#60 Surviving in a very technical company
41:36 Share

I think this is the situation that maybe many people will come to because this world becomes more automated, more complex and simple tasks are being automated. And I can see more and more even like absolutely not technical industries are becoming more tech. Like I'm working in an industry that is hospitality and I can see how much automation is a big thing. The earlier you embrace it and try to understand it, the more effective you can be in not just your current environment, but any other job you'll do.

Hi everyone and welcome to our new episode on Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa and today we're going to be responding to one of the messages that you've submitted on our Instagram page. By the way, make sure to follow Honest UX Talks on Instagram.

It's a topic that I think most designers who have been in the industry for long enough have probably some experience with. I'm going to just go ahead and read the message so that everyone knows what we'll be talking about today. And then maybe we make a small break just to unpack what went into our last week and how we've been doing. So this is the message. I currently work on a very complex web application.

It's so technical and for such technical users that I don't even have the best understanding of what it does even after working there for a while now. I am being asked to be proactive in generating ideas for improving the product rather than being provided with briefs for features to add. What's the best way to approach this as somebody with a lack of detailed technical knowledge that our users have? As we'll

unpack this topic. A small spoiler is that both myself and Anfisa have been in this situation in the past, and we're going to try to explore our own experience and maybe see some kind of advice can come out of that. So before we unpack this topic, let's start by thanking our wonderful sponsor. I'm going to let Anfisa do the ceremony and then maybe she can share a little about how her past week was. And I know that she was also on a holiday if I'm not mistaken. So let's see how that all went.

Yay, welcome everybody. Like I said, we have a sponsor today and the sponsor of our podcast is Figura.Digital. And if you haven't heard about it in the previous episodes, Figura.Digital is the most UX friendly network for freelancers to help them finding their perfect

clients. And the magic about the platform is that the platform actually does the matchmaking process for you. So you don't have to go through multiple interviews with the clients, do the sales, or you don't have to always go through the rounds of interviews if you're looking for a job. So instead of wasting your energy, and sometimes it could be like three, four months when you're looking for a job or for a client, if you're doing the sales and stuff like that, that is much better way to go because all you need to do is to go through the hiring process just once with the platform.

And then once you know who your on-work is, you'll be matched with the best potential client. And that's, I guess, the beauty of it. You also get access to the resources. You've got access to the networking. The platform is still new and growing and pretty small. So you got a personal mentoring.

You get a personal support. If you have questions, you get access to people who are working a similar setup. Also, the founder is trying their best, as far as I know, to help you personally to maybe overcome some obstacles in your work. It's a place where you can feel safe and actually grow. So if that's something interesting for you, make sure to go to figura.digital and try to go through the hiring process. Maybe it's something that you were looking for.

And I'm really, really happy that we have more and more opportunities for designers that actually solve the problem. Because as you know, I was doing a lot of interviews recently with people looking for a job. And I know for a fact it's a very, very daunting process that could take up to a year or even more actually. I had stories with people looking for a job for two years and the constant whirlpool of going through the interviews is very, very discouraging. And at some point you might even start losing self-confidence. So I'm really happy that we see the initiatives like Figura that solves those big problems.

Anyways, talking about how my week were, weeks actually, last time I talked it was two weeks ago. Yes, I was on vacation, which was great. For the first time, I relaxed probably too much. I didn't think a bit about work. I didn't think a bit about, I don't know, side projects and anything, to be very honest. I just took books and we had the pool in the place where we rented. So all I did was just reading book, sleeping, eating, swimming. That's it. I did nothing else.

That was definitely great. And I was with my friends. So, you know, it was just nice, nice time. I felt a bit like old because I didn't have crazy time. I didn't look party crazy, but it was still good for relaxing, I think. Now as I'm back, honestly, the first week after vacation, I immediately forget about the vacation and was immediately obviously jumping into the drama and the work.

and the things that are going on. So I almost forgot that I had vacation only one and a half weeks ago. Actually, just a week ago. Like last Sunday, I was still in Sicily. Anyways, I think my story is not as interesting as yours. I know that you just get back to your work after two years of break, right?

