business goals are. And I have this little Mad Libs format for anybody old enough to remember Mad Libs. It's that you you start with word increase or decrease, some important metric like number of people who sign up by some actual amount with a number in it, like twenty percent within some time period, six months. Now, obviously, this is not rocket surgery. It's not

like I'm like, oh, Tamara now knows, you know, because she said that we know what a goal is. Obviously not. But by sort of forcing that structure that does a couple things, increase or decrease is simple. The metric is often tricky to come up with, and they may not even be instrumented for it. But then what really gets interesting is the number. Because when you do an alignment workshop, if you get agreement that you

nobody's going to disagree that we need more people to sign up. But what you find when you do the workshop in the right way is that the CEO is thinking that it has to be eighty percent, while the market CMO is thinking ten percent would be great, while the CFO says if we're not tripling it, we're doomed. The fact that those

people I don't care what the number ends up being. If it's twenty percent, eighty percent, I may or may not be able to do that, but at least I need to know what you're aiming for as a UX person, and then I can push back on

it. What I care about is that everybody says the same number by the end of the conversation. Because if I start working on increasing the number of people who sign up thinking that twenty percent would be enough, I'm gonna get great responses from the CMO, terrible response from the c well, a bummed out and and a freaking tsunami of rage from the CFO. And yet, I was trying to do my

job. Or in the beginning, if I get but but if we do it my way, and I say I don't care what the number is as during the alignment workshop, then UX has a chance because I can say then, Oh, I see that you all agreed that this has to triple in six months. I can't do that for you, and here's why. So there's so many benefits to that. And so that's the way I'm asking UX people to do this, is to create those Mad Libs and

then even just to write those down for for this project. If you're working on this landing page or you're working on this feature or this checkout cart experience, not for the whole company, just this one. Get to those numbers and ask for clarification on them. That way, your boss isn't gonna know those numbers either, but your boss can forward your email up the chain and say, oh, poor Tamara isn't clear on exactly what our metrics are for this. And can you

help poor Tamara understand this rather than get themselves in trouble. All of this is also tied with politics. And Yeah. I mean, I'm just, like, so blown away from an perspective because I think that it's surprising how many people on any field. And so it's almost like saying to marketers, hey, You can apply some of these Tamara UX principles to framing the work, clarification on goals, just as an example of your if then statement

that sounds so simple, yet every stakeholder could think through these terms. Every leader could think through these terms so that I think it would just be a really awesome tool to remind and help people with. In some cases, they're not doing it at all. In other cases, they're maybe doing some of that. I think it's a really great reminder of alignment for a

marketer that is our audience, a marketer that we talk about on this show. I mean, I think a marketer like a UX person can design for anything as long as we know what it is. We can try, we can do our best, but we can't do a dozen different things at the same time. Right? And we also can't reach a finish line that is foggy and moving. So then the trick becomes, how do you enable I'm just gonna say executives. It can be stakeholders, whatever, to have a conversation that

is politically extremely dangerous for them to have without help. And the way that I like to do that is to present I write them myself and say, I know I'm so wrong. And then they can argue about how wrong I am and misguided I am. But still, they're getting to something that's going to help me. See what I mean? And then also by doing this sort of persona portion of this, then they're arguing about how important Genevieve is to the

business versus Bruce. They're not arguing about which one of them is smarter than the other one. Are you having to come in as a third party to kind of facilitate these conversations in all cases? I love doing that. But it's also true that this alignment persona workshop that I have, I'm currently putting together a free course on it right now on my site. And the reason I'm putting together a free course is because I think it needs

to be a tool in the UXers toolbox, and it certainly can be a tool in the marketers toolbox. And I think there is a certain amount you can do from within, you have to be careful and you have to do a dry run first without important muckety mucks in the room. But if you do this the wonderful thing about getting clarity on goals is that it's never inappropriate to ask for them, but they don't

exist. So if you say, so I'm I'm doing this class series so that because I want everybody to use this because I think it's really smart and I'm proud of myself and I you know, and lots of other practitioners have used it and really liked it. Of course, sometimes having me, the author of the books or the method, come in from the outside as a consultant is really important because I'm the one who can slam the book on the table and say, listen, you executives. One, two, three

eyes on me and not get myself in trouble. So I want people to start trying it. Even if you just do it with your own team, with all friendly faces, it's going to change the way you understand and then reflect back expectations on the important decision makers in your organization, which will also here's the here's the thing. This exercise gets to what I call a magic sentence, which is if our goal is x to increase sign ups by twenty percent within the first six months, and we don't make

