Talk Companion | Scaling UXR Impact: Case Studies from Google Maps by Victoria Sosik
Presented on June 6, 2019 at UXRConf 2019 in Toronto, Canada.
Watch the full talk on YouTube here. Want to listen audio-only? Find this talk on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here.
Talk Overview ✨
When we're working on a research project, we're often planning for a scope of impact that's fairly local: a PM, a designer... maybe a few additional managers.
But when we join large organizations with massive products, we need to think massive impact as well. How do we take the results of a small project and amplify them? Tune into this talk by Victoria Sosik, Director of Research at Verizon, to find out how.
Key Takeaways 🔑
1. Scale Impact through Organization-Wide Programs
To significantly increase the impact of UX research, consider expanding your focus beyond individual teams to organization-wide initiatives. By designing research programs that involve cross-functional stakeholders and align with broader organizational goals, you can amplify the influence of UX research across the entire company.
2. Leverage Immersive Experiences to Foster Empathy
Immersive programs like Urban Jungle, which take stakeholders into real-world environments, are powerful tools for building empathy and understanding. By allowing leaders to directly experience the challenges faced by users in different contexts, you can drive more informed and user-centered decision-making at all levels of the organization.
3. Measure and Communicate Impact Effectively
It’s essential to measure the impact of your research programs and communicate these results to stakeholders. Use a mix of quantitative metrics, such as product changes and feature improvements, along with qualitative feedback, like participant testimonials, to demonstrate the value of UX research and secure ongoing support.
4. Create Sustainable and Enduring Research Programs
Design your research initiatives to be sustainable and adaptable over time. By building strong program brands and shifting from one-time events to ongoing principles, you can maintain momentum and continue to deliver value without exhausting resources or overburdening your team.
5. Ensure Strong Executive Sponsorship and Cross-Functional Collaboration
Securing executive buy-in is crucial for the success of large-scale UX research programs. Additionally, fostering collaboration across different teams—product, design, engineering, marketing—ensures that research insights are broadly applicable and effectively integrated into the organization’s strategic direction.
Transcript, Per ChatGPT 🤖
I've been at Google, for 5 years.
All that time on the Google Maps team, which is pretty rare for for people at Google. And within that team, I live a sub team, are all around local search and discovery. So our Geo UXR team focuses on everything from Google Maps, Street View, Google Earth, Android Auto. And within that, I really think about how do we help people find places and experiences that they will enjoy doing.
And for a little bit of context, this is kind of the scope of the wider GEO team. And I share this just to kind of ground some of the case studies I'm gonna share. We're talking about working with over 25, 100 employees on a product, our flagship product, Google Maps, that has over a 1000000000 daily active users. And at this point now, our team is over 60 UXRs. But when I started, it was less than 10, which is now smaller than my sub team.
So, you know, while you may see you may see some large numbers in some of the case studies I talk about, we've we I've seen our team go from much, much smaller all the way to where we are now, and we've been doing these from the very beginning. So I I think that a a lot of these concepts really do apply no matter where you are, if you're a single UXR, it's a small team of 2 or 3, all the way up to a much, much larger team like we now are on that GA UXR. And I want to kick this off with a quote that I came across when I was, looking at one of the blog articles about this conference, and I just think I think it really grounds the topic really well. So we talk a lot about on our team impact. That's what we want to do at UXR, is we want to have impact.
And when Emily was talking about what the theme of the conference meant to her, she you know, she focused on on striving to make lasting impact through the world, my research. But how do we do that? How do we measure it? How do we convince people that we're having it? That's what I'll go more into.
And reflecting over the impact that we've had on Google Maps, I was kind of thinking over, you know, the past few years, and the beginning of our of our team, the beginning of my experience in the team, I felt we were pretty much following you know, pretty much along with our team size. We had a series of UXRs mostly dedicated to sub areas within geo that were doing great work with those sub teams, and we were having, you know, some some reasonable impact. But there came a point where we noticed that, the impact really did outpace the team size that we had. And thinking back on, like, what was what was that inflection point there? What allowed us to be able to go from, you know, really much staying in line to all of a sudden scaling much much broader than the people that we had?