Tell us more about how it went. How are we doing? Yeah, well, first of all, I'm happy to hear that you were able to disconnect on your holiday. I was able to achieve that as well, but I think after one and a half week and then it lasted one or two days, but still it was amazing.

When I returned from vacation, I had one or two weeks to prepare from going back to my job after two years and actually back in the office after three, almost three years, because I haven't been in the office since the pandemic started. And the feeling is is a bit surreal because this was a world that was a very big part of your life. And then it sort of disappeared completely because you went in a different world with the home responsibilities and everything and like the

home world, right? The home space. And then you're back in this world. And like, it's really strange to align everything in the beginning, like to make everything work together, even on a psychological level, right? But it's exciting at the same time. So it was a great feeling to start talking to people I haven't spoken to maybe in a long time. And just that excitement of a new project, in a way, it feels like I'm joining a new company, right? After two years, we can say that I'm starting a new job.

So it's also that excitement of discovery. I'm happy I get to feel it again. And yeah, on a personal level, my daughter just started kindergarten in the same week. And that's also a process that I'm trying to process. I've also had some personal struggles and some tough professional decisions that I'm exploring, but maybe we'll talk about those in a future episode. But overall, I think it's an interesting time to say the least for me.

So yeah, let's jump into the topic for today. How can you thrive or how can you be productive as a designer working on problems and products that you can't fully grasp because you lack the technical background or the technical knowledge? And I'm going to start by asking you if you've ever been in this situation and how was that?

Oh yes, I definitely have been and it feels crazy and I feel much easier about it right now. But it was pretty recently actually, I think in the beginning of 2020. I already have been in the industry for seven, eight years and I started working in a technical company. Some of you know, I was working at Citrix, which is very famous among like IT people.

like backend developers. I think the company is like 30 years old and they originally got famous, I guess, or used among corporate companies. They were working on secure tools and remote access to computer and a lot of different technical things that I didn't sometimes even understand. So I'd never heard about the product, but my husband knew it because he's a backend developer and everybody knew it. And I was like, oh, okay, interesting. I'm joining the company everybody knows about. I don't know.

So I started working there and I was allocated to work on a project that was very, very, very technical. Honestly, to this day, I think I still don't get a couple of the things I was doing there. And like I said, it's surreal to talk about it right now. It was an easy attitude. But back then I was basically supposed to work for the admin tools. Imagine working on the workflows and setting up the API integrations and

And making the flows for backend engineers as easy that they could build any application possible. And then as you make this job easy for the admins, that impacts the user experience of all the employees that will be using the integrations those admins build.

So actually your work is only for like a small group of people, but it impacts like millions of people who will be using those tools eventually. And so for me, it was crazy because I had no idea how the backend works. I basically asked the stupid questions like what is API? And I mean, I knew some things, I knew it's some sort of a breach, but how it works, I had no idea. I at that point never worked with tools like Zapier. Now I feel like it's the best tool in my life, but at that point I had no idea.

and my husband who's a backend engineer I had to take lessons from him to understand what the hell I'm working on and I definitely was in a very very imposter mindset for a first half a year I have no idea what I'm doing here why am I even working on this why did somebody think it's a good fit for me because I felt like I don't understand what I'm doing but luckily the good thing that my my peers people around me people who hired me were super nice in general people in the

company were really great. I'm still very thankful for people around me there back then, because they were very just human, I guess. They were very helpful. They would set up the sessions to help you understand the product, the system. Also, there were women, which is very important for me. And the woman who was a PM, she set up the call every day to help me answering all the questions I had. In the beginning, she also had no clue. So that's why she felt like she needs to help me. So I understand

what the hell I'm working on. And in a very plain language that people who don't work in the industry could understand, he was able to really build a picture for me and help me with the perspective. So to this day, I'm very thankful for the people around because otherwise I would have no idea what I'm doing. And if nobody will help me understanding it, I would just not do a great job at all. I don't know if I did a great job, honestly, but...