Genevieve ridiculously happy, what the hell are we doing? That's a magic sentence. Genevieve is different than Bruce. Bruce may already have an account or something. Genevieve does not. If you're able to say, we know our number one goal is is that number, and we know that if we don't get I mean, if we Genevieve's new. If we don't make her ridiculously happy, what the heck are we we're never gonna get to this number. And everybody agrees

on that. Then when that C level person goes to the Hamptons and comes back saying, we need this feature that our competitors have, you, the lolly littlest person in the whole team can go, how does that help Genevieve? Because you said Genevieve was really important. The the point is that exec has the power to

say, oh, Genevieve is no longer the most important. That's fine. But at least you know, and at least they have to take on the fact that then there, it has implications for something all the exec team signed off on. It changes the vocabulary and the conversation. And that's what I mean, I get goosebumps about this stuff. It's like the usability of people and teams and organizations. And if we get fluent in their language, then

and marketers will be great at this because you guys are great at audience just like we are. And if we team up, oh my god, an alignment workshop with members of marketing and tech and UX and product and finance, that's what gets flipping exciting. Yeah. It's the holy grail. Well, and so what I wanna do is put this method out there for free. Of course, I wanna make money, but I'm not trying to build a huge agency. I'm just me. I'm gonna

get enough consulting or coaching gigs out of this anyway. What I want is people to be like, oh my god. This is so cool. And try it. So that's why I'm gonna put up this free course that people can take and just try it if they want. I love it. Well, thank you. When you kind of assess where a team is at from an alignment, goal, clarity, usability perspective, when teams are doing really well on the spectrum or maybe better than most

you see, what have they done right in your perspective? What what are they Well, you know, I'm super biased because I've been working on this alignment stuff forever. And so to me, if there is some kind of finish line that they have somehow made hard to move in a positive way for the company, that's good. If they have tools that make sense and help team and and also if they look at the teams around them as their users also. So we have users of products. But as human

beings, we have users. Right? The members of our team or whatever, and we put out artifacts that are either usable or not usable. That's why in UX, a long time ago, people are like, let's stop doing these big reports because nobody's gonna read them. They're not usable. Even if a team has figured out how it can be most usable to the other teams that are out there and not be a pain in the ass from the engineer's perspective, but actually a relief, Those teams that really think holistically about

this, I think, do better. And also who have managers who are much more about being the umbrella to keep stuff off their teams versus anything else, which which requires, I think, a certain amount of EQ from the manager who you know, how do you make a name for yourself, which everybody wants to do while mostly serving serving your team and enabling them to do great work? It's a long answer. That's great. No.

It's a very great answer. With this free tool that you're rolling out and releasing, can you maybe share more of, like, what types of people, types of teams do you think would be a no brainer for it? Oh my god. All of them. All of them. So this alignment persona stuff. Okay. So traditional data driven personas as introduced so smartly by Alan Cooper back in ninety nine, were about solving a problem in the design and development process

right downstream a little bit, which is, you know, we need more data and more empathy down there. This alignment persona workshop that I've sort of evolved over time says that's not

the problem we're trying to solve. Yes. That may be a problem, but the reason so many persona data driven persona efforts fail or buyer personas or marketing personas, and we could talk on another time about the differences, is because they don't resonate for the leadership team, and they don't serve as a way to keep the leadership team from

seeming to constantly change their minds. And that's why the persona efforts don't work because they don't I have this analogy where if you're if you're building a house and everything's working great for building the house, that's fine. What I'm more interested is, you know, in your process and you have personas and your house is your product. What happen if a tornado comes through? I'm more fascinated by the tornado, and the tornado is executive

teams making decisions. There's nothing you can do down here in your design development process that can fight a tornado, and you're it's gonna stop if a tornado comes through. So what can we do to prevent the tornado? Expect it and manage it. Your question was different. Your question was, what kind of teams can use this? Any team that has experienced a tornado, this can help because it tries to control the weather a little bit before it gets out of control.

Right? It tries to be able to say, oh, before you become a tornado, large large front of wind, perhaps we can redirect you over here. Or perhaps we can put our entire project under a dome so that the tornado doesn't blow it to pieces. So I don't think it can hurt any project to get more clarity at the beginning. And it doesn't take data to do it either. It takes wrangling everybody's assumptions and lining them up. What you'll find, it's it also

pushes all the hard questions earlier. It takes some time and it's hard because asking people to clarify goals is like a DNA level question that takes time for the people above you to sort through. It's not easy to get to this alignment, but it's magical when you do. And the investment of time, couple weeks maybe, still isn't huge. So I think

every team should try this on a tiny scale. And then what happens if you're able to do a project or a product that performs better than anybody expected, then you can say, here's how we did this and create a pull. Wow. Maybe we can try that for team over here or team over. Just start small. Yep. One landing page.

