Monal Chokshi, Senior Director, Head of Research & Insights at Dropbox shares ways researchers can build a team from the ground up as well as elevating research teams that already exist.
Monal Chokshi is the Senior Director, Head of Research & Insights at Dropbox. She has built and led UX teams for over 10 years, including those at Lyft, Intuit, and SoundCloud. On this episode, she reflects back on some of her past talks about leadership and shares ways researchers can build a team from the ground up as well as elevating research teams that already exist.
ALFONSO DE LA NUEZ:
Welcome to UXpeditious! A show that brings you quick, insightful interviews with design, product, and UX leaders.
DANA BISHOP:
In each interview we dive into how UX research impacts user insights; shaping the design and business strategy of some of our favorite tech tools and products.
ALFONSO:
I’m Alfonso de la Nuez, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of UserZoom.
DANA:
And I’m Dana Bishop, VP of Strategic Research Partners at UserZoom.
ALFONSO:
And we are your hosts. Joining us on today’s episode is Monal Chokshi, Senior Director - Head of Research & Insights at Dropbox. Over her extensive career in UX, working at companies like Lyft, Intuit, and SoundCloud, she has a lot of experience building and leading research teams.
DANA:
Monal is here to share some tips, thoughts and ideas on how UX Research leaders can build a research team that is strategically providing valuable business impact.
ALFONSO:
Thank you so much, Monal, for joining us on the show.
MONAL CHOKSHI:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
ALFONSO:
We know that you've built several research teams in your career. Can you give us a couple of tips for someone who is looking to build a research team from the ground up at a company, and that has a strategic impact on the business?
MONAL:
Yes. This is actually a question that I've been asked many times, especially more recently. Our field is certainly taking off, especially in smaller companies as well, and more and more researchers are now being asked to step into positions of having to build a research team from scratch. So, as you mentioned, I've had the opportunity to do this multiple times, specifically at both SoundCloud and Lyft. And at the 2020 Learners UXR conference, which is run by Alec Levin and Maggie Mitchell, I spoke deeply about my strategy in building the research team from scratch at Lyft. In the talk, I discuss the seven stages of growth that we experienced as a research team at Lyft, as well as five key factors to help you determine how to strategize and to structure your team when building from the ground up.
And the five key factors include knowing the expectations that others around you have of research coming in, especially stakeholders and executives, what the collaboration and work processes are like at the company, how the company is organized structurally, and where research and insights or your team fits in, and where research sits in the minds of the executive leadership to understand how much they're bought into it, as well as the company culture when it comes to having a customer focus. So, I-
ALFONSO:
I was just going to say culture. I was hoping you would come to it, because that's where my mind is.
MONAL:
Yes, absolutely. And it makes such a big difference, because when folks are really bought into caring about the customer or the user and have that user first mentality, that makes a huge difference in determining how much influence and impact you can have on the business. And you don't have to fight that uphill battle I'm hoping, and I'm seeing that we are starting to turn the tables there, just because, as you mentioned, so many folks are now being asked to build research teams within their companies and for the business. For me, my time at Lyft is definitely a highlight in my career because I was able to build a team that ended up being successful for the business at all levels. I'm very excited for other folks to do something similar.
DANA:
What about if the research team already exists, you come in as a leader, a research leader, and you want to work to elevate that team to have more impact on the business, how might you go about doing that? Have you done that? And what would you suggest?
MONAL:
So, this is one of the reasons why I joined Dropbox. Now, the great thing is that we do have that buy-in from our executive leadership. They see and understand how important insights are to making decisions. And so right there was a big sell for me in terms of joining, because I'm like, this is a place where I can actually see my vision be successful. The team at Dropbox, which covers both product or design research, as well as market research, is to influence important business decisions across all levels of the company. And that means not only having impact on the ground with our product marketing and design teams, but also to influence the company strategy decisions at the executive level.
I've implemented a few foundational strategies at Dropbox to do so. First, because we have several teams in addition to ours that focus on delivering customer insights, such as our data science team, our customer marketing team, and our customer experience and support team, I formed a group with the internal leaders from these teams called the insights council. And so part of our mission is to create a single voice of truth across our insights. And then this will allow us to elevate one voice instead of several smaller voices, which may conflict at times.
So having this shared and agreed upon insights-based perspective about our users, which is supported by various kinds of data, is much more effective for influencing business decisions. And one of our tactics here is sending out a monthly newsletter to our executive team with the most important insights from across our teams, and hopefully triangulated, for them to consider as they discuss priorities for our company's strategy. And then these newsletters are also available company-wide.
DANA:
I know that you've done some talks around the difference between management and leadership, right? And you have a great perspective on that. Would love to hear more about that.
MONAL:
The first talk that I did at the Learners Conference, when it was called UXRs Conference, was about why UX researchers make great managers, and the part about having empathy, doing internal research, using your research skills to do internal research. And I talked about managing down, which is managing your team, managing across, which is managing with your stakeholders and in your peers, cross functionally most often times for us as researchers, and then managing up. So management, a lot of folks, it's more the tactical day-to-day people management parts, and a lot of administrative type of checkbox things that you need to do as a manager, ensuring compliance to policies and various other kinds of stuff. But I think leadership is something that is much more...