I did my best at that point. So yeah, that definitely is a part of my story. Tell me about your story and then we can maybe start talking about what else helped us. Because I already partly mentioned that people helped me, but I'm sure there are many more steps that we can discuss that helped us build in that confidence and understanding what are you working on so you can start coming up with the ideas for improvements rather than, you know, taking orders and just do what they told you to do because you don't understand what's happening. So what is your story?

I think that these kinds of stories are pretty similar. I resonate with everything that you said and I personally felt overwhelmed. So just for context, I joined UiPath in January 2019 and I started in a marketing team. And as you can imagine, I was working on a website and how do we communicate what our product does and how do we onboard people in the UiPath universe and the entire ecosystem of products and of possibilities. And it was really

fun and in a way like more marketing oriented, obviously. So it felt like I could definitely grasp it. But then I got an offer from the product team. So the product team came to recruit me. They had an opening on one of the core products of UiPath, the orchestrator. And it was very exciting to work on a product, right? As designers, we will always choose or at least my peers and everyone I've talked with

would have chosen the core product because you get to have a huge impact like as opposed to working on the website so where you can also have impact i'm not dismissing working on websites in any way it's like the the gates to the entire universe of a company so it's really very important as well i moved into the product team i immediately felt like i made a bad decision

Because I don't understand anything. Because it was, of course, a very technical product. So what UiPath does essentially to oversimplify, now it has like, I think, 40 products. I'm not sure what I'm going to do in this company to understand everything that we can do now with the UiPath technology. But to oversimplify it at that point, they were basically doing robotic process automation, which is what RPA stands for.

And that meant that we're automating menial tasks and business processes that don't work and where you can like not necessarily take out the human element, but help them achieve a more productive day in their work. One of the concepts that we were aiming to put in the market was to have a robot for every person, right? So the idea would be that everyone in a company will work

with a robot hand in hand to optimize and automate the work that doesn't require creativity or like the human touch. Right. So it sounds super nice and lovely, but it's very, very complicated, technically speaking. And I was working on a product that was basically the control panel of automations. And it was a product where the main persona or let's say the main archetype, we try to build personas, but it doesn't really work when you're working on B2B products.

were maybe closer to defining some archetypes in the end but um i think it's more fair to say that we understand role-based personas right so the main role that was using our product was the rpa developer and so this was a very technical person who had a much better technical understanding than i had and so to design for people who understand their needs and and their expectations

in a way so technically, it's really hard. I'm also going to keep the advice of what helped me survive in this environment to the second part of our conversation. But the feeling that I had was in the beginning, I was pretty gentle with me. It's okay that I don't understand. It's totally normal. I just came here. It's a sophisticated product. It's super technical. I don't have the technical background. It's absolutely normal. But then time continued to

pass and pass and pass. And I felt like I'm still not some parts became clear, of course, but other parts still felt like I'm not grasping them. I'm not I don't really get it. And like you can ask questions for one week, two weeks, three weeks, one month. But like if you ask stupid

question after one year, people are going to be like, what the hell have you been doing? Right. So I became increasingly reluctant to asking the question. So I try to fight against that, which is part of the advice that I'm going to give. But yeah, overall, it just felt like time went by. I was able to maybe in a way, get up to speed with my understanding of the product.

But it never felt I never had that complete satisfaction that you would with an industry or a space that you understand fully, maybe even as a user. Right. So if I were to work on a productivity app or an app that, I don't know, helps you do your fitness routine, then I don't know. I can understand that because it's very human. It's not technical. Right.

I always had this feeling that I'm not fully getting everything. And the ecosystem of relationships was a very convoluted one because you had the people, you had the robots, you had different systems, you had studio where you would define your automation and then the orchestrator would just show you how things are going, processes are happening and so on. So I had to understand not just one thing, not just my product, but the entire ecosystem of things that my product would like solve problems for, right? Yeah, it was tricky.

and frustrating. And I felt I had that feeling of uncertainty, unknown, of feeling a bit lost for many parts. But I managed to create a system for myself in which I think I did a fairly good job. Of course, you could always do a better job. I'm not the perfect designer. I will never be. I don't even plan on being. But I managed to deliver solutions that were good for the users based on the research that we've done following that. And overall, just improved the experience of the product.

even without feeling that I fully understand what I'm doing. So let's see how we can achieve that. How can you survive or how can you thrive maybe without fully grasping what's going on with your product? What are your tips and tricks? What worked for you? Let's go historically one by one and I will try to sort of reflect on my journey and see if this could be the lessons we make or not.