One of your, you know, little projects within a project. Yeah. When you get that hard earned agreement, which obviously takes a while and there's clarity, and then time goes on and storms arise as you reference the analogy. How do you encourage and and enable people to point back to that as the little mouse voice said earlier? What about Genevieve? How do you encourage those that maybe don't aren't naturally able to point back to that? It's a bit of a, you know, detailed minor

question, but maybe a big one. Like, how do you encourage it? It's not a minor question. When you do these workshops for real, you do them with the stakeholders, and they are in the room. This isn't about gathering data and trying to change people's minds. This is about trying to get people to dump their minds out on the table so everybody can

see where their minds are. So if this is if you get stakeholders or executives together and they collaboratively go through these five conversations, which is number one is the business goals. Number two is how do we talk about users today. Number three is how can we group those descriptions under sticky notes that start with the words I want or I need.

Step four is to sort of gather those together into motivation based personas. And step five is to prioritize those alignment personas based on the business goals. So, again, that that's how you get to that magic sentence. Our primary business goal is x. If we don't make Genevieve ridiculously happy, we'll fail. They were in the room. They were in the room. And so you also tell them, of course, you can change your mind about which is our primary business goal because

you're in charge and the honcho of all honchos. But at least we need to know that it's changed because then when we flip over to do some projects for Bruce, we'll be able to tell you these four things for Genevieve we can no longer do. And we'll be able to show you the impact of this. But the fact that they're in the room, even though there are some resistance at first, it's a relief to them to be able to talk about Genevieve and Bruce,

because nobody's given them a different vocabulary before. Right? If you throw personas over the wall, even if they're driven by data, data does not get rid of people's assumptions. It is not as powerful as we think. It never is. Because if you have a strongly held assumption and you're a senior level person, it doesn't mat you're gonna find ways around that data.

Oh, it wasn't collected right, or they're not considering this, or the market has changed. One of my favorite quotes of this podcast, data does not change people's assumptions. It doesn't. Here's a gotcha. Ready? Ready? Ready? People still get married. Why? Why? Because I know that's a hardcore one. Because I ours is gonna be different. We have something unusual. Nobody else understands what we have. Yep. It doesn't matter that there's data

that says this might actually not be a great idea. And it's it's the same power. It's the same I love this stuff so much. You know, I see you smiling and I'm like, it's made me happy. And maybe getting married is the right thing to do for a lot of people, but it's the same point. The data doesn't change your assumption or your strongly held beliefs. When that happens in a workplace function and you've seen that, and and maybe it's a redundant question,

but let's say the data is presented to a discussion around UX. How do you combat those assumptions when the data aiming to combat it was delivered and cleared and had the statistical significance and had all the things? You're asking some of the most the smartest question that of somebody I'm talking about this with for the first time. So when we were in seventh grade in United States and we were starting to learn science, what's the

first step of doing any experiment? Hypothesis. Exactly. But when we do research in business, I don't think we clarify our hypotheses enough. In fact, we have a lot of reasons

that we're told not to because it's gonna bias the research or whatever. What I'm saying is that if you get everybody's assumptions out on the table, you line them up so that everybody suddenly agrees through this process that if we don't make Genevieve ridiculously happy in the next release, we're not we're we're not gonna do well, and here's why, because we have this very important goal. Now you have Genevieve, you have Bruce, you have whoever. Now you can go out and validate

or invalidate those alignment personas based on data. You can say, I know we had great conversations about Genevieve, but we went out there, and we found out that Genevieve doesn't like washing her socks by hand and never has. But then at least you're all talking about the same person. You're not just throwing in these bullets that say, you know, women between the ages of twenty seven and thirty five who read the O magazine tend to enjoy outsourcing undergarments, care and control on a yearly

basis. No. You're saying we found out Genevieve doesn't like a washer, washer socks. And suddenly it's, I mean, it's a weird analogy, but it's more relatable, and people then can have that conversation. Oh, wow. Interesting. I love it. Kinda winding down. I feel like we could talk for hours literally, and this has been already, I think, super informative. I love the bridging of the gap between UX and marketing, which is obviously predominantly what

we talk about. But when you assess an opportunity to coach or counsel or support a business or an entrepreneur or a team, how do you what factors do you look at to say, hey. I'm I'm gonna take this project over this other one? So in terms of the startup, I wrote a I wrote a an article about why blockchain and