And upon reflection, it was really our focus and our shift in mindset to organizational wide programs, not just working on the team that I'm on in local search and discovery, but collaborating with everyone in GEO and thinking about how we can impact the organization as a whole. And I think, you know, you can you can take your organizational context and figure out what that means for you, whether it's going from, you know, your sub team to the whole organization, the whole company, whatnot. So the the overview we're gonna talk about, I'll go through a few case studies that give examples of what do I mean by these organization wide programs and kind of walk you through a little bit of what it looks like, what's behind the scenes, how to measure impact, and then kind of back into the definition of what do I think really are some of the key things in common of these programs that allowed us to really scale our impact. And then there were many, many challenges and learnings along the way, so I'll talk about a few of those, and hopefully things that can, you know, you potentially apply in your own context.
So let's get into the case studies. As I mentioned for this section, I'll give an overview, kind of kind of what does this program look like to our stakeholders, then peek behind the scenes and talk a little bit about what it takes to actually get it done, then speak a little bit to the impact of the individual, programs as well as the evolution because an important part of these all is that they were not once and done. They were not single research projects. They were things that we carried threads through over a a longer period of time. The first program we'll talk about, is Urban Jungle, and this is our international immersion program.
Now the goal of Urban Jungle was really to provide our leadership with the opportunity to to really talk to the people we're building for. That sounds like, yes, that's what we do all the time. We had a real shift in focus to thinking about not just the United States context, really trying to think about what's it like to use Google Maps in Delhi, in Jakarta, in cities that, you know, while we're sitting in our offices in maybe in San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, we're not really experiencing on a day to day basis, and people just they they didn't feel it, they didn't get it. So we need to bring them to those those environments to really see what it was like. So at the core of Open Jungle, it's it's really it's a trip.
It's bringing people into the field in in a context that they probably haven't experienced yet. You know, you can see some of our engineering directors here out in the market in in Delhi talking to Gojek drivers in Jakarta and just learning what what's it like to be them and kind of live live their daily lives and to use Google Maps as part of it. So from a stakeholder's perspective, this is roughly what, this program would look like. So they come, they get on, you know, get on a plane, travel long ways, and we'll have a little kick off session, then we'll do something we call, the amazing race. The amazing race is really get out and experience the city.
So we'll do things like, take the different transportation modes, you know, get in and out of Rickshaw, take the the subway in Delhi, just order food, buy something in a local market, just all the things that you may do in your daily life, but do it and and see what it's really like to do it yourself. We like to bake in reflection along the on the way, so we're not kind of keeping all the the data to the very end, but letting people kind of talk through what they're what they're experiencing, what are top insights, as we go. Then we we have also built something we call the Citizen Fair, where we bring, you know, if if going out in the the city is the first day, we bring a whole bunch of different people in the second day into our hotel, and that allows us to really go broad. So we can have things, like, we can do a panel on religion, we can have people who are contributors of content to Google Maps come in and speak to us and do posters and a journey map and just a whole bunch of different activities with a wide range of people.
Sometimes we'll also do cultural translators, where we'll identify people who we think will, you know, be really able to show us what it's like to be in that city and and be able to take us out on the town for a night. We'll break into some small groups and be guided around by those locals. We'll bring in speakers from local companies to just learn what's top of mind to them, hear what they're all excited about, and then we'll go deep. So if the citizen fair is broad, we'll deep dive into areas of interest for different stakeholders, really learn about the theme that they're there to learn about. And then finally, do a, you know, a longer reflection at the end where we try to uncover opportunities, synthesize, and then take things back to our offices that we'll actually then use in, you know, the the day to day product work.
And, of course, a little, you know, celebration at the end where we try to do something, you know, something local, cultural, whether it be a show or just different, you know, different experiences that kind of really celebrate, the week that we had there. Now, of course, you know, we we do a lot of prep before and after, so the UXR's do arrive early for last minute, coordination, as well as stay late in order to wrap up and try to start creating some of the deliverables that will actually share out once we get back. But that's roughly what the trip looks like for a stakeholder that's coming along for the ride. So what does it look like behind the scenes? The first part really on to get some board is the pitch.