I don't have like fully fledged beautiful answer that I can wrap in the guide or something like that. My story was that I first got the great design manager, the woman who hired me. She knew exactly how to make it easier for me. So that helped me a bunch.

So basically she said, here is this project that is not super technical, but we need somebody who can help facilitation and talking to different partners. There will be, you know, people like developers involved there. There will be people like end users involved there and PMs who facilitate it. And between there, you will be helping to build a usable product. For me, it was a good challenge because I could focus on usability of things, like a thing that is easy for me. Right. So I could make basically use two puzzles. I could

create workshops and facilitate the conversation from the design standpoint. But also we would focus on the end result, which would be the end user product, basically B2C product. And then from there, we will kind of roll back and try to think how can we use existing platform and existing admin tools to build that flow. And so that was really helpful.

And again, thanks again to my manager who understood that this is a great project opportunity that could help me understand the complexity of things. And as we start, let's say, if I'm laying out the flows about the perfect flow for that automation and coming up with a flow or test the flow, whatever it is, we had like the whole designing process for every single flow. But

The point is that as we came up with the flow, we then talk to developers as a part of the process to understand the platform capabilities. And if there is something that's impossible or we have some limitations or we need to do the technical research in something, I will be a part of that process and possibly I'll start learning about the product.

Maybe the first takeaway for me would be to try to talk to your manager who can understand your struggles. And again, it's very important that you being honest that I don't get it. I don't understand it. I have imposter problems. Can you help me? What are the opportunities that I can solve those issues? So my manager knew it and she was really smart and kind to find the project for me that could help me overcome it.

That's the first thing. And again, this is maybe the relationship you have with your direct manager. The second and honesty you can have talking to them. The second part that really helped me, like I mentioned, was that there was another PM, again, a woman. Surprise, surprise. There was definitely more help from the women's side in my case. Another woman who also were not a technical person at all. As far as I knew that PM, she was working in the fashion industry in the past and working in the technical field.

very tech driven community where most of the people were actually males and the products we were building were unfortunately only just for males. And I hate to say this because you know, IT industry, especially the backend industry was really dominated by males. But then I don't know how about now maybe the same situation. But she reached out and set up those calls daily, where she would answer the questions in a very plain human language.

because he was personally going through the hurdles of understanding it and she wanted to give me a hand speed like understanding that as well.

And it was a safe space because I knew she was coming also from the background where she had no clue and she figured it and she was really making it super easy for me. And I don't know, I was just so grateful that I had this experience. So that's second. Again, maybe if you don't have any support or people do not reach out to you, maybe think about only meetings as you're sitting passively. You can sit and see who are the people who can help you overcome it.

And maybe you can just reach out and ask for help. It doesn't need to be daily. It doesn't need to be that you're bothering them all the time if they're not offering that themselves. But at least weekly or biweekly, it would be really great. And if the people are great, you can think of how can we exchange knowledge here? Or maybe in return, you can also offer some help if they need consultancy on design side of things. That's another thing that you can offer in return. The next thing that really helped me was just trying to be proactive.

Because I personally, when I just got there in the first three months, I felt like literally numb. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say. I was also another thing that I did was a hackathon. Like we had all those tools, API tools, and then, and flows that help you to build micro apps. And I had no idea how my API works, how to research APIs. And so I was working in the first three weeks. I think it was the hackathon when we had to build an app in like a one day's

or sort of something like this. I got paired with another developer and I was really dumb. I had no idea what we were building, but I said, that's the flow, can you build it? And I was sitting there next to him and watching online because it was beginning of 2020. So it was all remote, but I was sitting on the call for three or four hours watching how he is building that flow. And as I showed him, here's the flow, here's what we need to get, here's the functionality, what we want to achieve in the end. As a new already final outcome result, I could see it literally on that hackathon callback

call and see how he's building it and asking him all the stupid questions. So they're asking like, how do you achieve that thing? We need to get this information. Where do we get it from? How do you find that information? How do you research for that information and stuff like this?

sitting like a baby and trying to talk or get any information possible. And I think the key recipe to it is having great people in the company. That's why for me, it's still a key criteria all the time when I'm going through the hiring process to understand who I'll be working with. And if I see that people are close-minded, not open, not motivated in their job, then it's a big no for me. But luckily, I was in an environment with great people, so they were always able to answer questions I had and not judge me for stupid questions.