Web three UX is gonna suck for a while. And part of it is because I was surprised, although looking back on it, it's not so surprising to find that the people starting these new companies in this disruptive technology were sort of starting over from scratch and they had the same run fast break things. We're inventing everything over again that the people in two thousand, nineteen ninety nine, two thousand one had. And both of you, you and

I were working at that time. But since, you know, since then, early two thousands, people like, oh, yes. Usability, product design. Oh, that all makes sense. And then it was like, bam. All that got thrown out the window. So when I look at startups, one of the things I look for and I help assess opportunities for a venture firm too. Like, is this first of all, is the founder pre disastered? Meaning, there's a there's a movie, old movie with Robin Williams called The World According

to Garp. And he Garp and his young wife are looking at a house and they're and while they're looking at this house to buy, a small plane crashes into the house. And Robin Williams Garth Garp says, we'll take it. And his wife is like, are you crazy?

And he said, no, no, no. It's pre disastered. What are the chances this will happen again? So if a founder or a team or a person looking for coaching has been through the disaster part in a previous portion of their life, then they are going to understand the value of looking at something in a in a different way or and or the value

of looking at old lessons that might be valid now. And so because of my experience, you know, I can talk to young founders quickly and figure out whether they know how far away their product is from being great, whether they're capable of thinking in the way that's gonna make the right changes. That's experience. But a shortcut for that is to look if somebody has been somewhat pre disastered and therefore has a desire to get past the assumptions that are driving

them inside, and telling them they're right about everything. Love it. Wow. That's fantastic. What advice would you give folks maybe interested in the user experience, what realm, and maybe not familiar with it, like how to get into it, how to start thinking about it, maybe even applying some of the principles to what they do now. Well, I guess I would have specific advice based on who's

probably listening to this podcast. If it's people in marketing or people getting into marketing, I would say, don't just think, oh, I'm gonna switch to UX because then you're gonna like put your there's too many people that come out of these boot camps and whatever. Instead, make it a one plus one equals three look for the overlaps between marketing and UX. One of those overlaps is gonna be in the field of personas, because there are traditional

data driven product personas. There are marketing personas that evolved after that. There's a concept I've seen out there called buyer personas. There's proto personas of all these things. So these descriptions of who users are or who purchasers are can be a great field, a way to overlap and start the communication between you and that other team, whether it's a UX and marketing team or the other way marketing and UX. Or as a marketer, you can start looking at what if the thing I'm

designing doesn't stop at the CTA on the landing page? What if through truly understanding the story, the full story of the movie and impacting that because I know what people actually want is the thing that's gonna make me make this trailer a lot better and offer to help and find, you know, even create a glossary. We started this interview by me asking you to create glossary definitions for the people listening in. So if you're a marketer interested in UX, why don't you do that? Start by

creating a little glossary of terms and find where the overlap is. Yeah. We have a nice, growth glossary on our website. I love where you're thinking. What a great idea. Great advice. Cool. Right? Maybe we should do that. And Yeah. And that's a way to approach as part of a solution to the UX team that's also struggling. You're all struggling with the same stuff. Love it. Tamara, this has been amazing. Where where can people find you

and learn more about you and contact you? Yeah. Well, I'm on I'm the only Tamara Adlin on LinkedIn, t a m a r a a d l I n. And then my last name a d l I n I n c dot com adlin inc dot com. That's where I'm going to post this free course and I'm still recording and people will be able to access it and also information about the services that I have and availability. I love speaking or being on podcast. So anybody out there, please feel free to reach out. Tamara,

this has been amazing. When I first met you years and years years ago, your your talk at Amazon was with some of the heavy hitters in user experience. It was it was passionate. It was clear. It was inspiring. This talk was as well. I we went fifty minutes, and usually, I'm kind of, like, counting time and and saying, is this over? And this went this went by. It felt like twenty minutes. So so thank you. And,

I'm really excited about your free course. I think it might be something our team might look at and look at maybe as a learning, maybe as something we introduce. And so, highly recommend folks in the marketing world, in the UX world, in the startup world, reach out to Tamara and learn more. Thank you so much. It's been so fun talking to you and reconnecting with you. Likewise. Have an amazing weekend. You too. We'll talk soon. Bye.