Design x Megan Kierstead
Life Coach and UX Research Leader
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Michelle Berois on July 17, 2020
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
I’ve been a researcher for over a decade now. I have my undergrad in computer science and political science from Wellesley, and I have a master’s degree in environmental conservation.
I’ve worked for a range of companies, from small startups to large companies like Salesforce, where I led the launch on research for their industry products. I’ve also worked in research and development for the government. Most recently, I’ve moved into career coaching for people in UX and research. I also teach a course at Berkeley and some online courses.
How did you move from political science and computer science into UX research?
I was always interested in the intersection of people and technology, but my computer science was much more supplementary than my political science. I’ve always been more of a social scientist. In my undergrad, I worked as a research assistant at Harvard and focused on nuclear weapons and policy. From there I planned to get a PhD in political science. I realized, however, that I did not want to be in academia and had a last minute crisis, so I started interviewing for jobs.
I did management consulting briefly and hated it. Then I got a job managing the product at EMC, essentially doing user research, user acceptance testing, and stakeholder management. I realized that I could combine my social science and computer science knowledge in a very beautiful way. It was only through a human factors class that I learned the name for what I was doing: user experience (UX). It just wasn’t something that was widely recognized or known on the East Coast then.
In grad school, I focused on qualitative methods, survey design, and ethnography. One of my thesis advisors was an anthropologist, so I came out with a strong methodological underpinning. Rather than being a UX generalist, I started focusing and working on startups. I realized that I was passionate about helping people understand users and using that to build better experiences.
Besides being a UX researcher, you’re also a professor and a career coach. What prompted you to want to become a career coach?
This was a recent transition, but it’s one that I’m extraordinarily passionate about. Being in leadership in UX, I realized that it’s tough to be in the tech industry. I’ve mentored and hired junior people in UX, and most of their struggles aren’t around methods, but around interpersonal politics, feeling like they have influence, and doubting themselves. I’ve certainly struggled with that as a woman in tech.
I have PTSD from a couple of sexual assaults, and the only thing that got me through that was one-on-one coaching, to work on how I see the world, how I show up, how I doubt myself, and how that might be holding me back. I realized it would be beneficial to take everything I learned about managing my own mind and teach that to other people who need it. It felt like a natural transition. I also just really like seeing people grow and find themselves.
There’s a gap in the tech industry around allowing people to be their authentic selves, show up, and feel comfortable doing that. One-on-one coaching is one of the best ways to fill that gap. I teach tools that help you start believing in yourself to help you get the career that you want, regardless of what your environment says.
A lot of your content on LinkedIn is focused on removing the barrier to entry for junior designers. What can companies do to help remove that barrier?
There are two sides to it. One is systemic, around how organizations think about hiring. The other is the junior researcher, around what you can do.
On the systemic side, organizations of all types should be much more open to hiring junior researchers. We often hear, “I want people to hit the ground running,” which is ridiculous. Just because you’re a junior, it doesn’t mean you can’t hit the ground running. Hiring any new person requires teaching them about the company and the culture, no matter how senior they are. I don’t “get up and running” faster than a junior person does. That’s just across the board.
Also, it’s not that junior people lack skills; it’s that they lack applied experience. As long as one person in your organization can mentor them, there’s no reason not to hire someone junior. People at that stage are so eager and ready to do the work, so keep an open mind.
My rule for hiring managers is that unless you have a damn good reason why you need someone with years of experience, hire someone junior—you’re growing the future. That person is much more likely to give it their all and not have conflicting practices and routines they’d established, and that’s particularly important in the process-heavy field of UX.
Then, on the other side, there’s the junior researcher—what can you do? First, I want to say that there’s nothing wrong with you. Just because the market is not currently hiring you, it doesn’t mean that you are not talented, not skilled, or not worthy. A lot of us take our career and turn that inward, so if we don’t get hired we think we’re not worthy human beings or we don’t have value. You have value, no matter who you work for. You have the exact same value as someone running a bunch of teams at Google.
“You have value, no matter who you work for. You have the exact same value as someone running a bunch of teams at Google..”
Work on how you view yourself. Do you really see yourself as a skilled researcher, as someone who can show up and make an impact in business? If you don’t view that in yourself, companies won’t see it either. When you put together your job applications, believe that you have an impact, because that is reflected in your work, your interview, everything you do. Adopting that mindset is step one.
The other thing I highly recommend is meeting a lot of people. It’s tough right now with COVID, but we’re all searching for connection, so we’re also much more open to receiving new people. Join as many communities as you can, not just professional communities. A lot of the best opportunities I’ve gotten in my life have been through people I’ve met, through hobbies or mutual friends. Keep an open mind, and tell people what you do and what you’re passionate about. When they hear that there’s an opportunity in their friend’s startup, they’ll think of you and send them your way.