That I was definitely asking. So that's the third thing, trying to ask all the baby questions. And then I think extra curriculum for me was to again, do my homework. Luckily I did have like first two or three months where I could spend time understanding the system. And so I was able to talk to very different people, understand their perspective. I even literally did like lectures. One of them, I was, I think I was BA. So another girl, by the way. Well, I was surprised at the third girl in this story.

But she was a BA and she did lectures to me to explain how the API works and how do we connect the data. It was fantastic. So I did my homework and also talked to my husband for a while, understanding how the backend works, what they are doing. And I was throwing random things. Can you do this? And can you do this? And how do you do this? How does this thing work? All the random stuff. I went through the first grade student kind of mindset. And then I think after three, four months, I finally started feeling much more confident.

and cracking it. It's not that I knew it all, but at least I didn't feel like a huge imposter. I was feeling myself in the first months and didn't feel lost. And so I think if I would try to draw some takeaways from my story, it was great manager who embraces and understands that it's complex and you cannot know everything, especially if you never dealt with this industry and giving you the projects that could help you understanding it or helping at least to figure out the projects for you.

second is great people who try to help you and then definitely talking to the experts in that area or developers who are actually you're designing for at the end of the day and i think if i try to think about it today what else would i hope to have if i were to start again the job in a very technical setup or environment i think i would be much more focused not in the product itself but really on a service design from the get-go so trying to

design workshops and involve all the key partners and experts and knowledge people who can help me understand the product while me facilitating the conversation. And as I being open and listening to them, I could soak the information and start understanding it.

So sit and listen basically, but through the design tools such as service design and designing workshops for people to collaborate. So you don't have to come up with a crazy, beautiful ideas yourself in the beginning. In the beginning, you're just embracing it. And as you start understanding and building the knowledge, you can start being more involved and like,

And I think in the first half a year, you still have this luxury of being slightly more passive, but not create, but consume, right? Learning, learning a lot. Because without baseline understanding, it's very hard to come up with relevant ideas. You can definitely go crazy and think about the perfect world, but not always those ideas will be feasible, right? So yeah, service design would be a very important part for me today. And of course, like I said, doing your homework and learning as much as possible if time allows.

So sorry for a lot of things. I was trying to remember everything. But tell me about your experience. What helped you overcome the hurdles of working in such a complex technical environment? It's amazing that actually the last point you made was the first point I wanted to make as well. So once again, we are so aligned in thinking and in the experience that we've had. I think that's

why we enjoy talking so much because in a way where we revisiting our own experiences and our own ideas. So yeah, that was the first point that I wanted to make. I like to think of it as a facilitator of good thinking. So what you can do in the beginning is to enable your team to think better about design problems, not solve those design problems because you don't yet know how. And if you come in in a project and you say that you understand what needs to be done, then you're going to be rejected by the team because it's

okay for once impossible but there's also that feeling of arrogance that oh because just because you're the designer and you have you think you know better but this is so complex and there are so many layers and you're just seeing the tip of the ice spring and just wait and so you you need to wait like you said wait a couple of months it's absolutely normal to be in the stage where you gather information and just that that but

But what you could do in those months, like you said, is basically facilitate good thinking. So what I did, and I felt like I could immediately bring value to the team was that I started asking interesting questions or questions that sort of help them understand why they're doing a particular feature, who that feature is for, and like even basic stuff. But when you're in a very fast paced, rapidly growing company where you're doing a lot of things,

it's really easy to get lost in the everyday just doing stuff so i came in and i started asking a lot of questions not just questions for me to understand because there's also that extra benefit so when you ask challenging questions you get to understand the problem better but you also help others have a stronger understanding or a stronger grasp and a better alignment