Right? This is not cheap. You're getting people to take a lot of time out of their days. You're spending a significant amount of money on vendors, on participants. How do you get people on board?
This was actually our first program like this, so we had quite an uphill battle. We pitched to a UX director that was pretty skeptical, and it was not a given that this was gonna be a good use of people's time. So they she advised us to go top down for sponsorship instead of bottom up like we initially thought. But what we did is we still, you know, we started slow, we built a momentum, we went out to to people who we thought maybe a little bit more sympathetic, who we had already distinct relationships with, got them excited, we run to the next person, be like, person a really thought this is awesome, what do you think? And you just kind of, like, get get the ball rolling.
But we had a once we we got people on board, but there was a lot of pressure for immediate impact here because, as you can imagine, taking a bunch of Googlers out into a city like Delhi or Amsterdam or New York, and for several days, if we came back and it just felt like a fun trip, that would get some some serious scrutiny. So we had a lot of pressure for there to be, like, immediate impact on this first trip. So identifying stakeholders. Next step once we actually got, you know, the buy in here was to figure out who's going to come, who is is, let's say, worthy of coming into the field with us, and make sure to leverage our sponsors to send those invitations. So some people were on board, some people thought it was great.
Others were, again, you know, I'm mid planning cycle. I am not gonna spend a week of travel time coming out in the field and running around with you guys. But by having our higher level stakeholders, sponsors starting, again, top down and sending those email invites out, that actually helps quite a bit. But also being really, really clear about the trip expectations. This was a packed schedule.
There was no time for email. There was no time for, you know, stepping out to to VC into some meetings, and we want to make sure that people really, really knew that. And also keeping it a manageable number. We're going to people's homes, so we're taking deep dives where you're going in with, several stakeholders, maybe a translator, maybe a videographer, and you wanna make sure that we don't become too too overwhelming. So keeping the numbers somewhat manageable is also really important.
And that's the question of, you know, who who is worthy? We did leverage this model to try to think through what were the right attributes of a stakeholder that we would want to bring to the field. So one obvious one that I think comes top of mind is reach, seniority. You want people who, you know, have the power to do to make change. And that's important, but you also wanna make sure that it's relevant.
It needs to be relevant to what they're working on, what they care about, their product areas. You need to make sure that they have that voice, the resonance with their team members, that they're recognized as leaders, which is not always, you know, 1 on 1 with seniority, and that they're reliable enough to bring back those insights from the field to the product and they'll actually make some change based off of it. So we worked with some with our with our sponsors, their senior leadership to identify people that we thought kind of had these different attributes, as well as, like, trying to keep things cross functional. So I think the colors are a little too light to see there, but you have nice little, quote, cross arrows going between them. And, in this first trip, it happened to be 40 people, but we want to make sure that we had people that were, across different product areas as well as designers, product managers, engineers, marketers, the whole, you know, swath of people who work on any given product and really make sure that we had just good representation across the board.
Now I have one of these slides for each of the case studies that really gets into the nitty gritty details. I'm not gonna go into it just for time, happy to talk about it, you know, at some point later, but 2 things I'll highlight here is one about just thinking about the timing of the planning of this. So we plan these 3 to 5 months in advance. This is a lot of of planning work upfront, and we also really try to think about timing with our planning cycles in mind. We've gone through several several iterations when the right time to have these trips is, but thinking about having people come back from the trip, having, you know, a few weeks to really let it all sink in and then leading into, like, yearly planning, half planning, whatever you do, found to be a sweet spot for us.
If we hit it too close to planning or too, you know, obviously, too soon after, we really just weren't in a position to have have much impact. And then a key point there is really thinking about the output and this is something that, again, because of that intense pressure to have impact, like, right when we got back, we thought a lot about in our first iteration of this. So thinking about what kind of, you know, maybe it's a standard inside deck, but maybe you also want to tailor them across different teams for higher level stakeholders, for also your, you know, teams on the ground, as well as can you get creative about other deliverables. So we ran an empathy campaign where we had a bunch of posters that just introduced people to the, you know, the individuals they met in the city back, you know, back to the office. We posted this all around.