There’s a lot of focus on portfolios and resumes, but while that’s necessary, that won’t be what gets you a job. There are a lot of talented people with amazing portfolios and resumes, so how do you stand out? By believing in yourself and being true to who you are.
What do you feel are some of the challenges that researchers are facing right now?
Number one is how to show impact. More companies are recognizing that research is valuable and transformative, but once they hire their first researchers, they realize they don’t know what researchers do or what impact they have. Unfortunately it falls upon researchers to demonstrate that. I have changed an entire company’s business through research, and I promise you, you can do it too.
Traceability of a researcher’s impact is often hard, because in addition to showing data and telling stories, you’re essentially changing how people think about users and products. That’s really hard to measure. I’ve never had a manager or boss say, “Yeah, I can see that you’ve entirely changed the company culture.” It’s usually more like, “I need to see how this changes the roadmap.” (It does, but often indirectly.)
Metrics should be better tied to qualitative data. You can create a beautiful feedback loop with open-ended questions that answer how and why, you can characterize your users and shift the strategy, but you also need to go out and measure what it’s done. People should make changes from what they find, then measure what effects those changes had. A lot of companies and organizations aren’t quite there.
I also have an issue with how researchers almost always report into design. Not to say that they aren’t close allies, but the power relationship implies that design is potentially more important than research, or that research is just a part of design. Research should culturally stand on its own. We don’t see a lot of executive-level researchers. So it’s just as important to teach skills like impact and influence to junior researchers, the same way we teach methods skills, but I don’t see that in boot camps or courses. That’s another thing that this field really needs to work on because I know junior researchers struggle with it.
I first found you through Cascade SF’s “UXNight: Connecting Research and Design.” You presented on how to do scrappy research and still make an impact. What prompted you to speak on that particular topic?
Because I’ve heard the same objections a million times. “It takes a lot of work to do research,” or “You can’t have an impact with such a small number of users or a small amount of data.” That’s all bullshit. You can have an incredible impact just by doing some very basic research.
One of my clients right now is a small self-funded startup that’s investing in research to make sure they find a good product market fit. It isn’t a huge study that we’ll need to spend months on, but I guarantee it will fundamentally change the company’s trajectory. They’ll pivot to have a greater understanding of the users, and that will percolate for years to come. There’s really no excuse to not do that. The main thing is you need to find someone who is trained in how to ask the right questions and give you information that is useful. It’s a skill to turn raw data into useful, impactful data.
Beyond that, it’s a no-brainer, particularly for companies making risky decisions and looking for where to invest. They’d save so much money by doing it upfront rather than realizing they’ve spent five years and $20 million on building a product no one wants, which happens all the time.
What advice would you give someone who’s doing user research at a company that doesn’t see the value in it?
There are a few different answers, depending on how resistant people are. I’m starting to agree with Jared Spool that some places are just not ready for research. You cannot fundamentally change the DNA of a company from scratch unless you are the CEO or in an equivalent position. If you find yourself working for a company that doesn’t value research, I suggest finding another job. That’s one extreme.
Most companies are in the middle. They think they know that research is supposed to be helpful, but they don’t know what questions they should be answering or what studies they should be running. In those cases, you can come in from an educational place.
Regardless of how invested your stakeholders are, I highly recommend doing interviews with your stakeholders on a regular basis. Understand what their problems are, what questions they have, what they think are wrong or are opportunities. Then use that to influence what research you do. You’ll actually have an impact because it’s something they can use, and it shows that you listen.
Bringing them on and listening to them as part of the research makes a big difference, but you also have to tie it back. You can’t just give them results, particularly if they’re unfamiliar with research. You have to be direct and recommend specific changes, to either the strategy or the product. As they get more mature, you’re able to step back on the basis of your recommendation, but until you get to a place where they can take insights and run with them, you’re going to have to handhold quite a bit. One reason stakeholders don’t invest in research is that they don’t think it’s worth their time. Make it worth their time.
“One reason stakeholders don’t invest in research is that they don’t think it’s worth their time. Make it worth their time.”
What would you say are some of the hardest parts or the biggest challenges you have in your job?
With career coaching, I’m essentially doing the same thing I do with research, where you tell the story, identify the problem, investigate it, and then show how you’re going to solve it. One of the biggest challenges with coaching people is that it can be very emotional. When you start digging into what drives you and why you make the decisions you make, it can get very tough.
It brings up a lot of personal, emotionally-trying issues that you wouldn’t have thought of, about your work, your self esteem, and your beliefs. It’s necessary because you have to feel it to get to the other side and actually change things, but it’s still hard to see someone crying and want to give them a hug when you can’t right now. It’s my role to be the neutral party though. I’m there to help them see their own mind.