So I also organized workshops, just like you said, where I brought in the people who really understood the product, the developers, the strong PMs. So everyone who could help me in a way co-create a good understanding, an initial plan, at least for what needs to be done. And then, yeah, just facilitate good thinking. This is what...

what i feel is a strong takeaway from from my experience and then what's really important i think you also touched on this as well stay close to your users so the only way to understand the users is to spend more time with them and for me that was very eye-opening a very

particular example that I keep giving is that we were aiming to build a product that's super simple to use, that's super with a lot of white space and very neat and it looks great and it's like very modern, like all the products out there, white spacey and airy. And we were focused on this, like simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. And then I started talking while we had this kind of direction in mind. In parallel, of course, we were doing discovery interviews. We were also running usability tests.

sessions where we had prototypes or solutions to be tested. But in the discovery interviews, what was really interesting was that developers kept saying again and again that white space annoys them because they feel like it's a waste because they want to have as much information as possible on a screen because that's what gives them the feeling of efficiency. And so, um,

I unpacked that and I eventually learned that they have the ability of grasping a lot of information on one screen. So they're very comfortable with big volumes of information for them. It feels just like I said, efficient. It feels like they're getting more out of the product and they can really operate and thrive in a space, in a product, right? Where they can just see a lot of things.

And it was mind boggling for me because at that point in my career, I had a lot of experience working on retail products. And so I felt that everybody wants an easier way, a simpler way, less information, more progressive disclosure. And

for this particular set of users, that wasn't the fact. So my point is spend time with your users. It's the only way that you will understand the space they're in, their expectations and their technical needs in a way. So spend more time with users. Well, that goes for any product. So in whatever situation you're in as a designer, just spend more time with users. But especially when you feel like you don't understand what you're doing, it's going to really help to watch them and talk to them. Okay.

And then another point that I want to make is to build relationships, build an ecosystem of relationships in your company. The stories you've shared about a PM and your manager. And I think this is the best way in which you could set yourself up for success.

Map out the ecosystem of people you can rely on to help you understand the product, to help you understand the problems, to help you understand everything. Use that ecosystem, build trust, build a relationship. It doesn't have to be just one way. Tell me how I do this or tell me what I need to know or I don't understand, please help me.

can also go the other way. How can I help you? What are your expectations from a designer? What's your biggest struggle around design decisions right now or around the product in general? So build a relationship of trust with these people. It's something that for me felt it took quite some time because they were very smart, opinionated people that they had strong opinions. They were debaters. They were not very easy to

win over if you want. But then eventually I managed to build good relationships with most of the people I work with and trust, which is very, very important for any environment you're in. Relationships are essential and mapping out the ecosystem of support, but also always giving something in return, right? So supporting them when they need it or like helping them make their work better. So sometimes the PM would like

uh have pushback from developers on on a particular feature right developers were also super opinionated in our company because they built the product it was a product built for developers by developers so their relationship was very strong they were this powerhouse and the pms they received pushback there was a bit of

attention sometimes. So what really helped me build trust with my PMs was to show them that I'm a partner in that and also the developers as well. So whenever they would like get lost in a debate, I was there to bring the conversation back to the user, bring the conversation back to the why of the problem and everything and just

facilitate a better communication between everyone. So facilitation is something that's really powerful, even when you don't really understand the product. And then the only thing that also helped me was to go in meetings, like sometimes even randomly, but just to get involved in conversations, be exposed as much as possible to the technical details, to what PMs are discussing between them, to what the developers are discussing. So it really helped me to be part of the conversation. And but this is also something that offices

facilitate in general, right? So if you're in there, it's easier to get access to conversations and those conversations kind of help me. Oh, okay. Now I get that. Okay. Now I understand how that happens. So, but what's that? I'll ask more questions about that. And so this is what, what I've experienced personally. And then the last point I want to make is like, it goes to any unknown thing in design when you know less test more, right? When you're less competent, test more.