Videos, we created this immersion room where we highlight the sights and the sounds and just everything about that city, we tried to bring it back for those that couldn't go. So the measurement, this is all about impact. So, you know, I can talk about bringing people out in the field, that sounds great. How do we know we actually had some impact? So we we send people a survey.
You know, we're researchers, we know how to research things, we know how to measure things, but we don't always do a great job at measuring what we're doing ourselves. So that was something we focused a lot on here and tried to understand how did stakeholders feel about the value of the experience, how they were gonna apply these learnings back to their work, and then we're just tracking product changes. You know, looking at the people who went, looking at the things that were launched or or not for different areas, and see what happened. And, you know, we also thought about different types of impact. So we were initially again, because of that pressure for impact now, we really thought about concrete and strategic impact.
So the shorter term and, you know, slightly longer term, but more in the year or so impact. Things like feature fixes or, you know, planning cycles. But what we actually found to be the most impactful of this whole project was more this enduring impact. So this more of a culture change of people actually understanding what it's like to actually be somewhere where addresses don't work like they do here. They're they're not addresses in certain parts of the world and you can get lost for an hour and a half trying to find an interview house.
And that happened to many of us along the way, and you can say that as much as you want, but it doesn't really hit until you're, you know, in a the sweltering heat, in a van, trying to get somewhere for hours and hours, just cannot find it. So you can kind of think that this, you know, along with feature impact, product impact, and then just broader organizational impact. And even though it took a lot of time to to build and to measure, true, because you're not gonna see organizational impact overnight, that is actually where the real value of this program has has landed. Just for a few examples, one thing that that was launched right out of this program was 2 wheeler mode in, cities like Delhi and Jakarta, so we did not have good directions for 2 wheelers. And we went there, we saw the landscape of of the transportation, and we saw how critical they were to get around the traffic and to get to the city.
So that was something that we were able to make a case for and to and to launch in the, in the app. And for things like enduring impact, you know, you get quotes from from surveys and you kind of see see, how higher level leaders talk about the experience later on. And this is just a quote from our engineering director that just speaks to, you know, how how really seeing it was been about eye opening, experience for him. And we you know, this was not just words, we've seen the change and we've seen how he'll talk about the user problems, how he'll really incorporate into his, you know, approaches moving forward, and that's really long term what we're looking for. So finally, the evolution of Urban Jungle.
So this started, again, this was our first program like this, and it started with a couple of us being in Zurich and just being like, okay, we've done a lot of emergence, we've brought small teams into different cities, what if we go crazy and do 4 cities same week, all our entire research team, you know, bring different sets of stakeholders into all the 4 cities, triangulate across, you know, as we go, let's just do it. So we did that and we did 4 cities in 2016, you know, we we had some some success, some things did not work as well such as triangulating across multiple time zones while you're trying to maintain that schedule, but it was it was a great first experience. Next year, we realized, okay, that was great, but we need to get our leadership immersed. We had a new VP of product, we had a new design director, how can we get them in? And kind of up the up the reach a bit.
So we did that, and we we ran a trip just to Delhi because we realized 4 cities probably not necessary to do all them at once. It was, you know, it was kind of a great big picture idea, but the value of doing them simultaneously really wasn't there. So we ran what was at the time the largest single city trip to to Google and we brought 31 exec stakeholders, and this time it took 20 UXRs, as well as, some some experts in MBU on the ground and video teams, etcetera. We kind of upped the production value a bit. Then we got to 2018, and we realized now you know, we had done a lot of research in Delhi before.
We had we have an office in New York. We we kind of knew those cities. We did not know Jakarta very well, even though we did our one urban jungle, city was Jakarta in 2016, so we need a recon trip. We realized that when we're doing, these trips with our more senior stakeholders, we need to kind of know what we're gonna find going in. You're not actually doing all the research when you're there, you're telling them the story and showing them the story.
