Say what you think

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One of the most fascinating things about working in multi-disciplinary teams is that you get to see how other people work and communicate with their teams. What are their challenges, their expectations but also where they falter.

A few years ago, as I was learning more about UX research, I reached out to shadow a 3-person team tasked to conduct user research on a potential new cohort of customers, who were not tech savvy and barely had access to the internet, to see if we could design a solution that would work for them.

After a week of phone calls and a rough prototype, the team has decided to proceed with a 3-4 week user testing process with the hopes that we could improve our main product.

As time went on, we kept struggling to find people to interview and the very few video calls we managed to book, the interviewees either didn’t show up or couldn’t set up the required tools to start the testing session. Logically, we soon had no other choice but to stop the project given we had pretty much no results to work with.

The following week, the team met one last time to do a retrospective and openly discuss what has gone wrong. After all participants expressed their (known) opinions, the two main stakeholders revealed that they thought we shouldn’t have done the testing sessions at all.

One of them, newly appointed to the role, confessed to the other “I’ve asked for it because I thought that is what people usually do”. The other replied “I thought we shouldn’t do it but I agreed because you asked me to”. I was stunned.

What I had just listened in that moment was so surprising to me that it made me question how often these situations happen all over the industry. Could I also be working on a product that shouldn’t have been developed in the first place?

We can speculate they lacked the self confidence to speak their minds or that they hadn’t yet built enough rapport. But the truth is that the company invested time and money in a user research project that shouldn’t have happened because two individuals weren’t honest with each other.

Assuming you communicate in good faith and in an appropriate tone, every time you choose to not express your contrarian opinion, you are intentionally choosing to not do what might be the best for the company.

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