Anyone can be a leader. You don't have to be a people manager to be a leader. And being a leader means coming up with ideas, speaking out about them, having a perspective, and really being able to influence.
DANA:
When you were talking about the insights council that you've put together, it really spoke to what I know you've said about managing up and across and down, and it seems like that's all incorporated into that council idea.
MONAL:
The insights council is really about helping manage across. And I think oftentimes as researchers and research teams within organizations, we are siloed from one another, and we're small teams. And this is really about coming together and forming a band, and somewhat of an alliance. It's more about a community, really, is what it is. It's like, "Hey, there's other folks like us in these small pockets that maybe we haven't heard about. Let's band together, and let's come up with a perspective that we all share." So quick example, we did this for the first time at Dropbox, and it's called the insight summit. And we just completed a couple workshops with this, but in the spirit of having a single voice of truth, we brought together our biggest insights from the last year and talked about that, folks from each of these various teams that the insights council represents.
And we took the biggest themes that we came across. First, we presented them all to each other. And there were so many head nods, and there was so much that folks were very excited about, "Wow, you get it too." So, what we're doing now is synthesizing those themes, and we're going to share that with our executive team to help them understand, "These are the things we think you should know about, and the trends that we're seeing." And so there's the managing up elevation part of it as well.
DANA:
Right. And then when you're presenting from the insights councils at an All Hands, that's really great communication across the board.
MONAL:
Yes, absolutely. And then I think we're stronger together, so we try to represent all together.
DANA:
As far as your experience at Dropbox and really trying to grow a team and come into an existing team, and you're obviously building consensus and a lot of great things are happening, what are the ways to make sure that, as you grow, that you're providing impact at every stage of growth.
MONAL:
First, I tell my teams that doing great research is only half their jobs. The other half is influencing. So if your insights aren't driving decision making, it's not effective, no matter how great the research is. So, that's number one. And tactically, we need to plan time in our roadmaps to ensure that we're socializing and influencing partners in the right way, in order to ensure that they are aware of how these insights can and will benefit the business
ALFONSO:
But if you can be a good storyteller, I think that's a huge part of your role. So, there are various UX research team organizational models, like embedded agency and democratized models. What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses or pros and cons of each?
MONAL:
I think the main pro for an embedded team is that you have researchers who are part of the cross-functional team, and they really feel a part of that, increasing job satisfaction, as well as impact, because they can be there at every step along the way, calling out when and where research is needed and build up sort of domain expertise around not only the domain, but the target customer or audience that the product team or area is looking for answers to. But the con is that when a team is fully embedded with various areas, you can lose sight of the forest for the trees. And so I think you need a way to be able to step back and look across.
With an agency model, it's kind of the opposite. It's much more service oriented. There isn't as much, I guess, of an opportunity to build relationships with stakeholders because it's always kind of throw it over the fence, and then you don't necessarily know what happened with that, or to be able to follow up. But the pro is that you can prioritize across all of the various requests coming in and have a chance to really be able to say, "Okay, these are the biggest projects with the ROI for the business."
ALFONSO:
So what is the model that you've chosen or you've used that you've felt like it was really effective?
MONAL:
Yeah, well, I've evolved what I feel is the most efficient way to structure my team based on just the environment as well, and the number of resources you have. But at Dropbox, what I've done is... When I first came in, the entire team was fully embedded. And so what I did was, I took, I'd say about a third of the team or so, and created a team that we call the central research team. And so we have two teams, two kind of pillars that are embedded and with their product area teams. And then there's one team that is sort of looking more across and holistically and building out a lot of the foundational structures that we did not have in place.
So they're answering a lot of questions more holistically about, who are our customers? What are their journeys? And working in collaboration with some of the embedded researchers, they're also establishing things like a CSAT program across…all these like foundational programs that we need.
ALFONSO:
Yeah.
MONAL:
And also putting more resources into our research operations team. We have such a strong focus on customer centricity and having folks speak with users across all of our product teams and marketing teams, so that we've been building out programs in order to provide a service that they can easily do this and schedule time with people to speak with, as well as educating them.
ALFONSO:
That's awesome. Monal. I mean, it's a pleasure to hear you and to listen to how you describe the leadership and the model that you've been working on. Thank you so much for joining us.
MONAL:
Yeah. Thank you. This was a lot of fun, and I appreciate what you're doing here.
DANA:
One of the things that really struck me that you were talking about today is something that I've seen happening, especially over the last few years, is us UXR’s have to really start digging in and understanding business strategy and talking business language. And we're not just all about the research anymore. We can't live in our little research bubble to be effective leaders in influence product and be customer centric and all of those things, right? We're at the next level of where we need to be, which I think is exciting.
MONAL:
A hundred percent
ALFONSO:
That's Monal Chokshi. Senior Director, Head of Research & Insights at Dropbox.
DANA:
Thanks for listening to UXpeditious. Make sure to continue listening to our new episodes each week for quality insights from UX industry leaders. If you like what you heard, help us out by rating and reviewing the show on your favorite podcast platform.
ALFONSO:
UXpeditious is produced by UserZoom in partnership with Pod People. Special thanks to our production team: Christopher Ratcliff from UserZoom; and the team at Pod People: Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Hannah Pedersen, Colleen Pellissier, and Michael Aquino.