There's times we've kind of likened it to research theater, and not to cheapen the experience, but just to to kind of speak to the fact that you you need to have the narrative down, and then you just show it to them and help them experience it. And then, you know, we were doing Mexico City actually, I think, in 2 weeks for for this next round of of Room Jungle. So this is a program that we really have evolved and kind of seen through the years. And as I mentioned, we've we've kind of fine tuned things with the timing. We've gone from being September to being June to being May, and all in trying to be better aligned with our planning cycles and to have better impact.
And along the way, we've also done several smaller scale immersions, so we haven't stopped those. That was what really kind of kind of sparked the interest in this first immersion to to even begin with. So we keep doing smaller scale team team level immersions with, you know, maybe 10 to 12 people on 1 single product team. It involves 1 to 3 UXRs potentially, and we kind of sprinkle those throughout as as necessary and as as timely. So that's Urban Jungle.
Now we move on to a different case study, which is called Poker Face. And this program is, the goal of this program was, you know, it's great we can bring people out in the field. We see the impact that it has, we see product changes, we see great, you know, quotes and experiences from senior leads, but we're not gonna bring 25100 people to those cities. Right? It's just it's not gonna happen.
So how can we help to really increase empathy by bringing people in? I'll give a quick overview using this video, if it's so inclined. Every single time I take the time to watch a real user interaction with one of our products, I learn a ton. To run a successful usability study, you need to have a very usual face. People actually found a problem and fixed it.
That's the perfect focus. So that was our little trailer that we put together, and there's a couple of things that are highlighted there. 1, you can see the top down, the top down sponsorship. We had our SVP of the entire geo organization bought into this and, you know, giving some time to be interviewed and to to put herself into some promotional materials to try to convince everyone to take part, and that was that was very critical as I'll as I'll get into. Let's see.
There we go. So this program, the scope of this program, again, we we can bring 40 people onto the field. Here we're able to actually impact over 1500 Googlers by bringing users to the offices. So we did this, with 26 researchers, 10 plus locations across the world, and it took 8 months. So this was also, again, a big program here that involved all hands on deck.
And what did it look like to stakeholders? Well, the 1st week, actually the week prior to the the experience, we gave them a little bit of, prep as far as helping, you know, understand what are their needs that they wanted to to get out of the research. Some of these teams had not actually interacted with researchers in the past. Some of these teams are back end teams. They do when they work on infrastructure, they work on data quality, and they're not not people who have really interacted with UXR, so they just didn't really know what what we're about.
So we we kind of give them a little bit of a primer as well as understanding what what would they be interested in. Then the week of, we did a seminar. We kind of gave, like, a research 1 on 1 and tried to teach them a little bit about actually how do you, you know, how do you give, how do you conduct a research study because they were not used to speaking to users at all. And they'll run the study in pairs. We actually had these 1500 Googlers.
They were each running our our study by themselves, And then we finally had a debrief where we brought all the teams together, we, you know, all the pairs together, and tried to try and get across what they all heard and just understand what were the main the main takeaways across their their group. So this overall was about 3 and a half hours of of dedicated time from the team. That's what we were asking of them. We were saying, okay. We want everyone in the organization, give us this much time and we'll help you understand your users better.
So behind the scenes for this one, this one, you know, we we built some, some trust with Arwin Jungle. People were like, okay, if we give the UXR team some leverage, give them some money, maybe they can do some cool things. So we pitched to our SVP, We, again, we needed that top down buy in because we're trying to mobilize a whole organization. And another thing that was really important in our pitch here was to connect poker face to a larger, company goal. So product excellence was a big goal at Google, trying to just, you know, create more excellent products.
So we connected it to that and the answer to what is Jio doing for product excellence, which was, again, a company level goal, was one of the answers was Poker Face. And that allowed us to get a little bit of leverage to actually try running this program. Again, a little bit of the making it happen behind the scenes, you know, you saw the video, you saw a fancy logo. Branding was actually relatively important for Russ in this one because we needed to be able to really kind of keep pushing this out, keep kind of saying why this is important, why this is something that it will be fun to take part in, have some swag, but and actually executing it, what was really critical is having templates. We were having everyone we were having 26 UXRs trying to run this whole program across 10 offices, so we need a lot of support around having templatizing things and making it as easy as possible for everyone to actually execute this program.