So I think that this is whenever you come up with a solution that you're not very confident about, research it more than you would. The idea is to reach a level of confidence with everything that we do. So if

If we start from a very low point to reach a comfortable level of confidence, we need to put more effort into research. At some point, I was able to leverage the power of the UX researcher we had in our company and then build more clarity and a better understanding and better processes and just an overall better outcome for our users. So test more. When you know less, test more. Learn more. Yeah. So one thing I've realized that wasn't

very good for me in the beginning, at least in that company. Now I feel like it's something I'm pushing forward much more. If this is an existing platform, an existing product that you don't have to create from scratch, in that case, try to ask for the product course or something like this, or try to ask to test this product as the user. I know we're not our users. We don't have to assume we are definitely like Joanna said, definitely talk to the users.

but in order to understand how it works and the full functionality of it and that sometimes you can go beyond and obvious it's very very important to understand the product in depth first and for me that was um all about to using this product for its purpose first of all so if it's a product so technical and you don't know how they use it what they build with this

It's very hard for you to improve the flow knowing you don't know the whole flow, right? You don't understand how they created from A to Z with any test playground, like especially with technical products. Sometimes you have those demo sort of environments where you can just play around, build something crazy, do it as much as possible, especially in your first months at this company.

Like I said, hackathon really helped me, but using this product as if you were the actual user helps you to gain the broader understanding of it, especially if the system is very complex. For example, in my company right now, it's a huge platform with tools and teams. And like, I think we have at least like 15 different product parts. In B2C, we have three product parts. In B2B, we have, I don't even know how many, more than 10 for sure. It's very complex. And there are a lot of details that I didn't know about other parts.

But living the life of the end user for at least a day and testing it, especially if you can do it in the live environment, a real environment, an environment where the actual user uses this product will give you sometimes mind-blowing understanding on what's working and what's not. So yes, I always vote and I try to push for the product courses, not like the static theory courses where you just watch

This is how we do X, Y, Z. And this is how we do that. But really, as you see, okay, once you watch the theory or whatever the things you're supposed to do, the typical user stories and how it is done in the current product, then try to do this, build it. In the company at Citrix, I were supposed to build micro apps.

using different integrations, with different APIs, with different data. And so I was trying to understand what data is out there, how do I connect it, what is possible to use, how can we bridge it, what is the end flow, how do I set it up, and blah, blah, blah, and the structure of data.

And as you go through it yourself, you will not be a user at any sense, but you will at least understand the perspective flow, the A to Z order of things. And so as for me, it gave a huge boost because up to this point, for example, in my already not a new job, it's been what, nine months or something. I still sometimes discover new things that I was thinking about, like some

Let's just tweak things up here. And then I'm talking to somebody who's very knowledgeable of the product and you realize there is such an easy way to do things. You just add a little checkbox there and it's done. You don't have to hack things out.

out. But again, it's because I don't still have full product understanding. And sometimes in a complex system, complex products, knowing the product gives you a way to come up with the more empowered and feasible solutions that will end up in the same valuable results. So that's the thing that I guess the last thing I wanted to bring up today.

Yeah. And I actually love your last point. I feel that that's something I also experienced myself. UiPath has a UiPath Academy, which is a huge platform for educating developers on how to use the UiPath technology. And I was lucky enough to have access to those courses, of course, and understand the product better myself.

by learning the theory behind it, okay? But also doing, just doing the flow myself, setting up things for myself, it really helped me understand what's going on there. Like not understand the needs of my users necessarily, but at least understand what the product does, okay? So yeah, so I think this is it for today. Our findings, our takeaways. Do you wanna go first? - Let's try. I don't usually go first, so I'm feeling nervous now.

I think the key themes or key takeaways for us today were, and I think we both agreed on the fact that in the beginning, when you still don't have deep knowledge on what you're doing, it's really great to use the facilitate and use the power of service design of workshops

involve the people asking like your manager, somebody who's in the company for a while, who are the roles that you should better involve, attract the people who have the knowledge, co-create with them together. But again, as a workshop facilitator, you're not a designer, you have a different role and your goal would be to facilitate the conversation. And in those conversations, you start learning a lot. And as you do more and more of these, you start getting a handle on it. Second takeaway for me would be definitely to build a relationship with the

people and really try to be honest, especially with your direct managers about things that you're not confident about and ask them to help identify those areas in which you can understand or overcome those hard hurdles. So understand the technical product for you. I really like your point, Ioana, with sitting as close to your users as possible.