Coaching is so worth it because once they’re on the other side you see how it causes people to make more money, have more confidence in themselves and it causes people to get jobs. People get jobs based on the work that we do.
You recently started a group on Facebook titled “Audacious: We are authentic, compassionate product people.” What inspired you to create this group?
This is something that I’m super passionate about. I have, unsurprisingly, a lot of friends in the tech industry, so I have seen over and over again how people feel dehumanized by their work, how showing up and building products for other people and not being able to solve all the problems that you want to solve really starts chipping away at your soul. That’s the gist of it. Particularly now, with the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, we’re seeing a lot of societal change, but it hasn’t percolated into the tech industry as much as it should. I’m starting to see some little changes here and there.
I realized that there was no space for people to show up and be a vulnerable human being, to feel like they don’t have to know all the answers all the time, that they can be a black woman in tech and feel loved and cared for. The group is meant to be a place for people who care about bringing humanity back to the tech industry, which a lot of us are craving. Particularly now, in the face of a pandemic, we don’t get to see our families and friends. It’s a space where we can feel like our authentic selves and feel like a whole human being.
What advice would you give to people who are thinking about getting into a career in research?
One, don’t be discouraged right now. The job market is kind of strange. I see a lot of people getting jobs, so it’s not stagnant. There’s a lot of uncertainty as companies try to figure things out with this pandemic. Don’t get discouraged. The thing that you want to focus on in times like this is to find is your “why.” Why do you want to be a researcher? Why do you think being a researcher is the path for you? Really find the “why” that resonates deep down inside where you can feel it in your body, so that on your shitty days when you’re frustrated and don’t want to apply to another job, you can remember your “why.”
Second, same advice for getting a job. Meet lots of people. Researchers do their best work when they have a really diverse set of opinions, knowledge, and experiences. This is why being an authentic human makes the best researchers. Try to expose yourself to as much of the beauty of the human race as you possibly can. Right now is a really good time to do that.
Worry less about the resume and portfolio. Focus on the things that drive you, that make you feel happy and fulfilled, and that will get you where you need to go. That sounds like emotional wellbeing stuff, but I honestly think that’s what makes the best researchers. That’s how you find the best job and it’s also how you have a happy, whole life, so it’s widely applicable advice.
Is it necessary to get into UX research through academia, or can you still be a great researcher if you’re self-taught or learned through other avenues?
You can definitely do it through other avenues. Sometimes I look back to my graduate education for skills I learned there, but you can build up those skills from experience or from a course. You don’t need a full degree. If you really want to be a strong quantitative person, take one class in statistics. You don’t need a whole boot camp.
I also think that research is really at its best when it recognizes the diversity of human experience. We need more people in research from different backgrounds. There are too many white lady researchers, no offense to either of us, and there is a disproportionate number of dudes in research, which is a whole separate discussion. I want to see more black women in research. In fact, I’m offering free coaching right now for women of color in research. More people who don’t come from really high socioeconomic classes or have a fancy education should be involved. We as a field will be better if we have those diverse backgrounds. You can learn any research method, but what we need most is human experience. We need more diversity in research.
“You can learn any research method, but what we need most is human experience. We need more diversity in research.”
Rapid Fire Questions
What do you love to do at home in your free time?
I’m a big fan of baking and cooking. I’m a big birdwatcher. I have made friends with a pair of jays in my yard. In fact, they are trying to invade and steal peanuts from my living room. I also do arts and crafts, and nature photography sometimes too.
What is your favorite book or podcast?
I’m a big Tolkien fan. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings a million times. I’m a big sci-fi and fantasy kind of nerd.
In terms of books that are more practical, Atomic Habits is incredible and life-changing.
For podcasts, I really like Radiolab. Radiolab and This American Life are two big classics. They focus on humanity in a way that I love, and I feel like is super valuable for being a researcher. They have great storytelling too.
Is there anybody that has inspired you or that you’ve been influenced by?
Erica Hall is brilliant, fantastic, and a wonderful voice of reason and innovation in a way that researchers often lack.
I also essentially want to be Brené Brown, with her work around vulnerability. That is kind of where I want to go with my life and my work. She’s my bigger idol.
Michelle Obama is brilliant, classy, and fabulous. She’s such an inspiration. I miss the Obamas so much.
I’m also a big fan of Tina Fey and Amy Pohler. They’re the best.
If you could live anywhere, where would that be and why?
It’s my goal to have a house on the beach and be able to walk downtown with my dog, which I don’t have yet, while enjoying a Mediterranean climate. Is it the south of France or Baja or Puerto Rico? I haven’t found it yet. Otherwise, Berkeley meets those requirements, other than the house on the ocean.