Again, pre and post survey to measure where researchers how we understand our impact, we'll send a survey. So we sent anonymous surveys to try to understand how did this experience impact people's feeling about their teams and their products. And what did we see? So we asked these questions, and we saw on the first side, you know, the first question there was no significant finding, but we we saw that people felt that their teams were more likely to capture feedback about users and act on it, which is obviously something we we would like to see from this program. On on the other hand, right, they realized some of the issues with their products they may not have known before, and they found that their products were less likely to demonstrate clear benefit, were less easy to use, and less beautiful and robust.
So, this is about what we expected, but it's we had the intended impact of helping people understand what, you know, where their products may have room to grow. And then, of course, also just capturing some open ended quotes. These are great to include in, you know, presentations when we talk about the impact, when we wanna pitch another program, be like, look what we got from from this one. So having some senior team members as well as, you know, anyone who wanted to share their their experience, speak about the program was was really helpful. So also on the evolution, again, to start off with a little bit of a of a crazy goal of working a 100% of the organization.
Again, 25100 plus people, we did not get that, but, we got a a pretty good number of them. And this was, this we thought about this as poker face as an event this time around, took 8 months, took all these UXRs. This was not something we were gonna do year after year after year after year because we just purely couldn't. So we shifted a bit in our thought process to thinking about it more as a principle. So more of an ongoing effort and leveraging that brand from Poker Face, you know, version 1 to try to encourage ongoing stakeholder participation.
Something we always try to do in the past, but putting that name behind it, putting that logo behind it, having some swag attached to it, really helped to kind of up our participation, and also made it a lot more scalable for us because we didn't have to repeat over and over and over this large scale event. And, of course, we still can leverage, some smaller scale poker face events when it's timely. So things like if there's a PM Summit, if there's a new a lot of turnover in a team, or a lot of new new members, we could still run a poker face event, and we still do, but we don't do it at the organizational scale like we did the first time. Alright. And the final case that I'm gonna go through is, our rapid research program.
Now the goal of of this program here is to provide a more flexible way to provide user feedback at an ongoing basis to high priorities. Again, this is not very different than what we try to do as UXRs, but when we're all embedded into specific teams and have focus areas or funded sometimes through certain focus areas, it can be hard to to kind of pivot when there's there's changes or there's other parties that come by or when a last minute study that need to be done, like, yesterday gets requested. So this program helps us do that. And basically what again, color is not doing too much favors here, but, basically this is a horizontal team across the world. This is a great one to look at.
So you have teams all over that are these rapid research kind of tiger teams, and there there's research assistants that are placed throughout and we use them basically to take requests. So if you need if you need a study and it can you you can be a researcher who just doesn't have the bandwidth, you can be a stakeholder who doesn't have a dedicated UXR but would love some feedback, you can basically make a request. And the types of research that are perfect for this are iterative research, things that are tactical, very actionable, shorter timeline type studies, very well scoped. Things that's not good for us we're not having people do massive foundational diary studies and interview studies through this program. That's just not what's intended.
They don't have enough context, but they can really run a really efficient short tactical study. And if you make a request, it looks something like this, you request the research, If there's some confusion in the request, we'll have an alignment meeting. If not, we'll just schedule it and then have a project briefing, which kicks off the real kind of process and kind of starts the clock because we do say we'll deliver within a week to 2 weeks from the kickoff. And then we run the studies, the the, RAs will run those, and we have a debrief meeting. So again, the same process that we all go through, but a bit condensed and, made to go quite rapidly.
And one way that we do this too is by we'll often run multiple 10 to 15 minute scripts in one study session as opposed to having to recruit individually for all those different sessions. And this process works relatively well, except we're kind of running into a bit of a backlog here where, in some ways, victims of their own of our own success where now these teams are sometimes booked up, like, by 3 months, which is very not rapid. So something we're working on right now is how can we kind of keep this efficient because now that people know they can request it, they do, and they do often. And when we tell them, oh, we're booked through the end of the quarter, it's kind of, yeah, not quite in line with our name. So a few things are making it happen, again, really scoping.