So being in the same room or on the same call, asking a lot of questions, asking how they do things, how they think about it, seeing in action and ask again, like being in the moment and asking those questions helped me immensely. And luckily, because I was working in technical product,

with a lot of backend developers who were eventually the users as well. They were a little bit biased, obviously, but people, for example, if they would work on a different product, so they were not particularly working at the same unit as I did, I could reach out to them and I could help myself by seeing how they use the product literally in the same room. And that was life-changing to me because otherwise I would just sit in my own bubble, not knowing what's happening, overthinking it, worrying that I don't get anything.

I didn't see where this data coming from and all of that. And so I would just be in a very close minded and not helpful for anyone's day. Not for me, not for the company, not for anyone. Third takeaway for me would be to be as close to your users as possible, especially in the beginning when you're still embracing the information.

How about your takeaways? I would say for once on a very personal level, just be gentle with yourself. Be kind with yourself. It takes time to understand something very complex. It's really not overnight. Don't expect to get everything after your first month. It's absolutely normal that can't be up to speed. But

the same time, put in the effort, create even learning structures if you want. So one hour per day, just playing with the product, doing the tasks of our users, or one hour per day, just going through the courses, maybe a couple of times, even for me, it was necessary. I do the academy twice, right? So give yourself time. Just be nice to yourself. I mean, try not to, to exaggerate the imposter syndrome by putting a lot of pressure on your,

yourself but at the same time putting the effort constantly because that's also going to help you feel like you're working towards grasping the product you're working towards gaining a strong understanding of what's going on and it's going to help you feel less like an imposter it's going to transform from oh i'm never going to understand what's going on to it's just a matter of time

And so start with that. I would say the second thing is map out the structure of your company and your allies on this journey, if you want, the people who can help you. And don't be afraid to ask for help and, you know,

Even more importantly, don't be afraid to ask questions, even if they're dumb questions. It's much better to ask a dumb question early and go in the right direction with your design than to create a dumb design and then have to explain it and then be exposed for the question that you were afraid to ask.

and would have been would have made your life much easier. So ask the dumb questions. Of course, it's important that you're in a safe space where that is encouraged, it feels supported, you don't feel judged, it's difficult to ask them questions in very judgmental environments or toxic environments. So also with that, if you're if it's hard for you to ask questions, sometimes it's because of the space around you, not necessarily your your lack of

And then the last point would be to, you've made all the good points I wanted to make, the facilitator, I think people should think about that very deeply and with enthusiasm. It's what they can bring to the table from the first day and just stay close to the users until you de-risk the decisions you're making. I hope we help folks who are in this situation or have been or will be.

And I think this is the situation that maybe many people will come to because this world becomes more automated, more complex and simple tasks are being automated. And I can see more and more even like absolutely not technical industries are becoming more tech. Like I'm working in an industry that is hospitality right now, and it's been very much a legacy industry for the last 30 years.

And I can see how much automation is a big thing right now. So anywhere you go, I believe there will be a space for automation or technical things. So the earlier you embrace it and try to understand it, the more effective you can be in not just your current environment, but any other job you'll do. And also in your, in your life, honestly, right now I'm using Zapier and trying to use a lot of integrations that saves so much time in my daily life. So it's a huge skill that will help you in life in general.

And I guess that's it. Thank you for another therapeutic conversation. I feel healed and understood, and I hope that the listeners get a similar feeling and see you on our next episode. And until then, make sure to follow our Instagram page on us to X Talks and send us your ideas for future episodes, the questions that you have, the struggles that you're dealing with, and and maybe we could go unpack them together and just, yeah, feel less lonely.

Yes, definitely. And don't forget to rate us if you're listening on Spotify. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we are definitely very much appreciating every single vote. Thank you and have a good rest of the day. Bye bye. Bye everyone.