It needs to be a really clear study. This cannot be the kind of thing that can expand out because we just do not have the time. It has to be a 1 to 2 week cadence that helps us keep our recruitment basically going, and we kind of have a recurring relationship with the recruiter who just kind of keeps the participants coming and we just, you know, get keep keep, it's a very mechanical process that we just kind of go through every over time. And again, templatizing, Have screener templates, have script templates, have, deck templates. As much as you can to reduce the time in production for all those stages, we do, but clearly still room for efficiency given, you know, where we currently are, in our backlog.
For this program, we were in a position where we're at the point where we don't have to necessarily justify the value of iterative studies to people, so just saying just keeping the number of the studies we ran, keep track of the number of users we talked to, the number of the teams supported was enough to show the organization that this is valuable. But we can also think a little bit about the benefit to the wider UXR team. So at this point, the rapid research supports about 2 thirds of our iterative tactical studies in our team, and one nice thing is that this does free up the time of more senior UXRs to run those bigger picture strategic works that oftentimes in the past, I feel like we would not do those because they're a little bit riskier, they took a lot more time, and it was a little bit harder to justify doing those when there's so much tactical work that had to be done. So freeing that time up has been awesome. And, also, again, it enables the flexibility that we just didn't have when we were all embedded, because as much as you try to plan, things never line up right and things always come on your plate last minute and having this resource has been great for that.
So the evolution, this program actually it was launched way back when Jio was part of a different organization within Google, and I remember us being really skeptical. But this it felt like it was taking our job. This is a program that was going to run user studies. Like, well, isn't that what we do on a day to day basis? Isn't that what people come to us for?
Are we gonna get cut out? Are we not gonna know what's going on with our teams? And and there were some real concerns here, and we just didn't know how they were gonna interact with the vertical UXRs. But, you know, we fast forward now to 2018 when Jio leaves that organization, and when we think we're gonna lose this support, we're, like, we cannot lose this. We've become so reliant on having that, being able to, you know, run the bigger picture things that we, basically pitched our leadership to get funding, to hire a whole bunch of RAs to replicate this program within our organization because it became that critical.
And we used some of those stats that I mentioned. We showed people, you know, what they would lose without it to get that funding. But our goal right now really is to increase efficiency. We're no longer rapid from request, we're rapid from kickoff, but that's not really what people think about. And when we point that out, they don't really take it so kindly.
So we're really working on how we can be, much quicker. How do we centralize? We're across 10 different locations, all different time zones. That makes it a little bit confusing for stakeholders to know, you know, when did you reach out to different teams. So the benefits of centralizing versus being run at the site level are things we're still working through, to be honest.
Okay. So 3 different case studies. What do these things have in common? Why do, you know, why have these things allowed us to scale our impact? So one thing is that they they are all organization wide.
Whatever organization means to you, they involve us going across that span and not just thinking about our day to day, you know, focus areas. They're also all collaborative. They involve people who, you know, were a team and name only in many ways to actually work together. We were you know, we're Geo UXR, but we're really a collection of local search and discovery, transportation, auto, who just hadn't really had the occasion to work together very much. And finally, they were enduring.
That evolution slide, that's it was actually a bit of an eye opener for me when I was putting it together because, I wouldn't have thought about the process that we've gone through and the progress that we've made on some of these programs, but having them go over time, giving people, you know, a brand to associate with, knowing what to expect really also helps to just gonna build our team's credibility, as well as our ability to to scale our impact. But all these things came along with some some serious challenges. The first one, you know, you're okay. You're trying to work organization wide. For us, that means 25100 plus.
That's a lot of people. So challenges in securing budget, you know, the amount of money that has to go into some of these things, not small. Encourage your participation, you know, if we want a 100% of that of an organization that size to buy in, how the heck do we do that? And then just impact at that level. You know, it's it's a little bit easier when you're close to your products, you know the people, you know the the project really well.
How what does that look like at an organization level? So a few things that we learned, again, measuring and tracking impact. We say this matters. We say this is our goal. As USRs, we want impact, but are we always great at measuring and tracking that?
So making that a key part of all these programs so we can kinda come back to our stakeholders and say, this is what you got for your money. This is why it's great to have everyone, participate in these programs. Securing executive sponsorship, but generating support leveraging existing relationships, that was really key for us to kinda get the ball rolling. And then each one of these that we do just gets easier and easier because, again, you build more credibility as a team. Pitching according to company organizational goals, it feels like a bit of a no brainer, but anytime you can tie to a buzzword or a a larger purpose, it just helps to to get people on board.
And then, yeah, leveraging the sponsors to send out communications. It was way more powerful to have our VP send things than to have us individual researchers send them. And then again, sharing in many forms. We create the number of different cuts of the data that we created for each of these programs. It was we had a lot of them because what a certain leader is gonna wanna see is totally different from what the subteams may be able to act on.
Collaborative. So here, again, challenges executing across all these these team members, especially team members who don't work together. Their teams, yes, but we don't really have much day to day collaboration, and coordinating these people, and also doing this along with their competing day to day priorities. Our other work didn't stop. Right?
Like, just because we are doing these geo wide things, didn't mean people were, like, okay, cool, like, ignore local search and discovery for a few months and just do this this big shiny thing over here. So how do we make that that happen? And that was a real struggling point for us in in the earlier days, and still is to some extent. So one thing, if you are able to leverage a PDM, we didn't in the beginning. We started these without, but it makes the world of difference to have someone just really focused on trying to help with some of those coordination components.
And again, a really obvious one, but being so clear in communication, what are the expectations, What do you need from people? How much time are you asking from them? Even if you don't know what the ask is quite yet, saying, I'm gonna need, like, a week of your time over here helps them plan. And we let we had some real sticky moments in in the earlier versions of these because we didn't do that. Let's see.
Yeah. Baking into planning cycles, once we realized that these were really jobs on top of our day jobs, we realized we couldn't do that anymore and we had to set aside more time for these initiatives in everyone's planning cycle, as well as really respecting individuals' times and constraints. You have part of the nature of going from a team that's that's, you know, team in in name to collaborating together is you have peers that are running different parts of these programs and assigning work to other peers, which can, again, be a little bit tricky if you're not really really respectful of people's time. And for us, making time zones work for us was actually really key. We had big times where we would have something start in London, pass it to New York, go pass it to Mountain View, pass it, you know, back to to Sydney.
And if you do have multiple time zones, it can be really really tricky to coordinate, but this is one thing that you can, you know, make work for you, which is nice. And finally, enduring. So, you know, each of these programs is a large time commitment, and we're adding new ones year after year and keeping the old ones going. So how do you how do you do that? How do you keep the brand top of mind?
How do you keep the momentum over time as you're introducing new things? And one thing that was really key for us here that we had some missteps in the early earlier programs as well is building them around the principles, not an event. So when when Urban Jungle became synonymous with that first trip, it was kind of like, okay, well, we're not gonna do that every year, so how do we tie things back to that that make people, like, oh, Urban Jungle, I know what that is. That's valuable. It's important.
But also not take the same level of commitment. Same with poker face. You know, I highlighted how this the year 2 is a shift from massive event just that the principle overall. So how can you leverage that? And, yeah, don't be afraid to evolve and use scrappier efforts that you tie back to that brand.
Once you have that brand and it's strong, you can really, you know, be a little bit creative with what you do and tie back to it and use a lot less time. But at the same time, really keeping that brand consistent because you built it up, you don't wanna lose it. So anything that feels relevant, tie it back to it, and don't be afraid to to use that. And that, you know, that's the the end of my talk. I do wanna thank real quick, 2 collaborators who did create some of the content, who, that I ended up using, as well as, you know, all the GUXRs who were involved in making these programs happen and needed to experience some of those pain points also that that I mentioned on the way.
So thank you, and questions.
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